PORTLAND DENTAL PRACTICE
LOOKING AFTER YOUR CHILDREN'S TEETH
Ensuring you children experience as little decay as possible is not easy especially with the demands of children today fuelled by advertising and peer pressure. I hope you this advice useful and practical.
OVERVIEW
Why do teeth decay?
A sticky layer called plaque is constantly forming on people's teeth. This layer consists of bacteria. When we eat or drink things that contain sugar the bacteria change this sugar into acid and it is this acid that damages our teeth and causes decay.
DECAY= 70% DIET & 30% BRUSHING
How we minimize decay is all about diet and less about brushing - sounds strange? Not that keeping your teeth clean is unimportant, but the child with the dirtiest teeth will never get tooth decay if he has a low sugar diet, but the child who has the cleanest teeth will get decay with a high sugar diet.
Managing your child's sugar intake is paramount to the goal of a healthy mouth. Here are a few tips and facts
The
main cause of tooth decay is not the amount of sugar in the diet, but how often
the teeth are exposed to it . The more often your child has sugary foods or
drinks, the more 
likely
they are to have
decay, so a treat like a lollipop sucked over a 20 minute period is very
damaging. Likewise a packet of chewy sweets that has a gives teeth a long
exposure to the sugar should be avoided. Particularly sticky sweets, e.g..
toffees chocolate etc, the sugar is released
slowly and over a longer period of time and damage is done.
HINTS
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Start as you mean to go on and encourage you children to develop a taste for a range of unsweetened foods from an early age. |
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Avoid sugar coated cereals - it is like giving your child a sugar mouthwash every morning ( these can be over 40% sugar) |
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Do not give children sweets or chocolate for snacks at school (many schools in England have a ban on sweets at school) |
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Avoid sugary drinks in the home and at school. Cartons of fruit juice (not fruit drink) are suitable, and even now water is cool to bring to school. Your child will not take much persuasion to do this |
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Keep any sweet treats to special occasions and avoid sweets that give a long exposure to sugar i.e . chewy sweets packets of sweets that take a long time to consume |
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If in doubt read the nutritional information or ingredients at the back of the product and look for sugar, sucrose, glucose syrup, fructose as these all will cause harm to teeth. Manufacturers are very good at disguising sugar (a cheap ingredient). A ''fruit drink'' will have sugar along with citric acid in it with a tiny amount of fruit juice - very harmful to teeth and very cheap to produce e.g. Sunny Delight and the packaging / advertising would have you think otherwise. Another example is the ''water with a touch of ''...e.g. peach; loaded with sugar |
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Ideally milk and water are best, but go for sugar free drinks if not choosing natural fruit juice. It is often recommended that if children are drinking large quantities of fruit juice, then add 50% water to them. |