There are certain foods that damage your teeth. While nobody looks forward to a dentist appointment, the slight discomfort from a routine exam or cleaning is nothing compared to the pain (not to mention the expense) of procedures such as fillings and root canals. Wouldn’t it be nice to just not have to deal with any of it? Well, there is a way you can, and it calls for strategic eating. What you eat or don’t eat can greatly lower your chances of needing dental work. There are plenty of foods that people should be avoiding if they want to keep their teeth in good shape. Following are the top 5 foods that dentists try not to have in their kitchen—and how they prevent food-related tooth damage whenever “bad foods” do manage to make it past their lips.
1. Canned Fruit Thought that canned peaches were a healthy alternative to pudding? Wrong. Canned fruit is full of delicious, destructive sugar. Excess sugar is kryptonite to your teeth. It sticks to your teeth providing all sorts of tasty nourishment for the bacteria, which lives in your mouth to thrive on. The more sugar, the more bacteria, the more plaque the bacteria creates and the higher your chances of gum disease, cavities and general oral nastiness. Canned fruit is a double whammy because it not only contains ladles of sugar, it also contains acidic fruit. You may be familiar with the old adage ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’, well, it won’t stop you from paying a dentist a visit. The acid in fruit can be extremely damaging to the enamel of your teeth which weakens them and which can cause staining and discoloration.
2. Soda This is an obvious one but well worth repeating. Soft drinks are a your teeth’s absolute worst nightmare. There’s nothing soft about the effect of fizzy drinks on your teeth, they damage them hard and they damage them badly. The quantity of sugar is to blame and the fact that, as a liquid, fizzy drinks will reach every nook and cranny in your mouth. If you are going to indulge in a cold coke on a hot day (and we really wouldn’t blame you if you did) the safest bet is to use a straw to minimize the damage to your enamel and to prevent the intense amount of sugar providing a tailor-made breeding ground for bacteria in your mouth.
3. White Bread You might not have known this but white bread is loaded with sugar. If your doctor ever nagged you about eating brown and not white, well we’re sorry to say it but – they’re very right. Not only is white bread full of tooth-battering sugars, it is also an extremely starchy foodstuff which is prone to sticking between your teeth, essentially cementing those harmful sugars in place until your next thorough brush. It isn’t just your teeth, which will suffer, your gums are also likely to pay the price – expect gingivitis and gum disease!
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4. Sweets This really goes without saying but, just like soft drinks, sweets and candies are a recipe for disaster. If you’ve got a constant sweet tooth, you should be prepared to have sweet dentures instead in a very short space of time. Milk chocolate, for instance, is obviously full of sugar but also comes with a generous side-serving of fat which helps the sugars to stick to the teeth for much longer.
5. Beer & Wine We don’t want to be killjoys but beer and wine are very acidic. The pH of beer is around 3.7-4.1 whilst wine tends to be worse, around the 3.5pH mark. With sugar in both, this acid has a very detrimental effect indeed. It isn’t really acceptable to drink alcohol through a straw so the best way to counteract the damaging effects of booze on your teeth is to brush regularly. If you are planning a night out of drinking spirits, brush your teeth beforehand to create a barrier between the wine and your pearly whites.
