Dentures and Dentist

Dentures and Dentist

Bread and Braces: How to Eat Bread Without Breaking Your Braces

Julian Andrews

When you have your braces fitted, your dentist will have a long chat with you about what you can and cannot eat while you wear your braces. While much of this advice includes foods and sweet treats you may be able to cut out of your diet, it may also affect foods you eat on an everyday basis such as some types of breads. The good news is, you don't have to necessarily stop eating your favourite bread products during orthodontic treatment. Often, you can simply adapt how you eat.

Hard and Chewy Breads

Hard or chewy breads, such as French sticks, bagels and very crusty breads, can bend your brace wires and even break your braces in extreme cases. Biting into a hard bread or breaking down a chewy bread takes some force, so you have to try to find a way to make this less of an effort to protect your brace work.

For example, you can still eat a crusty bread but you should break it into pieces rather than biting great chunks out of it. The same goes for pizza crusts or any bread that takes some effort to tear with the teeth. Putting pieces of bread in your mouth rather than biting the bread into bits takes the stress off your braces and allows you to soften the bread a little in your mouth before you start chewing it.

Nutty and Seedy Breads

While a few nuts or seeds on or in a bread may seem fairly harmless, nuts and seeds can also damage your braces or cause you problems after you've eaten. Small seeds can get stuck in and around your brace wires and your teeth and can be a pain to remove. If you bite down on a larger hard piece of nut, you may even damage your brace. If you can, it might be better to pick out larger pieces of nuts and to try to avoid very seedy breads.

Sandwiches

While soft breads may not cause you any problems when you have your braces in, you need to get savvy when you eat sandwiches. Taking a big bite out of a well-filled chewy sandwich may put pressure on your brace wires, pushing them out of place. It's better to take smaller bites or to cut sandwiches into small pieces before you eat them.

Bear in mind that you should also consider what's in or on the bread you're eating as well as the bread itself. Try to avoid fillings that are hard, chewy or difficult to bite through. You may still be able to eat your favourite sandwich fillings but may need to adapt things a little. For example, if you like peanut butter sandwiches, switch to a smooth rather than a chunky peanut butter. It's a lot easier to eat a smooth butter than a very nutty one, and you won't have to worry about pieces of nut getting stuck around your braces and between your teeth.


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Dentures and Dentist

Hello, my name is Jack. I am now 79 years old. As you can imagine, my teeth have taken something of a battering over the years. I lost a couple of teeth in a bar fight, four more decayed and one had to be extracted when it became infected. After losing so many teeth, my dentist suggested that I have dentures fitted. I was worried about this but my dentist was really great. He helped explain the procedure and then did an excellent job. I love my new dentures and I wanted to start this blog to offer help to others.

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