Chewing string cheese to reduce tooth decay
Posted By RichC on September 10, 2013
Saw this in the Wall Street Journal personal section today and although I knew about the gum, I did not know about the string cheese (for the fun of it, I’m trying the iPhone’s Mobile OCR app to capture text).
Studies show two things people can chew to help ward off tooth decay. One, Dr. Cole says, is chewy cheese: String cheese will reduce the pH of bacterial plaque. One reason, says Dr. Cole, is that chewy things make you salivate, and proteins in your saliva will buffer acids. Also, naturally occurring chemicals in cheese “encourage the tooth to remineralize.” Dr. Cole suggests: “The pairing of wine with cheese is actually a good thing, because the cheese can counterbalance the acidity of the wine.”
Chewing sugarless gum is also a good option if you can’t get to your toothbrush. “Some studies have suggested that xylitol, which is the sweetening agent in gum, actually has anticariogenic characteristics.”
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