Hannah and Kathryn's Science Fair Project

"Acid Attack"

Are sports drinks (and other choices) dissolving your teeth?

    The purpose of our project was to see what sports drinks do to teeth; to see if sports dinks are damaging to teeth; and to see how many people drink sports drinks and how often they drink them

Sports drinks have a negative effect on teeth.

Many children drink sports drinks.

    Mettler analytical balance, pH paper, 6 baby food jars, Gatorade, Powerade, Pepsi, apple juice, vinegar, water, 6 tooth samples, pair of tweezers, survey sheets, plastic bags.

Barren, RP, et al. (2003) "Dental Erosion in Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease". JCDA, 69:2, 84-89.

Young, WG. (2002) "The Oral Medicine of tooth Wear". Oral Health, 92:11, 39-63.

http://www.somerset-health.org.uk/healthcare/dental_erosion.html

Dental erosion - the loss of tooth enamel caused by acid attack. It affects the whole surface of the tooth. Progressive loss of enamel leads to shrinking and wearing of the tooth and crumbling at the biting edges. Over time, the dentin is exposed and the teeth become very sensitive.

pH - in this case, a measure of how acid a liquid is. The lower the pH, the more acid the liquid is. Neutral is 7.

Analytical balance - a balance that can weigh things accurately to 0.0001g

    We first weighed our six tooth samples on the Mettler analytical balance. Next, using pH paper, we measured the pH of the six liquids we were using: Gatorade, Powerade, Pepsi, apple juice, vinegar and water. We put some of each liquid into each jar, and then used tweezers to pick up each tooth sample and put one in each jar of liquid. The samples stayed there for three weeks.

    After these three weeks, we took the teeth samples out of the jars. We then compared each sample in appearance to the one that had been in water. We weighed the samples again to see if the weights had changed after three weeks soaking in the liquids.

    We also constructed a survey to see if children drank sports drinks and how often they drank them. The survey was given to volunteers ages 7-15 years. We tallied the results.

    All of the samples (except water) showed a change in colour and weight after 17 days in the liquids. The weight loss in the two sports drinks and apple juice were very similar. We were surprised that the Pepsi tooth sample showed only a 4.5% decrease compared to 15.2% and 15.8% for the Gatorade and Powerade. The vinegar showed the most change at 86.55%.

    We found that most of the people surveyed drink sports drinks. While most had them only once or twice per week, eleven people drank them 3-6 times per week. Fewer people drank colas and most of them had less than four times a week.

Project Summary

Kathryn’s mom is a dentist. She sees kids with teeth problems involving sports drinks. We thought it would be a good idea to do a science project on it.

We learned that sports drinks have a negative effect on teeth. A lot of kids drink sports drinks not knowing what it is doing to their teeth.

Our hypotheses and conclusions matched. We guessed that sports drinks did have a negative effect on teeth and that lots of kids drank sports drinks. We were right.

We learned that apple juice does the most damage to teeth. Pepsi did the second least damage ( which was very surprising).

It was going to the lab and weighing the teeth on the Mettler analytical balance.

Dental Erosion Info

More on Erosion