The Secret to White Teeth? Not Toothpaste!!!!

People are always asking the Fertilitybitch, For someone who drinks so much coffee and tea, you shore have some purty choppers--what's your secret, Crest Whitestrips?"

Puh-leeze. FertilityBitch is big on simplifying and keeping her hard earned moolah from the corporate maw. In the Korea of my parents, the toothbrush and toothpaste consisted of the index finger and a dish of sea or bamboo salt. So you didn't even need some toothbrush holder cluttering up the place.

I do consider myself a bit more modern and do use a commercially manufactured toothbrush of whatever free sample I happen to get from my (mercury-free) dentist. The magic toothpaste is called ARM & HAMMER BAKING SODA. Keeps the pearly whites pearly, bicarb balances the saliva pH. And, at 42, FertilityBitch boasts nary a cavity nor gum disease of any sort.

Toothpaste is not JUST another of those things corporations convince you that you need that you don't--it can actually be hazardous to your health. There are and can be all sorts of disgusting industrial chemicals in it. Let me just concentrate on one, to make my point.

Sodium laurel sulfate (SLS, and its cousins, sodium laureth sulfate, etc.) is an industrial chemical that makes things nice and frothy. Start looking at labels and you'll say, "But it's in almost everything! How can it be bad?" Well, check out the chemical/pesticide registrations web page and see out of all these countries, which ones register SLS for use in products toothpaste related and otherwise (hint: only one, can you guess which???), as the other countries (including Burkina Faso) seem to recognize that SLS belongs in a class of chemicals called nitrosamating agents, which are becoming well known for their ability to cause cancer!

FertilityBitch finds toothpaste generally unnecessary and STRONGLY suggests skipping even "natural" toothpastes for the sake of your health and the health of your loved ones and use that $ to buy a head of organic kale or something. Look what's in Tom's of Maine so-called Natural Toothpaste For Children, Silly Strawberry:

Glycerin, Water, Calcium Carbonate, Hydrated Silica, Carrageenan, Fruit Extracts, ***Sodium Lauryl Sulfate***, Sodium Bicarbonate

Feel free to do your own Google search on SLS and "toxic" and see what comes up--look especially hard at all the stuff from Europe, where they seem to worry a bit more about what all these chemicals eventually do to people...

Pour moi, I give that Tom's "Natural" a nice radioactive TOXIC SKULL and suggest you buy yourself a nice big box of baking soda (here's a bunch of other things you can do with baking soda, thanks to the excellent Eco-Chick site)

AND you can use your old toothpaste to polish your silver jewelry and stuff--it's just the right amount of abrasive to do the job without scratching.