fangman said..
Having worked at the coalface for a few decades I feel I can add a couple of points here.

Sodium bicarbonate mouthwash is fab. I could fill a page with the 'why' but simply put, it works. Do it!

Unless you actually have a bacterial imbalance or gum disease, antibacterial mouthwashes are of limited use and mainly just a triumph of the marketing division. (Ones with alcohol are probably worse.) For good oral health you want as many of the good bugs in your gob as possible. They will help keep the bad boys under control. Antibacterial mouthwashes just napalm everything, which is good when you are over-run with the bad boys, but not required when things are pretty stable. Bad bugs tend to form colonies in the dark corners, don't like to be disturbed, and make slimy protective domes which are really quite good at resisting chemical attacks. The good guys tend to just be floating around and just chillin' . They get smashed by chemicals. For a healthy gob, just keep disrupting and dislodging the bad colonies with a floss/interdental brush and, in most people, the biota will shift toward the good guys. Use whatever paste you want, it's not that important. I should add that unless you have gum disease, most of the bad breath bugs live on your tongue, so lots of fibre in your diet and a good scrape is the plan.

R/O (reverse osmosis) is required to remove Fluoride from water.

Drinking R/O long term is not recommended. You are a big bag of salty water with some minerals and stuff. If you drink pure water the osmotic pressure drives the minerals out of your body fluids and into your intestine in order to restore the balance. Long term there is a risk of mineral deficiency if you don't take steps to replace the mineral loss. Your large intestine and kidneys are awesome at recovering minerals from your waste, but eventually the ion exchange mechanisms can no longer keep robbing Peter to pay Paul and you lose minerals.

Fluoride benefits teeth mostly when they are being formed and maturing, but has shown benefits at all ages of life for all mineralised tissues. Again, I could stuff a whole page in here, but probably should just use a meme. Probs not going to change anyone's belief system on the benefits vs risks so won't prattle on.

Your genetics (natural defence mechanisms), diet, and your ability to clean BETWEEN your teeth are major determinants of your dental health. FN's point is valid because many of the patients I saw that had gum and cardio issues also had a veritable list of co-morbitities. Generally, they were just rubbish at looking after their health regardless of orifice or organ and nailing down the original pathway for disease was almost a moot point.

Gum inflammation results in elevated levels of an inflammatory marker called C reactive protein. You can Google Scholar the relationship between this and cardiac disease. Use the Cochrane library reviews to get the gold standard research. (It's free to Australians).

The highest density of dentists per population in Aus are in areas with unfluoridated water.

And finally some anecdotal gold stuff too. I worked for WAHealth as a dentist in the Kimberley and Gibson desert. I visited the various Aboriginal reserves/camps/settlements to provide a modicum of dental care. Some of this camps had naturally fluoridated water.(luckily, at almost the ideal rate.) Very few of the inhabitants of any of these places had any sort of relationship with a toothbrush. They all had tuck shops selling sugary crap and junk. In the unfluoridated camps it was a car smash of oral disease and a nasty business most of the time. In the fluoridated camps I was done in a day.

Now, did I mention Bicarb mouthwashes?

fangman

Fluoride benefits teeth mostly when they are being formed and maturing, but has shown benefits at all ages of life for all mineralised tissues. Again, I could stuff a whole page in here, but probably should just use a meme. Probs not going to change anyone's belief system on the benefits vs risks so won't prattle on.

psychojoe said..

Actually. I'm open to changing my belief system on this one. I'm considering not having a water filter on the next house just because of your comments. One of my kids doesn't like to brush her teeth properly.
So yes. Please do prattle on. I'll be reading it all with great interest.

remery said..

Bummer for the people who avoid fluoride, masks and vaccination. Darwinism at its finest.

fangman said..






Prattle v1 To the best of my knowledge, the vast majority of water filters won't remove fluoride from the water supply, hence the need for R/O. I still have an old work R/O unit at home and it is used daily for all sorts of stuff that is better done with pure water, so PJ, I wouldn't ditch the idea of a filter or R/O.

I am not sure where to start on the fluoride and tooth enamel stuff. Some background info perhaps? The enamel on your teeth is a rod like structure and looks like a packet of pasta viewed end on when viewed under magnification. If you could imagine a washing line full of footy socks lined up together, and each of those socks stuffed with quartz pebbles that's pretty close.
As your teeth form beneath your gums, the sock is laid down to act as formwork and then the grano-worker cells come along and dump a quartz like substance into each sock. Fluoride works by substituting into the 'quartz' filler and making it harder and more acid resistant. Once the tooth erupts into your mouth the grano-workers are done and dusted and no more quartz can be added. (Which is why you can't grow enamel back as an adult)
Except, nature is a bit clever and has added some more layers of defence. The enamel on a freshly erupted tooth is not fully mineralised/saturated, so you if you soak the surface in a mineralised solution the tooth will absorb more minerals. As Mrs Marsh said, the fluoride really does get in.
Hence fluoridated water and toothpaste is really helpful in strengthening freshly erupted teeth.

You can't overstuff the sock with pebbles. So as you age the benefit of F on tooth enamel reduces. However, the pebbles can be eaten out of the sock by acids. As long as you don't damage the sock you can top up the pebbles again if the environment is not acidic. Bicarb creates an environment where your saliva can get on with remineralising much sooner and faster. Toothpaste minerals can be good in this regard too.

You can damage the sock framework when it's not supported by pebbles. You cannot regrow the sock framework. So if you damage the sock, you can't replace any pebbles. (Pebbles are lost to acid attack). It's really important not to damage the sock framework. For example, when you have a spew and coat your teeth in stomach acid, the worst thing you can do is brush your teeth as the sock will be brushed away. Instead, rinse your mouth to get rid of the acid, again bicarb rinse is awesome here. Give the saliva a good half hour to repair/replenish the pebbles in the sock. Toothpaste is a good source of pebble minerals for repair too.
This applies anytime you bathe your teeth in acid - eg fizzy and sports drinks. I should add, that when you feed the bad bugs sugars, they form colonies know as plaque and churn out acid directly onto the enamel below -> decay is the result.

Congrats to the scrollers, here is the abstract: At any age F helps strengthen the surface layer of enamel against acid attack, but more so on freshly erupted teeth. Take special care to repair your teeth after bathing them in food additive acids.
PJ (assuming you made it this far) is this at all helpful?

psychojoe said..
Very helpful so far.
So maybe the kids should stick with a flouride toothpaste, and I can switch to the probiotic toothpaste.

snoidberg said..
Regardless of if or if not fluoride helps your teeth, people are overlooking the amounts of tap water that go into our food production like bread.
Fluoride doesn't evaporate out when it's boiled, it instead concentrates as the water boils away.
Is it safe to drink pure fluoride?
How much poison is ok then?
If you ask a dentist they will tell you fluoride is good for you because they care for teeth.
If you ask a toxicologist if fluoride is good for you you will likely get a different answer.
If someone says fluoride is good for you hand them a glass of pure fluoride and see if they are prepared to drink it.

Google "What was fluoride originally used for"
The first use of adding fluoride to drinking water was undertaken by the Nazi party who added it to the drinking water of the ghettos and prison camps. They found through human experimentation that fluoride actually made people more docile and subservient as well as sterilizing them.

Sounds similar to what governments want today,
depopulation and subservient slaves.

The sugar industry and the aluminium industry lobbied governments to put fluoride into water supplies.
The sugar industry lobbied for fluoride to be added to water supplies because governments were considering regulating the food industry to reduce sugar intake and reduce health care costs. The aluminium Industry were concerned about being sued due to fluoride pollution run off and funded a fraudulent study to make out fluoride has health benefits that would allow them to sell their byproduct (fluoride) to governments to put in town water.
It was a win win, they actually get paid to polite the environment by selling the waste for us to drink.

Fluoride added to our tap water is not the type of fluoride used at the dentist's office and in toothpaste (sodium fluoride), but is rather a form of industrial waste called hydrofluorosilicic acid.

Is it ok for government for force medicate a population?
Nuremberg.

remery said..
Studies have indicated that poor dental health and cardiovascular disease are linked.

Bummer for the people who avoid fluoride, masks and vaccination. Darwinism at its finest.

fangman said..
A little off topic but I cant help myself: healthy gum tissue is extraordinarily tough stuff. Think of what the tissue on your roof of your mouth goes through. Continually moist and mashed every time you eat. One of the defence mechanisms to deal with bacteria is for the gum to swell with more defence cells and become more permeable so the defence cells can get out into your mouth easily to deal with the intruders; opening the castle gates and counter-attacking sorta thing. The gum will look 'redder', bleed easily and possibly be a bit puffy to look at. So if your gums bleed, take it as a sign there are intruders at the gate and you need to help by going hard on that area. Don't worry if it bleeds, as soon as your body is happy there are no more intruders it will heal regardless of whatever you are throwing at it. Your gum will be tender because it's full of inflammatory cells, but as it heals, this will subside. In short, Go Full Predator Arnie "if it bleeds we can kill it"
Teeth that are not nicely aligned (amongst other things) can make this a never ending battle and a complete PIA. Unfortunately there is no lazyman's way out - if there was I would have found it.

And even further off topic, the increase in gum permeability when inflamed works both ways. The downside is it's also an opportunity for bacteria to get past the castle gates, and if large enough numbers, run amok and cause mischief in your heart.

fangman said..
Having worked at the coalface for a few decades I feel I can add a couple of points here.

psychojoe said..
I hadn't even considered putting bicarb in the waterpik, that's genius, I think I'll try that tomorrow.