Diet and the Teeth: An Experimental Study. Part III. The Effect of Diet on Dental Structure and Disease in Man

Mrs. Mellanby's work on dental caries, first published in 1918, in which she demonstrated that a sufficient supply of vitamin D was necessary in a child's diet to ensure the metabolism of calcium and phosphorus for the proper formation of the teeth, has had a revolutionary effect on the study of dental caries throughout the world. Her two previous reports, published in 1929 and 1930 respectively, dealt with dental caries in experimental animals and the effect of diet. In this report the subject is dental caries in children from different social groups. It was naturally not possible to apply the same experimental methods in investigating dental caries in