Inside Cookery: Eat your way to a healthier smile

In Inside Time’s monthly recipe column, a prison nutritionist provides ideas for creating your own tasty and wholesome dishes

The food you eat is linked to your overall health, and this includes the health of your mouth, also known as your oral health. It’s not only the health of your teeth and gums that matters but also that of the whole mouth, or oral cavity. 

If you have painful or missing teeth, it can make eating certain foods more difficult, such as hard fruit and vegetables, nuts and sinewy meat. In general, it’s the less processed foods which present more difficulty, so people with dental problems tend to choose easier-to-eat processed foods like sugary cakes and biscuits. Sugary foods are a big contributory factor to tooth decay and gum disease, particularly if oral hygiene is poor – that is, if you don’t brush your teeth or visit a dentist. It’s a vicious cycle.

Maintaining a healthy mouth means more than just reducing sugar. In the same way that a varied, balanced diet is important for other aspects of physical and mental health, so it is important for maintaining a healthy mouth. A diet that is nutritionally poor can, over time, result in vitamin and mineral deficiencies. These in turn can cause additional oral health problems such as poor wound healing, mouth ulcers and sores, and inflammation of the tongue. 

Good hygiene routines are essential for a healthy mouth, and you can achieve these even in prison.

Good hygiene routines are essential for a healthy mouth, and you can achieve these even in prison. The canteen National Product List has a range of reasonably priced dental health products, and if you need items not listed there, you could discuss them with the prison dentist. It’s probably easier to see an NHS dentist in prison than when living in the community, so make use of them. Also, giving up drugs and alcohol in prison can help your teeth and gums – by improving your overall self-care as well as  drug abstinence resulting in a reduction of problems like jaw clenching and teeth grinding.

Helen Sandwell is the Inside & Out Project Lead at Food Matters, which produces the Her Wellbeing and His Wellbeing newsletters. Both are available digitally via Launchpads, Coracle devices and on Virtual Campus.

Breakfast Toast 

If it’s difficult to bite into a hard apple, slice it up thinly like in this recipe. Cinnamon is antibacterial, so supports oral health.

You will access a toaster or grill

Makes: 1 portion 

Preparation time: 10 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 slices of wholemeal bread

• 1 sweet apple

• 2 heaped teaspoons of peanut butter

• ½ teaspoon of ground cinnamon

Method

1. Toast the slices of bread in a toaster or grill.

2. Core and slice the apple as thinly as you can.

3. Spread the toast with peanut butter.

4. Lay the apple slices over the toast and sprinkle with cinnamon.