Patient News: Baby Teeth - Dental Associates of Lancaster, Ohio 43130

A tooth left overnight in a glass of cola won't disappear, despite what other children in the playground told you. This shows the staining caused by cola after two weeks.

Pictures reveal the irreparable damage soft drinks can do to your dental hygiene.

A tooth left overnight in a glass of cola won't disappear, despite what other children in the playground told you.

But just what sugary drinks can do to teeth is graphically illustrated in the pictures here.

The first image shows the staining caused by cola after two weeks; in the second, it's the destructive effect of an energy drink on tooth enamel, which left it literally crumbling - the small, pink pieces on the tooth root are actually lumps of enamel.

The cola staining is likely due to the caramel colouring. With the energy drink, the extremely acidic nature of the liquid is to blame.

These images are from above image, a website where doctors share medical images and canvass their colleagues' opinions. The teeth were posted by Dr Tom Bierman, a dentist at the San Diego Dental Studio in the U.S.

He had recently read a book, Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman, which claims that one in seven new energy drinks are too corrosive to put in aluminium cans.

'I thought: 'If that's what these things do to a can, what on earth are they doing to our teeth?!' ' he told Good Health. And so he set up this unique experiment.

Dr Bierman, 34, used his own wisdom teeth - extracted during his early 20s and brought home by his parents while he was too sedated to notice.