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by clifanatic 3613 days ago
Be that as it may, I can smell somebody who doesn't floss from 10 feet away. You should floss if not for yourself, then at least for the rest of us.
2 comments

Bullshit. Some people have halitosis, some people just don't brush regularly. There is one of my coworkers who occasionally has really bad breath, but it's not clear that he just missed a flossing.

Source: I have a hygiene pact with a coworker. (If either of us ever smells or has a bad appearance, we're pact-bound to tell the other.) I floss twice a year: 48 hours before my dentist appointments, the times I've had bad breath have not been flossing related.

Look up origin of halitosis. It's just a name for bad breath made up by Listerine, not actual illness.
Sure, there's more than one cause of breath odor, and one of those is perio, the prognosis of which is improved by regular flossing (and other oral therapies). Morning breath doesn't reek the same way perio breath does, and it's a world of smells and other issues that are hard to forget.

The truth of the research is that flossing doesn't significantly contribute to oral health when done alongside adequate manual brushing- diet, hygiene habits, and personal chemistry accounted for. That's not new info; clean is clean.

However, most people don't brush adequately or frequently enough and aren't using good electric brushes, so flossing does help them.

And it sounds like you've been really lucky so far, but don't rely on odor as an indicator of your health. By the time you can smell a lot of things, they've been problems for a while.

> I have a hygiene pact with a coworker.

Huh, that's a cool idea :) Is that common (under another moniker maybe)? I can't find anything on Google. Just proposing such a pact can probably be tricky, but I've been thinking about something similar recently.

We were fast friends and one of us was bold to make fun of the spilled food on the other's shirt, and it led to "oh man I'm glad you told me before I walked into that meeting" which led to "oh yeah let's always do this."
> I've been thinking about something similar recently.

"Hey, dude, do you want to have a personal hygiene pact? Ok, great, because I have something to tell you..."

> I floss twice a year

Dude, I can smell your breath all the way here in Texas.

Personally I floss daily as well as Waterpik on most days, but don't you think that may just be a confirmation bias?