Vsauce! Kevin here, and I’ve got the scientifically-perfect meal
to whiten my teeth -- a toothpaste sandwich and a glass of warm pee.
Okay this might be a stretch but someone on Reddit really wanted to know whether eating a
toothpaste sandwich would brush your teeth, so we’re gonna think about it.
This sounds nuts, but it’s not. Wrestling legend The Big Show
famously claimed to live off toothpaste sandwiches before he made it… Big.
It's got all the basic mechanics you need: gentle abrasion delivered in a gooey,
mouth-filling medium, and even the bread plays a role in whitening your teeth -- but why do humans
use toothpaste at all? And what did we do before 3D ultra-whitening peroxide advanced fluoride
minty cavity protecting whole mouth health for sensitive teeth goop lined supermarket shelves?
And why would I buy $17 buckthorn and cardamom boutique toothpaste when I can just chew STICKS.
First of all, cleaning your chompers is not a new concept. It’s old. Like really, really old.
There’s Neanderthal evidence from 130,000 years ago that suggests they used toothpicks. And there
are fillings dating back 13,000 years found in Tuscany. That’s the Late Upper Paleolithic,
and analysis showed manually-enlarged cavities packed with plant fibers and hair. HAIR fillings.
People have chewed stuff to clean their teeth for a long time -- and they still do. It’s like those
dental treats you give to dogs… chew twigs are crude, but they actually work. Everybody
did this. Babylonia, Egypt, China -- in Africa and the Middle East, the Salvadora persica
is known as the “toothbrush tree.” The chewing sticks are called “miswak,” and miswak extract has
antibacterial properties that control plaque -- several of the Islamic Prophet Mohammad’s hadiths
recommend miswak-chewing before entering one’s house, before and after a journey, when you wake
up and go to bed -- ya know, basically the times that we brush our teeth? -- and the
World Health Organization has even noted miswak in the prevention of oral disease.
Alright. That’s chewing. Let’s talk toothpaste. Talkpaste?
The medium that makes teeth-cleaning happen is called a Dentifrice -- so, toothpastes or tooth
powders that work with a cleaning tool. 7,000 years ago, Egyptians were already using a powder
weirdly similar to what’s in this sandwich -- except it had ox hooves, pumice, and eggshells as
abrasives. A couple thousand years after that, Sumerians in Mesopotamia were trying to kill
mythical TOOTH WORMS that they thought caused decay. Even in the 1700’s, British and American
toothpaste recipes called for ingredients like burned bread… my scorched toast in the
video about whether lightning kills fish would’ve worked. But now over half of toothpaste is coarse
material like calcium carbonate or silica… which is the main component of sand in lots of places.
This is basically putting the sand back in sandwich!
In the 1700’s, the practice of dentistry separated from general medicine -- Pierre Fauchard’s “Le
Chirurgien Dentiste”....Le Chirurgien Dentiste... “THE SURGICAL DENTIST...” slowly
encouraged professionals focused specifically on dental pathologies and treatments -- including
preventative care like refining powders and pastes. Modern toothpaste has some flavor
additives so the taste isn’t awful, fluoride to remineralize teeth, and foaming agents to expand
and get between them. It’s like a tiny little version of Mark Rober’s hyper-expanding devil’s
toothpaste except it… doesn’t require a 2,000 pound rocket thruster. It just sort of tickles
your tongue and dislodges little pieces of meatloaf. Meatloaf the food not the man.
OKAY SO.
How well would chewing this sandwich actually work to clean your teeth? It depends on how well you
know calculus. You think differential equations are hard? Plaque is easy enough to remove,
but what it morphs into when it hardens is called calculus -- and that’s when you’re gonna need a
dentist. But if you’ve just got a little plaque and need daily maintenance… HOW MANY CHEWS?
HOW MANY CHEWS OF THE SANDWICH, KEVIN?
People seem to chew bites of food an average of 32 times, and a sandwich this size is probably like…
9 bites. That’s 288 chews, but we’re only working with two dentifrices here,
the bread and the toothpaste, NOT any tools to activate it or apply
pressure to the abrasives. If it takes me 5 minutes to eat this, that’s nearly 60 chews
per minute. An electric toothbrush can go over 20,000 movements per minute -- and
an ultrasonic toothbrush generates 192 million movements per minute.
Oh, look at the time. IT’S URINE MOUTHWASH O’CLOCK.
Having clean white teeth signals strong health -- Egyptians used vinegar,
which we now know is too acidic -- early European dental quacks used sulfuric acid,
which is WAY too acidic -- these harm the enamel, and you want enamel.
The Romans used urine. This is actually… this is apple juice. Stop thinking this is urine.
It’s apple juice, look. Mmm.. the juice of an apple. Not the juice of… me.
Anyway, back in my video about scurvy, I highlighted the poet Catullus’s observation
that “the higher the polish on your teeth, the more it proclaims that you have drunk
your piddle.” The ammonia in urine whitens teeth, and if it’s sloshing around the abrasives in
toothpaste? Uhhh.. It’s kinda like when you swim in the ocean for a while you
come out and your skin’s a lot smoother, you basically got water-sanded. So. Alright.
But what about eating toothpaste? You can’t do that right?
Wro…! Right. You really shouldn’t eat toothpaste. Here’s why.
Swallowing a little bit of toothpaste isn’t a big deal. Sodium fluoride is a toxin, but you’d need
to ingest 5 to 10 grams of it for it to be lethal -- which is like… 7 or 8 tubes of toothpaste. Even
my sandwich here is only half a tube. The worst that’s going to happen immediately is probably…
gastrointestinal distress. But when kids eat too much toothpaste it can lead to dental fluorosis,
which is the hypomineralization of tooth enamel from excess fluoride.
And let’s face it. Toothpaste is EXPENSIVE TO EAT. Seriously, this toothpaste costs 4
times more per ounce than peanut butter. Why wouldn’t I just eat crunchy peanut butter
filled with nut abrasives on the same burned bread my colonial ancestors used as toothpaste,
and do it all for a quarter of the price? I could even add something like psyllium husk
fiber for a little more safe grit and have it stabilize my digestive system at the same time.
But look, the main question here is whether eating toothpaste sandwiches can clean your teeth. And
the answer is… yes, absolutely. Just not very well or very efficiently. And you don’t want to eat a
whole bunch of toothpaste. You probably wouldn’t be able to reverse any accumulation of plaque,
and definitely NOT calculus, but if you ate one of these every day of your life? Yeah,
it would play a role in maintaining your dental health. There are just a lot safer, and cheaper
and better ways to do it. But… this is one way to do it. Especially if your sandwich bread is burnt.
And as always -- thanks for watching.
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Oh, that’s minty. Mostly just tasting the burnt bread. So it’s not that bad. I was scared of
this part. Now that I’m here, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Don’t eat toothpaste sandwiches!
Oh, that’s a combination. Thanks, colonial ancestors!