"Erythritol vs. Xylitol for Preventing Cavities and Tooth Decay "
Purveyors of erythritol like to talk about how this low-calorie sweetener
is a natural constituent of foods like melons and peaches, but
it's in such tiny amounts the average person only gets like 25 milligrams.
And now that it's manufactured commercially,
intake could easily be a thousand times that.
I've done a few videos about it.
What's the update?
Well, here's a paper with a twist:
Erythritol, a Non-Nutritive Sugar Alcohol Sweetener
and the Main Component of Truvia Brand Sweetener,
Is a Palatable Ingested Insecticide.
Huh?
Yeah, they found it killed fruit flies, and so
they suggested we start using erythritol as a safe,
sustainable approach for pest control.
It evidently induces in flies "lethal regurgitation."
Also kills the yellow fever mosquito, termites, and ants.
So why isn't erythritol sprayed on crops?
Because it hurts the crops, too!
At the doses needed to kill insects, it has damaging effects on the plants.
But hey, if it hurts plants, maybe we can use it as an herbicide, too.
OK, but what about just as a human sweetener?
We've long known that the bacteria that produce dental plaque on teeth
aren't fueled by erythritol,
and they can't seem to make acid out of it either to cause cavities.
As long as plaque stays above a pH of 5.7, food is safe for teeth,
and swish with some erythritol and nothing happens,
whereas then swish with some table sugar and pH dips down
into the danger zone.
But xylitol, a sugar alcohol similar to erythritol, isn't just dentally safe
in terms of not causing cavities, but may actually have
an active cavity-stopping benefit.
See, dental cavities are reversible
if detected and treated suffciently early.
Early on, we thought that cavity-reduction -- found in xylitol
studies where people chewed on xylitol gum or sucked
on xylitol candies -- may have just been due to indirect effects,
like getting your saliva going.
Or hey, every xylitol candy may be one less sugar candy,
so maybe it's just a substitution effect.
Can you imagine how you might design a study to test
if there were direct xylitol effects?
I'll give you a moment to pause, try to come up with something.
How about secretly randomizing people to use xylitol-containing toothpaste?
And indeed, boom!
A reduction in tooth decay compared to the control toothpaste
without the xylitol.
So xylitol really does seem to have cavity reducing effects.
What about erythritol, then?
All studies strongly support the idea of erythritol
as being cavity-reducing, too, perhaps even more so than xylitol.
For example, more than twice the drop in the amount of plaque
after six months sucking on erythritol candies versus xylitol --
an effect that extends out at least 3 years.
Yeah, but did that actually translate into fewer cavities?
We have all these studies pointing in that direction,
however no long-term human cavity trials on erythritol
had been completed... until now.
A double-blind randomized controlled trial
involving hundreds of school children, sucking on four erythritol,
xylitol, or control candies three times per school day.
And erythritol won the day: significantly lower number
of cavity-ridden teeth and surfaces were found in the erythritol group.
Another advantage to erythritol is safety to dogs.
Doses of xylitol -- as little as a half teaspoon in a 30-pound dog --
can be life-threatening, whereas erythritol is so well-tolerated,
with no adverse effects reported upwards of like more than a cup a day,
suggesting it could even be used as like an ingredient
in chew toys or something.