Mistakes we make when brushing our teeth: why they can’t be cleaned immediately after a meal and there’s no need to rinse toothpaste | Lifetime

Pasak 15min of life Interlocutors, to maintain beautiful and healthy teeth, it is necessary to consider three things. We should take care of them daily first. The second refers to a diet that requires a reduction in carbohydrates. And for tooth enamel to have time to recover from the effects of food, it takes three hours between meals, in other words, not to bite too often.

The third thing that cannot be forgotten are preventive inspections. You need to visit the dentist and oral hygienist regularly. It is true that there is not a common term for everyone, it can vary from three months to a year and depends on the risk that a person has of dental and gum disease. However, it is very important to show the condition of your mouth to a specialist not only when you have a toothache.

– Oral hygiene is generally associated with a beautiful white smile. Is that your only purpose?

– In fact, when we talk about oral health, everyone gets the image of a beautiful smile first, but oral health is not just a beautiful smile, although the second one really determines psychological and social health, because a beautiful smile helps us feel good in communication. Research has been conducted that claims a beautiful smile can help you find a partner and even a job.

However, the other side of oral hygiene has a lot to do with our general health. Therefore, we should not talk about oral hygiene, but about oral health. Many international conferences now mention: let’s turn the mouth to the body, let’s treat oral health in the context of all our health. There are more and more scientific publications that explain the relationship between the mouth and our general health.

Today, diseases like Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease have been shown to be directly related to oral health. So if we have gingivitis that we don’t care about, the risk of developing Azheimer in old age increases, as does the probability of complications from diabetes.

A scientific paper has appeared that indicates the importance of oral hygiene during a pandemic.

In this context, the COVID-19 pandemic, during which so much has been said about hand hygiene, is also inevitable. However, a scientific article has already appeared indicating the importance of oral hygiene in this case as well.

Clearly, it won’t protect us from infection, but it can reduce the severity of complications. It has to do with bacteria that live in our mouths and are not limited to our mouths. Through the general bloodstream, they also enter the lungs, which is very dangerous for people who receive artificial lung ventilation. Therefore, it is argued that if a person’s gums or teeth are not healthy, the risk of complications from the disease increases.

– It seems that we all know how to brush our teeth because we have been doing it for as long as we can remember. What do you need to know about proper tooth brushing anyway?

– On the one hand, brushing your teeth is easy, on the other hand, difficult. Easy because it takes very little time. Morning and afternoon cleaning takes a total of 4-5 minutes, so the time costs are small and the benefits are enormous.

It is difficult because when we brush our teeth we often do not see what we are cleaning there, so when we visit an oral hygienist, we hear that we are cleaning them badly. Therefore, I recommend that patients try plaque dyes (available in tablets and dye pastes) to see if they are actually cleaned effectively. This is especially true for children. To be more visual, imagine that the surface of our teeth is a plate covered with a film of fat. Our goal is to clean that film, breaking down the joints between the bacteria that grow on the tooth’s surface during the day so that they stop multiplying.

Experts always recommend using a soft toothbrush and changing it every three months, but you’ve probably heard that brushing your teeth alone isn’t enough, you also need to clean your interdental teeth.

The toothbrush cleanses only 60 percent. Tooth surface Accordingly, 40 percent. bacteria we don’t touch. Therefore, it is necessary to use interdental cleaners, the most common are interdental floss or interdental brushes. Unfortunately, statistics show that only 10-20% use such tools. persons.

It would be sufficient to clean the interrogator once a day and this should be done before brushing your teeth with a regular brush. I generally recommend doing this at night when we have more time. Which tools to choose would be the best recommended by a specialist because we are all very unique and have a different interdental shape. It is very important that the tool is easy to use, only then will we use it daily. It’s worth asking a specialist to teach you how to properly clean your interdental spaces, even to allow you to try it in your office. Interdental cleaning should not be painful and should not cause bleeding.

It would be sufficient to clean the interrogator once a day and this should be done before brushing your teeth with a regular brush.

General recommendations: the floss is suitable for cleaning the narrowest interdental spaces, and the brush is suitable for the largest. In fact, the interdental brush has more applications and the further away, the more professionals recommend using it, especially if a person has problems with the gums, uses orthodontic appliances, has implants.

Since most toothpastes are sold as cosmetics, beautiful advertising is inevitable.

Interdental brushes come in a wide variety of sizes, and if it’s not possible to see a specialist right away, pharmacies can provide kits that include brushes of different sizes. Then it is possible to adapt them.

– How to choose toothpaste? Sure, they are often advertised as miracles, but when you brush your teeth, you see that there is no miracle.

– Since most toothpastes are sold as cosmetics, beautiful advertising, which is sometimes just advertising, is really inevitable.

The most reliable source would be to ask your specialist, but to make it easier for people to navigate that abundance, I’d like to emphasize that toothpaste is commonly used for three purposes: to make it easier for us to brush plaque, revitalize mouth odor, and , which occur when eating carbohydrate foods.

Still, it must be remembered that 96 percent. Enamel is made up of inorganic substances. So when we learn about natural toothpastes, with fruit extracts, charcoal, essential oils and all kinds of other miracle substances, we have to understand that they do not affect tooth enamel.

It is very important that the toothpaste contains enough fluorine. When choosing a toothpaste, it is very important to rely on scientific knowledge, not emotions, when some unusual toothpaste catches your eye. I even saw a pasta with spinach recently. It is better to eat them now and clean your teeth with fluoride toothpaste.

– However, fluoride is ambiguously evaluated …

– I would compare the debate on fluorine with the debate on vaccines and the antiviral movement. Yes, there are speakers that do not need fluorine, which is a neurotoxin, etc. Still, it would reassure people a lot.

If we eat fluoride, it will definitely turn into poison, but the amount of fluoride in toothpastes is really low and it is very necessary that our tooth enamel be strong and not develop cavities. This is especially relevant in Lithuania, because we don’t eat a lot of seafood containing fluoride.

– Is it necessary to choose toothpaste only in pharmacies?

– There are pastes that can also be bought in supermarkets, but if we want to invest more in oral health, I would definitely suggest looking for them in pharmacies where you can find toothpastes that are no longer even cosmetic, but cures. I will only repeat that I would definitely recommend avoiding all kinds of noisy names: toothpastes with a variety of ingredients, essential oils, charcoal, etc.

It is also important that we like the taste of pasta because we will consume it every day. If it irritates the mucous membranes, it will be uncomfortable to brush your teeth.

I even saw a pasta with spinach recently. It is better to eat them now and clean your teeth with fluoride toothpaste.

– Is it necessary to use rinsing liquid after brushing my teeth?

– The rinse fluid is considered quite controversial. It is not recommended for most patients unless a therapeutic liquid is needed after certain interventions to heal the gums more quickly. And anyway, all supermarket rinse liquids only have a deodorizing effect.

It is true that there are fluoride mouthwashes that a specialist can recommend if there is an increased risk of developing cavities. So I would always suggest consulting a specialist on this.

– It is often discussed when to brush your teeth in the morning, before a meal, only after getting up or after a meal.

– The basic rule to follow: there should be an interval of at least half an hour between brushing teeth and eating. If you have this opportunity in the morning, you can clean it up after breakfast. And if you have to fly immediately after eating, I suggest cleaning them only after getting up and waiting half an hour before breakfast. This half hour is very important for the tooth enamel to absorb the active ingredients of the paste.

Why wait half an hour before eating? Our enamel is very thin, 1 to 2 mm thick. As it ages, its layer shrinks even more, so it’s important that the ingredients in toothpaste harden the tooth’s surface, and when we eat, our tooth enamel is more resistant to the effects of food acids.

After a meal it is similar. Our food, even if we don’t eat sweets, inevitably contains carbohydrates that start to digest in the mouth. When digested, acids are produced, whereby an acidic medium is formed in the oral cavity. In half an hour, our saliva neutralizes it, and it is when the oral medium is neutral that the minerals in the paste do not enter the saliva, but, on the contrary, enter the tooth. Then such cleaning will be more efficient.

I would also suggest not rinsing the toothpaste after brushing your teeth, just to spit out the foam that has formed so that the active ingredients remain on our teeth. People are often surprised to hear this, but we don’t wash the face cream.

Although enamel is one of the hardest substances in our body, its greatest enemy is acid.

– People often press the brush hard enough to clean their teeth as best they can. Is it possible to damage the enamel and cause more problems than good?

– You really don’t need to press too hard on the brush. I always give patients a brush to clean the surface of the hand so that they feel the movement, because the quality of dental cleaning does not depend on the pressure, but on the amount of movement performed. In other words, it is not the strong movements that clean, but as many movements as possible. Therefore, the bristles of the brush should be restored to the tooth at a 45 degree angle, and cleaning should be done with small light circular movements imagining that we are cleaning the entire surface of the tooth.

Although enamel is one of the hardest substances in our body, its greatest enemy is acid. So if there is an acidic medium in the mouth and it is so, if we eat frequent snacks, drink a lot of soft drinks, etc., we can damage the enamel by pressing the brush with force. We can also damage it if we use highly abrasive toothpaste. They are generally whitening pastes and are not suitable for twice-daily use.

Otherwise, it takes at least two minutes to brush your teeth. If we want to clean them well, we need to have a plan. For example, first I clean the lower teeth on the outside, then the upper teeth on the outside, then I clean the inner sides and finally the chewing surfaces of the molars.

For patients who like technology, I suggest using them as there are many devices that can help us clean our teeth well, count how long we clean them, show the places where we have cleaned very little, etc. We can also improve our skills using plates that show pasta. Therefore, even a boring tooth cleaning routine can be fun. At the same time, we will do a tremendous service to our overall health.