Does brushing and mouthwash really eliminate your microbiome? I heard it does precious little. Most of the microorganisms live below the gumline and surfaces. If that were true it would eliminate caries! Please post links

Mouthwash (WITH alcohol) daily almost completely eliminates the need for daily brushing and flossing. This was later retracted by demand of the ADA to only say "as good or better than flossing"; from here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3894074/ "mouth rinses would be considered to be “at least as good as” daily flossing if the upper limit of the 90% confidence interval" there are a number of studies on this topic and they all seem to generally be in agreement. Mouthwash even once a week is really good for dental hygiene. They make alcohol free mouthwash but it's hard to argue with the antimicrobial properties of alcohol and the price difference is neglible.

That would get rid of all the good bacteria too, which can't be… good.

No thanks. I'll not be using alcohol-based mouthwash. https://drugfree.org/drug-and-alcohol-news/australian-study-...

You should stop drinking diet soda too, a byproduct of metabolizing aspartame is formaldehyde which is also a carcinogen.

In one of their articles they claim that the microbiome is stable over 15 years, but this is categorized as "unpublished work" which leaves me with a large sense of doubt. I don't mind research that is in preliminary stages (as in conference abstracts, technical papers, etc), but the fact they are very naïve in how they approach scientific evidence makes me highly doubtful.