’Tis the season…for lists.
Everywhere you look, something or someone is rounding up the year and dropping it into your music apps, your news feeds, your inbox. Best of this. Worst of that. Most-played something or other. Each a tidy recap of twelve months, packaged and ranked and ready to scroll past.
It’s expected. It’s what humans do. And, honestly? It’s kind of boring.
When we reflect on the past year of writing the Tooth/Body Blog, what’s interesting isn’t the highlight reel. It’s seeing how the year actually unfolded in real time – the questions that surfaced, the topics that refused to stay put, the moments when science, policy, and patient care intersected in important ways.
One of the simplest ways of doing that is just looking at how each month actually began. Here’s what 2025 looked like, as told through the first sentence of each month’s first post:
- January: With the start of a new year, quite a few of us get health goals in mind.
- February: If you’re one of those people who often has trouble falling or staying asleep, chances are good that you’ve tried to help it with melatonin.
- March: Don’t you love how your teeth feel after you’ve brushed and flossed?
- April: The idea behind fluoride is that it helps remineralize teeth, even though that mineral doesn’t naturally occur in teeth.
- May: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has done a lot already to help move us closer to a fluoride-free future.
- June: Your gums are constantly defending against harmful bacteria.
- July: There’s something appealing about using a simple, kitchen staple like baking soda to clean your teeth.
- August: In news that should surprise exactly no one, the Environmental Protection Agency has filed an appeal of the historic federal court ruling that ordered the agency to address the neurological risks posed by fluoride in drinking water.
- September: Like most soft drinks, energy drinks aren’t exactly kind to the enamel that protects the living tissues within each of your teeth.
- October: “Biocompatibility” – literally, compatibility with life (bio) – is something we most often talk about in relation to dental materials.
- November: We don’t usually blog about the “scientists regrow teeth/tooth enamel” headlines you see cropping up regularly.
- December: Ever since last year’s federal court ruling that the EPA must address the risk that fluoridated water poses to children’s developing brains, study after study has added to the evidence that early exposure to fluoride can be harmful for little ones.
Read straight through, you can see how we moved back and forth, back and forth between the everyday and the systemic. Between the small, familiar habits that shape oral health day to day – diet, brushing, flossing, sleep – and the much larger forces that influence wha ends up in our mouths in the first place.
It’s also hard not to notice how often fluoride shows up, which says less about any fixation on the topic and much more about timing. 2025 was a year when court rulings, regulatory responses, and new research kept pushing the issue back into the public conversation. Rather than treating those moments as isolated headlines, we kept returning to the same fundamental questions: What actually supports healthy biology? What assumptions deserve re-examination? How do individual choices intersect with policies that affect many millions of people all at once?
Taken together, those first lines suggest more than a collection of trends – an ongoing exploration of ways in which materials, behaviors, and systems interact with a body that’s constantly working to protect and restore itself, all viewed through a biological lens.
Thanks for reading along with us through this 16th year of our blog’s existence – and for being a part of the ongoing conversation.
From all of us at Rehme Dental Care, we hope the holiday season is nothing but wonderful for you and that you have a healthy and happy start to the new year. Here’s to whatever the first sentences of 2026 may bring!
