Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Front-of-Pack Warning Label Exposure and Dental Therapy Utilization Among South African Caregivers: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of Label-Reading Pathways

South Africa's mandatory front-of-pack warning label regulations for sugar-sweetened beverages, implemented in phases from 2018, created a natural experiment in which caregivers' exposure to warning labels varied by product category and retail environment. The analysis draws on the DHS Program indicator 'Knowledge of any method of contraception among married women' (FP_KMET_W_ANY) across 38 African countries and 162 country-survey observations from 1986 to 2025, with a mean of 91.776 and a standard deviation of 11.342, to characterise the distribution of caregiver health knowledge in comparable settings. The proposed identification strategy exploits staggered label implementation across beverage categories and retail channels, using pre- and post-implementation survey waves. The contribution is a testable causal model that specifies how warning labels reach caregivers through visual attention, comprehension, and behavioural intention, and how these pathways translate into dental therapy utilization. The framework is designed to identify whether label exposure operates through direct cognitive channels or through retail-environment moderators, and to bound the plausible effect sizes given the observed distribution of caregiver knowledge.