There are certain things you can count on every summer in Mill Valley. The mornings get brighter, a hike on Mount Tam becomes even harder to resist, and somewhere nearby someone is putting an astonishing amount of produce, ice and sherbet into a blender. And like clockword, someone asks me, “So, Are Smoothies Good for You?”
I am Dr. Frances H. Yankie, a dentist in Mill Valley, CA, and while I’ll leave the broader nutritional debate to those who specialize in it, I can tell you what that smoothie is doing to your teeth. Also, let me be clear that I’m hardly going to argue against eating blueberries, strawberries, spinach, yogurt, bananas or any of the other things that tend to disappear into a summer smoothie. Most of us could probably stand to eat more fruits and vegetables, not fewer.
But dentistry occasionally has an annoying way of complicating an otherwise perfectly good idea.
That beautiful dark-purple smoothie made with blueberries, blackberries and strawberries may be full of things your body appreciates, while simultaneously giving your teeth a fairly concentrated encounter with natural sugar, fruit acids and some remarkably persistent pigments. Add pineapple, citrus juice or a squeeze of lemon because someone online promised it would make the smoothie “detoxifying,” and your enamel may be considerably less impressed with breakfast than the rest of you.
This doesn’t mean I’m about to become the Mill Valley dentist who tells everyone to stop drinking smoothies. I live here too. I know better. What I would like to do is ruin just one tiny part of the healthy-smoothie fantasy, because once you understand what is actually happening in your mouth, you can keep the smoothie and be a little smarter about how you drink it.
And yes, we should probably talk about why that blueberry smoothie seems determined to leave a forwarding address on your teeth.
Are Fruit Smoothies Healthy for Your Teeth—or Loaded With More Sugar Than You Think?
One of the interesting things about smoothies is that we tend to judge them by their ingredients rather than by the finished drink. Blueberries are healthy. Bananas are healthy. Yogurt can certainly be part of a healthy diet. Therefore, when all three disappear into a blender, it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that nothing troublesome could possibly emerge from the other side.
From a nutritional standpoint, there may be plenty to like. From a dental standpoint, however, I have to look at something else: how much sugar is reaching the teeth, how often it reaches them, and how long that exposure continues.
Fruit naturally contains sugar. Then we start improvising. The banana wasn’t quite sweet enough, so perhaps a little honey goes in. The smoothie is too thick, so we add apple or orange juice. Maybe the yogurt is sweetened. Perhaps there is sherbet in there too, which certainly tastes wonderful but has never made any serious attempt to disguise what it is.
Suddenly our wholesome little breakfast has become quite a complicated drink.
The bacteria in dental plaque can metabolize sugars and produce acids, and those acids contribute to the demineralization process involved in tooth decay. Fortunately, your mouth isn’t helpless. Saliva is constantly working to neutralize acids and help maintain a healthier environment around your teeth. What makes the situation more difficult is repeatedly starting that process over again.
This is why the smoothie you drink with breakfast concerns me less than the same smoothie sitting in a large insulated tumbler beside your computer until 11:30. A sip here, another one fifteen minutes later, another while answering an email… your teeth keep getting another exposure instead of being allowed to return to their normal environment.
That’s an important distinction, because when patients ask me whether smoothies are bad for their teeth, my answer isn’t simply yes or no. What is in the smoothie matters, but the way you drink it matters too.
Fruit Smoothies, Acidity and Tooth Enamel: The Part We Rarely Think About
Sugar tends to get most of the attention in conversations about teeth, but with fruit smoothies there is another issue that deserves just as much respect: acidity.
Many popular smoothie ingredients are naturally acidic. Citrus fruits and their juices are obvious examples, but pineapple and many berries can contribute acidity as well. None of that makes them unhealthy foods, but enamel doesn’t make nutritional judgments. It responds to the chemical environment around it.
Repeated exposure to acidic foods and beverages can contribute to dental erosion, which is the gradual loss of mineral from the tooth surface. This is different from a cavity caused by bacterial activity, although a person can certainly have concerns about both.
Again, frequency is important. Having an acidic drink occasionally is very different from exposing your teeth to one repeatedly throughout the day. Our mouths are designed to recover between meals and drinks, with saliva playing an enormous role in that recovery. Constant sipping interferes with that quiet period.
There is another habit worth mentioning because it comes from the very best intentions. Some people finish an acidic drink and immediately brush their teeth because they want to clean everything away. I’d rather you rinse with plain water, allow your mouth some time to recover from the acidic exposure, and brush later instead of immediately scrubbing an enamel surface that has just been sitting in an acidic environment.
It’s not a dramatic lifestyle change. In fact, most useful dental habits aren’t. Drink the smoothie, enjoy it, have some water afterward and get on with your morning.
Do Berry Smoothies Stain Your Teeth? Yes, Color Matters Too
Then we come to the part of the smoothie problem that doesn’t require a discussion about bacteria, pH or enamel chemistry because you can often see it for yourself.
Color is color, and color can stain. Some do it superficially, and some love to get in deep into the enamel.
Blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, cherries, pomegranate and beets contain strong natural pigments. Add several of them to a smoothie and the result can be gorgeous—a deep red, purple or burgundy that practically announces how many antioxidants you’ve managed to fit into one glass.
Unfortunately, those pigments don’t necessarily know when the nutritional portion of their job is finished.
If you’ve ever looked at your tongue after drinking a dark berry smoothie, you already understand what I mean. The effect on teeth is usually far less theatrical, but deeply pigmented foods and beverages can contribute to external staining over time, particularly when they’re consumed frequently.
And summer has a wonderful way of stacking those habits together. Maybe you start the morning with a berry smoothie, have an iced coffee later, drink tea in the afternoon and enjoy a glass of red wine with dinner. None of those things is particularly shocking on its own, but by late summer you may look at a photograph and wonder when your teeth became a shade darker than you remember.
That’s one reason I don’t like talking about tooth color as though someone has done something wrong. Teeth pick up evidence of our lives. Coffee drinkers know it. Tea drinkers know it. Wine lovers certainly know it, and people who spend the summer drinking blueberry smoothies eventually join the club.
How to Drink Smoothies Without Making Them Bad for Your Teeth
The good news is that enjoying your summer smoothie doesn’t require turning breakfast into a lesson in dental chemistry. A little awareness of what you’re drinking, along with a few simple habits, can make a meaningful difference for your teeth.
One of the easiest changes is simply to enjoy your smoothie and finish it, rather than letting it become the drink that follows you around for half the day. Having it with breakfast or as part of a meal gives your mouth a chance to recover afterward, and following it with some plain water helps rinse away some of what remains. There is no need for a special rinse, an elaborate routine or a toothbrush waiting beside the blender.
If your smoothie contains a lot of citrus or fruit juice, give your mouth a little time before brushing rather than reaching for the toothbrush immediately. And if staining is your concern, a straw may reduce some of the direct contact with the visible front surfaces of your teeth, particularly with those beautiful dark berry smoothies, although it obviously doesn’t remove the sugar or acidity from the drink itself.
Most importantly, keep the larger picture in perspective. Good oral hygiene, regular professional cleanings and dental examinations matter far more than trying to engineer the perfect smoothie. Teeth generally tolerate normal life quite well; it’s the habits we repeat day after day, month after month, that tend to make the difference.
That’s one of the things I appreciate about preventive dentistry. It isn’t about asking people to eat perfectly or giving them another set of rules to worry about. Often it’s simply understanding how an everyday habit affects your teeth and making a small change that lets you keep enjoying the things you already enjoy. A summer smoothie certainly qualifies.
When Smoothies, Coffee and Summer Leave You Wanting Whiter Teeth
There is also the purely cosmetic side of this conversation, and I don’t think we need to apologize for it.
You can have healthy teeth and still wish they were whiter.
In fact, some of the people who are most attentive to their health are also very aware of changes in their smile. They exercise, eat thoughtfully, take care of their skin, pay attention to what they put into their bodies and, quite reasonably, notice when years of coffee, tea, wine, berries and normal life begin showing up on their teeth.
Summer tends to make us notice these things a little more. There are vacations, weddings, dinners outside, family photographs and that very honest California sunlight that seems capable of finding every detail we hadn’t noticed in the bathroom mirror.
If that sounds familiar, we’ve got your back… or teeth.
At my Mill Valley dental office, I offer The Smile Perfected™ brand of teeth whitening, a professional whitening option for patients who would simply like a brighter smile. I prefer approaching whitening as part of good dental care rather than treating it as something completely separate, because before we worry about making teeth whiter, I want to know that the teeth and gums themselves are healthy and that we’re actually dealing with staining rather than something that needs dental treatment.
After that, wanting your teeth to look brighter is a perfectly reasonable request.
I’ve never believed that cosmetic dentistry should be about giving everyone the same enormous, impossibly white smile. There is a point where “white” stops looking like a tooth color and begins looking like something selected from a paint fan deck. My preference is much simpler: a smile should look healthy, bright and natural enough that people notice you, not the dental work.
Are Smoothies Bad for Your Teeth? Not If You Understand What You’re Drinking
So, are smoothies good for you?
I’ll leave the broader nutritional answer to people who spend their days thinking about nutrition. As a dentist in Mill Valley, I’m comfortable answering the part that involves your smile.
A smoothie can contain genuinely nutritious ingredients while also containing enough natural sugar and acidity to deserve some consideration from your teeth. A berry smoothie can be packed with foods you feel good about eating while those same beautiful pigments gradually contribute to staining. Both things can be true at the same time.
That’s really where I land on most conversations about food and dentistry. I don’t want my patients afraid of what they eat, and I don’t want someone reading this tomorrow morning and regarding a blueberry as though it has betrayed the family.
Have the smoothie. Enjoy the fruit. Take advantage of everything summer in Mill Valley gives us, including those mornings when a hike on Mount Tam sounds much better than whatever was waiting on your calendar.
Just finish the smoothie rather than nursing it until lunch, follow it with some water and remember that even healthy habits can occasionally use a little dental perspective.
And if the berries, coffee, tea and everything else you’ve enjoyed along the way have left your smile looking a little less bright than you’d like, come see me.
The blueberries can keep their beautiful color. We’ll help get the stains off your teeth.
Call my office at (415) 383-0824 to make an appointment for a pain-free Smile Perfected™ teeth whitening session. Because there is no arguing with a beautiful smile!
With love and hope,
Dr. Frances H. Yankie, DDS
