Medicine: Sweet Tooth, Sour Facts

In the basement of Harvard's School of Dental Medicine, Biochemist James H. Shaw and his assistants worked for more than ten years with cages full of white rats and cotton rats, with sugar-rich and sugar-free chow, with test tubes and dissecting boards. The twofold aim: to find out how certain sugars promote tooth decay, then to find a way to forestall it. The Sugar Research Foundation, Inc., set up by the sugar industry, bankrolled the project for a total of $57,000. Now, in the Journal of the American Dental Association, Dr. Shaw reports his findings:...

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