Stop Cavities Naturally: 5 Best & Worst Foods for Your Teeth

Diet and Dental Health Overview 0:00

Do you eat clean, avoid sugar, brush and floss twice a day, and still have cavities or gum disease or other tooth problems? It can be so frustrating, but I want to tell you that the answer might actually be found on your plate. There's an enormous connection between diet and dental health, And interestingly enough, all the talk about dental health, about why you get cavities and how to prevent them, largely has to do with brushing and flossing your teeth, correct? This is what your mom has told you for forever.

For some reason, we've forgotten that teeth are actually living organisms. And just like every other structure and organ in your body, they need nutrients and those things pass in and out. Not only that, but they're connected to the rest of the body. So if your body needs those really important minerals that keep teeth healthy and strong and not sensitive, if the body needs those minerals elsewhere, it will pull them elsewhere. This is a connected system head to toe. your teeth cannot be healthy without the rest of you being healthy and vice versa.

So diet is really important in tooth health, just like it's really important in overall health. We all talk about, oh, I didn't eat well yesterday, that's why I don't feel well, or that's why I broke out, or whatever it might be. But we don't often say, Those two cavities my dentist just told me I have, I bet it's because of the way I've been eating. We usually just blame it on, well, I just haven't been flossing as good as I should or maybe I need to try a new toothbrush or a new toothpaste or powder.

Five Foods That Support Healthy Teeth 1:35

Let's look at diet. So I want to go through a couple of different things for you. First we're going to talk about five foods that are very good for your teeth that you should make sure you're implementing and incorporating into your diet. Then we're going to talk about five foods that are really damaging for your teeth and likely you already know about them. Then we're going to tackle five sneaky foods that you think are in the health category but actually are damaging to your teeth. So let's get into this just a little bit.

First of all, what are the five that you should always be incorporating? One is dairy and cheeses. The next one is leafy greens. These leafy greens are full of minerals. They're full of all the things that your teeth need. They also are very alkalizing. So they help to balance the acidity in the mouth. One thing to be careful of, however, is oxalates. Oxalates are just part of what those greens have. They also bind up minerals. So if you're cooking them, no worry. If you're eating them raw, I like to add either calcium containing foods like some dairy in there or If you're doing something like a green smoothie, I drop a calcium tablet in.

What it does is it binds those oxalates right away and makes everything that's in those greens that's so good for you available to you. The next one is fatty fish. That fatty fish has a lot of vitamin D3 in it, which is so essential for taking in those minerals that you need. Another one is bone broth. Bone broth is full of collagen and minerals and really nourishing things for both teeth and gums. The last one of the five is raw fruits and vegetables. Of course, this isn't anything new, but you may not have realized that those fruits and vegetables bring needed minerals and vitamins with them, but they also clean your teeth.

They do a really good job of scrubbing things clean and they stimulate saliva. So if you want healthy teeth, make sure you're incorporating those five things in. Now, what are the bad guys? What things are going to really damage your teeth? These probably aren't going to be real surprising to you, but let's go through them.

Foods That Damage Teeth 3:57

The first one is sugary foods and candies. Why do they damage your teeth? Well, sugar does a couple of things. First of all, it feeds the bacteria in your mouth, and those bacteria love sugar, the bad bacteria, they love sugar, they excrete acid. That acid dissolves the minerals in the teeth. So the more sugar there is, the more acid in the mouth, the more minerals get dissolved. So sugar has a big impact on tooth decay on cavities, and we all know this. We've been told it numerous times. But there's some other sources of sugar you might not have thought about, things like dried fruit.

Why is dried fruit problematic? Because it's so sticky and it gets into the crevices and the nooks and crannies in the teeth and it stays there. So then it continues to feed the bacteria in the mouth. Another one is white foods. So white bread, white crackers, even things like goldfish crackers have kind of been on the chopping block lately. Why? Well, those foods are high in what are called simple carbohydrates, sugars. We don't call them sugar because we don't think of them as a candy but they are simple sugars and those things are also kind of gummy and get into the teeth and do nothing good for the body really as simple sugars but they do feed those bacteria and again you get an increase in acid in the mouth.

Now speaking of acid, another real common source of acid in the mouth is drinks. So this is sodas, this is energy drinks. The problem with acid in the mouth is it just simply dissolves minerals out of the tooth, making them more porous. Bacteria crawl in, they create more acid, they crawl in further. This is the starting point of tooth decay, is acid. so if you're drinking a lot of soda and this is including diet soda why it's not just the sugar and the soda that's the problem it's the acid and every single kind of soda has acid either carbonic acid or phosphoric acid or citric acid or some of all of the above energy drinks are particularly acidic and particularly damaging to the teeth as well I'm not saying you can't drink them ever.

I'm saying don't drink them all day long. If you're going to have one can, drink it and be done with it. Rinse your mouth with water and get the acid out of the mouth. And the other implicator with this acid is citrus fruits and vinegar based foods. So the same thing goes for those things. Lemon juice is great in the morning, but not if you drink it all day long. It's going to be very damaging. It's simply dissolving the teeth. So really, It just comes down to what do these things do in the mouth?

If they increase acid levels, they're going to increase that dissolving of minerals, which makes the teeth more porous.

Sneaky Healthy Foods That Can Harm Teeth 6:34

You're going to have sensitivity. You're going to have a high potential for tooth decay. Make sense? So that's what we're trying to battle. So let's talk about some of the healthy foods in quotations that may actually be damaging to your teeth if not used correctly. The first one is that citrus fruit that I just talked about. A lot of people recommend drinking, you know, warm water with some lemon juice in the morning. I also recommend the exact same thing. So some people say, well, if it's good in the morning, it's good all day long too.

I'm going to just add a lemon to all of my water that I drink throughout the day. that can be particularly damaging because it's constantly exposing your teeth to that high acid level. And citrus fruit is right on the same level of acidity as battery acid. This can be extremely damaging to the teeth. Make sure when you're doing it, you're doing it first thing in the morning and then you're done with it. And don't brush directly after drinking that citrus fruit beverage. You need to brush before or give your mouth about 20 to 30 minutes to regulate and let that acid go away before you brush.

Otherwise, your teeth are literally soft. after that acid exposure. The next one is smoothies. A lot of smoothies have a lot of fruit in them that may also be acidic. So same rules go there. You should not be drinking fruit smoothies all day long and you should not brush directly after them because your teeth are going to be softer. Fruit, same thing. So fruit is great. I love fruit. Fruit is full of antioxidants and minerals and vitamins and all the things we love. But it should not be something that you're snacking on all day long.

Every single time you put food into your mouth, no matter what the food is, it's going to drop the acid level. So basically your mouth will become more acidic. your teeth will become softer. They will be more prone to dissolving and those minerals dissolving. So fruit all day long is constantly dropping that acid level. Everything is becoming more acidic and you're going to dissolve your teeth. Same thing goes with healthy bars like healthy granolas, dried fruit, all those things. When they're in your mouth, they're gonna create a sticky, sugary environment, even granola, that's a sugar.

And if you do it constantly, just constantly tossing a few in your mouth, you're never giving your mouth a chance to recover from that acid sugar attack, and you are going to get more tooth decay. The last one is kombucha and other vinegary-based things. I love kombucha myself. There's a lot of other ferments that are actually acidic as well. Same rules go. These are fine for you, but not nonstop throughout the day, constantly sipping, constantly snacking. It's the frequency that's the problem. So to minimize damage with these foods, what are you going to do?

You're going to give your mouth a break. Use a straw to get it past your teeth if you're sipping them. give your mouth a chance to recover we really should be taking 30 minutes to an hour to two hours between snacking to let that acid level come back up again basically so your mouth becomes more alkaline more basic teeth are able to pull more minerals in and everything equalizes.

How to Protect Teeth and Remineralize 9:35

It's just about frequency. Avoid the things that are particularly damaging and just don't do them all the time, even for those health foods. There are some things you can do from a proactive standpoint to help make your teeth even a little bit more acid resistant, and that is to build up the mineral layers and the mineral levels in the teeth. How do you do that? With remineralizing products. So you're gonna use hydroxyapatite products when you're brushing your teeth, so toothpaste, tooth powder, mouthwash, all of those things, as well as mints.

You might, if you're going to, you know, pop a mint in your mouth, pop in a hydroxy appetite one. What is it going to do? It's going to rebuild the teeth while you're snacking. What a novel concept. So really making your teeth strong and resistant is also going to help during those times when obviously we have to eat food. So this is really important just to make your teeth cavity proof. How about when diet isn't enough? What if you're still getting cavities? Well, this is when it's time to visit the dentist and a biologic or holistic dentist is the best because we look at it and we say, you're still getting cavities.

Talk to me about what you're eating. Talk to me about what you're drinking. We try to find holes or missing pieces that you may not have identified. We take care of the decay that's there currently or the disease that's there currently. And then we work with you to never have to get back to that spot again. So I want you now to look at your diet and think, How am I snacking? What am I snacking on? What are my go-tos? Are any of these things on the do not list? Have I been adding things that are on the do list?

How can I strengthen my teeth from the inside out through diet? If you want a free guide with all the do's and don'ts that I've discussed in this video, go to the link in the comments, grab our free guide if you want that printable list. And please, if you like the information that we're sharing, make sure to like this, subscribe, lots of information coming out every single week. because my mission is to simply help you live well and that includes being able to keep your mouth and teeth healthy.