The Best Diet For Healthy Teeth
As dentists, we often talk about preventative dentistry and how important it is to ensure that our patient’s teeth stay healthy. However, one of the main ways you can prevent your teeth from becoming unhealthy is to improve your diet. By following a diet for healthy teeth, you can prevent your teeth from becoming unhealthy later on in life. Eating a diet for healthy teeth involves eating lots of healthy foods rich in different vitamins and minerals, and avoiding foods that erode your enamel and cause tooth decay.
One of the best ways you can improve your dental health is to optimise your diet for healthy teeth. Here are all the best ways you can create a tailored diet that suits you, that will improve your dental hygiene. Here are all the best foods to eat and avoid if you want the best diet for healthy teeth.
What should I eat to have healthy teeth?
If you want to improve your diet for healthy teeth, you should be including foods that are high in certain vitamins and nutrients. Foods that are rich in these vitamins are fantastic for the health and strength of your teeth, and incorporating these into your diet could vastly improve your dental health. Here are the best foods to add to your diet for healthy teeth:
High Calcium Foods
This is one of the most obvious choices when you’re choosing foods for a diet for healthy teeth. Calcium is notoriously amazing for your bone and dental health. Improving the strength of your teeth is important, as strong teeth are less likely to develop cavities or experience tooth loss in later life, causing you to need dental implants.
If you want to strengthen your teeth with calcium rich foods, you should add cheese, milk, yoghurt and other dairy products into your diet. If you’re vegan, you can still add calcium into a diet for healthy teeth, by eating sesame seeds and soy milk.
High Protein Foods
Protein rich foods are great for your overall health, but they’re particularly effective as part of a diet for healthy teeth. High protein foods contain a lot of phosphorus, which is important for the strength of your teeth and jaw. Protein also helps to build and repair tissue in your body, which is important for strengthening your teeth. If you want to add protein heavy foods to your diet for healthy teeth, eat foods such as meat, eggs, tofu, beans and leafy vegetables.
High Magnesium Foods
Magnesium is one of the best ways you can strengthen your teeth and jaw, and should be a big component of your diet for healthy teeth. If you want to add magnesium into your diet, you should look to add more whole grains into your diet, such as brown bread and rice. Avoiding processed grains as much as possible is also a great idea as part of eating a diet for healthy teeth, as white bread and rice can damage your teeth as they are high in sugar.
Foods Rich In Vitamin C and D
Foods that are high in Vitamin C and D are crucial when it comes to creating a diet for healthy teeth. Vitamin C helps to kill off bacteria that grows on the surface of your teeth. Vitamin D aids your body when it comes to enamel development, and helps your body absorb calcium. If you want to eat a diet for healthy teeth rich in Vitamin C, you should eat fruits such as strawberries, grapefruit, oranges, and apples. These fruits are high in antioxidants that not only help to improve overall health, but your oral health too. If you want to add more Vitamin D into your diet for healthy teeth, there are limited foods. However, fish and red meat are high in Vitamin D.
Eating foods that strengthen and improve the health of your teeth is great, but you should also eat foods that kill mouth bacteria. Including certain foods in your diet for healthy teeth that remove bacteria is a great way to ensure that your teeth stay clean.
What foods weaken mouth bacteria?
If you want to add foods to your diet for healthy teeth that weaken mouth bacteria, you should add a few of these into your diet.
Cheese
Cheese is one of the best foods to eat to neutralise the bacteria in your mouth, because it is high in phosphate and calcium. Neutralising the acid in your mouth helps you to preserve your tooth enamel and helps you prevent cavities and gum disease. Cheese is one of the best foods to include in a diet for healthy teeth.
Celery
Chewing crunchy foods such as celery helps your mouth to produce saliva, which promotes the prevention of oral diseases. Chewing foods such as apples or carrots is also beneficial for the same reason. Furthermore, naturally abrasive foods like celery are great as part of a diet for healthy teeth because they help to massage the gums and clean the teeth.
Green Tea
Many people avoid tea and coffee as part of a diet for healthy teeth, as they can cause teeth staining. However, black and green tea contain polyphenols, which can slow the growth of harmful bacteria that causes tooth decay and gum disease.
Water
Between your meals, you should also drink plenty of water as part of a diet for healthy teeth. Why? Regularly drinking water is a great way to rinse your mouth and teeth of food particles, and stimulate saliva production in your mouth. This is the best way to improve your dental hygiene as it helps you rinse your teeth.
What are the worst foods for teeth?
When you start eating a diet for healthy teeth, there are foods you should avoid as well as ones you should eat more of. Here are the worst offenders for damaging your teeth:
Fizzy Drinks
If you want to make the switch and start eating a better diet for healthy teeth, you should avoid sugary and fizzy drinks at all costs. The sugar in fizzy drinks sticks to your teeth, and the acids in them erode the enamel on your teeth, causing a lot of damage. If you do drink a fizzy drink, you should brush your teeth afterwards.
Sweets, Cake and Chocolate
Refined sugar is one of the worst things you can eat, and if you want to follow a diet for healthy teeth, you should avoid sugary foods as much as possible. Sugar can cause tooth decay and damage, which isn’t good for your dental hygiene and health. When you do eat sugary foods, you should eat them with meals to reduce the effect of acid production as a result of eating sugary foods. You should also clean your teeth thoroughly.
Starchy Foods
Foods that have a high starch content, such as bread and crisps, are not good in a diet for healthy teeth. It is easier for starchy foods to get stuck in between your teeth and turn into sugar, which can damage your teeth.
If you want more information about how to follow a diet for healthy teeth, talk to one of our dentists during your consultation and they can give you more advice.
