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Diet Tips
Diet is important!
The Clock is Ticking!
When your child eats sweet foods or high carbohydrate foods try to limit the amount of time it takes to eat. The longer these foods are in the mouth, the more damaging they are to the teeth. Try to eat quickly and rinse with water after eatting.
For example, 10 blueberries over the course of an hour will be more damaging to teeth than a whole container of blueberries in 10 minutes. The sugar from the blueberries are on the teeth for a shorter amount of time.
We also recommend rinsing with water after eating sugary and high carbohydrate foods to get the sugar off the teeth. It is also a good idea to keep a toothbrush in the kitchen for foods that stick tightly to teeth like goldfish, crackers, and blueberries.
Diet and eating habits are equally, if not more, important than oral hygiene habits like brushing and flossing. Your child spends much more time with food and drink in their mouth than they spend with a toothbrush in their mouth.
We like to use physical fitness as an analogy. We would not expect to reach a high level of physical fitness by exercising 2 minutes in the morning and 2 minutes at night. What we do the other 23 hours and 56 minutes plays a much larger role than the 2 minute periods at the beginning and end of the day.
Oral hygiene is the same way. Brushing and flossing is important and helps but the things we expose our teeth to throughout our day are also very important in determining if we get cavities or not.
Good and Bad Snacks
Good snacks are snack low in carbohydrates and sugar content like:
-Cheese
-Nuts (peanuts, almonds, cashews)
-Vegetables (carrot sticks, cucumber slices...)
Its always a good idea to check nutrition labels. A lot of foods parents ate as children now have much more sugar than they did years ago.
Bad snacks are snacks high in carbohydrates and sugar content like:
-Chips
-Candy
-Sweet drinks (Gatorade, any brand of juice, Kool-aid)
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