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Your teeth are precious. Once your permanent teeth come in, they need to last you a lifetime. Extensive tooth decay can lead to dental caries and the need for fillings, crowns, bridges, and dentures.

While these fixes can go a long way toward maintaining your quality of life, they cannot compare to your natural teeth. Getting braces is no excuse to let up on your thorough oral health routine: You need to take good care of your teeth before, during, and after braces to benefit completely from the gains you get from newly straightened teeth.

Why You Should Maintain Good Oral Health for Life

Begin a complete oral health regimen as early as possible in life, and maintain this routine throughout your life. Keeping your (or your child’s baby) teeth clean establishes a routine. It preserves healthy baby teeth whose function is to save space for the permanent teeth when they are ready to come in. Care of your permanent teeth helps preserve the enamel and prevent decay.

Take Special Care with Braces

It is important to pay attention to oral health when you have braces. If you do not take special care of your teeth during the months or years that you have braces, you risk irreversible damage to your teeth. Care is more difficult with braces because food can easily get stuck. In addition to brushing twice daily and flossing each day, Dr. Kuhlberg and our staff suggest avoiding sticky foods.

A clean mouth is a happy mouth. And when Dr. Kuhlberg and our staff see you have a clean mouth, we are happy too. Of course, all of this should make you happy because you’re the one preventing sneaky little food bits from getting trapped under the wires of your braces.

Still, you need to be thorough with your brushing. When you have braces, you’re playing a game of hide-and-go-seek with everything you eat. Here are five tips to keep your mouth (and us) happy.

1. How is brushing with braces like geometry? It’s all about the angles. Brush the tops of your teeth and braces with your brush angled down. Brush the bottom of your teeth with the brush angled up. Pointy brushes, aka interproximal brushes, are good for reaching the tiny spots around braces.
2. Brush after every meal. If those sneaky little food bits hide in your mouth for very long, they’ll turn into plaque. And plaque is a sign of a very unhappy mouth.
3. Brush one tooth at a time for at least ten seconds, and pay close attention to the spots where your braces touch your teeth.
4. Fluoride is your new BFF. Make sure your toothpaste and mouthwash contain this cavity-fighting ingredient.
5. Braces are no excuse not to floss. In fact, saying you can’t floss because you have braces is like saying the dog ate your homework. Dr. Kuhlberg and our staff, like your geometry teacher, aren’t going to buy it. Be sure to floss after every meal.

We already know that wine is one of the greatest things in life, but did you know that it could actually keep you from getting sick? Yup, apparently wine is a fantastic disinfectant for bad mouth germs, which is just another reason why we should all be drinking more of the good stuff.

Want to learn more? Check out the article here!

Halloween is a time to enjoy delicious candies you might avoid the rest of the year. Youngsters who get to dress up and ask for sweet treats out trick-or-treating cherish this holiday.

If you have braces on, Dr. Kuhlberg would like you still to have fun and celebrate Halloween this year!

It’s easy to get carried away on Halloween by eating too much candy at once. Most parents try to prevent the all-too-common sugar high their kids experience on Halloween night. While there are certain candies that should be avoided, not all candy will cause problems for kids with braces. After trick-or-treating, you could trade unsafe candies with siblings and/or friends so they don’t miss out on the sugar buzz.

Dr. Kuhlberg and our team have come up with a list of teeth-friendly treats that should keep you from worrying about breaking your braces. We also came up with a list of candies to avoid, so as to save you a trip to our office. Remember to be extra careful when you indulge this Halloween!

Braces-Friendly Sweets

• Solid chocolate: Milk, white, or dark
• Nougat-filled candy bars: Three Musketeers
• Powdery candy: Sweet Tarts, Pixie Stix
• Mint-flavored candy
• Malted milk balls
• Skittles
• M&Ms
• Soft cookies
• Peanut butter crackers

Avoid These Treats

• Sticky candy: Starbursts, toffee, Tootsie Rolls (Try sucking on these candies rather than biting into them)
• Hard candy: Suckers, Jolly Ranchers (Just like the sticky candies try not to bite into these)
• Taffy
• Caramels (Soft caramels are okay)
• Fruit chews
• Gum (sugar free is fine to have!)
• Caramel apples

The most important thing to remember is to BRUSH after eating all this candy. All this sugar is bad to leave on your teeth so after indulging in a Halloween treat make sure to brush your teeth well!

When in doubt, ask Dr. Kuhlberg if a particular candy is safe to eat when you have braces. We hope you enjoy your Halloween sweets, and look forward to seeing you at your next appointment! Happy Halloween!