Why do we floss our teeth? Well if you don’t floss your teeth, a good brushing will only get them 65% clean, which means 35% of your tooth surface isn’t being cleaned at all.
Would you only clean 65% of your house or car and consider it done? Would you put in 65% effort into your job and consider it a successful workday? So why not take the 100 seconds (yes, that’s all it takes) to floss properly? It’s less than two minutes a day.
There are many other reasons to floss, but we thought that this simple statistic was pretty convincing. This got our collective minds racing to find a few more interesting tooth and mouth-related numbers our readers might enjoy. We found a lot, but these were our top 10:
Other stats not related to the question of Why do we floss our teeth?
10. You’ll produce over 23,500 litres of saliva over your lifetime – enough to fill two regular-sized swimming pools.
9. 83% of people say their teeth are more important to their appearance than hair and eyes.
8. North Americans spend more that $2.3 billion annually on dental products (toothpaste, floss, brushes, mouthwash). This includes over 4.8 million km of dental floss.
7. 100 years ago, 50% of North Americans had none of their own teeth. Today, less than 10% of 65+ people are missing one tooth.
6. People who drink three or more sugary drinks a day have 62% more dental decay.
5. The Tooth Fairly paid out over $300 million to North American kids in 2016.
4. 59% of North Americans would rather sit in a dentist’s chair than sit next to someone talking loudly on a cell phone.
3. A sneeze flies out of your mouth at 965 km/h.
2. In 1986, the U.S. National Spelling Bee champion won by correctly spelling “odontalgia,” which means toothache.
And the best fact we found…
1. The average child laughs around 400 times a day.
Keep that last one in mind when you’ve had a bad day. Remember that you’ve had good days before. You know how to have them. So as you floss your teeth before bed, remember that tomorrow’s a brand new day to shine.
