A few weeks ago, just as Nicole and I started this blog, we attended a sustainability workshop that told us we could make our own toothpaste to reduce the consumption of typical squeeze-tube toothpaste packaging. Plastic toothpaste tubes are not recyclable through our waste-disposal provider EDCO (check with your local waste-disposal company) and only some can be recycled through TerraCycle, so eliminating these tubes from our routine seemed like a good choice. We were told that by making our own, we would no longer be paying for water, which makes up about 50% of the stuff in every tube. It was also presented as an option for those of us who want to know what we’re putting in our bodies, rather than squinting at the list of chemicals on high-production toothpaste labels.

After pondering the workshop’s recommendations, however, my DIY-buzz was replaced with a question: am I actually doing more harm than good by making my own toothpaste?

This question was prompted by the workshop’s deceivingly simple recipe: a 1-to-1 mixture of coconut oil and baking soda (sodium bicarbonate), with a few drops of essential oil for flavor. How was it possible that only two active ingredients could effectively replace the ingredients in my store-bought toothpaste? In fact, I noted, this recipe isn’t far off from a simple recipe for DIY deodorant! Using these ingredients to make deodorant, you may risk offending a few noses and increasing the distance between you and your co-workers in the lunch-line. Not a big deal. On the other hand, the consequences of oversimplifying toothpaste can be costly and long-lasting: you risk an increased likelihood of developing cavities and incurring expensive dental work (and pain).

What does toothpaste do?

Everyday, your teeth are exposed to acids. Bacteria in your mouth feed on sugars and excrete acids. Drinking things like coffee, orange juice, and soda, is equivalent to bathing your teeth in acid. Acids eat away at the hard outer layer of your teeth, enamel, and once that layer is worn-through, a cavity begins to form in the soft inner material of your tooth, dentin.

Toothpaste is designed to slow and reverse the damage cause by acids, and it does this in three ways. First, it is designed to be abrasive so that it can remove buildup (biofilm), from the surface of your teeth. The hard enamel surface of the tooth can stand up to a little scrubbing, but in places where enamel has worn-away and has exposed the inner material of the tooth, dentin, too much abrasion can be harmful. The American Dental Association (ADA) has actually developed a rating scale, called Relative Dentin Abrasivity (RDA), to score the efficacy and safety of the abrasive properties of toothpaste.

The second primary function of toothpaste (at least toothpastes that have the ADA seal of approval), is to remineralize the enamel on your teeth. Enamel is not living tissue, it does not grow back, but it is essential to protecting the soft dentin interior of your teeth. Toothpastes recommended by the ADA contain flouride, which attaches to areas of the tooth where enamel has begun to demineralize (due to acids) and attracts calcium and phosphate from your saliva to help rebuild a protective layer. For ideal remineralization, your mouth would always contain a low-concentration of flouride. This is why most of the US tap water supply is flouridated, and it is also why dentists recommend you do not rinse after brushing your teeth (except when a flouride mouthwash is used after brushing, in which case rinsing is not recommended post-mouthwash).

Third, toothpaste neutralizes the pH in your mouth. The pH scale quantifies the acidity of a substance, and it ranges from 1 being most acidic, to 14, being most basic. Enamel begins to degrade at a pH of 5.5. Toothpaste, therefore, should have a pH above 5.5 and be as close to 7 (neutral) as possible. Both coconut oil (pH of 7-8) and baking soda (pH of 8-9) are basic, so the simple sustainability workshop toothpaste formula may actually be too basic. If you choose to make your own toothpaste, you can determine the pH using these test strips, and then adjust the formula to get it as close to neutral as possible.

Regulation

All toothpastes that are marketed as cavity-preventing are considered drugs by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and all toothpastes that have earned the ADA seal of approval are cavity-preventing. As far as I know, sodium flouride is the only active toothpaste ingredient approved by the FDA for cavity-prevention. All flouride-free toothpastes are considered cosmetics, and have not been shown to prevent cavities.

The mandate of the FDA is to ensure that drugs sold in the US are safe and effective for consumers, and the ADA insists that flouride concentrations in toothpaste (as well as drinking water) are safe and recommended for twice-daily use. However, those who are less trusting of these institutions than myself (read: my wife and blog-writing partner) have reasons to be concerned that flouride has negative health effects.

Theobromine

Luckily, studies (1, 2) have shown that there may be an alternative to flouride as an anti-cavity agent: an alkaloid called theobromine. The two studies cited artificially demineralized extracted teeth using acid solutions, and then treated the teeth with solutions containing theobromine in concentrations of approximately 200 ppm. Both studies found that the theobromine solutions remineralized teeth, and the second study showed that the theobromine worked equally well to a 3310 ppm solution of flouride (the concentration of flouride in toothpaste is typically 1000-2000 ppm).

Theobromine is readily available because it is naturally found in raw cacao powder! Raw cacao comes from the seeds of the Theobroma Cacao plant, whose name is derived from Greek, meaning “food of the goods”. Raw cacao contains about 1% theobromine, as well as calcium and phosphorous which also help to remineralize teeth.

Conclusion

The upshot of all this research is that making your own toothpaste is not as simple as mixing coconut oil and baking soda. The abrasivity, pH, and remineralizing properties of the mixture are important to maintaining proper dental hygiene. So far, Nicole and I have not found a single consumer product (toothpaste tabs, Magic Mud, or otherwise) that both contain either flouride or theobromine and do not come in plastic packaging.

Thus, we’ve decided to make our own toothpaste using the recipe provided below. The recipe contains theobromine in a concentration of about 600 ppm (higher than that shown to be effective in the studies cited above), and the best part is that all of the ingredients are sold in glass or paper-based containers (though some still have plastic tamper-proof seals). Even though making our own requires buying 4 different ingredients, the individual containers are large enough that they will make several squeeze tubes worth of toothpaste, and therefore we expect that the net effect is significantly less wasteful.

Our plan is to use this toothpaste for the next few months and to follow up with our dentists to make sure that it is working. We will check the pH of each batch, and if needed, adjust the formula to neutralize the acidity. Hopefully, this will be a permanent oral-health care solution for us! Maybe it can work for you as well, but definitely talk to your dentist before choosing to change your dental hygiene routine.

Recipe

Ingredients:

• 2 tbsp Coconut Oil (in a glass jar if possible)
• 1/2 tsp Imlak’esh Cacao Powder (comes in a glass jar, tamper-proofed with a sticker rather than plastic)
• 1/2 tsp baking soda (Arm & Hammer in a cardboard box)
• 1/2 tsp bentonite clay (as an abrasive, food grade. The linked version comes in a glass jar)

Melt the coconut oil. Add the powders and mix completely. Continue stirring until the coconut oil has solidified to prevent separation. Enjoy!

For those of you that want an even-more complex recipe which gives greater consideration to maintaining a healthy biome of bacteria in the mouth, check out this probiotic cacao toothpaste recipe. For those of you who have no desire to make your own but want an easier to recycle toothpaste product without flouride, I recommend trying this cacao toothpaste powder that comes in a hard plastic container.

Happy brushing, Mike