Food and Drink

How Food and Drink affects your Teeth:

Why the problem?

One of the commonest questions we are asked is what is the cause of a particular dental problem. Often it is either caused by or made worse by what you eat or drink.

Dental Decay

There are three things needed for dental decay to occur:

1. A tooth
2. Plaque
3. Sugar

Theoretically if brushing is perfect then you could eat a lot of sugar and get away with it. However, this cannot be the case all day every day, there will always be times when plaque occurs. Therefore, sugar needs to be concentrated around meal times.

What to avoid / moderate between meals?
• Sugar in drinks, hot or cold. Use sweetener or no added sugar varieties.
• Sugar added to cereal etc
• Sweets
• Chocolate
• Cakes
• Biscuits
• Smoothies, whilst healthy, can contain a lot of sugar
• Sports drinks

Ideally these should also be moderated at all times.