The most harmful foods that cause tooth decay Nearly half a century ago, in a Senate hearing on nutrition, Dr. Niessel of Tufts offered cereal filled with sugar, be banned in the interest of all interested parties, especially children, which is probably not surprising, since he was a professor of dental medicine.
The dozen different foods and drinks were evaluated in terms of their caries potential – the ability to cause caries – by implanting electrodes in the mouths of the test subjects to measure the amount of acid produced in the plaque between their teeth after taking in a variety of different things.
Both cereals that were tested topped the chart. If you drink some water with sugar, the pH of your teeth drops sharply within a few minutes to the dangerously acidic zone and stay there for an hour, eating our teeth.
Caramel is the most harmful. It adheres to the teeth, which is why it stays longer and penetrates the acid zone more deeply. But look at breakfast cereals: the pH drops and remains low even after two hours. We know about the potential for caries of sweetened cereal snacks for decades.
A dozen such breakfast cereals have been tested for measuring the level of acid that breaks down the teeth, produced by a strain of bacteria that cause caries.
As can be expected, the potential for caries has been identified is directly related to the sugar content of each cereal, although Frosted Mini-Wheats was an exception. Despite the presence of 40% less sugar than cereal like Froot Loops or Frosted Flakes, Frosted Mini-Wheats causes more calcium demineralization, ranking second after the already existing “Powdered Donutz” in terms of their potential to cause caries.
A study of 28 different types of breakfast cereals concludes that it is indisputable the concentration of sugar in these twenty-eight cereal snacks is high enough to rank them as dangerous to the teeth. Wanting to be a good corporate citizen, General Mills took his Super Sugar Crisp cereal, which had 44% sugar and reduced … the size of the number on the label indicating the amount of sugar.
Then, concerned so much about the health of the children, they removed sugar as a word from the name … in general. Kellogg also cares for them. Although Sugar Smacks is obviously where space energy comes from, doesn’t sound as complete as Honey Smacks: same breakfast cereal, but a new name.
Really removed the sugar from Corn Pops and Frosted Flakes; I mean, well, from the front of the box. What about Cookie Crisp? I think the fact that they are made by a dog food company explains everything.
But, General Mills protested, mentioning a study where teens were divided into groups, with some getting a free breakfast snack delivered to their home and others not, the former having no more caries than the latter, which proves to be a breakfast cereal is harmless to the teeth.
Can anyone know the fatal flaw of this study? The children in the control group were free to drive their parents buy them cereal snacks from the store and like the experimental one, so did the control group, maybe they were eating the same amount of breakfast cereal, with the only difference being that the experimental group she taught her cereal breakfast for free, and the control group had to pay for it.
How did General Mills’ researchers protect themselves? Strict, nutritional control with the exception of breakfast cereals would be difficult, if not impossible.
But then this is not a control group! It’s like this Kellogg-funded article that says yes, if we didn’t give our kids sugar, maybe we would practically eliminate caries, but this ideal is not practical, so let’s take the middle ground and make up a cereal with fruit and marshmallows.
But hey, it’s fruit, or at least it’s shaped like a fruit. Observational studies also failed to link consumption of breakfast cereals however, with the development of caries, or it is an accident.
The reason is supposed to be because when they take it with milk, this helps to clear food particles from the mouth. Although the Frosted Mini-Wheat brand did indeed lead to the same retention of sugar in the saliva 10 minutes after administration, whether or not with milk; other cereal snacks cleared faster. However, children often eat sugary cereal without milk.
And ten minutes after ingesting a dry sugar cereal you have almost 50 times more sugar in your mouth, compared to sugar intake in liquid. “It’s impossible,” the researchers conclude, “to dispute the fact that the frequent intake between meals of [foods such as high-sugar cereal] is dangerous to the teeth.
The question is not whether eating a breakfast cereal as part of a meal will cause caries because children eat them between meals, this has significant potential for tooth decay.
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