These habits can cause a surprising amount of damage to your teeth, experts say.
A few years ago, I booked an emergency visit with my dentist for a cracked molar.
When he asked me how it happened, I told him I had been eating popcorn and crunched on some of the unpopped kernels, which I find weirdly satisfying.
He sighed. I was not the first popcorn-loving patient he had seen with a broken tooth, he said. Please, he added wearily, don’t do that anymore.
Like me, there are probably a few things you’re doing — some that you might even think are harmless — that can land you in a dentist’s chair. So I asked experts to share some of the habits that were keeping them in business. Here are four more.
Chewing ice
Several dentists told me that ice, like popcorn, is a frequent tooth-breaker.
Chewing ice “is notorious” for causing small chips in tooth enamel, the outer layer of your teeth, said Dr. Diana Nguyen, chief of clinical general dentistry at the University of California, San Francisco.
Those chips can develop into larger cracks, she added, that might eventually require treatments like root canals and crowns to fix — or even surgical removal of the tooth.
Dentists would prefer you didn’t chew pens, either, which can “cause repeated trauma to your teeth,” added Dr. Natasha Flake, president of the American Association of Endodontists. “I even treated a patient recently who fractured their front tooth while trying to take a cap off of a marker.”