
If I were a drink, I’d be a gin and tonic.
Not water or a green tea infused with jasmine, but a crisp G&T with a slice of cucumber. I love them so much, I even have a gin purse (see above).
Cool and delicious, I started drinking G&Ts when vodka oranges didn’t feel (or taste) all that fun anymore.
But according to a Sydney dentist, me and everyone else who fancies G&Ts should stop drinking them immediately.
Naaaaahhhhhhh, I thought. Not going to happen.
Then I saw the photos.
Earlier this week, Dr Lewis Ehrlich from Sydney Holistic Dental Centre shared some particularly brutal truths about drinking gin with tonic water on his Facebook and Instagram accounts.
“We’ve all heard of tooth decay but many haven’t heard of tooth erosion. It is when acids in your diet start to dissolve away your teeth – the hardest substance in the human body!! This will happen when the pH drops below 5.5,” he wrote alongside three images of teeth enamel.
The first of Dr Erhlich’s images, which is zoomed in 7000 times on the outer surface of a tooth, shows a tooth that’s been exposed to drinking water with a pH of around seven.
“Note the smooth, intact surface. The way it should be,” he said of the image that kind of looks like how I imagine the ground on Mars would be.
The second image, which resembles a dried up muddy soccer pitch the day after a game, is of a tooth belonging to a human who drank a a sugar free “vodka cruiser” with a pH of just over three.
Then we come to what my teeth might look like under a microscope – a very holey tooth exposed to a G&T, which has a pH of 2.2. Yikes.
Obviously this is very sad news for me, and I’m still struggling to come to terms with it all. Hence, I went straight to the source of the information to get some clarification.