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Comment by notafraudster | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an agenda-motivated post because even accepting your point as true, you ignored the actual subject of conversation and pivoted to the thing you wanted to talk about.

Imagine the following headline: Academics make stronger connections between sedentary lifestyles and heart disease. This is true. Imagine someone replied to that conversation with "I should go to the gym more often." You then butted in with "People 150 years ago didn't go to the gym, they just worked physically demanding jobs. Modern office jobs are the entry point for sedentary living. Therefor the solution is not going to the gym, it's becoming a construction worker."

You're not even wrong in that you are proposing something that's part of a solution, it's just bizarre to hijack someone mentioning dental hygiene into a hobbyhorse post about dietary sugar.

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No: the comment I replied to mentioned flossing.

I told him that flossing is a band-aid solution that hides the real cause underneath: sugar, which destroys teeth.

Imagine someone says "I inject herion each day but since I take some pills I can handle it a bit better".

Is the solution here to take the pills? Or to stop the heroin injection?

Are you not able to see that?

This also DOES connect to the main thread: if you don't eat sugar -> your teeth aren't destroyed -> if your teeth aren't destroyed -> you don't get infection -> if you don't get infection -> no gum disease -> and if the study is true -> then no gum disease -> less chance of Alzheimer.

Therefore no sugar -> less chance of Alzheimer as per the study.

You are conflating two different dental problems, tooth decay and gum disease.

Sugar doesn't cause gum disease. Poor dental hygiene causes gum disease. Poor dental hygiene also causes tooth decay, but that doesn't make them the same thing. Tooth decay is caused by sugars, though it's mitigated by cleaning and fluoride. For tooth decay to infect the gums you'd have to be completely ignoring tooth hygiene. A dentist should have filled those cavities long, long before that point, or performed a root canal if you let it go that far.

Eliminating sugar won't change your chance of gum disease one way or the other. It's a bacterial infection that grows into plaques, and they have to be removed. People in the past developed gum disease long before sugars: Otzi the Iceman had gum disease.

The main modern cause of gum disease is smoking, though thankfully that is decreasing. Diabetes is also a cause of gum disease, and managing sugars reduces the chance of diabetes type 2. (Diabetes type 1 is an autoimmune disorder independent of your sugar consumption, though type 1 diabetics also have to manage their sugar consumption -- though certainly not eliminate it.)

The "sugar is evil" trope is just not helpful, and it's not applicable here. It does not cause gum disease and is not implicated in Alzheimer's by this study. People should consume less of it, but it's not the villain it's made out to be by Robert Lustig and company.

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