A Packed Lunch to Smile About

from Families Edinburgh Magazine September/October 2019

A Packed Lunch to Smile About

by Dr Leanne Branton, Southside Dental Care

Being a dentist doesn’t mean that creating yummy but healthy packed lunches daily isn’t any less challenging!

Clearly one of my key concerns is ensuring that what my son is eating throughout the day is tooth friendly, but when sugars are hidden in so many foods this can be a mine field for any parent to negotiate.

In simple terms - when the bacteria in our child’s mouth are fed with sugar, they produce an acid and this can damage the tooth’s protective layer, which we call enamel, if this happens frequently then cavities can form.

Current guidelines advise that we should try and limit our children’s daily sugar intake to 25 grams (6 tablespoons or the equivalent to no more than two cans of coke) But shockingly a fairly average packed lunch box can have as much as 60 grams of sugar or the equivalent of 6 cans of coke!

But reducing the sugar content of a packed lunch doesn’t need to be complicated or costly.

Here are my top tips to reduce the sugar content in your child’s lunch:

Read the labels

Read the ingredients of any packaged foods in your child’s lunch box. Anything that ends with the letters OSE is a sugar and could potentially damage teeth.

A product is low in sugar if it contains less than 5g of sugar per 100g.

Juice

Some drinks marketed at children can be incredibly high in sugar and cause massive damage especially if sipped throughout the day. Stick to water flavoured with natural fruits if desired or sugar free cordial only.

Fruit

Fruit in its original form contains natural sugars but these are different to those found in donuts and biscuits and so fruit is a great healthy snack option. Avoid fruit smoothies as they are extremely high in sugar

Dried fruit

The natural sugars in dried fruit are more concentrated and dried fruits are more likely to stick to teeth so make sure to encourage these be eaten as part of lunch rather than for break time.

Yoghurts

Many children yoghurts are high in sugar so look for sugar free options. Even better is to flavour natural or Greek yoghurt with fresh fruit.

Frequency

Small amounts of sugar taken regularly throughout the day is far more damaging than one big treat as it gives our teeth no time to recover from the “acid attack”.

Be careful with snacks, keeping them sugar free, but reassure your little munchkin that they can have a small treat eaten with lunch or dinner when it will do least damage to their teeth.

Swap the snacks

Swap sweet treats such as cakes, chocolate, cereal bars and biscuits for fruit loaf, popcorn (not toffee!), rice cakes, sugar free jelly, crumpet or scotch pancake.

Cheese

Cheese doesn’t clean your teeth but eating it after food can protect your teeth from the acid produced so feel free to add a cheese string or baby bell into the mix.

If you want more advice why not use the Childsmile resources. Childsmile is a national programme designed to improve the oral health of children in Scotland and involves health visitors, nurseries, schools and of course many dental practices. Their website www.child-smile.org.uk has lots of practical tips to help keep your child’s teeth healthy.

And finally make sure any potential problems are identified early with regular dental check-ups for your little ones with your dentist.

Southside Dental Care situated on Mayfield Road in Edinburgh is undergoing exciting building works to expand their current 3 surgery NHS practice into a 6 surgery state of the art dental practice.

With the expansion comes the launch of Southside Orthodontic Clinic an NHS & Private referral clinic under the care of Dr Josh Rowley.

Southside Dental Care has always been a family friendly practice encouraging Oral Health Education to start as young as possible and really focusing on preventative care from the earliest of ages.