Is it important to avoid dark-colored foods and beverages during periods of performing teeth whitening treatments?
Do you need to maintain a "white" diet when bleaching your teeth?
One common "rule" you'll encounter with having teeth whitening treatments (using either an at-home system or one involving your dentist) is that you must avoid foods and beverages that have a strong or dark coloration during the time frame (days, weeks) when you're treatments are being performed.
This warning typically includes beverages such as coffee, tea, red wine and cola. And foods such as dark fruits like blueberries, blackberries, and purple grapes. And avoiding these chromogenic (colored) foodstuffs is referred to as maintaining a "white" diet.
Not adhering to this type of diet is frequently cited by manufacturers, and dentists too, as a reason why the whitening results a person has achieved aren't as dramatic as initially suggested they would be.
But is this "white diet rule" based on science?
No. It might come as a surprise to you but there hasn't been a study published based on clinical trials that have evaluated this specific subject.
And that means, despite what you've been told, and no matter how earnestly, this rule is really just conjecture and unsubstantiated conventional wisdom.
What scientific evidence does exist, one way or the other?
While documenting sources for information found on other pages of our website, we unexpectedly ran across a paper titled: White diet: Is it necessary during tooth whitening? (Lead author: BA Matis)
And as soon as we noticed this title, we were quick to get a copy of the article so we could read through it.

Whitening results.
What does the paper say? Is maintaining a white diet during your treatment period really necessary?
A surprise.
Since we too had been influenced by the conventional wisdom published in dental literature and provided by whitener manufacturers, we found it surprising that the article concluded that the majority of evidence suggests that avoiding colored foodstuffs does not increase the level of whitening results a person's teeth achieve.
More specifically, and in more formal terms, the paper itself states ...
- "Adhering to a white diet during the process of tooth whitening did not improve the esthetic outcome."
So, there you have it. Abstaining from coffee, tea, red wine and dark fruits, during your bleaching process (either at-home treatments or a series of professional ones), really isn't going to do anything in terms of enhancing your lightening results.
We'll also point out, and different from whitener manufacturers (and possibly even your dentist) who may be looking for a scapegoat to explain lackluster results, the authors of this paper were reporting "just the facts." They had no conflict of interest related to this subject.