How Does Sugar Affect Your Kids’ Teeth?

Trust us; you don’t want to risk your child losing any of their teeth due to tooth decay. One of the most insidious agents contributing to kids’ tooth decay is the excessive amounts of processed sugar in many of the readily available foods and drinks. Please take a look at this blog post and check out how sugar and tooth decay correlate.

Here in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a worrying 45.8% of all kids aged 2 to 19 have had some type of dental caries. That’s almost half of all kids!

Unfortunately for us all, and especially for us parents, many of our kids’ favorite treats are also full of sugars that help damage their dental health and weaken their teeth. Here, at Parkway Pediatric Dentistry, the whole team wants to help our patients, families, and especially parents to know what they can do to ensure their children’s best possible dental health.

How Does Sugar Affect Teeth?

So, in and of itself, sugar won’t damage your kids’ teeth. It’s not like sugar particles attach to their baby teeth and start melting away the enamel or anything like that. So, how can sugar cause tooth decay? Sugar, in fact, is the preferred source of food for harmful bacteria in any of our mouths. The bacteria feed off that sugar and produce an acid that erodes the enamel layer protecting the teeth.

Please keep in mind that these bacteria are present in anyone’s mouth. As such, this warning to limit sugar consumption is not only valid for young children, but for teenagers, parents, and elderly patients too.

Which Foods and Drinks Containing Sugar Cause Tooth Decay?

Many foods and drinks contain alarming amounts of sugar. Consider some well-known treats, such as candy, doughnuts, cakes, soda, and sweet tea. Other foods, such as healthy fruits, can also leave natural sugars in your mouth and help the decay under the right circumstances.

What you eat matters, and what your kid eats can severely impact their dental growth and development. You can follow this link to the USDA Tracker and check how your choice of foods and drinks does in relation to sugar content.

Citrus Fruits

Who doesn’t love a good cup of orange juice with their typical American breakfast. Pancakes, bacon, eggs, and orange juice. It sounds awesome. Furthermore, you’d be earning bonus points if you ate the fruit instead of making juice or getting the store-bought variety.

The unfortunate truth is that frequent exposure to acidic foods can contribute to enamel erosion in kids and make their teeth more likely to suffer from decay. Lemon, lime, orange, blood orange, and the many other variations of citrus fruits can hurt your kids’ teeth if they don’t clean them properly.

We have nothing against lemonade or a fun squeeze of your favorite citrus to make tea or your regular cup of water into a refreshing and delicious beverage, but you always have to help your children clean their mouths properly. Besides, citric fruits and juices can irritate mouth sores, so be careful about any citrus intake and pair your kids’ choices with proper dental hygiene.

Coffee and Tea

Oh boy. How do we say this? Coffee and tea have nothing bad in and of themselves. They’re amazing beverages, can be quite healthy, perfume our homes in the mornings, and make those cold days look amazing from the start.

The problem is that too many individuals add way too much sugar to their preparations. When we’re home, we may indulge in a teaspoon or two of sugar in our cups. During summer, you might be tempted to prepare cold variations of these beverages, and the sweeter they are, the more our kids like them. Or maybe you’re on your way to drop your kid at school, and you buy some beverages for your kid at a convenience store or well-known cafe brand.

In all these scenarios, we expose our children to beverages with staggering amounts of sugar in them. If on top of that, they don’t wash and clean their teeth properly, you’re preparing a recipe for disaster. Please keep these points in mind when preparing your next cup of coffee or tea at home and avoid using too much sugar.

Sticky Foods

We’ll let you in on a secret. Of course we love candy and other treats! But we are also aware of how dangerous they can be to our kids’ dental health. Some sticky foods and treats, such as taffy, licorice, and more, have a unique way of getting into the nooks and crannies of your kids’ teeth and helping harmful bacteria produce harmful acids that erode the enamel.

Furthermore, many apparently-healthy snacks, such as dried fruit, pack a bunch of sugar into every bite putting your child’s overall health at risk. Please help your child develop good dental hygiene habits so they remember to brush and floss their teeth properly after every meal.

Swap Soda for Water

Remember how we said adding some citrus juice to a glass of water was something that could hurt your child’s teeth? Well, this is considerably better than all the harm caused by soda beverages.

A single can of soda could have anywhere between 11g and 25g of sugar. The recommended sugar intake for men is 36g per day, and women should limit their intake to 25 grams…

Please, be careful, as many popular brands of soda use way too much sugar to achieve their signature flavor and put your child’s teeth at risk. Barely siping on these sugary drinks will contribute to the development of plaque that eats away your kids’ teeth’ outer layer. Not to mention that this will also lead to bad breath. Do your child a favor, and don’t overindulge in sodas.

Get Help From Your Roanoke Pediatric Dentist

As the best pediatric dentist Roanoke has available, the team of specialists at Parkway wants to help you in every way possible with your child’s dental health. We know parenting is not easy, so we hope you can learn much from the information we gather for you.

There are lots of ways you can have a pediatric dentist help your child, and if you want to provide your kids’ teeth with a lot more protection, you could set an appointment and ask about our preventative treatments, such as dental sealants.

We hope to see you and your smiling child soon to share the good news of a healthy smile.