Sugar hurts your teeth. One of the phrases that is continually repeated to us, from childhood to adult life. Is this a popular legend or is it a warning that has a scientific foundation?
Sugar hurts your teeth: why?
That sugar hurts teeth is a scientific fact, not a popular belief. All the sugars that pass through our oral cavity promote the production of bacteria, the mouth becomes an acidic environment in which the bacterial plaque proliferates to generate caries.
This process is also activated with small amounts of sweets, so sugar does not only hurt the gluttons.
By eating even one small pastry, we expose our teeth and the entire oral cavity to an acid attack for about twenty minutes.
Does any kind of sugar hurt your teeth?
The most harmful sugars are considered to be the simple ones, that is:
- sucrose;
- glucose;
- their industrial derivatives.
Sugar consumption should be limited to 3% of daily caloric needs, unfortunately this is not the case because sugar is contained in many foods and drinks.
Reading the labels of the foods we consume in a day, we can see that sucrose is present in many foods.
We therefore take large quantities of sugar without even being fully aware of it. The carbonated drinks, for example, they are full of sugary substances and in addition to favoring tooth decay, they also cause enamel wear.
So it is possible to say that all sugar is bad for your teeth.
Furthermore, refined sugar can cause inflammation of the tissues of the oral cavity and teeth. Who suffers from gingivitis or dentinal hypersensitivity, taking refined sugar can immediately feel an annoying toothache. This is because the sugar dissolving in the saliva comes into contact with the proteins of the myelin sheath creating inflammation and pain.
Limit sugar consumption
The fact that the sugar hurts the teeth is repeated to us from an early age, is due to the fact that the intake of sweet foods or carbonated drinks is a bad habit that is taken as children and hardly corrected by adults.
In industrialized countries caries is one of the most common dental pathologies and its origin is almost always due to excessive consumption of sugars.
Caries of children
Nearly two-thirds of children under the age of six have a tooth decay problem. Besides knowing for sure that sugar is bad for your teeth, another important issue is oral hygiene.
Teaching children to take care of their teeth from an early age is a good habit, just as it would be advisable to book the first check-up by the dentist from an early age.
