We all know that night time snacking isn’t good for us, and often when we’ll have been highly strict with our dieting only to ruin it all by creeping downstairs after hours to raid the fridge. This is in fact partly what makes it all the more tempting as all the foods in the kitchen become ‘forbidden fruits’ (though it is unlikely that fruit is what you are going for) and the thrill of being caught makes it into an adrenaline rush as well as a sugar one. There is another reason not to have those midnight snacks as well though – and that’s that it can increase the likelihood of your losing teeth, and in countless studies it has been demonstrated that there is a strong correlation between midnight snacking and the loss of teeth.
One obvious reason for this is that we usually clean our teeth at night and as such midnight snacks often involve eating after we’ve brushed our teeth and thus we are going to sleep with the sugar and acids still on our teeth to cause damage. You might be thinking then that midnight snacking is fine as long as you brush your teeth after then, right? Wrong! (Sorry…)
The other reason then that snacking at midnight can cause your teeth to fall out is that after dark our body and specifically our mouths produce less saliva. As our saliva is responsible for literally washing the sugar and bacteria out of our mouths, this means that those things will remain on our teeth more. Apart from anything else if you think of it from a purely statistical point of view, snacking at night will mean more time that your teeth have to endure eating and having the sugars and bacteria on them. In other words the best way to look after your teeth would be to brush your teeth as soon as you finished your dinner, and to then not eat again until the morning. Remember: ‘After 8 Mints’ is just a name…