https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/xylitol-101
(Also if you have pets, make sure they don't get any, xylitol isn't good for them, especially dogs)
Small quantities in gum may be fine but sugar alcohols are increasingly being added to foodstuffs, and I'm increasingly dubious about it.
(Personally I can eat an entire bag of sugar free gummies w/o any ill effect, ymmv!)
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/27/health/zero-calorie-sweet...
what does that mean? does it produce toxic chemicals? is it carcinogenic? or is this just fear mongering?
swishing a xylitol solution around your mouth is also different than pouring it in every drink you have.
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/paws-xylitol-...
Merck Vet Manual:
https://www.merckvetmanual.com/toxicology/food-hazards/xylit...
Also sold as bisindole which is a class of natural products derived from oxidative dimerization of tryptophan.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-04-qa-xylitol-teeth-swee...
What is the recommended daily dosage of xylitol for oral health?
"The recommended amount for cavity protection is 6 to 10 grams. And it's best to spread doses out throughout the day. So, if you want dental benefit from chewing xylitol-added gum, you should chew the gum for at least 20 minutes to extract the xylitol. That can be a lot of stress on the temporomandibular joints (in the jaw), so if you have problems with your TMJ, it's not a good idea to excessively chew gum."
That's a lot of Xylitol. It got expensive quickly, and I was heading towards TMJ dysfunction. Xylitol is also considered a high FODMAP, so if you are on a low FODMAP diet its best to avoid.
The product I've been using is this: https://carifree.com/product/maintenance-rinse/
Also it's alkaline in ph, unlike many mouthwashes on the market. Caries need an acidic environment to do their thing, so you want your mouth to be inhospitable to them. Acidic mouthwashes may kill off the bacteria, but they make it a nice environment for any that remain to attach your teeth.
Edit: One can easily find various papers like this: https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...
I imagine that you could, at least on paper, create a Rube Goldberg machine in their genes that, say, killed them if they produced lactic acid, and made it very difficult to delete these genes without destroying their ability to reproduce. But you'll probably also handicap them in the process and make it difficult for them to adapt to competitive adaptations from other bacteria.
That's not to suggest that knocking out one or two specific functions is going to accomplish recolonization, or that we should even trust the effort to be wise in the medium-/long-term in light of gene transfer or migration into the gut and elsewhere, but the broad idea of pursuing recolonization by less destructive bacteria isn't without merit in itself.
It’s like Jurassic Park’s “Lysine Contingency”, but in your mouth
I have a friend who started having a lot of teeth issues after moving in together. She swears nothing else has changed (i.e. food or stuff)
Hubris?
I'm all for progress and innovation. We need to couch such progress through the lens of thinking through the potential impacts of such progress though.
I honestly think the play here is to have customers continually inoculate with the same, or even improved, versions of their modified bacteria. Possibly with a very strong antibiotic course in between if a clean slate is needed. That would provide ample room to stay on top of mutations and gene swapping in-situ. Otherwise, you don't have a continuous revenue model or a successful product.
Bacteria are not machines, DNA is node code. Life is very different from mechanics
The research I've heard of that I was thinking about here was about splicing genes in such a way that in order to remove it, you will also need to remove genes necessary for reproduction.
I'm not a geneticist and it's been a long time since I've read about this type of thing, so if I'm mistaken or if you know more, I'm all ears.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique
https://www.fao.org/4/u4220t/u4220T0g.htm
> In February 1991, after 15 years of production and the sterilization of 220 billion insects, Mexico was declared screwworm free. The screwworm rearing plant in Mexico, the only one of its kind, continues producing flies on a large scale for the eradication efforts under way in Central America and now provides FAO's Screwworm Emergency Centre for North Africa (SECNA) with sterile flies to combat the recent outbreak in North Africa.
The "rationalist community" has always been quirky and edgy, but iterations in recent years have felt increasingly reactionary and contrarian at all costs. Being anti-FDA has been a meme in the rationalist community for several years, especially since Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten) started writing anti-FDA pieces. (Side note: The conservative firebrand they're talking about is a person who was caught using a pseudonym to post extremely biased, racist material, who has somehow remained prominent in the community despite the revelations).
This appears to have primed the community for "FDA bad" takes, which has triggered their contrarian tendencies to assume that anything that goes against the FDA must therefore be good.
A supplement maker publicly defying the FDA and pushing out a miracle treatment without the normal rigor of human trials and safety reviews is the type of behavior that would have triggered skepticism from the rationalist community. Yet because the community has been primed with "FDA bad, anti-FDA good" memes for years and the person pitching this supplement is vaguely connected to the rationalist community, this product has triggered a lot of adoration and praise from the community.
The product also exists in a space that is difficult to disprove: The effects of any anti-cavity product can only really be shown over very long periods of time in controlled settings. Anyone who gets a cavity while using this product will surely be dismissed as having a pre-existing cavity growing, or poor oral hygiene, or being a statistical anomaly, or any other number of excuses. At the same time, I'm sure we're about to hear endless anecdotes from people who have been taking the supplement and haven't had any cavities (while ignoring the fact that most people also don't get cavities in a given year, even without this magic probiotic).
It feels like the perfect storm for a grift, and this company is taking the lead and running with it. It's weird that a blog post advising some caution and skepticism for a supplement pusher making extraordinary claims who has refused to participate in the normally expected clinical trials. It's equally weird to see the self-described rationalist community throwing scientific rigor to the wind and embracing marketer's claims.
I don't entirely understand what's going on here, but I think it's strange that an article advising a modicum of skepticism for supplement pushers is now considered a contrarian take in the rationalist community.
The FDA is bad: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/07/22/i-am-dying-of-squamous-ce... and I'm dying largely because of their torpor and intransigence. It's not just "a meme." It's my life.
He's been pretty explicit on Lumina too:
"My real opinion, as precisely as I can express it, is:
* Advance of approximately the same magnitude as fluoride: 5%
* Good on balance, comparable to other beneficial dental treatments: 35%
* Doesn’t work in its current form, but could easily be modified into something that does: 10%
* Doesn’t work at all and never will: 50%
* Causes minor side effects for some people, same scale as Tylenol: 30%
* Causes medium side effects, same scale as tricyclics: 5%
* Causes disastrous side effects, same scale as thalidomide: <1%"
[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/beyond-abolish-the-fda [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic
But I'd still rather have the current state of affairs than no FDA! I don't even have to think about that one!
You mean doxxed. Since when do we condone doxxing?
Hanania is just some dude on twitter. He's not prominent in the rationalist community in any meaningful sense.
That said, I'm not sure I learned anything new after reading this.
I'm also not sure that taking issue with a company bypassing systemic protections against dangerous drugs is an appeal to authority.
All of this is stated in the article, if you missed this on your first read, you might consider re-reading it :)
It'd be a more interesting claim if it was argued that mutacin-1140 was particularly dangerous in the relevant doses (and this somehow never came up in the wild-type S. mutans that produce it).
What about off-label medication?
I don't think taking Lumina is smart, more or less for the reasons the author ennumerates. I also think it's unlikely enough to hurt people that FDA approval shouldn't be required. There's a lot of stuff in that category!
Off-label means prescribed for a different purpose than originally indicated, at the prescriber's discretion. The medication must still have past safety testing and have shown efficacy for something.
> I also think it's unlikely enough to hurt people that FDA approval shouldn't be required. There's a lot of stuff in that category!
You can sell a lot of products as-is without FDA approval. However, making substantial claims about that product's medicinal properties is regulated in a different manner.
These people are trying to have the best of both worlds: Making extraordinary claims about preventing a medical condition, while also avoiding any participation in the FDA process or even funding standard trials.
I think the most obvious counter argument is that this could easily be a massively successful drug if it works as well as they claim. The TAM is everyone with teeth who wants to keep them, which is basically everyone. Yet instead they've chosen this weird path of embracing the rationalist community and supplement nuts, which is a much smaller market.
The author has provided some solid arguments that this is not the case. Why do you think so?
It's hard to find a website discussing it that is not paid for by a toothpaste company, but here's something. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24660268/
From that paper, the brand they used as example of stannous fluoride was "oral-B pro expert all-around protection" Do you know of any other brands?
I wonder if we can conclude it was the stannous fluoride that made the difference and one of the other ingredients.
I'm sure that there are other studies out that that compare the active ingredients in isolation rather than as a part of a commercial preparation, that's just the first one I came across that looked to be from a reasonably independent source, rather than a disguised advertisement.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9220381/
but who knows if it is good for the rest of you.
WHAT IF... the mass increase in colon cancers in young people is due to gut bacteria colonies being taken over by a strain of bacteria in mouths that also survives stomach acids? What if that is causing the huge increase in IBS? What if the high carb diets and alternative sugars being consumed at mind boggling rates is a root cause? That the oral bacteria has been overtaken by a strain optimized for these carbs but is actively harmful to our bodies?
And what if fixing it is a treatment like this?
I'm willing to gamble.
Signed,
older millenial who has suffered with IBS for years
edit: If I could get a fecal transplant procedure in the USA to replace my gut colony I totally would.
edit2: fun fact -- did you know Sucralose accumulates in the environment because almost nothing breaks it down? it's pretty close to being a forever chemical. We can tell how much treated sewage injected into the water table is leaking into the ocean by measuring the amount of Sucralose in the ocean waters near the shoreline. That and nitrogen. But glug glug drink up those sugar free sodas and energy drinks!
Infants being kissed by their mothers might get it though, as they lack an already existing micro-biome in their mouths against which the new bacteria would need to compete.
Additionally, if you were in a relationship with someone and were consistently kissing that person over time, it might eventually establish a foothold. But a single kiss, no matter how wet and sloppy, is almost certainly not enough.
Surely that is analyzed in the FDA application file.
Oh wait, it's not.
Oh wait, there is no file.
Oh wait, they didn't do any significant testing at all.
To quote Dirty Harry, are you feeling lucky today?
Sorry, I don't understand Twitter lingo and Google doesn't return anything - What does /dd mean?
I don't like having alcohol there 24/7 but I concede that, this being true, it's not the issue I may have thought it was. I would want the FDA to sign off on it being okay, however.
Track record on similar projects was a question on the Manifund application. Those were Silverbook's answers. Were the footnote explaining this and the link to the application added after you read the article?
I don’t eat a lot of processed foods or foods high in sugar, but I don’t completely abstain from them either.
Nothing to do with Lumina directly, but I’ve always been curious about my dental microbiome and how something about it is different from others.
I often worry about new products like Lumina upsetting whatever balance I’ve got going on.
I do not buy that it is dangerous. However, I haven't seen any statistics showing the frequency of mutacin-1140 or its efficiency. Back in 2015 when I was a teen I did an experiment using colicin V (an E.coli one - I was planning on engineering E.coli Nissile to replace my current gut E.coli with something more fun. Got kicked out of the science fair for that one - https://keonigandall.com/posts/colicins.html ). Turns out, you need a sizable portion of the population to get takeover. I haven't seen ANY data on the population percentage necessary for takeover with this strain. Nor have I seen statistics of its natural occurrence percentage.
I wanted to modify the strain to have GFP expression, so I can have my own little engineered biome for myself that is showable at parties and such, but it looks like they removed comE :( will have to start from an original strain instead, I guess.
from https://www.aapd.org/globalassets/media/publications/archive...
"In addition, xylitol has a number of other effects on S mutans that may account for some of its clinical effects in caries reduction. Short-term consumption of xylitol is associated with decreased S mutans levels in both saliva and plaque.15 Long-term habitual consumption of xylitol appears to have a selective effect on S mutans strains. This results in selection for populations that are less virulent and less capable of adhering to tooth surfaces and, thus, are shed more easily from plaque into saliva."
No one is going to want to consult you, if you might blog about it, attacking them by name, so... if it was serious enough to burn professional bridges, why not go to the FDA, an Attorney General, a public health authority, an academic-professional society or journal, a Congressperson, or some other channel more official and credible than Substack?
[1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defying-cavity-lantern-biow....
Blogger trying to convince us he's presenting a good faith article challenge: impossible
https://expatcircle.com/cms/how-to-clean-your-teeth-and-save...
He's an investor!
