"It started as a simple idea. Take five teeth, five soft drinks, four weeks and one hypothesis borrowed from junior high science class: A tooth left in a cup of sweet liquid will quickly decay into a gruesome lump."

"But does the hypothesis measure up to reality? Are the sodas we drink actually that corrosive to our teeth? And if so, which are the worst offenders?"

"The plan was to create a kind of race. A dental office in Harlem, N.Y., kindly donated some undecayed, extracted gnashers that otherwise would have been discarded. Five teeth were each placed in a variety of sugary baths. While their progress into decay was charted and photographed, experts were consulted to describe exactly what was going on."

""It doesn't duplicate life exactly," said Dr. Matthew Messina, a spokesman for the American Dental Association. "But it shows how the enamel is definitely dissolving off the teeth.""

"The challengers in the contest were the kind of drinks much loved by children and adults: Coca-Cola, Snapple (lemonade flavor), Gatorade (fruit punch variety), Nesquik (chocolate) and Tropicana juice (orange and mandarin). For contrast, a sixth tooth was placed in a glass of 99-cent drain cleaner. The theory: Perhaps we'd be better off drinking that solution than cleaning our drains with soda."

"The teeth and the liquids were arranged in plastic champagne glasses to add a sense of occasion to the experiment. Then they were left alone, and the research began."

"In recent years, sodas have been regularly cited as contributing to the increase in obesity and diabetes. In March, in a bid to address some of the criticisms, Coca-Cola and Pepsi announced details of a plan to market drinks fortified with vitamins and minerals. But the new measures do not address sodas' longstanding link to tooth decay."

"In 2004, for instance, researchers at the University of Maryland Dental School divided common drinks into three categories -- cola beverages, non-cola beverages and teas and coffees -- and submerged teeth for 14 days in samples from each group."

"The teeth were weighed at regular intervals to determine how much of their enamel was dissolving. The study found that the vast majority of soft drinks "exhibited a progressive attack" on teeth."

"While canned iced tea dissolved enamel 30 times more than brewed tea, other drink groups were even worse. Cola drinks dissolved enamel 55 to 65 times more than water; the non-colas dissolved 90 to 180 times more enamel than water."

"A precision scale was not available for the less scientific apartment-based project of 2007. But visual examination determined that it took about a week before any of the teeth began to show the ill effects of their submersion."

"At seven days, the tooth bathing in Gatorade had become entirely stained by the blood-red color of fruit punch, while the teeth in Snapple and Coke were gradually turning brown. A thin layer of mold had developed on top of the Nesquik sample, trapping the tooth in a sort of chocolate mousse."

"In the orange juice, mushy gray moldlike matter had attached itself to the tooth. Things looked much more appealing in the drain cleaner sample: The liquid had bleached its subject pearly white."

"According to the Maryland study, two weeks of total immersion in a soft drink is the equivalent of about 13 years of actual soda drinking. These kinds of experiments show "what in reality is the cumulative effect of a lifetime of erosion," said Dr. Kenton Ross, a dentist in Fayetteville,
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