Oral health is so important.
I don’t really care too much when I was young. But friends, this is really important!!! The teeth are limited and effects our entire body. The health of oral greatly affect our overall health.
Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor / person in medical business whatsoever. This could be scientifically wrong, but here are some tips I concluded from books and videos. Use at your own judgement.
Floss after brushed.
I’m so surprised that so many things can stuck there and so many could come out when I first floss.
Brush is not enough to get out the food stuck in between your teeth. The best is to floss with the (dental or string) floss. You cut a arm-long floss string and wrap it on both your fingers to create a 1-2 cm working floss picks that go into taking out.
You pull out a string and use it to clean between your teeth. The learning curve of floss is high. If you still have wisdom teeth, they are deeply inside and usually grow wildly that does not perfectly line up with its neighbors. Hard to reach if your teeth not perfectly structure, makes it extra hard to floss properly.
Another option is to use a floss picks. The downside of floss picks is that you only got this small piece of string, and people use it for entire mouth of teeth, this creates a risk of bringing bad bacterias from one tooth to another.
The normal one is in F-shaped. Better ones are in Y-shaped. This is such a good example of little innovation that creates great impacts on life.
So I think if you can use floss strings, great! If you can’t reach certain teeth, use floss picks (prefer Y-shaped over F-shaped).
I looked into few machines, but nowadays it seems noisy, and still not supersedes the floss. But it would be awesome for senior people to just use the machine and get 90% the benefit of floss. Search Waterpik if you’re looking for one.
Remember no matter what you use is better than no floss.
Bass technique of toothbrushing:
Don’t forget to clean your toothbrush after used. It could be dirtier than what comes out from your body!
Why we are in such a hurry that we only brush 15-30 seconds? Brush for 2+ minutes so the paste that scientist put work into it can actually start to take effects. Do not use water to wash out afterwards.
This was my No. 1 mistake. My mindset was c'mon even the bristles go all way out, I still compensate with my hard (bad) brush. But this is so wrong. So now I keep 12 brushes in the house and change it as soon as the bristles go bad.
Use it after brush. Use it before bed. It’s so easy. Rinse in your mouth for 30 seconds and split out. Do not use water after mouthwash. They will form a protection on your teeth. The mouthwash is a plus, cannot replace toothbrushing and floss.
I would love to see a better water flosser (quiet and strong) or micro robots that I can deploy into my mouth and everything would be done automagically.
- Brush, mouthwash (whitening toothpaste)
- Brush, Floss, mouthwash (antiplaque toothpaste)