Which Foods to Avoid

Our goal is to provide you with a beautiful smile. This can only be accomplished if the braces stay attached to your teeth. We do not want to interfere with your nutritional intake, but we do ask that you watch the types of foods you eat. Some types of foods are capable of breaking your bands or brackets, bending your wires, and breaking the cement under your bands or brackets. All these things prolong treatment time.

A careful patient can eat a nutritionally balanced diet and do no harm to his/her braces. We hope that you will strive to be this type of patient. The foods listed below are the ones that we have found to be the most common causes of loose bands, brackets, and broken appliances:

HARD FOODS
Ice (no crunching please), peppermint sticks, hard pizza edges, carrots and apples, crisp french fries, corn on the cob, hard corn chips, ribs, all nuts, bagels, popcorn, celery, hard candy.

STICKY & CHEWY FOODS
Caramels, sugary gum, Snickers bars, taffy, Starburst, Skittles, gummy bears, licorice, beef jerky, Milky Way bars.

SWEET FOODS
Cake, ice cream, pie, cookies, candy, sweet drinks (although they may not cause damage to your appliances, care should be taken to brush your teeth immediately after eating very sweet foods. If your cannot brush, at least rinse your mouth out with water).