Episode 9 - Diet and Your Dental Health

Dr. Michelle gets real about how what we eat impacts our dental health.

Learn more at https://jacksonvillebeachdentist.com/services/general-dentistry/

Transcript

Kevin (00:00):
It's time for Dr. Michelle's smile cast where we talk about your smile and other interesting dental topics. And now here's Dr. Michelle DeFelice Hucke of Jax Beaches Family Dentistry, smile. And she has to smile during the entire interview the entire time on the radio. Otherwise that would be false marketing. And we don't want to engage in that. No, we don't. Are you smiling? I am smiling. She is smiling. Dr. Michelle's such a pretty smile. She's excited because we're all excited because Thanksgiving is Thursday. Woo

Dr. Michelle (00:35):
Woo. Yes. It's a crazy week for all

Kevin (00:37):
Of us. Yeah. Well, we thought we would speak with Dr. Michelle about the role of diet in your dental health. I think that's interesting. I mean, we've all been told since we were small children, candy equals cavities. That's right. I mean, that has been, it's pretty basic. And that gets drilled into your head from the time that you can remember anything, right?

Dr. Michelle (00:59):
Yeah. Candy's bad.

Kevin (01:01):
Or that if you chew really hard on a jawbreaker, thus the term, you'll crack a molar or something like that. But beyond that, I would imagine just what you eat doesn't impact your dental health. And for a lot of our listeners who are 50 plus aged, 50 plus, they would like to maintain their teeth for the rest of their lives. And diet probably plays a role in that, right?

Dr. Michelle (01:23):
It certainly does.

Kevin (01:24):
So what are some things that we eat, consume here in America with our wonderful diet that is probably not conducive to good dental health? Dr. Michelle from Jax Beaches Family Dentistry.

Dr. Michelle (01:38):
Yeah. I mean, I think the interesting thing about it that I talk a lot about, well, and actually mostly obviously my hygiene team talks about, is that it's not so much the thing that you're consuming that you maybe know you shouldn't, but you love it. And so it's your thing that you eat Sweetss, for example. So if you have a bag of m and ms that you picked up at the gate station because you want to eat it, you love them and you're treating yourself to that. So there's a couple of things that you can do that really minimizes the impact of a bag of m and ms. One of them is just eat them,

Kevin (02:20):
Right? Don't suck on 'em.

Dr. Michelle (02:22):
Or you are going to have lunch say, and then you're going to have your bag of m and ms. Let's just eat them.

(02:29):
So you eat your lunch, just eat the M&Ms and enjoy. I'm not saying you have to take the whole bag and dump 'em down your throat, but just eat them as dessert as part of your lunch. It's going to have way less of an impact on your teeth than if you took the bag of M&Ms and ate them throughout the entire day. Interesting. So for most people, they could eat exactly what they're eating and just eat it differently and have almost zero effect on their teeth. But what happens is people have a tendency to snack and sip. It's our snack and sip society that more negatively impacts your teeth than what it is you're consuming. So same with a, this is for the people on Facebook, but same with a beverage, right? People. Oh, I have one coke a day. Well, I almost don't care about it at all, except that in our society, a lot of times that Coke is sitting in a cup holder, it's sitting in the car, it's sitting at your desk, and it's taking all day to consume the Coke. So every time you expose your teeth to sugar, it takes 20 minutes for your teeth to recover from the one bite or the one sip. And so if you're just taking that Coke and sipping on it for hours at a time, your teeth can never recover acid wise from the Coke.

Kevin (03:52):
Yeah. Every time there's some progress made, you're basically splashing the sugary Coke right back onto the enamel of the teeth.

Dr. Michelle (03:59):
Right? Right. Exactly. So it's not the Coke itself necessarily, it's the way that Coke is consumed.

Kevin (04:05):
Yeah. I remember you telling me years ago about you go through the Dunkin Donuts and you get like a latte, and then people sometimes really savor those. You can tell they take a sip and they almost swirl around in their mouth. It's almost like they're drinking a fine wine in their taste. And you would say, and then

Dr. Michelle (04:23):
They reheat it.

Kevin (04:25):
Yeah. You were talking about how horrible that really is just not a good thing

Dr. Michelle (04:29):
With coffee. I always say just drink it while it's hot and then dump it out,

Kevin (04:32):
Be done. Right, right. Interesting. Yeah. Well, it's all about diet. It's all about trying to maintain your teeth for as long as humanly possible. I mean, it's actually good for business for your teeth to fall out of your head, but we don't like that at Jax Beaches Family Dentistry. We want you to have your teeth for the rest of your life. And that's the focus. That's their approach. That's the philosophy of Dr. Michelle and the whole team at Jax Beaches Family Dentistry. You can connect with them at jacksonvillebeachdentist.com, Jacksonvillebeachdentist.com probably should schedule that teeth cleaning sometime between the holidays. You got some downtime, right?

Dr. Michelle (05:07):
Yeah, it's a great time of year to come in because people that have dental benefits, traditional dental benefits, on December 31st, the $2,000 that you have for your annual allotment gets shredded in the shredder and it's real money. So it's a really good time to come in no matter what dentist you go to. Just go in and get an exam, get organized. And then the other advantage, if you have traditional dental benefits or F-S-A money also shreds at the end of the year. You can plan for finishing out 2022 strong and then figure out what kind of benefits you need for 2023. Sometimes people have so few needs that we max out their 2023 benefits. They don't really need future benefits. And so we can either cancel them or modify them. And it really helped. This is a really good time. I mean, everyone's talking about benefits. This is a time of year when people are trying to figure out what they're going to acquire, and your dentist is one of the best people to help figure out about dental benefits because some people don't need them. Some people have the wrong kind of benefits.

Kevin (06:21):
Well, that is true. A lot of times when you're given the opportunity to have some sort of dental health insurance benefit, you don't ever talk to your dental office, right? Yeah. I mean, doesn't that make all the sense in, well, I don't think really hardly anybody does,

Dr. Michelle (06:34):
And dentistry is different than health insurance. Way different in that when you look in someone's mouth and do a thorough exam with all the proper X-rays and everything that you need to do the exam, you can pretty much predict within a couple thousand dollars how much people are going to need to spend on dentistry for their lifetime as long as they don't do anything crazy

Kevin (06:56):
As we hit, once again, if you're just hopping in your vehicle, we're talking about the utility, the good use of making sure that you use your dental health benefits, your insurance benefits, because typically they end at the end of a calendar year. Now will be the time. You got to have time to get scheduled and get in. And then of course a lot of offices take time off during the holidays. So you want to be mindful of that. If you have any questions about good use of your dental health insurance benefits, you can always call this number (904) 247-0111. That's the number for Jax Beaches Family Dentistry. We're talking about diet and dentistry and how it can impact things in a good way. We're going to come back. So stay tuned.

Kevin (07:52):
Michelle DeFelice, Hucke of Jax Beaches Family Dentistry.

Kevin (07:59):
Hey, we decided we would talk a little bit about diet and dentistry and a lot of holidays tend to evolve food. So much of our culture, Dr. Michelle is surrounded by food we want to celebrate than Thanksgiving. We can't think of any other reason to get together other than to have food to eat as opposed to, I don't know, giving thanks. That's sort of secondary. But talk to me about, we talked in the first segment with Dr. Michelle about things like how you consume your m and ms and don't just hang around and eat 'em slowly throughout the day or swirl that latte in your mouth nonstop for five hours. Good. Short-term stuff, talk to me a little bit more about long-term stuff. So if somebody's really concerned about maintaining their adult teeth way into adulthood into their seventies and eighties, what are some basic dietary adjustments they might want to make overall that might help make happen?

Dr. Michelle (08:56):
So definitely minimizing the snacking and sipping, like we were talking about. It's not what you're eating, it's how you're consuming it. And then we also have to watch out for acidity and then our saliva.

Kevin (09:10):
So coffee, I've always thought coffee had a lot of acid in it. It is. So say you're somebody, I was just spending some time over the weekend with somebody who routinely does four or five cups of coffee in the morning, right? Deep breaths. Yeah. So that's not a good, so if that person could dial it back to one or two cups a day, that would at least maybe incrementally help with their dental health

Dr. Michelle (09:33):
For sure. So coffee is super acidic. If you're drinking four to five cups of coffee a day, that just takes a lot of time. And so your teeth are sitting in that acidic substance for a long time. Now, coffee's nowhere near as bad or acidic as processed beverages. So I put all processed beverages other than seltzer water in one bucket, Gatorade, most of them have. So battery acid has an acidity of one, Gatorade, Coke. All those things have an acidity of 1.5

Kevin (10:12):
More so than battery

Dr. Michelle (10:13):
Acid. So very close to battery acid, which is why you hear all the jokes of, oh, if you get a rusty bolt undone, just take some Coke Coke and pop the rusty bolt in there. You're good to go. Well, it's the same with your teeth and also your digestive tract. When people come in and they say that they've been on some sort of anti acid Pepcid thing for 10 years, even though you're only supposed to be on it for three months, they usually are also consuming some sort of processed beverage, is the term I use for it. Almost all processed, canned bottled beverages have citric acid in them. They're also obviously loaded with sugar, which increases the acidity. And that's the problem with coffee too. People. Oh, well, you drank five cups of coffee today. I promise. It's not black coffee for the most part. No, it's not. If you want to diminish the acidity and the negativity of coffee, you've got to take everything out of it, which also usually decreases the amount of coffee the person drinks.

Kevin (11:14):
Well, isn't coffee ultimately a sugar and cream delivery mechanism? A it's

Dr. Michelle (11:18):
A carrier. Yeah. Well, when I see people do that to their coffee, I'm like, why don't you just pick something else? It's a drink. You obviously don't like coffee.

Kevin (11:25):
It's an excuse to drink coffee creamer, which is yummy. Oh man. Dr. Michelle DeFelice Hucke is with us, and of course she is with Jax Beaches Family Dentistry, and she's been practicing dentistry for a long time and a long time member of our community here in Northeast Florida. Go to Jacksonville beach dentist.com for more information about her and other members of the team, Jacksonville beach dentist.com. Not to get too caught up in the weeds here, but when the acid from coffee or Coke or Dr. Pepper hits your teeth, what's it doing?

Dr. Michelle (11:59):
So your teeth are like a matrix and it demineralize that matrix. So the things that you can do too, and this is something that even though it's prescription strength is an amazing product on, I don't really care where people buy it. I just want them to take care of their teeth. So CTX is a product, I don't know the name of the company, but if you put in CTX toothpaste or CTX rinse into your Amazon browser, it's its own browser. All those products will come up. And it's a combination of a gel, which takes the place of toothpaste or can go in a tray like a delivery tray. It's a fluoride gel. They also make a non fluoridated gel for people that are against fluoride. And then there's also a series of rinses. And if you have kids that are struggling with decay, if suddenly as an adult you have a whole new batch of decay, it's a really great product to remineralize that matrix.

(13:00):
So fluoride, when it goes back into the matrix, if your teeth have demineralized, makes your teeth then stronger actually than they were originally, which is great. And then the CTX products have some other mine minerals in them to help. It's sort of shocking. A swimming pool, it brings down the acidity in your mouth, and then it also mineralizes the teeth. So if people come in and they suddenly have three or four new cavities, we're freaking out, usually, at least I am. And then we're not wanting them to six months from now have three or more other cavities, which they do at that point. They have what I call starter cavities that we can't even see yet. So unless we do something to that environment with products, they're just going to have more six months down the road. So that's something to do. And then the other thing that's super important, especially as we have more and more birthdays, so we get past 50 and then we're having God willing more birthdays, is we have to really keep a close eye on our saliva, the consistency of it and the quantity of it, especially if we're adding the next pill for the next ill.

(14:15):
So as you have more and more medications in your medication box, it generally affects your saliva. And that's something that your dentist needs to know about immediately. So you may need trays made and you would put the CTX product, or PreviDent Plus also is a great prescription product that's similar. You'd put those in the tray because you have to constantly be fighting that demineralization with remineralization.

Kevin (14:44):
And then for us consumers or patients, we would maybe colloquially refer to it as dry mouth.

Dr. Michelle (14:49):
Yeah, dry mouth is terrifying. It's annoying, but it's terrifying because your saliva is what is your defense, right? That's what protects your teeth, keeps them mineralized, keeps the acidity down in your mouth. That's the recovery from what you're consuming. And so if you have dry mouth, you have to just pretty much eliminate sugar, keep it to 10 grams a day. Don't suck on any hard candy, don't sip on any sugar. You just have to become a monk when it comes to sugar.

Kevin (15:22):
Otherwise it will have pretty short-term disastrous consequences

Dr. Michelle (15:26):
For your teeth. It's quick. So that's why you need to notify your dentist. As soon as you feel like you have dry mouth, you should call their office and come get some solutions

Kevin (15:36):
Immediately.

Dr. Michelle (15:37):
Immediately. Because in six months it can be catastrophic, unfortunately. Yeah.

Kevin (15:43):
Alright, well on that happy note, I

Dr. Michelle (15:45):
Know isn't that Well no. So we were talking about diet because the holidays are coming. The good news about the

Kevin (15:53):
Holidays, oh, good news. Here we go.

Dr. Michelle (15:54):
Is that from a dentist standpoint, have some pie, do all the things. It doesn't really affect your teeth on the short run. And to me, if people have a sweet tooth, I'd much rather have them consume a brownie or a piece of pie or something with a meal. It affects your teeth. Not at all.

Kevin (16:12):
Okay. At all. There you go.

Dr. Michelle (16:14):
Yeah. So have a piece of pie.

Kevin (16:16):
So let that be well documented. Dr. Michelle is pro pie. I

Dr. Michelle (16:20):
Am

Kevin (16:21):
Pro pie. Pro pie. A lot of people, if you asked them, if you said, Hey, is Dr. Michelle pro pie? They'd say Probably not. That's just a misconception in our world. Totally.

Dr. Michelle (16:29):
Yeah. Desserts are great.

Kevin (16:31):
And you're pro brownie too. I didn't realize

Dr. Michelle (16:33):
That. Whatever, any dessert you want, go for it. Go

Kevin (16:35):
For it. Just don't take that brownie and nibble on it all afternoon.

Dr. Michelle (16:40):
Don't set it on your desk

Kevin (16:40):
You know who you are. Don't do it. All right. Dr. Michelle DeFelice, thank you very much for stopping by and we'll talk with you again next month. Thank

Dr. Michelle (16:47):
You.