Wine, Teeth Don’t Mix

Always wanted to be a wine taster spending your workdays sipping cabernets and Cotes du Rhone? Think again. Swedish researchers found that wine tasters who swished 20 to 50 wines around their mouths for at least an hour every day suffered from tooth erosion. The study, from the European Journal of Oral Sciences, was based on evaluating 19 Swedish wine tasters working for Vin & Sprit, the state-owned marketer of wines and spirits. Fourteen of them showed signs that acids in the wine had eaten away some of their tooth enamel. Furthermore, the authors noted that only one study subject had a dentist who believed the erosion was probably associated with the wine. Dr. Charles Perle, a Jersey City, N.J., dentist and general spokesman for the Chicago-based Academy of General Dentistry, said erosion might be an occupational hazard closer to home than Sweden, such as in California’s Napa Valley. But, he added: “I don’t think there’s a danger for the casual drinker.” He’s more worried about acidity in soft drinks like sodas and what he calls pseudo-juices, those with just a small percentage of real juice. As for juices of the fermented variety, white wines have higher acidic content than red. Italian red wines, which have more fluoride in them, are less erosive than the French wines. So if you still have your heart set on tasting for a living, try Chianti.

Going to Extremes

In this season of dessert parties, here’s a little extra advice for making your tooth enamel last longer. If you want to keep those choppers free of cracks, don’t wash down ice cream or other frozen treats with hot coffee. According the Academy of General Dentistry, which put out a warning about the practice in its December Dentalnotes, tooth enamel is sensitive to extreme temperature changes. Over time, repeated cycles of hot and cold cause enamel to expand and contract, and that creates thermal fatigue. The weakened enamel eventually develops hairline cracks.

Safe Senior Sex

If folks over 50 are among the young at heart and are sexually active, too, they need to think as much about safe sex as younger people. According to a recent study by the Los Angeles County Sexually Transmitted Disease Program, more than 1,000 adults over 50 became infected with chlamydia between 1991 and 1996. Of the group, 3% were in their 80s and 1% in their 90s, said Gregory Vaughn, a doctoral student at UCLA’s School of Public Health. Vaughn, who reported his findings to the American Public Health Assn. annual meeting last month, says the overall figures are probably higher. The county tracked only reported cases. He suggests that although chlamydia tends to be a silent infection of younger people, among whom it can lead to infertility, doctors also should be checking for it in their older patients, because it can cause serious medical problems. It strikes two to three times as many older women as older men, the same ratios seen in patients in the 20- to 35-year-old age group.