The toothless diet

I don’t know why I torment myself with these observations, but I’ll note that we’re already more than 10 percent of the way through 2016. That’s as good of a benchmark as any for noting our progress, or lack thereof, toward New Year resolutions.

I’ll note one resolution that backfired on one of my pals. About six years ago he went on a serious diet, and he not only drank diet soda as a replacement for the sugary kind, but he also drank diet soda to keep his belly full and stave off hunger. He told me he’d sip diet soda all day long out of a big plastic cup, starting with his commute to work in the morning and ending after dinner.

Last year, he noticed that his teeth weren’t in such great shape. After seeing a dentist, he surmised that the acidity of the soda had been eroding his tooth enamel.

I asked a dentist about this. He said that soda is acidic, so if you’re going to drink one you should just go ahead a drink it down and not make a habit of marinating your teeth in it. That made sense. But here’s something else: He said that soda isn’t the only culprit here, and that many beverages are, in fact, highly acidic as well.

A factor called “pH” is used to indicate the acidity of water-based liquids, and is also used to indicate the opposite of acidity, which is alkalinity. It’s a pretty common term. I remember a popular shampoo being advertised as “pH balanced.”

So here’s a good question for a bar bet: What does pH stand for?

I had to look up the answer. Here it is: “pH” stands for “power of hydrogen.” This speaks to the underlying chemistry of the gig, which is, of course, completely over my head.

Anyway, you’d think that the pivot point of a scale would be set at zero. But nothing involving chemistry is ever that simple, apparently. We’re up against the fact that on the great see-saw between acid and alkaline, the pivot point is level 7. So, a pH of 7 is neutral (that’s what pure water is). The further below 7 pH something is, the more acidic it is. And the further above 7 pH something is, the more alkaline it is.

As for the alkaline (also called “base”) realm, a few common examples of alkaline substances are soap, baking soda, and bleach. All I know is that when I put baking soda on my car’s battery terminals, it fizzes up (cool!) as it neutralizes the acid that the battery seeps.

Like earthquake magnitudes, the pH scale isn’t linear, it’s exponential. A movement of one unit on the pH scale involves a tenfold change in acidity.

Anyway, having suffered to understand this stuff, we can now contemplate some rough pH numbers. I rounded up a few numbers from various websites, so this is just ballpark stuff to serve as food for thought.

Grapefruit juice is about 3 pH, so that sets a useful benchmark for us.

The pH of popular colas is about 2.5; the diet flavors are generally less acidic, ranging from about 3 to 3.4.

What surprised me is just how acidic many other beverages can be, such as sports drinks and other non-carbonated products. Some stuff that you’d think is a more tooth-friendly alternative to sodas has a pH of 2.4 or so, which is even more acidic than many sodas are.

The Web has a lot of information on this subject, much of it posted by dentists. You might find some interesting results by running a search for the stuff you’re in the habit of consuming.

For the sake of context, I looked at a list of common foods, and virtually all of them had acidic pH levels, so that’s just how nature seems to work. I’m not worried about this pH thing, but it still can’t hurt to have a little awareness about it.

Tea is popular on Saipan, so I’ll mention that a 2001 British Dental Journal study, “Tooth surface pH during drinking of black tea,” concluded that black tea “may be safely recommended as a substitute for more acidic drinks as a part of preventive measures for dental erosion.” The tea used in the study had a 4.9 pH, but the tooth surfaces quickly returned to their normal pH levels.

Well, now that we’ve taken care of this subject, we can start plodding our way through the remaining 88 percent of the year.