Vancouver Dentist Dr. Ed Lowe is the Editor of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry Journal. For over 20 years Dr. Lowe has been practicing Dentistry in the Downtown Vancouver area. Many of us have the habit of chewing on our pen whether we are cognizant of it or not, so we were curious: is chewing my pen bad for my teeth? Dr. Lowe tells us that there is both a good reason and bad reason to stop, or carry on. Wait what? If you’re confused, watch this:
Here’s the transcript in case you missed it:
I chew my pen… Is that bad for my teeth?
Well chewing plastic, I mean; first of all, plastic isn’t very tasty, so I don’t know why people choose to chew plastic anyways. The danger with chewing plastic is, I’ll tell you something good about it, and something not so good. The good thing about chewing plastic is you’re chewing something like gum and so you’re always producing saliva and flushing your teeth out. So that’s a plus. The minus of chewing plastic is if you wedge that piece of plastic that is hard between your teeth, two teeth, you may lose the piece of plastic between two teeth or even crack a tooth. You know like sometimes when people are tearing a plastic bag, they say:”oh, my tooth came out”. So I can imagine, depending on how soft that plastic is you may chip your teeth by chewing that plastic.
