It has long been known that good nutrition and a well-balanced diet is one of the best defenses for your oral health – something brought to attention by the studies of Dr Weston Price. Providing your body with the right amounts of vitamins and minerals helps your teeth, gums and overall immune system stay strong and ward off infection, decay and disease.
Harmful acids and bacteria in your mouth are left behind from eating foods high in sugar and carbohydrates. These include carbonated beverages, some kinds of fruit juices, and many kinds of starchy foods like pasta, bread and cereal.
Children’s Nutrition and Teeth
Good eating habits that begin in early childhood can go a long way to ensuring a lifetime of good oral health.
Children should eat foods rich in calcium and other kinds of minerals, as well as a healthy balance of the essential food groups like vegetables, fruits, some dairy products, poultry and meat.
Allowing your children to eat excessive amounts of junk food (highly refined starches and sugars) — including potato chips, cookies, crackers, soda, artificial fruit rollups and granola bars—only places them at risk for serious health problems, including obesity, osteoporosis and diabetes. The carbonation found in soft drinks, for example, can actually erode tooth enamel and create an acidic environment in the body. Avoiding sugary soft drinks and replacing them with filtered water or fresh, organic fruit juice is probably the easiest change you can make to your child’s diet that will have the greatest long term health benefits.
Adult Nutrition and Teeth
There’s no discounting the importance of continuing a healthy balanced diet throughout your adult life. At Laser + Holistic Dental we are firm believers in a balanced diet – largely dependent on fresh vegetables. Amazing work done by Dr Weston Price in the 1930s studied the effects of a Western ‘civilised’ diet of highly refined carbohydrates on native peoples around the world. It is needless to say that when exposed to the ‘civilised’ diet, the previously fit and healthy native peoples faced a severe down turn in dental and overall health. His ground breaking study is documented in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration which we consider essential reading for those interested in managing their diet and health.
For further reading please visit the Weston Price Foundation and read this page titled the Principles of Healthy Diets.