A method to assess cariogenic potential of foodstuffs.

By feeding rats their essential nutrition through gastric intubation and test foods on a programmed feeder it is possible to determine the cariogenicity of many foods in animals. Because the test food is the only substance that contacts teeth, all carious lesions that develop can be ascribed solely to the ingestion of the test food. Caries scores can be expressed as ratios of those occurring when animals are fed pure sucrose, thereby comparisons can be made from one experiment to another. The number of carious lesions that develop is directly related to the frequency of ingestion of sucrose. In addition, frequency of ingestion of sucrose has a significant effect on the establishment of S mutans in the mouths of animals. We believe that the approach used here can establish differences in the cariogenic potential of foods in a simple, unequivocal, and reproducible manner.