Rancho Dentists Warn Against Bad Dental Habits

If there's one thing a dentist in Rancho Cucamonga, CA, hates to see it's people doing preventable damage to their teeth. We don't like seeing patients with bad teeth! Unfortunately, there are some things that people do that are extremely harmful to their teeth - and they don't even realize it. So in this blog, we wanted to talk about bad dental habits, specifically, ones that people often don't know are bad habits.

Four Surprising Ways Teeth Can Become Damaged

1 - Chewing ice

Chewing ice is a pretty common activity. People do it with their drinks while waiting for food at a restaurant, or some diet plans suggest it as a way of "snacking" without consuming calories. The problem is, ice is actually quite hard. And it shatters in a way that creates very sharp fragments. These can cause small cracks in your teeth's enamel, which then get worse over time - particularly if the ice-chewing persists.

If you want to eat ice, let it melt. Don't chew.

2 - Cough drops

Maybe you've heard this before, maybe not, but either way: the vast majority "cough drops" are just medicine-flavored candy. They are truly just as bad for your teeth as sucking on any other hard sugar candy and don't have any real medicinal value besides maybe having some menthol.

Use a throat spray or other anti-cough medicine, if a cough is a problem. Otherwise, use sugar-free candy if you need something to suck on.

3 - Tongue piercing

Without getting into all the ways tongue piercings are prone to infection, they are extremely bad for the teeth. Your teeth weren't meant to have metal banging against them! Pretty much any time a tongue stud impacts the teeth, it's doing some damage.

There are plenty of other places you can get a piercing which will be far less likely to cause long-term health problems.

4 - Biting into packaging

It's something we've all done on occasion - even dentists. You need to open a package, but there isn't a knife handy, so you bite it. The problem is, this can easily damage teeth. People tend to bite very hard when they do this, basically ramming their teeth against each other - and that's an invitation to cracking and chipping.

Don't bite; just keep a pocket knife handy. They're cheap!