According to Nutrition Research, drinking white wine can be seriously damaging to your teeth, but…wait for it…they recommend you eat cheese, yipeeeeee!
An article on the BBC website goes into more detail, but in short it is due to the PH levels of the drink, rather than the colour or the alcohol content. According to Johannes Gutenberg University team, if you want to do some serious dental damage, hit the Riesling wines and other similar whites, mix them with fruit, then brush your teeth immediately after.
Red wines like Rioja are the least offensive, and if you add food to the cocktail, the saliva produced when eating helps neutralise the acid, and consequently lessen the damage. The BBC article quotes Professor Damien Walmsley of the British Dental Association “If you’re going to have a glass of wine do so with your meal and leave a break of at least 30 minutes afterwards before you brush your teeth and go to bed.”
Most importantly though, according to the research team; “The tradition of enjoying different cheeses for dessert, or in combination with drinking wine, might have a beneficial effect on preventing dental erosion since cheeses contain calcium in a high concentration.”
So the moral of the story is to eat lots of cheese and avoid fruit…kind of…?
I can at least try to convince myself that in order to drink more wine, I need to eat more cheese, but given the amount I already consume, I am sure I will be causing some other damage to my body – humn, maybe the anti-oxidants in red wine will help?
goodwin's gastro gossip 