Industry brief / PN—INSIDER
PN—INSIDER · 20 April 2026

Sports Dentistry

Elite athletes spend hours below critical pH on a training day.

This weeks issue is powered by The Performance Nutrition Network

Dear Performance Nutrition Leaders,

This week: athlete oral health, the latest news, and an innovative post-fuel mouth rinse product.

💡 LATEST RESEARCH

Your athletes are fuelling to perform. That fuelling is also quietly dropping their oral pH below 5.5 — the threshold at which enamel dissolves. It's a quiet problem with loud numbers attached.

A narrative review from Needleman, Gallagher and Ashley, published in the British Dental Journal, provides a clear picture.

Dental caries prevalence sits at 46.3% across a meta-analysis of five studies — higher than comparable age cohorts in the general population. Erosive tooth wear affects 36–85% of athletes. Gingivitis prevalence ranges from 58–77%.

When surveyed, athletes report knowing the correct behaviours and following them.

This paper suggests the framing needs to shift: oral health promotion in elite sport is better understood as risk mitigation. Athletes need the sugar — it's doing a job.

The question is how you build protocols around it.

Evidence quality is variable across studies due to inconsistent outcome measures and examiner training. But the direction of effect is consistent.

Read the full paper here →

📈NEWS

If you find our industry updates valuable, please consider supporting the platform.

💡Performance Tech

Dentadurance describes this as the Athlete's Catch-22.

Fuel properly, compromise dental health long-term. Don't fuel properly, and performance suffers now.

Their answer is a post-fuel mouth rinse. A single-use sachet, used as a 30-second rinse-and-spit after every fuel. According to Dentadurance, it helps neutralise acids, disrupt plaque, and strengthen enamel — designed to sit between the morning and evening brushing windows, not replace them.

Dentadurance is Informed Sport certified, with every batch tested for prohibited substances.

One formulation note worth flagging if you're running nitrate protocols: Dentadurance excludes alcohol, antiseptics, and essential oils. Each has been shown to disrupt the tongue's nitrate-reducing bacteria and impair the nitrate–nitrite–nitric oxide conversion pathway.

Athlete-specific trials on the full formulation are planned.

To explore how Dentadurance can protect your athletes’ teeth, please email CEO Will Armstrong at [email protected].

Check out Dentadurance →

Read by teams at…

Written by Dr. Alfie Gordon

Published first to ~1000 performance nutrition leaders at top-flight clubs, federations, WorldTour teams and the sector's brands. Subscribe free →

← Archive
Every issue, in full