"The Worst Food for Tooth Decay"
Nearly a half century ago at a Senate hearing on nutrition,
a Dr. Nizel from Tufts suggested that sugary breakfast cereals
should be banned in the best interest for all concerned,
particularly children, perhaps not surprisingly
since he was a professor of dental medicine.
A dozen different foods and beverages were ranked
for their cariogenic potential— their cavity-causing potential—
by implanting electrodes in the mouths of study subjects
to measure the amount of acid produced in the plaque between their teeth
after eating a variety of different things.
And the two breakfast cereals they tested topped the charts.
If you drink some sugar water, the pH on your teeth plunges within minutes
into the acidic danger zone, and stays there for an hour,
eating away at our teeth. Caramel is worse.
It sticks to your teeth so it stays longer, down deeper into the acid zone.
But check out the breakfast cereals: goes down
and stays down even two hours later.
We've known about the cavity-causing potential
of presweetened breakfast cereals for decades.
A dozen such cereals were put to the test
to measure the level of tooth-dissolving acid
produced by the strain of bacteria that causes cavities.
As one might expect, the cavity generating potential was found
to be related directly to the sugar content of each cereal,
though Frosted Mini-Wheats was an exception. Despite having 40%
less sugar than cereals like Froot Loops or Frosted Flakes,
Frosted Mini-Wheats caused the greatest calcium demineralization,
ranking second only to the now defunct "Powdered Donutz"
in cavity causing potential.
A study of twenty-eight different cereals concluded that, unquestionably,
the sugar concentrations in these twenty-eight cereals
was sufficiently high to qualify them as dentally dangerous.
Wanting to be good corporate citizens, General Mills
took their Super Sugar Crisp, which was 44% sugar,
and reduced the sugar...font size.
Then, caring about children's health so much,
they removed sugar altogether... from the name.
Kellogg's cares too.
Though Sugar Smacks is, apparently, where space energy comes from,
it doesn't sound as wholesome as Honey Smacks: same cereal, healthier name.
They did remove sugar from Corn Pops and Frosted Flakes;
I mean well, from the front of the boxes.
And Cookie Crisp?
I think the fact that it's made by a dog food company says it all.
But, General Mills protests, a study they did in which teens were randomized
to receive free cereal delivered to their homes—or not—
didn't seem to get any more cavities, proving breakfast cereal
is harmless for your teeth.
Anyone care to take a guess at the study's fatal flaw?
The kids in the control group were free to just have their parents
buy their sugary cereals from the store, and so both the experimental
and the control groups may have been eating the same amount of cereal
with the only difference being that the experimental group
received its cereal free and the control group had to pay for it.
What did the General Mills researchers have to say for themselves?
Dietary controls so rigid as to exclude the ingestion of cereals by children
would be difficult, if not impossible. But then it's not a control group!
That's like this Kellogg's- funded paper saying,
yeah, if we didn't feed kids sugar, then we could virtually eliminate cavities,
but this ideal is impractical, so let's take the middle-ground
and come up with, oh, Froot Loops with marshmallows.
But hey, at least they're fruit shaped, or at least fruity shaped.
Observational studies have also failed to link breakfast cereal consumption
with cavity prevalence though, or incidence.
This is presumed to be because eating it with milk
helps clear food particles from the mouth.
Though Frosted Mini-Wheats did lead to the same sugar retention
in the saliva 10 minutes after intake with or without milk;
the other cereals were cleared out faster.
Sugared cereals are often eaten as snacks by kids, though, without milk.
And ten minutes after the ingestion of dry sugary cereals,
you're left with nearly 50 times the sugar residue in your mouth,
compared to swishing the sugar down in liquid form.
"It is inconceivable," concluded the researchers, "to contest the fact
that frequent between-meal ingestion of [foods like high-sugar cereal]
is dentally hazardous.
Whether or not meal-time eating of sugared cereals induce cavities
is not the point...because kids snack on them between meals,
they have a marked potential for dental danger."