The Holidays bring us such JOY, ANTICIPATION, and STRESS! That’s what makes them so exciting. As we all know, eating that huge Christmas meal can leave you feeling miserable for days, but there are many hidden dangers, especially to your teeth that you need to avoid this holiday season.
Here is a list of the Top 5 foods to avoid this year:
#5 Sticky Sweets
All those sweet and wonderful coatings on sometimes not so delicious foods can make any palate clamor for more! But, caramel and chocolate covered delicacies can hide hard things like pretzels or popcorn kernels that can easily break and unsuspecting tooth. The sticky treats, along with toffees and taffy, cling to teeth and take a long time to dissolve. These treasures can make you happy at the moment but could leave you trying to find your dentist’s cell phone number to fix a broken tooth!
#4 Hot Beverages
When it gets cold outside or if we just want to get in the Holiday spirit, nothing soothes our insides like a steaming cup of hot chocolate or tea. Our teeth can handle the heat, but our gums, tongue, and roof of your mouth might not be so tough. Severe damage to your gums can cause permanent damage, but repetitive mild burns add up over time and can lead to gum recession or even tooth loss. We are not even mentioning all the sugar in those toasty drinks! So, let your hot drink sit for a few minutes instead of hastily sipping on it and doing irreversible damage!
#3 Sugary Beverages
We all love those sweet beverages around the holidays, especially those ones with ALCOHOL in them. Everyone knows about the damage sugar does to our teeth by increasing our chances for cavities, but alcohol can be a “silent assassin” when it comes to tooth damage. Alcohol dehydrates our bodies and can leave you with “Cotton Mouth”. Our saliva is our best natural defense against cavities. Without it our teeth become very susceptible to decay. So, a sugary toddy can be a double whammy and leave you high and dry in the dental chair next year!
#2 Citrus Drinks and Foods
The Holiday season and citrus have long be associated together. Fresh oranges, tangerines, and grapefruit start arriving in our stores just after the cooling winds of fall ripen these delicious fruits just in time for the stockings to be hung! A twist of lemon in our favorite drink or an orange slice to cleanse our palate, that sour flavoring contains tons of citric acid which can damage the enamel on our teeth and erode that protective layering. Those strong acids also lowering the pH of our mouth making a wonderful little playground for those cavity causing bacteria!
#1 Hard Candies
They are so wonderful, minty, and sweet, but CANDY CANES are a dentist’s nightmare or sweet dream ($) because of all the damage they can do– along with butterscotch drops, Lifesavers, and other festive hard candies that stuff our stockings. They can easily chip or fracture a tooth when chomping down on those hard candies. Sucking on them for hours just bathes our teeth in sugar that’s like an “IV drip” for the bacteria. If these sweet little morsels don’t get you one way, they will back door you another!
Avoid these 5 killers of teeth and may all your Christmas’s End with White Healthy Teeth! If a problem does arise, call Carlyle Dental for help!
www.carlyledentistry.com