When your teeth become sensitive to hot and cold foods, it’s important to understand what’s causing it. Sweet and sour foods are a common trigger behind sensitive teeth. Understanding this will help you find a solution to your tooth sensitivity.

Why Your Teeth may be Sensitive to Sugar

It’s actually quite common for someone to say that their teeth are sensitive to sweet, sugary foods. This really isn’t much different from any other type of tooth sensitivity that someone may be suffering from. Regardless of the cause, your teeth become sensitive when you’ve lost at least some of the enamel that makes up the inner layer of your teeth.

This is where the nerve center of your teeth resides. You may also be eating too many foods that have a high acidic content – something that will also cause damage to your enamel. Once you’ve damaged your enamel, you’ll feel a sharp pain any time something comes into contact with the nerves in your teeth.

Keeping Your Teeth from Becoming Sensitive to Sugar

Once you notice that your teeth are sensitive to sugar, there are a few things you can do to help yourself feel better. First, make sure that you’re using a soft-bristled toothbrush so you’re not scrubbing your teeth too hard, which will make them feel worse.

Secondly, choose a toothpaste that’s specially designed to help with tooth sensitivity. These will typically contain stannous fluorides – an ingredient that’s been clinically proven to protect your teeth against sensitivity so you can enjoy sugary food without the pain.

Having sensitive teeth isn’t enjoyable. In fact, it can be downright painful. This is why you should contact our office right away to set up an appointment to discuss your sensitive teeth and what we can do to help them. We look forward to helping you feel better soon.

If you’ve been under a lot of stress lately, you may have noticed that you’ve been clenching your jaw more often than normal. If you’re clenching your teeth a lot, you may also be grinding them at night. That means you’re dealing with bruxism, a type of stress outlet that can greatly damage your teeth. Very few people grind their teeth simply to grind them.

Normally, it’s a sign of something else. While we may not necessarily be able to help you with the stress that’s causing your bruxism, we can help you deal with the grinding of your teeth.

Why Is Bruxism and Teeth Clenching Dangerous?

When you clench your teeth tightly together, you’re putting a lot of pressure on them. This isn’t normal pressure like the type you exert when you’re chewing food. Instead, it’s often much stronger, and that can cause your teeth to crack.

If you’ve been grinding your teeth a lot at night, you may have already weakened them because the grinding can wear down your enamel. Without this strong enamel to protect your teeth from pressure, you can cause serious damage when you clench your jaw.

What Can We Do?

One of the ways we can help you deal with bruxism is to give you a special mouthguard to wear at night. This will prevent you from grinding your teeth, so you won’t damage them. Once you’re aware of what you’re doing, you can also make a conscious effort to unclench your jaw if you find yourself doing it while you’re awake.

We will also work with you to help restore the enamel of your teeth and protect your mouth from further damage. If you know you’re clenching your jaw a lot or if you believe you’re suffering from bruxism, call us today. We’ll set up a consultation and help you deal with this damaging condition. 

Making sure you are hydrated is important for your body and for your oral health. Your body needs water to do its job and your oral cavity needs water to do its job. So, what does your oral health have to do with being hydrated? We can tell you in one word; saliva.

Saliva is crucial to your oral health. Without it, you will not only have gum problems, but problems with your teeth as well. If those two reasons aren’t enough to convince you, we will give you one more reason. If you don’t produce enough saliva you will have bad breath. No one wants their co-workers backing away from them when they talk.

What Does Saliva Do for Me?

Saliva is a crucial part of keeping your teeth strong and your gums healthy. When you eat or drink, remnants of the food or drink, stay on your teeth.

This is what you brush away with your toothbrush. But you can’t brush your teeth constantly. That is why you have saliva.

Saliva is like your body’s own mouthwash. It cleans the acids away from your teeth and gums until it is time for you to brush again. It has properties that neutralize the effects of the bacteria that live naturally in your mouth.

Most people at some time or another have experienced dry mouth. That is what we call it when you don’t produce enough saliva. You may also have noticed that when you have dry mouth your teeth may feel a little slimy and your tongue may feel strange. The roof of your mouth may also feel a little sticky.

You don’t normally feel like this. That is because normally you have sufficient saliva to clean away all of the gunk accumulating in your mouth over the day, in between brushings. If you stay sufficiently hydrated, you won’t have these problems.

What to do if you have dry mouth

Dry mouth can occur even if you drink plenty of liquids. Medications and diseases like Sjogrens syndrome and diabetes can cause dry mouth. There is an over the counter spray we recommend for our patients called Biotene. It can freshen your breath and alleviate some of the symptoms of dry mouth. People who suffer from dryness should also visit their dentist more frequently. The risk of decay increases dramatically in people with dry mouth.  We routinely put our patients at risk for decay on prescription fluoride.  This reduces the risk of decay by making your teeth stronger.

If you have to take medication that causes dry mouth, you should drink more liquids than usual to compensate for the medication.Please contact us at if you have any questions.

You may find the idea of eating seaweed fairly gross, but there are a few different reasons why consuming this type of algae is actually really good for you. Seaweed comes in a number of different forms, so it’s not like you’re pulling it directly out of the ocean and putting it on your plate.

In fact, you can add seaweed to a number of dishes so that you don’t realize you’re even eating it. Here are a few of the benefits you’ll enjoy if you do so.

It Contains a Good Amount of Vitamins

Adding a tablespoon of dried seaweed to a dish gives it extra flavor and texture, but it also gives you a good amount of vitamins. One tablespoon contains four grams of protein, some fiber, vitamins A, C, E, and K, and zinc, folate, magnesium, and calcium. Eating certain types of seaweed also provides your body with the essential amino acids it needs to function as well as omega-3 fatty acids. Your gums, mouth, and teeth need many of these nutrients to remain strong and healthy.

It Helps Control Blood Sugar

Diabetes can affect your oral health by creating a horrible cycle in which the diabetes lowers your body’s ability to battle infection, your gums become infected, and that infection then makes it difficult to control your blood sugar. This cycle makes both your gums and your diabetes worse over time. Eating seaweed can help manage your blood sugar levels better, allowing you to break this cycle and have healthier gums.

It Contains a Large Amount of Antioxidants

Seaweed also contains a good amount of antioxidants. This helps battle free radicals and can even help prevent certain diseases and digestive issues. While seaweed will certainly help improve your overall diet and help with your oral health, it’s not a miracle food. You’ll still need to make sure you brush regularly and visit us every six months for a checkup. Call today to schedule one if you haven’t already.

When you practice good oral health, you receive many benefits. Your breath smells better, your teeth are whiter, your gums are healthy, and you simply feel better about yourself. What many of our patients don’t realize is that bad oral health can also contribute to your general health.

This is particularly rued if you are obese. Recent studies indicate that obese people have more periodontal disease than the general population. The study theorized that it is because obesity causes inflammation and inflammation is associated with gum disease.

It is also an underlying the reason for other diseases such as certain cancers and also cardiovascular disease. It is important to keep your weight down to an acceptable medical level for many reasons, but us more research is completed, the connection between oral health and obesity will become clearer. In the meantime, keeping your teeth and gums clean can help you with your weight.

How Can Clean Teeth Make Me Lose Weight?

When your teeth are clean and your breath smells fresh, you are less inclined to eat food that may destroy that good feeling. But you still like the flavors to which you’ve become accustomed to and you may also have a habit of snacking at certain times during the day. That is fine.

None of the snack habit needs to stop except what you snack on has to change. Start with not eating hard candy anymore.

If you want something that needs to be crunched on and will also give your teeth a little cleaning, try eating carrots or apples. Both of these are hard enough to scrape your teeth as you chew them This is like eating your toothbrush. They also contain antioxidants.

These will help to destroy the free radicals that, combined with your mouth’s bacteria, decay your teeth or inflame your gums. Eating fruits and vegetables that help clean your teeth, will also help you to watch your weight.

Dentin is the hard tissue that forms on your tooth. You should have plenty of this located under your tooth’s enamel (your tooth’s hard, outer layer). This is important because it is the second hardest layer of your tooth (second only to the enamel itself).

It’s responsible for protecting your tooth’s pulp (the soft, inner part of your tooth).

How Dentin Becomes Damaged

One of the major reasons your dentin may become damaged is due to GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) or heartburn. When this acid comes back into your mouth from your stomach it’ll wear away your tooth’s enamel.

Left unchecked, it can also eat through and damage your dentin. This can result in a significant amount of damage. If this isn’t what’s damaged your dentin, it may be that you have bacteria growing in your mouth, which will result in tooth decay.

Healing Your Dentin

Once your tooth decay has reached the dentin, it isn’t easy to repair. Unlike tooth enamel, which is incapable of repairing itself, your dentin can regenerate. Unfortunately, this will only happen within a limited capacity though.

This is why you’ll want to talk to us when you’re having any issues with your dentin and any damage to it has occurred. Fortunately, today we are able to engineer tissues.

We also know more about dental stem cells than we’ve ever known about it in the past. As such, we’re better equipped to help you regenerate your dentin today than in the past.

Even when you have dentin exposed in a tooth you can slowly have it repaired. However, we must stress that this is a slow process.

Of course, this doesn’t deemphasize its importance because you must remember that this is a natural way in which your tooth is protected.

Fortunately, it isn’t urgent for this to happen right away though.

If you’re like us, you’re always looking for ways to improve your oral health. You brush your teeth twice a day, every day. You floss. You go to your dentist twice a year for checkups, and you make sure that you are eating properly.

You drink plenty of water as well. So what else could you possibly do to make your oral health any better? Coconut Water. Coconut water not only works to protect your mouth, it also works to protect your body in general.

Why is Coconut Water Good For You?

There are a couple of reasons why coconut water is good for you. First, coconut water with a little sodium added has been proven to be better for your overall health than sports drinks are. Coconut water has potassium in it, which over time, works to lower blood pressure, and balances out the electrolytes in your system. Also, because coconut water has no added sugars, your mouth will thank you, because drinking sugar adds to the sugar in your mouth, which helps to feed the bacteria in your mouth and causes cavities.

Coconut water also increases the amount of saliva in your mouth, which aids in keeping your teeth as bacteria free as possible. Coconut water also helps to wash away bacteria, which leaves your mouth healthier. Coconut water is able to accomplish all of this without costing you empty calories the way sports drinks do. Some people drink sports drinks all day, adding hundreds of calories to their diet.

If you are looking for ways to improve your overall dental health, why not give us a call? We would love to talk to you about coconut water, or water in general, as tools for you to use to keep your mouth as healthy as possible. Give us a call today.

Do you regularly snack? If so, then you may want to make sure you are eating as healthy of snacks as possible. Snacks not only add to your daily calorie count, but they also add to the nutritional possibilities your body gets each day.

If you pick healthy snacks, it gives your body the ability to eat something good and feel better for it. One of the best options you can eat when you are munchy for a snack is nuts. They provide you a lot of good nutrition, plus they offer a special bonus to your teeth.

What Nuts Can Do to Help Your Teeth

When you go through and chew up nuts, the texture of nuts also scrubs your teeth. The more you chew, the cleaner your teeth become. When you regularly eat nuts, you can actually wind up with cleaner teeth than if you went with most other snacks.

Plus, nuts are also able to provide you with some of the more difficult to find nutrients, like Omega fatty acids. You can also include nuts in your regular meals to add them into more parts of your diet.

Try adding some chia seeds into your breakfast, almonds into your lunch, and walnuts into your dinner. Your body, not just your teeth, will reap the rewards.

If you want to see what else nuts can do to improve your oral health, give our office a call. We can talk to you about the benefits of nuts, and other items that you could add into your day that would give you similar benefits.

The more you are able to clean your teeth as you eat, the easier brushing will be, and the less work we will have to do during your exams and cleanings. Call our office today!