WE ALL know that fizzy pop is bad for us and our teeth, but, hey, it’s summer. So if you or your kids can’t resist cooling off with sugary soft drinks, American dental experts have made a cavity-saving discovery: drinking deep with a straw can cut tooth decay.
The report in the Academy of General Dentistry’s journal, General Dentistry, warns that soft drinks contain acids such as phosphoric and citric acids, which erode enamel. Canned ice-teas may have flavourings such as tartaric acids which are even bigger rotters.
But Mohamed Bassiouny, professor at Temple University, Tennessee, has found that your drinking style can accelerate tooth decay: if you quaff straight from a can and swallow slowly, your back teeth will rot. If you sip with a straw with its tip between your lips, your front teeth will get it.
Bassiouny says you should instead place the straw near the back of your throat and swallow lustily, thus bypassing your teeth. The academy has another suggestion, though: drink water instead.
This should be particularly useful for women, according to another study this week by Toronto University. This claims that they are 2½ times more likely to say they are scared of dentists. But, it says men may only trying to act brave.
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Forgetful? Try frolic
MAKE space on your vitamin shelves for another brain-saver. Folic acid is not only for pregnant women, it can also help to prevent memory decline as we grow older, a Dutch study claims.
Folic acid, a type of vitamin B, is already recommended to pregnant women for reducing babies’ brain and spinal cord defects. Research has also indicated that it may help to ward off heart disease.
Now a Wagenigen University study of 800 people aged over 50 says that those who took high-strength folic acid pills for three years had scores on memory tests comparable with people who were 5½ years younger. The pills were comparable to eating 2½lb of strawberries, the researchers told a meeting of the US Alzheimer’s Assocation in Washington.
Cancer killer
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THE bad news is that scientists say 80 per cent of us are infected with a virus. The better news is that the virus, AAV-2, is harmless. And the good news is that it appears to kill cancer.
A study presented at the American Society for Virology revealed that the virus seems to recognise cancer cells as abnormal and destroys them.
Scientists at Penn State University have found that it in the lab it kills human cervix cells infected with the human papilloma virus, which can turn them into tumours. It has also destroyed breast and prostate tumour cells. The scientists hope that the discovery could form the basis of a therapy that kills cancers but not healthy cells.
Get your head down
MORE reason to get a good night’s sleep: insomnia can lead to long bouts of depression, according to two studies to be published in the Journal of Behavioural Sleep Medicine.
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The research, by the University of Rochester Sleep and Neurophysiology Research Laboratory, cautions that insomnia prolongs bouts of sadness, hopelessness and loss of interest in life, the same characteristics that are typical of deep depression.
One sort of sleeplessness is particularly perilous, the so-called “middle insomnia”, where sufferers frequently wake up in the middle of the night but eventually fall back to sleep each time.
Sleeplessness also makes people less likely to recover from depression, according to the research, presented at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies conference this week. The study of 1,801 people found that depressed insomniacs are 11 times more likely to be still depressed after six months than depressives who slept well. The problem is most likely to affect older women.
iPod perplexity
PLUGGED into your iPod while working on the laptop? Stop kidding yourself, music does not help you to concentrate, cautions a study in The Journal of Neuroscience. Neurologists who scanned the brains of 19 to 35-year-olds working on computers while listening to headphones say that they can’t fully handle both tasks at once. Their brains kept alternately “turning down the volume” on one task while trying to focus on the other.