Have you ever taken a toddler on an airplane? If not, surely you’ve ridden on an airplane with a toddler on board.
Most of the other passengers avoid the parents with toddlers like the plague, right?! They are all imagining how much screaming, crying, throwing objects, and whining is about to happen in an enclosed space that nobody can escape for the next few hours.
Those toddlers are miserable. Sometimes they are tired or just need to move their bodies. Sometimes they are hungry. And then, those darn kids have the nerve to act their age.
The passengers expect them to magically mature beyond toddlerhood while surrounded by strange faces and being told to sit still and be quiet. To make matters worse, many of the parents bring their kids on the plane with a book and healthy food, naively determined to stick to their structured parenting plan.
Meanwhile, the veteran parents know that every outing with a toddler requires a bit of planning. They would never get on an airplane carrying a toddler without a plan.
All the regular parenting rules go out the window and survival mode kicks in when you fly with a toddler. You bring sugar, people! You bring junk food, special treats, and have screen-sized entertainment at the ready.
A plan is a must if you want to successfully fly on an airplane with a toddler.
Benjamin Franklin was absolutely right:
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
There are things in life that will simply go much better with a little bit of planning in advance.
If you have replaced missing teeth with dentures, you already know that you can’t just grab a snack and hit the road, or meet someone for dinner without knowing what’s on the menu. You have to plan for your meals.
Planning for Meals With Dentures
If you have recently replaced your missing teeth with dentures, then you have also had your teeth pulled. Your mouth is sore and still healing. You must choose your diet carefully.
You will need to find places that serve nutritious juices, applesauce, smoothies, mashed potatoes, pudding, or soup … but that soup cannot be too hot. Planning to get enough nutrition and drinking all of your meals through a straw is key to your survival.
You can either find restaurants that serve these things, or you’ll need to prepare your liquid diet in advance so you can bring food with you. The other option is for you to stay home and just have guests over to visit. It’s possible that you won’t feel up to going out.
For quick trips, it would be a good idea to think like a mom packing snacks. Grab an applesauce pouch or a fruit and veggie pouch that you can squeeze into your mouth. Or you might try prepackaged drinkable yogurt.
Kitchen Tools That Are Useful for Prepping Your Denture Diet
You can expect to be on this liquid diet for three to four weeks. Then you can move on to soft foods.
SOFT FOODS FOR DENTURES
Your gums have to adapt to chewing and biting again without your natural teeth attached to the jawbone. When you begin chewing your food again, you’ll want the chewing to be as comfortable as possible.
After you’ve already eaten foods like applesauce and mashed veggies, you can graduate up to foods that are slightly more solid. You will want them to be in the tiniest pieces possible.
- Baked beans
- Skin-free, fresh fish
- Cooked greens
- Pasta
- Cooked rice
- Soft bread
Soft Foods for Dentures
When you have dentures, you’re going to have to think before eating. There are some foods that you just shouldn’t eat because they’ll cause you too many problems to be worth it.
Tough Meat: If you have to chew and chew the same piece of meat in order to make it easy enough to swallow, that is a bad combination with dentures and gums. All of the gnawing can result in denture sores on the gums.
Hard Foods: Biting and chewing on hard foods can cause you to have uneven bite pressure. Guess what happens with uneven bite pressure … Your dentures can become loose or damaged. It can be easier to just say no to carrots, corn on the cob, nuts, apples, and popcorn.
Sticky Foods: Not only are the foods going to stick to your fingers, but they’ll stick to your dentures and pull them loose and off-kilter. That leaves room for food to get stuck underneath your dentures, irritate your gums, and give you horrible breath.
Foods With Small Pieces: Anytime you eat something with food that has tiny pieces that break off and are very hard to chew. Those little things come in the form of nuts, popcorn kernels, chia seeds, sesame seeds, flax seeds, etc.
When Can You Get Back to Eating Normally With Dentures?
If you want to know when you can bite and chew like you used to with natural teeth, then the answer for denture wearers is never. We are not being dramatic. You will never get anywhere close to your original bite force.
Dentures can get food stuck underneath them and your gums become very irritated. Dentures can loosen while you’re wearing them and make it difficult to speak properly, let alone chew food thoroughly.
Replacement Teeth That Really Bite
If you don’t want to drink through a straw or plan your food around your teeth for weeks on end, perhaps you should just get rid of your dentures. Better yet, don’t get dentures in the first place! We cannot and will not recommend that you wear dentures.
If you want replacement teeth that you can actually sink into your food, you need full mouth dental implants. Nuvia uses incredible processes and technology to allow for permanent dental implants in just 24 hours. Our internal lab creates dental implants that are custom to each patient.
Twenty-four hours after walking into our office for surgery, you will make your journey home and *immediately be able to eat soft foods. Within a few months, your implants will be so securely integrated into your mouth that you can have enough of your bite force back to eat steak, nuts, anything you want. That is security that traditional dentures can't offer.
So, say goodbye to planning your food and reach out to Nuvia. We want to educate you and answer all of your questions about replacing your teeth. We can’t wait to hear from you!
