To floss or not to floss — that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mouth to suffer the scrapes and gouges of outrageous prodding …
OK, enough with the lame Shakespeare imitation. But with the issue of regularly flossing your teeth being in the news lately, it’s time to brush up (sorry!) on a few facts about oral hygiene.
The federal government has recommended the regular use of dental floss since 1979, and the American Dental Association says on its website that “flossing is an essential part of taking care of your teeth and gums.” Somewhere along the line, it became accepted as fact that dislodging those steak particles from between your teeth will help prevent cavities and gum disease. But — and here’s the catch — for the government to make such a recommendation, by law there must be scientific proof to support it.
So, the Associated Press started doing a little digging and found that the science behind flossing is flimsy at best. The conclusion: “The evidence for flossing is ‘weak, very unreliable,’ of ‘very low’ quality, and carries ‘a moderate to large potential for bias.’ ” According to the AP, government officials conceded that “the effectiveness of flossing had never been researched, as required,” and this year they dropped the recommendation from their guidelines.
Now, before the floss flouters go flapping their gums (sorry!), allow us to point out that there is a difference between being ineffective and simply being unproven. If performed properly, flossing is better than the alternative of allowing food to remain lodged in the crevices of the mouth. A brush can clean the front and back sides of a tooth, and the floss can buffer the other two sides, and the floss isn’t going to do any harm.
But the kerfuffle surrounding dental floss quickly became the kind of story the media and the public like to sink their teeth into (there we go again!). It is a relatively harmless debate with relatively minor consequences, but it does point out the importance of science in formulating public policy. As Joel Achenbach wrote for National Geographic in 2015: “We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge — from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change — faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts.”
This has been troublesome. Naysayers are quick to believe the University of Google — where any number of crackpots can pass themselves off as professors — rather than the consensus of real scientists who conduct real research and have their findings vetted by other actual scientists. In the case of dental floss, the shortcoming is that nobody conducted the kind of in-depth research that is necessary; in the case of vaccines, the shortcoming is that far too many people choose to ignore mountains of evidence in defense of their own flimsily formulated beliefs. As Achenbach wrote: “The scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing, and sometimes hard to swallow.”
But we digress; the issue of dental floss is much simpler than that. If you floss and enjoy doing so, don’t allow a lack of proven effectiveness to stop you. And if you don’t floss, don’t worry, the benefits have yet to be proved. You can leave your dental health up to outrageous fortune.
