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Diet For a
Healthy Mouth
Keep Your Teeth Decay Free For Life
Here’s how it works. Everybody has bacteria (germs)
in their mouths. Decay happens when certain types of
these germs turn sugar into acid. This acid causes
decay. The good guy is your saliva. the saliva
neutralizes the acid produced by the germs (stick
around, this will get more interesting). It takes 2
hours however after having anything with sugar for your
teeth to stop dissolving.
So, your teeth are dissolving for two hours after you
have anything with sugar. If you have three meals a day
and nothing in between, your teeth dissolve for six
hours a day. They seem to cope OK with this.
Every sugary snack between meals adds an extra two hours
to your dissolving time. If you’ve got enough fingers
count up how many meals or snacks or drinks with sugar
you have a day. Multiply by two (use toes as necessary)
and you get how much of the day your teeth spend
decaying.
If it’s 12 hours or more, you may as well reserve a seat
in our chair for lots of fillings.
Public enemy number one, the sugary snacks are the
obvious ones like candies, lozenges, cookies and cakes,
but this also includes drinks with sugar such as soft
drinks, fruit juice, coffee or tea with sugar. Did you
know that a large McDonalds Coke has 22 teaspoons of
sugar? It’s full of acid too, which really wrecks the
teeth. A cup of juice is healthier, but still has 6-8
teaspoons. It has all the sugar and acid from the 6-8
fruits it was made from.
The worst snacks are those you suck on for a long time,
especially sour candies which have built-in acid. Even
"healthy" snacks like granola bars and dried fruit are
loaded with sugar.
Before all you chocoholics jump out the window, there is
a simple solution. Bundle up all your sugary foods and
juice and include them with the three major meals. No
guarantees, but it will go a long way to reducing
decay. Of course, you need to brush and floss for any
of this to work.
If you must gobble or nibble between meals some things
are OK. Most dairy products, fresh fruit (not dried) and
vegetables are fine to have as snacks. Meat, cheese and
the like are good too. You can drink water, milk, coffee
or tea unsweetened or with sugar substitute, and
watered-down juices in moderation. Juice with soda water
tastes good, and has a lot less sugar and calories.
There are fruit and berry flavored herbal teas available
that make good iced tea without any sugar. Diet soft
drinks and sugarless gum are sort of OK but contain
artificial sweeteners, so use moderation.
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