Credit: (left) UZH; (right) 120/Creative Commons 
 
 Europe's best-known mummy wasn't just a medical mess; he also had terrible teeth, according to a new study. Ötzi (inset photo), a Stone Age man who died atop a glacier about 5300 years ago, suffered from severe gum disease and cavities. His teeth, back and front, were also heavily worn from chewing coarse grain and use as a "third hand" for gripping tools and cutting. When Ötzi was discovered atop a glacier on the Austro-Italian border, his frozen corpse was intensively studied. But no one took a close look at his teeth until now. Using 3D computer tomography (a CAT scan), the hunter's mouth could be examined for clues as to the life he led. The results, published this week in the European Journal of Oral Sciences, suggest that Ötzi didn't have it easy. A fall or other accident killed one of his front teeth, still discolored millennia later. And he may have had a small stone, gone unnoticed in his whole-grain bread or gruel, to thank for a broken molar. That gruel may be the culprit behind Ötzi's cavities and gum disease, too. (An arrow on the right in CAT scan above marks places where the bone is eaten away by infection, the left arrow points at deep cavities.) In the late Stone Age, humans were increasingly incorporating coarsely ground grain into their diets. The uptick in starches, the researchers suggest, could explain the increasing frequency of cavities in teeth from the time—a problem that's been with us ever since. 
 
 
 
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 Phys Ed Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness. 
 
 Vigorous exercise is good for almost all of the body — except perhaps the teeth, according to a surprising new study of athletes. The study, published in The Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, found that heavy training may contribute to dental problems in unexpected ways. 
 
 There have been hints in the past that athletes could have a heightened risk for cavities and other oral issues. In a study published last year in The British Journal of Sports Medicine, dentists who examined 278 athletes at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London reported that a majority displayed “poor oral health,” including high levels of tooth decay, often in conjunction with gum disease and erosion of the tooth enamel. The athletes came from the United States and Europe as well as less-developed parts of the world, and most had access to good-quality dentistry, although many had not visited a dentist in the last year. 
 
 The study didn’t examine why the athletes were at such high risk of dental problems, although many of us might assume that sugary sports drinks and bars would be a primary cause. Other studies, however, have found little if any link between consuming sports drinks and developing cavities. 
 
 So to better understand what is going on inside the mouths of athletes, researchers with the dental school at University Hospital Heidelberg in Germany and other institutions recruited 35 competitive triathletes and 35 age- and gender-matched healthy adults who were not athletes. 
 
 All of the volunteers visited the hospital’s dental lab for a full oral examination, including collection of their saliva after they had been sitting quietly. They also completed questionnaires about their diets, including consumption of sports drinks and other beverages, their normal oral hygiene routines, and their exercise habits, if any. 
 
 Fifteen of the athletes also completed an increasingly strenuous run of about 35 minutes on an outdoor track, during which their saliva was collected several times. 
 
 Then the researchers compared the groups’ teeth and spit, which turned out to be different in telling ways. 
 
 Compared with the control group, the athletes showed significantly greater erosion of their tooth enamel. They also tended to have more cavities, with the risk increasing as an athlete’s training time grew. Over all, the more hours that an athlete spent working out, the more likely he or she was to have cavities. 
 
 The researchers found no correlation, however, between consuming sports drinks or any other elements of the athletes’ diets and their oral health. 
 
 They also found no differences in the amount or chemical make-up of their volunteers’ saliva after the athletes and the non-athletes had been at rest. 
 
 But that situation changed when the athletes worked out. During their experimental runs, the amount of saliva that they produced progressively lessened, meaning that their mouths became drier, regardless of whether they consumed water or other beverages during the workout. The saliva’s chemical composition also shifted, growing more alkaline as the workout continued. Excess alkalinity in saliva is thought to contribute to the development of tartar plaques on teeth and other problems. 
 
 The extent of the changes in the athletes’ saliva during a workout were something of a surprise, said Dr. Cornelia Frese, a senior dentist at University Hospital Heidelberg, who led the study. 
 
 “We had thought sports drinks and nutrition might have the most detrimental influence on dental decay,” she said, “but we saw no direct link” between them. Instead, it was the changes in saliva during exercise that differentiated the athletes’ mouths from those of the control group. Since saliva “has a very protective function” for teeth, Dr. Frese said, having less of it or a chemically different version during exercise could be problematic. 
 
 But, she cautions, this study was small, short-term and in many ways unrepresentative of the oral risks most of us would likely face from exercise. “The athletes participating in our study had a mean weekly training time of nine hours,” she said. They were, in technical parlance, hard-core. 
 
 “All we can say” based on the data from this group, she said, “is that prolonged endurance training might be a risk factor for oral health.” Whether less frequent or intense exercise would likewise affect oral health is uncertain but unlikely, Dr. Frese said. 
 
 Still there are a few precautions that anyone who exercises and has concerns about their oral health might want to take, she said. Drinking water during workouts could be a start, although the connection between hydration and oral health is not scientifically established, Dr. Frese said. More generally, brush and floss, as you know you should. And if you’re a serious endurance athlete, consider visiting a dentist with a specialty in sports dentistry, she said. The goal is to ensure that your teeth remain in as good shape as the rest of you. ||||| If you've ever grabbed a sugar-free drink for your kids instead of juice because you think it's safe for those darling pearly whites, you might want to rethink your decision. 
 
 Scientists from the Melbourne University’s Oral Health Cooperative Research Centre tested a wide range of sugar-free soft drinks, sports drinks and sweets and found that many of them can be just as harmful to teeth as their sugared counterparts due to their chemical composition. 
 
 Sugar can destroy teeth when it is fermented by bacteria to produce acid that leads to decay. The condition is extremely common: In the United States, about one in four children ages 2 to 5 had dental caries or cavities in their first set of teeth, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted in 2011–2012. Among those aged 6–11, 21 percent had had cavities in their permanent teeth. And among those 12 to 19, it was a whopping 58 percent. 
 
 [Cutting sugar from kids’ diets appears to have a beneficial effect in just 10 days] 
 
 While sugar-free foods won't lead directly to cavities, the researchers found that many can strip away a tooth's outer layer -- leading to chalkiness of the tooth's surface, pitting, opacity, tooth sensitivity and other issues. That's because they contain acids like phosphoric acid (found in colas) or citric acid (found mainly in lemon and lime flavored drinks). 
 
 “Therefore, banning sugar-containing beverages from schools may have positive health effects for reducing obesity, diabetes and dental caries but it may not reduce the risk of dental erosion," Eric Reynolds, an oral health professor, and his co-authors wrote in the Australian Dental Journal. 
 
 [A periodic table guide to sweeteners] 
 
 The researchers tested 15 soft drinks sold in schools on healthy human molars that had been extracted and found that all of them led to significant erosion of the dental enamel, with no difference between sugared and sugar-free drinks. This table from their report shows that the sugared and non-sugared soft drinks are the worst in terms of their acid content, followed by sports drinks. 
 
 In testing eight brands of sports drinks, they found that all but two of them caused significant loss and softening of the enamel surface -- although the effect was significantly less severe than with a soft drink like Coca-Cola, which was used for comparison. Note how water, which was used as a control, actually had a positive effect on the surface enamel. 
 
 [In letter to their baby, Mark Zuckerberg and wife pledge to give away $45b — and imagine ‘a world without suffering from disease’] 
 
 Standard pH tests, which indicate how acidic a liquid is, show that sugar-free candy can be similarly destructive. Of 32 commercially available sugar-free confections that were tested, 22 had a pH level below 4.5, which is below healthy levels required to maintain the integrity of tooth enamel and prevent tooth demineralization. 
 
 What does all this mean, practically speaking? 
 
 The researchers recommended that when it comes to drinks you may want to minimize both sugared and sugar-substitute beverages and choose the most basic, old-fashioned way of rehydrating -- water. Fluorinated water is even better. If you must drink or eat an acidic product, rinse your mouth out with water afterwards and wait an hour before grabbing that toothbrush. Brushing immediately can remove the softened layer of tooth. 
 
 Choose mint or menthol flavored sugar-free confections and avoid those that are fruit flavored, particularly lemon. 
 
 Sugar-free gum is still okay. In fact, the researchers said it can stimulate saliva flow, rinse away acids and reharden softened tooth enamel. 
 
 The American Beverage Association, an industry group, said in a statement on Monday that an individual's susceptibility to dental caries and erosion is determined by a number of factors, including lifestyle, diet and genetics as well as the types of foods consumed, the length of time foods are retained in the mouth and the level of oral hygiene. 
 
 "Characterizing beverages, such as juices and soft drinks, as a unique cause of dental caries or tooth erosion is overly simplistic," the ABA said. The organization also noted that low- and no-calorie sweeteners have been proven safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and its counterparts around the world and that it feels there is "no reason why the average individual should avoid them." 
 
 This post has been updated. 
 
 Read more: 
 
 In letter to their baby, Mark Zuckerberg and wife pledge to give away $45b — and imagine ‘a world without suffering from disease’ 
 
 Cutting sugar from kids’ diets appears to have a beneficial effect in just 10 days 
 
 A periodic table guide to sweeteners 
 
 In chilling accounts, Paris doctors tell of war-like effort to save hundreds of wounded after attacks 
 
 Modern men tend to overeat like cavemen as a way of showing off to women 
 
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– Cavities are far from a modern woe, reveals a new study of a 5,300-year-old "ice mummy." "Ötzi" didn't just have the bad luck of dying on a glacier, he also suffered from terrible teeth, reports Science. Though his remains were discovered on the Austro-Italian border in 1991, his teeth had never been assessed. Researchers circled back to a CAT scan taken in 2005 to review his "oral cavity" and "study evolutionary aspects of oral disease," per their abstract in the European Journal of Oral Sciences. What they determined, as translated from dental-speak ("the poor periodontal condition of the Iceman's dentition, eg, loss of alveolar bone...") by Science: a discolored front tooth as the result of some sort of accident, a broken molar, cavities, and gum disease. A diet involving gruel may have been responsible for the latter two conditions. In fact, the researchers believe that the rise of starches in the diets of the time may be linked to a corresponding increase in cavities.