eli5 why does sugar make my teeth hurt?
In: Biology
Probably cavities and/or you’ve worn down the outer layers of your teeth. Basically sugar is acidic and the underlying layers of your teeth (e.g. dentin) are more sensitive and don’t like acid.
Mouth bacteria can metabolize sugar into acids which can cause dental cavities. You should get that possibility checked out.
To add to the other comments,
If you must have sugar at all, wash your mouth with water, gargle in every nook and cranny, and run your tongue over all corners of your teeth straight after. Or just brush.
Your teeth are probably damaged, so when you have sugar and it gets into those damaged layers, the sugar itself irritates the tooth, and when it breaks down further due to mouth bacteria/saliva it continues to irritate the tooth and damage the more tender structures.
Go to the dentist as soon as you are able to do so.
The dentin in your teeth (layer below the enamel) has tiny tubules filled with liquid and connected to nerves. When you eat sugar it goes in to your saliva and makes it have a different osmolarity than the tubules. Basically the sugar in your saliva wants to suck up water and it sucks it out of the tubules. This sudden change is interpreted by the nerves in the tooth as pain. It doesn’t happen on all teeth because if your enamel is in good shape it acts as a barrier to the dentin layer.
If you talk to your dentist about an area that’s really problematic they’ll usually have three options for you: 1. Use sensodyne or equivalent toothpaste 2. Flouride varnish in hopes of re-mineralizing the area 3. They can treat it as a cavity and fill it, but this means drilling out some of the technically healthy tooth to add a filling which is not a perfect or forever fix so they don’t always like doing it.
Cracked tooth maybe? I was sensitive to cold and sweet for decades. Dentists thought it was just a surface thing and left it. Finally got it pulled and can chew on ice if I wanted
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