By Larry Pleasant
Now before you sigh and flip the page, wait! How much time, energy, and money do YOU spend each year in a losing battle against gum disease? If this sounds like you or someone you know, read on.
When you get a sore throat what’s the first thing to try? A salt water gargle! Bring a couple of cups of water to a boil. Dissolve about 20% table salt into it. Cool to room temperature. This salt solution makes a safe and effective sore throat gargle, infected tooth rinse and is great mouth rinse for sore and bleeding gums. Swish and gargle to your heart’s content. There is no toxic dose for gargling with salt water.
If you are on the go you can dissolve one-half teaspoon to a 4 oz. cup of warm water. Salt kills germs, reduces swelling and it is safe and nontoxic to you.
People have cleaned their teeth and mouth since Roman times using sea salt and water, apparently without ill effects and you can too.
While commercial toothpaste may be amazing for combating tooth decay (that’s the claim in their ads anyway), it does little for the long-term health of your gums. In fact, the foaming agent sodium lauryl sulfate used to make toothpaste suds (and, more important, to keep the toothpaste emulsified in the extruder or filler), actually increases skin and gum permeability dramatically. This means that IF you have a bit of gum disease and brush with commercial toothpaste, there is a strong likelihood that you will have gum disease issues the rest of your life. Why not try using a 50-50 mixture of baking soda and sea salt instead?
I do not recommend the common supermarket brands of baking soda either for baking or for brushing. There is a possibility of heavy metal contamination and even arsenic in some of these products. Spend a few cents more and buy the health food store brand instead. Vermont Soap (shameless self-promotion here) makes an easy-to-use dentifrice called Tooth Salt. We chose laboratory quality sodium bicarbonate rather than risk exposing our customers to a potentially contaminated product. Tooth Salt comes pre-mixed with sea salt and organic peppermint essential oil for added effectiveness.
The Internet is full of warnings that brushing with sea salt and baking soda can wear your teeth or enamel down. However, no one actually seems to have seen this happen! I am sticking with the half dozen or so people we found, typically in their ‘90s, who have been using salt or baking soda most of their lives without harm. Many report going for 70 years without cavity or gum issues. If it was going to wear their teeth out it would have happened by now.
You wouldn’t use the same hand towel month after month and never wash it, would you? Use the same sponge for a year without changing it? Wear the same underwear for months? Probably not! So, why do most people settle for a simple rinse of their toothbrush in cold water? It makes zero sense to do this. Watering germs just makes them grow faster. And the germs you are watering are the exact same germs you worked so hard to clean off your teeth and gums. Re-infecting yourself day after day with a grody toothbrush is counterproductive to the cause. Stop it now!
The ideal rinse for killing germs on your toothbrush is alcohol. Alcohol evaporates off the brush in about 20 minutes leaving a clean fresh toothbrush behind. Disinfect your toothbrush after EACH use. And as you may have guessed, Vermont Soap makes the world’s first spray-on toothbrush sanitizer from organic alcohol and essential oils. Never use denatured alcohol or methylated spirits for this as the methanol in it makes it quite poisonous! Use organic alcohol to be absolutely sure that what you are getting is pure and clean. Despite the trashing that organics have taken from the mainstream press, it is important to remember that “organic” means audited as natural. From farm to bottle, every step has been inspected and audited to ensure naturalness. Isn’t that worth paying a little extra money for?
You don’t have to be a millionaire to be healthy. Just remember that the big corporations are not your friends and that you can probably do just fine without buying the goods they are trying to sell you.
This is the Soapman reminding you to keep it clean, keep it natural; and to try to stay sane in a world that is not.
All the Best, Soapman
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