There might be times when a bowl of soup or a soft pasta dish is just what you fancy. This might be simply down to your mood at the time, or it could be to ease discomfort if you have an uncomfortable tooth or sore gums. Perhaps you are even feeling too lazy to chew your food too much. Whatever the reason, soft foods certainly have their place, but would eating them regularly be of benefit to your teeth?
The answer to that question is not as straightforward as you might think. Softer foods can certainly be useful in some situations, and some are very good for you. A diet made up almost entirely of foods that need little chewing though isn’t necessarily the best choice for your teeth or gums.
To understand this, we need to take a look at what happens in the oral cavity when food is eaten.
Chewing is obviously a normal part of eating, and your teeth are designed to deal with this. Biting into an apple provides exercise for the teeth and jaw muscles, while chewing helps to break food down before you swallow it, aiding the digestion process. Saliva also plays an important role, helping to wash away food particles and bacteria from the teeth and gum line.
You don’t necessarily need to eat hard foods to keep your teeth strong. They won’t become healthier simply because you make them work harder, and there’s no need to challenge them unnecessarily. Indeed, biting down on very hard foods, such as hard boiled sweets, can cause chips or breakages to occur to your teeth or damage existing fillings.
The main thing is to eat a varied and healthy diet that provides the nutrients your body needs, while also taking care to look after your teeth properly.
Soft foods don’t all act the same. A bowl of soup for example, is likely to impact your teeth differently to a sticky toffee pudding. Soup can be highly nutritious and shouldn’t contain much, if any sugar. Sticky toffee pudding on the other hand is full of sugar, AND will stick to your teeth, exposing them to the sugars for a longer time. This increases the likelihood of damage to the tooth enamel due to this longer exposure.
Eating softer foods then, isn’t necessarily good or bad for your teeth. It depends what they are.
Your gums benefit from a healthy, balanced diet too, along with your teeth. They need a variety of nutrients to help maintain the tissues that support your teeth. Fruit and vegetables, grains and suitable sources of protein will all help with this.
Some people assume that soft foods are kinder to the gums because they don’t rub or press against them as much. That can be helpful if your gums are sore and you want to keep discomfort to a minimum, but it doesn’t mean that avoiding harder foods is a good thing.
If your gums bleed or are causing discomfort because they are sore or swollen, eating softer foods won’t address the underlying cause. Gum disease is usually caused by plaque building up around the teeth and along the gum line. Good brushing, cleaning between the teeth using floss or interdental brushes, and having your teeth cleaned professionally at the Smile Dental Practice are much more important than whether the food you eat is hard or soft. If you are eating softer food for comfort reasons, you should make an appointment with our Bromley dentists to have the underlying cause investigated and treated.
There are perfectly good reasons for eating softer foods under certain circumstances. After some dental procedures, your dentist may recommend avoiding hard or chewy foods while the area heals. If you have had a tooth extraction, for example, you will probably need to eat foods that are easy to eat for a while before gradually returning to your usual diet as your recovery allows.
Denture wearers sometimes have difficulty chewing or might experience their movement in the mouth unless they avoid harder foods.
If you find yourself choosing soft foods simply because chewing has become difficult, this should be investigated. A painful tooth, loose denture, broken filling or other dental problem could be the reason. Simply changing what you eat will not resolve this problem.
Providing that your teeth and gums are healthy, there is no reason why you should exclusively eat a softer food diet. All healthy foods are beneficial providing that you don’t have food allergies of course. You should aim for a varied and balanced diet with all the main food groups, and, from a dental perspective, not too heavy in sugars and acids too.
For those of you who are thinking ‘yes, but it makes my teeth/gums hurt’; it’s time for you to get the problem checked out. You can do this by calling the Smile Dental Practice in Bromley on 020 8462 2473 to arrange an appointment to have a check up with us.
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