From Volume 41, Issue 10, December 2014 | Pages 862-866
This article is about dental caries and body weight. It will provide the reader with an overview of the complexity in the relationship between these and suggest the implications of taking a public health approach when addressing them within a primary dental care setting.
The amount of sugar we consume in our diet and the resulting health effects has received extensive coverage in the media in recent months. Excess consumption of added sugars is a recognized contributor to the development of a number of chronic conditions and diet-related diseases including obesity, type 2 diabetes and dental caries. Health professionals, including dentists, are encouraged to make use of a common risk factor approach1 to prevent such diet-related diseases. In simple terms, dental caries and body weight are linked via the common risk factor of diet. It therefore seems appropriate to examine the evidence which places sugar at the centre of the dental caries/body weight relationship; in doing so we have the potential to inform policy, practice and provide an opportunity for the development of tailored dietary intervention in primary dental care.
In the developed world, the incidence of people experiencing obesity has risen while the prevalence of dental decay has fallen. The WHO (World Health Organization) defines people being overweight and/or obese as having an ‘abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that may impair health’.2 In the USA, for example, 35% of the adult population are categorized as obese. The incidence of adult obesity in England has risen from 13.2% of men and 16.4% of women in 1993, to 24.4% of men and 25.1% of women in 2012.3 Twenty-eight percent of English children aged between 2 and 15 years are now classified as being overweight or obese.3 Public Health England has predicted that over 50% of English men and women will be obese by 2050. In contrast to trends in obesity, the dental health of English adults has generally improved. The 2009 Adult Dental Health Survey reported 10% of dentate adults as having ‘excellent’ oral health with the average number of carious teeth per person being <1 and the mean number of sound/untreated teeth as 18.4 However, encouraging as these figures are, they somewhat mask the huge individual variations found between both age and socioeconomic groups.4
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