5 Foods Your Dentist Wouldn’t Touch With a Barge Pole

Take a look at our list of the 5 foods your dentist wouldn’t eat if you paid them and start protecting your pearly whites today.

We’ve all faced those awkward questions from our dentist. We’ve fended off the probing queries about how much fruit juice we drink, whether we really only imbibe 2 glasses of red wine a week, if those ‘occasional social cigarettes’ are actually a full-blown habit, whether we are hiding a secret addiction to pick’n’mix at the age of 46.

It can be very easy to get defensive but, far from being nagging mothers, our dentists really do know what is best. Your teeth are the only ones you’ll ever have and, considering the extortionate cost of dental work, it’s well worth taking good care of your gnashers. Take a look at our list of the 5 foods your dentist wouldn’t eat if you paid them and start protecting your pearly whites today.

1. Tinned Fruit

Thought that tinned peaches were a healthy alternative to pudding? Wrong. Tinned fruit is full of delicious, destructive sugar. Excess sugar is kryptonite to your teeth. It sticks to your teeth providing all sorts of tasty nourishment for the bacteria which lives in your mouth to thrive on. The more sugar, the more bacteria, the more plaque the bacteria creates and the higher your chances of gum disease, cavities and general oral nastiness.

Tinned fruit is a double whammy because it not only contains ladles of sugar, it also contains acidic fruit. You may be familiar with the old adage ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’, well, it won’t stop your dentist from paying a visit. The acid in fruit can be extremely damaging to the enamel of your teeth which weakens them and which can cause staining and discolouration.

2. Fizzy Soft Drinks

This is an obvious one but well worth repeating. Soft drinks, whether it’s cola, lemonade, sparkling elderflower or cherryade, are a your teeth’s absolute worst nightmare. There’s nothing soft about the effect of fizzy drinks on your gnashers, they damage them hard and they damage them badly.

The quantity of sugar is to blame and the fact that, as a liquid, fizzy drinks will reach every nook and cranny in your mouth. If you are going to indulge in a cold coke on a hot day (and we really wouldn’t blame you if you did) the safest bet is to use a straw to minimise the damage to your enamel and to prevent the intense amount of sugar providing a tailor-made breeding ground for bacteria in your mouth.

3. White Bread

You might not have known this but white bread is loaded with sugar. If your mother ever nagged you about eating brown and not white, well we’re sorry to say it but – she was right.

Not only is white bread full of tooth-battering sugars, it is also an extremely starchy foodstuff which is prone to sticking between your teeth, essentially cementing those harmful sugars in place until your next thorough brush. It isn’t just your teeth which will suffer, your gums are also likely to pay the price – expect gingivitis and gum disease!

4. Sweeties

We really shouldn’t need to say this but, just like soft drinks, sweets and candies are a recipe for disaster. If you’ve got an insatiable sweet tooth, you should be prepared to have sweet dentures instead in a very short space of time. The worst offenders are those which you have to keep in your mouth for long periods – lollipops, humbugs, gobstoppers, sherbet lemons – all of these are bad dental news.

Yet other quickly digestible treats like chocolate are equally bad in a whole other set of ways. Milk chocolate, for instance, is obviously full of sugar but also comes with a generous side-serving of fat which helps the sugars to stick to the teeth for much longer.

5. Beer & Wine

We don’t want to be killjoys but beer and wine are very acidic. The pH of beer is around 3.7-4.1 whilst wine tends to be worse, around the 3.5pH mark. With sugar in both tipples, this acid has a very detrimental effect indeed.

It isn’t really de rigueur to drink beer through a straw so the best way to counteract the damaging effects of booze on your teeth this to brush regularly and, if you are planning a night on the tiles, brush your teeth beforehand to create a barrier between the wine and your pearly whites.

If you do enjoy the finer things in life and want to enjoy a Hollywood smile at the same time, Smile Like The Stars LTD can help. Visit Smile Like the Stars today to learn how you can get the bright smile you’ve always wanted, simply and affordably with professional teeth whitening.