Hesperian Health Guides

Eat Only Good Healthy Foods

In this chapter:

The best food is food that you grow or raise yourself. Mix different kinds of food together and eat several times a day. This helps your body as well as your teeth and gums to stay strong and healthy. Traditional food is usually good food.

Sweet food, especially the kind you buy from the store, can mix with germs and make cavities — holes in the teeth. Soft food sticks to the teeth easily and it, too, can make a coating of germs and food on the teeth that starts an infection in the gums — gum disease.

Soft and sweet food
and drinks with a lot
of sugar are bad for
both teeth and gums.
Traditional foods like fruit and maize are sweet and good, but cola and sugary foods are sweet and bad.



Breast feed to help a child's teeth grow and stay strong. An older child can drink from a cup. Do not give a baby anything to drink from a bottle. Sweet tea, sugar water or fruit juice can easily make holes in the child's teeth.
DENT Ch1 Page 3-2.png
REMEMBER:
BREAST
IS
BEST!
DENT Ch1 Page 3-3.png
YES NO
GOOD FOR TEETH BAD FOR TEETH


Even milk has sugar that can wash over the baby's teeth and cause cavities when it comes from a bottle.

This page was updated:17 May 2024