Toofpaste

In keeping with our efforts to start doing more ourselves I gathered the ingredients to make toothpaste. This had been a plan of ours for many months now but we had a few tubes of commercial paste that needed to be finished before embarking on the project. The enterprise turned out to be wonderfully simple. I didn't follow any one recipe but collected ingredients from a number of recipes I found with common ingredients: baking soda and hydrogen peroxide and salt. Sweetening agents suggested were glycerine and xylitol. A tub of xylitol granules were my best bet at Whole Foods, and the stuff, naturally occurring in fruits and vegetables, helps prevent tooth decay and was an obvious choice to add to our toothpaste concoction. Flavorings are optional, and I chose to go the traditional route with peppermint oil. I was so excited that I whipped up an unintentionally large test batch as soon as I got home and, despite the unpleasant saltiness, was very pleased with the results. My teeth hadn't felt that clean in a long time. So tonight I'm going to dilute the mixture with more soda, xylitol, and peppermint oil and I think that may do the trick. I may go back for a bottle of glycerine, too, just to see if I like the way it sweetens. It's true that this is a product whose sole purpose is to clean our teeth, not to serve atop a slice of pie, but making it as palatable as possible would be an added bonus. My mother brought up fluoride, something none of the recipes I found included, which led me to do a little bit of research on the topic. I'm certainly not cool with having my families teeth rot away because of a mineral deficiency in my homemade toothpaste (having them rot because of the Mountain Dew I put in Olive's bottle is a much better excuse for me!), but when examining children's toothpastes in the aisles of the grocery store I got a very clear impression ("No Fluoride") that fluoride is an undesirable component. This site provided me with more information on why it'd be wise to avoid it.