Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Baking Soda: It's not just for armpits anymore

My goodness, looking around the eco-blogosphere it would seem that we're all a bunch of druggies looking to score some magic white powder. I'm talking about the good stuff - baking soda. The miracle elixir of tree-huggers the world over.

Check it out, people are using it to clean their homes, de-stinkify their pits, wash their hair and, of course, brush their teeth. The funny thing? It works. It's all-natural. It's biodegradable. It's readily available. And it's cheap. My God, what more could you ask for?!?

I switched to baking soda for teeth brushing in May. It definitely took some getting used - and a little recipe-tweaking - but it does a fine job. It's another one of those changes where it may not work 100% of the time, but who cares? It works 85% of the time and that's good enough for me. So on garlic-pizza night I use "real toothpaste". Whoopdy-doo. It's better than using it every single night.

So are you willing to give it a try? Do it tonight (providing you didn't have garlic pizza) and see how you like it. There are a million different recipes you can try - peppermint, cinnamon, plain - experiment a little and find one you like. Then share your recipe with the folks on the Yahoo! Group.

And trust, me it's not a gateway drug. You won't find yourself passed out from sniffing Pine Sol next month. I promise.

8 comments:

ib mommy said...

Ack! I must have gotten too much salt in the batch I mixed up. Just a light brushing scrubbed off a few layers of my gums..... they were white for about a week! I haven't been brave enough to try it again. I'll have to look for a less abrasive recipe..... maybe no salt and a quick peroxide rinse?

Hannah said...

Now this is the kind of advertising I like to see!

Chile said...

Big fan of baking soda here. It is the gateway drug, though. Pretty soon you'll be mixing it with vinegar just to laugh at the fizzing.

Robj98168 said...

The down side to using baking soad according to my dentist is the lack of flouride. BUt I argued that since the water district I live in so loveingly adds flouride to the drinking water, it shouldn't be needed in my toothpaste or equivilent. He said no, they don't add enough to make a big difference. I still use baking soda for toothpaste occasionaly,As did my grandparents. Of course they had the advantage of being able to take their teeth out of their mouths to clean them.

Lulu said...

Interesting.. Have you ever tried tooth soap?? :)

Anonymous said...

>>And trust, me it's not a gateway drug.<<

Ha! That's what all the pushers say. This white powder sh*t is great. Now all I need is a glass straw...

Anonymous said...

Baking soda would be on my list of "100 things", along with olive oil and Dr. Bronners peppermint castile soap.

Bakig soda is an excellent gentle abrasive. If you don't add too much water, and make a 'dry rub' out of it, it cleans jewelry and glass coffe pots, and water calcium stains off windows, and teeth, and it takes sticky tags off of things, and ...
gawd, am I addicted?

Anonymous said...

I have been using baking soda for my hair,cleaning ect.I broke out in an awful scalp rash and started researching baking soda a little more.For some reason baking soda get a rating of 2 at the skin deep EWG site.Actually worse than the shampoo bar that I had used before. And also,Im curious,baking soda must be mined?I wonder what kind of other resources mining for baking soda uses.