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When it comes to your teeth, the more you know, the better.

With that in mind, here are nine things everyone should know about teeth. (Note: some are “just for fun,” while others are truly “good to know”):

1. Some people don’t lose all of their baby teeth. Most of us have about 20 baby teeth by the time we turn 3. We then start to lose these teeth around age 5 or 6, replacing the baby teeth with “adult’ tooth, finishing up the process by the time we hit our early teens. But if we don’t have a tooth to replace the baby tooth, the baby tooth stays put.
2. As children we have about 20 baby teeth, but a grown adult has between 28-32 teeth, with the final four (leading to the total of 32) of four wisdom teeth that appear between the ages of 17 and 25.
3. Most of us are born toothless, but our teeth start to form while we’re still in utero. Most baby teeth start to erupt when an infant is around 12 to 18 months.  But some people come into this world with tiny teeth on the bottom half of their mouth. Known as natal teeth, these teeth usually have weak roots. Most natal teeth are removed not long after birth to make breast feeding less painful for the mother.
4. The U.S. and other Western cultures may revere beautiful, white, straight teeth, but some folks in Japan prefer their teeth slightly crooked, so much so that people with perfectly straight teeth sometimes opt to don crooked veneers to alter their smile to the coveted non-perfect look.
5. Enamel, the substance that covers your tooth to protect it from the elements, is the hardest substance found in the human body.
6. As hard as enamel is, it’s surprisingly susceptible to erosion due to plaque and the bacteria that grow on plaque. Enamel also can become stained, yellow or even a grey-ish color from such things as tea, coffee, wine, strawberries, cigarettes, etc.
7. Sharks grow a new tooth if one is lost (some sharks will go through 30,000 teeth in a lifetime). Humans, however, have just two sets (baby and adult teeth). Once your adult teeth are in, take very good care of them: you won’t grow any more.
8. Picture the size of an average swimming pool. Then picture two of them. Now think of your saliva. You will produce enough saliva in your lifetime to fill both of those pools (about 25,000 gallons total)
9. The average man in American today has a lifespan of 76 years. That’s 27,740. The average person spends the equivalent of 38.5 days of that life brushing his teeth. Considering that practicing good oral hygiene habits (of which brushing is one) can help prevent heart attack and stroke, we think that spending just .0013878 of it is well worth the “hassle.”

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/FreeDigitalPhotos.net