Roll-ups. Fruit leather. Now commonly a corn syrup-based snack, it been around longer than you think; certainly before the ubiquitous use of corn syrup. How does a dental x-ray come to have anything to do with such a sugary delicacy?
‘Amardeen’ or ‘amardine’ is anglicised Qamar al-Din: an iconic handmade apricot paste of Syrian origin. In Arabic, it means ‘Moon of the Faith’ and it’s often made into a nectar drink consumed during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. With the observance of strict fasting between dawn and sunset for 29 or 30 days depending on the new moon, it’s the sunset jolt sometimes unfused with rose or blossom water for yearning stomachs before the communal dinner of ‘iftar’.
It’s not consumed excessively, and is rich in dietary fibre, electrolytes and vitamins A and B. It hydrates, prevents headaches and helps with concentration. Its high vitamin C content prevents weight gain by increasing the basal metabolic rate. As well as staving off fatigue, the drink helps maintain normal sodium and potassium levels; negating nausea, constipation and muscle cramps. It aids digestion, and guards against anaemia and insomnia.
Believed to have been first brought to Persia along the Silk Road, apricots were first domesticated in China around 2000BCE. The luxuriously sweet taste and velvety texture made it a culinary innovation.
With its perfect climate and fertile soil, the world’s best dried apricots come from varieties grown in Malatya, Türkiye. Unparalleled in taste, more than 85% of this sustainably farmed product comes from here; exported to more than 100 countries.
Delicious. Having a remarkably higher sorbitol and potassium content, as well as being important sources of magnesium, zinc and selenium, form part of the unique properties of Malatya apricots. Fruit leather made of these dried apricots contains functional food components, making it high in nutritional value.
Not so much with the commercially manufactured version.
Generally categorised as an ultra-processed food due to the high levels of artificial flavouring, colours, sugar and preservatives, nutritionists consider them more a lolly, than the marketing strategy of them being a healthy snack. They’re chewy, sticky and really, really bad for your teeth.
Dentists most certainly agree. So what place do they have in a dental practice?
Having an orthopantomogram is difficult to get your tongue around, and even more difficult to keep it still. More easily referred to as an OPG or panoramic radiography, it’s a scanning dental X-ray that produces a single two-dimensional image of the upper and lower jaws. It covers a wider area than conventional intra-oral X-rays, and this broad view proves a valuable diagnostic tool for dentists and oral dentists. It shows tooth positioning, maxillary sinuses and any bone or tissue anomalies, and is highly useful in treatment planning for orthodontics, implants and dentures.
Its greatest limitation is image distortion. More often than not, it’s the result of the patient being unable to correctly place their tongue during the process; which is ridiculously harder than it sounds.
When the tongue isn’t properly positioned against the roof of the mouth, a dark band appears on the dental X-ray image.
Technically referred to as ‘palatoglossal airspace’ it sounds more like what Bezos was aiming to take up when the ‘New Shepard’ rocketed what seemed to be lots of plastic 107 kilometres from earth, for less time than it takes to inflate a Venetian crocodile. Instead, it is the most common and most frequent error in OPGs.
That it can not only obscure pathology, but mimic it, you can appreciate the problem it creates.
So much so, a study was done by the Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology Department at Iran’s Tabriz University of Medical Sciences.
The routine imaging process was performed on 270 patients after they’d been randomised into three groups.
There was of course, the control group; with the other two being celluloid matrix, and edible tapes. The second group used the transparent plastic strips used in dentistry as a temporary wall for filling material while it sets; fruit roll-ups were the edible tapes.
Patients were asked to use their tongue to stick the strip or tape to the roof of their mouth, with the dental X-ray control group being given nothing but the positioning instruction.
There were significant differences in the results.
The highest incidents of unsuitable images came from the control group. Celluloid strips proved effective, but not as efficacious as the fruit leather, which had a 9.57 success rate. The opacity of the roll-ups was better than the celluloid, and the taste of the fruit leather improved the ability to keep the tongue on the palate.
Clearly, negating the need to repeat the radiographs is advantageous to both patient and clinician. Fruit roll-ups may very well have found a much healthier use than eating them. Undoubtedly, your dentist will second that.
