At Home Experiment! Which drinks stain our kids teeth the most?
All of us are at home a lot more than usual these days! And with school being out, many of us are looking for creative ideas to keep our kids entertained and learning! Here’s a really easy and fun experiment you can try at home to illustrate how some of our favorite drinks may stain our teeth!
Spoiler alert: you may be really surprised by the results!
Eggshells are loaded with Calcium, and so is the enamel on our teeth! Sugar and acids are very harmful to teeth. Acids actually dissolve the enamel, giving bacteria an inroad to begin decaying it, and sugar promotes decay (cavities).
When you soak eggs for 24 hours or more, you can quickly tell how they might be impacting your kid’s teeth.
What you need:
A number of your drinks from around your house. We chose items we already had and all drink from time to time. There are definitely drinks out there that might do more damage than these, but we wanted to use things our kids are familiar with.
Cups or jars
Labels
Eggs. We did not hard-boil ours in advance.
And here’s what we found 24 hours later!! There were some definite surprises.
WOW. WOW. WOW.
How about that Cranberry Juice!?!
A few observations:
Cranberry Juice looks the worst - with actual hot spots of decay and build up
Soda is the next bad egg, with blotches and erosion of the egg already starting
Tea has a consistent discoloring of the whole egg
Orange Juice was mild at first glance, but the same effects on the Cranberry egg were starting to show up here - blotches and globs.
Milk actually LOOKS normal at first, but there was a coating and filmy layer that you could scrape off.
Water - well that was in there for comparison!
The next part of our lesson was getting out an old toothbrush and toothpaste. It was very satisfying to scrub the junk away.
But, the brushing only helped so much….
Here’s what we found:
Cranberry Juice build-up scrubbed off well, but left very bad stains underneath.
Soda was hard to scrub off at all!
Tea improved after brushing, but still created a noticeable stain
Orange Juice improved, but stains remained
Milk scrubbed off pretty well, but the egg wasn’t as smooth and clean as the water egg
Pro tips from Dr. Jones and Dr. Pate:
WATER always wins!
If you are going to drink sugary or acidic drinks, limit them, and drink water afterwards.
And, BRUSH THOSE TEETH!
We’d love to see what might happen with some other popular drinks: Gatorade, fruit punch, grape soda, lemonade, coffee! If you try this at home, TAG us on social media with the results, @smallbitespd. We’d love to send you a Small Bites care package!
We’re looking forward to when Covid-19 has subsided and we can be back in the office treating our patients. In the meantime, keep up those healthy habits at home, and we’ll see you soon!!
