Your Child’s Oral Care
Diet
If your diet lacks certain nutrients, it may be more difficult for tissues in your mouth to resist infection. This may contribute to gum disease, a major cause of tooth loss in adults. Although poor nutrition does not cause periodontal disease directly, many researchers believe that the disease progresses faster and could be more severe in people with nutrient-poor diets.
Knowing what and when to feed your kids and what to avoid can help them to develop good eating habits that can have lifetime benefits beyond a healthy smile.
Baby Teeth
Sugar vs. Teeth
Children love sugar. But unfortunately, their teeth aren’t quite so crazy about it.
The reason for this is that when we eat sugar, the bacteria that cause plaque on our teeth turn sugar into acid, which then attacks the enamel. Most of the time, the mouth’s natural defenses and regular brushing with a fluoride toothpaste mean this isn’t a problem. But if your child has lots of sugary foods and drinks, or has them quite often, the teeth will be exposed to this acid for a lot longer. That’s when decay can start to happen.
Why Baby Teeth Are More Vulnerable To Decay
Teeth are protected on the outside by a layer of enamel — the hardest substance in the human body. But the enamel on your children’s tiny teeth is thinner than that in the permanent teeth, so once decay begins, it can do more damage, more quickly.
Decay happens when plaque acid eats away at the tooth below the surface where you can’t see it. If this is left unchecked, a hole forms below the surface and eventually the surface will collapse and a cavity is formed. In the early stages, this won’t cause your child any pain, and the dentist should be able to see it and stop it from developing into a bigger hole. This is another reason why regular dentist visits are so important.
Fluoride toothpastes are also important because they can help the tooth remineralize — that is, help prevent the hole from forming by replacing lost minerals in the enamel. However, if remineralization doesn’t take place early on, the decay can continue to spread. At this point, your child could start getting a toothache. Once the surface of the tooth collapses, the cavity will need to be filled.
If the decay keeps spreading, the tooth may have to be removed. This is a worst-case scenario though, and with proper brushing with a fluoride toothpaste, a good diet and regular dentist visits your children's teeth should be just fine.
At-Will Feeding
At-will feeding is an easy habit to get into with your infant child, but it can make for some difficult adjustments later. The reason is because the acid caused by sugars in the foods we eat continues to attack teeth after eating. The more times those sugars are introduced to the mouth without brushing in between to remove them, the more minutes of day your child’s teeth are under attack.
Once the first baby teeth begin to erupt and sources of nutrition other than breast milk have been introduced, at-will feeding should cease.
Drinking From A Bottle
When children drink from a bottle, the liquid sloshes around their teeth and gums, and any drink with sugar in it (even watered-down fruit juice) will increase the chance of decay. So the best advice we can offer is to only put milk and water in the bottle. At bedtime, it’s important to only put water in the bottle. That’s because prolonged exposure to the sugars in milk can cause cavities, too.
Of course, kids are kids, and there will be times when they want a sugary drink. At these times, use a cup and a straw angled away from the teeth so that the liquid goes straight to the back of the mouth. If possible, it’s best to limit these occasions to mealtimes.