Did Chuck Norris Mess With His Teeth?

And did that contribute to his recent unexpected death?

Chuck Norris passed away on March 19, 2026 at 86. The cause of death was undisclosed by his family, but it was clear that it came after an unexpected medical emergency.

I honestly didn’t think anything of it when my father told me.

Because I never really took Chuck to be a guy to make cosmetic dental changes. And I honestly hadn’t really followed him or any of his work in like 20 years (turns out he hadn’t done much).

However I was a big Chuck Norris fan when I was a little kid. Back then I’d walk up to the neighborhood video rental shop and sift through the VHS tapes.

This was in like 1988…. even before BlockBuster Video got popular.

And these old school video shops were full of movies by Chuck Norris, Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson. They were prolific and they rocked… even if the acting was far from Oscar material.

Anyway… I only looked into Chuck because someone from the community mentioned it. They said that he had a glowing white smile in the years before his death… the kind that a guy in his mid-80’s only gets when he does something like veneers.

So let’s dive in and investigate what happened.

Who Chuck Norris was

Chuck Norris was a triple threat — black belts in Tang Soo Do, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and judo, a United States Air Force veteran, and a world martial arts champion who eventually created his own discipline called Chun Kuk Do.

He made his film debut facing Bruce Lee in The Way of the Dragon in 1972, before becoming a genuine box office force through the 80s with Missing in Action, Delta Force, and The Octagon.

His most iconic role was Cordell Walker in Walker, Texas Ranger, which ran for eight seasons on CBS

Structurally, Chuck was gifted. Wide face, strong jaw, solid posture. The kind of foundation that should age well. And for a long time, it did.

dental practice that promotes Chuck as one of their star patients

The “SmileLift” procedure

Here’s the part most people don’t know. There’s a dental practice in Plano, Texas called Smile Maker of Texas, run by a cosmetic dentist named Dr. Ritchie Beougher.

Chuck and Gena Norris are listed as celebrity clients, used to promote the practice’s signature SmileLift procedure.

The SmileLift is described as combining “the art and science of anti-aging dentistry with the advanced application of porcelain veneers.” The practice claims Chuck’s SmileLift was done over 20 years ago.

So that puts the procedure somewhere around the early 2000s — right in the middle of his Walker, Texas Ranger run and just after it ended.

The pitch for the procedure is that it makes patients “look 10 years younger in one day.” The dentist’s own explanation: “As we age, the lower half of the face tends to sag. The lower half of the face muscles lose their muscle tone and we develop wrinkles, which makes the face look aged.”

So the whole idea is to use veneers to add volume back to the lower face and reduce wrinkles. Anti-aging dentistry, they call it.

I call it the exact mechanism by which you collapse a skull :)

What the “SmileLift” actually does

Here’s the problem with this kind of procedure, and it’s the same problem with virtually every cosmetic dental intervention I’ve ever analyzed.

When you bond porcelain veneers to every tooth to rebuild the lower face, you are fundamentally altering the lingual bite — the way the upper and lower teeth support each other from behind.

Dentists doing this work are focused entirely on what the smile looks like from the front.

They are not thinking about the curve of spee, they are not thinking about whether the bite is supported in both retrusion and protrusion, and they are absolutely not thinking about what happens to the skull over the next ten to twenty years as the soft tissue responds to the new geometry.

The Flattening of the Curve of Spee

What happens?

The skull deflates.

Slowly.

The soft tissue that surrounds and supports the skull begins to cave inward because the underlying bite structure is no longer doing its job correctly.

The brain gets compressed. The spine starts to compensate. The face that was briefly made to look fuller and younger starts to collapse in ways that go well beyond normal aging

Look at photos of Chuck from the early 2000s (see above). His face looked healthy and he looked great for 61 years old.

Now compare against how much things changed as compared to his later years.

The facial structure is hollowing out. The lines of his skull have changed in a way that isn’t just time.

My father is an example of how this does not need to be the case. He’s 80 years old now and his face is still relatively full as it was twenty years ago when he was 60.

Meanwhile he did none of the exercise that Chuck did and was never in very good shape to start with (as Chuck was).

The difference, however, is that my father never did cosmetic dentistry and wears my mouthguard for the last couple of years.

The irony of “anti-aging dentistry”

This is what I find so ironic about procedures like the SmileLift.

The marketing is built around the idea that the dentist is reversing aging by rebuilding worn-down teeth. And there’s a grain of truth in there — lost vertical height is indeed at the root of facial aging.

But the way they’re doing it is wrong. Stacking porcelain veneers on top of every tooth without understanding the biomechanics of how the bite needs to function is like inflating a balloon in the wrong shape.

You get a short-term result that looks good in the ads. Then over the following decade or two, the structure pays the price.

Chuck Norris was used in those ads. His “before and after” smile was the sell.

And yet in 2017 (pic above) you can already see that his skull was assuming a strange shape and the face starts to look unnatural. If you look at skulls for as long as I have you notice these things easily.

He died at 86, which is a respectable age. But in my view he should have lived far longer… and been much healthier along the way.

Chuck Norris IMDB profile from 2005 on

If that were the case I think we would have seen a lot more of him these past twenty years. But instead he never really did any significant roles since Walker, Texas Ranger ended in the early 2000s.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason we didn’t see much of him during that ~25 year stretch was because he knew his health and neurology felt off.

Compare that to Sylvester Stallone who at age 79 has been extremely prolific these past 20 years

.

And arguably did some of his best work just recently with Tulsa King (rated 7.9 on IMDB) which ran from 2022-25.

Closing thoughts

So to conclude… yes I do think Chuck Norris messed with his teeth.

And I do think it very directly led to the health issues that unexpectedly killed him just a short while ago.

For decades in the films he fought all these hardened criminals. Evil, strong looking men.

But he always won in the movies. Despite the odds.

In the end, however, you can almost say that he was killed by this innocent looking dentist in a white coat.

Dr. Ritchie Beougher, DDS of Smilemaker

But don’t worry…. I have a strong feeling Dr. Beougher will be paying for what he’s done sooner than later.

Because he did the same shit to himself ;)