GoodnessDirect Blog – Health foods & healthy lifestyles for you & your planet

How do you get on with the sound of someone brushing their teeth or swilling their mouth out in the morning? Some people can’t stand it. For them it’s on the same level as scratching your nails down a blackboard. I even have a friend who doesn’t brush his teeth until he gets to work…

Disgusting!

But what I’m about to say might put you off mouthwash for life.

It’s generally acknowledged that cleaning your teeth is one of the healthiest things you can do. I never understood all those asinine jokes about flossing, but it’s supposed to help prevent heart disease. Mouthwash, however, might be a more dangerous matter altogether.

The controversy is all about whether the alcohol in your antiseptic swill is actually detrimental to your body. Some mouthwashes have as much as 26% alcohol in them, double the volume in a sip of wine; and the problem is that some people give themselves that treatment twice a day, every day.

The scary word here is ‘carcinogenic’. Alcohol is thought to leave acetaldehyde, a cancer forming chemical, in the mouth. The Dental Journal of Australia printed a report in January 2009 arguing there was sufficient evidence to link alcohol based breath freshening products with oral cancer.

Professor Michael McCullough from Melbourne University, called for it to be removed from the supermarket, citing that you are nine times more likely to get cancer if you use mouthwash and smoke at the same time.

The problem here of course is that while smoking is recreational, fighting the build-up of bacteria in your mouth is supposed to be healthy! Not to mention the fact that gargling alcohol is likely to kill all the germs in your mouth when the majority of them are there for your good (and the logic that if alcohol dries your mouth you will have bad breath anyway).

Mouthwash companies, of course, say there is no scientific evidence. And they are not alone: Dr Nigel Carter of the British Dental Health Foundation has surveyed other reviews which lead him to conclude that there are “no proven links between alcohol-containing mouthwashes and increased incidence of mouth cancer.”

He advises people not to worry. So should we?

Please don’t. Revolutionary reports about what is or is not good for us always seem to swing one way and then the other. Ultimately, we are in charge how we treat our bodies and, at the end of the day, there are a few very sensible things we can do.

• Talk to your dentist – he or she is in the best position to tell you about the health of your gums. If bad breath continues after a thorough clean it can be a sign of gum disease.
• There are plenty of non-alcoholic mouthwashes out there. And you can also buy toothpastes made from natural ingredients.
• Keep brushing your teeth twice daily. Flossing really is supposed to be good for you (some say better than brushing). And if you use unscented floss you can work out where the bad odour areas of your mouth are.
• Brush your tongue! Lots of bacteria grow there. If you’re feeling keen you can get yourself a tongue scraper.
• Eat more fruit containing Vitamins C and D. The vitamins and fibre will help you avoid gum disease in the first place.
• Drink green tea. According to the Journal of Periodontology, it seems to decrease gum disease the more it is consumed.

And if you do have any friends with bad breath, just point them to this blog. You can pretend you were worried about what type of mouthwash they were using rather than the odious challenge of confronting them… face-to-face.