Oral Hygiene at School: The Importance of Having Floss on You At All Times

There are some things that are just so useful that once you have them on you for a while, you start to wonder how you ever got by without them. Simple, waxed dental floss is one of those things. Just look at what you can do with dental floss:

• Tie up a shoe whose lace has broken.
• Create a makeshift tourniquet to get a cut finger to stop bleeding so much.
• Cut cheese, modeling clay, or other soft things.
• Put a tripwire up across a bathroom stall.
• Combine it with a paper clip and a pencil to create an in-class zipline.
• Use it to tie your hair back should your scrunchie stop scrunching.

Of course, you can -- and should -- also use it to floss your teeth. Why would you want to do something that lame in the middle of the school day?

There are a couple of good reasons:

Something Hurts

It's not all that often that we can identify exactly why something in our mouth hurts, but when it does, it's more often than not in a place that we can't quite get to. It's a bit vulgar to walk around school trying to get between your teeth with a fingernail -- but floss is completely socially acceptable.

Something is Stuck

Along those same lines, there's very little more distracting than having something annoying stuck between your teeth. Also, as it happens, those bits of food stuck between your teeth are quite bad for your oral hygiene -- each of those bits is a source of food for the bacteria that cause plaque, gingivitis, and other diseases of the teeth and gums. Flossing is the best way to get them out efficiently and without causing a fuss during the school day.