Tangy citric acid sweets like Haribo's as the cause of the child tooth decay epidemic

[GH64]

I have an idea about what may be causing the ongoing tooth decay epidemic in children: it is the tangy but erosive citric acid contained in Haribo sweets (and similar tangy sweets).

Citric acid is particularly erosive to tooth enamel: one study found citric acid far more erosive to teeth than the phosphoric acid found in soft drinks like Coca Cola.

The Haribo brand of children's sweets that now dominate the UK market are loaded with citric acid, as well as malic acid, in order to create their tangy flavour. If you look the ingredients in Haribo's sweets (click on the word "Ingredients"), pretty much all their sweets contain citric acid.

In the last decade or so, Haribo sweets have rapidly come to dominate the UK market, and this rise of popularity has coincided with the child tooth decay epidemic, which began about a decade ago.

I have found that if I suck a lot of tangy citric acid-containing sweets every day like Haribo, after some days I start to feel sensitivity appearing in my teeth, suggesting that the enamel has been thinned by this acid.

Once I stop eating these sweets, the sensitivity eventually disappears after a few weeks, as the enamel is slowly rebuilt from the minerals calcium and phosphate in the saliva (this is how teeth are normally rebuilt), this rebuilding being helped along by the fluoride in toothpaste.

Here is a BBC article on the current child tooth decay epidemic.

Obviously all children should have access to dental care, but tooth decay doesn't develop because the child can't access the dentist. It develops because of dietary sugar and poor brushing.

No doubt the decay will become more severe if the child can't access dental care, but a dentist can't magically stop you getting tooth decay from eating excessive lemon sherbet.

Tooth decay is caused by the number of sugar attacks on your teeth, not just sweets. It's likely that while you ate more sweets as a child your overall diet probably contained less sugar attacks and you probably had good oral hygiene if you didn't develop decay. Eating one bag of sweets in one go is less likely to cause decay than snacking on sugar containing foods throughout the day. Bearing in mind sugar is not just sweets, our modern diet contains a lot of sugar

Tooth enamel (more properly known as hydroxyapatite) gets rebuilt all the time by minerals present in the saliva. It is an ongoing process called remineralisation.
When you use fluoride toothpaste, though, this does not build up normal hydroxyapatite on teeth, but rather builds up the teeth with fluorapatite.
Fluorapatite is is stronger and more resistant to acid attack than the natural hydroxyapatite, which is why brushing with fluoride toothpaste can help prevent tooth decay.
Teeth are remineralised under alkaline conditions, but they are demineralised (dissolved away) under acid conditions.

chat GPT - is it really you?!

I can’t eat the fizzy sweets.
If I forget, brushing my teeth is really painful for a few days after, where the sugar has attacked at the gum line, in a way that other sweet things won’t..

My kids have fluoride smeared on their teeth every 6 months. Lots of kids don’t.

they have typically sugary diets but not a single filling between them.

My understanding is that the child tooth decay epidemic started about 20 years ago. This article says "one study performed by the NHS shows that tooth decay among children aged five and under has actually increased by as much as 24% since 2006".

So something must have slowly changed, starting around 20 years ago, in order for this increase in child dental carries to appear.

I doubt that children are brushing their teeth more poorly than they did previously.

If you want to find a cause for the tooth decay epidemic, you need to identify a factor that first appeared around 20 years ago, coinciding with the start of the epidemic.

If you look at Haribo, they have expanded their market share a lot in the UK over the last two decades, and they currently have a market share of 21%. So that's a lot of kids sucking Haribo citric-acid filled sweets.

That's why it occurred to me that Haribo might be the culprit.

I actually was given a large packet of Haribo sweets recently, and started sucking these every evening. The tansy flavour of the citric acid is irresistible (probably why Haribo are so popular).

Anyway, after several days of sucking these sweets, I developed sensitivity in all my teeth, due I believe to erosion of the enamel from the citric acid. This is not the first time this has happened to me with tangy citric acid sweets. I then started wondering whether these citric acid sweets might explain the rise in child tooth decay.

Tooth enamel does rebuild, it is a well-known process called remineralisation. In another post above, I described the process in detail. Tooth enamel rebuilds when the mouth is more alkaline, but the enamel dissolved away when the mouth is more acid. Hence why acidic foods and sweets are bad for teeth.

Sugar does not itself erode tooth enamel, but bacteria in the mouth convert sugar into acids, which then dissolves the enamel.

Remineralisation is different to “rebuilding”. If a patient has lost their enamel due to erosion or tooth wear I can’t just give them a tube of fluoride toothpaste and tell them to keep their mouth alkaline and it will magically rebuild. Once lost the enamel is lost.
You’re asking what happened 20 years ago? Tony Blair came to power and changed NHS dentistry for the worse

That information came directly from a post I made about tooth enamel on another forums many years ago, long before AI bots. I spent many hours researching it.

Dentists cannot do anything to prevent tooth decay. They just fill the cavities once they appear. So any changes in dentistry are not relevant.

Grazing is what has changed.
it is not how much sugary stuff you eat but how often your teeth are under attack from the acid produced by the sugar that’s the problem.

you can brush , with fluoride, 27 times a day but if you are ingesting sugar frequently you will still get decay.

The average U.K. child eats 8 times a day , 98.5% of U.K. 7 years olds eat more than the recommended amount of free sugar every day.

We are a nation of grazers , we sip on drinks and nibble on food all day long and quite often just before bed which is the worst time as saliva decreases overnight and so , even if you’ve brushed your teeth afterwards, the sugar sits on your teeth for longer overnight. Even the things we think are healthy like granola bars and smoothies are loaded with free sugar . www.cdc.gov/diabetes/healthy-eating/spotting-hidden-sugars-in-everyday-foods.html

We eat a lot of processed food with hidden sugars … maltose,dextrose, hydrolysed starch , agave syrup, honey etc and we eat them often.

We are drinking a lot of fruit juice , eating a lot of yoghurts etc https://www.nutrition.org.uk/nutritional-information/sugar/

We are sipping energy drinks, protein shakes , flavoured coffees ,fruit teas etc in cups we carry around bathing our teeth in sugar for longer overnight periods of time. https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/nutrition/sugar-salt-and-fat/sugary-drinks/drinks-best-to-worst

There's a culture now of kids giving out sweets on their birthday. DD is in a class of 30 so barely a week goes by without a bag of Haribo or a maoam bar coming home in her bag. As it happens DD isn't bothered by these sorts of sweets so they just go in a box and we use them at Halloween.

I actually never buy DD sweets apart from an Easter egg. Between the chocolate she's given by others at Christmas and Easter plus what comes home in party bags or whatever she has a year round supply of chocolate.

I agree, it's more likely the constant drinking of juices and dizzy pop, lack of Dentist care and unsupervised brushing.

Yup loads of kids also handed out sweets for Christmas so as you can imagine they were coming out with about five different bags of haribos and lollies a day in the build up to Christmas.
I don't remember this being such a big thing when I was a kid and I'm only in my twenties

That's not true. I have a great dentist and she gave advice in teeth cleaning, helped clean teeth and put on fluoride caps to prevent decay. These were like a paint.

She also put a metal cap over a baby tooth that had decayed a little, this wasn't a filling. It just stayed on the tooth until it fell out, but it stopped it getting worse or spreading.

But if you don’t change diet the decay would carry on getting worse and despite the fluoride and stainless steel crown the tooth would have been lost.

The research has been done and although sweets are not great they are not the major contributor to free sugar in U.K. children’s diet which is grossly high in sugar.
Biscuits , cakes and sugary drinks are the major contributor for children , biscuits , jams and sweet spreads for adults.

Well I can report that we didn't change diet. We did improve brushing significantly (sen child with autism so this was a huge challenge) and the tooth was not lost. In fact 8 years along the line he has a lovely set of adult teeth and no fillings

But I think without access to dentistry during the toothbrushing challenge years it would have been so much worse.

I'm not for a second suggesting diet plays no part, but I think people underestimate good dentistry and brushing techniques too.

OP you're writing like a robot

That's probably true for regular sweets, but with with Haribo confectionary, we are not talking about regular sweets, but rather sweets loaded with citric acid, an acid which has been found to be highly erosive for tooth enamel (see the study I linked to in the first post).

With ordinary sugar-containing sweets, the sugar in these sweets first has to be converted into acid by the bacteria in the mouth, before it can erode enamel. But with Haribo sweets, they contain a lot of citric acid, which starts dissolving your enamel the moment you put these sweets in your mouth.

You might like to try slowly sucking a few Haribo sweets for an hour each day. I think you will find that after doing this for several days in a row, your teeth will become sensitive to hot and cold drinks, due to the enamel erosion. This is what happened to me.

You will not get this sensitive with regular sugar-containing sweets, because they do not erode teeth as quickly as citric acid sweets.

If you suck any sweet for an hour every day you will get massive decay. You see this a lot with people who suck mints for bad breath , or people sucking sweets to combat dry mouth .

The combination of acid and sweet is also fatal with fruit juice, smoothies and fruit teas which are sipped during the day . Orange juice is extremely acidic as are many fruit teas.

The takeaway is sucking any sweet or sipping on any sweet/acidic drink during the day is very bad for oral health.

If you look at the statistics fruit juice makes up a far greater part of peoples free sugar intake than sweets , let alone haribos.

No sweets are good for teeth and acid is bad for your teeth and digestive system. So many more young people getting digestive disorders like acid reflux which can be caused by excess acid in foods - look at your tins and jars - full of acid!
Agree with all PPs who say that the snack culture is ridiculous now for kids and maybe even worse than when I had my children (20 years ago). I also got a lot of fillings as a teen from chewing bubble gum - any prolonged contact with sugar is going to do it. As an adult I've barely had a filling and I'm in my 50s now so it has to do with food. My DCs are lucky with their teeth but also had that enamel coating from the dentist to protect their back tetth once they grew in.

Sure, any sugar-containing sweets do not do any favours for your teeth.

But I've never ended up with teeth sensitivity with any regular sweets. This only happens when I suck citric-acid containing sweets. You have the combination of sugar and acid, creating double trouble for the enamel.

Remember that sweets have always been around, so they cannot explain why children have been getting more decay in the last 10 or 20 years.

Whereas these Haribo sweets have come to dominate the market only in the last 20 years, so they are a possible explanation of the child tooth decay epidemic.

Sorry but the research shows that children are grazing more ie eating, on average , 8 times a day in the U.K.

The research also shows that children are eating more processed food and that processed food contains hidden free sugars.

The research shows 98.5% of U.K. 7 year olds are eating far in excess of recommended daily free sugars.

If you read the links above it shows the research.

In your case haribos have been a problem , that is unfortunate but you have realised the problem in your case , however UK wide it is excessive consumption of free sugars, particularly in fromage frais and juices in younger children , and baked goods and juices in older children that is the problem. See the graphs already posted

It’s not just down to the consumption of tangfastics…

parents regularly giving their young children fizzy pop, crisps and chocolate then not adequately brushing their teeth is the more general answer here. Especially the fizzy pop issue.

I could not see in your link where it says children are consuming more sugary foods or sweets in the last 10 or 20 years, when the epidemic hit.

It could well be that kids are consuming more sugary foods though.

Sugar is certainly a culprit. After I gave up sugar in my tea and coffee at the age of 25, and at the same time switched to diet versions of drinks, I have not had a single new filling for decades.

Whereas before 25, I had a new filling almost every year.