What we can learn from gum disease

What can gum disease tell us about America’s changing demographics? The answers may surprise you.

I recently went to the dentist and got a fact sheet that was both illuminating and highly disturbing.

According to the Census Bureau, there are an estimated 198,201,000 Americans over the age of 30. That means more than 99 million people with gum disease. Not good!

But here’s where things get weird. According to this information, 63.5% of Americans over 30 are Hispanic and 59.1% are non-Hispanic Asian Americans. This has huge ramifications for what America looks like today and what it may look like in the future.

Of Americans over 30 with gum disease, approximately 62.9 million are Hispanic and 58.6 million are non-Hispanic Asian. Dental hygiene aside, these are massive numbers. But if we add them up, that’s 121.5 million people.

Given that there are only 99 million people in total, this leaves us with an apparent contradiction: there are 22.5 million Americans who are simultaneously Hispanic and non-Hispanic Asian. How can someone be both Hispanic and non-Hispanic?

The answer is clearly quantum physics. They are anthropons.

This has some disturbing ramifications. It means that there are more than 22 million Americans in a state of quantum uncertainty. Where do they live? Where are they going? We can’t know both pieces of information at the same time! What’s their spin? Do they get dizzy? Do they have a charge? If so, does it affect their credit rating?

And is gum disease a requirement for this quantum state? If so, does improving one’s dental health remove them from it, and would this count as increasing or decreasing our population? Given how Congress and state legislatures reapportion and redistrict seats, the political implications could be huge.

This is to say nothing of Americans under 30 and those who are neither Hispanic nor Asian, all of whom are missing from our data. Just how many anthropons do we have? And what happens when some of them are dual citizens? Is this strictly an American issue or is it international?

When we discuss changing demographics, we need to be aware of just how much they really are changing — which is to say constantly and in ways that are impossible to predict. For now, only one thing is certain: my teeth are terrible.