Don’t Brush Your Teeth After Red Wine – Here’s Why!

Written by Dr. Reuben Sim
Published: 23-01-2022

One of the key things to remember is you shouldn’t brush your teeth immediately after having red wine or anything acidic for the matter. For example, carbonated drinks, soft drinks, lemon drinks, or anything acidic. Now, the reason is because when you have something acidic in your mouth for the next maybe 30 to 60 minutes, your mouth would be very acidic. And when it’s acidic and you brush your teeth, you can end up eroding your external surface of the teeth, which is called the enamel. Your enamel protects the teeth, but it becomes a lot softer when you’ve had something acidic.

So when you want to brush teeth after having something acidic like red wine, you should actually take glass of water, rinse the mouth, and wait for between 30 to 60 minutes before attempting to brush your teeth. That way you can actually minimise the erosion of teeth and minimise damaging the teeth in the longterm.

 

Now if you’re an avid wine drinker or if you regularly like acidic drinks, we would suggest for you to potentially cut on it slightly, because all the time your teeth will start to get smaller, then they might start to get a bit thinner and you may experience sensitivity as well. So it’s just one of those things where if you end up losing enamel, it’s actually irreversible. You can’t get them back and you can’t put fillings on them.

So remember — do not brush your teeth for the next 36 minutes after having red wine or anything acidic. Cause this will potentially help you save a lot of money when you do your dental treatment in the future. This is one of those things where I like to implore you to keep your teeth for life. And if you know someone who can benefit from this video, you know someone who always drinks red wine and drink soft drinks, share this with them because they might need that.