Can fruit and veggies whiten teeth?
Natural strategies range from ‘oil pulling,’ to eating apples, broccoli and even turmeric
Everyone wants a winning smile. But are you willing to swish oil around your mouth for 20 minutes every morning to achieve that brilliant shade of white?
Oil pulling is one of several folk remedy solutions regularly offered up to people who want to avoid expensive in-office procedures to get rid of stubborn stains and the natural yellowing that comes with middle age. Other natural methods include rubbing strawberries on your teeth, eating apples, broccoli or pineapple, brushing with baking soda or hydrogen peroxide and even using turmeric, which, given its power to stain my fingers yellow, seems counterintuitive, to say the least.
“It’s true it makes things yellow,” says Anaida Deti, a registered dental hygienist and CEO of DentalX Dental Clinic. “But this is a very little bit added to the coconut oil people use for oil pulling, that became huge in the media last year, which is why people started to do it. Especially, I found a lot of young people starting to do it.”
Although Deti doesn’t do oil pulling personally (citing time as a factor), she does recommend patients with mild stains try natural teeth whitening strategies (including all the ones above) before deciding whether or not to spend the money on a professional cleaning and/or over-the-counter products.
Since I basically fit that profile, I decided to try a couple of these folk remedies, starting with oil pulling — a folk remedy that involves swishing oil around the mouth to “pull” the bacteria from the gums.
Generally speaking, people use extra virgin coconut oil, but I found an article in the Journal of Traditional and Complementary Medicine that suggests you can use olive oil, sesame oil, sunflower oil, mango extracts and even milk.
Since I had no good coconut oil in the house and exactly one last tablespoon of really good extra virgin olive oil left, I went with that, anticipating the worst. It turned out, though, to be way less bad than I expected — possibly because it was a truly delicious olive oil I’d brought back from Italy last fall.
The results were even more surprising since, at the end of the 20-minute swish, my mouth actually felt great. My gums felt soothed, relaxed and less angry — and I didn’t even realize my gums were angry. Hard to say if my teeth were whiter, but I could swear they looked brighter.
After a second day of swishing (with slightly less good olive oil), I asked my partner if they were brighter. “Definitely” was the answer. “How can this be?” I wondered. Also what would my dentist say?
“I don’t think there’s any clinical evidence to support it,” says Dr. Sharon Walden, owner of Dentists on Bloor (which offers professional whitening), “but I’ve seen evidence in my practice that it does one of two things. It actually brightens the teeth and, more so, it actually helps reduce the inflammation in gingiva. So my patients, myself even included, have used it to combat gingivitis. It wasn’t intended for teeth whitening, but that was a beneficial side effect.”
Walden noted that she’s only ever used extra virgin coconut oil, not olive oil, and also that pregnant patients are
often keen to try oil as an alternative to commercial mouthwash, since some brands contain alcohol. When it came to the other folk remedies, however, she was a little less enthusiastic, although couldn’t comment on all of them. Since Walden advises her patients to avoid berries when they’re going through whitening treatments, she couldn’t see how they could help. Walden was concerned that apples and baking soda might be hard on the enamel, so she advised me to use baking soda only occasionally. She also remarked that the use of hydrogen peroxide has fallen out of favour as a home remedy.
So has “fresh urine,” which was once recommended as the best mouthwash by Pierre Fauchard, physician and “father of modern dentistry,” who, in the mid-1700s, dismissed a lot of contemporary cures as quackery.
In The History of Oral Hygiene Products, How Far Have We Come in 6,000
Years, Stuart L. Fischman shows us that our obsession with pearly whites is far from new. In addition to human pee, for instance, people have turned to chalk, cream of tartar, charcoal, chewing sticks, opiates, alum, brick dust, pumice and even metal files to remove the yellow and brighten their smiles. I decided to give these ancient remedies a miss and instead ask hygienist Anaida Deti about prevention.
“I usually say that smoking is the one thing that people should be staying away from,” she says. “And I usually find that things that have a lot of colouring in them — like ketchup, mustard, pop, soda, coffee and tea — leave stains so, if you can rinse with water right after you drink coffee or eat things, that will help a lot.”
That’s easy enough. And it’s better to head stains off at the pass, since there’s probably only so much that can be done at home to remedy deeply stained teeth. Both dental professionals I spoke to were in full agreement on that. In addition to damaged teeth that turn dark after, say, a root canal and can only be fixed with crowns, there are people with heavy “superficial” damage from smoking, coffee, red wine and, well, middle age, whose best bet is probably in-office whitening treatments.
“It depends on the stains,” Walden says. “Some of the over-the-counter products, like Crest Platinum white strips (her favourite recommendation), could work on very mild stains but, if you’ve got deeper stains, it really needs something more professional. When it comes to deeper, darker staining, such as tetracycline staining, even I struggle getting these patients brighter with a professional agent.”
I don’t want to get there. And if rinsing and swishing can save me from that fate, I’m in. Looks like it’s time to invest in some coconut oil. After all, two out of two dental professionals agree.