What Can I Eat With Dentures?

Missing a tooth or more affects your appearance, oral health, and speaking and chewing abilities. Therefore, a dentist near you will advise you to replace severely damaged or lost teeth. Dentures are one of the options dentists use to improve your smile and dental function. Read on to learn what you can eat after getting dentures in Castro Valley, CA.

How Do Dentures Impact Your Diet?

Dentures are teeth replacements that improve a smile, facial appearance, and dental function. Although they enhance your chewing ability, there are certain challenges while using dentures. As a result, you must adjust how and what you eat while using dentures.

For example, using new dentures may feel uncomfortable and cause gum soreness. However, the discomfort eases when facial muscles, tongue, lips, and cheeks adjust after a few days. Also, you produce more saliva in the first days, causing the dentures to feel slippery. This affects your chewing ability. Fortunately, your salivary glands will normalize within a short time.

Another challenge occurs due to the spaces surrounding the dentures. Food particles and debris can get stuck in these places, causing discomfort in the gums. In addition, dentures affect your sense of taste temporarily. As a result, you may notice that certain foods taste different than usual. Fortunately, your local dentists can help you adjust and learn how to chew with dentures.

Food to Eat With Dentures

It takes a few weeks to adjust to new dentures and learn how to use them effectively. It would be best to start with a liquid diet and slowly transition to soft foods during this period. For example, take pudding, smoothies, scrambled eggs, and cooked vegetables. Also, eat mashed potatoes, pasta, soft fruits, yogurt, and soups.

Once your mouth adjusts and learns to keep the denture in place, you can start eating more solid foods. For example, you can eat cooked rice, pasta, soft bread, soup with cooked vegetables and soft meats. You can enjoy soft, skin-free fish, baked beans, and slow-cooked meats.

However, you should avoid some foods because they can damage or dislodge your dentures. They can also cause your gums to swell or get sores. These include:

1. Sticky foods such as peanut butter and gummy candies
2. Foods with small but hard pieces like popcorn kernels, sesame seeds on rolls, and shelled nuts
3. Hard foods like nuts and popcorn
4. Avoid eating whole apples, carrot sticks, and corn on the cob.
5. Tough meats like pork chops, steak, and ribs

Tips to Eat With Dentures

Dentures can improve your diet by helping you eat most foods easily. However, it would help if you first learned how to use the prosthetics. Below are tips from the dentists in Castro Valley to help you adjust to your dentures.

1. Once you use dentures, break them in with a liquid diet instead of solid foods. Take soups, broths, milk, smoothies, yogurt, and other nutrient-dense liquids. It gives your mouth time to adjust to dentures. After a while, you can transition to soft foods that are easy to chew.
2. Using only one side of your jaw to chew can loosen dentures, causing them to slip. This makes eating difficult. Also, gums on the side you favor while chewing can become sore after a while. So, you should chew slowly on both sides of the mouth simultaneously. Doing so evenly distributes the chewing pressure and reduces discomfort.
3. Do not bite or chew with your front teeth since you risk displacing your dentures. Instead, use the side teeth to bite.
4. Use denture adhesive to keep your device in place while eating.
5. Take liquids with your meals for easier chewing and swallowing. Doing so also prevents foods from sticking to your teeth or getting stuck beneath the dentures. However, do not hold liquids in your mouth because they may loosen the bottom dentures.
6. The insulating effects of dentures can hinder you from judging temperatures correctly. So, avoid taking hot foods and drinks or test them with your lips first to avoid burning the mouth.
7. Adjust your eating technique to enjoy more food. Slice or cut tough foods like apples and carrots into smaller, easy-to-chew pieces. When eating corn, remove it from the cob using a knife instead of your front teeth. Avoid the crust in your pizza or garlic bread.

Contact us at Oak Ridge Dental for different types of dentures.