Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren bubble Boum here with a classic brain
Speaker 1: Stuff episode. I don't know about you, but I often
Speaker 1: take for granted the everyday hygiene products that I use
Speaker 1: hand soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, that is, unless I unexpectedly
Speaker 1: run out. But of course, although hygiene has been around forever,
Speaker 1: the specific formulations of products that we use are pretty new.
Speaker 1: Today's classic gets into the history of toothpaste. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum Here without teeth, life is tough. Sure we
Speaker 1: have all sorts of fancy dentistry tricks these days, but
Speaker 1: nothing tops the Choppers were born with. In fact, when
Speaker 1: rocker Patti Smith gave the commencement address at the Pratt
Speaker 1: Institute in New York, she gave those graduating seniors some
Speaker 1: incredibly sound advice. She said, now that I'm here, my
Speaker 1: greatest urge is to speak to you of dental care.
Speaker 1: My generation had a rough go dentally. Our dentists were
Speaker 1: the Army dentists who came back from World War Two
Speaker 1: and believed that the dental office was a battle ground.
Speaker 1: You have a better chance at dental health, and it
Speaker 1: may be true that our big dental procedures are considerably
Speaker 1: better than they were in the middle of the last century.
Speaker 1: But it's the maintenance that Smith was probably talking about.
Speaker 1: We've got to scrub our teeth each and every day,
Speaker 1: or else bacteria will calcify into tartar, which is where
Speaker 1: the tooth troubles really begin. Keeping all your teeth in
Speaker 1: your head and avoiding life threatening infection has always required
Speaker 1: constant vigilance, which is where toothpaste comes in. Now, nobody
Speaker 1: knows who invented the toothbrush. Most ancient civilizations seem to
Speaker 1: have had some variation of a frayed choo stick that
Speaker 1: they used to keep their teeth clean. But don't teeth
Speaker 1: also need some sort of well cleaning agent. Is that
Speaker 1: minty plaster like goo that we smear on our modern
Speaker 1: chewing sticks just capitalist snake oil? Not of his story
Speaker 1: has anything to say about it. Toothpaste might actually predate
Speaker 1: the tooth brush. While there's evidence that ancient Egyptians were
Speaker 1: using toothbrushes as far back as three thousand, five hundred
Speaker 1: b CE, recipes for tooth powder have been found the
Speaker 1: date back to five thousand BC, the earliest Egyptian tooth
Speaker 1: powder recipe contained plenty of abrasives to scrape off all
Speaker 1: the sticky residue. The ashes of burnt eggshells and oxen
Speaker 1: hoofs mixed with pumice seemed to be popular. By the
Speaker 1: fourth century, Egyptians had fancied up their tooth powder with
Speaker 1: abrasives like rock salt and flavorings like mint and peppercorns.
Speaker 1: They even added dried iris flower, perhaps because it was
Speaker 1: associated with purification. Good thing are tooth enamel is harder
Speaker 1: than bone or even iron or steel. If it wasn't
Speaker 1: those Egyptians would have brushed their teeth right down to nubs.
Speaker 1: But when this recipe was revealed in two thousand three
Speaker 1: at a dental conference in Vienna, Austrian dentist Heinz Newman
Speaker 1: told the Telegraph that he tried it and it wasn't
Speaker 1: half bad. He said, I found that it was not unpleasant.
Speaker 1: It was painful on my gums and made them bleed
Speaker 1: as well, but that's not a bad thing, and afterwards
Speaker 1: my mouth felt fresh and clean. I believe that this
Speaker 1: recipe would have been a big improvement on some of
Speaker 1: the soap toothpastes used much later around the world. Different
Speaker 1: cultures continued mixing crushed abrasives like oyster shell or bone,
Speaker 1: and nice tasting herbs like mint and jin sing together
Speaker 1: to clean teeth and keep hallatosis that's bad breath at bay.
Speaker 1: But as with literally everything else, the Middle Ages didn't
Speaker 1: really do much for toothpaste technology. During this time, Europeans
Speaker 1: settled on a mixture of honey, salt, and drye flour,
Speaker 1: which they supplemented by giving their teeth a good scrubbing
Speaker 1: with the bark of certain trees. It wasn't until the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century that the toothpaste biz as we know it
Speaker 1: really started heating up. Recipes for tooth powders and pastes
Speaker 1: that included abrasives like charcoal, chalk, and burned bread crumbs,
Speaker 1: as well as incense like dragon's blood were popular in
Speaker 1: England until eighteen fifty, when Coalgate introduced its first krem dentifrie,
Speaker 1: which came in a jar. Mass production of this product
Speaker 1: started in the eighteen seventies, and twenty years later they
Speaker 1: introduced the collapsible tube, and from then on toothpaste was
Speaker 1: a thing. Before World War Two, most toothpastes on the
Speaker 1: market were sold in a lead tube. They also contained soap,
Speaker 1: which was unnecessary and in some cases even counterproductive, but
Speaker 1: we humans seem to have a hang up about wanting
Speaker 1: our cleansers to foam. Toothpastes today still tend to contain soap,
Speaker 1: namely sodium laurel sulfate, because it's not clean unless it's foamy,
Speaker 1: but soap also helped maintain an even creamy texture. We
Speaker 1: can also get this smooth texture with humicants like sorbitol
Speaker 1: glycerin and propylene glycol, which have the added bonus of
Speaker 1: being a little bit sweet. Fluoride was first added toothpaste
Speaker 1: in nineteen fourteen, but it wasn't until the nineteen sixties
Speaker 1: that it was proven to fight cavities, and modern toothpaste
Speaker 1: no longer uses chalk as an abrasive. We most often
Speaker 1: use hydrated silica, which is exactly the same stuff you
Speaker 1: find in the little packets in your vitamin bottles and
Speaker 1: shoe boxes. So that's the story of toothpaste. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go brush my teeth. Today's episode is based on the
Speaker 1: article Rinse and Spit the History of toothpaste on how
Speaker 1: Stuffworks dot com, written by Jesslyin Shield brain Stuff is
Speaker 1: production by Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang and Ramsay Yung.
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