How Brushing Twice a Day Saves The Doomed City!
Tooth Brushing - Ugh! The longest two minutes of the day! And you say we must brush twice a day?
Yes. Plain and simple YES!
This is not just because mommy said so or my dentist keeps nagging at me about it. In fact, there is actual foundational research done on this topic and in order to be motivated to do so, it is so important to understand the basis of this claim that brushing more frequently reduces the chances of tooth decay. But, don’t fear when Dr. Kanan is here!
Alright, a little cheesy I know…
However, a fun fact! Speaking of cheese, did you know that cheese can actually help reduce the chances of us getting caries?
Anyways, back to the topic: What about Brushing makes it so important and what does it really do on a microscopic level to our teeth? By the end of this blog, I bet you will consider brushing before bed tonight! So, here it is.
See, our teeth are made of three layers: Enamel (the hard and dry cover), Dentin (The soft but moist body) and most importantly the Pulp (the bloodline, the heartbeat of the teeth). The severity of the decay is determined by how far it reaches inside the tooth. Is it reversible (if within enamel)? Is it restorable (if within dentin)? Or it is dead (if it touches pulp)?
Now, when we say tooth decay, what do we really mean? So let me tell you a story to help you understand what goes on on a tooth. Imagine our oral cavity, our mouth, to be a huge city with millions of residents (bacteria) homeless because, the city is still developing when we are infants and children, and when our first tooth is erupted into our mouths, the residents rush to these buildings we call teeth to get a little spot to live on and they wait for us to eat so they can get something to feed off. Now, imagine this when we have all 28-32 teeth! Imagine how many tooth-like buildings will be harbouring them. Many species of bacteria live on our teeth 24 hours a day and get their survival nutrients from the food we eat and what gets stuck in our teeth. Streptococcus Mutans is the name of the bacteria that has the highest population and the primary reason for our tooth decay. However, these bacteria themselves are not the real problem. The worst part is that once they overpopulate our city, they think they rule it and begin forming a government! YES! I know! A GOVERNMENT! Like come on!
What do I mean by a “government”? Well, it is that the bacteria get deeply stuck to our tooth surfaces especially on parts of the enamel that are cornered such as the contacting and touching surfaces of two teeth and inside the narrow cracks and fissures located on our molar teeth exactly at the chewing surface! Once they have a secure home, they begin growing in number by a process called mitosis (bacterial reproduction) and if we leave food stuck into these areas for a greater amount of time, we actually speed up this process of bacterial growth. In no time, we visually see a soft and slightly pale whitish film covering our enamel surface and that ladies and gentlemen is called PLAQUE! Plaque matures into what we call a biofilm when the bacteria build little tunnels and highways within the plaque to transport or should I say, smuggle, the sugars from our food to one another! This is now called BIOFILM! And this biofilm is a strong, hard layer that we cannot get rid of easily. This is no different than a government formed by dictatorship, true or not?
Well, what happens to the sugar smuggled, you ask?
Consider this: The sugar molecules are sold to various Streptococcus Mutans colonies under the protection of the biofilm without our knowing and they consume these sugars while laying on the sandy beaches of our tooth surface we call enamel. But the biological tendency to excrete byproducts after a meal is eternal, is it not? Well, bacteria have to follow that rule too and as a result of eating this much sugar (they love sugar), they produce ACID! It is Lactic Acid, to be precise.
By the way, in no universe is acid a helpful thing unless it is an amino acid because that is the building block of life (okay, bad biology joke).
Back to the story. The lactic acid then eats away the hard and dry surface of our enamel creating pits and cavities! That, my friends, is the beginning of our city’s demise. The enamel becomes porous and without our intervention intended to stop its growth, in no time, the cavity grows larger and digs into the second layer. As soon as it touches the soft and moist body of our tooth (dentin) it grows exponentially and all over the place all at once, as if the bacteria found a playground! They invite other friends such as lactobacillus families, and that species, let me tell you, is even worse!
Now, if we have not brushed regularly and removed that plaque well enough in the initial stages, then this bacterial penetration gets a head start! Unfortunately, once the dentin, the body is crossed and the pulp arrives, the decay spreads through the heart and bloodline of the tooth. At this point, it is improbable to revive the tooth to its initial vitality. The biofilm has successfully claimed the tooth and we have unsuccessfully lost the tooth in the war of brushing and flossing!
The only two options left for us now is to surrender and get an expensive Root Canal Treatment or wait even longer and we won’t have to. We will need extraction or it would just fall out of our mouth! The residents of the city literally took down the city building by building, it seems. How visually horrific!
So, here is a simple idea that takes only 4-5 mins of our time on a daily basis that can prevent this tragic ending from occurring in the first place! We call it “Brushing and Flossing Twice a Day”!
See, the stages of the Dental Dictatorship are as follows:
1.) Eating sticky and sugary foods
2.) Food getting stuck between and on teeth
3.) Bacteria feeding off of us and living on our teeth
4.) Bacteria create visual growth in to a white film (Plaque) - IMPORTANT*
5.) That film solidifies into an organized crime syndicate (Biofilm)
6.) The acid from the bacteria make our enamel porous
7.) Then comes dentin and the pulp!
What if I tell you that the principal benefit of brushing and flossing twice a day is to stop the entire bacterial revolution into dictatorship at stage 4?
What if I tell you that if we brush once in the morning and once before bed followed by flossing between the teeth where brush does not reach, would prevent these bacteria from forming a biofilm - the government?
What if I tell you that the best way to treat cavities and tooth decay is to prevent it from happening in the first place?
Well, that’s what I am telling you! Please consider this very diligently as the fate of our cities depends on your heroic activity of brushing and flossing more frequently.
Brush for two minutes and two times per day and follow it by one minute of flossing to disrupt the conversion of plaque into biofilm and know that this is a process of repetition. When you brush, remember to get all those unreachable corners of the teeth, even the ones we do not easily see. Each day, the bacteria wake up with the mission to form the biofilm! Our job is to terminate their mission.
Each day! Twice a Day!
I hope this dramatic cinema of the bacteria’s intention to conquer and colonize our mouths and destroy them into a wasteland helped you consider brushing twice a day. Most importantly, have our children be mentally trained to brush twice a day and floss twice a day so that it becomes their muscle memory in their adolescence and adulthood.
Let us come together and make a difference in the world by improving the status of our oral health. Let us fight the demonic bacteria in our mouths and preserve the beautiful city of teeth that help us chew, speak, and most importantly smile!
As we say at The Tooth Factory, “It is a beautiful day to save them smiles!”
PS: To help you creatively remember and to help you keep track of your brushing records, we have developed a beautiful brushing checklist which is available on our website. It is FREE TO DOWNLOAD! (Link Below)
BRUSHING REMINDER- DOWNLOAD HERE
Researched and Written by:
Dr. Kanan Shah
BDS
Co-Founder, C.E.O.
The Tooth Factory - 2019
Evidence based research:
1.) Heng C. Tooth Decay Is the Most Prevalent Disease. Fed Pract. 2016 Oct;33(10):31-33. PMID: 30766141; PMCID: PMC6373711.
2.) Holmes RD. Tooth brushing frequency and risk of new carious lesions. Evid Based Dent. 2016 Dec;17(4):98-99. doi: 10.1038/sj.ebd.6401196. PMID: 27980327.
