4 Habits That Negatively Affect Your Oral Health

Are you destroying your teeth and damaging your overall oral health with even knowing?

It may be possible!

Does your toddler have a habit of thumb sucking?

Or you bite your nails?

If yes, then know that these habits are extremely bad for oral health. Certain habits affect our oral health too negatively and lead to teeth loss and other oral diseases.

Bad oral hygiene makes the situation even worse.

This is why, 25 % of US citizens, who are older than 65 years, do not have any tooth left in their mouth, according to research.

Startling, isn’t it?

How to Maintain Oral Health?

In addition to adopting practices for maintaining good oral hygiene, such as regular brushing, flossing and paying visits to your family dentist at least twice a year (if you do not have any apparent oral issue), it is important to give up on certain habits.

Habits That Negatively Affect Oral Health

Following are some of the don’ts for maintaining oral health. These include both the practices/ habits that cause immediate damage and those that slowly and gradually cause irreparable damage to your teeth.

So, put these habits and/or practices to rest, if you don’t want to harm your oral health.

1. Thumb Sucking
Thumb sucking is highly common among infants and many of them automatically give up on it as they grow, usually between 2 to 4 years. However, do not wait for that time; discourage this habit from the onset. This is important because thumb sucking is highly damaging for oral health, in the long run.

It not only cause the misalignment of teeth, but could also lead to speech problems. Additionally, it causes damage to the mouth’s roof and may also affect the structure of teeth and jaw.

2. Tooth Grinding and Jaw Clenching
Do you clench your jaw and grind your teeth in anger? Or you are a bruxist?
If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then your teeth are at high risk for damage!
Tooth grinding and jaw clenching puts extreme amount of pressure on our teeth and could even cause fractures (micro or actual).
Sounds scary, right?

3. Smoking
So much has already been said about the negative effects of smoking on our overall health that it has become a common knowledge. However, some people still do not know that smoking not only damages your internal organs, but your mouth as well.

In general, consumption of any form of tobacco puts you at the high risk of following oral health issues:

4. Using Teeth as a Tool
Let’s accept it, almost all of us have used our teeth as replacement for certain tools, many a times. For example, for cutting thread, tape and nails, to open packaging, and some even go as far as to using their teeth to open bottle caps.

Put simply, this is not what our teeth are meant for.

If you do any of these things, be assured that you are soon going to have cracked teeth.