Plaque and tartar are created by harmful bacteria. These discolor your teeth, but they can also irritate your gums and lead to gum disease. But plaque and tartar are hard to see on your teeth when they get below the gums, and even harder to clean at home.

That’s why you need to call our Winnipeg, MD dental office at 204-977-8515 for a gum disease treatment called scaling and root planing. This is when a dentist or hygienist carefully removes plaque and tartar down on the roots of the teeth, below the gumline. This can help prevent gum disease from getting worse.

Why do you sometimes have bad breath? It could be because of something you ate, but chronic bad breath (also called halitosis) is a sign of gum disease. If not treated, this dental condition can lead to swollen gums and even lost teeth.

Call our Winnipeg, MB dental office today at 204-977-8515, you can make an appointment for a thorough dental exam. If you do have gum disease, you can get nonsurgical gum disease treatments that can help keep your gums healthy.

Holidays are a time to get together with family and friends for big dinners. In particular, Easter is connected to candy and treats. That means your family’s teeth can be at risk around this holiday. All of that sugar can lead to cavities and gum disease.

Call our Winnipeg, MB dental office today at 204-977-8515 and schedule your next appointment. Easter can be rough on your family’s teeth, so regular dental exams are needed to make sure there aren’t any problems hiding.

How Food & Drink Affects Your Family’s Teeth

When it comes to protecting your teeth and gums, you already know how sugar is a problem. But why? It’s because harmful bacteria thrive on energy-rich sugar. As they grow and multiply, they produce an acid that damages your teeth and gums. This is how you get tooth decay and gum disease.

Although bacteria love sugar, they can eat almost anything you can. Carbohydrates are packed with energy, so bread, pasta, and potatoes can increase your risk of cavities and gum disease similar to sugar. But just about anything you eat leaves behind food particles that support those bacteria.

There’s one other thing your family need to be aware of: acid. Some foods like wine, pickles, and coffee are naturally acidic. Other foods like pop have acids added to them to balance how sweet they can be. Any of these acids can erode your enamel and leave you with weakened teeth.

That’s why brushing, flossing, and regular dental visits are so important. The more you keep your mouth clean, the more you can decrease your risk of dental health problems.

Tips For Helping Smiles Get Through This Holiday

Here are some specific ways you can help your family limit the damage all those Easter foods and drinks can cause.

Rinse with plain water after meals and snacks.

Because cavities and gum disease are made worse by those food particles on your teeth and gums, it makes sense that washing them away will help. After your meals and snacks, rinse your mouth with water. This can also get rid of acids coating your teeth so they won’t do much damage.

Limit how much pop people drink.

Regular pop is full of sugar. Drinking this coats your teeth and gums with sugar, increasing your risk of dental health problems. But all pop — even diet — is also highly acidic. You might be doing better by drinking diet pop, but that acid is still damaging your teeth. Enjoy the holiday but limit how much pop you and your family drinks. Water is always the better choice.

Put any Easter baskets away.

It’s an Easter tradition to lay out baskets filled with all kinds of candy. That’s fine! You don’t want to take away all sweets because this is a holiday after all. Besides, your kids might rebel. But there’s no reason to leave these baskets out all day long. After everyone has tried some candy, put the candy in the freezer and the baskets away.

Skip colorful and sticky chocolate.

All candy can hurt your teeth, but some do more damage than others. Candy that’s bright orange, blue, or some other color can stain your teeth. You won’t get orange teeth! Instead, those teeth will start to lose their whiteness. Sticky candy is a problem because sugar gets stick all over your mouth. This just makes cavities and gum disease more likely.

Replace some of that candy with toys and games.

Speaking of candy, there’s no reason why every gift for this holiday has to be some form of sugar. Some candy is fine, but replace some of those sweets with more healthy alternatives. In fact, small toys and games make a great replacement because they’re fun but will not hurt your teeth.

Call Lakewood Dental Centre today at 204-977-8515 or use our online form to schedule your next appointment. A dental cleaning helps get rid of plaque and tartar that those bacteria create, while a dental exam will help find problems while they are still small and easier to treat.

You need to brush and floss regularly to protect your teeth. Harmful bacteria can spread and cause tooth decay. But did you know these same bacteria can hurt your gums as well?

If you have gum soreness or see some blood after brushing, you might have gum disease. This needs to be taken care of soon, as untreated gum disease can lead to drastic problems like losing your teeth.

Call our Winnipeg, MB dental office today at 204-977-8515 to schedule an appointment for gum disease treatment.

What Is Gum Disease?

Gum disease is a condition caused by harmful bacteria that live in your mouth. Don’t worry, everybody has them in their mouths.

These bacteria feed off tiny particles of food and drink that get trapped on your teeth and gums. They can eat anything you can, but they thrive on sugar. (That’s why candy and dessert is bad for your teeth.) As they grow, the produce an acid. When this happens on your teeth, you get cavities.

But when this happens on your gums, you get gum disease. It’s when harmful bacteria damage and eventually infect your gum tissue.

Gum disease can be broken into two stages: early and advanced.

That’s why it’s important to get gum disease treatment as soon as you start seeing the signs.

Gum Disease Signs

Here are some of the signs that you might have gingivitis or periodontitis:

If you have one or more of these signs, call us today at 204-977-8515 to schedule your next appointment for gum disease treatment.

Why Gum Disease Can Be A Major Problem

Gum disease usually starts out small. You could see a little blood after brushing but not much, and you might have bad breath on occasion. But here are some of the problems you can face if your gum disease is ignored for too long.

Gum disease can lead to losing your teeth.

As the bacteria damage and infect your gums, your gums start to recede from your teeth. This takes away some support teeth need to stay put. But your jawbone also starts to deteriorate when you have gum disease. Combined together, and gum disease can lead to some of your teeth falling out.

The infection that comes with gum disease can spread.

When your gum disease advanced to periodontitis, you have a bacterial infection in your gum tissue. This infection can easily slip into your bloodstream and get carried to other parts of your body. As your immune system fights it, you get problems with inflammation. But some bacteria can escape and infect your body elsewhere.

Gum disease can give you chronic halitosis.

With gingivitis, your gums are under attack by those bacteria — and losing. As gum tissue cells die off, you start to get a bad odor from your gums. Halitosis (or bad breath) like this can be chronic. You can brush and pop mints all you like, but it’s not going away until the gum disease is treated.

Gum Disease Treatments At Our Winnipeg Dental Office

At Lakewood Dental Centre, you can get two gum disease treatments:

Scaling and root planing: This deep cleaning treatment removes plaque, tartar, and bacteria from your gumline and below it. This can reduce irritation of your gums and help alleviate your gum disease.

Perio Protect: To fight the bacteria more directly, you can use Perio Protect. This system delivers antibacterial medication right on and below your gums. By taking care of the bacteria, you can take care of gum disease.

Call Lakewood Dental Centre today at 204-977-8515 or use our online form to make your appointment for gum disease treatment before those problems get much worse.

As a parent, you take your job seriously. You are always looking for ways to help your kids stay healthy. That’s why you know to make sure your children brush their teeth so often.

That’s also why you probably limit how much sugar and candy your kids enjoy. But there are other ways your kids can hurt their teeth. There are also sources of sugar in their diet that you might not be aware of.

Call our Winnipeg, MB dental office today at 204-977-8515 and schedule a new appointment. Our dentists can see children as young as one year old. Regular dental visits can help protect teeth.

How You Can Help Keep Your Family’s Teeth Healthy

But what can you do to help at home? Here are a few tips to help keep your children’s smiles healthy. Of course, these are just tips and do not replace regular brushing, flossing, and dental checkups.

Common Drinks That Could Hurt Teeth

By know, you likely know how bad a can of regular, sugary pop can be for teeth. That’s because of all that sugar. The harmful bacteria behind cavities and gum disease thrive on sugar, increasing the chances of you having those dental problems.

Pop is not the only drink you need to worry about, though. Here are four other drinks that could hurt your kids’ teeth.

FRUIT JUICES

It’s true that fruit juice normally has many vitamins in it, so it can be healthy for your body as a whole. However, fruit juice as two qualities that can cause damage to your family’s teeth.

First, they have a lot of sugar in them. Even all-natural, unsweetened fruit juice will have sugar in it. When you drink juice, you’re coating your teeth and gums in that liquid sugar. This will feed the harmful bacteria.

Second, they also have high acidity. This acid is not the same as what harmful bacteria produce, but it will still slowly erode the enamel on your kids’ teeth.

TEA AND COFFEE DRINKS

How these affect your teeth depends on how you take it. Plain tea and coffee (meaning without sugar or cream) are normally dark enough to leave tiny stains behind on your teeth. Keep drinking either long enough, and your white teeth will start to look dull and darker.

Tea and coffee are also highly acidic. As with fruit juices, this can erode and weaken your kids’ enamel.

But it’s the sugar that normally goes into tea and coffee drinks that makes it tough. A can of soda often has 39 grams of sugar. That large double double normally has 34 grams of sugar. As you can see, the two drinks are almost as bad for your family’s teeth due to the sugar content.

ENERGY DRINKS

You might not let your younger kids enjoy energy drinks, but teens might like these. However, be careful and read the label of these energy drinks. Some have close to or even around the same amount of sugar as a can of regular pop.

SPORTS DRINKS

While some can have sugar, most sports drinks do not. Then what’s the problem? Most sports drinks are full of carbohydrates. They’re designed to revitalize you and let you stay active. Unfortunately, carbohydrates are very similar to sugar as far as harmful bacteria are concerned. They can thrive on both, increasing your risk of gum disease and tooth decay.

DIET POP

Many people think diet pop is great for your dental health because it usually has no sugar in it. That part is true. If sugar feeds the harmful bacteria behind tooth decay and gum disease, limiting the sugar in your diet will help. However, most pop is full of acid. Again, that acid can erode your enamel over time.

Call Lakewood Dental Centre today at 204-977-8515 or use our online form to make a new appointment for your whole family (or at least anyone older than one year old).

According to the Canadian Dental Association, 7 out of every 10 Canadians will develop gum disease during their lives. Nevertheless, you can take action to reduce your risk of gum disease.

Today, we will discuss some of the things you can do to help prevent gum disease as well as some things that can be done to treat it.One option for treatment isnon-surgical gum therapyat Lakewood Dental Centre in Winnipeg.

If you have more questions or you want to make an appointment, you can contact us online or by calling 204-977-8515.

Preventing Gum Disease

The best approach to most illnesses is prevention. Gum disease, or periodontal disease, is no different. More than likely, you already know the things that you should be doing to prevent this kind of infection, but it never hurts to review the basics.

Every day, you should do two things as part of your daily oral hygiene routine — brushing your teeth and flossing between your teeth and gums.

You should brush your teeth twice daily. When you do it’s important to scrub every tooth on all sides, and you should pay particular attention to the areas where your teeth and gums meet. You also can use the tip of your brush to clean behind your upper and lower front teeth.

You should floss at least once per day. Flossing helps to remove plaque and food particles from between your teeth and gums.

When you are flossing, you will want a piece of floss that is about 18 inches long. To start, you can wrap the ends of the floss around your middle fingers. As you floss, you should wrap the dental floss around each tooth in a C-shape. Wipe the floss from the base of the tooth to the tip a couple times.

You will want to use a clean piece of floss on each tooth. You can do this by wrapping and unwrapping the floss as you move between teeth.

Plaque is a sticky film that can form daily. If it isn’t removed, it can harden to become calculus, a.k.a. tartar. Bacterial infection is more likely at the point where attaches to your gums. This can lead to gingivitis, which is an early form of gum disease.

As part of your preventive care, you also should visit your dentist a couple times each year for professional dental cleanings and exams. This will allow a dental professional to remove plaque and tartar that you may have missed. It also will give him or her a chance to check for signs of gum disease. Early detection can help your treatment be more effective.

If you have questions about gum disease, our staff at Lakewood Dental Centre will be happy to give you answers. Call us at 204-977-8515.

Non-Surgical Gum Therapy

Gum disease can affect anyone at any age, which is why we encourage everyone in your family to practice good oral hygiene.

Nevertheless, we want you to be aware of what to watch for in case you should develop gingivitis. The symptoms of this form of gum disease include gums that look red or puffy. You also may notice bleeding when you brush or floss.

If the infection spreads, you may have pockets form in your gum tissue. Without treatment, the infection could lead to tooth loss as more of your gum tissue is damaged.

Your dentist wants you to keep as many of your teeth as you can for as long as possible. This is part of the reason we encourage you to visit the dentist a couple times a year for cleanings and examinations.

If you should have gum disease, your dentist may recommend non-surgical gum therapy. This may include curettage and root planing. Curettage is the removal of infected gum tissue. Root planing involves removing tartar and smoothing the surface of the roots of your teeth.

Many times, this is enough to remove the infection from your mouth. After these procedures, a dental professional will instruct you on what you should do to take care of your gums.

In more serious cases, however, non-surgical gum therapy may not be enough. If needed, you may be referred to a periodontist. That is a dentist who has special training in the treatment of gum disease.

While we hope you never have gum disease, we also want you to know that the dentists at our Winnipeg office will do everything we can do treat it.

Keep Your Gums Healthy

Remember that preventive care is the best approach to dealing with periodontal disease. Brush and floss every day, and visit the dentist for regular cleanings and examinations.

To make an appointment at Lakewood Dental Centre, call 204-977-8515 or fill out our online form.

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