Every time we eat something that is sugary or acidic some of these minerals (the bricks) come out of your teeth. We have lots of bacteria (bugs) in our mouth, and they love sugar. When the bugs eat the sugar their waste product/excrement is acidic. They eat the sugar and excrete acid!

Acid from the bugs or from the acidic food you've been eating/drinking sucks the minerals out of your teeth. These nasty bugs live in the plaque on your teeth -  you will find your plaque around your gum line and between your teeth.

Where there's lots of plaque, there's lots of bugs, so there's lots of acid. If you have lots of sugary/acidic things and you don't clean the plaque off well with effective brushing and flossing you get lots of these little brick minerals getting drained out of your teeth and not many going back in.

If you imagine a real brick wall and you took lots of bricks out from the middle of it, soon enough the wall would collapse - it's the same with our teeth! More brick minerals going out than coming in back into the tooth mean a hole!

The bad news is that once you get a hole in your tooth it will gradually get bigger and bigger, unless you do something to prevent it from growing. The reason for this all comes back to that plaque we were talking about earlier.

The plaque is the house for those nasty bugs. The outside surface of a healthy tooth is nice and smooth - this is easy to clean with a tooth brush and floss.

Imagine a hole between your teeth, it's now like a crevice that your tooth brush and floss can't get to anymore, but the plaque absolutely loves it in there! If this crevice is filled with those nasty acid bugs and you can't clean them off, every time you eat something those bugs are making more and more acid, taking out more and more mineral bricks and that hole just gets bigger and bigger!

If it grows big enough your tooth will get sensitive to hot and cold and sweet food/drinks. If it grows bigger and reaches your nerve you will get a bad tooth ache and your tooth will throb and keep you up all night. Then, it'll be too late for a filling - you'll need a root canal or an extraction.

A tooth filling removes the rotten collapsed part of your tooth with all the bugs and returns it to it's smooth surface. This ensures you can clean it properly again and enjoy all foods and drinks without discomfort, tooth ache and/or tooth sensitivity.

Most fillings these days are white. There are two main types of white filling;

Composite Resin Fillings

The most versatile types of tooth filling are composite resin. This type of filling can be completed in one visit and is suitable for front teeth and back teeth. The colour of these fillings is very close to that of your tooth.

Composite resin fillings are not really suitable for large or wide fillings as they're not super-strong. Also, they can change colour with time and get stained where the filling meets the tooth.

Porcelain Fillings

Porcelain is a great material for filling your teeth. It's main benefits are that it is stronger than the composite resin option and the colour is excellent and stable. Porcelain fillings are great for front teeth and are often used to improve the look of your teeth with crowns or veneers. Porcelain fillings are also great for bigger fillings on back teeth, because it is stronger than composite resin.

A porcelain filling procedure will need to be carried out over two visits. On the first visit, we take a mould of your teeth and the laboratory makes the porcelain. We apply the filling on the second visit. Porcelain fillings can be a little more expensive than composite resin fillings because the procedure takes longer, however the result is well worth it and a porcelain filling will usually last much longer.

Amalgam

You may be wondering what about the 'silver' fillings? Amalgam is still a filling material available for use. Amalgam fillings are made from silver, mercury, tin and copper. Small amounts of zinc, indium or palladium also may be used. The mercury binds all the other metal together. Amalgam has its advantages - it's strong (many people have silver fillings that have been serving without issue for decades), reliable, cost effective and very tolerant of being in a wet environment, there are some disadvantages. These are the appearance (black) and the tendency to put pressure on your teeth after long periods of time causing cracks in the teeth.