Many of the bacteria that reside on our teeth in dental plaque have quite the sweet tooth. And to our great dental misfortune, when they satisfy their appetites for sugar (and other carbohydrates), they produce acids that eat away at the enamel of the very teeth they call home. Cavities are the result.
But our mouths are potentially well supplied with a substance that can go a long ways towards counteracting the acid: saliva. It’s quite alkaline and does a good job of neutralizing the acids that the bacteria produce as they sup on the sweet stuff.
So how to get the mouth watering and the pH level up? Ogle pictures in gourmet food magazines? Might work. But chewing gum is probably more practical for most of us.
Chewing any gum will get the salivary glands going, but if it has sugar it’s going to undermine any of the cavity fighting, so gum that’s good for the teeth is sugarless. Most sugarless gums are sweetened with sugar alcohols. From what we’ve seen, maltitol, mannitol, sorbitol, and xylitol (pronounced ZIGH-li-tol) are used most often.
Sugar alcohols sometimes cause gastrointestinal woe — bloating, diarrhea, flatulence. How often that happens with the relatively small amounts in sugarless gum is hard to say, but constant chewers might be courting trouble.
Xylitol has the strongest oral hygiene credentials of the sugar alcohols. Because of its chemical composition (five carbons instead of six), bacteria in the mouth don’t much care for it. As others have noted, replacing sugar with xylitol effectively starves sugar-loving microorganisms, particularly the mutans streptococci group of bacteria that are the main cause of cavities.
A number of studies have made side-by-side comparisons between gums sweetened with xylitol and other sugar alcohols, especially sorbitol. In most (not all), xylitol has been superior in whatever outcome is being measured: bacterial counts, cavities, plaque. In fact, there’s some evidence that oral bacteria learn to use sorbitol as a nutrient if they’re exposed to it long enough. Japanese researchers reported in 2007 that mutans streptococci levels increased when adults chewed maltitol-sweetened gum for six months.
But if you go to your local drugstore in search of a gum that depends on xylitol for its sweetness, you’ll come back empty-handed. The brands we’re all familiar with — Dentyne, Trident — are sweetened with the other sugar alcohols. When the package brags about xylitol, as it does for some types of Trident, it’s third, even fourth, down on the list of sweeteners. Researchers say xylitol isn’t used more because it is more expensive than the other sugar alcohols. When we contacted Wrigley and Cadbury Adams about why xylitol wasn’t used more, we got vague responses.
A simple online search will turn up Web sites hawking a wide variety of xylitol products, including gum. They might be fine, but our buyer-beware alarms go off.
Sugarless gum of any kind is better for your teeth than the sugary stuff. But alas, we may not be getting the full benefit from the popular brands because of the type of sweetener that’s used.
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