A Purdue University graduate student spent part of last month handing seltzer drinkers a small piece of good news. In a study of 20 adults presented on July 26 at NUTRITION 2026, unsweetened sparkling water lowered the acidity in the mouth only briefly and never reached the point at which tooth enamel begins to dissolve. Sugar-sweetened soda did considerably worse.
Then there is the part that got lost in the coverage. The two sparkling waters in that experiment were plain and calcium-fortified. No lime. No grapefruit. No black cherry. The flavored seltzers stacked in American refrigerator doors contain the one ingredient dentists have been flagging for two decades, and none of them were in the study.
