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Tag: teeth

  • Fish With “Human Teeth”? You Won’t Believe The Explanation

    A fish with HUMAN teeth? This is what a fisherman in Russia claimed to have captured after reeling in a most peculiar sea animal.

    Aleks Korobov was fishing at Arkhangelsk Oblast district’s Northern Dvina River when he caught the creature.

    At first the 50-year-old was convinced he’d hooked an ordinary bream.

    Said Korobov, “I opened its gills which were nice and red, but I noticed the mouth wasn’t right for a bream. [W]hen I opened [the mouth], I nearly dropped the thing in surprise.”

    The fisherman found that his fish had human-like teeth.

    It was such a bizarre find that when the startled man tried to convince his friends what he’d captured, none of them believed him.

    “We know Aleks can tell some tall tales but when he came in and said he had a fish with human teeth we thought he’d certainly been drinking,” quipped Ppal Anton Efimov, one of Korobov’s good friends.

    “But then he got it out and we were totally shocked! None of us had ever seen anything like it in our lives.”

    So did Korobov capture some mutated fish or reveal the existence of a cryptid?

    While the discovery is an unusual one, scientists have weighed in with a less than extraordinary explanation.

    An autopsy of the fish was performed at the Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography. There it was confirmed that the animal was indeed not a bream fish as initially thought.

    Instead, the experts agree that the fish is a “member of the Piranha family”.

    Before you run screaming into the night, you should know that it’s not THAT kind of a piranha.

    The scientists have identified the fish as an herbivore. “[It’s] not one of the meat-eating ones you see in films,” explained industry expert Gennady Dvorykankin.

    Yes, there are vegetarian piranhas:

    As for this particiular fish, experts believe it’s probably a pacu.

    The pacu is a fish that originally hails from the tropical waters of South America that’s slightly larger than your average piranha and with differing teeth.

    With the fish identified, that leaves the question of how the heck a South American tropical fish ended up all the way in Russia.

    “It is very unlikely that it made its way from its natural tropical waters to our Arctic and then into the river,” Dvorykankin said.

    “We can only assume it was dumped by an owner of exotic fish.”

  • Oil Cleansing And Pulling: 20 Minute Mouth Remedy

    When a friend replied to me recently, saying he was busy “oil pulling” and would get back to me, I really didn’t want to know what that meant.

    He told me anyway.

    Essentially, the idea is that you slosh around a tablespoon of oil (sesame, coconut, or sunflower are some popular ones) through the teeth in your mouth (hence the name “pulling”) for ten or twenty minutes, and the toxins get sucked from your body.

    Ayurvedic medicine has claimed the practice can prevent about 30 different diseases. After being put to use as an Indian remedy for numerous years, it’s been gradually catching on way out west. Reportedly, it has helped prevent tooth decay, bad breath, bleeding gums, cracked lips, and also helped strengthen teeth, the jaw, and gums. Some even claim it can help with non-oral afflictions in the body, like insomnia, skin health, or hormone imbalances.

    How does it work? In a word: neutralization.

    The stuff many of us eat causes an acidic pH in our mouths (low pH). This sort of environment is grade-A real estate as far as bad bacteria are concerned, so they settle down on Teeth Street and can cause a litany of issues from there. Oils, however, are alkaline bases (high pH). Thus, they can help even out that pH, raise the mouth’s pH, drop acidity levels, and evict the bad bacteria from their dental residence.

    But don’t trust me – let’s hear from some professionals with letters after their names:

    “Well you know, it can’t hurt,” Dr. Wayne Brueggen of Houston, Texas, stated, “There is at least one study that shows it reduces strep bacteria in the mouth.”

    As for curing other infirmities not immediately related to the mouth, Snopes believes there isn’t any “sensible scientific explanation for how simply swishing oil around in one’s mouth could accomplish any of those things.”

    Dr. John C. Comisi (spokesperson for the Academy of General Dentistry) states, “Many people don’t even take the time to effectively brush their teeth for two minutes.” Doc has a point there. My mom used to set an egg timer for teeth-brushing when we were kids. It felt like an eternity, so I broke it. And that’s why I need fillings.

    So, the scientific research on this practice seems inconclusive, but what does that matter? We blindly trust all we hear until studies get retracted and we don’t know if broccoli cures or causes cancer anymore. There are a couple things to consider. Regardless of what Snopes or Scientific American says, a holistic understanding of the body is that it doesn’t exist in pieces, so nothing happens in a vacuum; with that view, oral care could affect other bodily on-goings. What’s more, no harmful effects have been reported. So, keep doing it if it feels helpful! If you’re still wondering, however, how this could possibly be beneficial: perhaps for fast-paced people who take 20 minutes to try this, there’s something meditative, introspective, and relaxing about it that affects overall well-being.

    Then again, maybe it’s just the first good oral cleansing they’ve gotten in years.

    Image via Youtube

  • Soda Meth Study Reveals Bad News For Your Teeth

    Soda may be as damaging to your teeth as meth or crack in the long run, according to a recently released study. The study claims that the damage done by high soda consumption combined with a lack of proper dental hygiene can do damage that is substantially similar to “meth mouth.”

    (Do yourself a favor and do not do a Google Image search for meth mouth. You can thank me later.)

    The study was conducted by Dr. Mohamed Bassiouny. Bassiouny works at Temple University School of Dentistry as a professor of restorative dentistry. In the study, recently published in the journal General Dentistry, Bassiouny compares the damage done by various kinds of substances, including soda, crack, and meth.

    While the weight loss benefits of diet soda are debatable, Bassiouny says that when it comes to damaging your teeth, there is little difference between diet soda and regular. The reason for this is that they have comparable acid content – citric acid and phosphoric acid, to be precise. Regular exposure to these acids without proper hygiene can do catastrophic damage to the teeth in the long term.

    Fortunately for all you soda fiends out there, the damage from soda is much easier to mitigate than the damage from meth. One of the soda-drinking subjects of the study was a woman in her 30s who had been consuming two liters of soda every day for five years, and had not been to see a dentist in 20 years. That suggests that a little work to keep your teeth healthy can help prevent some of the damage soda can do. Brush regularly, go to the dentist at least once a year, preferably twice, and don’t drink an entire 2-liter per day, and you should be fine.

    Other subjects of the study included a 29-year-old man who had been using meth regularly for three years, as well as drinking 2-3 cans of soda per day. Another was a 51-year-old crack user. All three subjects had to have their teeth extracted and replaced with dentures.

  • Fluoride Mystery Is Closer To Being Solved

    The fluoride mystery has stumped scientists for almost 50 years. How exactly does it help stop tooth decay? Scientists may finally be onto an answer.

    A recent study suggests that the fluoride mystery is actually pretty simple – the mineral reduces the ability of bacteria to stick to teeth. This makes it so that the bacteria that causes cavities and other nasty mouth problems are easily removed with brushing.

    Scientists used artificial teeth to study the effects of fluoride, but stumbled upon some problems. The main issue was that tooth composition can vary wildly so the effect of fluoride can change dramatically on a tooth-by-tooth basis. Still, they found that the artificial teeth, when subjected to fluoride, repelled negatively charged bacteria by negatively charging the tooth itself.

    The study is inconclusive, however, and the fluoride mystery will continue to spur controversy. The most controversial, of course, is that fluoride is added to drinking water to prevent tooth decay. Scientists say that the fluoride in water is a controlled amount that poses no risk to humans who drink it, but some people still refuse to drink fluoridated water for fear that it may pose health risks.

    Regardless, much research must still be conducted before scientists can fully understand the fluoride mystery. The next step is to see if fluoride can actually weaken bacteria, thus disabling its ability to build up “fortresses” on teeth.

    [h/t: LiveScience]

  • Dentist Removes Ex-Boyfriend’s Teeth? Not Hardly

    Last week, yours truly penned a little article about a poor Polish chap who had all of his teeth surgically removed by his vengeful ex-girlfriend. The story proved to be quite popular, capturing the imagination of people all over the world who have often dreamed of performing unspeakable acts upon their ex-boyfriends and/or ex-girlfriends. Although the story was kind of sad, the ridiculous nature of the scenario left plenty of room for a chuckle or two at the guy’s expense.

    Turns out, the whole bloody affair was nothing more than a hoax.

    If you missed the piece, let’s play catch-up: A man, who recently parted ways with his dentist girlfriend, decided to pay the lass a visit so she could address his tooth ache. Instead of addressing the problem, the woman doped him up, yanked every single one of his teeth, and sent him on his way. To make matters worse, his current girlfriend, horrified by his embarrassingly empty mouth, decided to leave him. It was sad and funny at the same time.

    Erin Tennant at MSNBC decided to look a bit deeper into the case, and what she found was quite revealing. Neither the Polish police department nor Poland’s Chamber of Physicians and Dentists are investigating such a case, indicating that nothing of the sort ever took place.

    After some digging around, the tale was finally traced back to the online edition of Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper. However, writer Simon Tomlinson, whose byline appears on the article, claims that he doesn’t know where the story came from. Odd, that.

    “I’ve drawn a bit of a blank,” he stated in an email. “The (Daily) Mail Foreign Service, which did the piece for the paper, is really just an umbrella term for copy put together from agencies. My news desk isn’t sure where exactly it came from.”

    That’s pretty peculiar. Given that the piece is only a week old, you’d think it would be fresh in his mind. Is Tomlinson simply trying to ignore the problem until it goes away? Possibly. Then again, this whole situation has been pretty bizarre, so it’s anybody’s guess if he’s telling the truth or not.

    I, for one, am a little disappointed that the story is a hoax. It’s not that I enjoy having a laugh or two at the expense of others — well, that’s not entirely true — but the idea of someone getting a little revenge on the person who wronged them is kind of amusing. In a sick and twisted way, of course. It’s the sort of story we can share with others so everyone and their grandmother can enjoy the article’s inherent outrageousness. If nothing else, it’s reinforces the old adage that we shouldn’t always believe what we read, especially on the Internet.