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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

It's not that cut and dry. Just because you have a small carie doesn't mean it's only going to get worse. That's the reason for fluoride in our water, in our toothpaste and in the wax the dentists applies at the end of your cleaning (that for some reason, insurance never wants to pay for).

Fluoride treatments and good dental hygiene can reverse carries. Carries should only be treated if they're large, or if they're still growing after discovery and alerting the patient.

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And did you know dental plaque and tartar are actually protecting your teeth? And just because vanity we want to get it removed?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17016887/

In vitro study shows that plaque protects against externally-applied acid. Ok. Now what about the acid produced by the bacteria hiding behind the plaque?

Just because dental caries show up with plaque and tartar in no way means that plaque and tartar are causing the caries. These are the mechanism our body uses to protect our teeth from unbalanced oral bacteria. Just like the microbiome of the gut, we have one in our mouth. Removing plaque and tartar does not stop caries.

Caries are initiated by direct demineralization of the enamel of teeth due to lactic acid and other organic acids which accumulate in dental plaque. What is tartar?

Heavy staining and calculus deposits exhibited on the lingual surface of the mandibular anterior teeth, along the gumline

Tartar is a form of hardened dental plaque. It is caused by precipitation of minerals from saliva and gingival crevicular fluid in plaque on the teeth. This process of precipitation kills the bacterial cells within dental plaque.

Just because having plaque on your teeth will block acids doesn't mean it's actually a good idea not to clean your teeth.

I guess if you could show a study showing that leaving plaque/tartar on teeth leads to better health outcomes I might be interested.

If you leave the plaque and tartar on the teeth without fixing the fundamental problem (immune health) then there of course will not be better health outcomes.

Caries are a sign of an immune disorder or imbalance. As long as dentists only scrape peoples teeth and do not integrate their health into their practice you will keep having plaques and tartar to be remove as your body fight this battle.

https://www.lupus.org/news/people-with-lupus-exhibit-increas...

>Caries are a sign of an immune disorder or imbalance

Or just terrible habits like drinking liters of soda everyday. Besides the diabetes, the mix of sugar and acid is terrible for dental health, and contrary to the myth, brushing your teeth will not save them, at all, if one persists in terrible habits.

Sugar does not directly cause oral microbiome imbalance. Lipids do.

https://www.dentaleconomics.com/science-tech/oral-medicine-a...

The reason it's a good idea to clean your teeth is because if you don't they'll stink and become discolored. It's not because it keeps them healthy, because cleaning your teeth strips some protection from bacteria and acids away from them while deepening the pockets around them, creating a nice place for disease to live.

The idea that intensely cleaning your teeth (and keeping them white) is healthy is an intuitive leap that marketers take advantage of, just like the bad intuition that makes people clean their faces intensely to get rid of skin problems. The reality is more complicated. Clean, pure, healthy, white.

Fossils have better teeth than we do, but we have prettier, less fragrant teeth.

>Fossils have better teeth than we do, but we have prettier, less fragrant teeth.

That's because those fossils had way less access to sugar, which is the main reason we need so much more dental hygiene nowadays.

You all think sugar causes tooth decay, no, sorry. It's lipids. Not all bacteria use glucose, most use fatty acids for energy.

https://www.dentaleconomics.com/science-tech/oral-medicine-a...

It is more probably that the sugar throws off lipid metabolic and that changes the oral microbiome.

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