Over the course of your lifetime you’ll produce 10,000 gallons of spit that your body uses to initiate digestion, neutralize acid in your mouth and help fight germs that produce bad breath.¹ If you floss each day, you’ll go through approximately 5 miles of floss over your lifetime and will use 20 gallons of toothpaste. If you brush your teeth twice a day for two minutes, you’ll spend 24 hours brushing each year.

Even though you don’t swallow your toothpaste (and shouldn’t!), it all happens in an area of your body used as a drug delivery system when a rapid onset of action from medication is desired,² with a permeability four to 4000 times greater than your skin.³ The wide range is due to the different permeability in the different regions in your mouth. Thus, any chemical you place in your mouth, despite the fact you don’t swallow, may be absorbed directly into your bloodstream.

With this in mind, it’s worth considering what you and your children are placing in your mouth on a daily basis. Unfortunately, as toothpaste falls under the category of cosmetics,⁴ manufacturers are left largely to regulate their own products by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In the coming months, triclosan, an antibacterial chemical, will be removed from consumer hand washes in response to an overwhelming database of research demonstrating health risks. However, it will (illogically) still remain in toothpaste, especially those toothpastes designed for use in children.