Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Toothpaste

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by bestselling author Jason Pargin (‘John Dies At The End’ series, ‘Zoey Ashe’ series) for a look at why toothpaste is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

toothpaste known for being dental famous for being minty nobody thinks much about it so let's have some fun let's find out why toothpaste is secretly incredibly fascinating Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. Jason Pargin is my guest today. Jason Pargin, my former colleague, my old pal, and one of my favorite authors. He is writing a couple of new novels all at once.

I also highly recommend his latest novel, available to you now. It's entitled Zoe Punches the Future in the Dick. It's available everywhere. It's available now. It's written Zoe Punches the Future in the Dick. It's available everywhere. It's available now. It's written under the pen name David Wong, which he is retiring. But if your Google leads you to that, that you've got the right thing. You're doing it. Zoe Punches the Future in the Dick is full of humor. It's also full of big ideas all at once. If you like this kind of podcast that I hope does that, you will love this type of novel that does it in a format that is just so readable and so impressive, I gotta say. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and

used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Chicori peoples. Acknowledge Jason recorded this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Sa'atsoyaha peoples, and acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and today's episode is about toothpaste, which is a substance you will use today. Also want to give a quick shout out to listener Mark Willard, because I forgot he suggested this in the overall democratic process of listeners choosing topics for the episodes. You can participate in that.

If you back the show, if you support it at sifpod.fun, you get to suggest topics and then vote on them. We've got a couple new ones coming that are going to be from listener suggestions. And after Jason and I researched this and taped it and worked it all out, I remembered that I think Mark's suggestion primed my brain. So that's a whole nother benefit for listeners. If you suggest topics and they don't win the votes, you will probably still get in my head and maybe through the power of suggestion it gets made because I think that is what happened here. Congratulations, Mark Willard. Jason and I had

a blast talking about toothpaste. Anyway, now you know that fun thing. Again, siftpod.fun is where you can go to manipulate my mind. And in the meantime, please sit back or squirt a nurdle. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Jason Pargin. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Jason, always good to talk to you. And I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. How do you feel about toothpaste? You know how sometimes you play like a video game and immediately you realize it's too hard for you? Like you've got to back out and change the difficulty level?

As a small child, hearing what was required of my teeth to keep them from falling out of my head was the first time as a small child, I had the thought that life was too hard for me. I'm not going to be able, I'm not going to be able to do this. And I don't think people, maybe your upbringing was different for me in school. they like showed us graphic photos of people's teeth falling out horribly to show you what would happen if you didn't brush did you get that experience i don't remember like tooth decay in school but i think i remember my dentist showing us some stuff yeah no they had people come like in elementary school and there was like cartoons and stuff so this was you look, as an adult,

if you went to the doctor tomorrow and the doctor like shined a light up your nose and said, okay, I'm seeing a, um, there's a, there's a rare cell condition here. I'm going to give you this ointment. You have to rub it on your nose multiple times a day using the exact right technique. And you cannot miss. And if you do fail to do it, and if you times a day using the exact right technique and you cannot miss. And if you do fail to do it, and if you do fail to use the wrong product, or if you failed to do it exactly right, your nose will fall off your face. Like you'll have a giant, just rotten hole in the middle of your face. Like that kind of pressure as an adult would feel overwhelming, but we're so used to this as with our teeth that like, okay, you're a child,

life is carefree. You know, other people are shopping for you and feeding you and all that. But, but you have this one part of your body where if you don't care for it exactly right, and it has to be done multiple times a day on a certain schedule, it will fall off and it will be gone forever. Like it's, it's irrevocable. Like this mistake you made at age five, at age 89, will still be haunting you. And no one will love you because in this society, a missing tooth is ugly. It makes you look low class or dumb or gross or poor or whatever the stigma is with missing teeth. In America, like even more so than other countries where having perfect teeth is like assumed. So, yeah, this is I don't want to use the word trauma.

I know people overuse that word, but it definitely was a source of anxiety. And it is one of the earliest sources of anxiety. Like this is one of the first big responsibilities I felt like I had as a little kid was brushing my freaking teeth. It's such a universal pain point for people's health care. Like you have like a doctor, but then you need a separate person for your teeth. You can't, you can't just turn to them because it's this critical issue we're all constantly dealing with. To the point that one of the most common nightmares people have is simply their teeth falling out. Yeah. Like I've never had a nightmare about my penis falling off,

even though you would think that would be like a common nightmare for men to have. But I've had many dreams, terrifying dreams about my teeth coming loose and falling out. And that's common because it's such a secret source of anxiety for people because it's so hard to get a tooth fixed once you, you know, once you lose it. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a reconstructive project. And I feel like so many other surgeries, it's on something sort of inside your body and no one can tell you had it, but the, but with surgery on your mouth, it's like time to display this to the world until it's done, you know? Yeah. And the anxiety people are going to the dentist, you know, and

the people, if that, they almost feel like it's a confessional when the dentist asks them, or have you been flossing? And they feel like they have to lie. Like it's, it's weird. It's, it's, there's layers and layers of, of, uh, psychological things that play here that we're not going to be able to dig into because we're going to pick one specific part of it. Yeah. But again, I probably say this every episode, there could be an entire podcast, a weekly podcast just on dentistry and teeth stuff. Right. All the time, every week. Yeah. Yeah. And I'd listen to it. It's such a weird subject that no one ever thinks about.

Yeah. Until something goes wrong. And then it's all you can think about when you have a toothache, nothing else in your life matters. I did one time I got a little piece of, it's not a popcorn kernel, but it's the little shell around it. That really thin shell. I just, that went into my gums one time and the fix was like medieval. They just pulled it out. But I was sitting there with the pain of that thinking like, if I was a medieval person and I didn't have a professional dentist with a precise enough tool to get this out, it would probably just ruin the rest of my life. That would be it. It'd be the worst. It would cause an infection that would spread to your brain and kill you. Your teeth are right there next to your head. Infections that start in the teeth, yeah, they will spread. Teeth are right there next to your head.

Infections that start in the teeth, yeah, they will spread. Again, we don't think about that because it never, you know, it doesn't happen in the modern world unless it's someone who's just totally off the grid. But, yeah, that's part of why teeth stuff is so traumatic, I think. It's because it's right there. It's in your head. It's just impossible to ignore versus if you had a thorn stuck in your thigh or something. You could ignore that for years. And I think people kind of did like they had just pieces of arrowheads in them and they were like, well, that's my deal. But if a tooth thing happened, that's the end. That's it. No, it's a showstopper.

Well, and with this more manageable topic of toothpaste, I don't know if we should share our toothpaste brand. I end up alternating between Colgate and Crest, I think because they start with the same first letter. I don't know. I should have found a sponsor for this, but I did not. We're just talking about it. Well, see, this is that thing we're going to get into because there are dozens and dozens of brands and I routinely change them as they come up with something that's like new and fascinating. So like I have gum problems like many people people, uh, or whatever, like gingivitis is swelling around the teeth. And so if there are some new gum care toothpaste

that's new and they'll come out with new ones every month or so, or they'll change the package, I will buy it. Like there's one that's going to fix my, my problem, even though I've never heard my dentist recommend a specific toothpaste and as we are going to get into there's a reason for that it's all nonsense it's all marketing but no i'm not loyal to any one brand i will buy the new shiny thing and if you if you change like the container it comes in if you make it put it in like a little plastic pump or something i will buy that immediately because it's got to be better if it's got like a different dispensing mechanism. That's cool.

That's an enthusiasm about the progress of toothpaste. I like it. Yeah. The marketing people like me too, because I'm sure I'm paying three times more than you could probably buy the most generic brand off Amazon and get like several pounds of it and would be exactly as effective. Well, I think from here we can get into the first fascinating thing about the topic. It's a quick set of numbers and statistics, and that is in a segment called

I Like Stats, Stats Like Me, We Both Love Probability. And that name was submitted by Brent Woodfill. There's a new name for this segment every week. Make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit to SifPod on Twitter or to SifPod at gmail.com. Thank you, Brent. But you've never told fans that you have to sing them. Why are they all songs?

Is that just something that... I'm definitely doing it to myself. I don't mean this to be one of those things where it's like, oh, the agony, I can't stand it. But then they do it every week on YouTube. I'm enjoying it. But that's definitely the pattern we're falling into. Yeah. Okay.

And the first number here, it's really just a couple numbers this week because we have some amazing big takeaways to get into. But the first number here is up to 700. But the first number here is up to 700. And that's the approximate number of species of bacteria in your mouth. Up to 700 different species. And that's species. That's not 700 bacteria. That's 700 different types of bacteria.

The number of actual bacteria is in the billions. You basically have the population of multiple Earths in your mouth, but you have an entire ecosystem in there. Yeah, each of us, a friend of the show, Katie Golden, she always describes herself as a host of many parasites on the show she hosts. And this is kind of like that. We have them throughout our bodies, and the mouth is like a particularly populated one. We're getting that number from Scientific American. They say, quote, most of the bacteria are beneficial. They fight disease, help with digestion, and regulate various bodily functions. They talked to Kevin Foster, the University of Oxford,

and he says that the microbes are there to, quote, keep the ecosystem on a leash, and that we get cavities, caries, etc. when the leash breaks. So we have the bacteria no matter what. The idea is to regulate them, handle them well, and toothpaste theoretically does a lot to do that. Right, and if you've ever wondered why sugary foods make your teeth fall out, it's not that the sugar is caustic to teeth, it's that the sugar is food to certain bacteria that get so enthusiastic about eating it that it inflames the, it eats

away at the enamel in the teeth and all that, or in the gums and all that. Or at least that's how it was explained to me. Yeah. That's my understanding too. And from the research here. Yeah. The sugar, just you eat it, but if you leave it there, then stuff that wants to also eat your teeth comes and eats that.

Yeah. Kind of speaking of that process, next number is more than nine out of 10. More than nine out of 10 is the approximate number of Americans with cavities. Another name for that is caries. Another name is tooth decay. It's all the same thing. saw, the cavities carries tooth decay. That is the most common chronic disease in the world, afflicts billions of people. That's part of why, like, I've had cavities. You were talking about gum stuff, Jason. I think everybody is like pretty down to talk about these basic problems because almost everyone has them one way or another. Yeah, I have three crowns in my head, which means I've had three root canals where they had to like then glue a fake tooth on top of the old tooth. And I asked, because I had most of this work done back in college. I was like, well, what was I doing wrong?

And they're like, oh, no, it's just genetic. You have overactive like salivary glands. And so they flow past the teeth right under those glands around your cheek are just constantly. There's just more moisture coming through there. And so more stuff builds up and it's just it'll always be harder for you to keep your teeth from falling out. So if it wasn't bad enough as a kid that I was constantly getting cavities and stuff and didn't know why it. And again, had this guilt trip like where I have failed my own body. I failed this test of life.

It was finally explained to me, no, the reason everyone in your family has bad teeth is just, it's genetic. I'd never heard that before. Oh, wow. I also, I'm wondering, because we're both from the Midwest, I'm wondering if it's just the Midwest where I feel like there was a moral valence or a moral quality of, are you or not right you know like there was some level of like whether or not you're a good person based on how your dental health was going even though it's partly out of your hands right because it's all about well personal responsibility are you taking care of yourself it and again it's not like you know you you can fail in a lot of ways in life that is not visible to other people.

And so there's stigma, like even more so against, you know, things like if you were a smoker, but just didn't let people see you smoke. Oh, yeah. It's not so much that it has that much of an impact on your life other than you having to chew differently. It's just that it's people judge you. Like, imagine if we had somebody running for president and they were missing like two front teeth. Like it's unthinkable. It's absolutely unthinkable.

That's all people would talk about. Like political cartoons, that's the only thing they would show. Like everybody would just focus right in on it because they would be like, well, it's not just, oh, this person probably has trouble eating an apple. It's no, this person is low class. They don't take care of themselves. They have no self-respect, whatever, all of the stereotypes.

Wow. SNL wouldn't even be able to parody the person because they don't have any cast members with that tooth situation. They'd be like, no, we wouldn't hire someone like that. They'd have to do that crude thing where they paint the teeth black, you know, right, to make it look like they're missing or whatever. But yeah, you know, and then dumb and dumber. First thing Jim Carrey had to do is he had a bit of that tooth carved off to make him look like an idiot. Well, and last number here, we'll just go through it fast because it's a lot of percentages. But I was curious, hey, what's the breakdown of ingredients in a toothpaste?

How does that even go? This is according to Kayvan Moharamzadeh, who's a senior clinical lecturer in restorative dentistry at the University of Sheffield in the UK. In 2017, in a book, he claimed that the general breakdown of toothpaste is 20 to 40% water, 50% abrasives. So we're already at 70 to 90 percent just water and abrasives. And then 0.312 percent fluoride, a lot less than 1 percent. A half to 2 percent detergents and then varying amounts of other chemicals like antibacterial agents and flavorants

and humectants and some other anti-sensitivity things maybe if it's that brand. But the upshot is toothpaste is almost all something abrasive and some water along with some fluoride. And if the listener, like I get that the percentages are hard to visualize if you're hearing them on a podcast in your car, but if the listener paid close attention, you would notice what Alex just described a product that could have been made a thousand years ago. Water and abrasives. Yeah. Yeah. It's water. It's an abrasive powder. Cause people figured out in caveman days that if you're going to clean something with, that's got like a difficult stain, if you got an abrasive in your, in water, it will help scrub it off. It's like

sandpaper. Right. Um, so in, in, then it's just a detergent, some sort of soap. And then the other stuff is just like thickening agents to make it into a paste to work with. But you know, they used to have, we'll talk about it, but they used to have like tooth powder. That was just a powder. You put some water in it and there you go, you brush your teeth with it. And it was almost as effective as what we have now. It is a very primitive product that we have dressed up in a lot of modern ways, but it's a diminishing returns type thing. If you were cursed to have to use toothpaste from a hundred years ago, as long as you brushed correctly and your technique was good and your brush was good, the only thing you would miss was the fluoride, which you may be getting from

your drinking water anyway. But if you did a good enough job brushing, your teeth would be indistinguishable from me buying the stupid latest craze in toothpaste every month because the differences in the products are trivial in terms of the end result are trivial. Yeah. And let's, let's talk all about that. We have two big takeaways for the show. Let's get into takeaway number one. The only modern parts of toothpaste are the fluoride ingredients, the tube container, and the aesthetics of the paste. Aesthetics being how it looks. So the general idea, as we were just saying, is that toothpastes are ancient, either like what we have or like a tooth powder. And then the, these other little fluorides and upgrade and the other stuff is just kind of style. Uh, that's the only part that is modern and actually novel. Yeah. And we'll get into some of it's just done out of marketing.

Um, but it's stuff like the foaming action or the minty taste. That's just, that's for you. That is nothing for the teeth. That's for a part of the sensation of brushing to make you feel like you're doing something. Yeah. Especially, I feel like all the ads, they show someone brushing and then afterward they feel very refreshed and like their skin glows more and stuff. I feel like we expect toothpaste to deliver us a like positive vibe on top of the actual science and everything yeah and not to get off subject but shampoo does the same thing the the foaming and the white foam of shampoo that's purely added for effect it's so that it feels like you're doing something but it that

doesn't help clean your hair at all it's just like the shampoo could have all sorts of other textures and now there's you know people there's there's dry shampoos, things like that. The reason those work is because the stuff you think of the shampoo doing its job, the big foaming bubbles that come off your head and you wash down the drain. That's just, that's for you. That's just there to make you feel like something has happened. So it's the same thing with toothpaste. Man, capitalism loves special effects.

Really into it. I mean, I can't emphasize enough how important this ceremony is. Same thing with toothpaste. Man, capitalism loves special effects. Really into it. I mean, I can't emphasize enough how important this ceremony is. The ritual of cleaning. It does something to the brain. Like I'm new, new smell, new me. Like I've, you know, my mouth now smells like a chemical mint they put in my toothpaste and I'm ready to face the day. Like there's something about making yourself smell a little bit different and going through the motions. It just, it's

almost holy to some people. And if you say, well, that's ridiculous. I showered this morning and I was hung over and like, uh, the whole time it's like, yeah, but try not doing it for a week and see how badly you, you miss the action of it. Well, and as far as the toothpaste ritual, we've got a lot of stuff here about just like daily dental care. I think a lot of people know that the addition of sugary foods and processed foods to our diet as people, you know, you can see how that would change what you need from dental care. But there's basically two big sea changes in what our teeth

need. The second one is the industrial revolution, where you start getting more sugar and more processed foods. But the first is like basic agricultural civilization. We've got an article from NPR, they talked to Alan Cooper, who's the director of the Australian Center for Ancient DNA, he says, quote, hunter gatherers had really good teeth, but as soon as you get to farming populations, you see this massive change, huge amounts of gum disease, and cavities start cropping up. And then his team published a study in 2013 in Nature Genetics, where they looked at calcified plaque on ancient teeth from 34 prehistoric skeletons, and they found that as our diets shifted from just the meat, vegetables, and nuts

that they could hunt and gather over to carbohydrates and sugar from growing crops for the first time, the bacteria in our mouths changed a bunch. And then that started adding a lot more disease-causing bacteria. So it's not just that you have modern candy bars handy. It's also that agriculture and civilization happened. That's sort of the first big reason you need to brush and take care of your teeth. Yeah, that's actually an answer to, I think the most common question I've seen

people ask about this subject. It comes up on Reddit a lot and like ask Reddit, people ask, well, if I, if I just go six months, if like if like if I my life goes off the rails and I become a drug addict and after six months I'll have teeth falling out. Did people in olden days just all have no teeth? Because like they didn't have toothbrushes, they didn that Game of Thrones is coded to be, you know, the, you know, the horse and castles era would just no one have teeth on their head, you know, and before that, and like prior to that era, people were like nomads and in biblical times, like did, you know, the characters in the Bible, did they all just have no teeth? And the answer is no, you would actually be shocked by how good their teeth looked. That thing that I sensed when I was a little kid, like life is too

difficult for me, that impulse was right. It's not supposed to be this hard to take care of your teeth. They're not supposed to be this fragile. It's our modern lifestyle and modern diet is the reason why we have to frantically clean them multiple times a day. The culture changes much faster than the body does. And our culture and what we ate changed rapidly. Yeah, absolutely. I think before researching this, I sort of believed that nobody needed to do any care for their teeth until the industrial revolution, like until the Hershey company existed. It was really easy. We were just eating foods that are good for our teeth, but it's to me, very interesting to learn that basic agriculture led to people thousands of years ago, developing

rudimentary toothbrushes and rudimentary toothpaste and picking in a way that's kind of like flossing because just as soon as we had crops, that was kind of when it started. There's also, as far as the Industrial Revolution ramping it up, in Scientific American, that professor of anthropology, Peter S. Unger, says that processed foods are softer and also cleaner. And so that creates a thing where there is less chewing to cut through the organic film. There's fewer dietary abrasives. It's a thing where the softer and easier our food gets, that sort of maxes out this change that

civilization started. But as far as needing to take care of our teeth as soon as we had farming and societies, one source for this episode is a book called The Excruciating History of Dentistry that is by writer James Winbrant. But in that book, he talks about how, quote, extensive excavations of Egyptian mummies have revealed that caries and abscesses began to appear regularly among aristocrats as early as 2500 BC. He also says that loss of teeth was common, and this change tracked with the rise of an upper class in Egyptian society. The richer people had the means and opportunity to eat the nice foods that gave them this trouble. There's also Chinese medical texts that first describe toothaches and treatments for them around 3700 BC. And you also see some interesting things with the Etruscans, who were the dominant people in Italy before the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. The Etruscans created complex dental

bridgework to replace lost and decayed teeth. And then the first Roman law codes had rules about what to do with the gold in people's mouths when they died. Like, you should leave the fillings, they said, but you can take out the prostheses that come out. Because way back when they had to do advanced dentistry, kind of like we do, mainly because they have this same basic problem. Yes. Now, the big difference in the procedure

was that their numbing agents were not nearly as good as what we have. Like they may have had a paste or a leaf or something that you could rub on there and make it a little bit numb, but they certainly did not have something they could inject to the site and make it all the way numb. Anything they had like that would have killed you. So if you want to take a moment to appreciate that in modern life, like modern Novocaine and Lidocaine, those are fairly recent inventions. And dentistry prior to that was a whole different deal.

They just drilled right in there with you looking at them right in the face. Maybe they would give you like a swig of like whiskey or something beforehand. Yeah, wow. Yeah. I've never been to one of those dentists that puts you completely to sleep no matter what they're doing. But I feel like, I feel like if you showed that to an ancient person and you showed them a spaceship, they would be more excited about that dentist. They'd be like, how do you even do that? That's incredible.

I don't care about the moon. Like, how do you do that thing? So I don't have to feel any of that? Amazing. And they also had people in charge of dental work, especially apparently in Egypt, when Brandt says that not only did Egyptian aristocrats have servants to attend to their teeth as well as their hair, but also teeth cleaning was so much a part of the morning ritual in Egypt that the common parlance for washing the mouth became synonymous with the expression for breakfast. And then ancient Egypt had about 100 different medical specialties. Six of them were dental specific. So they had a lot of different, it was probably not great medicine, but they had a lot of essentially dentists, people whose medical work revolved around the teeth. And when you did that morning

dental care, some Egyptians would use a tooth powder made from the powder of ox hooves and ashes and burnt eggshells and pumice, all of which is abrasive. This is a, I guess, relatively dry version of toothpaste that people in ancient Egypt would use because they needed to clean their teeth about as much as we do. Yeah. And just as today, you will occasionally run into a friend who claims they only brush with baking soda and water. And they're like, nah, my dentist says they look great. It's like, yeah, because you're brushing really diligently and you're taking a lot of time and you're getting every tooth and it's your, the mechanical action of removing the plaque is what matters. And any abrasive will do it. That's what they are. Like it's your the mechanical action of removing the plaque is what

matters and any abrasive will do it that's what they are like it sounds scary or silly like they're using a powder of ox hooves but what they were discovering is like it's any powder any powder will do it yeah especially i almost feel like they had that belief we do where it the toothpaste needs to have like features like it needs to have the most thought out thing. And so I think in a lot of cases, they just put a lot of different things in it, even if they were all just kind of different abrasives. This is from How Stuff Works. Archaeologists found a tooth powder recipe from the 300s AD from Egypt, but that was a Roman province at the time. And it was a recipe for a mixture of rock salt,

mint, dried iris flower, and grains of pepper to form a quote powder for white and perfect teeth. So again, that's just a whole slew of stuff that's abrasive. It's also interesting to me that they used mint. That's like very modern. They added in the pepper, they added flavor to it. Yeah. Because it helps you feel like you're doing something. which is kind of sort of along the lines of why we brush our teeth. Like we want to get the things off of them and away from them that damage them. They also believed in mouthwash. And according to Celsus, who lived around 175 AD, he recommended using urine for mouthwash and believed that the urine of young boys

was the most effective. That's the best kind you could get to him. I want the listeners to note, Like that's the best kind you could get to him. I want the listeners to note, Alex said that this man, Celsus in 175 AD, recommended using the urine of a young boy to wash his mouth. Yes. And then he paused as if I would have some sort of a joke to make, speculating about Celsus and his motivations. I have nothing to say.

If he believed that worked, that's fine. I'm sure it was through scientific inquiry that he discovered that, and he had no other motivations. You don't know something works until you try it. Like that's how science, that's how science happens. speaking other scientists uh there's there's some more people interested in cleaning teeth in history in the byzantine empire like which was really the eastern roman empire in the 600s the 600s physician paul of igena said quote guard against such food as is hurtful to the teeth dried figs honey dates and all glutinous substances he hurtful to the teeth, dried figs, honey, dates, and all glutinous substances. He also said, quote, the teeth ought to be cleaned after supper, end quote, which is like just modern dental advice. It's really not that different other than being focused on figs

and dates because it's the past, but it's pretty much what we do now. You can also go way back to the Vedas in ancient India. They were sacred Sanskrit writings in ancient Hinduism. The entire 61st chapter of the Vishnu Veda describes methods of cleaning teeth. And the first Sanskrit medical text, which is called the Sushruta Samhita, recommends daily use of a cleaning paste for teeth made from honey, oil, and other ingredients. So that just picks out toothpaste as a thing to do right away. They recognized that long ago, the basic truth of it, that I struggled so much as a child to overcome. That's how long we've known what the problem is and how to fight it. And the technique,

what the problem is and how to fight it. And the technique, again, aside from fluoride, which we're about to talk about, not really changed. It's brushing with an abrasive and then something to make it taste like medicine because you've got sticky, sugary foods or whatever that are sticking in between the teeth or on the surface. And that's it. That's pretty much all it comes down to. And as far as fluoride goes, I did not really know what that is before researching this.

I just sort of knew it was a thing you needed, apparently. But according to any place you look, the chemical element fluorine is atomic number nine. It's most common in nature as a mineral or as a compound salt, which is known as fluoride. And according to Excruciating History of Dentistry, in the late 1800s, some doctors in Germany and England theorized that if you took fluoride pills that could strengthen your teeth, it took until the early 1900s for the first discoveries about fluoride actually impacting dentistry to happen. It mainly started in 1901. There was a dentist in the U.S. named Frederick McKay who set up a practice in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and he noticed that

a lot of his patients had mottled teeth, like they were teeth with flecks of white or brown or yellow on them. He started talking to other dentists in the country and learned that this was common in other mining towns, like one apparently is Oakley, Idaho, another is Bauxite, Arizona, which is even named after something you mine. McKay experimented with having the towns try a different water supply than the local one, and that solved the problem. From there, a chemist in Toronto named Frank Hannon theorized that the problem might be water with not enough fluoride. Other chemists discovered that the actual problem is that the water in those mining towns had too much fluoride.

And it caused this tooth modeling that's known as fluorosis. From there, they found it in 25 U.S. states and a bunch of other countries. And the solution was to just decrease the amount of fluoride in water. The solution was to just decrease the amount of fluoride in water. But they also realized, hey, if you put a little fluoride in water, if you get it to the exact right level, that actually benefits people's teeth. So maybe this fluoride stuff is good for teeth. Like it started as a thing in water and even a natural thing. And later it migrated over to toothpaste. And later it migrated over to toothpaste.

And if you want to find yourself kicking a hornet's nest on the Internet, read about the continuing controversy over adding fluoride to the water supply. Yeah. I guess that it was a secret government plot to like a mind control plot. Cause they said that fluoride would make the population more docile and it lowers intelligence or something like that. Yeah. To other people would simply say that it doesn't actually benefit the teeth and that it's never been researched, whether or not it actually helps or that, or whether or not there are actually counter benefits or harms done by it. It's such a simple, common thing.

You go looking for it, you will find a lot of angry people yelling at each other about it. Right. If I remember right, the mentally ill general in Dr. Strangelove is worried about the fluoride impacting the water in his body and trying to keep his masculinity good. But that's that's one of just basically everything that can happen to a person has been blamed on fluoride and water over time. That's amazing. Yeah. It used to be everywhere. Like these days it's easy to avoid it because people moved on to other more interesting conspiracy theories, but the water fluoridation thing, like you old sitcoms, you see people joke about it. Like it used to be in seventies and eighties, it used to be everywhere, you know because

your water the water is different in different parts of the world different parts of the country as it would be you're getting it from a completely different underground lake or wherever this is why you will hear people say the phrase there must be something in the water there right right and also i i so i trust fluoride in water And I think one reason I do is this phenomenon where we didn't just start doing it. It came from noticing that some of the water in some places had a bunch of it. And when they studied it, they found out that if teeth are over fluoridated when you're young, that can permanently damage them. But then they found in those same communities, a lot of the adults had less cavities and better teeth than other people.

And so from there, they ended up piloting the first on-purpose U.S. water fluoridation in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1945. So also it fits with the Cold War being where a lot of these conspiracies start, because that's kind of when the practice started. But also then in the 1950s, Procter & Gamble, the manufacturing company, started working with Indiana University scientists to develop Crest, which was the first toothpaste with fluoride put into it. And that launched in 1956. So that's really when the toothpaste you and I use started, is the mid-1950s. And it's my understanding that toothpaste with fluoride is objectively better. It is the first real change in the product and maybe the only significant change

in terms of the long-term benefit to the teeth. Yeah, it's cool to be alive when this is a thing because most humans were not. And there's all kinds of sources people can go to. We'll link one from the healthcare team at the University of Utah. A doctor there, Dr. David Ocano says that, quote, as far as removing the causative factors

for tooth decay and gum disease, the toothpaste itself is not as important as purely the mechanical action of your toothbrush and your dental floss. He also says that, quote, the fluoride will help reduce the demineralization process, which is the first stage to tooth decay. Also, if you have the demineralization but not yet a full-blown cavity, the fluoride can be taken up into that demineralized area to help it remineralize. be taken up into that demineralized area to help it remineralize. He also says that fluoride does disrupt dental plaque. So it like is useful as a compound in your toothpaste. It also seems like

you can get away with not having it, but I don't know. You might as well use it if you can. Why not? I had a dentist who in childhood who may have been crazy. So do not anyone listening to this, do not take this as dental advice, but he hated toothpaste because he said, what happens is people, most people will brush for like 30 seconds, just long enough to get the foam and the mint in their mouths and declare the job done. They, he said, but if you take your brush and just run it underwater and brush just, just with water, you will suddenly do a much, much better job than you ever have of brushing because you will feel which teeth are clean and which ones are still sticky or whatever. You can feel the scum or the service on your teeth.

So if you try brushing with just a brush, one, you'll find yourself brushing for like three minutes because it's actually hard to get your teeth to do it right. But you will be forcing yourself to do it right. And he's like, I, he suspected that if you just have like a fluoride rinse and just brushed with a wet brush, you would probably be better off in the, in the long run. But nobody wants to do that. But he felt like toothpaste was actually training people to do a worse job of brushing, which makes perfect sense. I bet if you had a camera on me brushing my teeth when I was like 10 years old, I bet I did just that. I just quickly went over the top and the bottom until I felt the foamy mint in my mouth. And it's like, okay, see, it tastes clean now. But the taste was

a mint that was not helping at all. Like that was a placebo. It all comes down to the mechanical action of brushing. If you're bad at brushing, if you don't have the right technique, you're not going to get the benefit of it. And you're going to have more dental work. Like you can complain to your dentist. Like I brush every day. But if your dentist could watch you brush, I bet they would have a lot of tips for you.

Yeah, that makes sense. And even I feel like the science and the marketing of modern toothpaste even helps encourage you to not brush as hard. Like, it's not just that you feel good, but you also think like, well, I've attacked this with the latest science. So the fact that I only brushed for a little while and a few spots kind of did it. I'm fine. When, you know, if you're just using water, you're like, now it's up to me. Now I don't have the force of modern progress behind it. We're going to talk about that in a moment because these toothpaste commercials have

like a graphic, like an animation, a CGI animation of teeth magically healing themselves after the magical foam has flowed over the tooth. And it's like the cavity is gone. But if you had an object in front of you that you were trying to scrub with a toothbrush and trying to clean it that had some sort of sticky whatever, like a dish or something you were trying to clean that had a sticky film on it, and you realize how much elbow grease you had to put into it to get it to come off, and then you would stop to think, well, actually, my teeth are exactly as filthy as this saucer I'm trying to clean.

Cause I, the stuff that stuck to the saucer, I ate it. It all passed and I used my teeth to grind it up. So yeah, wait a second. This stuff that's on here that I'm struggling to scrub off this pan. This is between my teeth too. But you know, but tonight before bed, I'm going to scrub off this pan this is between my teeth too but you know but tonight before bed i'm going to spend 40 seconds brushing and just casually brush over it i'm not going to put nearly as much force or anything into it because well why why would you but your teeth are not like a magical anti-non-stick surface they're kind of the opposite of that pretty much everything sticks to them they get little tiny pits in them and and stuff like it gets lodged in there yeah i never thought about my dishes being a warning like work hard tonight because look at this yeah that's great if you ate some like waffles or something

there's like like the syrup on there it's like oh gosh i'm never gonna get this off it's like yeah now now ask your mouth about that. Well, and the other actually modern parts are more just style stuff, but I do find toothpaste tubes convenient. And that's one of the other ways modern toothpaste is actually modern. We also know who came up with it. We're citing the Hartford Courant here. They say that the inventor of the toothpaste tube is Washington Sheffield. And Washington Sheffield was a dentist in New London, Connecticut. And they say that Sheffield started putting his own brand of toothpaste into tubes in 1878. He did that after his son Lucius returned from a trip to Paris,

where Lucius was inspired by the way artists squeezed paint onto pallets from collapsible tubes. So I don't know if that's an urban legend or not, but it's coming from a real newspaper. And it's one thing they say is the origin of bothering to put toothpaste in tubes. Yeah. I mean, the truth is other stuff came in tubes and realized, oh, this would be convenient for toothpaste, but you need a better story. If you're going to do press for your product, you need a better story. It's like, well, I watched the artists in France using the paint and it inspired me. It's like, no, I just saw something else came in a tube and I thought, I should put toothpaste

in it. Yeah. And I think it also helped him make money on it, too, because Sheffield patented the toothpaste tube in 1870, then trademarked his own brand of it in 1881. It was called Creme Angélique Dentifrice, and he created a company to sell it. He also believed that his special ingredient in the toothpaste was cuttlefish shells, which was his chosen additive abrasive, but you can use, like we said, kind of anything from any era to do this scraping. I love when we perfect a product because it's 150 years later, the exact same tubes, right? Like they have tried multiple times to top that and you can't, it's like the perfect, it's the perfect thing. It's satisfying to squeeze it and make it come out onto the, I think 150 years from now, toothpaste tubes will still be the same. I love stuff like this.

I, again, I write science fiction books. You're going to, you're going to plug one at the end of the episode. This is a, when you're writing any scene that takes place in the future, you're automatically thinking like, okay, well, the character is drinking out of a coffee mug. Are coffee mugs going to be different in the year 2075 or whatever? And the answer is almost certainly not. You can find coffee mugs from ancient Roman times and they're exactly like we nailed that design, a little loop for your hand and a thing to hold the liquid.

That's it. It does. It's perfect. We nailed it. You know, chairs are not like, unless you have like a fancy office chair, you know, otherwise the basic of a chair is going to look the same. And I love it when a guy came up with something and then that's that's just it. We've we've reached the final evolution of that product.

Toothpaste tubes and done. Yeah, we just we could just dust our hands off and go on to spaceships or whatever. We did it. Yeah. And also with the style of something, the aesthetics of toothpaste is the other thing here. I do feel like this is the most futuristic part. It's like how we, you've got here one thing we perfected is drinking glasses. We don't really need to innovate that more in a substantial way. But then in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker's family has regular drinking glasses full of futuristic blue milk. You know, like the blue milk, it looks cool and different.

And I feel like we've tried to make toothpaste blue milky. We've tried to make it stripey and amazing looking in a way that's not totally necessary, but it feels flashy. It feels cool. Oh, as an adult, I love it. Yeah. I have no idea how much money they spent designing the machine that could fill the toothpaste tube with the stripes of the different colored paste in a way so that when you squeeze it out,

you get the perfect stripes and the stream on your brush. It's one of the few products that looks like the commercial. Wow. I mean, even as an adult, I'm impressed with the little stripes of my toothpaste. It makes me feel like I'm using the fancy toothpaste. It's festive. Whoever came up with that was a genius. Yeah. And I don't know who came up with it, but we'll link people to some really fun pictures on the internet of it it's a toothpaste tube, and then it's frozen, and then it's cut open. So you can see how it looks in the tube. And when you look at that, you'll see how they get the stripes, because it's

injected into the tube from the bottom in the factory, but they inject it with these stripes kind of already in it. Like when you see these pictures, it's a mass of toothpaste that just is already striped in a giant way. When it comes out of the nozzle, it's a lot of fluid mechanics stuff and Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids, which is pretty complicated. But the point is that when the tube is at rest and your shelf, the stripes are thick. When you squeeze the tube, the toothpaste yields and flows out of the nozzle still with those perfect stripes and then when you stop pushing it out it comes back to rest and rests in a striped way it's amazing it's just really cool that we did this i love it it's not simple at all and if you see a tube of striped toothpaste if you take one just cut it

in half like like through the narrow way, bisected or whatever, you'll see the way the stripes are arranged is weird. And it had to be done in an exact, precise way because it's going from a very wide container to a very narrow nozzle that has to keep the perfect striping when shrinking down. This was an engineering challenge that was harder to come up with than every other step in toothpaste design up to this point. Everything about toothpaste is simple, except for the stripes, right? Like this is the one thing you can't do at home. You could make your own toothpaste out of stuff you probably already have in your house. You could not mimic

this without a factory. absolutely and every time i look at something like this i imagine that there's some factory floor manager like giving himself a heart attack because their stripes are not coming out right or they're mixing or they're twisting and they're they're getting tubes that don't stripe correctly yeah and they're having floor meetings about it and they're taking the machine apart and they're trying to figure out which valve in there is screwing up the flow because the stripes are you're getting the red and the blue. It's twisting. It's not coming out straight.

It's coming out as a twist like that. We can't have that. That's not what the customers were promised. I just imagine people getting fired and millions of dollars of replacements machine because that dumb that we got the stripes don't look right. I love it. That's so, that's so like consumerism to me in a nutshell. Like somebody interrupts that meeting. Like also the toothpaste is poisonous and they're like,

we're less worried about that. The key thing is these stripes. That's what sells it, man. That's, that's what we got to fix. Some, some enraged manager, just calling somebody to the carpet like he's got like a tube of toothpaste on his desk it's like look at this look at this is this acceptable to you frank is this is this the colgate way look look at the stripes are you seeing this this guy jeremiah colgate the fifth just chewing people out yeah this guy's got an ulcer because the other here's here's another way we're actually behind the curtain of this there is something called a nurdle and it turns out a nurdle is the industry term for that blob

of toothpaste on a brush like in a commercial that looks perfect and striped in the right shape. Each toothpaste manufacturer is ready to sue another manufacturer into oblivion if they mess with their nurdle and try to take it. We'll link to a Reuters story about a recent case in 2010 where Colgate sought a court order allowing it to use toothpaste packaging that superimposes the word triple action and has a blue, white, and green nurdle on it. The Glaxo Company uses triple protection phrasing for its Aquafresh toothpaste. They countersued, accused Colgate of trying to, quote, trade off the commercial magnetism, end quote, of its own

packaging and its own red, white, and blue nurdle. And the lawsuit ended at a confidential settlement the next year. But the battle of the nurdles is something that every toothpaste manufacturer is ready to do. They're ready to throw down. Yeah. And I know nurdle is one of those words, you say it enough times, it starts to sound like nonsense. But the listeners, like if you've ever in any commercial any package where they show a toothbrush with the paste on it it's got that curl of toothpaste that runs the length of the brush and then it ends in like a slightly little curl where it came out yeah um that's the nurdle and now it is displaying part of the purpose of that is to make you use way too much

like there's no reason to cover the entire brush with a big blob of toothpaste. You, you can put a pea-sized blob of toothpaste on there and you'll feel that it's, you're not short of the gunk in your mouth. Like you're not, yeah, it's no issue with the coverage. Like that Nerdle part of it is to make you use, it's probably three times as much as what you actually need to brush your teeth. Because again, as we've established, you can technically brush your teeth with none. Yeah, technically it's all the scrubbing. And then the toothpaste has extra benefits, especially if there's fluoride. So yeah, the amounts, and I've tried to like Google and

research around about exactly how much you can use and have basically found that answer, that it's just the most important to brush right. We'll also link to health.com where they have an article that says that if you like fill your mouth with toothpaste as a child, you can get fluorosis and damage your teeth. But as long as you aren't like chowing down on the stuff, you're using the right amount more or less, and you don't need to use a lot. Yeah, try it. You put like a pea-sized dollop is what my dentist tells me. Try it. You're not going to run out. That's more than enough. They show that nurdle on there is because they want you to buy more toothpaste. They're showing you too much and there's no harm in it. But their suggested serving size of toothpaste is large. I think I believed as a kid that the brush was the size to hold enough

toothpaste, but that's, it's probably just the size that they feel works good for the brushing action. And it's a coincidence that, that the toothpaste advertising uses that, you know what I mean? I think that's what's going on. Right. And if you look at those $200 Oral-B toothbrushes, the toothbrush head is now the size of a pea. So you literally can't put that much toothpaste on there. So they've already got much smaller brush heads already. And you physically cannot put a nurdle on one of those. It can't be done.

So there you go. Yeah. All right. Off of that, we're going to a short break, followed by the big takeaways. See you in a sec. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife.

I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a

valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Well, and this takes us into our other big takeaway of the episode, because it's about advertising. Takeaway number two. Toothpaste advertising invented modern brushing, and the ads have always verged on being snake oil. They've really got us into the brushing we do today, and they've always kind of been skirting the law as far as what is true or not. The key brand in these tales is Pepsodent, because we

talked about in takeaway number one about ancient societies, and they would recommend to each other, hey, my fellow Egyptian or Byzantine, you should do cleaning of your teeth every day. But your dentist is not telling you that because of ancient Egyptian lore. The modern dental idea of brushing with this toothpaste every day is partly the invention of an ad man working for Pepsodent. And we'll link a great article from Slade about it. It's excerpting the book The Power of Habit by journalist and author Charles Duhigg. But he talks about the ad man Claude

Hopkins, who lived from 1866 to 1932. So this is a while ago. Ad man Claude Hopkins, in the early 1900s, the start of that century, takes on Pepsodent as a client. And, quote, Hopkins realized he needed to find a trigger for Pepsodent daily use. So he sat down with a pile of dental textbooks. And then in Hopkins' autobiography, he says, quote, it was dry reading, but in the middle of one book, I found a reference to the mucin plaques on teeth, which I afterward called the film. That gave me an appealing idea. I resolved to advertise this toothpaste as a creator of beauty, end quote. So we've got Hopkins, for one thing, saying, I need to find a way to get people to use this every day, because otherwise they won't.

But then also he just flipped through books until he found one actual fact that he could hook the entire pitch on from there. This is the holy grail of marketing. Yeah. Not to convince customers that your product is good and they should buy it, but to convince them that the absence of your product is unthinkable. To where now, if you don't brush your teeth in the morning, you're missing something. You're missing a ritual. It is habit. It is part of waking up. You don't brush your teeth in the morning, you're missing something. You're missing a ritual. It is habit. It is part of waking up.

You have to brush your teeth. And that is once you've done that, where people feel like it's weird, if they don't do the thing you want them to do, you've, you've got it. Like you've built it into, it's the way that car companies keep trying to make buying a new car for Christmas, a thing, which no one does. No one does it, but they want to, they keep thinking like, Hey, in the future, there'll be a time when Christmas will be the occasion for buying a car for your spouse that they've never test driven with a giant red bow. Like we're going to sell these giant red bows and this will be the habit the way that, you know, like buying a Turkey for Thanksgiving, whether you like Turkey or not, that's what you have for Thanksgiving. That's, that's, it's weird if you don't have it.

And this guy did it now again, it came with a cultural good. It is good to brush your teeth every day, but the whole thing with, you know, cause Pepsodent had, as far as I understand, it had like the foaming and the minty action, all those feelings that make you feel like I have accomplished the thing. Yeah. That was world changing. And Hopkins from here, we've got samples of some of his ad copy for Pepsodent, quote, just run your tongue across your teeth.

You will feel a film. That's what makes your teeth look off color and invites decay. And another one is, And he just figured out the specific way to make you need this. The article says, Three weeks after the first Pepsodent ad campaign, demand for the toothpaste exploded. he just figured out the specific way to make you need this. The article says, quote, three weeks after the first Pepsodent ad campaign, demand for the toothpaste exploded. There were so many orders the company couldn't keep up. In three years, the product went international. And from

there, they became the number one toothpaste brand. That changed when other companies started copying them. But Hopkins says that he personally made a million dollars just from his work on the brand. Usually the company obviously makes most of the money, but this ad man earned a million dollars in old timey money just by making them a thing. That was all it took. And the knowing that appealing to people's vanity would be the way to do it. Even though the science is on your side, it doesn't matter. Knowing that you appeal to people's vanity, he nailed it. Because that's the thing with cigarettes. Cigarettes still, in every movie, every TV show, cigarettes look cool.

Smoking looks cool. And no threat about health or lung cancer can overcome people's vanity that in movies, cigarettes look cool. So saying, you know, like, hey, your teeth will benefit from this new product. That just sounds like anything like your feet will benefit from our foot powder. But appealing to you are now required to have a bright white smile like the movie stars. And if you don't have that, that's a source of shame and of low status or whatever. And our product will help you achieve high status and good looks and whatever. That's how you sell something. Yeah, yeah.

This thing you described, they directly tapped into it. Like they had, quote, everyone from Shirley Temple to Clark Gable eventually bragging about a Pepsodent smile. I don't know. And it's very strange to me today to imagine Brad Pitt specifically talking about Aquafresh or something. But toothpaste was new enough and advertised heavily enough at the time that that was the move. It was like, get these people to signal what you need to do if you want to be found attractive and likable. As far as how it works as an overall product, toothpaste really built itself in the modern day on advertising. We'll link to a JSTOR Daily article where they talk to business historian Peter Miskell, who says, quote, as the advertising industry grew in the 1920s,

particularly with the emergence of commercial radio, toothpaste was one of the most advertised products. The marketing surge worked. In 1938, a cupboard inventory of households in U.S. cities found that 65% had toothpaste, end quote. This is one of the products that really took off with that entire medium of radio and the general practice of advertising. It's almost like how I feel like people associate a couple of brands with podcasting. Like you think of Casper Mattresses or Stamps.com because you just heard them on all the first podcasts you heard. Yeah. And this is once the habit of toothbrushing every single day became entrenched. This is where the gold rush of advertising kicks off because you have a case where everybody is selling the same product. Yeah, basically. comes in with advertising, you see it with gasoline, you see it with bottled water where everybody's selling the same thing. Well, that's actually tremendously freeing as a creative person

in advertising, because you can say whatever you want. You're now free to associate your product with a certain type of person, certain type of personality, a certain type of self-image, you know, it's, you know, or do you want to aim it at kids? Like you can do whatever because we're all selling the same thing. And so you can be, you know, this is the cigarette smoked by a cowboy, you know, or this is a cigarette smoked by sophisticated women, same, same product is paper and little shreds of tobacco and a filter but you're you're now you are now unleashed as an advertiser to just say whatever the hell you want this is the toothpaste that will give you a wider smile will it give you a wider smile than the four other brands next

on the shelf scientifically no but it doesn't matter it's it's the government doesn't really do much to stop you from saying just whatever you want about our product um so they really embrace that is this the the this age of of toothpaste advertising is really something to behold yeah and especially as we said before the first fluoride in toothpaste came out of discoveries about water and didn't start until the mid-1950s, if you were a consumer. So this Pepsodon and these things we're talking about happened before that. All these different brands are just selling an abrasive thing. And so, like you said, Jason, it's truly the, it's like the ultimate Thunderdome of competing advertising.

Like all this stuff's the same, or if it's different, it's not different in a way that matters. So just who's going to be the best at advertising. That's who's going to win. That's all it is. You're mentioning, I'm sorry, I'm looking through here. Like we mentioned Gleam toothpaste. Is Gleam still around?

Gleam? I don't know if Gleam is still around, actually. I was talking to my mom a few days ago and mentioned this topic. And she said, I've never used Gleam, but that brand always jumped out to me. That's a fun name. That's all I know about it. I don't think I've ever been offered it. Yeah. It's a great name. Gleam spelled wrong. That's perfect. Spelled wrong. That's perfect. the article because they talk about how Procter & Gamble poured more than $3 million into researching at Indiana University to develop a fluoridated toothpaste. They also hired Norman Rockwell to draw the advertisements. They did a bunch of branding around like, no cavities,

it's very scientifically good. And when they rolled it out, it was still not popular. And it wasn't even Procter and Gamble's top brand because their top brand was Gleam, where all the advertising was just, you want to look nice, this will make you look nice, aesthetic stuff. That's what we're about. I wonder if as time went on, and we're going to get into this as like more of the pseudoscience started to take over, I wonder if Gleam didn't fall behind because its name sounds like it's just a polish like it's all just to make your teeth oh gleam yeah maybe um but i'd be curious or if even if they know that because like you know a colgate and crest don't

specifically say that but you know it's like pepsodent still sounds like a name of like a medication or something or it sounds like a medical product. But maybe that over time that fell by the wayside because people didn't necessarily care about it as a medical product and more of just making their teeth gleam. But there's just toothpaste advertising is a whole thing. We are skimming over the surface of it. It is a whole thing. Yeah, absolutely. over the surface of it. It is a whole thing. Yeah, absolutely. And we'll also link a piece from Harvard Business School about just the overall shift that they described from the 1950s to the 1980s is when they say toothpaste went from being seen as a cosmetic product to a health

product. Like there was a fundamental sea change in the 20th century that led to how I think of it, where I'm like, well, I want my toothpaste to make my teeth not fall out. And if they look better, that's good too. Before it was much more of a thing of this will make you likable. And I don't know, maybe your health benefits. We'll see. Yeah. And then today, because the people listening to this, I'm sure have now thought about the last time they were at the grocery store and saw the 800 different kinds of toothpaste on the shelf and wondered wondered how that's even possible in a market where you know they're kind of all selling the same thing and they all make different claims so i think the one thing everyone was asking is are there is there any difference because i think we mentioned or we may have

skipped over earlier like the sensitivity toothpaste. They do have like a numbing agent. They have a numbing agent in them. So they will, like if your teeth are a little bit sensitive to the water and the brushing and all that, they will help numb. But they're not doing anything different. It's just for your comfort, right? Yeah, we skipped that. That's kind of the one other scientific advance.

And it's only for people with sensitive teeth is that if you if you get something like teeth sensitivity toothpaste it numbs your teeth a bit and that's why it feels better like that that's but that's also it's at once in advance and also like the oldest medicine of here's something narcotic it's really not that advanced at all yeah and it's very very mild could, you could sit down and eat the whole tube of it and you're not going to overdose on it. It's just something to, because otherwise like if your teeth are kind of sensitive, that may discourage you from brushing as much or as hard. So it's just good to have something that makes them maybe not hurt quite as much, but it

is a very mild effect and it's not, it's not a controlled substance. Well, and also as we were putting this together, you found a lot of amazing stuff about how the world of advertising toothpaste is still a competition of outrageous claims to this day. And if you're me, maybe, where you had purchased a toothpaste with whitening, that is one thing that toothpaste does not actually do. But the advertisers just tell you it does because there are kind of no rules. They just get away with it. Yeah, and if you've ever had like a professional whitening done, I've not.

But if you are, like if you go into a dentist and have them do it and you see the process, you realize how implausible it is that your toothpaste could actually substantially whiten your teeth. But they've done studies on it. If there's an effect, it's very difficult to detect. Yeah, I've also had Invisalign done because I needed braces. And I was an adult, so we did that. And then from there, they said you can use the retainer trays that come with this. You can put whitening gel in them. So I did that. And then from there, they said, you can use the like retainer trays that come with this to you can put like whitening gel in them.

So I got that and that actually made a difference in the coloration of my teeth. But I think I just assumed this whitening toothpaste was like balancing out coffee or something like it wasn't making any difference. But I was like, oh, it's probably keeping me in neutral and keeping me where I'm at. That's probably what's happening. No, it's all made up. They just lied to me. As compared to the advertisements for those toothpastes, which will show a cartoon yellow tooth that has been brushed once with their whitening and suddenly it is gleaming white. Not a thing that occurs. And again, I don't doubt if the manufacturers of those toothpastes were on the podcast. Now they would say, well, if you're not seeing those effects, it's because you're not using

it right. Or you're not using it often enough that they do contain hydrogen peroxide, blah, blah, blah. It's just when they actually go into the real world and have people try it for a while and then compare it, it still comes down to how are you brushing? How often are you brushing? Are you using the right technique? What are you eating? What are you drinking? If you're drinking a lot of tea and coffee, those stains are going to be hard to get off no matter what. If you're really worried about how white your teeth are, you

ultimately need to get a whitening treatment like you mentioned. And that exists. That absolutely exists. A toothpaste that's going to just do that job on the fly, it's like one of those automated car washes, and they've got the wax treatment. It's like, no, it's not waxing your car. That is not a substitute from actually having somebody hand wax the vehicle. It's just a thing that might be slightly better, but, you know. And then also we'll link to an article from McGill University

in Canada where they talk about the quote, the fact is that no toothpaste can whiten teeth that can only be effectively done by a dentist using the bleaching activity of hydrogen peroxide, end quote. And that was the stuff I used. It's some kind of combination of hydrogen peroxide and some stuff to suspend it in kind of. That's basically it. Yeah, so you need a gel that will hold it against the teeth for a while. That's all. So it can actually do its thing. And also you found there are other claims being made by other toothpaste that are so extreme they are getting banned from claiming it.

There's a BBC story we'll link here about Colgate Advertising. The company is called Colgate Palmolive in the UK, and they were banned in the United Kingdom in 2018 because there were, quote, six complaints about the advert for Colgate sensitive repair and prevent toothpaste. The parent company said that the product provided a reparative layer on the enamel surface when used and claimed they had clinical studies showing that it repaired the microscopic gaps in tooth enamel. But the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK said that this was not the same as repairing the tooth and concluded that the claim that it, quote, repairs teeth instantly was not substantiated. And then the story says that

that is the ninth Colgate-Palmolive ad to be banned in the UK in the last seven years, five of which were for Denzel products. So there's just like a war of these companies skirting the truth and then various countries either allowing that or not. Yeah. And one of the bans was for a whitening toothpaste claiming that it could whiten your teeth. Yeah. Cause it turns out that stuff is not like, like when Dorothy enters Oz and all the color changes, like it's not, it's not magic like that. It's just, it's just the toothpaste that I guess if you brush really good, your teeth will get whiter. Maybe now in the United States where we have freedom, yes. Advertisers can just tell you whatever the hell they want. And you have to, basically your ad has to kill people before somebody will stop them from running it but the united states you can have some holistic whatever product like head on and claim that rubbing it on your forehead will

cure headaches yeah and we just we'll just let you do it it's you can say anything you want that's that's the first amendment it means you can spend millions of dollars just lying to people. You're free to say that, again, unless somebody dies, basically. George Washington just doing a thumbs up in heaven. Like, yeah, there we go. Take that, Britain. And as we're about to see, they have taken full advantage of that over the years. Because most of all here with the wild toothpaste advertising is just claiming that there are chemical ingredients in it that either are not there or don't actually do that.

One of them is the Amodent brand that said its toothpaste releases the ion of ammonium. And this is a vintage ad from the 50s, but also the 50s is not that long ago. Another ad like that from the Gibbs brand said that their toothpaste contained chlorophyll, which I understand to be something in plants. But I guess they said the toothpaste has it. But they don't have to explain why this helps your teeth. Yeah. The implication that it contains it, it's like, well, it must do something.

Otherwise, why would they have it in there? Right. And then the probably strangest chemical claim came from the Pepsodent people. Back to them. They claim that their toothpaste contains, I don't know if it's pronounced Irium or Erium, but it's spelled I-R-I-U-M. It's fake. You can pronounce it however you want. It's a made up word. That's right. So that's why we didn't learn about it in school. Because yeah, it doesn't contain that. And that's a made up thing. And according to Atlas Obscura, they didn't start to admit that

until the 1990s, the Pepsodent people. They didn't finally start to say, oh, yeah, we just came up with a thing that does not exist and said it's in our toothpaste. Yeah, because there was this whole thing at the time that like anything implied it was radioactive that used to be considered good because it meant it was like it was like modern. to be considered good because it meant it was like it was like modern right yeah so it was like well it's irium sounds like you know it's some sort of uh it's gonna glow in the dark or whatever and again it must be great for teeth because why why else would they put it in there yeah it must be nice and then there's also like an extra chapter of world war ii that came out of that because late in the war allied Allied espionage was watching the Axis countries to see if they were developing an atomic bomb too, like if they were doing their

own Manhattan Project. And so French intelligence ended up doing a lot of tracking of a German chemical company that was trying to gather as much thorium as they could. And thorium is a real radioactive material. But it turned out this chemical company was not a front for anything. They were just actually trying to make radioactive toothpaste because they saw the Pepsodent ads and they thought that was a good idea. So they were just trying to do a thing that doesn't make sense. And it wasn't actually an attempt to build a bomb, even though thorium is probably more useful in a bomb than it is in your mouth. Yeah. And, and the, apparently I wondered how hard they tried to find where they

could get erium, not knowing that it, that it was fake. Cause again, it can't, it cannot stress this enough. There was a time in America when you could just lie about what was in your product and it was fine. And the thing that got people to buy it was lying that we put a radioactive element in your toothpaste. Yeah. It was, it was a different time. Now today,

the technique, because there, there are people, you know, companies can be sued for lying about what's in our product. You know, if it's, if their lie is that explicit.

Right. So now the technique is they just add an adjective to it that makes it seem like they'll boast that their beer is cold filtered or the ice cream is slow churned or that these are steel cut oats. And without knowing what any of those mean, we will just assume, oh, that must be fancier. Oh, it's sea salt. It's not just salt. It's sea salt. It costs twice as much, but why wouldn't it? It's extra fancy sea salt. They wouldn't specify that it's sea salt if it wasn't fancy somehow. And so it's true. I don't doubt that it is salt from the sea, but that this sea salt candy is somehow better or fancier than just if they just used regular salt. It's all in your own mind. Right. Advertising is a fascinating field. And I simultaneously admire and loathe

anyone who works in that industry. And also, I think before this episode, maybe people didn't totally realize that toothpaste is one of the historical and current pillars of that whole industry. Along with cigarettes and a few other things, it's where they tested out a lot of these practices and found out that they work. And it is in some ways a marvel of human ingenuity. The truth is we could live in a world where there is exactly one kind of toothpaste on the shelf and it would be fine as long as people knew how to brush with it. But the way modern consumerism works, the way our country works, instead, there are hundreds. And plus, I'm sure more than you can, including now, you know, the organic brands and the all natural brands and Tom's implying that Tom is making this in his basement with just natural ingredients. And the thing is, they're not wrong. You can make a toothpaste with all natural ingredients with, with some sort of a paste and an abrasive and

some fluoride. Like, yeah, it doesn't need it. And there are people will be people who will buy it because they will be convinced that it works better and it's more natural. It will probably be better for me. And so it just comes full circle where I'm sure somebody out there is selling tooth powder again, saying, no, this is the even more natural way to do it. This is how the ancient Egyptians did it. And people will buy it, not because it has irium or because it has some sort of magical tooth repairing chemical, but because it is simple and they will actually be right. It doesn't need to be complicated. Yeah. Maybe there's a tiny silver lining of, yes, we're all being manipulated by advertising,

but also you really kind of can't go wrong. Even if you fail to buy something with fluoride at all or whatever, you can still make that work you'll be okay right where you can go wrong is in two ways one that new simple back to earth ingredient those were probably like 12 a tube right because it for some reason it costs more to have things that are all natural but the other thing is what you can do wrong is you can brush wrong yeah your technique you're concerned about your teeth should be 5% what paste you're using and 95% frequency of brushing and how you do it. Look up a YouTube video on the right way to brush.

Electric toothbrushes are better just because they do more brushing. Nothing magical about them. It's like all of the stuff about it sends sonic waves through the plaque. It's like, no, it's just if you don't have the arm strength and you don't feel like brushing that much, it will spin around and brush for you. It's objectively, if it's doing more brushing, it's objectively better. So that's what matters. That's all. If there's one thing to take away from this, that's what matters. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Jason

Pargin for engaging in the ancient art of conversation with the extra technological addition of microphones and the internet. Kind of a pretty good parallel to toothpaste, I would say. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is tooth worms. That is the concept of worms living in your teeth. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than two dozen other

bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring toothpaste with us. Here is one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the only modern parts of toothpaste are the fluoride ingredients, the tube container, and the aesthetics of the paste. And takeaway number two, toothpaste advertising invented modern brushing, and the ads have always verged on being snake oil. Those are the takeaways, also please follow my guest. He's great. Jason Pargin is at JohnDiesAtTheEN on Twitter, that's John Dies At The End minus a letter.

His newest book is entitled Zoe Punches the Future in the D**k. That's written under the soon-to-be-retired pen name David Wong. Find it at your local bookseller or in the episode links. And speaking of those links, many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. A great article in JSTOR Daily, it's called How Toothpaste Got Scientific Cred, and that's by Livia Gershon. A great book titled The Excruciating History of Dentistry by writer James Winbrant. And many others from there, including Reuters writing up the latest nurdle lawsuits. Now you know what a nurdle is, how about that?

Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to

you then.