Hacker News Reader

Comment by nrau | Hacker News Reader

My dentist has been on me for years that flossing is important for your health for more than just teeth. He explained to me recently the role it plays in toughening up your gums (essentially callusing your gums from the repeated abrasion of the dental floss) so that bacteria cannot thrive in there, which they otherwise easily do. And that this bacteria can cause you all kinds of health issues, including cancer.

If you search around you'll find a lot of articles from the dental community that talk about similar benefits from flossing.

After years of being lazy and ignoring their advice, this finally got me into regularly flossing!

View on HN

What percentage of your gum surface do you expect to floss in a session?

Coworker didn't go to the dentist for 30 years. Then needed a bunch of dental work to clear out a chronic infection before he could have surgery to replace a damaged heart valve. I'd heard that infections can spread from gums to your heart. This is the first case I've seen in the wild where that happened.

It’s something I need to get better about, but man, it’s so tedious and if I try to do something else while flossing in invariably do a bad job at flossing.

Here’s my one unsolicited advice for the day, keep a pack of those little flossers in your car, at your desk, or somewhere else you are commonly. Then, use those after lunch daily, or while on a meeting.

I’ve done this and my dentist has noticed!

I hate floss, and while I dislike the little flosser picks less, they still annoy me too, but I have now discovered they sell large (8 inch long or so, similar to a toothbrush) sticks with a flosser head (replacable, extremely cheap) on them.

I love them and they've helped me floss more often! I can just get through it so quickly and it doesn't feel like a chore. Just great manueverability that lets you fly through it rather than keep figuring out how to reposition.

If you have a hard time getting yourself to floss daily, try them.

(I won't mention a specific brand name because that rankles my anticonsumerism, but, you can easily find it at the drugstore)

> Then, use those after lunch daily, or while on a meeting.

It took me a minute to connect this with "oh right, everyone's all on permanent wfh now".

Even though I'm also wfh 4 days out of 5.

This. This is the one. I have those little flossies in an opaque jar on my coffee table and invariably, every night after dinner, I have flossed. Make it easy to do and you might do it more often.

Get a waterpik or the Sonicare equivalent. Use it with very warm but not hot water and a half cap full of Peridex or mouthwash.

My dentist told me I build plaque faster than most, and asked me to floss more (I hadn't been flossing any.) Like you, I found straight flossing to be pretty challenging, but the hydrofloss routing I described takes less than a minute to floss, and is pleasant to boot,and my dentist finds it more effective for me than straight flossing ever was.

I find the waterpik is amazing at getting food out of my teeth, but I still need to floss to get the plaque off.

Same I hate using dental floss, never could get into the habit.

Waterpik changed my flossing habits for life, can't recommend it enough; I don't use the mouthwash, just warm water so that's a good tip.

Peridex nukes your mouth biome. That leaves it temporarily vulnerable to pathogenic bacteria. Normally you would prefer to have a biome consisting of benign bacteria which outcompete the pathogenic ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com