How to Floss
“A genuine smile comes from the heart, but a healthy smile needs good dental care.” – Anonymous
When we’re expecting or enjoying our little one, there is certainly so much to smile about – but we cannot forget about our oral health at this important time.
Pregnant women can have a higher risk of periodontal (gum) disease and cavities, while your baby might not have all their teeth, but will still need proper oral hygiene. And that’s why we sat down with Natasha van Reede van Oudtshoorn – a mom and oral hygienist.
Natasha loves to teach children about oral health in a fun way, exposing them to the dental environment in a child-friendly and exciting room. And today, she’s here to teach moms-to-be and moms about everything to know about oral hygiene – from pregnancy to toddlers!
Watch our video to get your teeth into this vital topic!
Find out more about Natasha’s child-friendly oral hygiene practice – Floss.
Brought to you by Fedhealth Medical Aid – We let you be you. Also supported by Epi-max and Jacaranda 94.2.
Flossing remains a very important part of our cleaning routine, but you don't have to floss all your teeth, you can only pick the ones that you really want to keep and then you've lost those. [laughter]
The month of October is dental hygiene month and we got hold of Natasha from floss practice.
So, I'm sorry that we were even bothering you in your car, but we've got your time. Natasha it's great to see you, how you are doing?
I'm good thank you, hello Elana. I'm good. Natasha I've known you as someone who is passionate about teeth for a very long time from the days that we were studying through marriage and children and now oral hygiene in the form of an oral hygienist. But before we talk about your practice I want to talk about the relevance of oral hygiene in this month of October. Why do we celebrate a national dental health hygiene month and why is it important that we create awareness about this?
Well, it's a profession worth celebrating isn't it? During the month of October, we would like to celebrate the work that oral hygienists do, but we as a dental hygienists would also like to create awareness about the importance of our health, that's what it's for. So, what would you say is good oral health? Good oral health is the absence of disease. Dental hygiene and oral health are often aspects that are taken for granted but it's part of our everyday lives. We all brush our teeth every day, well i hope everybody does but we use floss and mouthwash and tongue scrapers and all sorts of things to clean our mouths every day and that's the things that we use to prevent disease.
I remember when I was pregnant with my first. You going past the dentist is compulsory, you kind of have to do it, it's one of the routine check things.
How passionate are you about oral hygiene and pregnancy? Oh, it's one of my favourite topics, also because I'm a mother and I have three boys. I've been pregnant, I've been there, i know what it's like but when you start the journey in your pregnancy, there's so many things. It gets overwhelming because there's me, there's a lot of information out there and I see with baby brunch you all know there's a lot of information out there and we don't always know where to touch and where to take and where to leave and, you know it can be very overwhelming. So for me I love it to inform pregnant mommies, I love to see them early in their pregnancy, even if i can see them when they start planning to have a baby it's even better because we give them a lot of advice, we give them a lot of information so that they know when they start to have bleeding gums or they start to have problems or they start to have questions like “will my baby take the calcium out of my teeth” then they already know all these answers, they already know that it's fine, and they already know that they are capable of taking care of their own teeth and their baby's teeth.
So, I mean what kind of advice is there if you can give it to us offhand, this is obviously advice that's not just for pregnant women but for all people you know. Do we need to floss every day, that whole thing about brushing teeth in the morning and at night, does it still apply, or do we now add on a third time as well or after your pizza and lasagne do you do you brush your teeth even more, do you brush too hard, how do i know if I need to have a soft or a hard toothbrush? I mean this is all the stuff that people ask you in your chair while their mouths are gaping this big and you're busy scratching in there. So go Natasha go go!
Yes aside from brushing there's a whole lot of other tools that you can use to clean your mouth and when you go to an oral hygienist she will also give you individualized advice. So, she will tell you what will suit your mouth because someone might have braces, they will need something else. Someone might have a bridge or an implant so they will need a different type of floss than just a normal floss so there's different tools that we can use definitely.
Flossing remains a very important part of our cleaning routine, but you don't have to floss all your teeth you can only pick the ones that you really want to keep and then you floss those.
[Laughter]
Okay you got me there you see? So, someone also said to me you must brush your teeth because they're forever you know, so if you don't want teeth forever then don't brush them.
When we think of our babies, I mean there's so many questions: Uh, when do we start with toothpaste? I mean oral hygiene for our babies and our toddlers, what kind of advice do you have for us?
We would like to start brushing our teeth the moment they come into the mouth, so that's usually by the age of six months and we usually start with toothpaste as well, but we only use a small amount like a rice grain size smear on the toothbrush and you can gradually increase the amount of toothpaste until about pea size by the age of three.
Usually when you buy your first toothpaste for your baby it's good to use a toothpaste that says zero to two years, which means there's not a lot of fluoride in there so if the baby swallows it it's still safe for them, but fluoride is the thing in the toothpaste or the ingredient in the toothpaste that really helps us to protect the teeth against cavities. So, fluoride is important, and we can use them from the first day that we brush the teeth, but we can also start to clean the mouth even before the teeth come out in the mouth and a lot of people don't know that you can start to clean your baby's mouth since birth.
So you use a small gauze, you know those small little square blocks that you get, you use one of them. You wrap them around your index finger, you wet it a little bit and then just wipe the inside of the baby's mouth. So, you can wipe inside of the cheeks over the gums, over the tongue. You've probably seen in infants or in babies, we see it like a small white layer sticky layer on the tongue, that's probably milk residue so if we clean it regularly you know it will probably go away. It might also be a first sign of oral thrush that's also very common in babies. If it's persistent and it keeps on bothering you can see your oral hygienist or dentist or even your paediatrician and they will give you advice now to treat oral thrush but cleaning the baby's mouth is important you can try to do it once or twice a day.
The textbooks actually suggest that you do it after every feed, wow! I don't know about you Elana but as a mom that's never ever going to happen, if that baby is asleep you're not going to wake him up with red balls in his mouth, you're not you're not going to even try. You're just going to do it like once or twice a day and in the morning when you wash their face and clean their bum.
I love the gauze suggestion, you know the older people always say a “nat lappie” you know like a clean, um “was lappie” wasabi but I like the gauze suggestion because it's a little bit more hygienic right.
Talking about parents in the chair now, so how important is it to have your teeth checked while you're pregnant? Can you see the oral hygienist while you're pregnant?
yes definitely it's safe to see the oral hygienist or the dentist during pregnancy. If you have a severe dental problem the dentist will probably have to do some sort of dental procedure but if they don't do that and the problem evolves and it becomes even worse, it can have serious complications in pregnancy and when I talk about serious complications even up to premature birth. So, we don't want to leave serious dental problems you know without anyone knowing what's going on.
So, it's better to go and see your dentist. If it's not that serious, the dentist might ask that you to wait until the honeymoon phase after pregnancy which is usually the second trimester or that he will wait until the baby is born.
But if it is a serious problem and we need to do dental procedures, there are precautions that they can follow to make sure that the baby stays safe in your tummy.
So, they'll use injections that don't contain any adrenaline, they might use a lead apron on you when they have to take x-rays, so there are ways to do dental treatment if it is necessary. Visiting your oral hygienist as we've said before, is very important during pregnancy, the earlier I see the patient the better. Even if I can see her before she falls pregnant that's even better because we give them a lot of advice.
There's a lot of things happening during your pregnancy that makes the gums bleed you are at a higher risk of getting cavities so it's good to give them information early in their pregnancy.
Speaking about pregnancy and oral and dental hygiene Natasha has offered to write an article for us, so if you check out our website on www.babybranch.co.za you'll see her passion project right there. She's giving us practical examples and also we unpacked this topic even further in written form.
So, pregnancy and oral health if you want more information and you can find that on www.babybranch.co.za. Natasha, while we still have some of your time i mean in your opinion what is the best way for prevention how can we prevent all of it because teeth are expensive if you have to fix them afterwards.
Definitely, now prevention is definitely better than cure and in this case definitely you want to install good oral hygiene habits from a very young age and if we teach our children about prevention and taking good care of our teeth. Because when we were little you know we didn't even know anything about flossing. I only learned how to floss my teeth when i was when i was studying oral hygiene. There's many ways how we can maintain a good standard of oral hygiene, but I think one of the one of the tools that is that is underestimated often is flossing because flossing is one of the most important ways of preventing disease in the mouth.
When I started working as a young oral hygienist, I realized that not many people use floss and of the few people that use it, that don't use it correctly, so my aim is to teach people young and old how to use floss properly how to use it correctly.
Well, speaking of using floss properly, Natasha doesn't just sit in her car to do interviews with us she's actually showing us how to floss, take a look at this. [11:37]
That's really good, you see you should let the children watch the video! Really awesome thanks to Natasha. Why are you so passionate about cleaning people's teeth and making sure that everyone maintains good dental hygiene?
You know Elana, during these troubling times of Corona virus it's important to remember that you get Covid 19 through your mouth, so having a really good healthy mouth is very important. If you have poor oral hygiene, if you have a lot of germs and a lot of bacteria in your mouth, the chances of getting a secondary and bacterial infection in your airways and in your lungs is greater and the same goes for heart problems. If you have poor oral hygiene if you have a lot of germs and a lot of bacteria in your mouth those same germs and same bacteria will end up in your bloodstream.
We have blood flow through our mouths, we have blood flow through the gums and the teeth so if all the bad the bacteria enters your bloodstream, it goes through your heart and it goes through your heart by the minute it doesn't take a week for bad stuff to get into your bloodstream it happens really fast.
I started my independent oral hygiene practice two years ago and when I started my practice the word floss was something really special to me, it was something that was a symbol of health and it represents the passion that I have for my profession and the passion that I have to educate people and to teach people about having a healthy mouth, so the name of my practice is also Floss and the website is www.flosspractice.co.za.
You can also see there what oral hygiene is all about. If you visit your own oral hygienist wherever you are in South Africa or in the world, you will not just go for teeth cleaning and you're not just going to go to get your teeth whitened, you're going to go to a dental professional who will be able to help you to prevent disease, and that is what it's about.
You just made teeth brushing a whole lot more interesting and you can find Natasha van Reede on www.flosspractice.co.za, also follow them on Facebook, it's Floss Practice and on Instagram, natashafloss and on twitter, @natashafloss other than that, just floss!