My Dentist's Advice: Eat Ice Cream and All the Halloween Candy You Can (and Exercise, Eating Right, and Brushing are Optional)

I went to my new dentist on Halloween. Yeah, I thought that was funny too. I bought and ate a doughnut afterwards but didn't eat any Halloween candy.

They make their new patients that drive take a test. If you park in the parking lot, you see a sign that has an arrow to the left that says "Back Entrance" for Dr. Herschleb. He isn't listed under "Front Entrance" with the right arrow. When you get to the back entrance, you see only a couple of doctors' names on a small door--with all those doctors listed on the left, there must be another entrance--so you keep walking around the building until you get to the front entrance, which lists all the doctors. It wasn't until I just wrote this a day later that I realized the "Front" and "Back" labels next to the arrows atop the two columns of doctor names on the sign on the parking lot side are not headings for the doctors listed beneath. My wife had the same trouble when she first went to this dentist a few months ago. Don't get me going on poorly-designed signs... I've got another whole blog post in my head about confusing signs at Samuel P. Taylor State Park. It is kind of like designing a Website--some people just shouldn't be allowed to be in charge of making and placing signs, and when they do the rest of us must suffer.

So after managing to figure out how to get into the building, and waiting for the mandatory waiting period for seeing a doctor, I really liked the guy.

They take an extra hour on the first visit to get to know your teeth... and you too, since those pearly whites come attached to you. He spends a big part of that time talking to you about oral hygiene. This is important, because after all the years of going to dentists, going to school and college, having health classes and even becoming an Emergency Medical Technician with twelve years of experience and refresher courses (note: cleaning your teeth doesn't usually have much to do with emergencies), I've never had the basics of oral hygiene presented as clearly and helpfully... and alternatively.

He started off talking about sugar. This seemed quite predictable, and I tuned most of it out since I have good teeth, I brush twice a day and floss (poorly) once a day, and I have an insatiable sweet tooth and I had already decided I was going to get a doughnut after this visit since I was going to be going right by a bakery afterwards. It would be kind of like a doctor explaining the dangers of alcohol to an alcoholic...it isn't going to work like that. So there is something to be said for knowing your audience before starting a presentation.

But then things got good. He realized I was a scientist, and even though I might have gotten the standard presentation (a lot of it sounded familiar to my wife when I told her about it), I think he went the extra mile with the explanation--even pulling out the graphs comparing the relative acidity of various drinks and sour candies. If he didn't tailor it to me, then at least he did a good job of making me think he did. Here is what I learned. And just so I'm clear, if you haven't figured it out already, the title of this post taken out of context is quite poor advice.

Dental Hygiene Makes You Live Longer than Exercise or Eating Right
Dental hygiene has been proven to prolong lives. This is not true for eating right and exercising. I had to stop him here because my head was spinning too. The key for understanding this is differentiating the quality of your life and the length of it, as well as differentiating between what has been proven scientifically and what is known through experience. It is largely an academic point--the side-effects of dental hygiene are few and the benefits are known. If you ride a bike for exercise you might be more likely to get in an accident. If you eat vegetables then maybe you'll ingest some E. coli. We all know that exercise and eating right are very important, if not for prolonging life, then at least for improving the quality of it and making you feel good. I didn't argue with his dental propaganda too much--I let him make this point and move on. But now he had my attention.

Sweet n' Sour
The problem with sugar is that the bacteria that live in your mouth really like it. It allows them to reproduce fast, and since they double with every generation... well, lets just say most people have bad breath in the morning. It is already warm, moist, and easy to latch on to your teeth, so the sugar just allows them to flourish like a watered and fertilized lawn on a hot summer day. The bacterial mats (yuck) in your mouth hold onto the nooks and crannies of your teeth really well and secrete (yuck) acid. Enough about bacterial secretions. The point is that it isn't sugar that is bad for your teeth, it is acid.

Telling your kids to eat all the Halloween candy they can in 5 minutes is a good way to avoid tooth decay (and make them sick--and unfortunately stomach acid is bad for your teeth). Snacking on a package of Skittles (sour + sugar = bad) all afternoon would be much worse. And you should eat ice cream! It has calcium and is not acidic! I love ice cream, so this myopic view sounds great to me. My kind of medical practitioner!

He probably would have told me that swimming with sharks is healthy since seawater isn't acidic.

This allows me to rationalize that maybe some of the sugar I ingest somehow isn't feeding the bacteria, and all I need to worry about now are sour things. Red Bull and Lemonade were at the top of the sour (acidic) drink list. I'll just stop drinking sugary acidic lemonade and orange juice and all will be fine. Oh yeah, by the way, stay away from chewable vitamins--they could probably kill you, with all that sugar and citric acid that you are crushing into your teeth with every crunch. And stay away from dried fruit--it is really bad for you.

Fluoride
Fluoride, when applied to the teeth in toothpaste (and let it sit, don't rinse after brushing), pulls calcium from the saliva and binds it to the surface of the teeth, making them stronger and counteracting the effects of acids from the sweet and sour things. Fluoride in toothpaste is far more effective at preventing tooth decay than putting it in our water, which was nice to hear, since I'm personally opposed to medicating the population without our consent using the public water supply. Fluoridating the water supply to prevent tooth decay in people that have poor dental hygiene is kind of like requiring toxic fire retardants in furniture to prevent smokers from burning themselves up. Hopefully these state laws will change--in order to protect those that are irresponsible, should the rest of us be treated as such? I have the same problem with drug testing and invasive airline security searches--if we are truly innocent until proven guilty, why treat everyone as if they are guilty until they are proven innocent? But I digress... where were we?

Brushing Your Teeth is Optional
When you brush, you can't reach the parts of your teeth under the edges of the gums or between the teeth. When you floss, bleeding is good because it means you are getting at the areas that are inflamed due to bacterial mat growth and secretions (yuck--sorry). The bleeding and inflammation should go away in 5 days. If you floss well, you can cover about 70% of each tooth with flossing, and only have the remaining 30% of each tooth that needs brushing. Most of us don't floss well and especially not that well. If you didn't eat sugar or acid and just flossed really well, then brushing would be optional. If you had fluoride and no sugar and no brushing, you would have no cavities.

So on that next backpacking trip when you are trying to save weight, leave the toothbrush and toothpaste at home (and the dried fruit) and take the floss. The doughnuts are up to you.