You’ve been brushing your teeth all wrong, and a dentist has revealed the big no-no you need to stop doing.
Brushing your teeth is something we all do twice daily, once in the morning and again, at night to keep our pearly whites healthy.
Considering we’ve been doing it for so long, you’d think that we’d have become experts by now... wrong.
Apparently, many of us have been doing it incorrectly, and a dentist has told us the disastrous mistake we’ve been making.
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Functional dentist Dr Victoria Sampson shook the internet when she appeared on Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO podcast and dropped her bombshell statement.
She described exactly the steps you should take to brush your teeth, and it’s missing one very key component that people generally take part in.
In a clip posted on social media, she explained: “Brush, brush, brush, spit into the basin, and that’s it.”
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What? No rinsing with water? Surely, she must have just forgotten. Dear reader, she did not forget, you’re just doing it wrong.
The reason for this is that you’re essentially rinsing off your toothpaste if you swirl water around your teeth, making the whole process obsolete.
She said: “Reason being, going back to my sunscreen analogy, imagine you spend two minutes putting all this lovely sunscreen all over your skin to just go and then have a shower right before you go into the sun.”
Dr Sampton then added: “So with the toothpaste, you spend two minutes putting all of that on your teeth, and then if you rinse it, you’re actually removing all of that goodness from your teeth and gums, and it’s kind of like you haven’t done anything.”
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Of course, this garnered the sort of reaction you’d expect to happen online.
While some wholeheartedly agreed with her, others refused to believe that they had been doing it all wrong for so many years.
“I thought everybody did this,” one person said.
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Another wrote: “Look, I’m 34 y’all. Used to rinse. I had horrible cavities for years. Haven’t had a single one since I started flossing and spitting only. Go do it now, before you go to bed, and thank me in 10 years.”
Someone else commented: “My life has been a lie.”
However, the naysayers were out in full force, but you can’t just argue with a dentist about teeth... that’s like arguing about space with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
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However, that doesn’t mean people didn’t try.
“But the toothpaste instruction says you should rinse thoroughly,” one person adamantly said.
“They rinse at the dentist though,” another wrote.
“Disagree completely,” someone else commented.
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According to toothpaste brand Sensodyne, rinsing stops the fluoride being optimal in your mouth after brushing.
Its website states: “Rinsing with mouthwash immediately after brushing may not be the best for your teeth, even if your mouthwash contains fluoride. Using a mouthwash that contains fluoride can help prevent tooth decay, but using any kind of mouthwash straight after brushing your teeth can wash away the concentrated fluoride in the toothpaste left on your teeth.”
Britt Jones