Is A Coffee Habit Harming Your Teeth?

by Fox-AdminPosted on July 29, 2020 Posted in Advice

With coffee shops open again, many are gradually returning to daily visits

It is not so long ago that having a coffee outside your own home would invariably mean a mug of ‘instant’ at a cafe, especially if you lived outside the major towns and cities.

These days though, coffee shops are everywhere in the UK; indeed, there are estimated to be in the region of 30,000 of them and they appear to be gaining in popularity by the day.

Coffee shops have been popular in the past and were often frequented by artists and intellectuals. These days they are more accessible to the rest of us and may provide an alternative meeting place for those who don’t wish to drink alcohol, whether for health or religious reasons.

Whilst coffee itself is not directly harmful to our teeth, the speciality drinks and snacks that often go with it, can be.

The ‘problem’ with coffee

As mentioned above, coffee itself will not cause any actual harm to our teeth. It can stain them though and a frequent espresso drinker may find that their teeth become quite badly discoloured over time. This can be treated at the Foxhall Dental Practice by using our popular teeth whitening procedure, but if the staining is too heavy, you may need to consider having porcelain dental veneers fitted instead.

The real issue with coffee is that few of us drink a non sugar version, and indeed, many of the ‘speciality coffees’ offered in these premises are likely to contain very high quantities of sugar. To take just one example, a ‘Mocha Latte’ in one of the well known coffee chain stores, contains 14 teaspoons of sugar, and that isn’t the worst offender! As we add creams and syrups to our drinks, the amount of quantity we consume increases. If we also add a blueberry muffin from the same store, we add another 10 teaspoons of sugar. In total then, one of these coffees and a muffin will give us 24 teaspoons of sugar, an incredible amount. To put it into perspective, a can of coca cola contains around 9 teaspoons, so our coffee habit there is the equivalent in sugar of drinking just under 3 cans of cola.

If this were an occasional treat, we could perhaps let this go as long as we generally look after our teeth well. As we know though, many people do this almost every day, or at least a few times each week and this habit is likely to lead to a great deal of tooth decay and gum disease.

Whilst our Ipswich dental team can help to restore teeth damaged in this way, it is better to be aware of the damage that our coffee habit can cause and make choices that help to prevent these problems from occurring in the first place.

Obesity

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Dental Care In The Near Future

by Fox-AdminPosted on June 8, 2020 Posted in Advice

Dental practices in the UK are able to open again from June 8th, but what should you expect when they do?

Most of you will have seen the news that dental practices in the UK are able to open again following our closure because of the Covid-19 situation.

On the surface, it may appear to some patients that this means that everything is more or less back to normal. Much as we wish this were the case, it isn’t unfortunately.

When the government announced this, we heard about it at the same time that patients did. As you can probably understand, running a dental practice means not only performing treatments but also ensuring that the whole practice environment is safe for both staff and patients. This is even more important at this particular time for obvious reasons.

As the announcement came with no real forewarning, dentists and their staff have been doing all that they can to get things ready to open again as soon as possible. Unfortunately, this is not as simple as just unlocking the doors. The most obvious thing to note is that we have to plan for the new ‘normal’, at least until such a time that the virus is no longer such a threat or a vaccine is widely available.

PPE and staff training

Most of you will have now heard of PPE, the protective equipment that keeps both patient and staff safe. Due to the worldwide demand, it is challenging to source this in sufficient quantity to be able to operate safely. Our Ipswich dental patients can rest assured that we are doing all that we can to source this as quickly as possible.

Systems are also being put into place to make the practice a safe environment. This stems right from how patients can safely wait in the reception areas to how we thoroughly clean the environment after each treatment.

What should patients expect?

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Wobbly Teeth In Children And Adults

by Fox-AdminPosted on May 20, 2020 Posted in Advice

Why teeth become loose and where it requires professional advice.

Most of us can probably remember having a wobbly tooth or two when we were younger. Some of us may even be unfortunate enough to remember the traumatic experience of a parent tying all sorts of ways to remove them? We will discuss why you shouldn’t do this a little later on in this blog, but first, let’s take a look at what causes wobbly teeth both in children and adults, and the potential consequences.

Children and wobbly teeth

Our patients who are parents of young children may already have experienced their child having a wobbly tooth. This is usually nothing to be concerned about and is quite natural as their first teeth will eventually fall out so that their adult teeth can erupt in their place. The temporary nature of the first teeth can, unfortunately, cause some parents to pay less attention to them as they will come out anyway. Even though these are temporary teeth, it is still important to make sure that your child cleans them well, and also the gums. Anyone who has had a severe toothache would not want to put their child through that, and, although temporary, these teeth still play an important role.

The first teeth, or milk or baby teeth as they are sometimes known, enable a young child to progress from soft foods to a more normal diet. If the teeth are not looked after and have to be extracted, this can cause problems in this transitional stage that could have long lasting effects. In addition to this, confidence and speech development can also be affected and can cause problems during a child’s developmental years.

Just a word of caution here; if your child has a wobbly tooth, even if it has been ‘hanging on’ for a little while, please don’t forcefully try to pull it out by the ‘door handle’ or any similar technique. Gentle and gradual pressing on it with the tongue should see it soon fall out. If you have one that is particularly problematic, please contact our Ipswich dental team for advice. Using a more forceful method may cause not only discomfort to the child but also possible damage to the gum tissue.

Try to keep your children’s teeth healthy and make sure that they brush them well, ideally supervised by yourself or another responsible adult.

Loose teeth in adults

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Stress And Anxiety – Challenges For Our Teeth

by Fox-AdminPosted on May 6, 2020 Posted in Advice

Additional side effects of the Covid-19 crisis – guidance for our Ipswich patients

As if it wasn’t enough that some of us have suffered stress and anxiety not only from the threat of the disease itself, but also of the many weeks of isolation; reports now indicate that many of us are anxious about the safety aspects of having to return to work.

Although we are not yet at this stage; with the numbers of deaths and new cases going down gradually, it can only be a matter of time before many of us have to return to a situation where we are less able to control our own safety.

All of this ongoing anxiety and stress can be harmful and have adverse knock-on effects, including for our teeth and gums.

How stress and anxiety affects our oral health

There are two main ways in which these problems can have a negative effect on our teeth and gums. These are both direct and indirect. Our Foxhall Dental Practice dentists explain below.

The direct effects include immediate or gradual damage caused by grinding of the teeth; a condition known as bruxism. In most people this occurs at night and is therefore very difficult to control directly. In rare cases, and under extreme stress, people may also do this during their waking hours.

There are two likely outcomes to this. The most likely being a gradual wearing away of the protective enamel layer of the teeth. This exposes the underlying dentin layer, thereby increasing the likelihood of both tooth decay and tooth sensitivity. Less likely, but not unheard of, is that teeth can break under the strain. This is probably more likely to happen on teeth that have already been restored or are already weakened by damage. The breakage can range from a small chip coming away from the tooth, to a complete fracturing.

The main indirect way that we harm our teeth and gums through stress is by changing our daily habits, nearly always for the worse. When stressed, we are less likely to care of  ourselves, and especially when it comes to what we eat. Under normal circumstances, most of us probably eat reasonably well balanced meals, with perhaps the occasional junk food ‘treat’. As stress levels rise, the latter is likely to feature more. With stress and anxiety often comes some degree of depression or at least a lowering of the mood.  When this happens, making an effort to cook a meal is one of those things that is likely to go amiss when we simply ‘can’t be bothered’.

Unfortunately, most junk food and even general ready meals often contain high levels of sugar. Add to that the additional cakes and biscuits we may eat and it is easy to see how damage to our teeth and gums can occur, especially over a period of time.

What can you do about it?

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More Dental Advice To Help You Through Lockdown

by Fox-AdminPosted on April 21, 2020 Posted in Advice

A few more tips from our Ipswich dentists on how to keep your teeth looking the best that you can.

In the greater scheme of things, keeping our teeth looking nice is probably a fair way down our list of priorities right now. Even from a dental perspective, it is far more important to keep your teeth healthy than to keep them white.

For some patients though, it will be a bit of a concern, especially those who may have previously lost confidence due to having stained or unattractive teeth.  As we are currently unable to see patients for treatments, including cosmetic ones, we thought that we would offer a few tips below that might help to keep your teeth looking OK for just that bit longer.

Some of these tips will also be of benefit, not only to the appearance of your teeth, but their health too. Enamel erosion is a factor which can affect both for example.

Brush your teeth well

This one should be pretty obvious. Brushing your teeth regularly will help to remove much of the surface staining that can occur as foods and drinks become stuck to our teeth. It will also help to remove acids which can cause tiny pits to appear in the surface enamel which in turn can trap discolouring substances as well as potentially harmful bacteria.

Avoid damaging foods and drinks

A surprising amount of foods and drinks can cause our teeth to look less pleasant. Some of this is down to the acidity as mentioned above. Some though are more likely to have an immediate impact than others. If you smoke, or if you drink very strong coffee such as espresso, you probably shouldn’t be too surprised if your teeth darken relatively quickly.

Whilst it might be a difficult time to cut down or cut out habits like this, by doing so, you will help to maintain the current condition of your teeth for longer. In the case of smoking; if you can use this time to stop, you will be doing your teeth and gums a favour. There is also some medical thinking that smokers are at a greater risk of the more serious consequences of the Coronavirus, so stopping now would certainly be beneficial.

Drink water

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Taking Care Of Your Oral Health During Lockdown

by Fox-AdminPosted on April 6, 2020 Posted in Advice

Some simple oral health care tips to help you through the coming weeks.

Hopefully we are all following government advice to stay at home, apart from essential workers and for exercise or food suppliers. Although this initial period technically ends soon, there is a widespread belief that the restrictions will be extended for several more weeks, and perhaps even more strictly.

We are sure that our Foxhall Dental Practice patients are finding it stressful and worrying and, like us, can’t wait for things to return to normal, or at least to some degree of normality. As it is though, what is happening is necessary and we encourage our patients to follow government guidelines strictly. We also encourage you to look after your own welfare, including teeth and gums during this testing time. Bearing in mind that even emergency dental care is quite restricted at the moment, it makes sense to do all that you can to avoid requiring it.

In today’s blog, our Ipswich dentists offer some general oral health care advice to help keep your teeth and gums healthy during lockdown.

Teeth cleaning routine

In ‘normal’ times, most of us will live by certain routines to some degree and this includes when we clean our teeth. Our night time clean should be easy to replicate as it should always be done last thing at night before we go to bed, with nothing (except water) eaten or drunk afterwards. Mornings may be a different matter though.

If we usually brush our teeth just before leaving for work, we may not currently have that situation as many businesses are closed. As this gets us out of a routine of getting ready for work, it is possible that we may also forget to clean our teeth. If you are in this situation, try to find a regular time to brush your teeth, whether that is the first thing upon getting up or perhaps before you walk the dog; whatever fits in with your own lifestyle – but please keep the discipline.

Start flossing

One of the things that we sometimes hear is that people don’t have the time to floss between their teeth. In all likelihood, this is because some people find it difficult to do and perhaps give up. So if you find that you currently have time on your hands, this is a good opportunity to learn how to do it. There are videos available online, though please make sure you choose a reputable one to help you. We are sure that once you have practiced a little, you will be able to do this in just a few minutes and subsequently improve the health of your teeth and gums.

Don’t eat too much junk food

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