Drinking your tea with milk will give you pearly whites, research shows

Want to keep your teeth pearly white? Just adding a bit of milk in your tea will work better than your whitening toothpaste, according to a recent study.

Dr Ava Chow of University of Alberta's School of Dentistry had initially designed her study as a way of introducing undergraduate dental hygiene students to research. She used human teeth that had been extracted except for those teeth that had fillings, signs of tooth decay or visible cracks and fractures.

She then analysed the colour of the teeth and recorded them, before putting them through a ‘staining process’. This ‘staining process’ involved putting the teeth into either a solution of tea, or a solution of tea with milk for 24 hours at 37 C.

The results showed that casein is the component of milk that was responsible for the reduction of tea-induced staining. “The magnitude of the colour change observed in our experiments is comparable to the colour change seen by vital bleaching products and more effective than whitening toothpastes,” Dr Chow explained, reports the Daily Mail.

This research was published in the International Journal of Dental Hygiene.