Energy drinks could cause less dental damage with a simple addition
The acidity of drinks like Red Bull can erode dental enamel, but a lab experiment suggests this could be avoided via calcium fortification
By Clarissa Brincat
4 July 2025
Energy drinks may perk you up, but high consumption could be damaging your teeth
Shutterstock/francesco de marc
Fortifying energy drinks with a calcium concoction could reduce the damage they do to teeth, but it isn’t clear whether this would affect their taste.
Studies suggest that dental enamel, teeth’s protective outer covering, starts to dissolve when exposed to liquids with a pH of less than 5.5 – which most energy drinks fall well below.
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Looking for a way to get around this, Erik Jácome at the State University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil and his colleagues added calcium and other minerals to traditional Red Bull energy drinks to see how this affected their pH.
The most promising combination was calcium, phosphorus and potassium, with the highest concentration taking the pH from 3.96 – that of the unmodified Red Bull – to 5.27, while dicalcium malate and calcium citrate malate both made the drinks more acidic.
Next, the researchers exposed samples of enamel from donated human teeth to the different fortified energy drinks for 2 minutes, then analysed them for changes in roughness and hardness, indicators of enamel erosion.
