Food for Thought (And Teeth)
How the food we eat can help our teeth
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We’re constantly bombarded with messages about how different foods can hurt our teeth. From the sugar in candy to the acid in soda, there are tons of messages out there about how the wrong foods hurt your teeth. While these messages are accurate, they’re not a full story. As much as some foods can hurt your oral health, others can really help.
In this newsletter, we’re going to cover how some foods can help you maintain your oral health, and how some small changes to your diet might help you avoid your next cavity.
Cavity-Combating Cheese
Most of us don’t need an excuse to consume more cheese, but we here at Amardent are going to give you one anyway! When we’ve talked about cavities and the microbes involved in their formation, we talked about two specific points: 1.) Demineralization is the root of cavities and 2.) Dry mouth can result in faster cavity progression. Cheese manages to help on both these fronts.
When we take the first bite of cheese, we start to salivate. While this might seem mundane, it has significant effect. Cheese is able to make us salivate more aggressively than some other foods, and coupled with the large amount of calcium and phosphates found in milk products, cheese can start the remineralization process much faster than other foods.
Our favorite ferment has one last trick up its sleeve, too. Casein, a common phosphoprotein found in many cheeses, is able to bind with the hydroxyapatite of our teeth, preventing S. mutans from doing so. That buys your teeth time to remineralize with the calcium from the cheese, while holding the more aggressive bacteria at bay.
Now, researchers stated that you don’t need much cheese to accomplish these results, but we’ll leave it up to you how much you want to work into your diet.
Getting Your Caffeine Fix
For those of us who need a whack of caffeine to keep moving through the day, it can be hard to make sure what we drink can let us maintain momentum without eating at our teeth. Sure, energy drinks have what we need, but they also have a lot of what we don’t. We need caffeine solutions that don’t come at the cost of our teeth.
First off, I’ll answer the question up front: There is no solid answer on coffee. Yes, it’s acidic and can cause demineralization. However, in some studies, drinking it with milk reduced cavity and periodontal risk. There really isn’t a clear answer other than saying it depends. However, I can offer another alternative.
Recent studies have shown that tea, both green and black, can have positive impacts on oral health. These drinks are truly hitting out of their weight class when it comes to their health benefits.
- Tea has fluoride, which just like the fluorides in toothpaste, help to remineralize and strengthen the teeth
- Tea has Catechins and polyphenols, both of which boost overall microbiome health and reduce gum inflammation
- Tea is much less acidic than coffee, so all these added benefits come with even less cost
I’m not going to pretend I can ask you to totally replace your coffee intake with tea (that would be sacrilege). However, if you have oral health concerns and a healthy caffeine intake, consider replacing a cup or two of coffee with tea.
Just Scratching the Surface
While these foods are fantastic examples of how what you eat impacts how your teeth feel, this list is nowhere near exhaustive. Everything we eat, and really everything we do, impacts our dental health. Likewise, our dental health impacts every part of us, making it all the more important to be aware of how we make our choices.
There are so many foods out there, and most of them are honestly good for your teeth. Your teeth were meant to be used, and as long as you’re not just whacking them with sugar over and over again (or chewing on a rock), they can take it.
Of course, it’s important to keep them healthy, and to get in front of any potential issues early. If you’d like some help maintaining your oral wellness, go check out Amardent’s Scout: The world’s most advanced at-home dentistry device. And to get more information like this delivered straight to your inbox, sign up here.
Disclaimer: Scout is a wellness device, not a medical device. It is intended only for general health and wellness purposes, and it has not been evaluated, assessed, or approved by the FDA.
