i’ve always wondered this. i just toothpicked something that my toothbrush missed out and it’s made me think.
say you haven’t flossed in a while and have a bit of chicken you ate a few days ago stuck inbetween ur teeth that you didn’t know about. it’s definitely not fresh, so why doesn’t it make us sick?
is it not the same as eating something you left out for a while?
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Saliva is antibiotic antiviral and antitoxic but old food stuck in teeth can cause tooth decay and gum disease. Eating a very small piece of food left to soak in an antibiotic isn’t as bad as eating food just left to rot.
You can eat cooked chicken up to 4 days after it was cooked and I assume the amount stuck in your teeth is far too small to have any effect on you.
Your mouth is a more closed environment than the outside air. It’s more hostile to bacteria. There’s a lot of saliva that’ll wash away the bacteria before it can penetrate far into the little bit of food.
Also, there’s a lot less food for the bacteria to work with. And, unless your dental hygiene is *really* bad, you’ll likely get rid of that food before it has a chance to grow dangerous levels of bacteria.
Note that with most bacteria and stuff that makes you sick, it’s an issue of volume. Just eating a little bit of bacteria won’t hurt you. In fact, you’re probably eating some with every meal. Your body can easily deal with small amounts of bacteria. It’s when there’s a lot of it that it becomes an issue.
And one more thing to think about – a lot of the time (but not all), it’s not the bacteria itself that makes us sick, it’s the waste products they leave behind. And again, it’s a volume issue. If there’s only a little bit of waste in the food we won’t even notice, but when there’s a lot of it, that’s when we get sick. Even if there’s a little colony of bacteria living on your teeth, they’re probably not producing enough waste product to get you sick. Your saliva washes it away and the rest of your body deals with it before it reaches hazardous levels.
It does make your teeth sick, if enough builds up and isn’t removed via flossing, you get plaque, tarter and eventually cavities.
I believe it technically could get you sick if it was contaminated, but it would be unlikely. The food you ate was probably cooked properly. Meanwhile, your body has defense mechanisms. Your mouth is not as suitable of an environment as an open piece of food.
There are multiple ways food could get you sick, but if we are talking about leaving food out, I’ll focus on the growth of organisms that can multiply.
Think about a piece of chicken with two salmonella bacteria as a pond with two bacteria. There’s a riddle they ask you in school: the bacteria double each day, and by day 30 the pond is covered. What percentage of the pond was covered on day 29?
The answer is half. The bacteria, when uninterrupted, will double, so half of the pond will then turn into the full pond the next day.
If you leave a piece of chicken out with salmonella in favorable living conditions it will multiply. This increases the chances of the bacteria getting past your bodies defenses. You can further assist your bodies defenses by cooking the food to the recommended temperature and time, so you lower the amount of bacteria that is alive.
It’s a numbers game. Small pieces of cooked food have a lower chance of being contaminated with an alive bacteria. With no bacteria there is no multiplying. If there were some bacteria that survived, now they have to get past your bodies defenses.
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