Yee gads. I mostly ignored this study about diet soda being equivalent to meth or crack as far as your teeth are concerned when it showed up in my Twitter feed. I’ve mentioned here before I have periodically had a diet soda “problem” and at the time thought, well, good thing I’ve been drinking my diet soda through a straw … figured that made a big difference.
Well. This whole study is based on a dentist’s three person case study. As in three. One more than two. Seriously?!
The diet soda drinker in the study drank “two liters of diet soda daily for three to five years.” Well she’s got a long way to go to catch up to my 3+ decades! Not sure all the confounds (sorry Yoni, I’m writing this post without reading the full study), but after looking at the pics (click thru to HuffPo to see them), I call total BS. I’m sure the dentist has “observed hundreds of similar soda-caused erosion cases” over his career. That’s why he used just one in his case study.
Sigh. I am certainly not defending diet soda or the beverage industry, but puh-leeze. There are plenty of reasons for cutting back or eliminating diet soda, but “meth mouth” isn’t one of ‘em.
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health, & food policy. And cats! 
One of the commenters noted that the soda-drinking woman supposedly avoided professional dental care for decades. This certainly impacts what the case study photo is going to look like. Imagine if she had been going to the dentist semi-regularly for that time. She would have tens of thousands of dollars worth of fillings, crowns and other restorations and her teeth would look pretty normal.
I wouldn’t discount how quickly teeth can become diseased and damaged. Sugary or not, sodas are extremely acidic and even if the quantity is low, the way they’re consumed can be very damaging to teeth (i.e., sipping on a can throughout the day is much worse for enamel than quickly gulping down a larger quantity).
I’m not discounting that teeth can become diseased and damaged. I watched that ABC special on Appalachia a few years back, and they had something they called “Mountain Dew mouth” that was very serious. But this definitely involved poor dental care in addition to the soda drinking.
I stick with my original point: there are plenty of reasons to avoid soda, but meth mouth isn’t one of them.
Hi Beth,
Yeah, this attack against diet soda is pretty ridiculous. I just did a google image search for “meth teeth” which pretty much settled the issue for me.
P.S. I don’t recommend doing a google image search for “meth teeth.”
LOL!