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Silver Fillings Appear Safe Which fillings are safest for kids’ teeth? Two new studies compare the safety of traditional silver-colored fillings with newer, more popular tooth-colored fillings. The older “amalgam” fillings contain mercury. Researchers in New England and Portugal gave fillings to more than 1,000 children ages 6 to 10 and tracked them for five to seven years. Half got amalgam fillings and half got the tooth-colored composite resin fillings. “What we found over the course of the study is the amalgam fillings had no adverse effects on the IQ of these children as well as on a range of other neuropsychological measures and kidney function,” says Sonja McKinlay, Ph.D., principal investigator of the New England study. There were no other signs of mercury poisoning, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported. However, the kids’ urine showed slightly higher mercury levels.