# Is chewing ice bad for your teeth?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chewing-ice-bad-for-your-teeth/288625>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [February 6, 2005, 6:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chewing-ice-bad-for-your-teeth/288625 "2005-02-06T06:14:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![fontor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/34f0e0/32.png) [@fontor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fontor)\
**Post date:** [February 6, 2005, 6:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chewing-ice-bad-for-your-teeth/288625/1 "2005-02-06T06:14:03Z")

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People have told me that chewing on ice is like chewing on rocks – bad for your teeth. But people do it all the time with seemingly no negative effects.

So is it bad for your teeth to chew on ice?

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**Author:** ![fiddlesticks](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fiddlesticks/32/18129_2.png) [@fiddlesticks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fiddlesticks)\
**Post date:** [February 6, 2005, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chewing-ice-bad-for-your-teeth/288625/2 "2005-02-06T07:16:53Z")

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IANADentist, but I’ve got tsk’d at by my dentist for admitting I chewed ice after I had a tooth get a hairline crack and require a crown (it was a molar with an large, old ugly filling in it, so it was worth the suffering). I can’t say what really crack the tooth, it was probably cracked for awhile before my dentist noticed it during a routine checkup.

99.999% of the time you aren’t going to crack a tooth on an ice cube, but a sufficiently solid cube probably is as much able to crack a tooth if you hit it just right (or wrong) as an unpopped popcorn kernel. Probably depends on the size of the cube too…I still can’t resist chewing the thin walled cubes you get from soda fountains and have yet to have a recurrence.

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**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\
**Post date:** [February 6, 2005, 8:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chewing-ice-bad-for-your-teeth/288625/3 "2005-02-06T08:24:58Z")

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According to my dentist, chewing ice causes excess wear on teeth. It’s not the kind of thing you’ll necessarily notice right away, or even in 20 years. But it does wear them down, and can cause cracks and other damage.

Yeah. I do it too. Maybe they’ll have good artificial teeth in 40 years.

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**Author:** ![DMark](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e68b1a/32.png) [@DMark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DMark)\
**Post date:** [February 6, 2005, 9:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chewing-ice-bad-for-your-teeth/288625/4 "2005-02-06T09:28:02Z")

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I am going to say yes. Not so much as I know it to be a fact as simply I almost wanted to kill the woman sitting next to me at work who constantly chewed ice and drove me nuts. We finally had a little heart to heart and she has stopped doing it.

But I would imagine it can’t be good for you…although as a non-dentist, I can’t really claim any site to prove it. Have you Googled “chewing ice bad for you”?