Dental News

5 Tips for Stronger Tooth Enamel

October 4, 2015

Prevent sensitivity and cavities with these 5 tips for strong tooth enamel.

5 Tips for Stronger Tooth EnamelTooth enamel is one of the hardest substances in the human body, but that doesn’t mean it is invincible. If you’re not careful, you can easily find yourself suffering from the many side effects of weakened or damaged enamel, such as pain, sensitivity, and tooth decay.

The good news is there are many ways to protect and improve the strength of your tooth enamel. Here are our top 5 tips.

Clean Your Teeth After Eating: The two main causes of tooth enamel damage are sugar and citric acid. Sugars—including both foods containing refined sugars and also carbs—provide food for bacteria that cause tooth decay, and citric acid can cause enamel to soften and erode. The effect will be worse the longer the sugar or acid remains on your teeth. Therefore, brushing promptly after eating is an excellent way to keep your enamel strong. However, be careful not to brush immediately after eating foods containing citric acid. You need to wait an hour to avoid damaging the temporarily softened enamel with your toothbrush.

Brush Correctly: If you brush really hard, you can actually damage tooth enamel even if it has not been softened by contact with citric acid. To prevent overbrushing, use a soft-bristled toothbrush and try to avoid brushing too fast. Instead use short, gentle back and forth motions.

Eat a Tooth-Healthy Diet: The body can actually repair tooth enamel to a great extent through the process of remineralization. In this process, calcium and phosphorous, the building blocks of strong enamel, are deposited on teeth by your saliva. Obviously, in order to get the best benefits from remineralization you need to have these raw materials in your system. Dairy products are an excellent source of both calcium and phosphorous.

Pick the Right Toothpaste: If you have the right toothpaste, you can not only prevent the damage to your enamel that would otherwise be caused by the activity of plaque bacteria, but also actually repair this damage to a certain extent. For example, one study showed that when patients with acid-weakened enamel brushed with a toothpaste containing sodium chloride, dissolved calcium, phosphate, and fluoride ions, the hardness of their enamel increased by 12 percent.

Chew Sugar-Free Gum: Chewing gum after snacks or meals is an excellent way to clean and strengthen teeth. It stimulates the production of saliva, which washes away the bacteria that cause tooth decay and gingivitis as well as the food debris that they feed on. Saliva also helps deliver more enamel-strengthening minerals like calcium and phosphate to your teeth. Research has shown that 20 minutes of chewing after meals can help prevent tooth decay.

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