The Rise and Impending Fall of the Dental Cavity | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Impending Fall of the Dental Cavity

cremieux.xyz

46 pointsMrBuddyCasino12 comments

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-...

The guy who thinks African heritage is fundamentally inferior to European heritage is sloppy about his science writing! Not a surprise, alas.

Context?

The blogger who wrote the linked post is a white supremacist who explicitly supports eugenics. His stock in trade is pseudoscience. This particular post is an attempt to get people thinking he’s clever before they get to the racist bits — look at the cool dental things we learned! It is not surprising that he was shoddy here; he’s always shoddy.

This is somewhat blunt but like a lot of these schmucks, he relies on people being polite. I see no reason to play along.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/cremieux-jordan... for more.

I don't know if the science is correct or not but people should know up front that there is an advert at the bottom of the article.

Ok interesting, but I wonder: if you load up a bacteria that kills other bacteria in your mouth, and it ends up in your gut, will it mess up the microbiome there? The weight gain studies suggest not (and I’m not even sure if S mutans is a major component of the gut microbiome), but it seems like the kind of thing that’d be worth checking for. (If there are already studies on this - happy to see them).

Also - if these things produce ethanol, even small amounts, are they going to be safe for children? The assumption here is that this strain would be passed mother-to-child, so this isn’t an unreasonable concern.

This is mostly an advertisement with some dubious information in it.

Wow! A research article disguised as an ad, or is it an ad disguised as a research article?

doesn’t that bacteria strain need to colonize your mouth somehow? how would that happen if we are constantly exposing our mouths to various foods, liquids, and dental products?

citing the discovery from 1987? synthesis of the strain in 2002, and then moving onto the product recommendation without going into the mechanisms that allow such a bacteria to persist after just one magical application feels very snake oil to me.

we can use metagenomics to test the rna and dna of our oral microbiome. (testing is somewhere around $200-400 a swab currently)

show me the data even with a low N value of test subjects that give a oral microbiome analysis weeks, months, and years out after just 1 application and you’ll have my curiosity, maybe my money.

also give recommendations about if and what habits and behaviors would wreck this expensive bacterium’s viability in our mouths.

* this is coming from a father whose tested their child’s poop with inhale every 4 weeks or so several times to debug a believed to be rare (but science doesn’t truly know) staphylococcus aureus & eczema issue

i’m skeptical but i’ll stay open minded

found this explanation on why they went the probiotic route rather than seek FDA approval. from their subreddit that https://x.com/yishan/status/1780131552615420189

> 1. Move forward with manufacturing and distributing this as a probiotic supplement > 2. Once a critical mass of biohackers and early adopters take this treatment, other third-party research can get involved

https://www.reddit.com/r/lanternbioworks/s/01haEdviDz

I'm skeptical as well but from the earlier linked faq (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defying-cavity-lantern-biow...):

>BCS3-L1 has four main genetic modifications:

It produces a weak antibiotic, mutacin-1140, which kills competing oral bacteria.

It’s immune to mutacin-1140, so it doesn’t kill itself.

It metabolizes sugar through a different chemical pathway that ends in alcohol instead of lactic acid.

It lacks a peptide that its species usually uses to arrange gene transfers with other bacteria.

my next question would be what is the effect of mutacin-1140 on the gut microbiome.

I looked up mutacin—1140, found this 2018 study looking at the effect on staph and possibly positive persistence in the gut.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6256755/

> “Nisin and mutacin 1140 have potent activities (nanomolar or submicromolar activity) against well-known Gram-positive pathogens, including Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pneumoniae. Nisin has been used as a food preservative for more than 50 years without inducing significant resistance”

> “ Despite the short half-life of mutacin 1140 in blood, analogs of mutacin 1140 were demonstrated to have increased gastric stability and were effective in treating a Clostridium difficile infection in hamsters “

this very interesting to me.

we fought off a extreme overgrowth of staph aureus with a regiment of probiotics and bacillus subtillis (a bacterium found in dirt that is known to disrupt quorum of bacteria that create biofilms.

biofilms are a huge reason to floss and brush our teeth, it’s like a slime that protects and nourishes the bad bacteria on our teeth.

this bit from the sparse wikipedia was interesting. “Mutacin 1140 belongs to the epidermin subset of type Al lantibiotics.”

are there other bacterium in our oral/gut that produce these kind of compounds?

that said, if i floss, occasional use mouth wash, or drink a alcoholic beverage will this bomb the micro biome in my mouth making a one time dose magic cure a expensive maintenance cost?

Wouldn’t it be better to have a probiotic toothpaste?

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