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Fruit and fruit juices are an important part of a healthy diet. They provide important vitamins and minerals which are crucial to your oral as well as general health. However, fruit juice can attack the enamel around the gum. Eating apples can be up to four times more damaging than drinking carbonate drinks.

Here are some of the things you can do to avoid this damage and continue to enjoy your fresh fruit. There are also some important points about juices and dried fruit.

• If you constantly snack on fruit then your teeth are under attack more frequently with less time to recover. If you stick to three meals a day and enjoy fruit at these times, your teeth have longer to recover between meals. Saliva plays a major part in protecting our teeth from the harmful effects of fruit but it needs time to build up in the mouth between meals.
• Avoid brushing your teeth until an hour after you have eaten your fruit. Brushing straight away, which is what we tend to do to clean our teeth after eating, can speed up the effect the fruit acid has on your teeth and wear down the enamel, which the acid has begun to attack. If you wait until the acid has neutralized this will not happen.
• Brushing teeth before we eat fruit can provide a protective barrier but this may be harder to remember.
• Eat fresh fruit with a glass of milk or piece of cheese to neutralize the acid.
• Better still; drinking a glass of water after eating fruit will rinse away any acids from the teeth and mouth.

• Regular flossing, in particular after eating will remove unwanted particles.

Juice

When you juice a fruit all the sugar is squeezed out of it and into the juice. The high sugar content of juice makes it more damaging to teeth. It is a good idea to limit juice to a glass a day for adults and children and use a straw when you drink it. Watering it down can also help.

Dried fruit

Although promoted as a convenient and healthy snack, dried fruit is full of concentrated sugar and therefore not good for your teeth. These sugars can feed the bacteria in your mouth, which encourages plaque and eventual decay. It’s a bad alternative to fresh fruit.

Some points about Braces and Dentures.

When you wear braces your teeth are still vulnerable to attack from the wrong foods. Following the tips above can prevent decay. Sticking to softer fruits like berries, that are less likely to get stuck between the structure of your brace, can protect your teeth. Using a Waterpik can be helpful around the braces. Using a mouthwash or gargling with salted water twice a day is a good way to rid your mouth of plaque and protect your braces.

Dentures

Vitamin C is important for healthy gums so a diet rich in fruit is important for people who are fitted with dentures. The fruit acid cannot attack the denture itself but following usual procedures for cleaning and maintaining dentures will keep them in good shape and enable you to continue to enjoy your fruit. Slicing it thin or chopping it fine will prevent any difficulties eating harder fruits.