Relationships between sugar‐foods and the DMFT in 1968–1970

As shown in a sample of 2514 adolescent participants in the Ten‐State Nutrition Survey of The United States, there is a systematic relation between sugar‐food intakes and dental caries as shown by the DMFT index. Analyzed with respect to the DMFT, adolescents with high values of the DMFT reported sugar‐food ingestion ten times greater than did comparable adolescents with low DMFT values. Conversely, boys and girls and blacks and whites deemed high in sugar‐containing food intakes showed DMFT values approximately twice as high as in adolescents with low reported sugar‐food intakes. These findings attest to the practicability of investigating relationship between dietary habits and dental disease in mass‐data nutrition surveys.

Key words:

• Dentition
• caries
• diet
• sugar‐food intake
• surveys