Maintaining good oral hygiene and modifying your diet slightly is often enough to prevent the worst of tooth decay. Regular visits to your happy dental home can help with the rest. Between us we can prevent tooth decay and ensure your mouth is cavity free.
Cavities can be prevented by:
- Brushing your teeth
- Flossing
- Proper Diet
Let’s take a look at each.
Prevent Cavities With Regular Brushing
It is vital that everyone brushes their teeth at least twice a day with a good toothpaste. If you want to know which are good toothpastes and which are not, just ask us when you visit us, we’ll be happy to help.
In an ideal world, we would all brush our teeth thoroughly after each meal, but we know it doesn’t happen that way. What’s most important is that you do brush and that you brush properly. A vigorous but not rough action is needed for at least 2 minutes across all surfaces of your teeth to clean properly.
Consider electric toothbrushes if you’re not confident that your manual brush is doing the job. All electric toothbrushes are not the same. We can discuss this with you on an individual basis.
Flossing Helps Prevent Cavities
Regular brushing with a good toothpaste and brush cleans the majority of the surfaces of your teeth. However, the brush can’t get everywhere, especially between your teeth and around the gum.
Flossing takes a little practice to get right, but once you’re used to using dental floss, it becomes part of your daily routine. You only need to floss once per day, but you would be amazed at just how much food and debris it removes.
Use a good floss, and work it gently back and forth between your teeth. Once you hit the gum line, use the floss in a “C” shape and clean under the tooth until you hit the root.
While it doesn’t sound very pleasant, it’s actually a painless process that can help prevent cavities immeasurably. If you’re new to flossing, you may experience a little bleeding at first. This is normal and will go away after a while. Water flossing can be an alternative in many cases.
Help Prevent Cavities With a Balanced Diet
Diet is probably the most difficult aspect of cavity prevention to manage. It requires real lifestyle changes to make it work. The upside is that changing a diet to prevent cavities will also benefit all other aspects of your life too.
Diets high in sugar and carbohydrate create a fertile ground for bacteria in your mouth to create the acid that erodes your teeth. By reducing both, you can help your mouth remain healthy and reduce the harmful bacteria that can do so much damage.
Cutting down on fizzy drinks, coffee, alcohol, chocolate, candy, cake, white bread and other high sugar and carb foods is what will really work here.
You can substitute some of them for other food types so you don’t miss out altogether. For example, you can swap white bread for whole grain, use whole wheat pasta, drink sugar-free or water instead of fizzy drinks.
Preventing cavities is quite easy once you know how. It just takes slight adjustments of your daily routine and a little effort. Getting children in to the habit of brushing and flossing as young as possible also helps.
If you would like more information on preventing cavities, contact Aesthetic Family Dentistry for a consultation.
