Sports Drinks - How to Dissolve Your Teeth

 This is about those wonderful fruity flavors.  In order to create the flavors in today’s beverages, those tangy and/or fruity flavors, the makers use fruit juice as their base or they add organic acids that come from organic juices.  Reading the label you will usually find citric, ascorbic, or malic acid; often several.  Also, there is commonly a fruit juice concentrate which will have high amounts of organic acids.

"Organic "systems are designed to maintain stability.  In other words, if nature establishes a fruit with a certain acid level, there is also a "buffering" system that holds that acid level constant.  This reserve system is huge so that living systems can resist significant insults from the outside world and still survive.  For example:  Comparing a glass of Coca Cola (inorganic) with apple juice (organic), the apple juice will require 8 times as much base (antacid) to upset the balance and neutralize the apple juice compared to the Coke.  It is this lasting power that makes it possible for sports drink acids to do so much damage to teeth.

The other crucial ingredient is how we use these drinks ... sipping.  Sports literature expounds the value of maintaining hydration during physical activity.  This has translated into sipping patterns to maintain hydration during sports.  Large bottles (lots of calories) are at game side for frequent gulps during game breaks.  The athlete is bathing her teeth in acid attack.  This frequently translates into a sipping style of hydration every day for many of us, especially our youth.  Athletes in sports that allow a hydration pack on their back are bathing their teeth continuously with enamel dissolving acids.

The most alarming example I witnessed was a patient of mine.  For 13 years this bright and personable boy had been a cavity free patient in my practice.  He is quiet, studious and has a real creative talent with computers.  He developed a habit of coming home from school, doing his homework and then his computer graphics and programming.  He was bathing (sipping) his teeth in organic acids (sports drinks and other beverages) all afternoon and evening several days a week.  In the short period between 2 regular cheek-ups his teeth deteriorated so severely he needed several crowns. And it was not cavities nearly so much as he just dissolved the enamel off of his teeth.

My simple rules of thumb.

Hydration - nature designed us to use water.

Electrolytes-we get plenty of them if we eat “real food.”

Calories.  We get enough in our meals so be careful about snacking.  Our bodies store plenty of glycogen to get us through long periods of exercise and exertion.

Next week:  Sports Drinks becoming energy drinks with dangerous implications.