Sugar Protects Teeth and Inhibits Periodontal Disease

Man, people are really mean about sugar these days. I had someone chew me out on Instagram recently after I stood up to them for body shaming, who claimed I was responsible for promoting diabetes, as if they actually cared about the people with diabetes whom they were just fat shaming. My latest work has centered around oral pathogens because I wasn’t aware until several months ago that I had an active infection involving some seriously harmful oral microbes (in part because my diet protects so well against its effects, but I was starting to finally have more severe symptoms which forced me to pay attention to what was going on). In fact, I have had these pathogens on and off since my early thirties after getting into a relationship with someone who was pathologically unfaithful and engaged in some seriously risky behavior, and there is a lot of evidence that these pathogens contribute to the development of cancer, obesity, fatigue, cardiovascular disease, and even conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. During our relationship I began experiencing severe periodontal inflammation and bleeding when I brushed my teeth and, like many people, considered my problem a personal failure. Out of embarrassment I began hiding away from my partner when I brushed my teeth so that he wouldn’t see what a loser I was, though I now know he was the one actually responsible for getting me infected in the first place, and that what I dealt with was in fact not a lack of proper dental care, which I had adhered to all my life, but some quite virulent oral pathogens which many of us ignorantly carry around and casually pass from person to person.

Sugar is demonized by the dental, medical, nutritional, athletic industries, and equated inexplicably to moral values and self worth, even though many millions of people simply ignore their advice and happily imbibe in soft drinks, candy, and other confectionery. Dental industries have been laughably ineffective in reducing consumption of sugar in developed countries, but really they fail to even consider why this is the case. As I discuss in my book, most of the health, wellness, and medical fields continue to regard human behavior in terms of moral and religious considerations rather than the biology and nature of which our bodies and minds are actually made, and the reason that sugar consumption explodes in developed countries is because sugar actually treats many of the conditions we suffer as humans, many conditions which are exacerbated in developed societies, and is in fact medicinal and not as they would have us believe, a vice. My book talks about this ad nauseam, so if you really have a problem with sugar but aren’t willing to read my book and want to waste my time about it, kindly fuck off.

Nowhere is the characterization of sugar more misguided than when it comes to dental health. For many decades sugar has been derided as the cause of tooth decay, even when those who faithfully avoid sugary foods and practice disciplined dental care fail to avoid cavities and tooth decay. I can’t tell you how many mothers complain to me that they withhold sugar from their children and force them to practice rigid dental care routines and still their children’s teeth are riddled with cavities. I spend quite a bit of time in my book talking about what really causes tooth decay (it’s mostly caused by a deficiency of calcium in salivary excretions). So I’m not going to waste your time here repeating all that. But in the course of my recent research I’ve come upon some great studies which are prime examples of the bias, fraud, and ineptitude which occurs in dental health research and why the ability of the medical profession to cure us of our dental diseases has been pretty much a failure.

One lovely study here actually stopped the flow of saliva in rats for their study on whether sugar causes caries (cavities). Since saliva, properly saturated with electrolytes, is our natural defense against cavities, this would logically result in tooth decay. I came upon this study from another using it as justification to claim that sucrose caused carries, and yet this study also points out that the controls promoted enormous populations of other pathogenic microorganisms. This study also didn’t use any other carbohydrates, such as glucose, and used as controls toxic sugar substitutes which have been shown in other studies to produce very harmful health effects which are arguably much worse than cavities, so I don’t know how the authors of this study can appropriately claim their study to be valid. Aspartame “increased the incidence of malignant tumor in Sprague–Dawley rats, with a significant positive trend in both sexes, and in particular in females treated at 50,000 ppm” but studies like this one will turn around and say that evidence doesn’t show adverse effects, even though it does, and even though they will cite other studies on rats like the first one I mentioned which claims to promote causality, and the later also admits that “However, avoiding sugar does not reduce dental caries dramatically in regions with high levels of caries.”

Medical professionals gloss over such inconvenient inconsistencies in dental health science since it does not support the established industry. But malfeasance takes many forms when it comes to “scientific” information on dental health. This study from 1989 sampled farm workers to come to their conclusion that higher fruit intake was associated with higher rates of caries. But their sample size for both apple and grape farm workers were each literally twice that of the control. The sample sizes were too small anyway and had no protocol for blind or random sampling or to control for so many possible variables like what these samples ate apart from their day at work. The fact that their own study showed fewer dental and periodontal problems in the youths of their study from the apple and grape samples could also have been their conclusion, but the bias of the researcher as an older man seems to have influenced his conclusion. In one paragraph he literally says they found four mouths without any dental problems but only states in which samples three of them came from. Not to mention that the examinations were done on the farms, with researchers knowing full well which groups they were examining, with no attempt at blind examination or investigation into the fruit consumption habits of the supposed control.

One of my favorite gripes about dental health research concerns high fructose corn syrup, which is a highly processed product treated with chemicals and enzymes. Corn is also one of the most highly sprayed crops both of pesticides and herbicides like glyphosate which interferes with many biological processes in the human body and high fructose corn syrup is flippantly regarded simply as fructose when it in fact is not at all simply fructose as demonstrated by this study on Puerto Rican youth, as study which also happens to show some of the lowest rates of carries in children who don’t floss, don’t use mouthwash, and don’t brush their teeth, and that flossing was associated with the highest rates of tooth decay in this sample. The reason that flossing can promote periodontal disease is that oral pathogens are usually after iron and amino acids and peptides and not sugar. Flossing causes consistent small injuries and bleeding which actively delivers hemoglobin which contains the iron and animo acids needed by pathobionts outside the protective epithelial layers of the mouth, thus actively facilitating pathogenic microbial establishment. There are also many, many types of pathogenic oral bacteria, from Streptococcus mutans to Porphyromonas gingivalis to Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans, with each one also containing different strains which are more or less virulent than others, all of which are spread by exposure to contaminated saliva and not poor tooth brushing habits.

One of the most frustrating things about my recent work is realizing how many in vitro studies are utterly useless when it comes to practical solutions to human health. Pretty much everything you could fit in a petri dish will inhibit oral pathogens. In vivo is an entirely different problem, however, and what works in the lab does not usually translate to human organs and bodies, which is bad when practical answers are needed but good when it comes to dogmatic, out-of-context inferences and biases. Bacteria produce acids from carbohydrates, and acids can and do erode teeth. But like the idiom “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” the dental industry’s obsession with sugar has caused it to create solutions for problems it made itself, and the pathogens which cause tooth decay and periodontal disease are FUCKING PATHOGENS which need to be addressed and treated. Sugar heals wounds and injuries and is antibacterial, so why is that not the case in the mouth? But it is. Most interestingly is the fact that fructose, the supposed doom of tooth health, is actually toxic to the pathogen responsible for tooth decay, Streptococcus mutans. This study shows activation of stress in the microbe when exposed to fructose, and though this study focuses on the role of sucrose in S. mutans biofilm synthesis, it actually shows that fructose strongly inhibits biofilm formation. As humans we have been eating carbohydrates for millennia. Sugar is not something which has just shown up in our diet, and the role of fructose in sucrose is specifically its antibiotic properties. That’s why it’s added to products like jams and jellies and other preserves, because it is strongly antibiotic. Fructose serves to inhibit microbial access to glucose. That is why S. mutans responds to sucrose by growing biofilm, because the biofilm buffers it from the effects of releasing fructose. The major point missing from dental research is the liberation of fructose from sucrose by salivary enzymes to promote the same antibacterial activity, our own body already activating the inherent protective nature of this compound along side which we have evolved for millennia. That we can buy sugar in a bag is certainly a relatively new development in the course of the human diet, but consumption of sugar has always been high in most populations of human beings throughout our history. Fruit is one of the most widely available natural foods for mammals, especially for the enterprising human being, which is why today we possess such an abundance of varieties and cultivars, never mind all the wild varieties which are still available. Fruit also contains as much or more sugar as all the desserts and soda we consume on a daily basis. A soda only has 1 gram more sugar than an apple (per 100g). Of course, it’s better to get sugar from great food sources, not because of all that bull crap about fiber and shit, which is an entire other argument discussed in my book that I’m not patient enough to get into right now, but because fruit tends to contain less crap like pesticides (if organic), glyphosate, plastics, and other harmful chemicals. Consuming as much fruit as is available to you can go a long way in promoting great oral health as this blind and randomized study demonstrates when kid’s sugar consumption through fruit rose almost 300%. This study is admittedly short, but it demonstrates what a real, useful study done with consideration and principled investigation should look like. Studies which call people on the phone and interview them about their dietary habits, lack strict scientific practices, or rely too heavily on conclusions from laboratory rather than biological conditions should be met with strong skepticism. In the case of oral health, it is clear to me both from my research and personal experience that good, organic, less-refined sugar and foods high in sugar not only do not cause tooth decay, they protect us from the most severe of oral diseases and should be a considerable part of the diet.

My book contains more information on how to address existing periodontal disease and those which originate from oral microbes such as cardiovascular problems, thyroid disease, and even cancer. If you do have diabetes you can learn about the real etiology behind the illness and how to treat it, or you can learn about the science behind weight loss, how diet sodas make us fat, why sugar helps to cure depression, or you can just make some doughnuts to celebrate.