I'm a dentist from Germany, University of Heidelberg.
As I see, the author of the article has no idea what kind of benefits flossing has. She saw someone who didn't used floss and has good teeth. Yes, it's true that some people are more immune to the diseases than others. I saw a 65 year old women in Azerbaijan, who had never brushed her teeth and has 30 perfect teeth, without any paradontitis or tooth decay or any lost teeth. They were just perfect. Scientist found Mandibular Bones which were 600,000 years old, and they had all teeth on it. And we're sure that they didn't brush their teeth. - Homo Heidelbergensis ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Unt... )
So why some people don't get tooth decay or other diseases even if they don't brush their teeth? There are many factors, but for further read you can search Google. I'll answer the author of the article. She says that there are no studies showing if flossing is useful for tooth health. I wonder if she searched PubMed about that. There are hundreds of studies showing how benefical floss really is. (for ex.: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22161438)
I did several studies on myself and on my wife, about effects of floss. One most important advice that I can give people: Floss is as important as brushing.
There is some evidence from twelve studies that flossing in addition to toothbrushing reduces gingivitis compared to toothbrushing alone. There is weak, very unreliable evidence from 10 studies that flossing plus toothbrushing may be associated with a small reduction in plaque at 1 and 3 months. No studies reported the effectiveness of flossing plus toothbrushing for preventing dental caries."
That's true, but this study shows some benefits of floss even it's weak. "Flossing plus toothbrushing showed a statistically significant benefit compared to toothbrushing in reducing gingivitis at the three time points studied, the SMD being -0.36 (95% CI -0.66 to -0.05) at 1 month, SMD -0.41 (95% CI -0.68 to -0.14) at 3 months and SMD -0.72 (95% CI -1.09 to -0.35) at 6 months."
I just selected random study from the search results, didn't read it entirely. But there are hundreds of studies about benefits of floss.
Maybe you didn't get to the end: the author tells us she replaced flossing with mouthwash + xylitol for a month, and by the end of it, her dentist said her teeth were perfect, unlike before. Not a third-party anecdote.
The article says no studies show that flossing has any effect on tooth decay. But what about gingivitis? I know it's anecdotal, but since I started flossing regularly, I've noticed a drastic reduction in the amount of times I get inflamed gums.
Exactly what I was thinking. Tooth decay's one thing, gum health is another, and wayyyy more important than teeth health (if we have to choose). Filling in cavities, applying new crowns, all relatively simple procedures these days. Replacing your gums? Yeah, that's probably going to require grafts from somewhere inside your mouth and will require seeing an oral surgeon if your dentist doesn't already do it. Overall, the experience won't be as..."simple" as a cavity filling.
> Overall, the experience won't be as..."simple" as a cavity filling.
But they do give you date-rape drugs under incredibly monitored conditions, and then you wake up at home and spend a few weeks poking the stitches with your tongue!
I absolutely hate flossing -- Telling my dentist this, he said that if I tried really hard to do it every so often (1-2 times a week to clean out anything really stuck), mouthwash will be more than sufficient at keeping my gums healthy.
> Twelve trials were included in this review which reported data on two outcomes (dental plaque and gum disease). Trials were of poor quality and conclusions must be viewed as unreliable. The review showed that people who brush and floss regularly have less gum bleeding compared to toothbrushing alone. There was weak, very unreliable evidence of a possible small reduction in plaque. There was no information on other measurements such as tooth decay because the trials were not long enough and detecting early stage decay between teeth is difficult.
Purely anecdotal, but I'm pretty sure I scrape some stuff off my teeth via flossing. In particular, there are areas near the rounded corners of my molars that, even after a good brushing, sometimes have stuff I can feel with my tongue. By looping the floss around as much of the tooth as possible and doing a few (not just one) up and down movements, it seems to get that stuff.
But the question is, is that stuff bad for your gum or teeth health? That's not something you should assume a-priori.
An analogy: Whenever you bath with soap, you remove a layer of oil off your skin - a layer that your body puts there to keep you moisturized and hydrated. If you bath and soap too often, your skin will suffer, not improve, even though you're "cleaning" your skin.
A: 6.5 grams of Xylitol each day has been shown to eliminate
harmful bacteria in about 5 weeks. ...
And what other bacteria does it kill off? Since they're recommending it in pill form, it seems highly unlikely it's just affecting "bad" mouth bacteria.
Ah, true - they're just pill-looking. My mistake, thanks! I don't see 'diluted crystals' anywhere (the pre-brush rinse maybe?), but you are correct on gum / mints, so it's at least a lot more focused.
Still - "consuming x grams" != "keep a ratio of X in mouth at least Y minutes per day". If consumption is what matters, how does it work?
I don't think it's that Xylitol kills off bacteria, just that it makes it more inhospitable. To be fair, it should still be cause for worry; while some bacteria do cause acid production that can lead to tooth decay, other bacteria are part of our immune system. There is little reason to suspect that a mouth inhospitable to bad bacteria would still allow the good bacteria to thrive.
It just reeks of "bacteria BAD, <x> GOOD" mentality. Like giving everyone broad-spectrum antibacterials for minor diseases without realizing that it slaughters the bacteria in your gut, which you generally need to be healthy. Or the claims that magnets or cell phones or ionized water will only kill good / bad bacteria, leaving you infested / healthy, 100% guaranteed*!
The suggestions are interesting, and I might look into them more carefully, but it has seriously tripped my they're-using-overly-religious-reasoning alarm.
There is a study somewhere where subjects consuming up to 1.5kg of xylitol per month and up to 430g/day, for two years, didn't experience any harmful effects (other than the expected laxation, which subsides with time).
Thank you for submitting this. I enjoy articles which challenge popular "wisdom" very much, especially those related to health. I hope one day we'll have a computer system to validate all of science's assumptions and when one of those assumptions turns out to be false by later research, to automatically correct conclusions drawn based on those assumptions.
This is fascinating. I had read before about xylitol's dental benefits, but I had not heard that they were so pronounced. I want to do some more independent research before I jump to any conclusions, but you can get pure xylitol pretty cheap online. It's a lot more expensive than sugar as a sweetener (~4x) and way more expensive than sucralose (~20x), but factor in dental bills and it starts looking downright cheap.
When you search on xylitol, use "futile cycle" in the query --essentially, bacteria take xylitol up because it looks enough like a genuine, useful sugar, but can't do anything metabolically useful with it. It would be like humans spending all our energy chewing wood.
Interesting. Reminds me a bit of the parts in Greg Egan's "Permutation City" (fiction) where the protagonist is trying to force simulated bacteria to evolve to digest a "sugar" analogue that is poison. Hope our real world bacteria don't evolve to do anything useful with xylitol.
My dental hygiene routine which has worked well for 20 years is brush my teeth twice a day, avoid dentists altogether (most of what they do is unnecessary) and soft drinks and stay the hell away from non natural and refined sugars. I can munch ice cubes quite happily.
As I see, the author of the article has no idea what kind of benefits flossing has. She saw someone who didn't used floss and has good teeth. Yes, it's true that some people are more immune to the diseases than others. I saw a 65 year old women in Azerbaijan, who had never brushed her teeth and has 30 perfect teeth, without any paradontitis or tooth decay or any lost teeth. They were just perfect. Scientist found Mandibular Bones which were 600,000 years old, and they had all teeth on it. And we're sure that they didn't brush their teeth. - Homo Heidelbergensis ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Unt... )
So why some people don't get tooth decay or other diseases even if they don't brush their teeth? There are many factors, but for further read you can search Google. I'll answer the author of the article. She says that there are no studies showing if flossing is useful for tooth health. I wonder if she searched PubMed about that. There are hundreds of studies showing how benefical floss really is. (for ex.: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22161438)
I did several studies on myself and on my wife, about effects of floss. One most important advice that I can give people: Floss is as important as brushing.