One of the many things I am concerned about, in my role as A Parent, is toothpaste. On the whole, I prefer not to put chemical concoctions into my mouth or that of my child, but yet look! It’s full of the stuff!
I have been experimenting recently with the organic toothpastes from Kingfisher, Green People, and Weleda. The Weleda one in particular tasted delicious, but they all leave one’s mouth feeling a bit furry after a little while; you don’t get that highly-polished effect that you get from the scrubby stuff in real toothpaste. So I decided to alternate natural and real, and last night we cracked open a new tube of Sainsbo’s Total Care, relishing the thought of having shiny clean teeth again after weeks of tree-huggery. [I should emphasise that neither of us has noticeably suffered with bad breath; the non-minty toothpaste seems to increase the amount of effort put into actually brushing one's teeth].
But this morning I happened to look at the ingredients, and oh what a mistake that was. Concerns about fluoridation aside, what about this Triclosan? The Swedish, who know a lot about teeth, no longer use this nasty carcinogenic endocrine disrupting poison in toothpaste. It has been found in breastmilk[1] and in fish, which suggests that it is bioaccumulative – yet we put this stuff in our mouths?
Pete mentioned yesterday that his mint of choice was now the Trebor Extra Strong Mint, because it was the only one that doesn’t contain artificial sweeteners. Sorry Pete, but your toothpaste has Sorbitol in it, and so does the baby toothpaste (which at least has no Triclosan).
So the dilemma is, do we continue to ingest small quantities of disgusting, or do we learn to live with the slightly less polished mouthfeel of natural toothpaste?
- cow’s milk obviously also contains environmental pollutants, and breastmilk still offers wide-ranging protection against many childhood and adult illnesses. Breastmilk is still the most appropriate food for a human baby. [↩]
Do you find the mainstream paste really overwhelmingly minty when you switch back? We chop and change too, for similar reasons: there’s the sweetener thing and then I just can’t decide, nor find any sensible resources to help me, whether and how much fluoride we should be using (everything you read is either panicky fluoride comes from the devil or terribly calm of course you need it). And that’s just us, who can be trusted to spit it out: when it comes to the children I am utterly clueless. My mum used to give us fluoride tablets: good or bad? My dentist has offered to paint M’s teeth with some banana-flavoured gel stuff: good or just a way to try to fleece money from the annoyingly low-profit NHS patients? I’ve also recently switched back to a manual brush after using an electronic one for some years. Much less furry with the natural pastes.
Health Canada does not recommend the use of fluoride supplements (drops or tablets). This guideline is consistent with recommendations made by Health Canada’s First Nations and Inuit Health Branch (FNIHB) and the Canadian Association of Public Health Dentistry (CAPHD http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/iyh-vsv/environ/fluor_e.html#mi
Fluoride supplements put children six and under at significant risk of permanently discolored teeth, according to a review of studies recently posted on the American Dental Association’s (ADA) web site in their new section, “evidence-based dentistry,” for dentists and their patients
http://www.ada.org/prof/resources/ebd/reviews/fluoride_supplements.asp
Heh. Does the above comment answer any of your questions, Lisa?
And yes, the minty shock was quite pleasant, but didn’t mitigate the triclosan much.
Yes, but – I had fluoride supplements as a kid (the gels that are applied directly to teeth) and to this day I lead a filling-free existence, whereas my peers have at least one or two and my brother is suffering metal fatigue (no kidding). I suspect that it’s not all as simple as that.