When You Should Be Careful with Sticky Foods
Everyone likes sticky foods, caramel, marshmallows, chewing gum, etc. They tend to be delicious, chewy, texturally appealing, and did we mention delicious? But sticky foods can sometimes be challenging or difficult for any number of reasons. Sticky foods are typically okay in moderation for most people, but there are lots of other factors and conditions that can make sticky foods more of a danger to your health than for other people. Here are three conditions and factors that can make sticky foods more of a challenge and why you should be careful with them.
When You Have Sensitive Teeth
The first factor that can influence your ability to eat sticky foods is when you have particularly sensitive teeth. Sticky foods can be delicious for most people, but sticky foods can cause all sorts of pain or discomfort to people with sensitive teeth. Stick foods have an easy time sticking to and clinging onto your teeth, which can provide a lot of stimulation to the nerve endings in your teeth, increasing the pain or discomfort that you feel. If you have sensitive teeth, you may want to consider decreasing the number of sticky foods that you eat so that your teeth don’t get overwhelmed.
When You Have Braces
Another factor that can influence your ability to eat sticky foods is when you have braces. Braces are an important part of fixing alignment issues with your teeth, from crooked teeth to problems with your bite. But braces are also easy to break and damage, and sticky food can pose a major threat to braces. With traditional braces, sticky foods can easily get stuck in your braces, leading to tooth decay, and can even break off brackets and bend wires. Alternatives to braces like Invisalign don’t come with food restrictions. If you want to be able to eat sticky foods safely while fixing alignment issues, you should talk to your dentist about Invisalign.
When You Are Losing Baby Teeth
The final factor that means you need to be careful with sticky foods is when you are losing baby teeth. Children love all sorts of sticky foods, from peanut butter to taffy and everything in between. But eating sticky foods while they are losing baby teeth can be a painful way of extracting their teeth. It can even aggravate gum beds where they have lost teeth but don’t have their adult teeth quite yet.
Sticky foods are yummy. But they can also be dangerous for your dental health in certain situations. If you are dealing with any of these three factors, then you may wish to scale back or eliminate the number of sticky foods in your diet.
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