Eating and Drinking with Invisalign

The core rule is simple: take your aligners out to eat and to drink anything other than plain water, then brush before they go back in. You can eat anything you normally would, which is the big day-to-day advantage over fixed braces and their list of forbidden foods.

Drinks are where people slip up

Hot drinks can warp the plastic, and anything coloured or sugary (coffee, tea, wine, fizzy drinks, fruit juice) will stain or sit against the teeth under the aligner and raise the decay risk. Plain water is the only thing to drink with them in. If you graze on coffee at your desk, that is a lot of removal and re-cleaning, so many Essex commuters batch their drinks into meal breaks.

Keeping wear time up

Every meal and snack is time out of the aligners, and they need twenty to twenty-two hours a day in. Fewer, longer eating windows protect your wear time better than constant grazing. Always brush, or at least rinse, before re-inserting to avoid trapping food and sugar against the teeth. More on day-to-day life in the living with Invisalign hub.