Month: February 2026

In my first Dental Hygiene 101 article I focused on how the teeth and the oral cavity affect our overall health, the importance of keeping our teeth, and some of the challenges associated with age.

There are two ways that most of us lose teeth: either from the breakdown of the tooth structure from dental decay (cavities) or from periodontal (gum) disease. Today, let’s focus on tooth decay; how it occurs and how it can be prevented. While the process of dental decay is the same, much has changed since the early radio and TV advertisements promoting dental health.

Many of our generation in the United States may remember Crest toothpaste’s “look, Mom, no cavities” advertisements of the 1950s, with a young boy running in to tell his mom the good news that he didn’t have cavities, or Pepsodent’s jingle “You’ll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent” (these can be found on YouTube for a good laugh).

Tooth Anatomy

Teeth are made up of three layers: the enamel, the tooth’s strong protective outer surface, the dentin, the softer middle layer of the tooth, and the pulp, which contains the tooth’s nerve and blood and lymph vessels. (Did you know each tooth has tiny lymph vessels?)

Think of the enamel as you do your skin; the skin is the body’s physical first line of defense in keeping bacteria out of the body. The enamel is the tooth’s physical first line of defense in keeping bacteria out of the dentin and pulp.

Decay Process

Acid is the enemy of the tooth! Whether acid is produced by the bacteria in the mouth OR from ingesting acid in products such as sodas, it is the cause of the enamel losing minerals (calcium and phosphate).

Stage One: Tooth Demineralization

The first stage in the decay process occurs when the enamel is first compromised by bacteria which produce acid, causing the tooth enamel to lose minerals. Early demineralization appears as white or chalky spots. At this stage, decay can often be stopped or reversed!

Stage Two: Enamel Decay

If the acid attacks continue, the enamel breaks down further, creating a hole or cavity. This damage is irreversible and is treated with a filling.

Stage Three: Dentin Decay

The decay moves through the enamel and into the dentin. Because dentin is less resistant to acid than enamel, the decay spreads faster and moves to the pulp. This damage is irreversible and is treated with a root canal or extraction.

Preventing and Reversing the Decay Process

Like many things we thought we’d “outgrow” (hello, adult acne!), tooth decay can become more of an issue as we age. The effects of a high carb/high acid diet, dry mouth, and exposed roots can lead to an oral environment prone to decay. A change in our dexterity can make cleaning our teeth more challenging.

Here are some easy preventative strategies you can start today:

Diet

If you enjoy occasional acidy drinks or sticky carbohydrate snacks, go ahead and enjoy them but be smart. Solutions include:

• Consume cavity producing drinks (i.e. soda) and foods (i.e. sticky carbohydrates) all at once rather than sipping and snacking on them all day. This is so the “acid attack” on your teeth is for a shortened period of time. Once you have consumed the cavity producing drink or food, rinse your mouth with water.
• Do not brush right after consuming an acidy drink. Allow 30 minutes to pass so that you don’t scrub the acid into your teeth.
• Use Xylitol gum or lozenges. Xylitol is a natural anti-bacterial agent that targets the bacteria specific to cavities, Streptococcus mutans.

Dry Mouth

While dry mouth caused by low saliva production is uncomfortable and makes chewing and digesting food more difficult, saliva also plays a protective role against tooth decay. Saliva both flushes debris off of our teeth and neutralizes the acids in the mouth. Solutions for a dry mouth include:

• Proper removal of sticky plaque from teeth on a daily basis using a toothbrush and another aid to get between the teeth (this is not always floss!).
• Use toothpaste containing Hydroxyapatite. A calcium-phosphate product (which is what teeth are made of), it will repair early demineralization! Hydroxyapatite can be found in toothpastes with or without fluoride. NOTE: The debate on the pros and cons of fluoride are beyond the scope of this article.
• Use baking soda rinses to neutralize acids. One teaspoon of baking soda to 8 ounces of warm water.
• Use saliva substitutes. These over-the-counter products mimic natural saliva and can be found in lozenges or sprays or gels. The gel-based products work well if dry mouth wakes you up at night. While saliva substitutes won’t neutralize acids or re-mineralize enamel, they do make chewing and swallowing easier and food doesn’t stick to the teeth. Try a few different products to find the one that works for you.

Exposed Roots

Often the roots of the teeth, which in health are inside the jaw bones, become exposed in age due to gum recession. Without the protective covering of enamel, roots are more susceptible to decay. Solutions include:

• Using a toothpaste containing Hydroxyapatite for cavity prevention and to reduce the sensitivity often associated with exposed root surfaces.
• The more gum recession around the teeth, the more space between them; thin floss doesn’t remove the debris and plaque in these spaces. The use of thicker “interdental” cleaners helps. Examples are Proxabrushes, Superfloss and Stimudents.
• Waterpiks are helpful as the pulsing water helps flush debris from larger spaces between teeth.
• Since roots are covered by cementum, which is much softer than enamel, a soft bristled toothbrush is a must. A great manual choice is the Swiss made Curaprox.

Dexterity Changes

Even if you don’t have dexterity challenges, an electric (also called power) toothbrush provides better plaque removal than a manual toothbrush. Solutions include:

• Choose the brand you buy based on budget; you don’t need to purchase the most expensive high-tech brush to improve effectiveness over a manual brush!
• Consider the brush head size. If you have a small mouth or limited ability to open, look for a small brush head size, often the round brush head is smaller.
• As with manual toothbrushes, look for a soft bristle head.
• Change the toothbrush head at the correct interval or it will lose its effectiveness.

Next month Dental Hygiene 101 will cover gum disease.

Join the Conversation:

What dental concerns or questions do you have? What practices have made a huge difference in your oral health?

If you thought the only way to learn about Italy’s history was through books or in a museum, think again. Set off on an active walking holiday across the Italian landscape, past castles and monasteries, through medieval villages and across well-trodden terrain, and discover a treasure trove of stories that transport you through recent history all the way back to ancient civilisations. Better still, you get fit at the same time!

But it’s not just about keeping active. Unravelling history on a walking holiday in Italy embodies all the best bits of slow travel, encouraging you to pause, stop and notice things that might otherwise pass you by. And as you walk, stories take on context and meaning, connecting the past with the present, clarifying the role of buildings along the way and even explaining contemporary culture.

With plenty of guidance and the freedom to stop and explore, those fortifications and frescoes suddenly make perfect sense when compared with the often abstract and disconnected history lessons of your youth.

How Italy’s Landscape Shaped Its History

Before you get to the history lesson, take a look at Italy’s geography. Italy is hugely affected by a terrain that veers from mountains and volcanoes to long coastal stretches, as well as its climate.

When you walk through any of its mountain ranges – the arc of Alps across the north of the country, the Dolomites, and the Apennines which form the spine of Italy – you start to understand how they might shape communication and trade and thus influence the country’s agriculture, politics and economics.

Climate also plays its part: the harsh conditions experienced by those who lived in the south, the ‘Mezzogiorno’, contributed to mass migration and a massive divide between northern and southern Italy.

See Italian History in Context

One of Italy’s most distinctive features is its strong regional differences. Each region also has its own unique historical imprint, so fans of ancient history can explore Bronze Age treasures in Sardinia, or, in central Italy, walk along sunken Etruscan roads and through Etruscan settlements such as Orvieto and Civita di Bagnoregio.

In the Italian Alps, history enthusiasts can follow in the footsteps of Roman armies and medieval pilgrims, visit Aosta’s Roman amphitheatre, and even take the route used by Victor Emanuel II, the first King of Italy, in the 19^th century.

But wherever you walk, you can’t help but notice several major influences. The first is probably religion – evident in the pilgrim trails, churches and monasteries along the way. The other is the country’s military history. While the Roman Via Appia and Via Flamina reveal how armies and goods were moved across the Roman Empire, several routes in the northern Italian Alto Adige and Veneto regions illustrate the tensions of World War I.

Understand How Ordinary People Lived and Worked

One of the great joys of walking through the countryside is the deep dive it allows you to take into local culture. As you walk, it’s not hard to imagine how ordinary people lived and worked. Shepherds’ trails, mule tracks and abandoned farmhouses plunge you straight into everyday history rather than the big events.

The mountain trails and paths we follow today were essentially economic lifelines, created to ease seasonal migration and transhumance, and some of Italy’s most historically significant routes are still walkable. The most famous is the Via Francigena, once a pilgrimage route linking Rome and northern Europe, but subsequently a major trade corridor used by pilgrims, merchants, clergy and nobles. The Salt Roads (Vie del Sale) which connected the Ligurian coast to Piedmont and France, are a series of mule tracks which perfectly demonstrate how mountain economies functioned.

A special place for me is the tiny remote alpine village of Elva, with its stone houses and 15^th century church, in the Val Maira, a part of Piedmont that falls within the huge historic region of Occitania. The village has an extraordinary museum, the Museo dei Cavié, or Hair Museum, which tells the story of the men from Elva who survived in the 1800s by buying hair from women in local villages, bundling and grading it by colour and length, and then covered enormous distances to sell it on to wigmakers who supplied the Paris fashion houses.

The Role of Fortifications, Monasteries and Other Buildings

You can also find that architecture and buildings take on a new significance when you walk through the landscape. Italy’s iconic hilltop towns were surrounded by defensive walls that protected their inhabitants from invasion for good reason!

San Gimignano in Tuscany is a classic example, fortified with solid stone walls punctuated by towers and gates. Its tall stone medieval towers (thought to at one point number 72 and reaching up to 50 metres), reflect not only the town’s conflicts with neighbouring Siena, Florence and Volterra, but also the existing inter-family rivalry.

As you walk, you’ll also come across bridges, gardens, theatres, abbeys, cloisters and, of course, imposing castles and palaces that each reveal riveting stories. A visit to the imposing ruins of Rocca Calascio in the Abruzzo or King Victor Emmanuel II’s former hunting lodge in Piedmont adds layer upon layer to Italian history.

Explore How Diets Today Are Shaped by History

But exploring a country’s history also helps us understand its contemporary culture, and in Italy, food certainly plays a big part in that culture. Characterised by distinctive regional differences, Italian gastronomy is partly shaped by its geography and climate, but also by its history.

Northern Italy favours dairy, meat and rice-based dishes and from the 16^th century, polenta, while Tuscany and Umbria in central Italy were traditionally big wheat producers, hence the popularity of pasta, along with olive oil and grapes for wine. But in southern Italy and Sicily, dishes involving seafood, sun-ripened tomatoes and durum wheat for pasta are prevalent and Greek, Arab and Spanish conquests had a big influence.

This was particularly the case in Sicily where you’ll find Arab influenced couscous, ‘agrodolce’ flavours and widespread use of almonds in desserts.

What Else Do You Notice as You Walk?

There’s so much to take in as you walk. Perhaps the first step is switching off from everyday concerns and tuning into your surroundings. Once you relax, you’ll start to notice little details that may pique your interest. It may be the use of dialect or even another language on signposts around border towns. Or a communal bread oven, millstone or washhouse along the road or tucked into a village square.

And however interesting a guide or history book may be, it’s these tiny details that help us truly understand local culture, the many micro layers of history that make up a community, and the incredible resilience of past generations.

Let’s Talk:

Do you enjoy learning about history on your holiday? Do you read up on the history of a region or country before you visit? Is there anywhere you’d recommend for a step back in time?

One of the strangest things about getting older is that life can become quieter.

Sometimes that quiet is peaceful. But other times it feels like emptiness. It can feel like loneliness is creeping in, even when you’re surrounded by people.

And for many men and women over 60, the real issue isn’t a lack of things to do.

It’s a lack of something meaningful to look forward to.

That is where writing and music can become far more powerful than most people realize – not as entertainment, but as emotional medicine.

Writing Clears the Mind Like Cleaning Out a House

Most of us have cleaned out a garage, a closet, or a room that’s been neglected for years. At first it feels overwhelming – old boxes, old memories, things we didn’t know we were still holding onto.

But once you begin sorting through it, something unexpected happens: relief.

Writing works the same way.

When you write honestly, you release what you’ve been carrying – grief, regrets, memories, anger, love, and fear. Little by little the mind becomes lighter.

Writing is not just a hobby. It is a way of organizing your inner world.

Writing Helps You Find Your True Self Again

Many people spend their adult lives being what others need them to be – a parent, a worker, a caretaker, a provider.

But after 60 a question often appears: Who am I now?

Writing helps answer that. It reconnects you with yourself – your thoughts, your feelings, and the parts of you that may have been quiet for years.

It becomes self-discovery.

Music Fills the Empty Spaces Loneliness Tries to Occupy

Loneliness doesn’t always come from being alone. It often comes from feeling disconnected – from purpose, identity, and meaning.

Music fills emotional space. It brings comfort, memory, and connection. It reminds us we are not the only ones who have lived through what we’ve lived through.

And sometimes, it brings us back to ourselves.

When Writing Meets Music

Writing is powerful. Music is powerful. Together they become validation.

That is the idea behind From Heart to Harmony, a project that takes personal writing – poems, journal entries, or stories – and transforms them into original music.

The goal is not perfection.

The goal is expression.

The Gift of Anticipation

One of the most meaningful responses came from a writer named Courtney. After hearing her poem turned into a song, she said it gave her something to look forward to.

She described waiting to hear her own words come back to her as music. Hearing her thoughts surrounded by melody amazed her, but more important was that someone accepted her words without judgment and built something beautiful around them.

It gave her confidence and a sense of belonging.

Being Heard Changes a Person

Human beings need to feel heard. Writing allows a person to speak. Music allows a person to feel.

When someone honors your words, it sends a simple message: Your life matters. Your story matters.

You Don’t Have to Be a Writer

You can start with one sentence:

“I never told anyone this, but…”

“The happiest moment of my life was…”

“If I could go back, I would…”

That is enough to begin.

Peace Through Expression

Writing organizes the mind. Music soothes the heart. Together they replace loneliness with purpose and anticipation.

And sometimes, they give hope.

Let’s Put Those Thoughts to Paper

Please read the poem below, then listen to the music. Take note of your emotional response when reading the poem, then compare it to when you hear the music.

Silent Rooms

The house is quiet, but my mind is loud, filled with yesterday’s voices and tomorrow’s doubt.

I walk through rooms that know my name, but no one calls it just the same.

I hold my memories like old worn keys, unlocking doors that bring me to my knees.

Still, somewhere deep beneath the ache, a spark survives that loneliness can’t take.

So I write the truth I’m scared to say, and watch the darkness fade away.

Because every word I place in line is proof that I’m still here, and still I shine.

Final Thought

Growing older doesn’t make life smaller – it can make it deeper.

Write your truth.

Let it be heard.

Let it become something beautiful.

That is what From Heart to Harmony is about.

Your story still matters.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

How did you respond to the poem? Did your response change as you listened to the music? How so? What music do you listen to and do you think it has a therapeutic effect?

At some point in our lives, many women begin to feel smaller. Not physically, but emotionally, energetically, and internally.

When Silence Becomes Easier

You may notice it in subtle ways. You hesitate before speaking. You second-guess your opinions. You defer to others, even when you know better. Over time, confidence erodes, and a quiet voice inside says, “It’s not worth saying,” or worse, “Who am I to speak up?”

I see this pattern often in my work as a career and life coach, especially among women in midlife and beyond. Through years of relationships, workplaces, caregiving roles, and life experiences, many of us have learned to soften, accommodate, or stay silent to keep the peace or meet expectations. Gradually, our voice gets tucked away.

And when we lose our voice, the impact reaches far beyond communication.

Losing Yourself in the Silence

When your voice is muted, decisions feel harder. You may stay in situations that no longer fit. Jobs, roles, or relationships because it feels safer not to rock the boat. You might avoid advocating for yourself, setting boundaries, or exploring what you actually want next. Over time, this can lead to feeling invisible, stuck, or disconnected from your sense of purpose.

Losing your voice doesn’t happen overnight. It happens in moments when you weren’t heard, when speaking up had consequences, when it felt easier to shrink than to stand firm. But here’s the good news: your voice isn’t gone. It’s simply out of practice.

Reclaiming Your Voice Is Very Much Like Exercising a Muscle

At first, it may feel uncomfortable or awkward. You may doubt your strength. But once you begin to practice, develop, and intentionally train this muscle, you will feel stronger. With repetition comes confidence. With confidence comes clarity. And with clarity you gain the courage to step fully into your truth.

Three Exercises to Reclaim Your Voice

1. The Daily Truth Check-In

Once a day, ask yourself: What do I really think or feel about this? Write it down without editing or censoring. You don’t need to share it with anyone. This practice strengthens your inner voice; the foundation for speaking outwardly with confidence.

2. Practice Saying It Out Loud

Choose one low-risk situation each week where you intentionally share your opinion, whether it’s suggesting a restaurant, offering a perspective in a meeting, or expressing a preference with a friend. Confidence grows through action, not perfection.

3. Rewrite the Old Narrative

Notice the phrases that stop you from speaking: “I don’t want to be difficult,” “It’s probably not important,” “Someone else knows more.” Challenge them. Ask: What would I say if my voice mattered? Because it does.

As you continue to strengthen this muscle, something powerful happens. You stop selling yourself short. You trust your perspective. You show up more fully in your life. And yes, you begin to sparkle in a way that is authentic, grounded, and unmistakably you.

It’s time to reclaim your voice and step into your power.

I’d Love to Hear from You:

Where do you feel you’ve lost your voice, and how has that impacted your life? Please share in the comments, you may be surprised how many women recognize themselves in your story.

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Originally posted at: Amanda Frances’ Heart Embroidered Jacket and Jeans