1001 Uses For Dental Floss #64- Tusca Loosa

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Just as a caveat emptor, the following story took place outside Tuscaloosa, AL, and it’s about a loose tooth. Since a tusk is basically an elephant’s tooth grown extra large, should you be skeptical here: (tusca-loosa, ha!ha!)? There are photos taken from a helicopter of the ensuing mess, seen above, but still, I get that nagging feeling, somehow, like my leg is being pulled. In this case it wasn’t a leg being pulled, it was a loose tooth undergoing this treatment.

You often see stories about dangerous driving on YouTube and other online sites. Scary, especially when you see similar things right on the roads you drive every day. It’s always the other guy’s fault. In this story, there isn’t much guesswork about who was at fault, though, because the only person directly involved ended up with the evidence in his shirt pocket.

A truck driver who must have hated going to the dentist was tooling down the highway outside of Tuscaloosa (See what I mean? You pause a bit at the name.) Seems he had a loose tooth (probably many, and he probably wasn’t a flosser) that was causing him some discomfort, and since he wasn’t doing anything which required his attention, he jiggled it and pulled it out, with both hands, letting go of the steering wheel of his rig to do that. He promptly lost control, the truck jack-knifed, and it ended up in the ditch. The effort to extract his truck caused a traffic jam that lasted from Sunday night until the following morning. How the driver had the presence of mind to slip the tooth into his pocket, I can’t explain. Maybe he thought the tooth fairy would slip him a few dollars for his effort.

So, my advice: see your dentist regularly, brush, floss, and if the unlikely happens and you’re driving along and one of your teeth feels loose, pull over into a safe spot, get out your cell phone, and call your dentist’s office. And don’t tell her or him that you’re from Tusca Loosa.

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #63- Mouth Bacteria Linked to Colon Cancer

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image from United States Department of Health and Human Services,

Fusobacterium nucleatum, a bacterium found in the mouth, and specifically in dental plaque, has been shown to also be accelerate the growth of cancer cells in the colon and rectum (your lower gut), where they are also found.

In the mouth, dental plaque is found on the surfaces of the teeth if they aren’t kept properly clean by brushing and flossing. It is a sticky mass of various kinds of bacteria and their chemical products, some of which are damaging to the teeth or to the gums. This is why it’s important to keep your teeth clean by flossing and brushing every day. some of which allow the plaque to be sticky and keep the bacteria next to the teeth instead of washing away as saliva flows past them. 

Please be warned that some strange-sounding chemical names will be mentioned here, but this isn’t me trying to scare you off reading the real message of this story. Just keep going. It’s actually pretty simple to understand.

A recent scientific research paper ((http://embor.embopress.org/content/early/2019/03/01/embr.201847638) has shown that these specific bacteria, produce a substance (FadA adhesin), involved in sticking bacteria together in dental plaque in the mouth, also accelerates the growth of colorectal cancer cells. The colorectal cancer cells themselves produce their own substance, (Annexin A1) which isn’t made by normal (non-cancerous) cells. That material allows the cancer cells to communicate with other cancer cells and make them divide and grow faster and to be more aggressive.

What the FadA adhesin does is help the cancer cells’ Annexin A1 to work better, but not only that, it also helps the attachment of more bacteria and in this way produce more of their substance, which stimulates the cancer cells to make more of their own product, on and on, and so on, so that the end result is that the cancer grows better and faster. This action is known as a positive feedback loop. The next step would be to find medications which may prevent this interaction, interfering with the way the cancer grows. 

It’s important to understand that cancer is a very complex disease or, really, group of diseases, and there are many steps along the way before it will, and hopefully in the not too distant future, be controlled or maybe even cured, so this is only one small step along that long, twisting path. Cancer research is making great strides forward, and will continue to do that because of the dedicated minds of the scientists involved in that research.

It’s also important to know that oral hygiene, brushing and flossing, can’t be expected to affect this cancer disease process, but do it for all the other good reasons. This type of bacteria, as I said, is common in the mouth and the mouth can’t be made sterile. That would cause other problems, because some bacteria are actually useful to our health–they’re our friends.

As I continue to say, though, remember to brush and also to floss. Make it a habit that you do very day. You’ll be healthier, and therefore happier, if you do.

1001 Uses For Dental Floss # 62- A Woman Scribe Got The Blues

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A Woman Scribe Got The Blues

You may recall the name–Dr. Christina Warinner, who is an anthropologist, last mentioned in these pages (1001 Uses #4) because she discovered that ancient humans used one type of grass to floss their teeth. Well, here she is again, this time with colleague Anna Radini of the University of York in England, still studying dental calculus, AKA tartar, but on the teeth of a medieval woman’s skeleton. 

What is special about this woman and this skeleton, and these teeth? Well, this anonymous woman’s remains were disinterred from the graveyard of a monastery of a small religious community at Dalheim, Germany. And what they did at this monastery was create illuminated manuscripts. 

Monastery–monks, right? Wrong, sort of. It turns out that this woman was somehow involved with creating these illuminated manuscripts. You know the ones, those beautifully illustrated hand-written biblical texts displaying fanciful brightly multicoloured drawings of saints and demons and dragons along their margins and decorated with real gold foil. 

That’s not done anymore, not since Johannes Gutenberg put an end to all that when he invented the printing press and inaugurated the Age of the Book (I made that title up, but he did do that.) Anyway, I digress. Back to the blue dye.

Anyway, what does that have to do with anything? It turns out that this woman’s teeth had tartar (there were no dental hygienists around in those years to scrape it off–that’s why they called them the Dark Ages- no, not really) on them. And no one flossed, as far as I know. 

These researchers found that the tartar had a striking blue coloration which turned out to be lapis lazuli, a mineral which was ground to a powder and used in these illuminations.

Well, okay, so what? Well, not only that, but the coloration was unevenly distributed on her teeth, so it’s not like she was inhaling the powder while grinding it or from kissing the Bible at the monastery. There was more of the blue tint on her front teeth than in the back, and this suggests that she was probably using a brush, and licked it to make a fine point of the bristles, and in the process picked up some of the lapis lazuli on her teeth.And this means that she was one of the artists creating these illustrations. 

The only question I have is, why weren’t there any other dyes on her teeth, since other coloured minerals were also used? I don’t have the answer to that question, except maybe this woman specialized in applying this particular colour (like in an assembly line, an innovation supposedly invented by Henry Ford in the early 1900s.) 

Maybe further testing will find other dyes on other skeleton’s teeth in that cemetery. We’ll just have to wait with bated breath for the answer to this question.

In the meantime, floss regularly. And visit your dental hygienist at least twice a year. You don’t want some future archeologist checking out your teeth one day in the far future. I’m sure you have secrets you’d rather no one knew anything about.

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #61- Fluoride Toothpaste and Young Children

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We’re back after a hiatus of a couple of years. Us smiling up at the top? No, that’s a mild form of dental fluorosis.

 

A recent report from the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention on the use of toothpaste and tooth-brushing patterns among children and adolescents (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6804a3.htm)suggests that young children are using and swallowing too much fluoridated toothpaste when brushing their teeth. They recommend that children under the age of 2 should use a non-fluoride toothpaste and those aged 3-6 should only use a pea-sized portion on their brushes.

Let’s dissect this advice down into its parts, or as they say these days, let’s unpack it. The prime idea here should be to do what is necessary, what is practical, and to not make compliance so difficult or complicated that it would turn some of us off from doing the right thing.

First of all, brushing is important. It should be done as soon as the teeth come into the mouth (about 6 months of age and later), preferably after each time a child eats (or drinks from the mom’s breast or a bottle), but since this is maybe impractical in some cases, like the middle of the night where mom is exhausted, do it at least once or twice a day. (Do it in the middle of the night too, if you can.) That way, bacteria won’t build up a layer thick enough to start retaining acid (from sugar breakdown by these germs) which will start to leach calcium from the tooth surface (and so cause tooth decay.)

Second, fluoride at proper levels has been shown over many years to be beneficial to tooth health, by changing the crystal structure of enamel so that the enamel is more resistant to acid. Fluoride has therefore been added to the water supply of many cities as a public health measure. Almost 200 million people in the U.S. and 300 million world-wide have fluoride added to their water supply.

Third, fluoride can enter tooth enamel in 2 ways, either when the teeth are still under the gums, and after they are already visible in the mouth. Before teeth come into the mouth, the enamel may still be forming and fluoride present in the bloodstream bathing these teeth increases the fluoride content as enamel is laid down as the outside layer of the teeth. After the teeth are already in the mouth, fluoride applied to the teeth strengthens the outer layer of enamel. Fluoride that moves from the blood into the saliva in the salivary glands also can contribute to this beneficial process.

Fourth, too much fluoride can cause white spots (see photo above) or lines on developing teeth (termed “fluorosis”), which are teeth which haven’t yet broken through the gums and entered the mouth. By the way, this growth of teeth from below the gums into the mouth is called “eruption”, sort of like a volcano erupts lava from underground onto the earth’s surface. I know, it’s a weird comparison but the term has been around for a long time, so what can you do?

If the concentration of fluoride your child is exposed to is significantly higher than 1.2 parts per million (ppm), fluorosis can result. If it is higher than that (the upper limit here is not well-defined), the enamel can be disrupted enough that surface defects, staining, and weakening of the enamel’s strength can happen. It’s therefore important that the fluoride concentration stays in the “Mama bear” zone (thanks, Goldilocks, for giving us this concept of just-rightness.) The two permanent upper front teeth, which are the most esthetically important teeth when we smile, have generally completed enamel formation between 15 to 24 months for boys, and between 21 and 30 months for girls, so fluorosis can happen to these teeth during this period.  Also, because we drink more when it’s hot, people living in a hot climate should probably have less fluoride added to their water, since they’ll drink more and absorb more fluoride, possibly producing fluorosis more easily.

Fifth, it’s clear that young children, if unsupervised, will not follow dental association guidelines (or listen to you, either.) Toothpaste, especially the fruit-flavoured children’s toothpastes, appeals to kids’ natural affinity for sweet flavours, so watch out.

Sixth, below the age of 6, children haven’t developed enough control over the swallowing reflex and the ability to spit to prevent swallowing of toothpaste. Some, if not most, will be swallowed. So, obviously, preparing the toothbrush with the right amount of fluoride toothpaste by a parent or supervising adult is very important. As for the right amount to put on the toothbrush, a very thin smear of toothpaste for kids below the age of 3, and a pea-sized blob, not more, is recommended after 3. The parent actively doing the brushing is really the best way to go.

So, finally, use of a non-fluoride toothpaste below the age of 3 is probably a good idea, and using a children’s fluoridated toothpaste, which has half the adult concentration of fluoride, from 3 to 6 years of age, is also recommended. And a parent should always be watching and helping young children brush their teeth. I hope all this is clear and convincing.

And don’t forget the dental floss (again, done by the parent), especially once the teeth next to each other are touching.

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #60- Neanderthal Kisses and Dental Plaque

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Helene Rougier, anthropologist at California State University Northridge, in the United States, displays some of the 96 bones and three teeth from five Neanderthal individuals which were found in the Belgium Goyet cave. Credit: Emmanuel Dunand Getty Images

Neanderthals were amazing creatures. Much like us, and much not like us at all. And yet, archeologists have recently looked at hardened plaque, which is the same, I think, as what we know as calculus or tartar, the stuff your hygienist spends an hour scraping and vibrating off your teeth at your six-month visit to your dentist. The results are (for me, anyway) amazing.

The Neanderthals of El Sidrón Cave in northern Spain had a pretty hard time. Food was hard to come by, and they had to fight off predators, disease, and long, hard winters. By looking at the stuff stuck between their teeth in five fossil skulls, (some 50,000 years ago or more), it’s been found that they ate mushrooms, moss and pine nuts.

One individual may even have used plants and moulds to treat his diseases. Paleolithic medicine!

Laura Weyrich, a palaeomicrobiologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia co-led the study, and suggests that these findings “really paint a different picture, almost of their personalities, of really who they were.”

Christina Warinner, an archaeological geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, praises the team’s microbiome reconstructions. The mouths of Neanderthals seem to have been colonized by microbes rare in humans today.

Recent improvements in ancient DNA analysis, have allowed these trace sequences to be identified and have led to a bonanza of research into ancient plaque.

WOOLLY RHINOCEROS
In a 2013 study, a team led by Alan Cooper at the University of Adelaide sequenced preserved plaque to show that major shifts in diet such as the large increase in starch because of settled farming some 10,000 years ago made for large changes in the human oral microbiome.

Weyrich’s team compared plaque DNA from Neanderthals from El Sidrón and from the Spy cave in Belgium. The analysis revealed that whereas Spy denizens seemed to consume woolly rhinoceros and wild sheep, El Sidrón’s foraged for plants, although . Hervé Bocherens, a palaeobiologist at the University of Tübingen, Germany, believes that thee two groups ate meat. Both ate mushrooms.
SWAPPING SPIT

Amazingly, the El Sidrón Neanderthals probably also used plants to self-medicate. DNA from poplar trees (parts of which contain salicyclic acid, historically used in aspirin), and Penicillium mould (the source of penicillin) turned up on one individual’s teeth. Weyrich suspects that they were trying to treat a visible tooth abscess and a stomach infection caused by the bacterium Enterocytozoon bieneusi. Maybe eating mouldy grain could have caused this too, but the idea that these creatures, long thought to be primitive hulking brutes, as self-medicating and familiar with pharmacological approaches to disease is fascinating.

A microbe called Methanobrevibacter oralis is found in the mouths of modern humans, but genetic analysis shows that it was there in ancient humans at the same time as in the mouths of Neanderthals. This suggests the archaebacterium was transmitted between them. Were they kissing, or simply sharing food? Whatever they were doing together, they were together, turning on its head ideas that they were separate and always fighting for dominance.

“If you’re swapping spit between species, there’s kissing going on, or at least food sharing,” says Weyrich, “which would suggest that these interactions were much friendlier and much more intimate than anybody ever possibly imagined.”
So many amazing advances in our study of these ancient beings, who were largely misunderstood in the past, really changes our ideas of whre we came from and how alike we are to what came before us.

The original article in Scientific American by Ewen Callaway can be found at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/neandertal-tooth-plaque-hints-at-meals-mdash-and-kisses/.

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #59- Fashion Toothpastes

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A little late for the end-of-year holidays, but I can’t always be up-to-date on everything dental. Now toothpaste has joined so many other products as worthy of a fashion article. In Vogue Magazine, an article of 8 toothpaste products deemed worthy of being considered as gifts (and why not throw in some floss) was in the December 20 issue, just in time for those last-minute head-scratchers trying to come up with the ultimate unusual and impressive article for the gift stocking. They come in a variety of flavours, including:

1. David’s Natural Toothpaste, touted as being fluoride-free (actually not a good thing, in my professional opinion) and sulphate-free (I don’t know what the value of this is, but I’m not a chemist or public health person.

2. Lebon Cinnamon-Mint flavour

3. Jarvis Jasmine Mint

4. Theodent Kids, which has a chocolate flavour

5. Couto Pasta Dentifrica

6. Acca Cappa

7. Boka Mint Natural Toothpaste

They all look fancy and flavourful, and may make you feel good about taking care of your teeth, so check them out. Not an endorsement, though, just thought this was interesting. I haven’t looked into the prices or availability, though.

So, brush your teeth every day and floss them too. Again, floss your teeth.
But like one of my dentistry teachers once told his patients, only floss the teeth you want to keep. I case you have favourites.

To see the original Vogue article, go to:

http://www.vogue.com/article/gift-worthy-toothpaste-davids-marvis-holiday-sweet-tooth

1001 UsesFor Dental Floss #58- Sugar Really Is Bad For You, In So Many Ways

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I recently came across this article in Medscape, a well-respected medical journal which is easy to access online. The contents of the article should make you worry. If you think about the processed and commercially-available restaurant food you may occasionally (or often) eat or take your kids to, you should be aware that sugar is an ingredient in very many of these foods, sometimes even surprisingly so.

It used to be that salt added to foods, and fat, whether saturated or unsaturated, was seen as the villain “eating away” at your health, and this has been promoted by the food industry and used as an excuse to cover up the role of added sugar, in all its many forms, in affecting nutrition and health. As it turns out, sugar is, according to research findings coming out more and more, a major cause of obesity and a contributor to, among other conditions, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. It should be a cause for concern. Just as tobacco was once defended by the companies who produced products such as cigarettes and cigars, industry involved in the use of sugar in its many forms and disguises are now fighting to retain their hold on its use in food production, denying its deleterious effects. Something to think about.

From a dentist’s point of view, sugar is well-known as a cause of tooth decay when combined with poor oral hygiene, because it feeds mouth bacteria, which produce acids. These acids at first etch tooth enamel (by dissolving its calcium-containing crystals), and in later stages eat away at its structure, making cavities (holes) in the tooth surface. Now, sugar is being linked to other disease processes.

Flossing is important, but let’s not forget that our teeth are part of our body. It’s all one, and it’s all that you’re got, really. Take care of it.

This is important reading.The original article can be found at: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/

 

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Sugar Is the New Tobacco, so Let’s Treat It That Way
Aseem Malhotra, MBChB, MRCP

I was recently asked to speak at the UK parliamentary “Sugar Summit.” This event was convened by Rend Platings, a mother so disturbed by England’s chief medical officer’s revelation that, as a result of obesity, today’s generation of parents may be the first to outlive their children, that she launched a campaign, Sugarwise, to help consumers identify foods with added sugar.[1]

Keith Vaz, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Diabetes, chaired the event, whose audience was made up of a number of representatives from such high-profile UK retailers as Tesco, Caffè Nero, and the Jamie Oliver Group, as well as such influential stakeholders as the UK Department of Health, Public Health England, the British Soft Drinks Association, and the Food and Drink Federation.[2]

I began by welcoming the UK government announcement of an introduction of a 20% tax on sugar-sweetened beverages in 2017. I similarly welcome the recent statement calls by the World Health Organization (WHO) to tax sugary drinks by at least 20% in order to curb the global epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes. We mustn’t forget that the substantial decline in tobacco consumption in the past three decades, which was the single most important factor driving a decrease in cardiovascular mortality during that period, only happened after legislative measures that targeted the affordability, availability, and acceptability of smoking.[3]

Health Effects

Oxford researchers have estimated that a 15% reduction in sugar consumption through such a tax would prevent 180,000 people in the UK from becoming obese within a year and a larger number from becoming overweight.[4] But the scientific evidence reveals that the positive health benefits for the whole population of such a tax goes beyond a mere reduction in calories:
• An econometric analysis of 175 countries (considered the highest quality of study with the exception of randomized controlled trials) revealed that for every additional 150 sugar calories available for consumption, there was an 11-fold increase in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the population. This is compared with 150 calories from another source such as fat or protein and independent of body mass index (BMI) and physical activity levels.[5]
• The prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the US population between 1988 and 2012 increased by 25% in both obese and normal-weight populations,[6] which goes to show that type 2 diabetes is not a condition related purely to obesity.
• A high-quality prospective cohort study revealed a trebling in cardiovascular mortality among US adults who consumed more than 25% of calories from added sugar versus those who consumed less than 10%, with consistent findings across physical activity levels and BMI.[7]
• The positive health effects of reducing sugar intake appear to be quite rapid. In a study of 43 Latino and African American children with metabolic syndrome, keeping total calories and calories from carbohydrate identical, a reduction from a mean of 28% of calories from added sugar to 10% significantly reduced triglycerides, LDL cholesterol, blood pressure, and fasting insulin within just 10 days.[8]

How Much Sugar Is Safe?

So, how much sugar do we need? For the purpose of health, the optimum consumption is zero. Added sugar has no biological requirement and is, therefore, not by any definition a “nutrient.” It is the fructose component (sucrose is 50% glucose and 50% fructose) that fulfils four criteria that justify its regulation: toxicity, unavoidability, the potential for abuse, and its negative impact on society.[9]
How much sugar is safe? The consumption of just small amounts of free sugar, which includes all added sugar and sugar present in fruit juice, syrups and honey, on a daily basis, has a deleterious impact on the most common noncommunicable disease globally: tooth decay. Treatment of dental disease is responsible for 5%-10% of health expenditures in industrialized countries, and in the UK, tooth decay is the number-one cause of chronic pain and hospital admission in young children.[10,11]
As pointed out by researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, there is a powerful argument that the WHO should recommend a maximum limit of sugar consumption to make up no more than 3% of daily calories (about three teaspoons).[12] The average UK and US citizen, however, consumes at least four to seven times that amount.[13,14] This is perhaps not surprising when one acknowledges that it has been almost impossible for the consumer to avoid sugar, as it is so prevalent in the food environment and much of it is hidden. In the United States, almost half of all sugar consumption comes from foods one wouldn’t normally associate as having added sugar, such as ketchup, salad dressings, and bread. A third of sugar consumption comes from sugary drinks, and a sixth from foods that people normally perceive as junk, such as chocolates, cookies, and ice cream.[14]
In the United States, there isn’t any reference dietary intake for sugar on food labels. In Europe, the labelling exists but doesn’t differentiate between children and adults. One can of regular cola contains nine teaspoons of added sugar, which is triple the 2009 upper limit intake suggested by the US Department of Agriculture for an 8-year-old child. The UK Guideline Daily Amount label describes these nine teaspoons of sugar as 39% of the guideline daily amount. On the basis of this false reassurance, it would be understandable for parents to believe that it is safe for their child to drink two and a half cans per day.[15]

The food industry often argues that the public should have a “personal responsibility” when choosing what foods to eat, which deflects blame from their own culpability in the obesity epidemic to the consumer. The truth is that the public lacks knowledge because of confusing food labels, and the public lacks choice because sugar is added to approximately 80% of processed foods.

Big Tobacco, Big Sugar

The fact that it took 50 years before the first links between smoking and lung cancer were published in the British Medical Journal and before effective regulation was introduced is testament to how Big Tobacco was able to defend its practices. Key to the strategy was denial, planting doubt, confusing the public, buying the loyalty of scientists, and giving ammunition to political allies.[16]

The similarities between Big Tobacco and the sugar industry are disturbing. As a recent publication in JAMA Internal Medicine showed, the sugar industry paid three influential Harvard scientists to downplay sugar’s role in heart disease and to shift the blame to fat.[17] Last year, the New York Times exposed that the Coca-Cola Company paid millions of dollars to fund research that downplayed the role of sugary drinks in obesity and push lack of exercise as the main factor.[18] And, according to one former UK shadow health minister, the incorrect advocacy of a low-fat, high-carbohydrate, and high-sugar diet by “morally corrupt scientists and politicians who allowed themselves to be manipulated by food suppliers” is to blame for global obesity.[19]
The recent calls by the WHO to tax sugary drinks are very welcome news for health campaigners. The public health messaging, however, has to be more clear. There is nothing wrong with the occasional treat, but sugar has no place as part of a “healthy balanced diet.” Similar to smoking, any further regulatory measures to reduce sugar consumption, such as banning of sugary drink advertising and dissociating sugary drinks with sporting events, will have a further impact on improving population health within a short time. The science is more than sufficient; the case against sugar is overwhelming. Sugar is the new tobacco, so let’s start treating it that way.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/871064

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #57- The Dental Nurse Who Became An Alligator Catcher- A Story With Teeth.

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Image copyright by Christy Kroboth, 2017. One of her catches (on a golf course).

Not exactly dental floss-related, but a fun story anyway. I came across this story of a dental assistant who decided to give up her career to become a full-time alligator catcher. Alligators of course have a lot more teeth than your (or my) average dental patient, and they’re a lot sharper and dangerous, so there’s part of the challenge. When Christy Kroboth started training as an alligator catcher she was the only woman in her class, but – she’s apretty tough and determined woman. She wanted to show that she could jump on an animal much bigger than her, and tape its jaws tightly shut before it had a chance to do her any damage.

She first started to catch alligators as a side employment to her main job, which was as a dental assistant, but her reputation grew to the point that demand made her take this on as full-time work. She’s a real animal lover, and remembers how she got to be that way- her mom used to stop the car at the side of the road to help ducks and turtles cross, and took in stray cats, dogs, and any other animal that needed a home.

In southern Texas, where Christy lives, there are a lot of communities where large man-made lakes and ponds are a sure attraction for alligators who live in the region to move in, but surprisingly, only one person has been killed by an alligator in the last 100 years. (So she claims, anyway.) People are of course afraid that their children and pets will be attacked and eaten,but she pooh-poohs this just a “superstition”, that they’re not the monsters they’re made out to be.

Alligators, being reptiles, have been around for millions of years, and have become an important part of the ecosystem, maintaining the fine balance of aquatic life. Apparently, they’re quite shy (when have you ever seen an alligator on a celebrity reality show?) and are fairly benign.

With a special licence and a permit, having taken a course which includes both a theoretical and a practical part (in other words, catching the beast with your bare hands).
She was the only girl in the class and also the youngest. The trainer told them: “OK, you’ve all passed the paperwork, now let’s go do this hands-on.”
Having never even touched an alligator before, for a split second she thought, “I can’t do this.” She called my mom, who said, as most loving moms would,”Come home right now, don’t do it!”
But this yound lady had something to prove, to herself, her mother, and especially to the “big ol’ country boys”. In her words, she ran out to the pond, got the alligator, taped him up and ended up passing the test. It was one of the happiest moments of her life and that adrenaline rush lasted the whole day.

Considering the the average alligator weighs almost 800 pounds (360 kilgrams) and is over 13 feet (4 meters) long, you can imagine the guts it takes to do this work. And she loves her job. She didn’t say, though, if she ever tried to floss an alligator’s teeth, and if she would ever try to use floss to tie one up. Somehow, I think, the answer to both these questions would be “no”.

This story was first reported by BBC Magazine. You will find the original article at: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38641709

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #56- Is Flossing Really Useless?

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Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente recently wrote an article following up on the Associated Press’s dismissal of flossing as a useful adjunct to oral health, expressing, I guess, relief that finally she could ignore the advice she receives every time she goes to her dentist’s office. She seems to hate doing the flossing, and resents having an “expert” tell her what to do. Her article in the Globe and Mail, declaring the absolute uselessness of dental floss is, however, wrong on her part. What she says is a misreading of a misreading. The original article by the Associated Press claimed that flossing is useless, as evidenced by a lack of good scientific data supporting the practice, which simply means that a large enough double-blind study hasn’t been done, which I and the American Dental Association acknowledge. This is, however, mainly because the corporations who manufacture floss and toothbrushes and toothpaste and mouth rinse haven’t found it sufficiently important to finance such a study (no one else will because it’s not a matter of public health being threatened enough, like AIDS or Zika virus or Ebola do, which really, and rightly, scare people. Dental decay and gum disease, although very prevalent (dental caries affects more people in the world than any other infection), it doesn’t kill anyone (or hardly anyone, because it can, but rarely in the West), and their effects are slow and limited, for the most part, to the teeth, not the rest of the body. So who cares, right?

Luckily, there are journalists who are more thoughtful. Global News reporter Andrew Russell gives a much more balanced and nuanced picture of this subject.

It’s a little scary to see this issue turned into a controversy by people who dislike doing it, and so feel gratified, if not liberated, by what seems to be a reason for them to stop flossing. It’s more distressing, though, when those who shape public opinion in the news media misreport and misrepresent issues, and then pass them along to other reporters who, in a grotesque sort of broken telephone, blather on about issues which are then presented in a simplistic and distorted fashion to an audience who are unfamiliar with them and accept that whoever is doing the writing must be an “expert” on it. So the “experts” are deciding who the “experts” are, without really vetting the value of the information or disinformation they’re passing on. This doesn’t just apply to this small issue of flossing, but also to more important subjects which make the headlines of our newspapers and the ticker tape display on our news channels. Distressing.

Please continue to floss. It really is good for you.

 

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #55- The Story of Gulliver’s Floss

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So, it seems that the Associated Press did a deep review of scientific papers studying flossing and found that, amazingly, FLOSSING IS USELESS! Sure, and Dewey won the presidency against Truman in the 1948 U.S. Presidential Election- they got that one right too. No one could be more surprised than me at this revelation, but sceptic that I am, I don’t believe it. In my heart (and experience) I know that flossing prevents both decay between teeth and gum disease, and I plan to go through all the articles cited investigating this. Give me a couple of months, though. There’s a lot to read.

While you’re waiting, though, here is another tall tale inspired by a comment by Chuck H., a Facebook friend of mine.

Many years ago, a man named Lemuel Gulliver travelled from one place to another, meeting all sorts of strange creatures. The best-known of these were the Liliputians, who appeared to be fully-formed humans, except they were very, very small. How small were they? Very, very small. Very, very, very, small. Minute. When Gulliver landed on Lilliput after a gale sank his ship, taking everyone but him to the bottom of the sea, he was exhausted from swimming, fighting the currents, and outpacing the sharks and other sea creatures bent on eating him. He fell asleep on the shore, and when he woke up later, he found himself surrounded by a horde of the tiny inhabitants of the island, who, being cautious about the possible danger from such a huge creature, had lashed him with rope, so that he couldn’t move a finger.

Gulliver, though, was, among many other things, a surgeon and dentist, and he mistook the ropes, which were pretty thin and fashioned from silk, for dental floss. Not having much else to do, Gulliver began to speak, describing his work and the terrible scourges he fought every day, dental decay and gum disease. Not being someone who surfed the net, which was not to be invented for several more centuries, he hadn’t read the Associated Press article on the futility of flossing, so he proceeded to preach on the value of the practice. Gulliver was such a good orator that the creatures of the island were soon convinced. By night, a few would sneak close to him and cut off a length or two of the silk lines and floss their teeth, and amazingly, within a few days they felt better, and had much better breath. This so impressed their friends that the practice spread across the island, and very soon, all of Lilliput had great oral hygiene. Because they used up the silk binding Gulliver, he was quickly able to free himself and soon took short walks across Lilliput. The tiny people of the island hailed Gulliver and wanted to make him their king. But Gulliver was a modest man. He didn’t want power. He just wanted to go forth to other lands, extolling the virtues of good oral hygiene habits far and wide. And this is why Jonathan Swift’s book about him is called Gulliver’s Travels, and not Gulliver’s Floss.

If you liked this story, go read the real Guliiver’s Travels, a satirical novel published in 1726 by Irishman Jonathan Swift, now available free online. It’s in the public domain. And continue to floss. It really does help. I’ve seen it happening.