EDTA in toothpaste? It chelates iron and calcium. Binding iron can prevent degradation during storage, so a little bit is often added.
Are you talking about adding a lot more? For what purpose? In situations where you can chelate iron to prevent bacterial growth, you can also just kill bacteria with surfactants. Maybe breaking up certain biofilms held together by Ca? EDTA doesn’t seem very effective for that for teeth, but also, chelating agents that could strip Ca from biofilms would also strip Ca from teeth. IIRC, high EDTA concentration was found to cause significant amounts of erosion.
I wouldn’t want to eat a lot of EDTA, anyway. Iminodisuccinate seems less likely to have problematic metabolites.
Maybe breaking up certain biofilms held together by Ca?
Yeah there’s a toothpaste on the market called Livfree that claims to work like this.
IIRC, high EDTA concentration was found to cause significant amounts of erosion.
Ok, that sounds bad. Thanks.
ETA: Found an article that explains how Livfree works in more detail:
Tooth surfaces are negatively charged, and so are bacteria; therefore, they should repel each other. However, salivary calcium coats the negative charges on the tooth surface and bacteria, allowing them to get very close (within 10 nm). At this point, van der Waal’s forces (attractive electrostatic forces at small distances) take over, allowing the bacteria to deposit on the tooth surfaces, initiating biofilm formation.10 A unique formulation of EDTA strengthens the negative electronic forces of the tooth, allowing the teeth to repel harmful plaque. This special formulation quickly penetrates through the plaque down to the tooth surface. There, it changes the surface charge back to negative by neutralizing the positively charged calcium ions. This new, stronger negative charge on the tooth surface environment simply allows the plaque and the tooth surface to repel each other. This requires neither an abrasive nor killing the bacteria (Figure 3).
The authors are very positive on this toothpaste, although they don’t directly explain why it doesn’t cause tooth erosion.
If you just want to make the tooth surface more negatively charged...a salt of poly(acrylic acid) seems better for that. And I think some toothpastes have that.
Any thoughts on edathamil/EDTA or nano-hydroxyapatite toothpastes?
EDTA in toothpaste? It chelates iron and calcium. Binding iron can prevent degradation during storage, so a little bit is often added.
Are you talking about adding a lot more? For what purpose? In situations where you can chelate iron to prevent bacterial growth, you can also just kill bacteria with surfactants. Maybe breaking up certain biofilms held together by Ca? EDTA doesn’t seem very effective for that for teeth, but also, chelating agents that could strip Ca from biofilms would also strip Ca from teeth. IIRC, high EDTA concentration was found to cause significant amounts of erosion.
I wouldn’t want to eat a lot of EDTA, anyway. Iminodisuccinate seems less likely to have problematic metabolites.
Yeah there’s a toothpaste on the market called Livfree that claims to work like this.
Ok, that sounds bad. Thanks.
ETA: Found an article that explains how Livfree works in more detail:
The authors are very positive on this toothpaste, although they don’t directly explain why it doesn’t cause tooth erosion.
If you just want to make the tooth surface more negatively charged...a salt of poly(acrylic acid) seems better for that. And I think some toothpastes have that.