When it comes to dental health, sweets are often off limits. Dentists are quick to tell patients to avoid sticky candies, as they are a major contributor to cavities and other dental problems.
But researchers have recently found a new way for candy lovers to get away with it. They have developed a special type of candy that not only satisfies a person’s sweet tooth, but also fights cavities.
This sweet news comes from the Stony Brook University School of Dental Medicine in New York, which developed an experimental fluoride-free treatment that’s sure to make kids (and adults) everywhere smile.
The new treatment is packaged like a mint but contains an active compound known as CaviStat. The researchers said this compound mimics a component in human saliva that neutralizes tooth-destroying acids in the mouth.
“Unlike regular candy, we want this product to get stuck in your teeth,” said Mitchell Goldberg, president of Ortek Therapeutics Inc, a private company in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., that licensed the technology from Stony Brook.
“Unlike sugarless gum, which fights cavities by temporarily increasing saliva flow in the mouth, Goldberg said in a phone interview that mints actively neutralize cavity-causing acids,” Julie Steenhuysen explained on Yahoo. ! News.
Mints marketed under the brand name BasicMints were initially tested on 200 children in Venezuela. The subjects, 10 1/2 to 11 years of age, were erupting in adult molars but still had some deciduous teeth remaining.
Half of the children took two mints in the morning and at night after brushing their teeth with fluoride toothpaste. The rest simply brushed twice a day with fluoride toothpaste and took sugar-free mints.
“After 12 months, children taking decay-fighting mints had 61.7% fewer cavities than the placebo group. The soft mints are designed to dissolve and chew on the biting surfaces of the back teeth, where about 90% of cavities in children occur,” Steenhuysen revealed.
The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Dentistry and Goldberg is confident that it won’t be long before the product is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. That is certainly good news for all of us.