This article is the second in the series on how to balance your oral flora and be a ‘good conductor’ for the symphony in your mouth micro motor. In the first article, How to Balance Your Oral Flora, we introduced the oral microbiome and debunked the overly simplistic cultural myth that ‘all plaque (biofilm) is bad’. Now we want to walk this story one step further and explore together whether some plaques may actually help our teeth stay healthy. When we think about dental plaque, we tend to imagine the gory photos of the ‘end game’ level of the lifecycle of a plaque colony where calculus has formed and the individual has all sorts of problems going on in their mouth tooth scaler australia. However, you know from the first article in the series, that biofilms have a lifecycle and strategies exist how we can help maintain biofilm in the health giving zone and away from the zone that encourages tooth decay and gum disease. An important part of the story is a little known structure called ‘dental pellicle’. The pellicle is essentially the beginning biofilm on teeth after cleaning. Formed by proteins from saliva, pellicle is a thin protein layer that coats our teeth. Like we discussed in the first article, pellicle provides the ‘platform’ for oxygen loving bacteria to attach which begins the lifecycle of a plaque colony. How some types of biofilm protect our teeth from demineralization… Our culture likes to blame ‘bad bugs’ as being the cause of tooth decay. And while microbes are part of the story of tooth decay, it’s not the whole story. Another major contributor to demineralizing enamel and weakening our teeth is exposing our teeth to acidic foods and drinks. (Incidentally, here are a couple good articles for those of you interested in diving deeper into why teeth decay and the #1 cause of tooth decay and here’s a good article if you want to learn strategies how to stop acidic foods and drinks from demineralizing your teeth.) It turns out that the pellicle and the thin biofilm that attaches to the pellicle play an important role in keeping acids in foods we eat and drink from having direct contact with our teeth. What Are Dental X-Rays And Why Are They Needed? for more information.The thin biofilm provides a ‘buffer zone’ and literally takes the acid bath ‘hit’ for our teeth which protects the enamel from demineralization. With this, you can see that the ‘scorched earth’ policy to maintain teeth completely free from bacteria not only isn’t possible, but may actually cause us to lose one layer of protection for our teeth. Interestingly, our ancestors were very aware of the benefits of saliva for not only our oral health but health of the whole body. Here’s a video tutorial on a simple practice to increase resistance to tooth decay AND improving digestion. We call it ‘Mouth Probiotics‘