Organic fruit gummies in a flower shape with a sour coating — cherry, mandarin and lime. 100 g, from Hey Yum.
Sour sweets and teeth — the thing worth knowing
This is the most useful information on the page, and it is genuinely not obvious.
Sour sweets are harder on teeth than ordinary sweets, and the reason is acid rather than sugar.
The sour coating is an acid — usually citric, malic or tartaric. Tooth enamel begins to dissolve below about pH 5.5, and sour sweet coatings routinely measure between pH 2 and 3, which is around the acidity of vinegar. That erodes enamel directly, without any bacteria involved.
So a sour sweet does two things at once: the acid attacks enamel chemically, and the chewy body sticks in the grooves of molars and feeds bacteria for a long time afterwards. Dentists see the result often enough to have a name for it.
What actually helps:
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One sitting, not grazing. The whole bag in ten minutes does far less damage than the same bag across an afternoon, because it is the number of separate acid attacks that matters, not the total quantity.
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After a meal, when saliva flow is already high — saliva is what neutralises acid and restores pH.
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Rinse with plain water afterwards.
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Do not brush for at least half an hour. This one is counterintuitive and it matters: brushing softened enamel scrubs it away. Waiting lets saliva reharden it first.
None of that is a reason not to eat sweets. It is a reason to eat them in a way that costs less.
Where the colours and flavours come from
Organic certification does not permit synthetic colours or artificial flavourings, so the colour comes from concentrated fruit and vegetable material and the flavour from fruit.
Expect softer, less uniform colours that vary slightly between batches — plant pigments cannot reach fluorescent, and vegetables vary. That is the evidence, not the shortcoming.
There is a real reason to prefer them: six synthetic colours must by EU law carry the warning "may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children", which is why many children's sweet makers abandoned them.
Cherry, mandarin and lime
A well-chosen trio for a sour sweet, because all three are naturally acidic fruits — the sourness has somewhere to come from rather than sitting on top as a separate sensation.
Choking
Firm chewy sweets are a choking risk for children under four. Supervise, and cut them up for very young children.
Sophie m
Bonbon-France
Hey Yum
