Category Archives: Health and Fitness

Surprising Foods You Didn’t Know Prevented

Keeping up with your smile is important, even if it means skipping out on your favorite treats and candies. Too many sweets leads to plaque � a film-like substance that overlays your teeth � the ultimate cause of tooth decay. A study conducted by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) concludes 92% of all adults 20-64 years of age have at least one cavity. If you don’t want to be a part of that percentage, start taking care of your teeth today by eating right! It’s time to pass up on desserts and look at foods that not only prevent tooth decay, but keep your teeth strong and healthy.

Add More Calcium to Your Diet

Calcium is a key supplement your body needs to make sure our bones stay strong, and your teeth the strongest of them all! Milk, eggs and cheeses are full of calcium. Don’t like whole milk? No worries, there’s plenty of calcium in skim milk and low-fat yogurt. So, if you skip breakfast daily, stop that and take your time in the morning to sit down and enjoy a glass of milk next to a plate of eggs and toast.

Other foods loaded with calcium includes vegetables such as broccoli and bok choy, dried beans and most nuts.

Eat Foods Rich in Fiber

Saliva guards your mouth like no other. Most foods that you eat high some degree of acidity, which gnaws away at the enamel protecting your teeth. Saliva though, neutralizes most of these acids, gives space for the thousands of bacteria living inside your mouth to break down any sugars, and helps re-mineralize your teeth.

To promote salivation, you need to eat a lot of fibrous foods, such as fruits, nuts and vegetables. The best of these includes apples, bananas, oranges, brussel sprouts, peas and bran.

Switch from White to Whole Wheat Grains

Bleached foods such as white rice and white bread are fine, but if you’re looking to help your teeth out it’s a great idea to switch to whole grain foods. Whole grain foods have essential supplements, including B vitamins and iron, that promote healthier gums. In addition, whole grains contain magnesium, a mineral that helps absorb calcium and strengthen your teeth.

The next time you’re at the market, fill your cart with items like brown rice, whole-grain cereals and pastas, oatmeal and bran.

Protect Your Teeth with Potassium

Avocado is a unique food for it’s many properties. For one, avocados are calorie-burning powerhouses great for weight loss and muscle gains. Secondly, packed inside an avocado is loads of potassium, a chemical which strengthens your teeth and stops decay right in its tracks.

If avocados aren’t your thing, there are other foods full of potassium. Some of those are potatoes, sweet potatoes, bananas, watermelon and yogurts.

How Orthodontists Contribute In Helping People

During such cases, professional help is needed in order to restore the teeth to its original shape and form. All of this is made possible with the help of orthodontics.

Let us look at what role Canberra orthodontists play in helping their clients achieve great smiles.

Cases Orthodontics Can Treat

Misaligned teeth are caused by a number of factors, each with its own distinctive feature. Crowded teeth for example are often the result of the difference between the jaw and tooth size or between the size of the upper and lower jaws.

Overbite or what is sometimes referred to as buck tooth is often hereditary which means that there is a huge likelihood of a child getting it from his or her mom’s, dad’s, grandma’s and grandpa’s genes. Bad oral habits can also cause the development of overbite such as thumb sucking or using of pacifier when younger.

Tooth spacing is the opposite of crowding and this happens when a person loses a tooth with no way of filling up the mouth. This also occurs if your jaw has more space causing your teeth to spread out as they may not be large enough to fill them. People who have a habit of pressing their tongue against their teeth when they swallow also have a huge likelihood of developing gaps in front of their teeth.

Orthodontic Solutions in Canberra

It is good to hear that finding an orthodontist in Canberra is made fairly simple with many of them integrating their services over the internet. This in turn makes it possible for just about anyone to get in touch with them to have their teeth checked.

We are the best in Canberra when it comes to Orthodontics.Orthodontics in Canberra provides treatment that will cater the different needs and preferences of clients. This includes the use of fixed appliances such as braces, special fixed appliances, as well as fixed space maintainers.

There is also the option to use removal appliance which includes aligners, jaw position appliances, lip and cheek bumpers, palatal expander, removable retainers, headgears and the likes. You will surely find suitable treatment with the vast options available in Canberra.

Achieving the perfect smiles requires the aid of the best orthodontists in Canberra. The services of an orthodontist indeed contribute greatly in helping achieve a number of people’s goals with their teeth.

Ready For Wisdom Teeth Removal

Before sitting on the dental chair, it’s must to discuss the cost of wisdom teeth removal in Sydney with your dentist. During initial consultation, make sure to confirm your wisdom teeth removal specialist to get the answers for the questions listed below:

– How many teeth will you remove?
– Will you use general or local anaesthesia?
– Is there a possibility that I will get nerve damage?
– How long will the surgery and my recovery process take?

Prepare for the Day of Oral Surgery

If your dentist uses general anaesthesia during your surgery, someone will have to be your attendant. So make sure to arrange someone beforehand.

Ask your dentist, whether you need to avoid eating or drinking before the surgery. As general anaesthesia might cause vomiting, some specialists of cheap wisdom teeth removal in Sydney may recommend that you fast starting at midnight the night before the procedure.

If you are on prescription medications, discuss with your dentist regarding that and make sure to take the one before your surgery begins.

Tips to Prevent Wisdom Teeth Removal Pain after Surgery

You will need pain medications and a cold pack to control your after having wisdom teeth surgery. So make sure to ask about the pain killers and buy a few cold packs and medications as prescribed by the dentist. By this, you can avoid a trip to the pharmacy when you are still groggy.

Tips for Resting at Your Home

As like all surgery, you’re going to take rest for the first few days after the surgery. Before you visiting, prepare a comfortable area in your home where you can rest and enjoy your recovery period by watching TV, and fall asleep while relaxing.

Since, you were not supposed to take hard foods during the healing period, so make sure to stock up on soft foods, such as applesauce, cheese, and yogurt.

What Foods Are Bad For Your Teeth

With the end of the year fast approaching, now’s the time to start thinking your New Year’s Resolutions. For lots of people, getting that promotion at work or investing more into your family are one of many resolutions you have planned out. However, let’s add great dental health to the list as well.

Why dental health? Your smile is the first thing that represents you wherever you go, and it’s also plays its part in your overall wellbeing. To keep up that smile, everyone knows that starts with brushing twice and flossing daily, as well as visiting their dentist a minimum of once every 6 months for a thorough cleaning. But wait, there’s more. What we don’t get to talk about too often is the foods that are either good or bad for your dental health. Today, we’d like to highlight how your diet affects your teeth, and what you can do to start eating right even before the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s.

Plaque is Your Teeth’s Worst Enemy

Before you start preparing foods for your holiday meals, let’s shine light on the big culprit posing harm to your teeth � plaque. Plaque is a thin, soft layer that slowly builds on top of your teeth and traps sugars that hit your teeth. It’s the job of the bacteria living inside your mouth to break these sugars down, resulting in an acid that is responsible for tooth decay, enamel erosion and close to all dental problems. We fight plaque daily by brushing our teeth when we wake up and before we go to bed, and for the cautious types, after meals. Plaque will always try to build back up, so it’s our job to learn what foods/drinks are the best and worst for our teeth, so we have the edge on achieving better dental health.

Avoid Foods with High Acidity Levels

Our teeth are extremely sensitive, and it doesn’t help when put in front of us are highly acidic foods and drinks. Acidic foods – including lemons, pickles, grapes, alcohol and coffee � being eroding your teeth’s enamel the moment they have contact. Enamel does not grow back naturally, which can lead to bigger problems such as cavities and tooth decay.

To combat highly acidic foods, you can always purchase an enamel strengthening toothpaste from your local market, and eat less acidic foods � not limited to vegetables, whole grains, eggs, and lean meats.

Watch out for Foods High in Sugar

As we’ve highlighted before, sugar is a main accomplice of plaque. The first step to weakening the threat of plaque is to reduce the amount of foods you eat with high concentrations of sugar. More importantly, it’s best not to let sugar settle inside your mouth for long. Brushing your teeth between meals and drinking lots of water is important to consider.
Foods that you need to watch out for includes raw sugar, candies, and other desserts. Be sure to skip out on the sodas and other sugary drinks as well. Healthy alternatives packed with flavor includes sweet potatoes, yogurts, apples and shiitake mushrooms.

Keep Away from Foods that Dry Your Mouth

Saliva is your mouth’s toughest defense system to prevent anything harmful to your teeth. Saliva is a natural base that neutralizes acid secreted by bacteria, aiding in the fight against gum disease and tooth decay. Let’s not forget saliva washes away plaque momentarily and helps re-mineralize your teeth. However, dry mouth heavily impairs salivation, and you need to make sure that doesn’t happen.

The Different Cosmetic Dentistry

Cosmetic dentistry in Parramatta, NSW can range from simple procedures to major repairs. There are multiple procedures that a dental professional can do to improve one’s smile.

Several techniques and procedures can be done to teeth that had been discoloured, cracked, chipped, misshapen, and those that are missing.

The specialist dentist can do many changes to your teeth such as close the large gaps, restore the short or worn out teeth, reshape the teeth, and change their length. There are other more common procedures that can be done on your teeth such as bonding, crowns, veneers, bleaching, contouring, and reshaping.

Such procedures are not often considered as cosmetic; they can be done to correct bite problems at times.

Crowns are also known as caps. Crowns are used as tooth cover to restore the teeth to their normal appearance and shape.

Because of the high cost, this procedure is used in cases wherein the other procedures don’t work. They are known to have the longest life span but they can be time-consuming.

Bleaching is a common and a popular chemical process that can be used to whiten teeth. There are those people who undergo this procedure to remove stains while there are also those who only desire for a whiter shade.

Discolouration of the enamel may be caused by drinking coffee, tea, coloured beverages, and cigarettes. This may also be due to heredity or due to age.

This procedure can be done by the dentist in a dental clinic or it can be performed at home through a teeth whitening kit.

Contouring and reshaping are also two procedures that can be done to correct chipped, crooked, and irregularly shaped teeth or even those teeth that overlap and they can be done in a single session.

These procedures are commonly used to correct the shape, length, size, and the positions of teeth. This can also be done to correct some bite issues.

Bonding on the other hand is that tooth-coloured material that is used for filling in tooth gaps and changing the colour of teeth. This can be done in one dental visit and may last for life. However it is susceptible to staining and chipping compared to other procedures.We have the best dental implants here in Parramatta.

This may also be used as tooth-coloured filling for filling smaller cavities. This can also be used to fill the gaps between teeth or cover the whole external surface of a tooth to have its colour and shape changed.

Veneers are the thin porcelain or plastic pieces that are put over the front teeth to have the colour and shape of the teeth changed. These are placed on teeth that have uneven surfaces or those that have been discoloured, chipped, have odd shapes, crooked, or have uneven gaps.

This procedure requires little to no anaesthesia and it can function in the same way as bonding. Veneers can also be considered as alternative to crowns which are more expensive.

Is It Possible To Fix Your Half Broken Tooth

Discovering that you have a broken tooth can be pretty scary. But you do not have to worry because it can be repaired. There are several cosmetic and restorative treatments available today that can repair damaged teeth. The right procedure for you will depend on the extent of damage on your tooth, based on your dentist’s assessment. Below are five procedures that can help repair a broken tooth.

Dental Bonding

Lasting up to 10 years, composite bonding can repair cracked, chipped, discolored, misshapen, decayed and gapped tooth. The procedure starts by roughening the tooth and putting on conditioning liquid. Putty is then applied, molded and smoothed before it is hardened using UV light. Once it dries, it is then shaped and polished to match the rest of the teeth.

Veneers

Veneers are basically covered for the teeth. Usually made of porcelain, it is bonded to the front of the tooth to transform its appearance. It can last for up to 30 years with proper care before it will require replacement. Veneers are a great option for many people, but this might not be a good one for those who grind their teeth as it can wear the appliance down.

Crowns

A broken or chipped tooth that causes pain when you drink or chew might require a crown. One of the most common restorative dental treatments, a crown is a cap that covers the tooth to protect and improve appearance. Otherwise, your damaged tooth will not be able to withstand the pressure that comes with chewing. Crowns are made for every patient to perfectly match the rest of their teeth.

Root Canal

A crack in the tooth that extends to the pulp is treated with a root canal. Root canal therapy involves removing decayed tooth matter and the nerve. It has a reputation for being painful but only minor pain and discomfort is expected when done right. A toothache, swelling, and sensitivity might necessitate a root canal. Otherwise, these problems can lead to serious problems like bone loss and abscess.

Dental Implant

A crack that extends below the gum line means that tooth can no longer be treated and can no longer be saved. In this case, you will need to get it extracted. A dental implant works as an excellent replacement for your natural tooth. They act as the new root of your tooth, securely placed in the jawbone to ensure a lasting fit.

If you think you have broken or cracked your tooth, get it examined immediately. Doing so will help avoid further damage and even possible infection. Prompt treatment can also help save your tooth, thanks to modern dental technology. Talk to your dentist to learn more about the effects of broken tooth and how you can prevent it