Manufactured foods and dental decay

Abstract

Dental caries (or tooth decay) is our most prevalent disease, and hardly anyone living in present‐day Britain is completely free from it. More than 99% of the population have had teeth attacked by decay, sometimes so severely that a large proportion of their teeth have had to be extracted. The result of dental caries combined with gum disease is that 37% of all the people over 16 in England and Wales are edentulous (i.e. have had all their teeth extracted), while the figure for Scotland is even higher at 44%.