The Relationship Between Physical Characteristics of the Diet and the Water Content of Monkey Teeth

Abstract

Considering that it has been suggested that soft diets and high caries incidence may be related in man; that bone reacts to disuse with atrophy which is char- acterized by an increase in water content of the tissue; and that sound tissues from carious teeth contain more water than tissues from non-carious teeth, an attempt is made to determine whether the degree of use of the masticatory apparatus can affect the tissues of fully erupted teeth (as measured by their water content). Ten Rhesus monkeys were divided into 2 groups of 5. The control group received food requiring vigorous mastication while the diet of the exptl. group required little or no chewing. After 8 weeks, the 4 first permanent molars were removed from each animal, cleaned and weighed after drying in air for 12 hrs.: subsequently the teeth were dried to constant wt. and reweighed. The wt. loss was then calculated as a per cent of the initial wt. The control teeth lost an avg. of 8.17%, the exptl. an avg. of 9%, that is the molars of the animals on an entirely soft diet had a water content 10.77% higher than the molars of the vigorously chewing animals.