Homemade Baking Soda Toothpaste (original) (raw)

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October 25, 2021

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Baking soda toothpaste - Dr. Axe

If you care about your health and that of your family, then you are really careful about what you put on the table and what they put in their mouths. That includes toothpaste.

Commercial toothpastes are loaded with ingredients you wouldn’t feed to your worst enemy, and they don’t belong in toothpaste either. Luckily, it’s cheap and easy to make a good, basic homemade baking soda toothpaste.

The recipe below will work at least as well as a standard commercial toothpaste. You may already have all the ingredients in your pantry. Plus whipping up a batch will cost you a lot less than buying a tube of natural toothpaste at your local health food store.

Commercial Toothpaste Ingredients to Avoid

First, let’s look at some of the questionable ingredients that are often found in commercial toothpastes (some are probably dangerous; others are just unnecessary), which you can avoid by making your own homemade baking soda toothpaste:

Why We Brush Our Teeth

Let’s start by talking a little about why we brush our teeth and what a good toothpaste homemade baking soda toothpaste should offer. We brush our teeth to remove any acidic or sugary/starchy food particles and every smidgen of plaque — that slimy biofilm that can coat our teeth and lead to tooth decay.

Brushing — the mechanical process — is the No. 1 way to protect your teeth from decay. It’s far more important than toothpaste, mouthwash or any other product! You may be surprised to learn that you can brush your teeth without any toothpaste at all. Just give all the surfaces of your teeth (plus your tongue and all the other surfaces inside your mouth) a good rubbing with a soft-bristled toothbrush. This “dry brushing” is a great way to brush when you’re away from home or between meals.

But adding the right toothpaste can make brushing extra-effective.

What Makes a Good Toothpaste?

Adding just a little bit of something gritty (a very mild abrasive) makes brushing away that plaque a bit easier. But keep in mind that too much or too strong an abrasive is not a good thing, as you may start removing more than just plaque and food particles!

Baking soda is a cheap, readily-available and very effective mild abrasive. Dipping your moistened brush in plain, dry baking soda is quick, easy and effective for basic tooth cleaning. But no one is going to rave about the flavor (salty) or mouthfeel (mildly gritty) of brushing with plain baking soda. Also, it’s hard to get it to stay on your brush.

How to Make Baking Soda Toothpaste

This is where making a homemade baking soda toothpaste comes in: creating a product that not only helps gently remove plaque, but also stays on your brush and feels/tastes good in the mouth. You can just mix baking soda with enough water to make a paste. But a few other additions make a much nicer paste with a smoother mouthfeel and flavoring to mask some of the salty aftertaste. In fact, you don’t have to use baking soda at all.

You can find a good basic homemade baking soda toothpaste recipe at the end of this article. But feel free to experiment with different combinations and proportions until you get a toothpaste that works for you and your family.

Here is a list of good ingredients for making homemade baking soda toothpaste, including readily-available ingredients, mild abrasives and liquids to blend them with. Plus I’ve included tooth-friendly flavorings and sweeteners to make the paste more appealing.

Potential ingredients:

Tips:

How to use:

Scoop/apply about a ½ teaspoon of toothpaste onto your brush and give your teeth, and all the other surfaces in your mouth, a good brushing. The paste will liquefy almost immediately when put into your mouth, so there is no need to add water. Swish the liquid around when you are done to get it into all the nooks and crannies your brush can’t reach. Then spit out the remainder and rinse with water.

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Description

There are a lot of questionable ingredients found in commercial toothpastes. Instead, make your own homemade baking soda toothpaste!

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  1. Place coconut oil container in a bowl of hot water to liquefy it (depending on your room temperature, this may take up to 15 minutes).
  2. Measure all ingredients into bowl and stir until completely blended.
  3. Store the finished product in a lidded glass jar.

Notes

Adding more baking soda helps keep your paste firmer in warm weather. Adding less baking soda makes it less firm, which makes dispensing it easier in the winter if your house is cool.