Oh how I’ve been waiting for this study. Turns out that arsenic poisoning is a big problem in India due to contamination of the water supply and no alternatives. So researchers from Hamdard University in New Delhi noticed that some people who ate a lot of sugarcane didn’t generally get arsenic poisoning. So they hypothesized that perhaps sugarcane had some protective effects against arsenic poisoning. To test this, they took a bunch of mice and administered arsenic together with sugarcane and compared it to mice fed only arsenic. They found that many of the adverse effects of arsenic were substantially mitigated or entirely prevented by sugarcane. These included enhancing levels of detoxification enzymes, preventing damage to the lungs and substantially reducing inflammatory markers. Keep in mind this is sugarcane juice and not sugar. There is a huge difference between the two. Also, the study did not look at the subsequent dental health of the mice.
 
Toxicol Appl Pharmacol. 2009 Oct 26. [Epub ahead of print]