Budgeting For Better Oral Health

What ‘red boxes’ can you open to save you money and have a healthier mouth?

With yesterday’s budget currently being analysed by experts, it seemed like an opportune moment to discuss our own personal budget and its relation to your oral health. It is fairly well accepted that the pandemic has changed things greatly and some of us will find that we have to tighten our belts a little in the next few years. Sometimes this will mean cutting back on things like holiday expenditure, but it can also be a good time to take a look at what we spend on a regular basis and how spending less on some of these, can also be beneficial to our teeth and gums.

But even where money isn’t an issue you can still benefit from reading this blog; so please read on!

Some people may also want to consider using these savings towards cosmetic dentistry at Alexandra Dental Care to give their smile a significant boost! There a lots of options to investigate with the help of our experienced team.

Smoking

This is the big one and if you only do one thing on this list, stopping smoking should be it. As we have noted before, smoking is a key contributor to so many dental problems. These include oral cancer, gum disease and even dental implant failure. Stopping smoking is one of the best things that you can do to improve your mouth health. On top of that, it is a very expensive habit indeed. If we take someone who smokes 20 cigarettes a day, with cigarettes costing around £11 a packet as a rough average, this will cost you £4015 per year  for something that can cause significant harm.

Coffee

There is nothing inherently wrong with coffee per se, but the prevalence of high street coffee chains has led to an increase in some very high sugar drinks being drunk, rather than a straightforward coffee. Many of us will buy one of these either on the way to work or at lunch time, or possibly both.  The coffee with the highest amount of sugar of a popular brand has 18 teaspoons of sugar in it! This is an incredibly high amount and more than that in the best known soft fizzy drink. Given that we know how bad sugar is for our teeth, not only will you save money by skipping your regular caffeine fix but you will help to preserve your teeth too. At around £3.50 a cup, your once a day habit would cost you £1277.50 per year. Do yourself and your teeth a favour and wait until you get to work to make a cuppa with much less sugar and benefit your pocket too.

Chocolate and the mid afternoon ‘slump’

How many of us find that we start to tire in the middle of the afternoon and need a quick energy boost and something that tastes nice to get us through the next few hours? When this happens, the easiest and often most convenient way to boost our energy levels is to grab a bar of chocolate. No one is disputing that these taste nice and an occasional one is OK, but if you eat just one bar a day, that is coating your teeth with a lot of sugar, some of which will be stuck to your teeth and gum line for several hours before you brush your teeth. With a bar of chocolate costing perhaps in the region of £1, that is still £365 that you could save by opting not to eat it and doing your teeth a favour in the meantime.

There are other things that you could cut down on too which would be beneficial for your teeth and gums, such as alcohol. But even taking just the three things mentioned above, you would save yourself in the region of just over five and a half thousand pounds a year. That is a lot of money that could be directed towards other, perhaps more useful things.

Cosmetic dentistry

We mentioned earlier that you could use the money saved to treat yourself to a cosmetic dental treatment to give your smile a nice boost. The money saved from the above would really open up doors for you and could buy you a range of treatments that include teeth whitening, invisible braces and even dental implants. Naturally, the cost of treatments can depend on individual circumstances and we would need to examine your teeth before giving a final cost and treatment plan, but there is no doubt that this sort of money could really change your smile for the better.

With the new year not so far away now, it is worth giving serious consideration to the above. You could even start now if you wanted, rather than wait for 2022.

We hope that this blog provided some food for thought and if you would like to make an appointment at our Swadlincote dental practice, whether for cosmetic or general dental care, please call Alexandra Dental Care on 01283 216347.

Google+