WHAT YOU CAN EAT WITH BRACES

The presence of braces does not mean you have to survive off soft or puréed food for the duration of your braces, but you should be a little vigilant otherwise you could damage the brackets, bands and archwires. Also, food lodged between your teeth and the braces could encourage tooth decay. Therefore you should be selective about food you can eat with braces.

Fruit as a Food Choice

Fruit should always be a part of any diet, but you have to choose carefully when you have braces installed. Hard fruit, such as apples and unripe peaches and pears, can pose problems and might affect the integrity of your braces. One way around this problem is cutting the harder fruits smaller enough so that your back molars can chew and break them down. The choice of fruit will depend on how sensitive your teeth feel at a particular time. For example, after a brace change, your teeth might feel a little sore, so it’s best to avoid even smaller hard fruits. You can choose the softer fruits such as raspberries and blueberries.

Vegetables Should be Part of Everyone’s Diet

Harder, raw vegetables, particularly when uncooked like carrots or cucumber, should be cut up into pieces like the fruit so it can be chewed by the back teeth. There is no problem with eating vegetables that have been cooked, as they are then soft enough so that they won’t affect the braces.

Care Must Be Taken With Grains

Grains are just fine for brace wearers, because once they have been prepared they are soft and easy to chew. You should be careful when eating crusty bread, as it can be hard to bite, but again it can be broken down into smaller portions.

Dairy Is a Good Choice

Dairy products are a great choice for bracket wearers as they are soft and require little chewing. These include portions of milk, cheese, and yogurt which are low in fat.

Keep to Tender Meat

Meat has more problems for those who wear braces, especially cuts that are more fibrous. This makes it more difficult to chew. The fibrous meat pieces tend to get stuck in the gaps between braces and teeth.

Tougher cuts pose an even greater threat and could loosen the bands that enclose the molars. Tearing meat straight off the bone can incur problems as well. Meat should be tender and reduced in size by cutting up into mouth sized pieces rather than using the teeth to extract it from the bone.

Take Care With Seeds and Nuts

Biting onto a hard seed or nut could easily damage or break off a bracket or band from the tooth. It could also bend the archwires, which could mean that the repositioning process may be delayed until the bracket has been fixed or replaced.

Advantages of Invisalign

Invisalign braces can be removed when eating and drinking so food consumption and variety poses no real threats, but when the braces are in place then extreme caution should be taken when consuming many food varieties and even hot drinks as they might distort them.