Common Causes of Tooth Decay

While sugary and acidic drinks and foods, like hard candy, coffee, soda, and juice, get all the publicity for causing tooth decay, there are a few other things that can do the same. Here are just a few of those things.

Milk
While milk may have beneficial aspects, including protein, calcium and vitamin D, it also has lactose. Lactose, like all words ending in -ose, is a type of sugar found in milk. And all forms of sugar are used by our oral bacteria as food, which is turned by them into enamel destroying acids.

Cough Syrup
Although cough syrup can definitely help you rest at night or get work done during the day, it can also erode your teeth. This is because many of them contain sucrose (white sugar), fructose (fruit sugar), and citric acids, all of which can cause decay but are added to make the active ingredients more palatable, particularly for kids. And since this is the last thing we sometimes take at night, care should be made to brush our teeth after taking it.

Swimming Pools
Swimming pools are a great way to kill countless hours with our kids during hot summer days, or to get in our daily exercise. However, most people have no idea that by spending more than six hours in a chemically treated pool per week can cause significant staining on our teeth. While the chemicals are great at killing bacteria in large bodies of water, they do a number on our oral health because of the higher pH levels they induce.

To find out more about surprising tooth-decaying causes, contact our root canal dentist in Los Angeles.

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