How To Prevent Tooth Decay Long Term

Hi. I'm Brian Halvorsen and I'm a dentist. I've been in practice for over 35 years, and I've written a book about the principles on holistic dentistry.

The book is called "Great Teeth for Life.” In this video, I'm going to be talking about tooth decay. You may not realize it, but tooth decay is the second most common disease on this planet.

Virtually, everybody has some form of tooth decay. Alarmingly, in large studies that have carried out recently, over a third of all children below five years old have got actual holes in their teeth - tooth decay. So it's virtually a running epidemic.

How can we look at possibly preventing it? Well, the key is actually basically diet. But when do we start? Well, believe it or not, if we want to look at the future of our next generation, we actually start before birth. It's been shown that if mom, or if the expecting mom, actually has a low sugar diet, then the likelihood of the offspring having tooth decay reduces considerably.

Now of course, if we're looking at long-term planning, it also means when baby comes off of milk, and especially formula which will contain some sort of sugars in terms of lactose, then we'll actually see the potential for tooth decay. Now, as soon as we start introducing children to solid foods, it's really a very good policy to try to stay away from sugars, especially what we call refined sugars. That doesn't just mean things like sweets and biscuits, it also means virtually anything which is dissolved, and this could be anything like tomato sauce, and if you look at the label of anything that is in a jar or processed, often there are some ingredients which contain sugar.

It is no doubt that, unfortunately, sugar is the main cause of tooth decay. Believe it or not, even healthy foods such as fruit, also has got their own sugars. And so they can be potentially a source of tooth decay.

Now, if we can start training our children on a low sugar diet, and instead bringing in what I would call unrefined carbohydrates, things like potatoes, rice, cereals, which haven't got sugar in it, then we hopefully will see a new generation which won't have these disastrous cavities at a young age. Unfortunately, if a child has tooth decay at a young age of 5 or 6 years old, then it is likely that this will last them their whole life. What can we do to actually prevent this? One is to seek dental advice.

There are various forms of treatments that can be applied, especially to the young teeth as they are growing, we can put sealants on them, we can use fluoride toothpastes under supervision from the dentist, and there are various applications that can be applied to teeth, which will reduce the chance. These really need to be done professionally and so as soon as, I would recommend, 2 years old, bring your child to the dentist and get advice on prevention of tooth decay. Tooth decay is a young person's disease.

It really fades out, in most people, over 30. So the prevention needs to be done at the younger age. If you can imagine a tooth that's filled at the age of 6, which may be a permanent molar, then these days, where we are expected to live to 80 or 90, then that tooth will most likely need to be re-filled, bigger filling, more damage, then possibly leading to a crown, bigger filling, root filling, all because we didn't do the prevention at an early age.

So this is a huge investment, not just in sort of pain and discomfort of having treatment, but also in the real cash that can actually be spent to keep repairing this tooth over the years. And that's some advice on preventing tooth decay. Thanks. .