By the time my father was born, my grandmother had had all her teeth pulled. The story goes that she had two or three teeth removed but remained in constant pain. Being the pragmatist that she was, she decided to get rid of all of them in one fell swoop. By the time I came of age, she could bite into an apple with her gums no differently from us with teeth! My father had bad teeth too, and I am prone to cavities. I had two teeth pulled in my twenties, although I think those dentists had their motives, and I have several fillings, one of which is a black metal alloy that beeps every time I go through a metal detector.
So, as you can imagine, I take oral health advice seriously. For years, I have brushed my teeth twice a day, as the doctor ordered, but for some reason every December features a night of climbing the walls with toothache. Two years ago, I had to find a dentist on the first of January (the only one open in our region), who charged a small fortune to prescribe antibiotics. I never went back to him even though, I must admit, he was great. I guess I still hold a grudge over that damn bill, and when his prescription ran out, I kept having serious toothaches.
After years of waking up with the smell of rotten eggs in my mouth and bleeding every time I bit into an apple, I finally decided to do my own research. It did not take long to learn that some advice, like brushing twice a day does, is marketing reinforcement more than it is good advice.
For instance, ordinary toothpastes expose us to the side effects of fluoride. Fluoride is proven to strengthen enamel, the hard outer shell of the tooth, and is therefore trusted and added to just about every oral health product, from toothpaste to floss. For all its benefits, however, fluoride can also make our bones more rigid and brittle and increase the risk of fractures as we get older. Moreover, I learned that you can reverse some tooth decay, contrary to what I was told by the dentists who wanted to either pull or fill my teeth and, of course, bill me.
Most of oral health comes down to one idea: the acidity of your mouth. I know this is not an oral care newsletter, but I am onto something, so please bear with me.
Most of the foods we eat contain two things: acid and sugar. Acid softens the enamel, and sugar feeds the bad bacteria that live in our mouths, whose byproduct is plaque. Plaque attaches to the enamel and gums and wears them down, slowly causing cavities and gum disease. Brushing twice a day is ineffective (although still important) because most of the damage happens during the day, after meals, when the acidity in our mouths is at its highest and when there is plenty of sugar to feed the bad bacteria.
The solution is to remove the acid and sugar from your mouth as quickly as possible after meals. Do not brush your teeth straight after a meal. This actually makes things worse, because that is when your enamel is softened by the acids in the food. Instead, the second-best solution is to rinse your mouth with plain water. The best solution is xylitol, a sweet-tasting sugar alcohol originally extracted from birch trees. You can find it in just about any supermarket. After swishing and rinsing your mouth with water, take a few pinches of xylitol and let them dissolve in your mouth.
Xylitol does two things. (i) It quickly shifts the acidity in your mouth by stimulating fresh saliva, which is packed with minerals and good bacteria. (ii) It feeds the bad bacteria a substance that looks like sugar but is actually bad for them. This prevents the formation of plaque and therefore protects the enamel and gums.
The point I am making is that when we have problems, the first thing we reach for is popular advice. Given the mountains of money to be made by the biggest companies, one must be wary of seemingly good popular advice. If the problem does not go away, the advice is probably not working. The next best thing is to do your own research and find a solution that works: to study the first principles yourself. This takes a lot more time, and it is inconvenient when pressed to find a solution. Worse, you might find that the solution goes against the norm, because someone would lose income if they gave it to you. In that case, be prepared to be called weird or strange until further notice.
Alongside my oral health, I have increasingly been thinking about food and business along the same lines. What “good advice” have I been taking and has it worked? As a result of this enquiry, I am turning away from processed foods with labels that require a chemistry degree to understand. For instance, you would expect butter to be made of one ingredient: milk. Check the label, though. Most of the butter we eat is made by chemists.
My attitude towards money and business is changing as well. I went home to Mpumalanga recently and realised that cows grow the same way now as they did 100 years ago. Yet we pay far more for meat today, even though nature has remained constant. Most young men in my village cannot afford to marry because they can no longer afford cows, which once existed in abundance and were the pride of every household. It reminded me of my trip to England in 1999, when I was taken aback by how small yet expensive the houses were.
We are working more and more for less and less. In the same way that brushing twice a day does not address the real problems of oral health, I think the advice to work harder, save money and invest slowly over time falls into the same category: good advice that benefits those giving it more than those taking it.
