In the 1950s, Dr. Beguin noticed that tooth decay was expanding at epidemic proportions among his patients. In his search for an answer, Beguin ran across the work of Swiss dentist Adolph Roos. His studies, which stretched over several decades, showed that, in nineteenth-century Switzerland, people who lived in isolated mountain villages had good, strong teeth. They ate wholesome, unrefined foods such as cheese, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, which had been produced or grown on local soil. Tooth decay was unheard of. It was only after the villages became more accessible that tooth decay set in. Over the years, Beguin came to believe that the degradation of the food supply, in particular the "consumption of refined sugar and flours, which had been deprived of the mineral salts and vitamins contained in wholesome, natural products," was the main cause of an alarming rise in dental caries.

       He was convinced that, if his patients could be provided with a complete unrefined sugar, tooth decay could be stemmed. References to sweeteners produced by drying the juice squeezed from sugarcane had appeared in ancient Indian, Persian, and Chinese writings, but nowhere in the world was there a contemporary source of a high-quality, commercially available complete sugar. White sugar was king.

       Refined white sucrose appeared on the scene in the early 1800s, when a series of European chemists perfected a method of refining sucrose from sugar beets. The discovery of this process coincided with a British blockade of France's supply of sugarcane from the West Indies and subsequently, under Napoleon's influence, the French quickly built forty factories to process sugar beet sugar. A Napoleonic law set the standard for "white crystal sugar" to be composed of 99.9 percent sucrose.