I was under the impression that there are no studies that demonstrate that flossing is good. He certainly doesn’t link to any. I floss, because I suspect that it is helpful, but can anybody point to some actual research on this topic?
The research on the topic is wanting, I guess because there's not much money in arguing about it and it's a pretty low-risk intervention. There was a spate of "flossing is useless!" articles a while ago but my takeaway was that it's more that it can't be shown definitively to be useful, which is a different thing. As I recall, some studies showed that home flossing didn't seem to have much of an effect, but other studies showed that professionals flossing did improve dental health, so it seems just as possible that we could chalk it up to selection factors or poor technique. If you want a strong study that definitively shows that flossing is effective, though, you won't find it, really.
I was also under the impression that Teflon's properties are mostly due it's high chemical stability up to around 260*C, so I wouldn't e.g. expect it react with anything inside your body. Not sure if PTFE chips accumulate inside tissue or are excreted, but maybe that's a problem. I searched for studies how degrading/chipping PTFE coatings in cookware may affect health but couldn't find any good ones, mostly articles from biased sources.
Afaik, the main concern in cookware was PFOAs used in manufacturing that may outgas during use, not the PTFE itself. The PFOA have now been mostly replaced by something called GenX, which isn't proven to be safer yet.
I'm not sure the cited studies really apply unless there's some proof that the PFOAs (generally no longer used, but same may apply to GenX replacement chemical) leach out during flossing; afaik heating is the main concern in cookware, not contact. And the latter ones are mostly about alum nano-particles accumulating in the body, I don't know into what size particles Teflon coating on floss would break down if at all.
