The Effect of the Punjabi Diet on Oral Health

Oral health is influenced by many factors, including diet (Alpert, 2017). However, the assumption arises that unique and ever-changing diets have varying effects on oral health. This project aimed to determine the effect of the Punjabi diet on oral health. Specific goals included understanding components of a general Punjabi diet, as well as the current oral health status for individuals of the Punjabi community, to ultimately determine the correlations between the two variables. It was hypothesized that a diet consisting of foods primarily under the Punjabi diet would have fewer oral health concerns because healthier food items would be consumed. By researching relevant background information to create appropriate survey questions, survey questionnaires were sent to members of the Punjabi population (not just limited to the Punjab geographical region) for completion. From this data, analysis depicts that there is no relationship between the oral health of individuals with the diet they consumed, thus rejecting the initial hypothesis. Similarly, a lack of a relationship was found between the oral health of individuals and their respective oral hygiene habits. These results suggest that the current Punjabi diet may not be as healthy as initially assumed and that there are likely other factors that influence an individual’s oral health, such as genetics, environmental factors such as stress (Kapila, 2021), or other unexplored dietary variables, such as diets high in sugar.