The Cabin Countess : 2016-05-29

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Make Your Own Toothpaste

I think I was a pioneer woman in my former life or a chemist. In this life the chemistry part was squelched by my high school chemistry teacher. I will just say that our personalities did not gel. As many of you know, I am constantly combining ingredients and messing around with making healthy foods and products. I have written about many of these experiments. Some are complete failures, but others I make over and over again. At the end of this blog, I will list some of my favorites. Thinking about it, I realized I haven't posted the recipe for homemade toothpaste. It is a product that needs some getting used to. Visually it looks like gray cement and the taste and texture are different from the toothpastes we are used to.

If you have ever read the label on the toothpastes we have all used for years, you will see all the ingredients. The first is usually a form of fluoride. The toothpaste manufacturers claim fluoride is necessary to prevent cavities and gum disease. They even put fluoride in city water supplies or give fluoride tablets to kids who have well water. I am not going to go into the pros and cons of fluoride because the web is full of information on this subject. I recently read that many brands of bottled water are taken from city water supplies that have fluoride in them. I personally try to avoid fluoride. It is based on an experience from when I was young. My mother had an aunt who had a lot of joint pain. She was older and was told she just had arthritis. She read an article about the side effects of fluoride and started buying spring water. Within a short period of time, her symptoms got so much better. At that point, my parents began buying spring water and therefore the fluoride controversy has been on my radar for years. More and more information has come out about the dangers of fluoride, and I have tried my best to stay away from it.

Other ingredients listed on a popular brand of toothpaste are glycerin, hydrated silica, sodium hexametaphosphate, propylene glycol, PEG-6, water, zinc lactate, flavor, trisodium phosphate, sodium gluconate, sodium lauryl sulfate, sodium saccharin, carrageenan, stannous chloride, xanthan gum, titanium dioxide, and blue 1. I don't want some of these ingredients in my mouth. Trisodium phosphate is used for cleaning walls. I think hydrated silica sounds like wet sand to me and some of the other ingredients I have no idea about.

I do like Young Living Thieves toothpaste. It has no fluoride, synthetic dyes, artificial flavors or preservatives. It is quite expensive at over $10 a tube. Making it yourself is much cheaper. If you google homemade toothpaste, there are a lot of recipes. I have tried several, but the one I use now is by Dr. Axe (http://draxe.com). It is super simple to make and works great. Last week I had a dental cleaning and checkup. My dentist told me I did a wonderful job of cleaning my teeth and my cleaning took no time at all. I didn't tell her I don't use the junky toothpaste she gives away, but I make my own.

Probiotic Toothpaste

1/4 cup coconut oil
3 Tablespoons Bentonite Clay
2 capsules of Probiotics (open the capsules and use the powder)
10 drops of peppermint essential oil
A reusable toothpaste tube

Mix all the ingredients together. I warm the coconut oil to liquefy it so it's easy to put into the container.

I purchased an awesome travel container at CVS. It works very well for this purpose.

This is the bentonite clay powder I use and the container.