Teeth, we all need them but is there the potential for us to be damaging our own health even when it comes to having dentures to replace those teeth that have decayed or broken for a whole host of reasons? Well, the answer to that question is potentially both yes and no.
Back in the 1940’s companies involved in the manufacturing process of dentures had to come up with ways to make them look as realistic as possible. They stumbled across using small amounts of uranium in the mix to give it a color that was similar to our own teeth. People loved the color, so the idea, and the manufacturing process, kind of stuck. This all worked as the uranium was fluorescent under various lights, so it did then mimic our own teeth.
However, the good news is that this practice pretty much fell out of favor by the 1990’s when they started to use a form of plastic rather than porcelain, so there was no need to alter the color in the same manner.
Now, we don’t want you to be worried if you have teeth that are pretty old because the amounts that were used would have been extremely small and certainly nowhere near enough to cause you any potential problems. Instead, it is just quite a cool fact, in a strange way, that your teeth may very well be radioactive.