Taking a bottle of a cola drink or energy drink regularly is like a ritual to most people these days but how healthy are these drinks to our teeth?
According to Dr Tom Bierman, a dentist at the San Diego Dental Studio in the United States, sugary drinks can cause irreparable damage to our teeth.
The image above shows the staining caused by a cola drink on a tooth after just two weeks.
The image below shows the destructive effect of an energy drink on a tooth.
Dr Bierman, 34, decided to check the effect of sugary drinks on the teeth after reading a book, Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman, which claims that one in seven energy drinks are too corrosive to put in aluminum cans, according to a Daily Mail report.
“I thought: If that’s what these things do to a can, what on earth are they doing to our teeth?” Bierman told Good Health.
To perform the experiment, Bierman put a tooth into a bottle of a popular energy drink, another into cola, a third in diet cola and the fourth into water as control.
After two weeks, the tooth placed in diet cola didn’t do much damage but it was stained while the tooth in the cola drink was stained nearly black.
The biggest damage was caused by the energy drink. The energy drink was a lot more destructive to the enamel than the cola drink.
“Even more concerning is that this was the sugar-free version of the energy drink. It’s very potent stuff,” Bierman added.
However, Biermam admitted the experiment wasn’t the same as consuming the drinks regularly but he insists the damage to the tooth can be the same in the long run if these drinks are consumed daily or almost every day.
Phil