Practicing good oral hygiene is just as important as taking care of our own general health. That being said most of us do tend to brush at least once if not more everyday as part of our standard practice in taking care of our own personal oral hygiene. But it's what that is supposed to be correctly done before and after brushing that people tend to forget about...
Did you ever notice that most of us rinse our mouth with water immediately after brushing? The reason being to remove the taste of toothpaste from our mouth. It sounds logically but from an oral health point of view it's absolutely WRONG and I will explain why. The mouth is full of bacteria as we all know and these bacteria will breakdown any food sources mainly containing sugar producing by-products in our mouth. That is why we have bad breaths when we wake in the morning. These by-products will also help the bacteria to stick to our teeth and slowly but surely breakdown our tooth structure or in dental terms causes demineralization which will eventually breakdown our tooth. So the 2 main reasons we all tend to brush is to:-
1. Remove that bad breath we get every morning
2. Remove the bacteria that have stuck to the teeth to prevent any breakdown of tooth structure
However just removing the bacteria from the teeth is not enough. We must provide a "shield" to protect and strengthen the teeth so that any tooth that has already been damage by the bacteria can be remineralized and be protected from further bacteria attacks later on. This "shield" is called fluoride and it can be found in most of the toothpaste that are currently sold nowadays such as Colgate and Darley. Now when we brush our teeth we are actually in cooperating this fluoride into our teeth. Let's say we then rinse our mouth with water immediately after brushing, it will automatically wash away the fluoride that has been applied and if that happens then what was the whole point we used toothpaste while brushing? We are literally defecting its purpose! That is why is it is always recommend that after brushing we only spit out the excess content of toothpaste from our mouth but then we DO NOT rinse our mouth with water for at least 30 minutes to 1 hour to allow enough time for the fluoride to properly in cooperated into our tooth structure to strengthen it. On the other hand if we rinse our mouth immediately before brushing it actually reduces the amount of food content or bacteria not stuck to our teeth. This will help when brushing afterwards to remove only the remaining food debris and bacteria that are mainly still stuck on our teeth. By doing this it provides a less disruptive tooth surface for the fluoride to properly work on. Hence now we know why we should always rinse before but never after brushing. It is a common mistake society makes nowadays in assuming brushing is just to remove any bad breath and so rinsing the mouth to remove the after taste will do no harm. However, microscopically we are actually defecting the actual purpose the toothpaste is used in the first place which is to strengthen our teeth with fluoride to prevent bacteria from breaking it down. So remember next time we brush, keep that after taste in our mouth for a while so that we do our part in keeping our teeth strong and healthy!
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