Back in the day

As a child, a certain time of year would come and I’d get excited. This wasn’t Christmas or my Birthday, this was a visit to the dentist. The dentist you see, was an exciting place; massive futuristic chair, toys I didn’t have in the waiting room and a cupboard full of sweets and stickers for the good kids. I you see, was one of the good kids. Let the dentist poke around in my mouth a bit and then be rewarded with a sticker and a sweet. Fantastic!

Growing up

As you grow up, you’re given more advice on how to care for parts of your body: Don’t eat fatty foods, don’t have too many sweets or sugary drinks etc. This advice is largely ignored, because the best things in life aren’t necessarily the most tasty. As a child and even as an adult, I will regularly go through large amounts of sugar in my diet.

Fizzy Drinks

One of these things you’re supposed to stay away from, is fizzy drinks. From about the age of 7, I started to drink coke pretty regularly. Not always coke coke, but some random brand of it. Now, luckily I always followed the advice of dentists: Brush your teeth twice a day for a few minutes at a time, never brush straight after eating or drinking something with sugar (as it’s abrasive) and don’t eat or drink anything after brushing your teeth before bed. This excellent advice has resulted in my total filling count, at the age of 27, as 0.

Complacency

Growing up, you realise that a lot of things people tell you are actually wrong or misinformed, or you simply haven’t heard of something because nobody ever told you. And so, my tale is a sad one. After 15 years of drinking coke, I decided I was fat. As the average 2 litre bottle of coke contains 800 calories from sugar (1/3 the daily recommended intake for an average male), and as coke was my main source of liquid (as I like neither tea nor coffee, and water is a little bland) I switched to diet coke. Diet coke after 15 years of coke tastes foul for a good couple of weeks. But within the first two months I had already lost a stone, and the horrible stickyness you’re left with on your teeth from normal coke was gone. 4 years ago I went to the dentist. For the first time in 8 years. I was expecting something, but no – once again my teeth were perfect, the dentist didn’t even believe I hadn’t been for 8 years. All I required was a scale and polish, and that’s what you usually get anyway. I left happy.

Realisation

Some things in life are obvious. Some are so obvious, you don’t even realise it until somebody tells you. Now, coke / diet coke contain an ingredient known as Phospheric acid. This acid is in a low quantity, and gives coke a tangy taste and helps to preserve it on the shelf. What you may not know, is that this acid is also more corrosive than battery acid. This kind of acid is undoubtedly, bad for your teeth. But it wasn’t until I saw the dentist last week that they filled in all the gaps…

Result

I hadn’t had a filling in 27 years of life, 20 years of drinking 2 litres of coke a day. Why? Quite simply, this acid had been sterilising my teeth. That part makes coke sound like a miracle cure for tooth decay. But then comes the bad news: Imagine a stone left in an ocean for hundreds of years. It turns into a nice smooth pebble. This is what drinking such a large quantity of coke for so long has done to my teeth – the acid has washed them away and left them fairly blunt. The reason I had no fillings – there was nothing left to fill.

Conclusion

The advice the dentist gave me, was to stop drinking coke. Or anything with acid in full stop. No more fizzy drinks, no more fruit juice, just water. If I absolutely have to, use a straw to avoid getting acid on my teeth and rinse with water as soon as possible. If I continue to drink coke as my main source of liquid, within the next few years all of my teeth will require root canals or crowns. At the same time.

So here it is kids: Don’t drink battery acid. It’ll make your dentist very rich before you get to 30.