Episode description

We all know that sugar is bad for our teeth.

But... how did we come to know that?

It’s fairly common to see a healthy set of pearly whites now, but scroll back just a few decades, this wasn’t the case. A study in Sweden in the 1930’s found that even 3 year old children had cavities in 83% of their teeth.

That’s bad. That’s real bad.

See, the Swedes love their sweets. They even have a special term for Saturday Candy! 

With the knowledge we have today, the connection between candy consumption and cavities is blatantly obvious. But back then, they were still trying to figure out why people had black teeth… or no teeth at all. 

In fact during the World Wars, toothlessness was so prevalent in the United States that the military restricted recruits to men who had six teeth intact. As long as you had six teeth, you were good to go.

But what was to be done? At that point, dentists were divided on the cause of dental decay.  Was it due to an underlying disease? Was it due to overall diet? Or… was it candy? (Thankfully people had figured out by then that tooth worms weren’t to blame).

So, The National Board of Sweden decided to undertake a long term nutritional study to determine the root cause of dental cavities once and for all. Aptly named the Vipeholm Hospital sugar experiments!

They did in fact determine the cause (yes, it’s sugar), but the way they went about it was, well… not so ethical. 

Sources 

• The New Yorker -  How to eat candy like a Swedish person
• History of Dentistry - History of Dental Caries and Cariology
• CNN Health - The Swedish cavity experiments: How dentists rotted the teeth of the mentally handicapped to study candy’s effect
• Atlas Obscura - An Adorable Swedish Tradition Has Its Roots in Human Experimentation
• Wikipedia - Vipeholm experiments

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