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Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated

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Re: Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated

#21

Post by consp »

bnralt wrote: post #19
comp_throw7 wrote: post #8

> in fact, it forms less than 2% of all the bacteria that cause caries I tracked down the chain of citations here. The directly cited article ( https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2018.81 ) says the following: "These caries ecological concepts have been confirmed by recent DNA- and RNA-based molecular studies that have uncovered an extraordinarily diverse microbial ecosystem, where S. mutans accounts for a very sm…

The safety concerns sound circular in an almost Kafkaesque manner. From what I can tell, a strain of the bacteria was found in the wild that created less acid and seemed to lead to less carries. So people thought it needed to be safer, so they instead created a genetically modified version of the bacteria. But now it couldn’t even be tested in the wild because the “safer” version had so many unknowns that even lettin…

> So people thought it needed to be safer

That was after they decided it needed to outcompete the existing bacterium and added a mutagen to kill it off.

Re: Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated

#22

Post by jolt42 »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #12
yosito wrote: post #9

I have a feeling that the people who would trust a product like Lumina are probably the same people who will never use flouride.

Since you bring up fluoride—does anyone know the state of the literature on the effectiveness of fluoride treatments? I’ve been getting them for years. But with the recent trends towards PE owned dental practices and efforts to juice their profitability, I’m more and more skeptical of anything my dentist tries to sell me on.

Seems solid to me. They can predict reduction of caries before they add it to city supply water, which still happens in China I believe.

Re: Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated

#23

Post by bnralt »

consp wrote: post #21
bnralt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The safety concerns sound circular in an almost Kafkaesque manner. From what I can tell, a strain of the bacteria was found in the wild that created less acid and seemed to lead to less carries. So people thought it needed to be safer, so they instead created a genetically modified version of the bacteria. But now it couldn’t even be tested in the wild because the “safer” version had so many unknowns that even lettin…

> So people thought it needed to be safer That was after they decided it needed to outcompete the existing bacterium and added a mutagen to kill it off.

But why did they decide that? It seems to be a pretty clear example of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

1. Better bacteria is found in the wild, it might be able to significantly reduce cavities. People could be randomly passing it to others through kissing, and no one is concerned about it since it doesn't seem to be harmful.

2. It’s not given to people for replacement therapy because (as the article states) people decided that a replacement therapy “needs to meet a number of criteria."

3. Except meeting that criteria makes people think the replacement isn’t safe and shouldn’t be tried.

The article is saying “of course we needed to add X characteristics to the bacteria, they were necessary in order for it to be a good replacement” and then goes on to say “of course people shouldn’t be using the bacteria with X characteristics, X characteristics might be dangerous.”

Re: Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated

#24

Post by bhaney »

bnralt wrote: post #19
comp_throw7 wrote: post #8

> in fact, it forms less than 2% of all the bacteria that cause caries I tracked down the chain of citations here. The directly cited article ( https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2018.81 ) says the following: "These caries ecological concepts have been confirmed by recent DNA- and RNA-based molecular studies that have uncovered an extraordinarily diverse microbial ecosystem, where S. mutans accounts for a very sm…

The safety concerns sound circular in an almost Kafkaesque manner. From what I can tell, a strain of the bacteria was found in the wild that created less acid and seemed to lead to less carries. So people thought it needed to be safer, so they instead created a genetically modified version of the bacteria. But now it couldn’t even be tested in the wild because the “safer” version had so many unknowns that even lettin…

> From what I can tell, a strain of the bacteria was found in the wild that created less acid and seemed to lead to less carries

I think you're confused about which changes to the bacteria were natural and which were engineered. A strain in the wild was discovered that produced a weak antibiotic that it had also developed a resistance to, but it still had the original metabolic pathway that produced lactic acid. Researches took that strain and genetically modified it to produce ethanol instead of lactic acid, and then relied on the natural antibiotic-related mutations to get this strain to replace common S. Mutans in the oral microbiomes of test subjects.

The useful non-acidic property of the strain is entirely artificially introduced. The natural mutation in the wild just allowed for outcompeting and replacing bacteria that lack it. There would be no benefit from personally experimenting with the natural non-engineered strains.

Re: Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated

#25

Post by teslabox »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #12
yosito wrote: post #9

I have a feeling that the people who would trust a product like Lumina are probably the same people who will never use flouride.

Since you bring up fluoride—does anyone know the state of the literature on the effectiveness of fluoride treatments? I’ve been getting them for years. But with the recent trends towards PE owned dental practices and efforts to juice their profitability, I’m more and more skeptical of anything my dentist tries to sell me on.

I learned about Novamin a few years ago [0], and ordered BioMin Restore [1] to give it a try. I'm now a devoted customer. There are other Novamin/hydroxyapatite toothpastes, but I only have experience with this one brand.

I think this company's latest news is the version of their toothpaste that has fluoride [2] is now FDA-approved for sensitive teeth, so they're going to be able to sell it in the United States specifically labeled to help with sensitive teeth. If you live in Canada or the UK [3], it looks like you can order this now.

Just noticed a blog post on the UK site: Why you shouldn’t over-prescribe fluoride to your patients - https://biomin.co.uk/news/article/why-you-shouldnt-over-pres...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26669660

[1] https://drcollins.com/collections/toothpaste/products/biomin...

[2] https://biomintoothpaste.com/

[3] https://www.biomin-toothpaste.com/products/biomin-f-75-ml / https://biomin.co.uk/

Re: Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated

#26

Post by thowawatp302 »

Grimblewald wrote: post #14
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm strongly considering it, although I can't get it where I live yet. I've never had a cavity, but I spend a lot of time doing endurance sports and very high carbohydrate intake has become the latest performance enhancer. As a result I'm often drinking a couple hundred grams of plain table sugar per week and I'd like to keep my streak of good teeth health. If I can do that for $250 I don't see why not. They're prett…

Read the article. If you have not already, you might rethink consideration of this product.

Th article just confirms my suspicion that the worst thing is I could be out $500

Re: Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated

#28

Post by vigneshwaraya »

Or, just use oil pulling with coconut oil. simple, natural and easiest way to reverse and prevent cavities. keeping the oil in the mouth for 20 minutes (before spitting out into the sink) is also a great way to maintain silence, and develop awareness of oral process, as you can't swallow.

More generally, am highly skeptical of this whole genetic modification drive for replacement of undesirable creatures like mosquitos and screw worms and now bacteria. Sure, sounds like a great idea and may work for the advertised benefits, but look who's funding it and how keen they are on developing vectors to human blood and what other tampering may occur that would be undetectable to anyone without millions of dollars of sequencing equipment. It fits in with the biosynthetic technology drive towards transhumanism alongside nanotechnology, worth researching before jumping on the "Homo Deus" bandwagon that paints us as 'hackable animals' whose soul is due to be extinct (quoting the top transhuman posterchild N. Harari). Worth deeply investigating the other side of the story, most clearly outlined by Prof. Anita Baxas, but also see Dr. Edward Group, Dr Ana Mihalchea, Karen Kingston and Dr. David Nixon.

Re: Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated

#29

Post by devbent »

teslabox wrote: post #25
pdabbadabba wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you bring up fluoride—does anyone know the state of the literature on the effectiveness of fluoride treatments? I’ve been getting them for years. But with the recent trends towards PE owned dental practices and efforts to juice their profitability, I’m more and more skeptical of anything my dentist tries to sell me on.

I learned about Novamin a few years ago [0], and ordered BioMin Restore [1] to give it a try. I'm now a devoted customer. There are other Novamin/hydroxyapatite toothpastes, but I only have experience with this one brand. I think this company's latest news is the version of their toothpaste that has fluoride [2] is now FDA-approved for sensitive teeth, so they're going to be able to sell it in the United States speci…

It has recently become harder to order novamin versions of sensadyne in the US through Amazon, so I'm hoping something gets onto the shelves soon.

Re: Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated

#30

Post by CyberDildonics »

vigneshwaraya wrote: post #28

Or, just use oil pulling with coconut oil. simple, natural and easiest way to reverse and prevent cavities. keeping the oil in the mouth for 20 minutes (before spitting out into the sink) is also a great way to maintain silence, and develop awareness of oral process, as you can't swallow. More generally, am highly skeptical of this whole genetic modification drive for replacement of undesirable creatures like mosquit…

If this is your very first comment, I can't wait for your next one.
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