Toothpaste | Ingredients With George Zaidan (Episode 1)

What's in here? What does it do? And can I make it from scratch?

Ingredients toothpaste, as we know it, is relatively new—only 150 years old. Toothpaste, as we don't know it, had things like rock salt, pumice, crushed eggshells, crushed bone, and even crushed oyster shells. This kind of toothpaste is a lot older—5,000 years old. Some people say others say only 2,500.

Now, the weird thing is old toothpaste and modern toothpaste are not all that different. We have titanium dioxide. Now that is kind of a long list, but we can split it up into different categories.

First and foremost are the abrasives. Now, abrasives are things like sandpaper or steel wool or pumice. Abrasives literally scrape food and other gunk, like plaque, off your teeth. Now, I'm not going to lie, when I discovered there were abrasives in toothpaste, I was surprised. I mean, if you live a good long life, you will spend 2,000 hours, more or less, brushing your teeth. Imagine sandpapering a bone for 2,000 hours; you would end up with nothing but powder. But your teeth are actually harder than bone, iron, and steel.

Now different manufacturers use different abrasives in their toothpaste, but they all make up a good chunk of the final product—anywhere between 30 to 60%. Now the abrasive in this toothpaste is hydrated silica, which believe it or not, is the very same thing you find in these packets in your luggage and vitamin bottles, except with water added.

Now, if you ever take toothpaste and rub it between two fingers, what you'll find is that it's not that rough, and that's for a really simple reason: it's because your gums are a lot more fragile than your teeth, so you don't want to overdo it on the roughness.

Now the second category is called humectants. A humectant is something that helps retain water, and that is what gives toothpaste its—and this is a direct quote from this manufacturer's customer service rep—smooth and creamy texture. Anyway, the humectants in here are glycerin, sorbitol, and propylene glycol, and two of those molecules actually have an additional function: they are sweet, and they're not as sweet as sugar, though, so most manufacturers add some sort of artificial sweetener on top. It could be something like saccharin in here or xylitol in here.

Now none of those artificial sweeteners break down to form acids like sugar does, so that's why they don't cause cavities, and you use them in toothpaste. And then, of course, there are flavors, which are there to make the toothpaste taste not awful and your mouth feel clean. Now, in our case, and in almost every case, you will find flavorings super precisely described as "flavor" so that manufacturers can't steal each other's corporate secrets.

Okay, so we got abrasives, humectants, sweeteners, and flavorings. Next up, foaming agents, just like you find in soap or shampoo, except here there's just one: sodium lauryl sulfate, or SLS, as it's called in the business. It foams up real nice when you're brushing—real nice. Some people say that all this foam traps some of the gunk that the abrasives scrape off your teeth. That's chemically not unreasonable, but I think the reason that most modern toothpastes have all those foaming agents is because you really feel good making foam, like you're doing something. You are cleaning your teeth.

Now, you can actually buy non-foaming toothpaste if you want. Okay, so the next category is thickeners and binders, which keep your toothpaste from becoming a runny, watery, disgusting mess or separating out like natural peanut butter. So the ones that we have in this toothpaste are cellulose gum and carrageenan, which come from trees and red seaweed, respectively.

Okay, so we are finally at the last three ingredients. These don't really fit into categories. All right, so first, there's sodium fluoride, which is in almost every toothpaste manufactured today, and prevents cavities. Next up is sodium hydroxide, which bumps the pH up. You don't really want to be brushing your teeth with acid. And finally, there's titanium dioxide, which makes your toothpaste white; without it, it'd be like a dull gray, and no one wants that.

So now that we figured out what's in toothpaste and how it works, I'm going to try and make my own from scratch using only natural ingredients. First, I need an abrasive. My abrasive has to not dissolve in water because if it dissolves in water, then it's no longer a solid and can't rub stuff off my teeth.

I'm going to use something that you can find in rocks all over nature: calcium carbonate, otherwise known as chalk. And because I don't want my toothpaste to taste horrible, I'm going to use xylitol as a sweetener and peppermint oil as a flavoring. I've also got glycerin—this is my humectant; it's going to keep everything nice and moist.

Now all three of these come from plants. I'm not going to bother with sodium fluoride because I'm not going to use this toothpaste for the rest of my life. And I'm also not going to bother with sodium lauryl sulfate, the foaming agent, because I don't really care if this foams up. So let's just do this and see what happens.

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Shhh...

Okay, here we go, and I guess I just... that's about right, right? Okay, here we go. Here we go. Here we go!

That's not bad! It tastes—um... um... tastes like vaguely rocky toothpaste is honestly what it tastes like. There's a little bit of peppermint, there's some sweetness, and then it tastes like earth—not like dirt, but like minerals—um, not bad! I would give this a solid 7 out of 10. I mean, I'll probably never use it again, but 7 out of 10 nonetheless!

If you guys have ideas on how to improve the recipe or if you have an idea for an episode, let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter. Until then, good job! Byeee!

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