An excerpt from a post by one of our favorite bloggers, Dagmar Bleasdale, the mom behind Dagmar’s Momsense.
Move over, sugar, there is a much better alternative: xylitol seems to be the best option to sweeten food and drinks.
Don’t know what xylitol is?
It’s not just another word I can use to teach my preschooler the letter x. Xylitol is a natural substance found in fibrous vegetables and fruit, corn cobs and various hardwood trees like birch. It is a natural, intermediate product that regularly occurs in our glucose metabolism.
My favorite aspect of xylitol is that is helps with tooth decay since my son is prone to cavities. It helps to restore a proper alkaline/acid balance in the mouth and reverses destructive effects of sugar on oral health. It even has the ability to enhance the mineralization of the enamel and can stabilize cavities.
In the last two years, I have put some Biotene mouth wash, which has xylitol in it, on my son’s tooth brush with his tooth paste, and his small cavities have stabilized.
Read more here…
Dagmar is a mom, blogger, columnist, proofreader, editor, entrepreneur, and social media consultant who writes about motherhood, breastfeeding, attachment parenting, green and frugal living, decorating, blogging, and her love for Twitter and Nutella.