Adding a Smile Helps with Your Diabetes Management

If you have diabetes, you’re probably wondering about the changes you can make to help you stay healthy. The good news is that just a few small steps can make a big difference—you can start by simply adding your smile to your diabetes care routine.

While oral care should be an important part of everybody’s lives, paying more attention to your gums and mouth will play a greater role if you have diabetes. This is because diabetes puts you at a risk for developing oral infections, which can in turn complicate diabetes management. The silver lining is that these are easily preventable.

Let’s try to understand how, by looking a bit more closely at the link between diabetes and oral care and what you can do to maintain that bright smile of yours.

Diabetes impacts sugar levels in your body, but we’re here to help you understand how this can make a difference to your oral health.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, diabetes can affect oral health in the following ways:

• Teeth and gum troubles can be more common, because high sugar levels often slow down the gum-healing process.

• Your saliva can have high sugar levels, which makes an ideal habitat for some infection-causing microbes.

• The amount of saliva in the mouth can decrease, causing a dry mouth, which poses a risk for infections, sores, and tooth decay.

You needn’t ever have these troubles, with just a few healthy habits:

• Eat right: Consume high-fibre, low-carb foods, such as those found in plant-based diets, as several studies and other sources point out. By moderating your diet, you can regulate your carb intake and reduce the amount of sugar in the blood overall. If your sugar levels stay down, oral care becomes easier too.

• Brush twice a day: Maintaining a healthy habit of brushing twice a day and flossing with quality products like Colgate Diabetics, a specialized Ayurvedic toothpaste, is a great step towards keeping harmful mouth bacteria at bay. 

• Get regular oral check-ups: Make regular visits to doctors who can assist you in your quest for good oral health, including your dentist and diabetologist. Don’t forget to let both doctors know your full medical history (dental and diabetic).

In a gist, with diabetes, adopting healthy habits and minor lifestyle tweaks can go a long way. Make sure that these changes include taking care of your smile too, because after all, the smallest actions can make the biggest difference!