Table VI. Activities for effective integration of nutrition in oral health promotion and disease prevention

Clinical Setting

  • Include diet counseling for caries prevention and control as a component of comprehensive dental care.
  • Request a nutritional consult and confer with dietetics professional for patients at nutrition risk because of compromised oral health (e.g., caries, diabetes, xerostomia, immunosuppressive disorders).
  • Be familiar with nontraditional diet interventions and provide patients with guidelines to maximize oral intake.
  • Collaborate with dietetics professionals in delivery of medical nutrition therapy and provision of oral health care in long-term care settings.

Community Setting

  • Develop oral health messages that include nutrition education.
  • Offer advisory assistance to school and community nutrition programs.
  • Include nutrition screening initiatives in oral health programs in schools, worksites, and health maintenance organizations.
  • Develop partnerships with dietetics professionals to promote nutrition screening, assessment, and counseling in private practice.

Research Setting

  • Identify and support nutrition topics in appropriate clinical oral health research.
Oral Health and Nutrition: Position of the American Dietetic Association. Copyright by the American Dietetic Association. Adapted with permission from the Journal of the American Dietetic Association 1996;96:184-189.