Floss Like a Boss: A dentist teaches you how to give your teeth alpha status
Boss. You want be boss like this? You must floss.
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“Floss Like a Boss” is a common catchphrase you will hear among dentists and hygienists. We’re strange people. Apparently, it is also the title of a hot new single from a Berlin-based pop star. Never be surprised by how bizarre our world is. It’s infinitely strange and full of serendipity if you’re willing to look around. She’ll even teach you how to brush your teeth. What do you need me for? There’s also this, so I don’t even know why I’m trying. The rest of the internet seems to have this covered.
Well, maybe not all of the internet.¹ You may have read stories back in 2016 that you don’t need to floss your teeth. That I, as a member of the international dental Illuminati, am just another puppet being manipulated by “Big Floss” to trick you into wasting your time and money on a truly meaningless Sisyphean task. There’s probably nothing I can do to convince you that this is not true if you already believe it. I mean, wouldn’t someone who is in Big Floss’s pocket do exactly as I’m doing and go online and write articles and make videos about how important flossing is? I’m clearly a corporate stooge. Still, much like Camus, I’m here to tell you that we must imagine Sisyphus happy carrying out his daily interdental cleaning routine.
Before I move on, just for fun, let’s assume flossing doesn’t do anything to make you healthy. Fine. What if I told you we don’t have any well-controlled, double-blinded, randomized clinical trials that prove that wiping your butt is good for your health. Are you going to stop wiping your butt? “I’ll walk around with a dirty butt if I want to. It doesn’t affect my health!” Cool. But don’t be surprised when other people don’t wanna kiss your butt.² Ditto for your mouth if you don’t floss. Corn eventually gets funky no matter what end of your digestive tract it’s lodged in.
Anyway, what then, in my humble opinion, does flossing actually do to keep you healthy? Flossing is great for both your teeth and gums. Why? Let’s start with the teeth.
Everyone has bacteria in their mouth. Lots of bacteria. Some of those bacteria form a gang called plaque that sticks to your teeth. Plaque gets everywhere, even in between your teeth where your brush cannot reach. Once plaque is on teeth, it can get to work, turning food and drinks you have into acid that destroys your teeth. One of the most common places I see cavities on patients is in between their teeth. They may brush every day, but that misses the plaque that is chillin’ out maxin’ relaxin’ all cool in those little interdental crevices. If you want to remove that interdental plaque, you have to use the one tool they fear: floss. It’s a hassle to get fillings in between your teeth. It takes time. It costs money. It weakens the teeth so that they are more likely to crack and fracture over time from chewing, grinding, or clenching. Floss your teeth, and you will prevent a downward spiral of declining dental health over your lifetime.
Flossing is an excellent way to help keep your teeth healthy. What about them there gums? Ya know, the gums: Grandma and Grandpa’s last defense against a burglar? Okely doke, let’s start with this: Would you be totally chill if lightly touching your skin caused it to start bleeding spontaneously? No? Aight, why are you so relaxed that your gums bleed as soon as you touch them? Random bleeding is rarely a sign of health. Gums are basically just skin in the mouth. It’s all epithelial tissue. Why are you fine with your epithelium, your protective barrier against the outside world, bleeding so easily? You can’t let your enemies see you bleed like that. They’ll think you’re weak. What if you go swimming and a shark smells your bloody gums? “Oh, yea, Timmy Tom. He never flossed, so a shark bit his legs off.” Do you want to be Timmy Tom? I didn’t think so.³
When you start flossing your teeth each day, they will bleed. However, that will only last for the first week or so. If you stick with it, the bleeding will magically stop. You’ll witness your body growing stronger and more powerful before your very eyes.
You may be thinking: “But my gums don’t hurt! Who cares if they bleed?” Your gums grow weak and pitiful slowly over time if you don’t care for them. Then, all of a sudden, you start losing teeth when you’re older. The teeth are healthy, but the beautiful support structure of gums and bone around the teeth has fallen into disrepair. “But it didn’t hurt!” you protest. “Why didn’t I get a warning that there was a problem?” Your gums bled every time you touched them for decades. What more of a sign do you need? Time to join grandma and grandpa trying to gum burglars to death.
In my experience, most of my patients think that getting their teeth cleaned by a professional is more important than flossing them at home. Although I don’t have a study I can point to in order to prove it definitively, I am very much of the opposite opinion. If I had to bet my teeth on flossing every day and never getting them cleaned vs. getting them cleaned every 6 months and never flossing, the choice is easy for me: I’m flossing and foregoing cleanings forever. No question. No hesitation. I’m confident that it is more effective and it will certainly save me lots of moolah.
Also, if you’re going to read all of this and still not floss your teeth, for the love of all that is holy, please, please, please, don’t start smoking. Ever. That is the worst wrecking ball you can throw at your gums and bone around your teeth. If you already smoke, I’m not judging you at all. I’m not going to lecture you. But it would be best if you read this book. You can enjoy smoking while you read it.
You may have read stories back in 2016 that you don’t need to floss your teeth. That I, as a member of the international dental Illuminati, am just another puppet being manipulated by “Big Floss” to trick you into wasting your time and money on a truly meaningless Sisyphean task. There’s probably nothing I can do to convince you that this is not true if you already believe it. I mean, wouldn’t someone who is in Big Floss’s pocket do exactly as I’m doing and go online and write articles and make videos about how important flossing is? I’m clearly a corporate stooge. Still, much like Camus, I’m here to tell you that we must imagine Sisyphus happy carrying out his daily interdental cleaning routine.
What is the best technique for flossing?
When using traditional floss, you’ll want to wrap the floss around the middle finger of each hand a few times (you can pretend you’re flicking me off every time you do this if it makes you feel better to express some anger toward a dentist for making you perform this absurd daily ritual), then pinch the floss with your index finger and thumb for maximum control. The best way to floss is to gently caress the side of each tooth in a “C” shape and then glide up and down several times like Baloo scratching his back on a tree to get that itch just right. You don’t need to push down hard into the gums. All the pressure (gentle pressure) should be directed against the side of the tooth. The goal is to scrape the plaque off the side of the tooth, not slice your gum tissue to bits.
I get asked a lot whether you should brush or floss first. Dealer’s choice, my friend. Whichever makes you feel the most empowered. Both brushing and flossing are for removing dental plaque. Brushing gets plaque off the outer surfaces of your teeth. Flossing gets plaque off the surfaces in between your teeth where the brush can’t reach. I don’t care whether you clean the inside or the outside first; just be sure to take care of both.
The plaque will come back each day. Why? Well, our mouths are full of bacteria. That’s normal. The bacteria join up and form a team that colonizes your teeth. The bacteria can’t turn food into acid that breaks down your teeth until they have banded together into plaque. So, as long as you wipe the plaque off each day as it’s starting to build up, you can’t have trouble with bacteria turning the food you eat into acid that destroys your teeth.
Types of Floss:
Unwaxed — Old Faithful, as trusted by C.C. Bass⁵ himself, “The Father of Preventative Dentistry”
Waxed — Silky smooth floss to slip in between your tighter tooth contacts and keep your teeth silky smooth
Floss Picks for helping floss your kids’ teeth and for patients who struggle with manual dexterity
Reach Flossers for back teeth
Floss threaders for cleaning under bridges and braces/bonded wires
Superfloss for wide gaps around teeth
This is unlikely to be a problem for you, but there have been some rare reports of hypersensitivity reactions to waxed floss. If that were to occur for you, just switch to unwaxed floss and/or a water flosser.
Other Tools to Help Keep Your Teeth and Gums So Fresh and So Clean:
Water Flosser — A nice adjunct to flossing, especially for cleaning around implants, bridges, braces, and between teeth with larger spaces. This is generally NOT a replacement for flossing.
Interdental brushes — Also helpful for cleaning around implants and teeth with larger gaps.
Have I convinced you to floss now? I sure hope so. But maybe I’ve only convinced you that I’m even weirder than that German singer named FLOSS we kicked this article off with. Who knows. If you want to watch a video where I demonstrate proper flossing technique and talk more about all this stuff, click here. Hopefully, I’m even more entertaining visually than I am in written form. If you don’t think I’m entertaining at all, I’m sorry. But also, I don’t understand why you would still be here reading this.
Last point: no judgment here if you choose not to floss. Truth be told, I didn’t start flossing consistently until I was in my fourth year of dental school. Three years as a dentist in training, and I still didn’t do what I knew I should have been doing. It took that long for the message to sink into my rock of a head. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones as they say, especially when the stone is what your brain is made of. Probably a bad idea to try to detach that and chuck it through a window.
Anyway, I recognize that building a flossing habit can be a challenge, but good thing life consists of nothing but us rising to meet new challenges as they present themselves to us. That’s the whole game. I wish you the best on your journey and hope that you earn your flossing badge earlier along the path than I did.
Thanks for reading. Have a lovely day.
If you still believe flossing is all one big conspiracy, I dare you to pull at this stray floss thread and see how deep the rabbit hole goes…
Footnotes:
¹ If you read the whole thing instead of just the headline, you’ll notice that at the end of that New York Times article, the journalist notes that when children’s teeth were flossed at school by professionals for 2 years, there was a significant reduction in cavities. It is difficult and expensive to organize such a well-controlled study. There are more pressing and uncertain scientific questions that deserve our resources. Furthermore, if you’re seeking certainty, even a well-controlled clinical trial cannot definitively prove anything. Everything considered “true” in science is conditional on the lack of appearance of future contradictory evidence. There are no absolutes in science. However, we have far more evidence that flossing is very good for your teeth and gums than we have evidence that it is useless or harmful. If you’re a gambler, flossing is one of the safest bets you can take in life. If you’re looking for certainty, honestly, you probably shouldn’t even bother being alive because everything in this world is pretty contingent. Sorry my dude. But again, if you are willing to forgo both obsessing over flossing conspiracy theories and panicking over the epistemological crisis that faces modern humanity, then one of the most effective ways to prevent cavities in between your teeth is to remove the plaque there each day with proper technique. If you don’t floss with the right technique, you may as well not do it at all.
² That’s becoming more popular these days, so you’ll probably miss out on all the fun the kids are having.
³ There are circumstances under which your gums will be more likely to bleed, even if you are flossing diligently and correctly. There is some thought that this has to do with hormonal changes during puberty (but maybe teenagers just don’t clean their teeth) or pregnancy. So, if you’re pregnant and your gums are bleeding more, it’s cool. You swap one type of bleeding for another. It’s just nature’s way. Still probably wanna keep your distance from sharks.⁴ I’m not a shark dentist, but from what I can tell from Discovery Channel and the Jaws franchise, they have pretty sharp teeth. Also, they ate Samuel L. Jackson in Deep Blue Sea, and anyone who is willing to eat Samuel L. Jackson is pretty scary in my book. I’m also scared of raptors and snakes. I was just thinking: What if you were stuck in a time loop where you had to keep watching Samuel L. Jackson get eaten by a CGI shark over and over again forever? What if that was your version Groundhog Day? Yikes. Scary. Anyway. Floss your teeth.
⁴ I realize that as a man writing on the internet, I am joking about things that could be interpreted as stigmatizing women’s bodies. I am not here to stigmatize. I am here to be silly and stupid and hopefully helpful. Nonetheless, I get that what I’m saying is situated in a cultural context that consciously or subconsciously teaches women that there is something wrong with their bleeding patterns. I also realize that me writing that last sentence has to be making all of this so much worse. Instead of me continuing to dig a deeper, bloodier hole…ok, that was just gross. I’m sorry. Instead of me continuing to dig a deeper hole, I’m going to suggest you read Lindy West’s excellent and amusing book, Shrill. Chapter 3 covers periods. Also, I wore my mom’s maxi pads to grade school sometimes because I used to shart uncontrollably. So there. We all leak things out of our bodies sometimes. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure the sharting was the result of this fat substitute being added to Pringle’s back in the ‘’90s. Also, “shart” is just one letter away from “shark.” So, there’s that.
⁵ Some would say that I am a rather fanatical disciple of this man and his preventative oral health principles. You follow Jesus, Muhammad, or the Buddha. I follow C.C. We all have our prophets. A lesser-known fact is that Charles C. Bass was also cousins with Billy Mouth Bass. As we all know, Billy Mouth was tragically eaten by a shark because he didn’t take cousin Charles’s advice about flossing his tiny little teeth.