Toothpaste
Did you know there are ingredients in some of our most popular toothpastes that are actually banned in Europe? Associated with hormone disruption, organ toxicity and cancer, common household toothpaste could be doing more harm than good. In this episode, I’m sharing the reasons I switched up the oral care of my entire family and the toothpastes I recommend.
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Sources
https://emedicine.medscape.com
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Transcript
Do you have very vivid memories of going to the dentist as a kid? The two things I remember most are asking my mom if I’m going to have to get the “jelly tray” (that’s what I called the fluoride treatment at the end) and that we could go to Dunkin Donuts right after the appointment to get a chocolate glazed donut as a treat. Which still makes me laugh — like mom, what were you thinking? If she’s listening she’s thinking, it was the only way to get you not to complain the entire drive to the dentist.
But in this episode, we’re not talking about chocolate glazed donuts, we’re talking about toothpaste.
So, you may not have thought about what’s in your toothpaste before. Your dentist has probably given you a free tube of Colgate or Crest since your very first appointment and if that’s what dentists are recommending you may figure, that’s good enough for you.
But if you’ve listened to this podcast before, then you can probably see where this is going…
Here are some of the problematic ingredients in most mainstream, conventional toothpastes — foaming agents and stabilizers, some of which have been banned in the EU because they’re associated with hormone disruption, cancer and organ toxicity.
Then there are preservatives, antimicrobials and artificial colors in toothpaste that have been linked to neurotoxicity, organ toxicity and other long-term health effects.
The other ingredient worth mentioning is obviously, fluoride. Fluoride is hotly debated, especially here in the United States, and brings up a lot of opposing opinions. As with everything, you have to do your own research and come to your own conclusions if something doesn’t feel right. I will tell you that there is no fluoride in my home — we stay away from it in toothpaste, we have a water filter that filters fluoride and my son won’t be one of the kids getting the fluoride “jelly tray” at the dentist.
The ingredient we use, instead, that hopefully will replace fluoride treatment in our kids’ generation is hydroxyapatite. Abbreviated as HAp (capital H, capital A, lowercase p) it’s the form of calcium that already makes up 97% of our tooth enamel and 70% of dentin.
Hydroxyapatite does the same job as fluoride, in terms of rebuilding tooth enamel and remineralizing, but it’s not toxic when ingested. And I’ll link to a study in the show notes that proves that it’s just as effective as fluoride.
I know I might get some pushback on this, especially from dentists and dental hygienists, but my question for you is if there have been studies contradicting the safety of fluoride and there’s another non-toxic option out there, then why not just go with the ingredient that is already in our teeth?
So, in this segment of “This for that” I’m encouraging you to switch out your conventional toothpaste (especially if it has fluoride in it) and choose one of the toothpastes that has hydroxyapatite in it instead. I’ll link to my favorite toothpaste options in the show notes, where you can also find my source list — that’s at cleanlivingpodcast.com/toothpaste
I also want to highlight AsktheDentist.com as one of my sources. I first discovered @askthedentist on Instagram and didn’t even know that functional, holistic dentists existed. Dr. Mark is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to oral health and inspired me to completely overhaul my daily dental routine. We’re also switching my son over from a pediatric dentist to a functional dentist, especially in these early years of baby teeth. I highly recommend checking out Dr. Mark at @askthedentist on Instagram.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Clean Living Podcast — I’m your host Shannon Lohr. If you learned something from this episode, please subscribe and leave a positive review. It helps other people find out about the podcast and would also mean so much to me. Here’s to creating a cleaner, more sustainable world for all of us.
