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Bite toothpaste bits with fluoride8/3/2023 ![]() ![]() This piece was amended on 16 February 2021 to clarify that Beat the Microbead is a campaign run by Plastic Soup Foundation. If tablets are good for the planet, and evidence for their cavity-preventing capacity materialises, I’m happy to go tubeless. The overall experience doesn’t quite live up to my Fifth Element fantasies, but I’m sure toothpaste in 1898 wasn’t much fun either. Two brands also left some kind of gritty, mineral residue behind (not a big deal – a few rinses and it washes away). Compressed powder tablets do not masticate well. The initial “nibbling” phase with all three brands I tried was, to be frank, pretty unpleasant and vaguely medicinal. The tablet dissolves around your gums in a blast of eye-watering menthol, then disappears, like chewing minty paracetamol. You can literally chew toothpaste tablets on-the-go, like breath mints, but I found the effect to be underwhelming and weird. So, how do you actually use toothpaste tablets? Toothy Tabs, from British cosmetics brand Lush, directs users to “nibble one tab to form a toothpaste and then use a wet toothbrush to clean as normal.” Most tablets feature similar crush-brush-and-rinse instructions. One exception to this is German brand DentTabs, which does contain fluoride and is widely available online in Australia. In fact, in this space, many toothpaste tablets actively flaunt their fluoride-free status, and that’s a worry because research suggests fluoride-free oral care products, often marketed as “natural”, tend to increase cavities. I tried three brands of tablet, and none advertised fluoride as an ingredient. “I personally wouldn’t be telling patients, ‘Hey, use this product’.” There’s not much clinical data out there on toothpaste tablets, and to be honest, I couldn’t find any lab data either.”įernando says the lack of fluoride in many tablet brands is worrying, and even though some do contain useful active ingredients, like sodium bicarbonate and xylitol, without further study there’s no way to know how much of that goodness ends up in your teeth. “Toothpaste should be able to remove plaque, prevent gum disease and tooth decay, and fluoride is a big part of that. “There’s a lack of scientific evidence on how good toothpaste tablets are, in terms of oral health,” says Dr James Fernando, dentist and research fellow at Melbourne Dental School. Crest’s original ad campaign featured Norman Rockwell paintings of toothy, corn-fed American children and the caption: “Look, Mom! No cavities!” One ingredient you won’t find in many tablets is fluoride, a proven cavity-buster that’s been standard in toothpaste since Procter & Gamble released Crest in 1956. Depending on your tooth-brushing regimen, one bottle of 60 tablets should last about a month.īut there’s an elephant in the bathroom. ![]() They’re made from things you might find in the back of the average pantry. Toothpaste tablets, by comparison, are usually sold in glass jars or recyclable plastic bottles. Moreover, many toothpastes – roughly half according to Dutch NGO Plastic Soup Foundation’s Beat the Microbead campaign – also contain microplastics, tiny indestructible plastic polymers that get spat down the sink and washed into the food chain. While enterprises like TerraCycle offer collection-points for oral care products, plenty still end up in landfill. Toothpaste tubes are made from a bunch of different materials making them difficult to recycle. This means tubes can end up in landfill and fragment over time.” ![]() “They’re usually made from different types of plastics, including the cap, and they’re sometimes laminated with a metal layer, which can be another big barrier to recycling. “Conventional toothpaste tubes aren’t easy to recycle,” says Dr Sahar Farzadnia from the independent eco-labelling program, Good Environmental Choice Australia. Since it first appeared in 1898, tubular toothpaste has been a bit of an environmental catastrophe. Not only are they portable and heat resistant – you can leave them in a hot car and they won’t melt into some kind of gross spearmint epoxy – they’re much more sustainable too. This is the big selling point for toothpaste tablets. The glass bottle promises: “The most versatile, eco-friendly toothpaste available.” Eventually I managed to track down some tablets in a vegan, organic grocery store. Supermarkets, chemists and chain grocers are still selling toothpaste in tubes, like it’s 1995. That’s small minty potatoes, compared with the $18bn global toothpaste industry, which is why it’s surprisingly hard to buy the stuff in person. The market for toothpaste tablets is valued at about $20m, but it’s expected to almost double by 2026. Photograph: Mint Images/Getty Images/Mint Images RF Toothpaste tablets are a compressed powder that you nibble to form a paste. ![]()
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