If you’re concerned about maintaining healthy, beautiful teeth, then you must be aware that the holiday season is a minefield of poor oral health choices. While there’s nothing wrong with indulging in the occasional sweet, the sheer abundance of them that can be found this time of year makes it difficult to practice any degree of restraint. Further, many of the options available are of the hard or sticky variety of candy that can tempt you to bite into them or crunch them. Doing this to hard candy or sticky caramel can spell disaster for your oral health and existing restoration work.
What You Need To Avoid
To help out the intrepid holiday social butterfly, we’re going to provide a list of things that you can watch for and avoid. How strenuously you need to avoid these treats is going to depend largely on exactly how much dental work you already have and the details of your oral health. Come with us as we explore some of the holidays most dangerous delights:
Hard Candies
Hard candies are a constant risk during the holidays and come in an immense number of varieties. While they are intended to be long-lasting, there’s an unfortunate habit that many people have of crunching right down into them. This is less than ideal as the candy is more than hard enough to cause damage to even structurally sound teeth. If you have any form of decay or damage on your existing teeth, chewing on hard candy may exacerbate it. Avoid crunching them if you can, and if you can’t, maybe just avoid them altogether.
Chocolates
Chocolate, in and of itself, is actually a fairly harmless treat as far as your teeth are concerned. It’s soft and non-damaging, and as long as you brush after you enjoy it, you’re not going to see any serious trouble. Even your saliva is enough to remove most of it. During the holidays, on the other hand, you may discover that that assortment box of chocolates you have contains crunchy nuts or gooey chewy caramel that can rip restorations out of your teeth. Caution is definitely required.
Alcohol
Alcohol may seem like a fairly harmless choice for your teeth, but this simply isn’t true. High alcohol consumption can lead to tooth decay, gum disease, and a host of oral infections that enjoy the environment it creates. This is due, in part, to alcohol’s propensity for dialing back our production of saliva. Saliva plays an essential role in protecting our teeth from decay, and bacteria flourish in its absence.
These are just a few select tips to help you make better choices for your oral health during the holidays. Want to discover more ways you can protect your teeth during the holidays? Reach out to Dr. Anna Romans and Sheila Soltani at Romans Soltani Dentistry in Camillus, NY today! Our friendly staff will help you prepare for your visit by getting the paperwork filled out before you arrive at our office so you can focus your time on your dental care while you’re here!
