Wake up and gargle the coffee

By 3. July 2014Blog, Taste

Coffee has many good properties: it helps a lot of us to start the day, to continue staring at that computer screen for another few hours, or as a nice drink following a big meal. But what you probably did not know was that coffee also helps to prevent tooth decay, or so says a paper published in the journal Letters in Applied Microbiology.

So how have they tested this? Well, teeth kindly donated by children (let’s hope they were as generous as the tooth fairy) were broken into fragments and divided into 4 groups: the treatment group with coffee, the negative control with pure water, the positive control with antibiotics and the blank group which had nothing done to them. The first three groups were incubated for a week in growth medium containing human saliva aimed at simulating the human mouth before the treatments began.

They found that the group given coffee and the positive control had an increase in calcium in the liquid consistent with bacterial cell death. This increase was not observed in the negative control were it actually decreased.

Now if we could just sort out the problem with the tooth staining we could be on to a dental winner.

Click here to go to the abstract on the Letters in Applied Microbiology webpage.