Dental Hygiene Tips for a Better Smile

At least 10% of Americans have a dental phobia, which keeps them from going to the dentist twice a year, as they should. While this is understandable, getting into the habit of taking care of your teeth makes it easier to go back to the dentist. If you want to be proud of your smile, a few dental hygiene tips ensure that you’ll be comfortable with your teeth.

Here are five tips to ensure that you start getting the smile that you want and deserve.

1. Eat Right

The first step for some people trying to achieve healthy teeth might be to brush and floss. However, if you never eat any food, there’s nothing to worry about when it comes to brushing and flossing. While many foods have the ability to do damage to your teeth, there are many more than help to strengthen and build them up.

Lots of foods other than milk contain calcium. Even vegans find ways to get calcium into their diet in a natural way.

The fact of the matter is that leafy greens and crunchy vegetables have a lot of what you need for bone strength and health. When you eat crunchy vegetables, you both strengthen and clean your teeth.

Carrots and apples have natural sugars, meaning you’ll need to brush your teeth as often as anyone would. However, their natural fiber help to strengthen your teeth through chewing and clean them as the fibers hit them. You might never have imagined you could eat your way to healthier teeth, but it’s true.

2. Brush and Floss As Directed

If you’re like most people, your dentist has told you that you don’t floss enough. Even though you’re supposed to floss every day, only about 30% of Americans polled claim to floss that often if they’re even being honest. Brushing and flossing are the foundation of good dental health, whether you have the perfect diet or not.

If you’re not brushing twice a day, you’re missing out on the easiest way to protect your teeth. Since most people don’t like flossing, it’s going to be much harder for you to floss daily if you never brush.

Remember that the best time to brush your teeth is after meals. If you don’t have a toothbrush at your office, you might want to start packing one. Good dental health is connected to other kinds of health, so there’s no such thing as a healthy person with bad teeth.

Use soft bristles to protect your gums. It might mean that you’ll be replacing your brush more often but your gums will thank you by not receding.

When you brush, make sure you brush thoroughly. If you need to, set a timer for yourself. You should be brushing your teeth for two minutes every time you go at it, which feels much longer when you’re in front of the mirror.

3. Use Fluoride

If you want to harden your teeth’s enamel, you need to brush with a toothpaste with the best ingredients. The only basic ingredient your toothpaste needs are baking soda and fluoride. Everything else is extraneous.

Toothpaste claim to have all kinds of other elements, like the ability to whiten or to fix dental problems. Most of this isn’t strongly substantiated, but fluoride is the one element there’s proof for.

Tooth decay happens to everyone as they age, but if you want to mitigate the issues, fluoride can help.

4. You Are What You…Drink?

While you might have the food issues under wraps, are you thinking about what you’re drinking? A lot of people will tell you to drink more fruit juice, but that’s a total myth. When deciding between juice and soda for kids, most parents think that juice is better for teeth.

Well, it turns out that juice is just pure sugar with all of the important fibers separated from the fruit. Giving juice to your kids leads to fast tooth decay as the sugars in the juice eat away at their young teeth.

The same goes for adults. Bacteria that live on teeth love to feed on sugar. The sugars in food create the breeding ground for bacteria. Sugary foods turn into acid that eats away at teeth by the bacteria living on teeth.

That’s how people get cavities and holes in their teeth. Imagine the alien from the Aliens series spitting on your teeth and melting them. That’s what bacteria do with the help of sugars, just much more slowly.

5. Protect Your Teeth

If you play high-contact sports, you need to ensure that you protect your teeth. Whether you’re playing baseball, boxing, or out on the soccer field, you need to make sure you wear a mouth guard. If it’s feasible, wearing a full face helmet protects you from hard flying projectiles that are perfectly suited for knocking out teeth.

If a tooth gets knocked out, you need to hold it in place however you can until you get dental advice. This protects the nerve and helps to stop the bleeding. If the tooth is totally out of your mouth, the alternative is to put it in milk or to wrap the tooth in plastic until you can get the dental help you need.

Don’t ever use your teeth for anything you know you shouldn’t. Your teeth are meant for chewing food, not for opening up packaging, cracking a nut, or opening a bottle. If you use your teeth for these things, you’ll invite broken or chipped teeth.

Dental Hygiene Tips Help Give You What You Want

Everyone wants a smile that they feel confident about with teeth that feel strong and secure. If you follow a few dental hygiene tips, you ensure that you can maintain a clean and bright smile that you’re proud of. You’ll tell people how you feel openly and comfortably.

If you have other questions about how to have the smile you want, contact us for more tips.