Dr. Brian Baird, DMD, Dentist

Duration: 57 seconds

Cavities are holes in your teeth. They're caused by bacteria, taking the sugars out of your diet and producing acid and dissolving a hole in your tooth.

What do you do about cavities? We all know that's usually a filling. There's the tooth-colored fillings, composite fillings, which are great because when all is said and done, you can't tell that you've had a filling.

Or there's the older styles of fillings, the silver amalgam fillings. If it's a larger cavity, then you're going to need probably a lab-made filling, such as a gold inlay or a porcelain inlay now. And those are great because you can't see that anything's been done, and they help strengthen the tooth up to its natural tooth structure.

A simple way of preventing cavities is brushing after meals. It removes the food off your teeth. Now the bacteria don't have it to produce acids and disoolve holes in your teeth.