Medicine: Caries

When they warn children against sweets, doctors and dentists act on an old hunch that there is some relationship between diet and dental caries (tooth decay). Last week at a meeting of the First District Dental Society of the State of New York, two brothers, Lieutenant Leland James Belding, a Navy physician, and Paul H. Belding, aWaucoma, Ia. dentist, claimed to have confirmed the belief that diet and caries are related. Backing their conclusions with a mass of laboratory detail gathered over a period of twelve years, they declared that the cause of caries was not candy but certain “fractions” of wheat, corn and oat products, that these ferment in the mouth, and are transformed by a germ—which they christened Streptococcus odontyliticus (tooth dissolver)— into an acid which attacks tooth enamel.

In examining 1,000 Annapolis midship men the Brothers Belding discovered that the acid was produced more rapidly in some mouths than others, that there was ”a remarkable relationship between the speed with which the acid [was] formed and caries susceptibility.” “Primitive” foods, they said, such as rice, potatoes, orange juice, honey and sucrose, are fermented so slowly in the mouth that they probably have no relationship to dental caries.

Elimination of tooth decay, they warned, is not the task of cooks. “We do not advocate the deletion of cereals from the diet, but rather suggest that measures be directed to removing or inhibiting the offending carbohydrate fractions prior to human consumption.” No cure for adults, a strictly regulated diet will be of value only to children. Said the Brothers Belding: “You have to catch them young.”