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Sports and energy drinks irreversibly damage teeth

 
, medical expert
Last reviewed: 14.02.2024
 
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03 May 2012, 19:15

American scientists (University of Southern Illinois) made a statement: it turns out that the use of sports and energy drinks provokes the occurrence of irreversible damage to the teeth. The tooth enamel suffers also - and all because of the fact that the listed drinks have high acidity.

The younger generation, who willingly buys and enjoys energy drinks with pleasure, seriously believes that these drinks win in comparison with other pops, if only because they allegedly improve their sports achievements (advertising promises ...). That's just not likely young people know that after drinking another Red Bull, they thoroughly rinsed their teeth in acid.

Thirteen "sports" and nine energy drinks were studied by researchers. It turned out that the level of acidity differs between brands of drinks, and between different drinks of the same brand. Seeking to find out what this threatens, the researchers conducted an experiment: samples of the enamel of the human tooth, they were dipped into each of the drinks for a quarter of an hour. Then these same samples fell for two hours in artificial saliva. And so four times a day for five days. The rest of the time the enamel was in artificial saliva.

Result: after five days the enamel was visibly damaged. It turned out that energy drinks are more harmful than sports drinks - the damage from the first is two times palpable.

A small nuance: the tooth enamel is not subject to recovery, that is, its damage is irreversible. And teeth that are not protected by enamel, sensitivity increases, and the risk of caries and other unpleasant things increases.

According to statistics, in the States alone, about half of all teenagers regularly use energy, of which about 60% do it daily. Dentists sound alarm and strongly recommend to reduce the use of these drinks to a minimum, necessarily chewing after drinking the chewing gum without sugar or rinsing the mouth with water. This helps to increase the production of saliva, resulting in the acidity of the oral cavity is normal.

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