Food and diet is an important aspect of dental health. What you eat and drink and when can have lasting and damaging effects on your teeth. When we wrote how to brush your teeth we decided it was important to discuss how food and drinks affect your teeth too.
Your dentist may have asked you for a diet sheet when you first registered. Diet sheets help to identify eating habits that can damage teeth and gums. The relationship between diet and oral health is a complex one and should be discussed on an individual basis with your dental surgeon. We've provided a downloadable sheet which you can print and fill in. This will need to be given to your dentist at the first visit.
Fresh fruit drinks can be very sweet and acidic. If taken often then the acid is able to instantly attack teeth leaving them soft and easily damaged.
We all love sweet sticky things such as these chocolates but the sugar is converted to acids by bacteria and sticky foods provide the bacteria with long exposure to sugars. Sweet sticky foods are worse than equivalent sweet non sticky foods
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Five portions of fresh fruit is recommended as part of a healthy diet. Choose your five carefully and ensure that you don't have too many acidic citric fruits such as apples, oranges and satsumas. Bananas and pears are more tooth friendly fruits.
Exchange fizzy drinks and diet fizzy drinks for healthy water. Not only is it purer but it cleanses the mouth, allowing the saliva to work wonders deposting essential minerals back into the weakened teeth.