Getting food stuck in your teeth is an uncomfortable part of eating, whether you are consuming a raw or SAD diet. I mean, how many times have you eaten a green smoothie or raw salsa only to walk around the rest of the day with little bits of lettuce and tomato skin in your teeth?
Plus, how hard is it to floss? You’ll already be at the sink brushing your teeth anyway (I hope) and it only takes a minute or two to finish up with some flossing.
But I was always annoyed growing up when my dentist, despite my regular twice-daily brushing and flossing, would tell me that I needed to do a better job taking care of my teeth. There would always be tons of plaque around my them, and I could never get rid of it entirely.
Nuts and seeds are almost always dried when found in the store, and like dried fruit they can wreak havoc in your mouth by sticking to your teeth. The body generates acid in your mouth to break nut and seed particles down. It's enough to lower your pH balance, and when that happens the enamel of your teeth is in trouble.
Dentists have long warned patients that acidic juices can destroy the enamel on teeth, and that goes for raw juice as well. If you're going to drink it at all, I suggest you do so in very limited quantities and that you use a straw to bypass the problem.
The general rule is to floss once each day and I think it's a good one. No matter what you're eating, even if it's just bananas and water, you need to clean between your teeth. You will get food stuck in there and there will be some plaque build up as well.
If you are eating some particularly sticky/stringy foods, you may need to floss more than once. For instance, if I decide to have mangoes for lunch, I’ll definitely floss afterward. Leaving stringy bits of mango in my teeth all day is just gross.
Ya know the phrase, "Too much of anything is a bad thing"? Well, this applies to flossing as well. You can overdo it when flossing; it is definitely not unheard of for people to floss too hard and actually wear down their gums.
It doesn't much matter which you do first, brushing or flossing. There is a school of thought that suggests that you should floss your teeth first and then brush afterwards. The idea is that your tooth brushing activities can aid in removing the food and dental plaque debris that has been dislodged by your flossing efforts but not yet expelled from between your teeth. While we don't feel strongly one way or another on this topic, we do feel that it is important that you swish your mouth with water or mouthwash at some point after you have flossed, so the debris you have loosened up is rinsed out of your mouth.
As flossing does become easier for you, you'll probably find that you no longer need to look in a mirror when doing it. Try to come up with some other activity you can do while you floss. This can be a time saver for you as well as a way of ingraining flossing into your daily routine. Many people watch TV while they floss their teeth.
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