When you begin eating with your new dentures it is important to start very slowly. Eating at first may present difficulties; in fact it is the most difficult part of mastering new dentures.
Don’t be discouraged if you experience a few failures at first, natural teeth are fixed in bone whilst your artificial dentures only rest on the bone. When you chew on one side of your mouth you may find notice a tendency for your dentures to tip and loosen on the opposite side. Attempt to chew food evenly on both sides of your teeth. This will prevent your dentures form tipping while you are eating.
Be Patient
Provided that you are patient and spend the necessary time practicing eating with your new dentures you will learn to control the automatically using the muscles of mastication in your mouth. With some new dentures it may be necessary to increase the height of the upper and lower teeth so as to have them contact sooner. This may have to be done through the use of an appliance known as an occlusal splint or bite splint. With a change such as this you may have to develop new eating habits simply because you will chew your food at a different position than that of your old dentures.
Tips for Helping You Eat with New Dentures
Here are a few eating tips when wearing new dentures;
Eat food that does not need hard chewing
Take smaller mouthfuls and chew slowly and evenly
At first don’t bite off food with your front teeth – you will learn how to do this later
Cut food into smaller pieces that can easily fit in your mouth.
As you become more skilled at eating while wearing your new dentures you will be able to try harder and tougher foods and eventually you will be able to use your front teeth for biting. Remember with your natural teeth you bite and pulled but with your dentures you bite and push. Sometimes you may have difficulty eating very thin foods such as lettuce or the skins of apples and tomatoes. It’s often easier to eat apples if you first peel them or slice them into quarters.
