First 'tooth regrowth medicine' to be tested in Japan from Sept. 2024

Our teeth enamel is in chemical interaction with our saliva. Lower pH favour the dissolution of the apatite (attacking the teeth), and higher pH favour its precipitation (growing enamel). So it’s true that the components are in our saliva as well, in itself it is not enough to make it grow.

These toothpastes change this by providing lots of the building blocks of apatite, saturating the saliva and promoting growth, but also by increasing the pH. It tends to decrease after a meal (or particularly after drinking sugary drinks, which tend to be awfully acidic), which is why it’s useful to have the toothpaste stabilising it.

Not with a modern lifestyle, no.

You can easily look up some studies, but for me personally it has been the impact on sensitivity. It's basically gone since I've been using it.

At least in the US, the argument is that when pressed by the FDA, Novamin was pulled from the market by GlaxoSmithKline instead of doing the required trials whereas Biomin went through and passed all the trials.

And since it's actually gone through the process, there are studies out that compare it to other hydroxyapatite solutions. I've linked one study which compares their two variants against Apacare and karex (two HAp toothepaste which have studies of their own that compare against the others before them like Novamin).

The study shows that Biomin C (the one without Fluoride) is comparable to karex (the one without fluoride) and other similar HAp toothepastes. HAp + fluoride (like novamin) marginally outperforms it. So if you use fluoride (such as by also using a fluoride toothpaste or living in an area with fluoride in the water) the difference should be negligible. Importantly though for people in the US, Biomin C is available here.

Biomin F is wrapping up the FDA approval process however it does seem to generally outperform all other formulations since the fluoride is actually part of the bioglass itself rather than simply an additional active ingredient in the suspension.

TLDR: Biomin C is within marginal differences to comparable no-fluoride HAp toothpastes on the market but Biomin F outperforms other HAp toothpastes that contain fluoride since the fluoride in Biomin F is delivered via the same mechanism that handles remineralisation of the other elements. And to my knowledge Biomin F is the only HAp toothpaste to do that so far. Also Biomin C is the only HAp toothpaste available in the US (with Biomin F apparently soon to follow).

https://doi.org/10.21608/adjg.2021.66174.1346

The kids version is as effective and less sweet. But more expensive. Another benefit is that it doesn't contain titanium dioxide.

Companies have teams upon teams of people desperate to justify their continued employment despite existing products being more than adequate. See: constant UX redesigns, 3-blade razors.

I you live long enough in Japan this is just concept as viewed by an outsider. Their dollar store is full of almost useless ideas put out in the market. Even the blue LED was discovered because a company owner invested millions and his scientist was not afraid to try new ideas. You will find all sorts of camera styles on their electronic stores. Even their appliances have all kind of categories and you wont see the west even trying to put it out in the market.

Meh. My experience working there wasn't so much that original ideas were frowned upon as much as thinking/saying you're better than your group-mates for having them was. It's a subtle difference, but I saw plenty of novel ideas take root, but only after an excruciatingly long period of socialization. In the states and in most of Europe, it seems if you have a good idea, you just blurt it out and people say "hunh. that sounds like a good idea. let's do that thing." But Japan and Sweden required A LOT of planning and hemming and hawing about whether the new idea was a good thing to do.

My mom was obsessed with flouride in water so I actually asked my dentist about it. According to an actual health professional it is quite good for the teeth and excessive amounts only affect the appearance not structure.

To be clear: drinking water sources often contain flouride and swallowing water is generally not optional. The source can be natural or artificial, but the outcome will be the same if you get an unusually excessive amount during developmental years. As with all nutrients, too much will inevitably become bad for you (thankfully, in the case of flouride, the therapeutic index is quite generous)

With all of this being said, once you're an adult there's no longer any particularly viable pathways from the bloodstream to your outer teeth, so flouride in the body becomes mostly disconnected from flouride in the teeth (and vice versa). Flouride's effects on the body are less well understood, albeit only because we struggle to measure such apparently small effects on a general population.

Too much of anything will kill you...

Added fluoride is done at safe levels. But some natural water sources have TOO MuCH fluoride which is unsafe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride_toxicity#Bones

Seems to be a cosmetic issue only?

You could, though at least when I bought my house a well test was required.

The parallels to cold fusion are hilarious! Maybe just to me

As a layman it seems like the natural follow-up is to figure out how to grow tooth buds from stem cells and implant them, which in theory would allow people to grow whole new sets of teeth.

Strangely enough, still possible. My dad was in this sixties when he got his wisdom teeth.

And that's just the oddities you've noticed

The label was updated in 2016. Please refer to the official FDA guide to the updated nutrition facts label[1], item #4.

[1]: https://www.fda.gov/media/135197/download

Initially this is hard but then you soon realise that you are never buying processed food ever again and everything is a single ingredient food. There may be one or two exceptions and often tinned things have a preservative or an acidity regulator in there too.

What this means is that there is no puzzling over food labels. If you are buying carrots then they are just carrots.

Initially this seems a bit extreme as there seems to be nothing in the supermarket to buy. On my most recent trip I saw some of my former 'friends' including what was once my favourite frozen pizza. There was nothing toxic about it, once you have embraced home cooking, then nothing processed or ready made is satisfactory. In the case of the pizza, my home made pizza will be in a different league of taste, it might not be to everyone's liking but, for me, it will be like being on a drug high. I can't get that buzz from store bought food and it certainly does not list 'natural opiates released per bite' on the nutrition labels.

When you seriously get into buying the vegetables, there is always so much that you have not bought or cooked with before. These things have always been there and they are not weird, but, for some reason you have not decided to cook with them in new and exciting ways. Processed meals mean you don't have to.

Then you start mixing in herbs and all of the nutrition labels are left far, far behind. They have different meaning with processed food to real food made with single ingredient items, most of which are vegetables. Carbohydrates also shift from the cheap ones in processed food to being much better quality and best described as 'nutrient rich fibre'.

> The thing is that if brushing your teeth means a world of pain then you do it out of obligation and it is not a happy experience.

Yes, investments often come in the form of obligations. Less than ten minutes each day is nevertheless cheap by self-care standards. Even by the standards of a person with pained teeth, they'd probably rather brush than undertake such a strict diet.

I'm aware that all of this must seem terribly condescending, so before I go on let me just say that I honestly have no issue with the solutions you've found to your problems -- even if I disagree with some of the logic that helped you arrive at them. Everything beyond this point will be my own attempts to straighten established facts from the rest for the benefit of other readers. Live well and go in peace, friend.

> If brushing your teeth means a world of pain then you do it out of obligation and it is not a happy experience

If gentle, careful brushing causes a world of pain... that is not normal and indeed a strong indicator of advanced oral disease. Once disease advances beyond a certain point, the only reliable solution becomes professional dental treatment.

> My point still stands though, there is a lot of money made from tooth related FUD and sugary food. I just wished a dentist had spilled the beans to me many decades ago that it really is simple to have excellent oral hygiene just be avoiding the added sugars, and, to a lesser extent, the processed food.

The vast majority of dentists do want people to be healthy. It's just human nature. The core issue is that most patients don't want to be lectured -- it's bad for repeat business, so dentists learn to stay quiet about such things unless asked. Yet another one of the many tragedies caused by the systemic monetization of healthcare and something which I think we should all be more insistent about fixing.

> By every metric I just find the situation very different, the gums have definitely 'grown back' and I am sure some tartar is now below the gumline.

That is most excellent and I am genuinely pleased to hear that you are in good health. It's important to note for others, however, that the capacity for gums to "grow back" in most cases is usually lackluster. The best way to fix receding gums is to prevent the recession before it occurs with regular care -- the next best thing to do is brush and floss (or water floss!) diligently, receive regular cleanings, and maintain the routine consistently for the rest of your life.

> Many common preservatives kill bacteria, or specific bacteria such as 'anything but yeast'. This makes sense for shelf life but I am not sure it helps with the gastrointestinal tract, which includes the mouth. There are good bacteria and then there is the one that lives off sucrose to make plaque. If you are eating standard issue bakery products then you are killing off the bad guys whilst giving the yeast=like strains that live off sucrose a free pass.

This is an incredible oversimplification. Salt -- for example -- is itself a powerful preservative and you certainly would kill most gut bacteria by ingesting a sufficiently large dose... though such a large dose would prove equally deadly to the host. Preservatives are not antibiotics, they work because they're concentrated in the food and get quickly rendered harmless once eaten thanks to diffusion (Yes, even in the mouth. You can thank your saliva.)

You are of course still correct to say that modern diets wreak havoc on gut fauna, but the cause is rooted in nutrition rather than poisoning. Fauna which are beneficial in a diverse gut can turn toxic in an environment with lower biodiversity -- something which is all too easy to cause with an unbalanced diet that systematically favors only a fraction of the extant species. Sugar-heavy diets are but one of many problematic cases in this respect.

> Incidentally, after I banished sugar from my home, I was reading the label of the toothpaste one day whilst brushing my teeth. And you will never guess what? Sugar. The cheek of it, putting sugar in toothpaste. That is perpetuating a problem that was being set out to be solved.

That's sad to hear and I'm sorry you've been failed like this. With that being said... I suspect that the incentives at play are not what you imply. The toothpaste manufacturer really has very little interest in the profits derived by whichever odd dentist happens to work on your teeth -- they probably just needed a cheap filler that didn't taste bad. None of this diminishes the evil caused by such greed, but we need to be clear-eyed about where the fault lies if we want to make things better.

> I cut coffee and dairy too, so it is not difficult or a challenge to put in the effort to get them really nice for when I am meeting someone. However, I no longer feel obligated to brush them twice a day lest they feel like they are falling out or 'covered in fur' the next morning.

I want to stress again to anyone reading this that brushing is the singlemost effective way to delay the development of calculus and thus prevent tooth decay. Even if you can't feel the plaque, it's still there and almost certainly forming new calculus.

As a side-note: you may be interested to hear that plain coffee is not particularly bad for your teeth. One should avoid drinking it before brushing because the acidity can temporarily soften enamel, but aside from that all you'd have to worry about are coffee stains. Tea is similarly safe and even has a gentler PH, making most brews safe to drink even before brushing.

> It is not rocket science but I did not feel that any of this was explained to me very clearly at school or on any TV science program

I agree. Knowledge of such things is woefully undertaught. Schools seem much too eager to abdicate the responsibility for such things to parents who themselves may have never been fully taught. It is for this reason that we must often rely on the expertise of other professionals to make up for our own shortcomings, even as we simultaneously seek knowledge on our own terms.