Have Your Candy and Eat it Too

Christmas just came early in my house! A study released in the Probiotics and Antimicrobial Proteins journal described a way to make candy guilt-free (sort of).

A Berlin-based biotech lab has claimed to have developed cavity-free candy. The candy still isn't good for you, but it won't rot your teeth (it's the little things). Tooth decay and cavities are caused by a food-borne bacteria called mutans Streptococcus. This bacteria attaches to the surface of your teeth and slowly releases an acid that dissolves away the enamel. A scientist at the lab, Organo Blance, identified a bacteria called Lactobacillus paracasei (L. paracasei) that has a sugar on its surface that binds to the mutans Streptococcus, preventing it from attaching itself to teeth.

The scientists used a dead version of L. paracasei to avoid problems caused by live bacteria. The heat-killed bacteria retains its ability to bind with sugar and does not interfere with beneficial oral bacteria.

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To test whether L. paracasei could help prevent cavities in people, the scientists developed a sugar-free candy containing heat-killed samples of the bacteria. They then tested the candy on a group of 60 volunteers. One third ate candies with one milligram of L. paracasei, one third ate candies with two milligrams and one third ate candies that tasted the same, but contained no bacteria.

These poor test subjects had to eat five candies over a day and a half and have their mouths swabbed. At the end, three-fourths of the volunteers who'd eaten candies with bacteria had significantly lower levels of mutans Streptococci than they'd have in the day before.

By engineering a candy with L. paracasei, the level of Streptococcus mutans in the mouth is greatly reduced, along with your risk of cavities.