Once your adult teeth replace your baby chompers, they’ll be with you for life – a period that’s much longer than it used to be.
“That molar that came in when you were six, for most of human history, that tooth had to do it from six to 50, maybe 60 if you were really old,” he says. Matthew Messina, director of the Upper Arlington Dental Clinic and the Ohio State University Dental Oncology Clinic. “Now we expect the same tooth to reach 90, 100 years.”
To keep your teeth in shape for a longer life, it is essential to separate the good dental advice from the misleading fads or myths.
Do not rinse after brushing
The basics of dental health are well established.
“The healthy four is what I recommend to my patients,” says Messina. “Brush twice a day with a fluoride toothpaste, floss or clean between your teeth once a day, see your dentist regularly and eat a healthy diet.”
If you can do these things, he says, “You’re the top one percent.” It’s that simple. Spitting, rather than rinsing after brushing, can give tooth-strengthening fluoride the time it needs to work. If you want to rinse, do it before brushing your teeth while flossing (gently).
Messina says it’s important to use our teeth for their intended purpose: biting and crushing food.
“They’re not designed to pull the little plastic price tags. They’re not designed to help open things up,” he says. If you open a drink with your mouth, your teeth will pop or break, and grabbing the pliers instead of your molars is a much better idea.
To pull or not to pull?
If you want to add extra steps to your oral hygiene routine, choose them carefully. Some widely publicized dental practices, such as the Ayurvedic technique of oil pulling, have been around for thousands of years.
It involves rubbing (or “pulling”) an edible oil – for example, coconut oil – around the mouth and then spitting it out. Messina says that while no reliable tests have been conducted on the effectiveness of the technique, there is no reason that oil pulling would be harmful unless you had an oral infection at the time. Some case reports have is suggested a connection with stomach upsets. “It was the height of fashion 5,000 years ago, and I’d like to think we’ve improved a bit on that point,” says Messina.
Charcoal: A wood grinder for your teeth
Not all alternative dentistry is harmless. Messina says recent trends encouraging charcoal toothpaste could be putting users’ teeth at risk. Charcoal toothpaste is marketed as a whitening product to remove stains. This can do what it says on the tin, but in the same way that a wood sander will lighten hardwood floors.
Carbon is an abrasive powder consisting of natural oxidized substances. If you rub this on your teeth regularly, it can wear down your enamel, the protective coating on your teeth.
“If you put it on, it won’t come back,” says Messina, who argues that “overusing charcoal products for whitening can be extremely dangerous.”
Brushing teeth as a brain diet?
One theory about tooth brushing is that it can be an effective appetite suppressant. Messina says this isn’t because of some Wegovy-like manipulation of our appetite, but because eating after brushing your teeth tastes bad, signaling to your body that it’s time to eat.
Where appetite and dental health interact is in the timing of our meals. When we eat food, bacteria in our mouths metabolize the sugars in that food, producing acid as a byproduct. It’s this acid that leads to the destruction of our teeth, says Messina. If we eat many small meals or snacks during the day, this means that the bacteria in our mouths are constantly being fed.
“Or the teeth are subjected to an acid bath that lasts a day,” says Messina. To combat this, Messina recommends pairing your snacks – eating them as dessert after your main meal. This reduces the number of opportunities bacteria have to eat.
