After you’ve had your wisdom teeth removed, there can be a lot of holds and bars put on what you can eat. This might be that your dentist absolutely demands that you don’t eat crunchy, acidic foods, or it might be a set of gentle recommendations.
Generally speaking, your dentist’s advice will tend to be closer to the first of those two eventualities – there is a tier list of what food to eat after wisdom teeth removal, and when to eat it.
How does spice affect your tastebuds?
Spice can affect your tastebuds in a number of interesting ways. This is because the spice of a chili pepper, for instance, is something that was developed as a protection for the plant and it’s seeds.
The plant releases spicy chemicals into your mouth when you bite down on it. Then, your tastebuds will receive that signal, and interpret it as something that you should be avoiding. In turn, your tastebuds will become numb, and that’s the flavor that we interpret as spiciness.
This is bad as this sense of numbing can lead to you overstretching the parts of your mouth that have just had a tooth removed from them, leading to you sustaining some damage there.
How does wisdom tooth removal affect your tastebuds?
This is an interesting one since few people realize that teeth themselves actually do have some nerve endings within them. Typically, the teeth that are removed will cause some level of damage to the nerve endings that are nearest to them.
Then, other nerve endings in your mouth can adjust a little to compensate – this means that your overall level of taste will typically stay about the same, but the individual tastebuds can get a little bit stronger.
In the short term, though, the nerve endings and taste buds around the tooth that has been removed will typically be very sensitive for a short period of time. This means that anything you eat while you’re not under the influence of painkillers will go beyond tasting intense, it will start to hurt quite a bit.
So, really, the answer is quite straightforward – the removal of wisdom teeth will be painful in the short term, and won’t make too much difference in the long term.
What’s the difference between tastebuds and nerve endings?
Well, there isn’t much of a difference, really. A nerve ending can be thought of as a tube with a little hole in the end – the hole is where the information goes in for you to feel, see, or hear, for instance.
A tastebud is essentially the same, but instead of having a hole in the end, it has a sieve – the sieve only allows through certain chemical markers that indicate different flavors, such as fructose from sweet fruit.
Taste buds will sit throughout your mouth, not just on the tongue, in small clusters. Then they’ll be able to detect a greater number of different chemicals that are there all at once.
So, it could be said that taste buds are just very specialized nerve endings. This helps us to understand when you can eat after wisdom tooth removal, and what you can eat, as we understand that a large amount of taste buds can function in a very similar way to nerve endings, meaning that they can experience touch and pain, too.
What food can you eat after wisdom teeth removal?
Generally speaking, it’s recommended that you only eat very soft food in the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours, for instance, food in liquid form, like soup or juice. Any amount of chewing would be quite painful for you during this period of time, meaning that it’s certainly worth avoiding.
On top of this, in this early period after the wisdom teeth removal, it’s quite likely that any level of pain relief or numbing that the dentist might have given you is still active, so the act of chewing and not spilling any food might be quite difficult indeed.
After that first period of time, you will likely be able to move on to very soft foods, such as scrambled eggs, mashed potatoes, and avocados. These foods typically don’t require much chewing at all, meaning that you can eat them really easily, and not have to deal with too much pain in your teeth.
After around a week, you should be back to normal to eat foods that’s especially crunchy or chewy – while we wouldn’t recommend going straight for the removal site, the rest of your teeth, and the ones surrounding the removal site, should be in great shape for eating just as you would expect them to be.
When can you eat spicy food after wisdom teeth removal?
After you have your wisdom teeth removed, all of the nerves in your mouth will be quite a bit more sensitive than you would expect them to ordinarily be. This may mean that you have extra trouble eating spicy food for a short while after the tooth removal.
Generally speaking, dentists recommend that you allow around a week after the tooth extraction before you have any especially spicy food. This will allow you to give the site plenty of time to heal without the intense flavor of spicy food impacting the nerve endings around the extraction site at all.
The exception to this would be if the site of the tooth extraction was still damaged or tender when you came to it. After around a week, the site of the extraction should be healed, but if it isn’t, then you should avoid especially crispy, crunchy, or spicy foods in your day-to-day diet.
Conclusion
We hope that this short article has enabled you to understand when you can eat different foods in the time following your wisdom teeth removal. It can be a difficult procedure to go through, but making sure to take care of the site of the removal after you’ve had it done will ensure that you heal as well as you can.