Don't brush your teeth -- do oil-pulling instead

[fuzzyfungus]

It’s Time For FuzzyFungus’ SCIENCEDROME (at least one poorly formed hypothesis enters, and leaves bloodied but only partially tested!), where N=1 and anecdotes are dressed up in white lab coats because we don’t have time for your fancy ivory-tower elitist ‘data’!

So, yeah, for pure curiosity’s sake, I gave a mouthful of olive oil 15 minutes of serious swishing. Immediately thereafter, my teeth did feel atypically smooth(whether because crud was removed or because biofilms were augmented with delicious lipids, who can say?) except toward the bottoms where the most stubborn crud gradually hardens. No effect on tongue-coating whitish stuff (science term there, kids, copybooks ready!)

I spit the oil into a handy piece of Science Glassware (not living in Texas, I didn’t even need a license!) and allowed it to settle for several hours to try to decrease the degree to which it was just cloudy because of all those oil droplets emulsified in mostly-water like some sort of satanic variant on salad dressing.

The results are below, photographed with ebay’s finest dubious digital imaging hardware:

First, a shot from the top:

My apologies for the poor image quality. Most of the fluid is oil, the particularly white ‘globules’ toward the left-center are primarily water, saliva as I attempted to get the last of the oil out of my mouth.

Here’s a side shot, the Science Container was tilted, allowing fluid to collect against the side, and then righted to see what particulate would remain as the oil flowed back down to the bottom:

Conclusions!

I venture no hypothesis about what, exactly, is being extracted (I’m guessing that it isn’t “Toxins”); but some sort of whitish, fairly gross looking, mouth gunk is definitely showing up in the oil. I presently lack the patience, and possibly the mouth gunk, to test if the same would happen with water, mouthwash, acetone, or session ale. The whitish gunk does look pretty similar to the stuff you sometimes see in saliva, so I’m inclined to suspect that at least some of it isn’t an artifact of the oil (as is the case with those oil/citrus ‘gallbladder cleanse’ things).

So, I don’t think I’m going to skip brushing anytime soon; but some sort of horrid goo apparently forms suspended gunk-structures in the oil. Some sort of hydrophilic vs. lipophilic effect pointing to actual cleaning, or just oil being all viscous and better than water or mouthwash at retaining the gunk? I nobly leave that question as an exercise for the reader.

[AliceWeir]

I get your point, obviously, but that still doesn’t appear to match up with anything my people are telling me. However, they push calcium and potassium - not fluoride. Or oil.
Although, by your logic, no 70 year-olds should have any natural teeth left, either, no matter what they did earlier in their lives, and for those same reasons. In which case, the assertions of fabulous benefits from fluoride would still make little sense.

I understand the fluoride in water supplies has been banned or never implemented in most European water supplies over the past several decades, and yet dental caries have decline drastically in most western countries, including those which do not fluoridate.

Discussion of MMWR and WHO stats here:
http://fluoridealert.org/studies/caries01/

[LDoBe]

@AliceWeir

Although, by your logic, no 70 year-olds should have any natural teeth left

I’ll let you in on a little secret: Most 70 year olds are sporting a few falsies, if not a mouthful of dentures or a dental bridge. There’s a reason dentures are associated with old people.

Teeth wear out possibly worse than internal skeletal bone. The environment they’re in is constantly wearing them down, and they can only remodel on the inside. Once the enamel is gone, it’s very difficult to build up again. Fluoride helps by filling in the gaps out on the surface of the tooth. Phosphorous and Calcium are good for building the structural strength of bone from the inside where the tissue matrix is.

[dnebdal]

@SamSam

Your perceived inefficiency is because you are unaware of how fluoride works.

If we’re quoting wikipedia:

Most countries in Europe have experienced substantial declines in cavities without the use of water fluoridation. For example, in Finland and Germany, tooth decay rates remained stable or continued to decline after water fluoridation stopped. Fluoridation may be useful in the U.S. because unlike most European countries, the U.S. does not have school-based dental care, many children do not visit a dentist regularly, and for many U.S. children water fluoridation is the prime source of exposure to fluoride. The effectiveness of water fluoridation can vary according to circumstances such as whether preventive dental care is free to all children.

That doesn’t mean fluoridation is harmful or pointless or anything - but we seem to mange without it.

[LDoBe]

@dnebdal

but we seem to mange without it.

Can’t tell if it’s intentionally brilliant, or an honest misspelling. Either way, I like it.

[dnebdal]

@LDoBe

Can’t tell if it’s intentionally brilliant, or an honest misspelling. Either way, I like it.

Just a pre-coffee accident, I’m afraid.

[AliceWeir]

I was aware of the effects of aging on teeth pre-snark, thanks. I understand how bones are mineralized. But you do not address the original questions. And, we have no comparisons of directly-applied dental sealants vs. fluoride, so the case for fluoridation of drinking water is still not made. And, if the information on the way fluoride is retained and stored in the skeleton is correct, then we should have seen a measurable reduction in bone degeneration somewhere along the way, even if only a small one. Something is still wrong with that whole picture.

Think I’ll go do some Nutella-pulling. It isn’t known to destroy biofilms of any kind, but it does banish all thoughts of logic or debate or dental hygiene absolutely reliably.

[LDoBe]

It’s gotten to the point in this debate where I’m pretty much arguing for its own sake really. And that’s almost certainly a bad thing for me at least.

Anyway, I can agree that you bring up an interesting point about the missing connection between bone density and water fluoridation.

I don’t know enough about biology, and haven’t done enough reading to posit a valid reason, other than: a lot of municipal water sources have high levels of fluoride already, and I’d chalk the negligible changes in bone density up to the fact that many places actually are removing fluoride from the water because there’s too much in it already.

It’s half-assed, and I can’t substantiate it with proportions, and numerical data at the moment, but I keep hearing it argued by the anti-fluoridation people that there’s plenty of naturally occurring fluoride in the water already, to which I say, a fluoridation program is still useful because it doesn’t just add fluoride but also regulate how much fluoride is in the water, so the levels don’t get too high and cause teeth stains and such.

[AliceWeir]

Yeah, I don’t think we’re gonna solve it all here, lol. At this point, I’d just be happy if we could count on clean water, let alone any ‘power-ups’, ya know?

No worries - we can argue more stuff later, lol.

[kingannoy]

Isn’t oil-pulling just replacing the sugars in your mouth with fats? The bacteria work on sugars, not on fat, or so it seems when I read wikipedia.

This would give it a plausible reason for effectiveness without any reason for “toxins” (unless you count sugars as toxins and you kinda could really). I might try this in addition to brushing, flossing and toothpicking (still need to stimulate the gums).

[ianbukowski]

If you search at the NCBI’s website, it appears that there have been some limited studies done: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.­nih.gov%2F+oil+pulling

[WearySky]

@fuzzyfungus

So, I don’t think I’m going to skip brushing anytime soon; but some sort of horrid goo apparently forms suspended gunk-structures in the oil. Some sort of hydrophilic vs. lipophilic effect pointing to actual cleaning, or just oil being all viscous and better than water or mouthwash at retaining the gunk? I nobly leave that question as an exercise for the reader.

First of all, thank you for your tremendous scientific work in this thread.

Second of all, I have my own anecdotal data to share (sadly, without pictures). I use Crest Pro-Health mouth wash (this stuff, I think), and when I spit it out it has blue tinted bits of solid goo, similar to your oily structures there but stained a nice bright blue thanks to the colour of the mouthwash. So, at least with the Crest stuff (for me, any way), there’s a similar behaviour in mouthwashes. It always kinda freaks me out a little bit, because it’s like, is that parts of the inside of my cheeks falling off? Is the mouthwash eating away at my soft, fleshy mouth bits? But my mouth never feels cleaner than when I use that stuff, so I continue to use it.

[SamSam]

@dnebdal

That doesn’t mean fluoridation is harmful or pointless or anything - but we seem to mange without it.

I’m not sure who “we” is in your quote, but I’m in the US and your quote explicitly says why water fluoridation is still necessary, and that “we” apparently can’t manage without it.

The paragraph right before the one you quoted (which you didn’t link to, but I was about to cite myself when I realized your quoted paragraph came next) has numerous studies showing its efficacy. “A 2000 systematic review found that water fluoridation was statistically associated with a decreased proportion of children with cavities (the median of mean decreases was 14.6%, the range −5 to 64%), and with a decrease in decayed, missing, and filled primary teeth (the median of mean decreases was 2.25 teeth, the range 0.5–4.4 teeth), which is roughly equivalent to preventing 40% of cavities.”

Sure, in countries with better dental care, fluoridation is less necessary. It still seems to be necessary here, because, like health care in general, the US is far behind in terms of access to dental care. This seems to be slowly changing, per that article, so fluoridation will probably become less and less necessary.

(And note that I do mean necessary – it’s not just a matter of a few caries. Oral health has been very strongly causally linked to general health, with infections of the oral tract causing sickness and diseases of the body, such as endocarditis, cardiovascular diseases, premature births, etc.)

[fuzzyfungus]

@WearySky

So, at least with the Crest stuff (for me, any way), there’s a similar behaviour in mouthwashes.

Those crud-structures definitely seem to be a reocurring element in oral hygiene scenarios. It would be interesting to know if they are made of some sort of dislodged biofilm from the teeth, or whether they are mostly expendable epidermis responding to the most vigorous exfoliation of the day, or some sort of clumping/precipitation of free-living bacteria into visible structures, or some combination of the above.

As you say you’ve seen them with mouthwash, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them post-brushing with saliva, I don’t think that they are just a lipid-induced artifact; but I’m not sure what they are, and unfortunately my microscope is several moves lost at this point, or I’d slap some on a slide and have a look. Does anybody know?

[madopal]

Speaking of reading the article, did anyone actually see what oil pulling was defined as?

Gandusha and Kavala Graha are two primary oral cleansing techniques; specialized therapy to treat as well as to prevent oral diseases. Gandusha involves filling the mouth completely with fluid so that gargling is impossible. In Gandush, the oral cavity is filled completely with liquid medicine, held for about 3-5 minutes, and then released. In Kavala Graha, a comfortable amount of fluid is retained with the mouth closed for about 3 minutes, and then gargled.

20 minutes anywhere? I see 3-5 and 3. Also, I see no swishing mentioned. Both seem to just retain the oil for that timeframe.

[OtherMichael]

@LDoBe

you bring up an interesting point about the missing connection between bone density and water fluoridation.

Fluoridated water works on tooth-surfaces:

Fluoridated water operates on tooth surfaces: in the mouth it creates low levels of fluoride in saliva, which reduces the rate at which tooth enamel demineralizes and increases the rate at which it remineralizes in the early stages of cavities. (source)

In order to see a similar impact on the rest of the skeleton, you’d have to remove the skeleton and regularly immerse it in fluoride.

I am not participating in any related double-blind study, I can tell you that.

[dnebdal]

@SamSam

I’m not sure who “we” is in your quote (…)

People living in the countries mentioned in the quote (I’m Norwegian).
The point was merely that it’s not a requirement for good dental health (since we [as defined above] do fine without). That does not exclude it from being a good idea for everyone else.

[AliceWeir]

I don’t know what that stuff is. Apparently, though, it is an ayurvedic practice. They use sesame or sunflower oil. They call that gunk in your mouth ama - a funky, sticky by-product of digestion. And they don’t know precisely what the hell it is, either. Chopra describes the idea as being a way to remove toxins.

Makes sense, if you consider something like candida or other fungi - their toxins are indeed lipophilic. But I have no idea if it works on other microbes. Although, we use triple-antibiotics, which are just fungal endotoxins packaged as a pill, to bust through that biofilm and kill all that same junk. And then, you have to do other stuff to kill the fungi you just allowed to take over because you killed the beneficial bacteria along with the bad stuff. That’s kind of a natural limitation to attacking that way. You are going to take out pretty much every species that are vulnerable to those fungal toxins.

So, it might kinda sorta make some sense…but whether it actually has the benefits claimed, I have no idea. If you just want to kill some microbial stuff, either citrus juice (acidic) or vinegar or baking soda(alkaline) will usually get it done. 99% of this science-y stuff is just figuring out where the limits of any particular microbe are, and if it’s within the limits of what we survive, you just turn yourself into a hostile environment - at least for a few minutes. At the far extremes, you’d use bleach or boric acid to do that same trick on surfaces - it’s just too hostile to human life to drink. So, seems like any system that used all three ideas - fat, acid, and alkaline, just might do a really decent job of mopping up. Other than the brushing? Mouthwash usually has an alcohol base, and that works the same way as vinegar or chlorine. Or, that old army trick of peeing on your feet in the shower to kill athlete’s foot - because urine is also too alkaline for fungi.

And there ya go! When the apocalypse comes? You’ll be all set to flash a perfectly blinding scream and look good doing it!