Dental health experts are reminding people that brushing and flossing is important but what you eat is equally impactful.

According to the American Dental Association, foods rich in calcium and phosphorus help protect and rebuild tooth enamel.

The ADA recommends a diet that includes fruits and vegetables, grains, dairy and protein. The ADA says the form of the food—whether it’s liquid, solid, sticky or slow to dissolve makes a difference.

Also, the ADA recommends brushing twice a day with a soft bristle toothbrush.
 
Tracing autism

Researchers have found dozens of new genes that may play a role in causing autism, according to two studies published in the medical journal Nature.

Autism is a complex disorder, one that has been difficult to treat because it is so poorly understood. By tapping into the genetic foundation of the disorder, scientists theorize, it may be possible to provide more personalized treatment based on a person's own unique gene set.
 
Scientists identified 60 genes with a greater than 90 percent chance of increasing a child's autism risk. Previous research has yielded only 11 genes that had been confirmed with this level of certainty.
 
Though other studies have shown the importance of genetics in the development of autism, experts say these new studies zero in on the exact nature of the genetic mutations that cause the disorder.
 
The researchers say these genes appear to be clustering around three sets of key biological functions.
 
The first set focuses on the development of synapses in the brain, which are responsible for all kinds of communication between nerves. The second set is responsible for the creation of genetic instructions, and the third is responsible for DNA packaging within cells.
 
Each of these functions could have an effect on the individual that would cause the traits commonly associated with autism, according to one of the studies.
 
Dr. Matthew State, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and co-author of both studies, believes that the most important thing to take away from the studies is a new knowledge base. Instead of focusing on environmental factors, he says, these studies are focusing on what happens inside of the brain.
 
This kind of genetic research has been used to treat all kinds of disorders and diseases, State says, but before now had not been applied to psychiatric disorders. Similar genetic studies for childhood leukemia took it from nearly always fatal to a treatable, often curable disease.
 
"It's the understanding of biology at that level that's helped treatments for cancer. It's something we've been missing in psychiatric disorders in general," State said. "They lay the groundwork for a transformed understanding of the disorder and hopefully a transformation in how we're able to diagnose and treat it."

Chronic fatigue syndrome

People with chronic fatigue syndrome are exhausted, no matter how much rest they get, for more than six months at a time. They suffer from muscle and joint pain and may experience short-term memory loss.

But diagnosing chronic fatigue syndrome is difficult, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There's no blood test or brain scan that definitively identifies the condition, so doctors must first rule out many other disorders with similar symptoms.

A new discovery may change that.

Scientists at Stanford University compared the brain MRI scans of 15 patients with chronic fatigue syndrome with the scans of 14 healthy patients of the same age and gender. They found that the patients with chronic fatigue syndrome had slightly less white matter in their brains. White matter contains your brain's communication cables, which enable regions of the brain to talk to each other.

The scientists also saw abnormalities in a specific tract in the patients' right hemispheres and found that two connection points in the brains of the chronic fatigue patients were thicker than the same connection points in the healthy patients.

"The differences correlated with their fatigue -- the more abnormal the tract, the worse the fatigue," study author Dr. Michael Zeineh said in a statement.