5 Reasons Why Tooth Picking Is Bad for Oral Health

It’s not uncommon to visit a restaurant or on the way out, notice a container that offers toothpicks. While they might seem a good way to remove food debris from our teeth, they’re actually doing a lot more harm than good. Some people often chew on toothpicks as a bit of a bad habit that was picked up by the continuous usage from when they dined out. There are five great reasons why you should immediately stop using toothpicks and what it could be doing to you and your oral health.

5 Reasons To Stop Using Tooth Picks

1. Oral infections: There is absolutely nothing sterile about the usage of toothpicks and they can easily lead to oral infections. While we know that some are stored in little plastic sleeves, even these aren’t much better. Toothpicks often sit for prolonged periods of times in closets or shelves in which they’re capable of building up dirt and debris on them. That transfers to your hands when you take them out and inevitably the toothpicks as well. As obvious as it should be, but often is not, this can lead to a person easily getting the germs and more into their mouth and causing an infection. In many cases, those who use a toothpick are at a bigger risk of developing different types of mouth cancer.
2. Goodbye Enamel: Enamel is such an important part of the protection that goes into guarding our teeth. While it’s pretty hard, enamel is also pretty thin which means that enough work against it, can break it and leave your teeth exposed. When using a toothpick, you’re constantly grinding away at that enamel which can lead your teeth susceptible to a lot of damage and issues.
3. Teeth Spacing: While this is an unfortunate and often unknown one, using a toothpick can cause your teeth to space unnaturally. You're forcing a small piece of wood between your teeth which also means your forcing them apart unnaturally. In doing so, you’ll be creating an unnatural spacing which might not be capable of being fixed or may require the usage of braces later on in life.
4. Damaged gums: At some point and time we’ve probably all used a toothpick while not paying attention and injured our gums or gum line. Obviously, beyond the physical pain, there are a lot of issues that can be caused in such an instance. The biggest one includes the allowance of bacteria into the gums which can lead to many other oral health issues as a result.
5. Left behind debris: While we expect a toothpick to remove debris we’ve got stuck in our teeth, things don’t always work out that way. There have been instances in which a soggy toothpick that was used repeatedly to try and remove debris actually wound up breaking off in the person’s teeth leaving them something else to remove. Beyond being unsanitary, they’re just not reliable or safe.