You’re probably thrilled with your new denture, especially if you’ve been missing teeth for a while—which has prevented you from enjoying a varied and balanced diet. Adjusting to eating with a denture does take some patience as you adapt to the new sensations of eating without natural teeth, but as you become more confident and comfortable eating foods you may want to vary your diet to ensure that you are maximizing nutrient intake and exposing yourself to different flavors and textures to keep mealtimes interesting.
Why a Varied Diet is Important
It’s easy for people who wear dentures to limit their exposure to essential nutrients due to not eating a full range of foods. This may be due to habit stemming from not having healthy natural teeth or from a time of not having any teeth at all. Resorting to meal after meal of scrambled egg and rice pudding not only becomes incredibly boring, but this limiting diet can quickly sap the body of nutrient stores, leaving it depleted and weary. Having a new denture is a great opportunity to revisit food that you may have avoided for years, and begin to replenish essential stores of vitamins and minerals.
Eating For Your Health and Your Denture
An aspect of eating that can be annoying to denture wearers is the decrease in taste due to the denture covering the upper palate, a part of the mouth that is plentiful with taste buds. But with some modifications to recipes flavor can be regained so that you look forward to fulfilling meals. So what are the best and worst foods for your health and your denture? Interestingly, pretty much the same as natural teeth, so avoiding or limiting foods like sticky candy and popcorn as well as drinks like tea and coffee will definitely keep your denture looking good and prevent you from getting frustrated due to a popcorn kernel getting caught under your denture or a piece of candy becoming stuck to your appliance.
Cutting up meat into smaller pieces will enable you to chew more efficiently, and cutting crunchy fruit and vegetables is also recommended to avoid developing sore spots and to be able to still enjoy a full range of food. Foods that are particularly hard, crunchy, or sticky can present challenges—but don’t become discouraged as these types of food aren’t always the best for dentures or natural teeth, so staying away from Tootsie Rolls and hard candy may be in your best interest.
