Avoid These Foods for a Healthier Smile

A healthy smile starts with a healthy diet. In addition to making sure your diet contains plenty of nutritious and vitamin-heavy foods, there are a few foods and beverages you ought to avoid as much as possible. Below, you’ll find a list of some cavity-causing culprits and an explanation of why they cause so much damage to teeth.

1. Ice

This might seem like a strange item to top the list. After all, ice is just frozen water, right? That’s true and ice is totally harmless when used to cool a beverage. It only starts to cause problems when people chew on it. Ice is so hard that crunching on it can damage your enamel and leave your teeth susceptible to dental issues, such as chipped teeth and loosened crowns.

2. Alcohol

Drinking too much alcohol can lead to tooth decay and oral infections, such as gum disease. This is because an excess of alcohol can cause a decrease in the saliva flow to your mouth. Saliva washes away food particles and bacteria and provides protection to the soft tissues in your mouth. When you do not have enough saliva, your mouth becomes more prone to dental issues.

3. Bread

Bread might seem pretty harmless, but it can actually cause some real dental issues. The problem is that, as soon as we start chewing bread, our saliva breaks down the starches and almost immediately converts them to sugar. The sticky, sugary substance that bread becomes once we start to chew it can stick to teeth and provide fuel for cavity-causing bacteria.

4. Dried fruits

Although they often seem to be the healthy snack option, dried fruits can actually cause real damage to your teeth. This is because they are full of natural sugars and the juices that would normally work to quickly rinse this sugar from your teeth have been removed during the drying process. As a result extremely sugary dried fruits often stick to our teeth, where they quickly become food for cavity-causing bacteria.

Before you get too concerned, just remember that it all comes down to moderation. We’re not asking you to entirely give up any tooth-damaging food or beverage. Instead, we simply suggest that you limit your intake of these items and that you always follow them up with a thorough cleaning of your teeth. In addition, by following your meals and sweet beverages with water, you can rinse away food particles that could fuel cavity-causing bacteria.