Toothpaste

Toothpaste is a vital substance in our war against tooth decay, but when did we first rub this stuff into our teeth and gums? In this episode of Invention, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick squeeze out the history and origins of toothpaste.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick. Robert, have you ever had the misfortune
of going to work having forgotten to brush your teeth
in the morning. First, No, you've never done it. No,
I just don't. I don't remember having done it. I
might have done this earlier on. But I've I've really,

(00:30):
I've been on a care the last ten years or so,
um where I've I've really put a focus on maintaining
proper dental hygiene. Yeah, you keep the mouth regiment under
the lash. Yeah. Like I'll go into to see my
dentist and the dentist will say, hey, what do you uh,
what's it like when you don't wear your mouth guard
at night? Because I wear a mouth guard at night

(00:50):
to keep from grinding my teeth. And and I when
they asked me this, they say, well, what do you
mean you tell me to wear this every night? I
wear it every night. So um so yeah, I I
try and follow everything to the letter. You are like
a monk. You are like a medieval monk with that
kind of discipline. I guess you know the fear of hell,
but in this case, the hell that I that I

(01:12):
am uh fearful of is a hell of lost teeth
or decaying teeth, et cetera. Oh, nasty mouth is a
kind of hell. I mean, when this has happened to me,
it feels so disgusting, and my mouth feels nasty and unhealthy,
and I assume my breath must be terrible, and I
assume that, like my teeth are all going to fall
out by six pm. It's it's just bad. And I

(01:33):
also feel like I have, I have made some seriously injurious,
irreparable mistake for my own dental health. I know that's
probably way over the line, but I I do feel
that way sometimes, And and brushing one's teeth can sometimes
feel I don't know if you share this, feel as
absolutely essential, as like biologically essential and primordial as sleeping

(01:57):
or breathing. You know that like if you don't do it,
something is deeply wrong with your body and you're not
living as you were meant to. Yeah, it's it's a
totally weird area that I've probably spent way too much
time contemplating. Because on one level, yes, when you're when
you're younger, older people tell you, hey, you need to
brush your teeth, you need to flash your teeth, you
need to do these things. And when you're young, you're

(02:19):
you're just kind of like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'll do
those things. I'll do those things some of the time.
Um it's and oftentimes as only as you get older
that you realize, oh, I need a double down on that,
or worse, I really should have listened to them back
in the day, back when I was younger. Well, you
don't want to be looking back and saying, oh, if
only I've done things differently, I wouldn't have goblin shark mouth.
And it also doesn't help that so many of us

(02:39):
are pet owners. And if you get older pets, then
you know the experience of your your your pet outliving
its teeth um because or having to pay for for
brushings for your various animals, having to get in there
and brush their teeth yourself, that sort of thing. You know.
I was wondering what happens if you just don't brush
your teeth. I have this fear that the bad things

(03:00):
will happen if I don't. But what actually happens if
you just say let it go for a year. And
there are actually quite a few articles about this. There
must be a thing people wonder pretty often. For example,
I was just reading an article in USA today that
interviewed a dentist and a spokesperson from the American Dental
Association named Matthew Messina about what would happen if you
stop brushing your teeth for a year, And for reference,

(03:21):
the the a DA, the American Dental Association recommends flossing
once a day and brushing twice a day. And that's
and that's what everyone should do um at least twice
a day. I say, do three if you can. But
everybody apparently has a different reaction to neglect of dental hygiene.
So there are probably some people out there, just depending
on your genes, your diet, your microbiome, various things about you,

(03:45):
that that could do this and wouldn't suffer all that
many consequences. Probably there are other people who would have
very negative consequences. But generally, on average, people who stopped
brushing their teeth for a year would be a lot
more likely to develop tooth decay in the form of
cab at ease, and more likely to develop periodontal disease
or gum disease, and both of these can be really bad,

(04:06):
They cause pain in the mouth, can cause tooth loss.
Uh So, a primary function of tooth brushing is to
just brush away bacterial formations on your teeth, and if
you don't brush that bacteria away, it can cause immune
system reactions, and the gums can potentially lead to a
host of other sort of secondary health problems in the
body which aren't even in the mouth. It can even

(04:28):
it's been linked to, say, pneumonia and heart attacks and
so forth. And then on the more esthetic side, you
of course have your teeth looking like you haven't brushed
them in a year, and chronic bad breath probably, But
sometimes I think about how my toothbrush, the toothpaste I use.
These are products of twenty first century industry, and if
you go back a few hundred years, people didn't have
products exactly like these. They might have had some other

(04:49):
things they did to their mouth, and we'll discuss those
in a bit. But what would it be like to be, say,
a fifteenth century peasant who just doesn't have a tooth
rush and toothpaste. Because our dental health and hygiene, as
we understand it is, is dependent upon this modern technology,
upon these inventions, and what did we do before those inventions,

(05:11):
because obviously there's like a base level, right of like
the animal level of maintaining your dental hygiene, in which
you use your tongue and maybe your nails to remove
and you know, dislodge bits of vegetable or flesh. But
but beyond that, what was there. That's one of the
things we're gonna talk about today, not only where does
modern toothpaste come from, but what past for toothpaste in

(05:34):
ages past and the relationship between why we use toothpaste
and what it actually does. I have to to admit
that the historical question here is something I always think
about whenever I'm watching a movie that's that has a
historical setting, especially if it's a big budget, modern Hollywood production,
because you inevitably have just somebody with you know, they've
they've put grime on their face, they're wearing splendid outfits,

(05:56):
but then their their teeth just shine like like the sun,
and they're just so pearly white. And I'll often say,
often call them out on that. I'd be like, oh,
that that doesn't seem right at all, like the teeth
in Brave Heart, And yeah, you know, to go in
the other direction, if you look at post apocalyptic films,
especially bad post apocalyptic movies from the eighties, the kind
of Mad Max rip offs that like Cannon films did,

(06:18):
like a Cyborg, the gen Claude Van Damn movie, You'll
get people living in this squalid future and they do
the thing where they take people who have normal, healthy
looking teeth and they just kind of rub grime on it,
like they've got these streaks of black across their teeth.
Like in the future, everybody just eats shoe polish. Well,
who knows. I mean, that's actually gonna gonna line up

(06:39):
in interesting ways with some of the earlier dental hygiene
inventions that will be discussing. That's true. I didn't even
think about that. People in Cyborg, those those black and
teeth could be a product of their their tooth cleaning regimen,
not a product of decay, right or you know that
has to do with their their tobacco usage. Who knows.
But another question and I have is, Okay, so if

(07:02):
we don't brush our teeth for a year or even longer,
some bad things can happen to our mouth. Which makes
me think that if you go back to prehistoric life,
people didn't really have much of anything, toothbrushes, toothpaste. Uh,
they probably didn't really brush their teeth much anyo. They
had fingers and like they had twigs to chew on.
They could probably rub around in their in their mouth

(07:22):
with their fingers if they felt like it. We don't
know how much they did that, but did prehistoric people's
just always have nasty mouth syndrome with teeth rotten away
by the time they were teenagers? Like, how did teeth
survive before we had modern dental care and dental hygiene equipment.
And I actually found a really interesting paper about this.
This was a paper published in Nature Genetics in by

(07:44):
Christina J. Adler at All a bunch of authors called
Sequencing Ancient calcified dental plaque shows changes in oral microbiota
with dietary shifts of the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions. And
so the takeaway of this paper is, despite not having
the dental hygiene methods that we do, prehistoric hunter gatherers
had pretty good teeth. They could probably pick at their

(08:07):
teeth with twigs and so forth, But they didn't have toothpaste,
they didn't have toothbrushes, they didn't have dentists, So how
did their teeth survive And the answer appears to be
their teeth were pretty healthy because they survived on a
totally different diet than we do now. Yeah. Indeed, think
of all the coffee and sugary sodas that they were
not consuming. I think it seems like sugar is a

(08:29):
big part of this equation because much of our oral
health depends on the relationship with the microbial organisms that
live in our mouths. It's kind of fun to think
about the fact that your mouth is an ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah,
And and sugar is something that you're you're only really
supposed to find so much of in the wild. Our
modern candy bars just throw all that out of whack.

(08:51):
And my my father, I should mentioned, was a dentist
and u in. One of the things he always told
my sisters and me was was, if you eat that
candy bar, it's just gonna write your teeth own, Like,
don't don't eat that candy bar. Don't eat it. We
still ate a lot of candy, but the message was
always there, like it's eating consuming too much sugar is
a road to garbage mouth. Well that you can assume

(09:14):
that that might be like one of those kind of
just uninformed parental warnings is just to scare you, the
same way they say, like don't if you watch too
much TV, you'll go cross eye. There's something like that.
You know, that's not really based in fact, but but
it does appear that that piece of advice is somewhat
based in fact that there does appear to be a
relationship between sugar consumption and poor oral health. Because if

(09:37):
you change what you eat, you also change what the
organisms in your mouth eat. It's an ecosystem. You're changing
what chemical energy profile is going into that ecosystem in
your mouth, and different microbes eat different things, change your diet,
and you might encourage a different crowd to take up
shop in your teeth. And so the prehistoric hunter gatherer

(09:58):
diet favored things like meat, vegetables, and nuts, and apparently
that is pretty friendly to your teeth. One of the
important things to keep in mind yeah here is that
inventions do not occur within a vacuum, and inventions are
affected by other inventions. And there's a pretty key invention
involved here. That invention, of course, would be agriculture. About

(10:21):
ten thousand years ago, Neil with the humans began the
farming Revolution, which caused a massive shift in the human diet.
If you were in one of these regions that was
sustained by farming, suddenly your diet would shift from things
like you know, meats, wild growing fruit and vegetables and
nuts and roots and all that into carbohydrate rich grains,

(10:43):
grain based breads and porridges and things like that. So
you're you're suddenly shifting your diet to this mainly carbon
driven thing. And then there's another shift that happens again
once again due to technology. Uh, the Industrial Revolution brings
about the wide spread availability of processed flour and sugar

(11:03):
around say eighteen fifty or so. And so this study
that I mentioned a minute ago, it looked at thirty
four early European skeletons to show that the transition from
the hunter gatherer diet to farming quote, shifted the oral
microbial community to a disease associated configuration. And apparently around
the Industrial Revolution, carryogenic bacteria, which is bacteria that causes

(11:26):
tooth decay, became dominant in our mouths, and mouth microbiota
are much less diverse now, which may be the cause
of all the chronic oral disease we see in wealthy
industrial societies today. It's a case where innovations and innovations
unbalanced things, and then we have to create other inventions.
We have to come up with with with various schemes

(11:47):
to try and rebalance everything. Yeah, exactly. So one of
the authors of that paper was Alan Cooper, director of
the Australian Center for Ancient DNA, and so, speaking to NPR,
he said, quote, what you've really created is an ecosystem
which is very low and diversity and full of opportunistic
pathogens that have jumped in to utilize the resources which

(12:09):
are now free. And as a result, of course, what
happens is that the mouth is constantly fighting these microbes
that live inside it. Uh to quote Cooper again, quote
you're walking around with a permanent immune response, which is
not a good thing. It causes problems all over the place.
This reminds me of of of of one of my
favorite quotes from Tina Fey that was in her her autobiography.

(12:33):
She's talking about the experience of growing older and waking
up in the morning and just having this horrible taste
in your mouth, and she uh surmised that quote the
mouth dies first, and it makes sense that it would
be of them. The mouth is just this constantly just
ground zero for this war against pathogens. Well, this is
just one front on which we're seeing more and more

(12:54):
evidence that our microbiome, the microbes that live within us
and on us, really do affect our health in in
pretty extreme ways that we haven't really recognized until very
recent times. But anyway, what all this so far tells
us is that it's not necessarily a fact of nature
that animals just have to brush their teeth with toothpaste

(13:17):
and floss and stuff. I mean, it can be good
for animals to clean their mouths, right, Oh yeah, I
mean it's it's worth noting that cleaning your teeth is
not merely a human thing. I mean, you just think
about how we might again dislodge food with you with
a tongue or or a nail in some cases. And
certainly there are other creatures that may do the same. Uh.
Tooth grooming even with tools has been observed among chimpanzees.

(13:41):
So they might use twigs for close work when fingers
won't cut it. But do they stand outside the olive
garden with that twig hanging out of their mouth in
the parking lot holding a styrofoam clamshell. Uh no, I
don't believe they do. But but they're not there yet
as a species. But from these results, it seems pretty
clear that what what's going on is that we have

(14:01):
created through our technology a need for an oral hygiene
regime that was that was not necessarily there in our
wild existence. And so how how do we cope with
this new microbiome in our mouths, this new more hostile
ecosystem between the teeth and the gums. Yeah, when we
look into the look back into the deeper history of

(14:23):
toothpaste itself, um, it seems pretty clear that that people
were figuring out things they could do pretty early on. Um,
in terms of recorded history. Uh, it's thought that Egyptians
probably started using uh something like toothpaste is as long
ago is maybe five thousand uh BC. And also we

(14:43):
see evidence for this among the ancient Greeks, the Romans,
the ancient Chinese, the ancient Indians. Yeah, there there is
a long tradition of I mean, one of one of
the things you see if you go back into the
ancient world as medical manuals and and like more magical
edging kind of potion manuals and these things may sometimes

(15:05):
give you recipes for what to do with the mouth.
A lot of times there will be like a powder
or something it'll tell you to grind up and you
rub that on the teeth to clean them. Yeah. I
was actually reading in a book, uh title Clean, a
History of Personal Hygiene Impurity by Virginia Smith, which is
a really excellent book that I've referred to on podcasts

(15:25):
in the past. But she mentions that the ancient Egyptians
indeed had to deal with dental problems and that this
is ultimately one of the quote problems of civilization. Uh,
you know, getting back again to the the idea that
the the agricultural revolution created some of these problems for us.
She says that it's likely that excess consumption of honey

(15:45):
and sugar likely impacted that at least the wealthy in
Egyptian society, but that many ancient Egyptians had teeth that
were also worn down to the quick due to poorly
milled flour. Oh yeah, so if you have flower the
it's got like um, it's got like sand or grit
and mixed in it can actually wear down your teeth
from chewing on it. Yeah, So all you kids out

(16:07):
there that love to eat sand, and we're looking for
an excuse to stop eating sand. There you go, yeah, yeah,
if you get sand in your mouth of the beach,
do wash it out if it all possible, because it
gives me the olivers to think about the alternative fear.
So thinking about tooth what does toothpaste actually do? In fact,
toothpaste does something sort of like the sand and the bread,

(16:28):
except hopefully not as harsh on the teeth. Uh. It
fulfills functions related to both health and aesthetic. So on
the health side, it removes the build up of dental plaque,
which is a bacterial biofilm that grows on surfaces inside
the mouth, such as on teeth and around the gum line,
and that helps prevent tooth decay and gum disease. But

(16:48):
then the aesthetic side, of course, is that it also
helps prevent bad breath, It prevents you know, stinky mouth,
It helps keep the teeth appearing white and healthy, and
it also sometimes just provides a pleasant taste, which is
actually I think a more important factor in why people
use toothpaste than many of them realize. Now, back on
the health side, there are a couple of different things
that it does. On one hand, it's an abrasive kind

(17:11):
of like the sand or the grid or something that
helps rub the stuff away in the mouth. And on
the other hand, sometimes it has chemical aids as well,
Like an ingredient might be something like fluoride. Yes, fluoride,
that's an essential one as well. Well, we'll get back
to the importance of fluoride in a bit. Well, yeah,
that that'll be in the modern section. First, we gotta
tell you about what people used to do to their teeth, right,

(17:33):
And before we do that, we should probably take our
first break. But yeah, when we come back, we will.
We will jump in the time machine and brush our
teeth among the denizens of history. Robert, would you like
to go on a journey with me to twelveth century

(17:53):
Italy to find out what toothcare looked like? Then let's
do it, Okay. So I want to quote from the Trotula,
which is a famous collection of treatises on women's health
from medieval Italy. Translated this is a translation by Professor
Monica H. Green, And there are several entries in the
Trotula about what to do about problems with the teeth.

(18:16):
First of all, here's one for black teeth. Off to
a good start. Quote for black and badly colored teeth.
Take walnut shells well cleaned, if their interior rind, which
is green. And we rubbed the teeth three times a day.
And when they have been well rubbed, we washed the
mouth with warm wine and with salt mixed in if desired.

(18:37):
Do you swallow the wine? I would think not, not
with the salt thrown in there. But you know this,
this reminds me of episodes that we've recorded for Stuff
to About Your Mind, where we've talked about the history
of well cocktails, but also things that we're sort of
like cocktails that at least involved alcohol being mixed with
other substances, and very often those were magic potions or

(18:59):
some sort of medi snol mixture that was supposed to
aid you, and very often they did involve wine or
some other alcohol. It is striking how many of the
treatments of the past involved alcoholic beverages. It almost makes
you think that, like in some cases, the alcoholic beverage
may have been a sort of consolation prize for the

(19:19):
fact that the treatment does not generally work, or if
it had some kind of placebo effects. The placebo effect
might have been linked to the fact that the alcohol
gets you a little bit drunk. Yes, And and I
can't think about the salt aspect of this without thinking
of about some of the saltwater treatments that have been
employed in the past, where you're essentially you're you are
just drinking saltwater, maybe saltwater mixed with honey or milk

(19:40):
or something, but but just drinking a bunch of saltwater
to try and cure some ailment. Oh yeah, some of
the ancients actually thought that that could heal you of problems. Yeah,
and they're not so ancients, And I recall correctly. Uh,
here's another one. This is also from the trotula. This
one sounds more like this is for rich people. I
think quote for whitening black teeth and strengthen in corroded

(20:00):
or rotting gums, and for a bad smelling mouth. This
works the best. Take some each of cinnamon, clove, spike,
nord mastic, Frankinson's grain, wormwood, crab foot, date pits, and olives.
I'm not sure I know what crabfoot is. I think
crabfoot is a plant. I was looking it up. There
appears to be a plant that, at least in the

(20:22):
modern world, that is some kind of plant that may
be a parasitic plant that grows on the tea tree
or something that it's some modern people on the Internet
I've seen referred to as crab foot, But as to
this medieval reference, I don't know if it refers to
the same thing or something else, or to just crabs feet.
I would hope they would say foot of crab if
it were, if it were an actual foot of a crab. Yeah,

(20:45):
all right, we get all these together. What do we
do with them? Well, you grow, So, to resume the quote,
grind all of these and reduce them to a powder.
Then rub the affected places. Likewise, in order to make
black teeth white, take tin DRAMs of roasted pummice, tin
DRAMs of salt, two DRAMs each of cinnamon and cloves,
and honey as needed. Mix the pumice and salt with

(21:06):
a sufficient amount of honey, then place them on a
plain dish upon the coals until they burn, and reduce
the other spices to a powder. And when there is need,
rub the teeth. Well that doesn't sound all that bad. Well, yeah,
they're putting honey in there. I was like, wait a second,
you're brushing your teeth with honey. That sounds counterproductive. Well,
I think one possibility here and uh and I believe

(21:27):
I read this in reference to the ancient Egyptians is
that if you were to use honey in your toothpaste,
you would help hold everything together because if because with
all these ingredients like it sounds like it's coming together
as a powder. And certainly powders were employed, but the
difference between a powder and a paste is kind of
the the addition of some sort of viscous substance. Right
right now, For a few other recipes for ancient toothpaste

(21:49):
um which again various paste washes, toothpicks were used throughout Eurasia,
we have the ancient Egyptian evidence as well as pointed
out by a teen National Geographic article a fourth century
see recipe. Uh and I believe this was a This
was an Egyptian recipe called for a paste made from salt, peppermint,

(22:10):
and dried iris flower. Dennist Hines Newman actually tried this
out in two thousand three and reported that it made
his mouth feel clean and fresh, though it also made
his gums bleed. Still He said that this was probably
this probably would have been an improvement over some of
the the soap toothpaste that were used prior to World
War Two soap toothpastes. Yeah, And basically it's just a

(22:33):
reminder and we'll get into this uh as we progress
here that that really toothpaste as we know it. Uh,
the dental dental hygiene products as we know it are
really a post War War two phenomenon. Like that is
really where we enter the more or less modern age
of of dental hygiene. Fourteenth and fifteenth century England, you
had toothpaste made from honey, salt rye flour meal. Uh.

(22:57):
And the honey, as I mentioned earlier, this held it
all together and gave it flavor. Also from the from
the time period, you have toothpowder made from the burnt
branches of a broom plant mixed with burnt alum black.
And this is in a black, ashy substance that had
a likely just horrid taste. But maybe that's where you
know the black and teeth of post apocalyptic societies come from. Okay,

(23:21):
for some reason, this is the only the only thing
they know to go back to that they skip all
the other dental hygiene products, and they just go back
to this ashen mixture. We're out of guzzline. Time to
get out the blackened album. Now I mentioned the book
Clean earlier, and she concludes some interesting material on eighteenth
century Paris. In Clean, Smith writes that you kind of

(23:43):
had a perfect storm of bad teeth at the time
because you had the existing problems of dental hygiene again
sort of the problems of civilization, compounded by poverty and
increased access to sugars, sticky fruits, and sweetmeats that traditional
teeth cleaning methods just couldn't contend with. You couldn't just

(24:03):
scrape or wipe your mouth clean with sticks and cloth
like one might have been able to for uh in
previous ages. Uh. You know, suddenly these these methods that
we had that were, you know, pretty good, we're suddenly
just ineffective. On top of that, you had a lot
of additional damage done by course and badly ground powders,
ashes and whiteners. So the the the very products that

(24:27):
are being rolled out to help within all hygiene or
also contributing to some of the problems. Worn enamel and
irritated gums end up resulting from these products, and teeth
could also be destroyed by overuse of cleansing sticks and
irons that were used to you know, to get in
there and uh scrape them clean. But towards the end
of the century, she notes increased understanding and vastly improved

(24:51):
brushes and pace were beginning to make an impact. Robert,
this is this has given me vibes from like a
marathon man. Oh yes, is safe? Well, over use of
cleansing sticks and irons. It sounds like it is not safe.
We do not recommend the use of irons now. One
of the common features you're seeing in many of these
ancient toothpaste and toothpowder recipes is that there is, uh,

(25:14):
there's a common need for some kind of abrasive powder
something that would be also useful and say scrubbing a
pot clean or something like that. You know. Sometimes they
might use salt like rock salt, or that might use uh,
sand or ash or something like that. What we've seen
references to powders that that used ox hoofs, or that
use something like egg shells, which look that sounds really awful,

(25:37):
or as we mentioned several times earlier, pummice. You could
look to the Greeks and Romans, who occasionally used a
crushed bone and oyster shells powdered charcoal and bark, and
the Romans also added flavoring to assist with with bad breath.
So many terrible stories of the ancient Roman period involved
oyster shells. Thinking about like the murder of Hypatia. That

(25:59):
that that's suppose believe they like killed her with oyster shells. Huh,
like a bunch of them are just just like one
really sharp one. Well, this might not be a historical anecdote.
It might just be the legend, but the story is
that Hypatia was killed by a mob who like scraped
her to death with oyster shells. Just horrible. Yeah, well,
I guess that'll get the get the job done though. Um.
The Chinese are said to have had a wide variety

(26:21):
of toothpastes over time, which included the use of gen
sing herbal mints, and salt. And this makes sense given
the robust nature of Chinese traditional medicine. But before eighteen fifty,
most toothpaste were not paste. They were powders. They were
again some sort of powdery substance that you would you
would put in your mouth and kind of rub into

(26:41):
your teeth and your your gums to clean things up.
I mean, I'm thinking traditional comet scrub. Oh yeah, isn't
there a song about that makes your mouth tearing green? No?
I don't know this song. We're getting sidetracked. All right, Well,
let's take another break, and when we come back, we're
gonna spend the rest of the episode of talking about
modern tooth phase. Alright, we're back. So we mentioned World

(27:12):
War Two earlier. Uh and and that's that's really where
we're heading to in this portion of the episode, because
we see improved dental powder's paste and brushes during the
nineteenth century, but the modern age of dentistry doesn't really
kick in until after World War Two. You had um
in the United States, you had army dentists that championed
a modern dental health practice of biennial checkups, a healthy diet,

(27:34):
and twice a day brushing and uh. And then they
bring this back to the civilian world with them that
they bring this back to private practice and the resulting
high standards in US hygiene and cosmetics, which is always
key because with I mean, we see this in the
some of these early examples too. Dentistry involves both hygiene

(27:56):
and cosmetics. It's some of these these efforts are about out, yes,
let's keep the let's make the mouth healthy, let's keep
the teeth where they are. But others are about let's
make the let's make the breath smell nice, let's make
the teeth look shiny. Well, I mean, I would say
that oral hygiene dental hygiene products are an area where
there is a lot of blurring of the line between

(28:18):
health and aesthetics. Yeah, and it can I mean, honestly,
it can be frustrating when you go to the dentist
and you have to ask this question, like you want
to trust yourself completely over to healthcare professional, and I
certainly um suggest people do that. But but at the
same time, sometimes in the back of your head, you

(28:39):
you you want to ask, wait, is the is this
service that is being offered me? Is this is this
aligned with hygiene? Or is this about cosmetics? Is this
about improving the uh, you know, the the the subjective
appeal of my smile, or is it about more objective
health benefits? And of course most modern tooth we mentioned

(29:00):
earlier that toothpaste in general it serves both functions usually right, So,
the ingredients of modern toothpaste usually include things like mild
abrasives and that's just gonna be to help scrub things away.
But then of course you've got flavors, things that maybe
taste sweet or taste minty and fresh. And I would
say the mintiness of toothpaste is in the modern world,

(29:22):
a very very important part of the package. It is
a crucial part of what you're paying and why you
use the product. Now here's something interesting. Uh, So many
other products are marketed, especially in the United States, are
marketed towards either male consumers or female consumers. But I
don't think we really see this with with toothpaste, and uh,

(29:44):
and and mouthwash. Oh no, gendered marketing of toothpastes. Yeah, well,
what's like the the ax body spray brand of toothpastes,
like the hardest, toughest mouth I mean, I guess to
a limited stent extent, maybe you could say something like
arm and Hammer is like maybe accidentally marketing towards a

(30:04):
like a hyper masculine audience because it's arm and hammer, right.
But at the same time, for the most part, adult
toothpastes are kind of all the same. It's only like
you basically have kids toothpaste who have tastes like you know,
sickeningly sweet mango sherbet or something or that that blue
stuff with the sparkles in it. And then most adult toothpastes,

(30:25):
at least the the main toothpaste, not talking about some
of the ones you might acquire only at health food stores,
but like the kind you can get to the grocery store.
I feel like most of those are going to be
more or less in the same realm our mild abrasives
are made of eagle claws. No, I'm sorry, I don't
mean to encourage all you advertising brains out there to
try gendered marketing of toothpaste. Leave it be. We don't

(30:46):
need more gendered marketing. I mean, unless it encouraged improvedental hygiene.
I mean then I guess you know if. But but
I don't think there's any like gender based messaging against
brushing your teeth, Like what are you doing brushing your teeth?
Don't be a girl? Like nobody's saying that other common
ingredients in toothpaste would be things called humectants, which sort

(31:08):
of prevent the paste in the mouth from getting too
dry or all the water leaving it that you've got
usually some kind of binder thickener, somewhat the role that
honey might have played in these older toothpaste kind of
holding everything together. You've got foaming agents that make it
foam in the mouth, and that's an important aesthetic part
of the process. If you brush your teeth with a

(31:29):
toothpaste that doesn't foam, you might be wondering is it
working right? Right? You want to get a good froth
going in there because it's then I think also that
it reminds one of scrubbing one's body with soap, right.
But then, of course there might also be chemical agents
in the toothpaste that do something in particular, say like
a whitening formula, or say it might contain fluoride. Ye,

(31:51):
And we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that
that water of fluoridation is one of the top medical
achievements of the twentieth century. Do not believe your local
conspiracy theory about the fluoride and your drinking water, I mean,
unless you just want to end up rubbing your teeth
with pummice. Now, speaking of conspiracy theories and whatnot, I

(32:12):
do think it is worth reminding everyone out there that
just because we've reached a certain point in the evolution
of of dental hygiene and dental hygiene products, it doesn't
mean that we can't slip back and fall into into
pseudo science, into conspiracy theory, or even into uh, like
to put an optimistic spin on it, traditional medical practices,

(32:35):
alternative medical practices that have not yet been completely vetted
by modern science. Are you referring to the oil pulling
craze of several years ago. Oh? Yeah, that's a good example,
oil pulling, which is an oil dental rents based on
air vated practices. I don't really know anything about whether
that's supposed to be actually efficacious or not. Does it

(32:57):
do anything good. It's definitely one of these practices that
some people swear by and some people have very strong
opinions about. But generally speaking, those individuals are not going
to be dentists, uh, and it's not going to be
They're not gonna be representatives of the say the American
Dental Association. Okay, so would you say if it provides
any benefit? The evidence is not really in right. I

(33:17):
saw one source that was saying there was kind of
speculating on ways that it could work if it was working.
That that's kind of the answer one tends to to
come across. That being said, they pointed out that there
wasn't necessarily a reason why you couldn't do it in
addition to um more modern dental practices, but that this
is also a great question for any listeners out there,

(33:39):
because I'm sure there's somebody listening to this has a
very strong opinion about oil pulling, and I wouldn't mind
listening to to what you have to say. We also
they'll have to remember what we said earlier about the
other factors that play into one's overall dental hygiene. Uh,
this one person on the left might be able to
fall back on a more traditional or alternative method of

(33:59):
maintaining the all hygiene and it will work for them,
where the person on the other side it will just
it will fail miserably. Like you know, even with with
modern dental hygiene methods, they might be kind of having
an uphill battle. Yeah, it depends on a lot of things.
Your genes, your microbiome, your diet and all of that contributes. Now,
on the other hand, I want to point out we've

(34:20):
been talking about a sort of modern science based dental hygiene.
But as best I can tell, it is apparently the
case to me that toothpaste is not strictly necessary to
get many of the health benefits from tooth brushing. From
what I've read, toothpaste essentially can help, but it's not

(34:40):
like brushing your teeth without toothpaste is useless. Brushing teeth
without toothpaste appears to be much better than not brushing
at all, And there might be cases where the toothpaste
isn't even providing all that much of a benefit on
top of just brushing. So if you're in a situation
where you have, I don't know, you've gone out to
a cabin in the middle of the woods and and

(35:00):
you're you're there for the night, there's no leaving that
the monsters are prowling in the forest, and you realize
that you you brought your tooth brush, but you didn't
bring any toothpaste. You you're you're not that bad off, right,
You might not get some of the aesthetic benefits such
as like the mintiness, you know, the breath cleaning, and
especially if if you're trying to get some kind of
chemical benefit out of your toothpaste, like whitening, or if

(35:23):
your toothpaste provides fluoride. But also if you're simply just
brushing away as you would normally brush with with you know,
the bristles of a toothbrush, you will succeed in removing
a lot of the bacterial coating on your teeth, which
is one of the primary health reasons for brushing your teeth.
You want to try to get the bacteria off of
the surfaces in your mouth so they don't build up. Now,

(35:43):
of course, if you are using toothpaste, one of the
key rules out there is that you do not swallow
it as you are brushing your teeth or after you've brushed.
You know, you spit in the sink and then you
wash your mouth out and you spit that in the
sink as well. Yeah, our our researcher, Scott, was looking
at this and apparently toothpaste swallowing can be a really

(36:04):
big deal. Yeah. Now, I had looked into this a
little bit because I have a six year old and
so in in in teaching him to brush his teeth,
you know, we were we were told, you know, don't
let him swallow the toothpaste. You know, that's just one
of the parental rules that you you pass on. And
so I looked into it a little bit. I'm like,
why why why not? And then you see some of

(36:24):
these these reasons are like, Okay, it's just a it's
a bad idea for them to swallow at the toothpaste.
Just really encourage them not to. But yeah, Scott brought
up some of these specific things that can happen if
you even have a toothpaste overdose. A toothpaste overdose. What's
a regular dose, that's a recommended dose. I guess there'd

(36:45):
be none, right, none? Yeah, as absolutely little as possible.
I mean, that's why you're spitting, uh, you know, rinsing
out your mouth, spitting again. There's no just you know,
there's no swallowing a little toothpaste as part of your breakfast. Um.
In fact, Scott to point it out a page on
meadline plus dot gov that pointed out the following quote,

(37:06):
Swallowing a large amount of regular toothpaste may cause stomach
pain and possible intestinal blockage. Quote. These additional symptoms may
occur when swallowing a large amount of toothpaste containing fluoride. Uh.
They this include The list includes convulsions, diarrhea, difficulty breathing, drooling,
heart attack, salty or soapy taste in the mouth that

(37:27):
seems kind of mild compared to these others U but
also slow heart rate, shock tremors, vomiting, and weakness. So again,
don't swallow your toothpaste, and if you have been doing
so for some reason, please stop. But why do they
make it so delicious? I look, for instance, I brush
my teeth at work here sometimes, and you know, it

(37:48):
means having to spit into a sink in the men's
room or spitting into a water fountain. And sometimes I'm
thinking of somebody's gonna walk by, or they'll you know,
they'll be washing their hands and they'll think I'm discussed
thing for spitting. But clearly the alternative is that I
poisoned myself. So I am going to continue to spit.
Do you ever meet that guy who carries around like
an empty gatorade bottle that he spits his his dip

(38:11):
dip mouth in, or the chewing tobacco. No, there is
there's such a person here. Yeah, I've met guys like that,
but this is this is a Tennessee thing. Oh, I
think you meant here at work thing. No, no, no,
I remember this from Tennessee. Yeah, they'd be like a
guy's got an empty power aid bottle, he already drank
all the power Aide out of it. He's got a
mouthful of tobacco product, and he walks around at some
point needs to spit the bacco juice out somewhere, and

(38:33):
just goes right into the bottle that he carries in
his hand. Oh well, that's better than I remember being
in study hall in high school in Tennessee, and there
was a desk at the back of the room, like
an old like teacher's desk made of wood kind of uh,
you know, it was on unsteady footing. And and that's
for for some ungodly reason, me and a few friends

(38:53):
would hang out and like do our homework at the
last minute. But in some other class, clearly a stud
sudents were chewing tobacco and then spitting into the desk.
So most of the drawers were filled with like you know,
scraps of paper and uh, and tobacco spit. And occasionally
the desk would leak a little. There would be like

(39:15):
a foul brown substance that we begin dripping out of
some corner of the desk and pooling on the floor. Um,
it was. It was disgusting, Robert. That is a wretched,
wretched story. Thanks for sharing. You're welcome courtesy of Lincoln
County High School. So here's another question we should address
before we leave, because we've established that throughout history. You know,

(39:38):
since the the agricultural Revolution, people have needed to clean
their teeth much more than they did when in a
hunter gatherer state. Especially since the Industrial Revolution, people's oral
health has been a bigger concern. You're more at risk
given the kinds of diets people eat, with refined sugar
and flour and all that kind of stuff. And so
we know at some point tooth brushing became an extremely

(40:02):
common thing in the Western world. But how did that happen?
When did when did that come about? And the American
journalist and author Charles do Higg wrote about how toothpaste
took hold of American culture in a book called The
Power of Habit, Why we do what we do in
life and business? Uh So, in this book, do Higg

(40:23):
tells a story about sort of the toothpaste revolution. It's
the story of a man named Claude C. Hopkins who
was one of the great and perhaps one of the
great diabolical minds in the history of modern advertising. Hopkins
wrote a book called Quote Scientific Advertising. It does sound sinister.
So around the turn of the twentieth century, apparently almost

(40:45):
nobody in America brush their teeth, at least not with toothpaste.
Do Higgs sites consumer research claiming that only seven percent
of people had toothpaste in their medicine chests around the
turn of the twentieth century. But then one day a
friend of Claw Hopkins came to him for help promoting
a new product that he was selling. He was an
industrial manufactured toothpaste called PEPSIDENTT. And the pure aesthetics of

(41:10):
this name sounds so disgusting to me. It makes me
think of dyspepsia. Like the only toothpaste endorsed by a dyspeptic,
Jodan Baker defined dyspeptid well, dyspepsia means indigestion. You bad,
bad digestion. But they think Jodan Baker has bad digestion.
That's a line from Mystery Science Theater three thousands, starring

(41:31):
a dyspeptic Joe Don Baker, which which Jodan Baker movie was?
It I think it was Final Justice. Is that the
one where he's running around Malta? Yes, But anyway, there
is actually a common thread in the names here. So
dyspepsia is indigestion. The root is pepsis, which is the
ancient Greek word for digestion, and this was apparently a

(41:52):
clue to the chemical formula of Pepsident. It contained a
chemical digestive agent to help break down or quote digest
best food stuck in the teeth. Okay, what's a little
disgusting when need to put it that way, But a
lot of things about dental hygiene or disgusting if you
looked too closely. So Hopkins signed on to spearhead and
advertising strategy for Pepsident, and it was a huge success.

(42:15):
Do Higg writes that just a decade after the first
Pepsident ad campaign, uh, that tiny fraction of Americans who
had toothpaste in their medicine chest jumped to six and
we went so we went from almost no Americans brushing
their teeth with toothpaste to more than half in a
very short span of time. And do Higg writes also
that the advertising campaign wasn't just successful in America by

(42:37):
nine thirty, Pepsident was on store shelves in China, South Africa, Brazil, Germany,
among other markets. So the question is what made Pepsident
such a successful advertising and marketing campaign. And so Hopkins
had a strategy that he always used. It wasn't just
for this product, it was something he'd used on other products.

(42:59):
And the strategy she was to create a repeated daily
routine using the product. And the system might go something
like this oatmeal gives you energy for twenty four hours,
but you have to eat it first thing in the morning.
So this gets people into the habit of having it
every day when they wake up. There's a queue, there's
like a time of day Q that signals time to

(43:21):
consume this product. And then if you consume it every day,
you keep buying it because you're in a habit. And
in fact, we still see this kind of strategy used
in marketing all the time today. Right, try trying to
encourage you not just to try a product, but to
make a product a repeated routine in your life, a
complete part of your daily breakfast, right, exactly right. So

(43:42):
Hopkins wanted to find a way to to find that
kind of trigger that would get people using pepsin like
this every single day. And so he was reading through
dental textbooks and according to his own autobiography, he he
was doing this, and he was reading these books and
he found references to the fact that bacteria in your
mouth form mucin plaques on your teeth. And you can

(44:03):
feel this plaque with your tongue if you let it grow.
And here's his idea to quote one of the ads, quote,
just run your tongue across your teeth. You'll feel a film.
That's what makes your teeth look off color and invites decay.
Another ad, note, how many pretty teeth are seen everywhere.

(44:23):
Millions are using a new method of teeth cleansing. Why
would any woman have dingy film on her teeth? Pepsident
removes the film. So the fact is, of course that
pepsidint the product was by no means the only way
to get rid of this film. Right, You could brush
your teeth without pepsident and do it. According to do Hig,

(44:44):
one of the top dental authorities of the day, explicitly
said that the toothpaste was worthless. It did not add
anything to this process. But it didn't matter because Hopkins
had found a queue to use the product feeling the film,
and the film is always is reforming, so you always
have a new queue to use the product again. And

(45:05):
so this was hopkins model and how to sell something.
It was you have a queue, a routine, and a reward.
And hopkins original idea was the queue is you run
your tongue across your teeth, and when you do that,
you will happen to feel a film. It's just biology.
It just happens. That triggers the routine, which is brushing
with pepsident, and then there is a reward that comes

(45:26):
after that, which is feeling that your mouth is now beautiful.
But do Hig points out that this was actually enhanced
by the fact that there was a much more direct
and sensory reward. You didn't just have to rely on
the cognitive idea of like, ah, now I'm more beautiful.
You had a very crucial part of the recipe of
pepsident that contributed to the cycle, and that part of

(45:47):
the recipe was the mintiness. There was a clean tingling
left in the mouth after the brushing had been done,
and that, in fact has been cited as the main
reward that people feel. You feel your mouth your mouth
feels dirty, so you brush your teeth and then it
feels tingly. The tingle lets you know it's working. It does.
And once the tingle is gone and your mouth feels

(46:08):
kind of hot and nasty again, don't you want to
brush your teeth again? This also, you know, I imagine
this also factors into into some various reasons that one
could neglect one's stental health, because all you really want
is the feel of something working. I mean that alone
is one of the reasons that you have various pseudoscientific
medical practices that have been pushed by by hoaxters over

(46:29):
over the the ages. Just if something feels like it's happening,
then you can you can, you can you can get
caught up in that alone, like, oh, you just drink
a little bit of poison of so that's what you're feeling.
But no, you're feeling something and that is the cure. Yeah. Well,
I mean we talked earlier about why so many of
these quack medical cures from the past involved alcohol. Right,

(46:51):
You're feelings something's happening, right, So I mean you could
fall into the trap of say thinking, wellhy I have mouthwashed,
why should I brush my teeth. Why should I flash
my teeth? Because if I just take a swig of
this stuff, I feel a little tingle and uh, and
then I'm minty afterwards, I'm good to go. That, of course,
is is inaccurate because we've discussed here you're not gonna
you're not gonna actually get the effects of brushing on

(47:12):
your teeth and gums that way. But Yeah, one of
the big takeaways for me at the end of this
is that, um, while to toothpaste has come to feel
like an invention that is the central part of modern
dental health, I think my takeaway from this research is
that it's it's not that it's bad. Toothpaste is good,

(47:33):
but it's not the central part of modern dental health.
That would be brushing and flossing and going to a
dentist regularly, right, Yes, And that toothpaste is sort of
like a little bonus it helps a little bit more.
That being said, I find myself I find myself oddly
okay with someone using the dark science of of marketing.

(47:54):
H If it results in people brushing their teeth more like,
if it if it actually results an improved dental hygiene,
it's good. Yeah, I guess you're right. I mean, as
long as it is as long as people retain the
idea that brushing is important whether you have toothpaste or not.
But toothpaste can help. Still at the end of the day,
I'm very pro toothpaste. Oh, I mean me too. Without it,

(48:14):
I can only imagine how I would spend the day
just thinking of the horrors of hell lurking under my tongue.
I am one of the people who's been affected by this, uh,
this this tingling cycle, the queue and the routine and
the reward. I've got to feel the minty tingle in
my mouth. And in fact, I have actually used toothpaste
before that did not have the minty tingle after I

(48:36):
was done brushing. I'm sure it helped clean my mouth
just as good as as a minty toothpaste died. But
my mouth didn't feel like it was clean. Yeah. The
whole business of clean is is a complex one, and
this is one of the topics of Virginia. Smith comes
back to time and time again in the book, is
that throughout human history we have hygiene like and then

(48:57):
we have we have this idea of cleanliness that that
is detached from the body and these two things just
become intertwined in human culture and very difficult to to
pull apart. So the things that are are things that
are hygienic and things that are clean. It's often that
they're complicated and they're intertwined to the point that you

(49:17):
just really can't separate them. Again, well, I think there's
a case to be made psychologically and sort of theoretically
that the the cleanliness drive, the hygiene drive is sort
of part of the over of the overarching orderliness mindset,
which is a powerful part of of human psychology and
can be deployed for for great good and great ill.

(49:37):
I think some people would say that the orderliness drive
gives us civilization and and all that, but it also
gives people, uh, I don't know, fascism and all that
kind of stuff. So uh so, hey, keep your mouth clean,
but don't practice fascism of the mouth. I don't know,
I'd say, go practice fascism of the mouth. At least
it's going to be a very orderly state in there.

(49:59):
But we can we'll just have to agree to disagree
on that, all right. So there you have another episode
of invention. In the books, we looked at toothpaste. Who
knows what we'll look at next. We didn't even talk
about flossing all that much, but dental floss is another
invention of the post War War two uh dental world.
If dental floss is independently interesting, we will revisit it,

(50:20):
all right. So that's it for this week's episode of Invention.
If you want to learn more about the show and
check out other episodes, head on over to our website
invention pod dot com. Big thanks to Scott Benjamin for
research assistance with this episode, thanks to our audio producer
Tari Harrison. If you would like to get in touch
with us directly with feedback on this episode or any other,

(50:41):
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hi, let us know how you found out about
the show where you listen from all that kind of stuff,
you can email us at contact at invention pod dot
com the rep day and your pearlier with your da