What Is Nutritional Counseling?
Nutritional counseling is a very important part of a preventative dental care plan. Our dental team takes good nutrition extremely seriously as we know it is vital for healthy teeth and gums. Your child’s diet plays a huge role in their dental health. Equally, it is important to make sure your child’s teeth remain healthy and strong as it is very difficult for a growing child to eat a good, varied and nutritionally sound diet if they have child toothache or dental infections, and this can negatively affect their overall growth and development.
How Can Nutritional Counseling Help?
Our dental practice offers nutritional counseling to parents and caregivers as we can evaluate your child’s diet and will recommend ways to improve it. Often these recommendations will be simple and straightforward and easy to implement, but they could make the world of difference to your child’s dental health. This information can help even very young children and toddlers who are at risk of or who have already developed primary teeth cavities. This can occur if they are put to bed with a sugary drink or if they like to have a pacifier coated with something sweet.
We can analyze your child’s diet, as well as their risk of developing dental diseases, before recommending the most suitable ways to help reduce this risk. We might suggest cutting down on certain foods, in particular those that are sugary or rich in carbohydrates.
Examples include cookies, cakes, chips and candies. While these may be nice to eat they are often quite sticky and will adhere to the teeth for many hours before being brushed away, increasing the risk of tooth decay. In addition, these types of foods often have low nutritional value and may be preventing your child from receiving all the vitamins and minerals necessary for good dental and general health. It isn’t practical to try to eliminate these foods altogether, but keeping them for a treat and making sure they are eaten as part of a main meal can make a big difference.
Lots of children get hungry in between meals and their choice of snack can increase or decrease their risk of dental problems. If they currently snack on chips or cookies, try giving them alternatives such as cheese or crunchy fruits and vegetables. Cheese is excellent for teeth as it contains high amounts of protein and calcium while crunchy fruits and vegetables contain plenty of water which helps to wash away bacteria and food debris. Another straightforward way to improve dental health is to look at their choice of beverages. While most people are aware of the high sugar content in sodas, it isn’t always so obvious for other popular drinks such as fruit juice and sports drinks.
D1310 – Nutritional counseling for control of dental disease