How The Right Vitamins Keep Your Teeth Healthy

A sweet tooth is likely to be full of fillings. This is one point in the relationship of diet to oral beauty on which

researchers generally agree.

Beyond that, except for admission that minerals and vitamins are essential to sound teeth, there is wide difference of opinion on the proper feeding and care of bicuspids.

A few significant diet factors, however, give promise of persuading your molars to linger longer in their sockets.

As an adult you are probably beyond the stage where vitamins make much difference to your teeth. True, if you develop scurvy from lack of Vitamin C your teeth will drop out, but that is largely because of breakdown of surrounding tissue. Matters arc different with children. Young animals deprived of Vitamin A grow teeth without any covering of enamel. Dental enamel is the hardest substance in your body and when it isn't present in teeth, soon the teeth aren't present either. Shortages of Vitamin A in childhood can cause teeth to develop with thin, broken, or misshapen enamel coats that pave the way for early decay.

Oversize servings of orange juice have helped to prevent tooth cavities in children, since Vitamin C is essential to the formation of dentine, the hard stuff between the enamel and pulp of the tooth. Vitamin D is necessary too to regulate the distribution of calcium and phosphorus out of which teeth are principally made.

Once you've grown up, however, the mechanisms that make for tooth decay are multiple and complex. Meat-eating animals and carnivorous humans, such as Eskimos, are relatively immune to dental decay and it is evident that the oral decomposition of protein is offensive only in the sense that your best friends won't tell you. Carbohydrate appears to be the big tooth enemy.

A widely accepted theory holds that the decomposition of carbohydrate particles (particularly when packed into the fissures of the teeth, where decay most often begins) results in conditions favorable to the growth of lacto-bacillus acidophilus, a sour little bacillus that is charged with gnawing away at enamel and preparing you for the dental bur.

 This ties in with the observation that sugar, of all foods, is the most efficient tooth dissolver.

Persons who suck lozenges and cough drops—a favorite habit of some cigarette smokers, to cool off the mouth between fags—or who crunch hard candies frequently have very bad teeth. The old Scandinavian custom of holding a sugar cube between the teeth and sipping coffee through it also is a joy to dentists looking for steady customers. Sugar in solution bathes the teeth with fluids that, for whatever reason, appear notably effective in dissolving the tooth structure. The obvious moral, if you simply can't cut down on sweets, is to choose candies that you can get to the glottis swiftly.

Low sugar and high fat diets—the type customarily prescribed for diabetics—have proved surprisingly effective in holding tooth decay to a minimum. Brushing the teeth is esthetically advisable, but "dirty" teeth often show less decay than "clean" ones. The protective film that covers the teeth (it requires acid to dissolve it, and is not necessarily visible to the eye) appears to prevent withdrawal of calcium from teeth, perhaps by preventing direct contact with bacteria. Even when bacteria are present in the mouth, a well-balanced diet goes far to render them harmless.

One of the new discoveries in nutrition is that some types of pyorrhea can be prevented or benefited by increase of Vitamin C. Bleeding gums—the popularly terrifying cause of "pink toothbrush"—often need Vitamin C more than they do vigorous scrubbing or the gnawing of bones.