Regular coffee drinking, enjoyment of soft drinks or starchy foods , well-earned age or even history of an eating disorder may have left you with weakened enamel or stained teeth . Your first impulse may be to brush your teeth more: That’s a good thing. But your regular toothpaste may be doing more harm than good to your enamel if it’s too abrasive.
For guidance on enamel-safe toothpastes, doctors utilize an list — a kind of cheat sheet developed by the American Dental Association — that ranks toothpastes according to their abrasivity on dentin. It’s called the Toothpaste Abrasiveness Ranked By Relative Dentin Abrasivity (RDA) list. Dentin is the soft layer of tooth structure underneath your enamel, explained New York-based dentist Dr.
Azadeh Akhavan . “If [dentin] is exposed to very abrasive toothpastes day after day, it will wear down ..
. and may introduce surface roughness to enamel,” she tells HuffPost, which can result in plaque buildup, staining and sensitivity. “I would recommend toothpaste in the low abrasivity category for people with weak enamel,” Akhavan wrote.
“High abrasivity toothpastes would potentially damage and wear the person’s enamel until the second layer of tooth structure [dentin] is exposed, leading to sensitivity and cavities.” A post shared by Suhail Mohiuddin (@dr.m_____) The RDA chart orders pastes from 0 to 200, with 0 being least and 200 being most abrasive; generally, 0-70 is considered low abrasivity, Akhavan noted.
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