4 Foods to Avoid Eating While Wearing Braces

Orthodontics (braces) are vital to ensuring you or your child has straight teeth and a healthy smile for life. Unfortunately, orthodontics comes with certain drawbacks. Anyone who has orthodontics should know and understand how to take care of them to enjoy the benefits. This might even include giving up certain foods until the orthodontic work is complete.

Eating certain foods can quickly and easily damage orthodontics. Damaging these appliances can slow down the straightening process and require extra office visits to a Dentist Near Me.

Understanding What You Can and Cannot Eat with Orthodontics

When you or your child have braces put on, food choices may be limited for a few days due to soreness. Pain and tenderness are possible whenever food is eaten. For this reason, it’s usually best to eat either soft or liquid foods until the soreness lessens.

Tough meat, harder bread, and raw vegetables will often be too difficult to eat for a few days after treatment. There should be no problem with biting into most foods at the end of the first week after treatment. Even if something can be eaten doesn’t mean it should be. There are, in fact, several different types of foods that anyone with orthodontic work should avoid or risk causing damage to the brackets and wires. For this reason, anyone with orthodontics must avoid eating the following food types.

Overly Sticky Foods

These food types include jelly beans, chewing gum, caramel, and other types of sticky candy. These sticky foods can get stuck easily in a bracket or wire and knock teeth out of alignment. Anyone with any orthodontic appliance should avoid these foods.

Foods That Are Chewy

Things like hard rolls, bagels, and many other types of hard bread can also damage orthodontics.

Excessively Crunchy or Hard Food

Orthodontic work does not mix well with chips, popcorn, nuts, and many other crunchy or hard foods. These can cause severe damage to orthodontic appliances.

Anything That You Have to Bite Into

No one with orthodontics should eat corn on the cob, apples, carrots, and similar foods. Biting these foods is a good way to damage brackets, loosen wires, and cause other damage. These foods are still safe to eat if they are in small, bite-sized pieces. The problem with these types of these foods is either their hardness or texture. Either of these factors can loosen wires and brackets. If this happens, another trip to the orthodontist will be required to have brackets put back in place and the wires tightened.

Many types of foods can cause these problems. For this reason, an orthodontist will likely provide a complete list of all foods that should be avoided. It’s in the best interest of the patient that these instructions are followed as closely as possible.

Preventing Problems with Appropriate Care

Realigning and straightening teeth is a delicate and complicated process. This is true whether it is accomplished using traditional orthodontic appliances or aligners. Every person’s mouth is different, so an orthodontist must have a specific treatment plan to correct whatever issues are present in each patient.

Unfortunately, even minor damage to brackets and wires can drastically slow the treatment process. Further, these kinds of damage can often lead to shifting that can rub the inside of the mouth and create painful sores.

The best way to avoid any of these problems is to ensure the instructions from the orthodontist are followed. The orthodontic process is very involved and much more than simply brushing and flossing. These are still important because food particles can even get stuck in brackets and wires, but avoiding certain foods is one of the best ways to take care of your future smile.