Diet and oral health

To prevent cavities and maintain good oral health, your diet -- what you eat and how often you eat -- are important factors. Changes in your mouth start the minute you eat certain foods. Bacteria in the mouth convert sugars from the foods you eat to acids, and it's the acids that begin to attack the enamel on teeth, starting the decay process. The more often you eat and snack, the more frequently you are exposing your teeth to the cycle of decay.

Mouth-healthy foods and drinks

The best food choices for the health of your mouth include cheeses (which are alkaline and help counteract acid), chicken or other meats, nuts, and milk. These foods are thought to protect tooth enamel by providing the calcium and phosphorus needed to remineralise teeth (a natural process by which minerals are redeposited in tooth enamel after being removed from enamel by acids).

Other food choices include firm/crunchy fruits (for example, apples and pears) and vegetables. These foods have a high water content, which dilutes the effects of the sugars they contain, and stimulate the flow of saliva (which helps protect against decay by washing away food particles and buffering acid). Acidic foods, such as citrus fruits, tomatoes and lemons, should be eaten as part of a larger meal to minimise the acidic environment to which your teeth and mouth will be exposed.

Poor food choices include sweets -- such as hard sweets and mints -- biscuits, cakes, pies, breads, muffins, crisps, pretzels, chips, bananas, raisins and other dried fruits. These foods contain large amounts of sugar and can stick to teeth, providing a fuel source for bacteria. In addition, cough drops should be used only when necessary as they, like sugary sweets, contribute to tooth decay because they continuously coat the teeth with sugar.

The best beverage choices include water (especially fluoridated water if this is available in your area), milk, and unsweetened tea. Diluted sugar-free squashes are the safest alternative. Limit your consumption of sugar-containing drinks, including soft drinks, lemonade, and coffee or tea with added sugar. Fizzy drinks are probably the worst offenders. Also, avoid day-long sipping of sugar-containing drinks -- day-long sipping exposes your teeth to constant sugar and, in turn, constant decay-causing acids.

Sugar substitutes and sugar-free products

Sugar substitutes are available that look and taste like sugar; however, they are not digested the same way as sugar, so they don't ‘feed’ the bacteria in the mouth and therefore don't produce decay-causing acids. They include erythritol, isomalt, sorbitol, and mannitol. Other sugar substitutes include saccharine, aspartame, acesulfame potassium and sucralose.

Sugarless or sugar-free food sometimes simply means that no sugar was added to the foods during processing. However, this does not mean that the foods do not contain other natural sweeteners, such as honey, molasses, evaporated cane sugar, fructose, barley malt or rice syrup. These natural sweeteners contain the same number of calories as sugar and can be just as harmful to teeth.

To determine if the sugarless or sugar-free foods you buy contain natural sweeteners, examine the ingredients label. Words that end in '-ose' (like sucrose and fructose) usually indicate the presence of a natural sweetener. On the label, look under sugars or carbohydrates.