Education and diet in the prevention of caries in the preschool child.

Caries prevalence studies of preschool children today show that caries is increasing in many of the developing countries. This is often blamed on a situation where confectionary, soft drinks and refined sugar-containing snacks have become easily available. Studies in Sweden in 1980 on 4 year olds showed a high sucrose consumption, and an increasing proportion of the daily energy intake coming from snacks. Recent studies from Norway have confirmed that the dietary pattern is established in early infancy during the period of primary socialization. In Sweden, nearly all children are taken regularly by their parents to child health centres for regular check-ups and vaccinations. In these centres dental health education is given when the child is about 6 months and 18 months of age. Children of refugees and immigrants in Sweden have a considerably higher prevalence of dental caries than Swedish children. A dental health education programme at the child health centre to Finnish immigrant parents has been carried out and evaluated. The information was given on three separate occasions in Finnish to one test group of Finnish parents, and in Swedish to another test group of Finnish parents. A third Finnish group was given information twice in Swedish. When the children were 3 years of age, the dental health of the group where the parents had been given information three times in Finnish was equally as good as the dental health of matched Swedish 3 year olds.