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| Photo from cwbuecheler's photostream |
I found this lovely little nugget about slowing (and maybe eliminating?) tooth decay with cheese in a book I'm reading by Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. The book is NOT a recipe book, just factual knowledge about food.
The whole first chapter (60 pages) is all about milk, and milk products. The very last paragraph in that chapter is quoted here in its entirety:
Finally, it has been recognized for decades that eating cheese slows tooth decay, which is caused by acid secretions from relatives of a yogurt bacterium (especially Streptococcus mutans) that adhere to teeth. Just why is still not entirely clear, but it appears that eaten at the end of a meal, when streptococcal acid production is on the rise, calcium and phosphate from the cheese diffuse into the bacterial colonies and blunt the acid rise.
What that says to me is very clear: simply eating a bit of real cheese immediately at the end of the meal cuts down on tooth decay. Isn't that amazing? I've always wondered why, despite close attention to dental hygiene, I still developed tooth decay. A simple bit of food science could have saved me untold amounts of money and agony!
