The vast majority of Americans spend more time feeling guilty about flossing than they do actually flossing their teeth. So does that mean you’re off the hook for your daily floss? During its investigation, the AP looked at the best research on the subject over the past decade, focusing on 25 studies in particular.
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Another review in 2015 cited “inconsistent/weak evidence” for flossing and a “lack of efficacy”.
The American Dental Association says, “Flossing is an essential part of taking care of your teeth and gums”.
The evidence for flossing is “weak, very unreliable”, of “very low” quality, and carries “a moderate to large potential for bias”. “We often say in the office, floss the teeth that you want to keep”, dentist Natalie Archer told CTV News Channel on Tuesday. Still, he urges his patients to floss to help avoid gum disease.
Few of the studies in the Cochrane analysis, for example, lasted from more than three months.
Associated Press reporter Jeff Donn fact-checked the American Dental Association’s (ADA’s) claim, which the U.S. government has backed since 1979, that “flossing is an essential part of taking care of your teeth and gums”. A new finding indicates that dentists may have been wrong this whole time because there’s hardly any proof that flossing is beneficial!
And it turns out that, what little evidence there is to suggest that flossing is good for you probably comes from places that have something to gain from getting you to buy floss, the AP reported – and even they had trouble getting pro-flossing results from the research. Flossing is still considered so crucial to health that it’s included in one of the questions in the Living to 100 Life Expectancy Calculator, a tool that uses metrics like diet and exercise to determine your approximate life expectancy.
Professor Damien Walmsley, the British Dental Association’s scientific adviser confirmed floss can be “of little value”.
For long, we’ve been told frequent flossing is good for the teeth. By law, these guidelines must be based on scientific evidence. As it happens, the studies used to support habitual flossing were crap.
The AP also found that manufacturers of dental floss are struggling to provide convincing evidence (which is hilarious considering they actually fund a lot of this research). The guidelines must be based on scientific evidence, under USA law.
Tim Iafolla, a dentist at the National Institutes of Health, thinks that we shouldn’t give up on flossing.
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This is all pretty mindblowing to be honest, and we don’t even know who to believe at this point, but this feels like staring into some dark abyss and trying to make sense of what is real and what’s not.
