Medicine: Sweet Tooth, Sour Facts

In the basement of Harvard's School of Dental Medicine, Biochemist James H. Shaw and his assistants worked for more than ten years with cages full of white rats and cotton rats, with sugar-rich and sugar-free chow, with test tubes and dissecting boards. The twofold aim: to find out how certain sugars promote tooth decay, then to find a way to forestall it. The Sugar Research Foundation, Inc., set up by the sugar industry, bankrolled the project for a total of $57,000. Now, in the Journal of the American Dental Association, Dr. Shaw reports his findings:

¶Tooth decay is caused only by food remaining in the mouth—proved by rats through stomach tubes. Even sugar, fed this way, causes no decay.

¶Sugar, in solution, causes little decay; granulated sugar (as sprinkled on fruits and cereals) causes much more.

¶Of the various kinds of sugar, fructose (from most fruit), glucose (from grapes and starch foods), sucrose (table sugar from cane or beets), lactose (from milk) and maltose (from beer) are all precipitators of decay. So is a high-starchdiet, even when relatively low in sugar. It does no good to substitute raw for refinedsugar; but blackstrap molasses causes a marked reduction in cavities.

¶Saliva is a good tooth protector. Removal of successive salivary glands gave a progressive increase in decay.

¶Penicillin and chlortetracycline (Aureomycin) are effective anti-decay agents, as are urea and dibasic ammonium carbonate; other antibiotics and chemicals tested (among them, many of those now commonly blended into toothpastes) do little or no good.

Dr. Shaw's conclusion: "We should cut down on our sugar consumption, particularly candy. We should be careful about sugar in forms that remain in the mouth because of their physical properties." Along with his findings, Dr. Shaw also reported that his work has stopped. Reason: the Sugar Research Foundation withdrew its support.