Anyone has had any thoughts about how a mostly liquid diet affects dental health, or actually experienced reduced dental health from Huel or other liquid diets? I know chewing helps prevent tartar, and also sweet or acid liquids are negative for your dental health. I feel it’s even more important to brush my teeth then before, and have thought if I should maybe start to do it 3 times a day, or at least rinse my teeth a bit with water after having a shake, or maybe start chewing gums, but I’ve never liked gum.
PS. Weird I tried to search the forum for words like “dental” and found nothing, but when writing this post suddenly an old post with the topic “Huel and dental health” popped up as similar. Didn’t it show up in search because of it’s age?
when I search I always switch the filtering to latest posts rather than relevance - seems to work better - the latest one that popped up by searching for dental is this
Huel is not liquid diet as usually defined. Keep that in mind when searching for scientific literature regarding this topic.
My dental health remained the same (never had any cavities) or improved, as a result of food no longer being stuck in my teeth, close to zero sugar content of U/U Huel powder, and Huel providing appropriate protein/calcium and other nutrients for good dental health.
As a slight aside, chewing is overrated - my dentist advises against chewing gums and other substances that would lead to repetitive chewing motion. According to him, it causes unnatural stress to the jaw muscles and joints, and humans are not cows. The contribution from salivary enzymes to the overall enzymatic activity is minuscule in comparison as well.
Good point regarding not having food stuck, that would indeed be on the postitive side of the scale. I meant more the grinding against the teeth caused by chewing, rather then the jaw motion itself. I know at least it works wonders on dogs
Oh and don’t overbrush. Ask your own dentist for specific health advice of course, but overbrushing can potentially damage your tooth enamel as I understand it.
Also worth bearing in mind the potential heart damage, again please ask a qualified dentist about that.
You’re probably right. My habits are really good compared to a lot of people, no nicotine, no sodas, pretty much no sweets, mostly drink water (and Huel) etc. It’s just that I’ve had some issues in the past and want to avoid something similar in the future.
What kind of issues?
If you’re worried about chewing you can also have some sugar free chewing gum.
Just don’t overdo it, if done excessively chewing may lead to temporomandibular joint dysfunction. Sounds harmless, but if it is severe chewing might not be possible any longer.
But even then your teeth would survive that.
I am now entering month 4 of Huel, and consequentially had my scheduled 6 month cleaning last Wednesday at my dentist. He noted nothing out of the ordinary and that my gums and teeth were fine. This is a far cry from 2018 when my diet was awful and I had to have a procedure called scaling and root planning performed. Dentists often call this “deep cleaning” since this sounds less menacing but I can assure you it sucks. I was on a liquid diet for several days after this was performed back then, but it was not by choice.
