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17.05.2022

Hefty daily dose of glycine prevents caries

If you are to believe a forgotten animal study from the 1970s, supplementation with glycine can help prevent tooth decay. However, the human equivalent of the dose tested by Salil Das and Robert Harris was on the high side.

Study
Salil Das and Robert Harris, two food scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published an animal study in 1975 in the Journal of Dental Research in which they fed two groups of rats a few weeks old for several months in which they had stopped sugar. As a result, you could expect the rats to develop cavities in their teeth.

One group of rats was given sugary feed and nothing else. The other group received feed in which the researchers had also added extra glycine. [Table] If the rats had been adult humans, they would have consumed 15-20 grams of glycine daily.

Results
Supplementation with glycine reduced the number of cavities in the rats' teeth by 65.7 percent.

When the researchers analyzed the composition of the rats' molars, they saw that glycine supplementation had reduced the amount of fatty substances in the teeth by 15.1 percent. Das and Harris do not know whether this effect has anything to do with the decrease in the incidence of caries in the rats.

Mechanism unknown
The researchers are also in the dark about the mechanism of action of glycine. For a while they thought that glycine supplementation had made the body retain more calcium and phosphorus, but this was not the case.

Source:
J Dent Res. Sep-Oct 1975;54(5):987-92.

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