There’s something appealing about using a simple, kitchen staple like baking soda to clean your teeth. It feels natural. It’s inexpensive. Many people swear by its effectiveness.
But the power of baking soda isn’t just the stuff of folk wisdom. There’s also science to back up claims about this humble ingredient. In fact, sodium bicarbonate – the chemical name for baking soda – has long been recognized for its dental benefits.
For one, it’s far less abrasive than most toothpastes, gentler on tooth enamel than you might expect. Arm & Hammer Advance White, for instance, has a relative dentin abrasion score of 106, and Crest Pro-Health has a very high score of 155. Plain baking soda has a score of just 7.
Yet sodium bicarbonate is effective against oral biofilms. Its large crystal structure helps physically remove plaque from the surfaces of the teeth, while its chemical properties help disrupt the sticky matrix that holds those bacterial communities together on your teeth. What’s more, its alkaline nature helps neutralize acids in the mouth that contribute to tooth decay.
You might wonder, though, how a strong baking soda toothpaste compares with conventional fluoride toothpastes – not just in the lab but under real world conditions, as you would use it at home. Most previous studies began with patients getting professional dental cleanings – and that’s what makes a recent 12-week clinical trial so interesting. Its authors wanted to see what would happen when people with early gum disease – gingivitis – used either a high-concentration sodium bicarbonate toothpaste or a standard fluoride toothpaste without any professional cleanings to start with.
Just published in the Journal of Dentistry, the study followed nearly 200 patients with localized gingivitis, which affects between 10% and 30% of tooth sites with bleeding when probed. This represents the stage of gum disease that’s reversible yet can progress to more serious periodontitis and eventual tooth loss if not properly treated.
After two weeks in which everyone used the same starting toothpaste, participants were randomly assigned to brush twice a day with either baking soda toothpaste (test group) or regular fluoride toothpaste (comparison group). The team measured inflammation, bleeding, and plaque buildup at the start and again at 3, 6, and 12 weeks.
And it turned out that the baking soda toothpaste significantly outperformed the fluoride toothpaste across multiple measures of oral health. Those in the test group had fewer bleeding sites; those in the control group actually had slightly more. The test group also had superior inflammation scores and better plaque removal.
Perhaps most importantly, by the end of the study, 25% of those in the baking soda group had achieved what dentists consider true gingival health – bleeding at less than 10% of sites when probed. Only 13.5% of those in the fluoride group achieved as much.
All of these improvements were apparent as early as three weeks into the study.
And again, what makes these results particularly relevant is that the study was done in a way that reflected real world conditions. All participants started with teeth in their natural state, complete with existing plaque and inflammation.
Of course, you do need to keep in mind that the toothpaste used had a very high concentration of sodium bicarbonate: 67% by weight. That’s much higher than many commercial products.
It’s also important to recognize that several of the study authors work for Haleon, the company that makes the sodium bicarbonate toothpaste used in their study. While this alone doesn’t call the results into question, it does reflect the potential for conflict of interest.
Even so, this adds to the evidence for baking soda’s oral health benefits and reminds us that sometimes effective solutions are hiding in plain sight – or in this case, right there in your kitchen cabinet.
