 Nearly a half century ago, at a Senate hearing on nutrition, a Dr. Neisel from Tufts suggested that sugary breakfast cereals should be banned in the best interest of all concerned, particularly children, perhaps not surprisingly, since he was a professor of dental medicine. A dozen different foods and beverages were ranked for their karyogenic potential, their cavity-causing potential, by implanting electrodes in the mouths of study subjects to measure the amount of acid produced in the plaque between their teeth after eating a variety of different things. And the two breakfast cereals they tested topped the charts. If you drink some sugar water, the pH on your teeth plunges within minutes into the acidic danger zone and stays there for an hour, eating away at our teeth. Caramel is worse. It sticks your teeth, so it stays longer down deeper into the acid zone. But check out the breakfast cereals. It goes down and stays down even two hours later. We've known about the cavity-causing potential of pre-sweetened breakfast cereals for decades. A dozen such cereals were put to the test to measure the level of tooth-dissolving acid produced by the strain of bacteria that causes cavities. As one might expect, the cavity-generating potential was found to be related directly to the sugar content of each cereal, though frosted mini-weats was an exception. Despite having 40% less sugar than cereals like fruit loops or frosted flakes, frosted mini-weats caused the greatest calcium demineralization, a ranking second only to the now-defunct powdered donuts in cavity-causing potential. A study of 28 different cereals concluded that unquestionably, the sugar concentrations in these 28 cereals were sufficiently high to qualify them as dentally dangerous. Looking to be good corporate citizens, General Mills took their super-sugar crisp, which was 44% sugar, and reduced the sugar font size. Then caring about children's health so much, they removed sugar altogether from the name. Kellogg's cares, too, though sugar smacks is apparently where space energy comes from. It doesn't sound as wholesome as honey smacks. Same cereal, healthier name. They did remove sugar from corn pops and frosted flakes, I mean, well, from the front of the boxes. And cookie crisp? I think the fact that it's made by a dog food company says it all. But General Mills protests a study they did in which teens were randomized to receive free cereal delivered to their homes or not didn't seem to get any more cavities, proving breakfast cereal is harmless for your teeth. Anyone care to take a guess at the study's fatal flaw? The kids in the control group were free to just have their parents buy their sugary cereals from the store, and so both the experimental and the control groups may have been eating the same amount of cereal, but with the only difference being that the experimental group received its cereal free and the control group had to pay for it. What did the General Mills researchers have to say for themselves? Dietary control so rigid as to exclude the ingestion of cereals by children would be difficult if not impossible. But then it's not a control group. That's like this Kellogg's funded paper saying, yeah, if we didn't feed kids sugar, then we could virtually eliminate cavities, but this ideal is impractical, so let's take the middle ground and come up with all fruit loops with marshmallows. But at least they're fruit-shaped, or at least fruity-shaped. Observational studies have also failed to link breakfast cereal consumption with cavity prevalence, though, or incidence. This is presumed to be because eating it with milk helps clear food particles from the mouth, though frosted mini-weets did lead to the same sugar retention in the saliva 10 minutes after intake with or without milk. The other cereals were cleared out faster. Sugared cereals are often eaten as snacks by kids, though, without milk. And 10 minutes after the ingestion of dry, sugary cereals, you're left with nearly 50 times the sugar residue in your mouth compared to swishing the sugar down in liquid form. It is inconceivable, conclude the researchers to contest the fact that frequent between-meal ingestion of foods like high sugar cereal is dentally hazardous. Whether or not mealtime eating of sugared cereals induced cavities is not the point, because kids snack on them between meals, they have a marked potential for dental danger.