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Comment by xupybd | Hacker News Reader

My wife comes from a country that did not add fluoride to the water. She has very good dental hygiene but here teeth are not in good shape for her age. That's one data point that I have observed.

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>That's one data point that I have observed.

As with many things genetics plays a big part.

I neglected going to the dentist for 15 years and take just ok care of my teeth (brush at least once per day, don't floss).

I was expecting bad news, lots of cavities, but my teeth are perfect. After some plaque removal, not a single cavity.

Asked the dentist about this, he shrugged and just said "genetics".

I'm sure they do, but the dentists here have told her that lack of fluoride is her problem. She is using a night time fluoride paste to help.

It might not be a fluoride, it might also be a lack of molybdenum.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/222941122016020...

Interesting, I didn't know about molybdenum.

Her home city of Hanoi doesn't have tap water that the locals like to drink. Even after boiling I think it can taste bad. So she grew up with heavily filtered water or bottled water. I would guess her diet was lacking in many trace minerals from this.

Dentists don’t do genome sequencing, so they have no way of ruling out genetics.

Sometimes you don't need to rule everything else out to be confident in a diagnosis.

In this case it’s more “when all you have is a hammer (fluoride)…”

The therapy appears to be improving her teeth. Is there something I am missing?

Just because a treatment works doesn't mean it's the best treatment, or is treating the "cause." To say that a lack of fluoride is the cause of their bad teeth is silly. Not eating sugar/acidic foods, Novamin, or a different set of bacteria in her mouth would also improve her teeth.

We used a toothpaste with novamin in it. That didn't help her. She doesn't eat much sugar. She's 40 something kg and eats very healthy.

I’ve noticed the same thing living in Taiwan. They don’t fluoride the water, and in general people have pretty bad teeth with caries and decay that I never see in Americans in their 20s and 30s. The highly sugary diet probably doesn’t help either.

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