What’s Cooking?

Celebrate fall with foods that are good for you and your teeth!

Nutrition and oral health are interrelated. Nutrition and diet can affect overall health and well-being as well as the development and integrity of the oral cavity and the progression of oral diseases.

Likewise, oral disease impacts the ability to eat and nutrition status. Caries-causing bacteria in the mouth use sugar in food to make acid that can break down tooth surfaces and create tooth decay (dental caries). Browse our resources to learn more and find some great snack recipes!

Nutrition and Oral Health (webpage)

This collection of selected resources from OHRC and our library offers high-quality information about promoting good eating and oral health practices to help prevent oral disease in pregnant women, infants, children, and adolescents.

Bright Futures: Oral Health—Pocket Guide

This guide offers health professionals an overview of preventive oral health supervision during five developmental periods: prenatal, infancy, early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. For each period, information about nutrition is included in interview questions and anticipatory guidance.

Cook’s Corner: Recipes for Healthy Snacks

This cookbook features recipes by category like fruit, vegetable, dairy, and seasonal. Funded by the Office of Head Start (OHS), it’s available in English and Spanish.

Healthy Habits for Happy Smiles

This series of handouts for pregnant women and parents of infants and young children provides simple tips on nutrition and oral health issues. Topics include choosing healthy drinks for young children, encouraging young children to drink water, and giving young children healthy snacks. It is also funded by OHS and available in English and Spanish.

Resource Spotlight

Selections from OHRC’s Library

An Inexpensive and Painless Way to Treat Tooth Decay

This video for consumers discusses the use of silver diamine fluoride (SDF) to treat tooth decay. It explains that SDF, unlike the traditional treatment method, is inexpensive, painless, and does not require numbing or drilling, and that non-dentists can be trained to apply it. The video also discusses the importance of good oral health and describes how tooth decay develops, its consequences, and treating decay in primary teeth. The video is available in American Sign Language, Arabic, Bosnian, Burmese, Dari, English, French, Kirundi, Haitian Creole, Maay Maay, Mandarin Chinese, Nepali, Pashto, Portuguese, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Tigrinya, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. [Produced by Vermont Language Justice Project]

Click to view more spotlighted resources

In the News

CMS Funding Opportunity: Is Oral Health at the Table?

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) unveiled details on how states can apply to receive funding from the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program created under the Working Families Tax Cuts Act to strengthen health care across rural America. All 50 states are invited to apply for funding to address each state’s specific rural health challenges. Program funding will be allocated to approved states over five years, with $10 billion available each year beginning in federal fiscal year 2026. Half of the funding will be evenly distributed to all states with an approved application. The other half will be awarded to approved states based on individual state metrics and applications that reflect the greatest potential for and scale of impact on the health of rural communities. The program aims include improving access, technology, and innovation to improve care. The deadline for states to apply is November 5, 2025; CMS will announce awardees by December 31, 2025. Can you find opportunities to weave oral health into this work? Learn more about the program.

Insights on Current and Future Supply of Dentists

The American Dental Association (ADA) Health Policy Institute (HPI) presents insights in this report on the current and future supply of dentists and shifting demographics within the workforce. The U.S. Dentist Workforce: 2025 Update report explores who makes up the dentist workforce, how and where dentists work, how dental practices are performing economically, and what the future of the dentist workforce looks like. Review the report and watch a brief recording featuring HPI's Marko Vujicic to get the full data and its implications for the future of the U.S. dentist workforce.

National Conference on Dental Therapy

Registration is open for the 2025 National Dental Therapy Conference, in Sacramento from December 8–10. The conference brings together leaders, practitioners, educators, and innovators to explore how to expand access to oral health care.

Q&A About Fluoride

This resource, Fluoride: Top 10 Questions Parents Ask, was developed by the CareQuest Institute for Oral Health in collaboration with the American Fluoridation Society. It provides answers to some of the most common questions parents ask about fluoride and fluoridation.

• CareQuest has a new self-paced course (eligible for 1 continuing education credit), Community Water Fluoridation: How Dental Professionals Can Lead the Conversation

Oral Health Learning Café

The Oral Health Learning Café is open every month to host presentations and discussion about integrating oral health and primary care. Recently, there was a series of presentations at the Café by representatives from each of the programs featured in the report, Integrating Oral Health Care into Primary Care: Five Successful, Long-Standing, Statewide Programs Providing Care for the Maternal and Child Health Population. In March, there was a debriefing discussion of all five, and that review continues at the Café in October. Catch up with the recordings and the report and join us on October 14. Register for the webinar.

Visit our website to find recordings of past Café gatherings and subscribe to the discussion list to receive announcements about upcoming webinars and the monthly Integration Alert.