The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
I think avoiding acidic foods and drinks is probably a good idea. As far as I understand the reason that eg. sugar is bad for your teeth is that it feeds oral bacteria that produce an acidic waste product, and that is what harms your teeth. So consuming acidic food is basically skipping the middle man, although the acid from bacteria might adhere and stay on your teeth more than food that's washed out by some water. It would stand to reason that basic foods would then have the opposite effect, although I'm not sure being high in calcium makes something inherently basic.
Generally I find opposition to fluoride to be associated with kooks; maybe there is some shadows of doubt to be cast on it's safety for the rest of the body but as far as I can tell the dental benefits of (normal amounts of) fluoride are pretty firmly positive or at the very least not negative, so the fact that they're recommending to not consume fluoride seems like a red flag.
Similarly, I don't see what the point of delineating between "naturally" carbonated and "unnaturally" carbonated is if their main thesis is that acids are bad for your teeth. Seems like a sort of appeal to nature fallacy and indicates they aren't thinking entirely clearly about their prescriptions.
So, the thrust of the idea (avoid acid) seems good, but I'd take most of their points with a grain of salt.
This is backward - sugar is food for the bacteria, acid isn't. Acidic drink in itself doesn't do much. Combine it with sugar..
And bacteria is bad for your teeth because it creates acid... in addition to forming plaque which has the added effect of keeping the acid stuck to your teeth. From what I understand the dominant strains of bacteria that cause cavities also thrive in an acidic environment so acid would help them grow more too. Maybe consuming acidic food is too transitory to have an effect, but considering that's the same method of delivery as sugar I think it's likely it could; I'm having trouble finding the right keywords to find experimental data on that however and what articles I can find seem to just follow the same reasoning I've given.
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