Here are some of the problems people have with dentures:

• They slip around. The lowers particularly. The uppers are held in place by suction, so they move less, but the lowers just sit on your lower jaw and are held in place by your tongue and cheeks. There is no way to keep either uppers or lowers from moving when you chew or speak, because they rest on movable tissue.
• They come out. By definition, they are removable. There are sometimes embarrassing accidents where they come out at the wrong time. But even when they stay in place, there is always a worry in the back of your mind that they could slip, and this affects your confidence.
• Chewing efficiency is reduced. Even with the best-fitting complete denture, you’ve lost 50% of the chewing ability you had with your own teeth. Sometimes its much worse. And as you get older and it gets more difficult to make you a well-fitting denture, you will lose more and more. The danger is that you will tend to restrict your diet to soft foods that are easily chewed and that this will affect your overall health.
• They often cause sores in your mouth. If you haven’t been missing all your teeth for too long and your denture is well-fitting, this isn’t as much of a problem as when you’ve been wearing dentures for ten or more years. As the lower jawbone resorbs, sometimes all that is left is a sharp ridge that tends to develop sore spots easily.
• But the worst problem with removable complete dentures is that they cause your jawbone to shrink. Once your body senses that there are no teeth in your jawbone, it begins to dissolve away that bone to use the minerals elsewhere in your body. And not only does this cause your face to gradually shrivel and look much older, but as time goes on it gets more and more difficult to wear a complete denture. With some people, it becomes difficult or impossible to eat normally, and they have to settle for a diet of soft foods. For more information on this process and illustrations, please see our page on facial collapse.