Medicine: Dentists’ Nightmare

Sugar rationing may well cut down “the rampant decay of American teeth,” writes Research Dentist Thomas J. Hill of Western Reserve University in Dentistry. Decay of teeth, says Hill, is a product of civilization. It increases with a people’s standard of living and is almost unknown among the few isolated and primitive races on the fringes of civilization. At the end of the Civil War the average American ate only 31 Ib. of sugar yearly. By World War I consumption had risen to 85 Ib. Last year it was 114 Ib. The average American, says Hill, today has two more dental cavities than he had only twelve years ago.

All the contributing causes of tooth decay are not clearly understood, Hill admits. But it is certain that decay is usually associated with the presence in the mouth of swarms of bacteria, whose acid excretions etch away calcium from the teeth. These bacteria cannot live in human saliva unless sugar is present; and since sugar does not occur in normal saliva, they must get their nourishment from food taken into the mouth. Says Dr. Hill: “When diets are followed which contain a rigid restriction of sugar, these acid-forming organisms rapidly disappear from the saliva.”