Carbohydrates
Why this matters
Caries is a carbohydrate disease. Which sugar, how often, and how long it stays in the mouth are the three things that decide whether a tooth demineralises, and all three are answered by chemistry. You will also give dietary advice more often than you give injections, and the advice only works if you know why a slowly sucked sweet is worse than a glass of juice drunk quickly.
The big picture
A handful of six-carbon sugars, joined through one kind of bond, make up almost every carbohydrate you will meet. The direction of that bond decides whether a human enzyme can break it, whether the sugar reaches the colon undigested, and whether plaque bacteria can turn it into acid.
The bond decides the fate: alpha we digest, beta we do not — and anything a bacterium can ferment will lower plaque pH, sugar-free or not.
The 14 cards in this lesson
- 01Why this is the caries lesson
- 02Aldose or ketose, and which carbon decides
- 03Rings, anomers and mutarotation
- 04Four things people get wrong about sugar chemistry
- 05The glycosidic bond, and why sucrose is special
- 06The disaccharides worth knowing
- 07Same glucose, four architectures
- 08Digestion: why amylase cannot finish the job
- 09Absorption: three transporters
- 10Clinical alert — in the lesson
- 11Free sugars: the definition that actually matters
- 12How we know frequency matters
- 13Sugar substitutes, and what sugar-free does not mean
- 14Clinical alert — in the lesson
You have got it when
You are ready to continue when you can say why sucrose is not a reducing sugar, why amylase cannot finish digesting starch on its own, and why a sugar-free fizzy drink still damages teeth.
22 references, graded by tier: 14 tier-1 · 7 tier-2 · 1 tier-4 · sources last checked 2026-07-30
The full lesson entry includes
- All 14 teaching cards, each opening at Quick and expanding into Learn and Deep
- 5 final-challenge questions with worked rationales, and a micro-check on every card
- The 10-prompt recall deck, scheduled today, +1, +3, +7 and +21 days
- The misconceptions students actually hold, each with its correction
- All 22 references, tiered and annotated
More preclinical curriculum
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