Eating healthy promotes strong teeth in children, and by encouraging a healthy diet, you can protect your child’s teeth from dissolving enamel and decay. In many ways, the types of foods you eat have a direct correlation to their long-term dental health. As an essential part of preventative dentistry, the quality of our foods translates to the quality of your oral health. However, sometimes it can be hard to gain the nutrients we all need when fast food options present a cheaper alternative or when low incomes result in less than nutritious foods. But it’s important to make an effort to eat healthier because while that chocolate bar may taste good, it doesn’t do good for you or your child’s teeth.
Our bodies are amazing machines due to their ability to fight off infections and diseases and having poor nutrition only compromises that ability. Many studies cite the effectiveness of diets on oral health and argue that nutritional foods can help prevent many of the oral diseases we often try to avoid, including cavities and gum disease. In many ways, our mouths present an open the door to our overall wellness and can provide many clues about how our bodies are doing. In a more accurate sense, they’re a gateway to bacteria strains such as streptococcus mutans to enter our mouths, develop plaque, and infect our gums and teeth. Combine that with poor oral hygiene, and your teeth are in deep trouble!
One of the great things about diets is that they can be started at any point, and they’ll always provide benefits. When it comes to eating healthy, here are some of our tips:
We encourage a well-balanced diet for the whole family, and together with good brushing habits, your child’s teeth will be sparkling clean and strong in no time. For more information about how to aid your family’s diet and receive dental care, contact your local family dentist to arrange an appointment.
Practicing good oral hygiene is the most assured way to prevent the early signs of tooth decay. For children with developing teeth, the molars can be an incredibly particular set to brush because of their location along the back of the throat. Because of this, the molars become harder to clean, making it easy for bacteria to develop in those areas. If your children have started developing cavities along their back molars, know that this is quite a regular occurrence. In cases where the molars are getting ready to erupt or have already erupted, your dentist can apply a sealant to protect them from cavities.
Sealants are a thin, protective coating made of plastic materials, made to act as a shield against bacteria. Children’s molars can benefit from sealants because as they age and their teeth come into alignment, it can allow the molars to grow safely without the risk of cavity development. Today, we’re going to look at the glass ionomer sealant, how it works, and tell you why this sealant is a trusted variety among dentists.
Most often, sealants are either made from plastic material with no BPA or resins made from ceramic and other plastic compounds. Glass ionomer sealants are made of water, polymeric acid, and glass powder, making them a unique option for families needing dental treatment for cavities or erupting teeth. For dentists using glass ionomer sealants for teeth, they provide an excellent means of protection against bacteria and have numerous other benefits, including:
Glass ionomer sealants have a fantastic ability to protect your children’s teeth. However, these sealants should not be considered the only solution. If you wish to learn more about the various treatments your dentist has available, then it’s best to arrange an appointment with them if you have any questions. If you’re curious, ask them about glass ionomer cement, and they may be able to help. Most importantly, glass ionomer sealants do not replace brushing and flossing. Make sure to keep reinforcing good oral habits for your child, as having healthy teeth can help prevent oral diseases and keep their smile in great shape.
Your food choices have far-reaching implications for your oral and whole-body health. We’ve all been cautioned about the risks to our oral health from consuming too much sugar and acidic foods, but some foods can actually benefit it! While you’re considering changes to your diet to prevent osteoporosis, heart disease, IBS, and diabetes, give your oral health some consideration as well! Eating the right nutrient-rich foods can help you feel better and be healthier on every level!
Your mouth is able to communicate an immense amount of information to your physician and dentist. If you’re not getting enough of the proper nutrients or enough of them, there will be indicators in your oral health. Within our mouth can be found a microbiome comprised of hundreds of types of bacteria, some of which are essential to fighting illness. Others, like the streptococcus mutans bacteria, have a deleterious effect on the health of our teeth, gums, and other oral structures.
Not only can making healthy food choices protect your teeth, but it can also help the healthy bacteria that keep the harmful ones at bay. This is good for more than just your oral health, as well. There has been substantial research that reveals that oral health problems can have consequences that extend to our entire bodies. In severe enough cases, the bacteria that cause periodontal disease can get into our bloodstream and cause serious illness, even death.
One of the worst things you can do for your oral health is to have a diet that consists of an overabundance of processed sugar and carbohydrates. Both of these substances are well-known food sources for the unhealthy bacteria that call our mouths home. They are still something that we need as a part of our diet as they also form the primary source of energy for our cells. StatPearls has produced results from studies that cover the digestion and consumption process and encourage a dynamic variety of foods that are both highly nutritious and healthy for our teeth. These foods promote the production of saliva, protect deposits of calcium, and limit the risks of dental diseases. We recommend the following if you wish to eat a healthy, balanced diet:
You also want to be certain to avoid foods that are highly processed and high in fats, sugar, and salt. These foods are particularly bad for your teeth and your health overall. If you want more guidance in starting a healthy dental diet, reach out to your dental practitioner today!
Probiotics have been a hot topic in health and medicine circles in recent years. As our understanding of them increases, we continue to find additional ways they can benefit our bodies and our health. One recent body of evidence suggests that taking oral probiotics may actually be of benefit to our oral health and serve as a natural way to hold off tooth decay. If you’re curious how these microbes are able to provide a meaningful benefit to your oral health, it’s important that you understand the underlying causes of tooth decay.
When most dental patients think about tooth decay, their first thought involves the action of sugar and acid on our enamel. While this is definitely one element of tooth decay, it’s not the central driving element. Our mouths are complex biomes containing hundreds of species of bacteria, some of which are actually beneficial to our health. When you start experiencing tooth decay, you are actually experiencing what can be thought of as an imbalance in your mouth’s microbiome. So how do probiotics help with this? They can:
As you can see, probiotics play several important roles in the health of our oral microbiome. While they can’t eliminate the presence of decay-causing bacteria on their own, they’re an excellent bonus. Other steps you can employ include maintaining a regular routine of oral hygiene involving brushing, flossing, and the use of mouthwash. Reducing our sugar intake remains a good idea, as most of the bad bacteria in our mouths act on these substances.
While probiotics aren’t able to single-handedly eliminate the advance of tooth decay and biofilm, they are capable of lending a significant hand. Streptococcus mutans is well known for its role in promoting tooth decay, but the good guys of your oral microbiome are largely unknown. Let’s make some introductions:
These are just some of the potentially hundreds of probiotics that are capable of providing support to our oral microbiome. They can be obtained through a variety of sources, from supplements to changes in diet that include probiotic yogurt and milk products. Talk to your dentist to determine if probiotics are capable of helping your teeth.
Obesity has been emphasized across our healthcare industry as a highly prevalent issue for today’s generation. Being overweight or obese has been shown to lead to numerous health issues later on in life, increasing the risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. For our oral health, being overweight can impact our teeth and gums, as the various foods eaten can contain an increasingly dangerous level of carbohydrates and processed sugars, causing an increase in cavities and gum disease among those obese. However, where does the line between dentistry management and overall health play hand-in-hand? How does obesity affect dental health, and how can dentists help provide solutions to these issues?
The CDC often measures excess amounts of body fat as a way of comparing weight to height, taking in factors such as age and overall health to determine the percentile of body fat required to maintain a healthy lifestyle. For children and teenagers, it’s especially important to consider how their overall weight affects their body composition and how their nutrition, genetics, and environment play into their overall BMI. However, how obesity connects to oral health considers many of these factors, as these both correlate and share common risk factors.
According to a study conducted by the International Journal of Clinical Pediatric Dentistry, childhood obesity and its correlation with cavities and gum disease are affected by factors such as lack of physical activity, changes in eating habits, and social changes. Because childhood is such as critical point of development, both obesity and dental diseases present some of the greatest public health burdens because of their adverse impact on their growth. When behaviors are altered and form into unhealthy habits, their oral health becomes impacted as well.
Within the study, researchers found that increased caloric intake with highly processed sugars and fats, alongside a lack of exercise, is responsible for the onset of multiple health conditions, including an association with cavities. Eating fewer fruits and vegetables reduces children’s fiber intake, and the unavailability of a nutritious, healthy diet overall has been shown to increase cavities and gum disease in children. This positive correlation creates risk factors for other health conditions in later life.
When it comes to addressing obesity, dentists present a unique position, where their insights can offer extensive help towards giving parents better options for their child’s health. Dentists can provide numerous solutions that can address these issues and help change and transform lifestyle habits into a more prospective outlook for their future. These various solutions can include:
Childhood immunizations often present parents with an illusion that they’re protected from diseases later in life once their child’s vaccinated. However, childhood vaccines need constant revisiting to protect against diseases that mutate and adapt to various environmental changes. Preteens and teenagers should continue to get vaccinations for many essential reasons, but both parents and teenagers are often unaware of the advantages vaccines bring. We’re here to help examine the information teenagers need to best understand vaccines, preventable diseases, and attitudes towards immunization.
The CDC recommends various vaccinations for children between the ages of 13 to 18. It allocates specific times for these vaccines to be administered because it factors in the child’s growth, immune system development, and the disease’s nature. Out of the various vaccines a child requires to maintain good health, the vaccines highly recommended include:
All other varieties of vaccinations can often be caught up to help protect their health from diseases such as HPV, polio, measles, and whooping cough. The majority of these vaccines are often dispersed throughout their toddler years, which helps protect their immune system from highly preventable diseases and makes them less memorable by comparison. When it comes to how teenagers understand vaccines, some studies suggest that vaccinations and immunizations need to be better communicated. The study, conducted by Vaccine journal, examined the understanding of teenagers’ preventable diseases and vaccinations through twelve focus groups throughout the UK. Within this study, researchers found that those teenagers exhibited limited knowledge of the diseases that vaccines can prevent. Their knowledge of these diseases depends on the prevalence of the disease and its long-term harm.
Diseases such as meningitis, chickenpox, and rubella can have a severe impact on your child’s health if they are not vaccinated. For teenagers, the risk of infection matters just as much as for newborns. However, due to the lack of awareness of the impact of these preventable diseases, many teenagers often go without getting vaccinations. One of the best ways to protect your children is to get all their vaccinations because getting vaccinated can help them by:
To protect your child from these diseases, make sure they stay updated on the latest in vaccinations by following the CDC guidelines and speaking with your primary physician.
For children between the ages of 6 months to 4 years old, they may have a thumb sucking period as their primary baby teeth begin to appear. Thumb sucking during this time is considered a normal habit, but it should be limited by the time their teeth appear. Beyond this point, thumb sucking can potentially harm our child’s teeth. Because of the vulnerable and special time it is for your child’s teeth, keeping up with limiting their habits is essential for their oral health because it can affect the palatal roof of their mouth, causing overbites and misshapen teeth to form. But why does this occur? Malocclusion is a tricky condition for children. For orthodontists and pediatric dentists who consistently work with children, malocclusion has a high prevalence among children who suck their thumb than those who do not.
To understand why thumb sucking is harmful to your child, it’s essential to understand how the teeth form during their first few years. Teeth development occurs while the baby is in the womb, and within five weeks of gestation, their primary teeth appear inside the baby’s jaws. Their eruption stage, or teething stage, occurs when their about six months old. Often, due to the discomfort that the process brings, some children will begin to suck their thumbs to compensate for the pressure buildup. It’s important to keep up with your child’s proper hygiene during this time because sucking thumbs can expose them to various diseases, such as bacterial gastroenteritis and parasitic diseases.
Teething usually ends around eight weeks, and during this time, eruption cysts will develop and go away as the teeth begin to push their way through the gums. Once this process ends, thumb sucking can still be a habit that your child develops as a comfort form. How this affects their teeth, however, comes down to understanding the anatomy of tooth growth. Studies from Case Reports in Dentistry observe the effects that long-term thumb sucking has on children’s anterior teeth and found that thumb sucking creates absences in the development of the palatal ridge, which helps form the shape of the mouth to support the teeth. This study observed how treating the palatal ridge with an expander helped reform the dental structure of the patient’s mouths and helped them stop their thumb-sucking habit.
When left untreated, overbites developed from thumb sucking can cause them to become more vulnerable to cavities and gum disease at an early age and cause them to be more vulnerable to diseases when placing foreign objects in the mouth. To prevent this habit from developing, we suggest the following:
If any of these dental tips don’t help, and you would like to learn more about how to help your child’s thumb-sucking habit, then speak with your dentist and schedule an appointment with them to help them learn about the positive effects of stopping this habit.
For children, sugary food is often the main culprits for cavities, and thanks to many parents and their proactive choices, the average percentage of children’s cavities has been decreasing overtime! According to the CDC, only 16% of children between ages 5 to 19 years old have untreated cavities. But even while that percentage continues to decrease, many families still affected by cavities can find themselves in situations less than ideal. For some families, even proper diet and oral hygiene may not fight against this cavity-causing factor. If your family appears to have more cavities than you would like, then we suggest looking around your home for an unusual but dangerous culprit – black mold.
Black mold, as we currently know of it, doesn’t cause tooth decay directly. Rather, it occurs as a side effect of certain symptoms often associated with black mold. As we all know, cavities develop from plaque buildup left untreated, containing bacteria harmful to the tooth’s enamel or the tooth’s outer surface. Bacteria love moist warm environments, and when added sugars are mixed into the scenario, a person’s mouth can become a haven for bacteria to grow and fester over time. But if your children have been relatively good about keeping up with their brushing and flossing, then black mold may cause it. Here’s what we know about black mold, according to sources from FEMA:
While there is an association between black mold and cavity development, more research is needed to understand whether black mold causes cavities in people’s teeth.
As pediatric dentists, we highly recommend following FEMA’s guidelines on ridding your home of black mold. If you’re experiencing any severe respiratory or nasal symptoms, schedule an appointment with your primary care physician for a proper diagnosis, and if you find black mold in your home, contact a professional mold remover to clean and disinfect your home from black mold and its spores. We also recommend visiting your dentist if you notice that your child has begun to develop more cavities than usual.
Swimming is one of those sports that don’t make dentists cringe when you bring them up, but that doesn’t mean it’s free from oral health risks. A little known fact is too much time spent swimming in a chlorinated pool or in the ocean can pose certain risks to your oral health. If your children are avid swimmers that you can’t keep out of the water, this article will let you know the dangers.
Improperly chlorinated pools pose a risk to dental health, be sure to chlorinate appropriately
Swimming of all forms is excellent exercise, working every part of the body while being low-impact. While this latter is hardly a concern for most young swimmers, there are a number of concerns that can face those who spend long hours in the pool or swimming in the ocean. Below are five of the most prominent.
If your children spend a lot of hours in the pool, it’s important that you communicate this to your dentist. They’ll be able to keep an eye out for related concerns and identify the correct cause of those that may appear to be from poor hygiene.
There are quite easy things you can do to prevent time spent in the water from impacting the health of your child’s teeth. It starts with making sure you take regular trips to your dentist and rinsing your mouth after every swim. Getting additional fluoride will definitely help protect your teeth, and you should always have a professional manage the chemical levels in your home pool.
Setting good dental care habits is one of the most important things you can do for your child’s future oral health. Among all of your other responsibilities as a parent, it can be challenging to figure out how to provide them with the guidance they need. There are many questions to be answered, including when they should start brushing, flossing, even when they should start using mouthwash. We’ve put together this guide for parents to help you make the right decisions when helping your child build good dental care habits.
The first thing to know about your children’s teeth is that they begin to develop before they ever leave the womb. During your second trimester, they’re already beginning to develop teeth, and there are as many as 20 of them already present in the jaw, ready to start erupting. This means that starting your child’s dental care should start as soon as they’re born, and their dental care education should start as soon as they can properly hold a toothbrush. As your child ages, their oral hygiene practices should progress as follows:
By the time your child is 8, they should be able to brush, floss, and use mouthwash competently on their own. One of the most significant options for you to make for your child’s dental development is to make it a family affair. If everyone gets together to brush their teeth at the same time, you’ll get the benefit of supervising their brushing and bonding with them at the same time.
The American Dental Association recommends that you take your child to their first dental visit before they reach a year old. This helps you get a good start on their yearly dental visits and helps them begin developing positive associations with visiting their dentist. Regular appointments with the dentist will also help your child’s provider identify developing concerns while they can be easily addressed. Many orthodontic concerns can be addressed more quickly and less expensively while your child’s jaw and teeth are still developing. Another issue that dentists can identify early is a child’s susceptibility to cavities. For those showing a strong tendency to develop them, your dentist may suggest using topical fluoride before all of their teeth have even come in. If you haven’t scheduled your child’s next dental visit yet, do so today!
