subject: How Often Should I Undertake Dental Flossing? [print this page] You are likely to find yourself drawn to undertaking regular dental flossing the very first moment you learn about it. If you are coming from the parts of the world, where dental flossing is a regular oral hygiene practice then you will, of course, find it being a part of your second nature, it being something you will have been taught about since your childhood. Under these circumstances, you will most probably know what the benefits of the process are. But if you are coming from the parts of the world where dental flossing is not a part of the oral hygiene regime, you will definitely find yourself greatly drawn to it when you first come to learn about it and its benefits. The benefits we are looking at, things like protection from dental cavities, prevention of halitosis, and protection from some forms of gum diseases are likely to be things that you will greatly appreciate.
It is from such a background, then, that you are likely to find yourself wanting to learn how to go about dental flossing. And having learnt how to go about it, you will find yourself interested in knowing how often you should undertake it, which is our focus here.
Now there is almost full concurrence, among dentists all over the world, that dental-flossing is something you should do at least once every day. Ideally, like teeth-brushing, dental-flossing is something you would need to do after every meal. This will at first probably feel counter-intuitive, because chances are that on first hearing about dental-flossing, you will be drawn to imagine that it is one of those things that you only need to undertake once in a while. As you can see though, that isn't the case. Dental flossing is something you should make part of your daily routine - much like that morning shower you always make a point of taking.
The need for you to undertake dental-flossing so often becomes clear to you once you come to learn what the process is all about, and why exactly it is carried out. As it turns out, the main idea behind the undertaking of regular dental flossing is to remove the plaque and food particles that the normal tooth-brushing process can't remove.
It is something you will have noticed, if you are careful observer of mechanical phenomena, that there are some areas of your mouth (and precisely in the 'teeth portion' of it) that never get cleaned during the ordinary teeth-brushing process, as carried out using a toothbrush and toothpaste. The areas in question are, of course, the spaces between your various teeth. That space between a tooth and its adjacent 'neighbor:' who cleans that? Ordinary toothbrush bristles are too thick to go through there, and in any case, they still wouldn't adequately clean that very thin space. We need something more here and this is what dental flossing is all about. The dental floss is a very thin thread-like material that can not only be conveniently pushed into those inter-teeth spaces, but also moved up and down to have a cleaning effect.
From all this, it becomes clear that dental flossing plays an important supplementary role to tooth-brushing. It also becomes clear that if all you are doing is brushing teeth, and never flossing the teeth, then obviously, you are not practicing proper oral hygiene. Seen from this perspective then, the need to undertake dental flossing on a daily basis becomes very clear.
