Teeth Cleaning: Avoid Bacteria That Cause Cavities

Your mouth is a hotbed for bacteria. These bacteria can erode your teeth, causing serious tooth pain and expensive cavities, they can cause serious halitosis (bad breath) and (more seriously) can infest your arteries where they can build plaque.

Despite all this, proper dental hygiene’s importance to your health is often overlooked or dismissed as an issue of vanity. During times of recession (as now) trips to the dentist are one thing that many people cut out of their budgets. Here are some tips to help maintain teeth (and mouth) health:

1. Getting a regular teeth cleaning (twice yearly) can remove tea and coffee stains, as well as head off serious problems before they begin. Your hygienist can also help you evaluate how well you’re doing maintaining teeth health between visits.
2. Brush your teeth twice daily, or after every meal.
   1. Floss once daily; if you floss before bed (and aren’t a midnight snack type) your teeth will be cleanest longest.
   2. Tongue scrapers are great for removing plaque/mucus that builds up on the tongue.
3. If you’re prone to cavities, avoid certain foods. Everyone’s saliva is a little different. Saliva is mostly composed of water, but a small percentage contains antibacterials and enzymes.
   1. If sweet foods give you cavities, enjoy them only when you have a toothbrush handy for afterward (sugar can fuel bacteria growth even if you aren’t cavity prone).
   2. Acidic foods can also be a cause for cavities, so ditto on having a toothbrush.
   3. Try including more natural antibiotics in your diet, and consider swishing your mouth with something like Listerine (whose main ingredients have a tradition in this use) or carefully researching (or consulting an herbalist) on creating something similar. Alternatively, there are other natural antibiotics in liquid form, like colloidal silver.

If you do get cavities, there’s hope for the future: a new paste that can help regrow the hole that bacteria grows, removing the need for drilling in the tooth. Unfortunately, it still has lots of testing to undergo before it’s a viable treatment.