Inexpensive Home Remedy for Oral Acidity

food acidity, oral acidity, raw food dental, raw food teeth, tooth enamel erosion, tooth enamel softening

Ever since my trip to the dentist last month, I have been thinking about how to deal with oral acidity.

Now, note that I’m talking about oral acidity, which involves the acidity of foods as they contact your teeth. This is a different topic from how foods affect your body’s internal acidity.

I am having to deal with this because I eat a lot of fruits.

Oral acitidy issues are by no means limited to raw foodies. Besides fruits, many common items are acidic. For example, sodas and red wine.

So that doesn’t mean stop eating fruits. On the contrary, fruits are an essential component to any healthy diet. It simply means being aware of the issue, and not allowing the acidity the opportunity to hang out on your teeth and do its dirty work.

I have done some investigation and come up with a simple and inexpensive remedy you can make at home.

There’s a good, nerdy story behind this that appears below. But if you’re the kind of person who likes to read the last pages of a book first, I’ll let you in on the remedy here.

Mix a 1:250 ratio of baking soda to tap water. (That’s roughly 3 tea spoons of baking soda per gallon of water.) Thoroughly swish a couple sips after meals, snacks, and drinks. Then rinse again with plain water. This will help neutralize acidity left on the surface of your teeth, which are at risk of enamel erosion.

IMPORTANT: Seeing a dentist regularly is a crucial aspect of maintaining optimal oral health.

Mad Science Experiments

My dentist sent me home with several samples of commercial products, but I wanted to answer some questions. How effective are they? How do the different products stack up against each other? Would a simple home remedy do just as well?

I like data rather than guessing. So I set out to design a suite of simple home experiments to measure my oral acidity, how foods affect it, and how various remedies dealt with it.

I started by ordering some pHion pH test strips. These are allegedly accurate to 0.25 pH increments, with a range designed for testing saliva and urine.

Each strip has two test areas. Once you take a sample, you match the colors of the test areas to a chart to determine the pH value. pH values range from 0 to 14. Lower pH values are more acidic. A pH of 7 is neutral — neither acidic nor basic (the opposite of acidic).

The pH scale is logarithmic, which means that one unit of pH really means a 10x difference in acidity. So, something with a pH of 4 is 10 times more acidic than something with a pH of 5. (This is similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes.)

I found it difficult to get consistently accurate results using the strips. Rarely did both test area colors match the chart. The instructions for the strips do say that the strips are designed for measuring saliva and urine, and not for directly testing other substances. Although I did test some foods directly out of curiosity, I still had difficulty getting consistent results even when measuring my saliva. So though the color chart has increments for 0.25 pH, due to the difficulty in matching colors, the accuracy is really limited to +/- 0.5 pH at best.

(Note, after I finished my testing, pHion discontinued the strips with two test areas that I had used. They’ve been replaced with single test area strips. I haven’t tried these yet.)

Great Grapefruits Galore

The plan was simple. I’d eat some grapefruit (a highly acidic and readily available fruit I consume frequently), try a remedy (or none), then measure the change in my oral acidity at specific intervals of time.

I didn’t eat or drink anything for at least an hour before starting. Then I weighed out 100 grams of grapefruit. Just for kicks, I used a test strip to measure the grapefruit. It came back at 5.5 pH, although I had been expecting it to be closer to 3 (which would be below the valid range for the testing strips).

I then measured my oral acidity by placing the test strip between my left check and lower-left molars, with the test area facing my check, using no remedies, at the following intervals:

Interval	Oral Acidity (pH)
Before eating	6.25
Immediately after eating	(unreadable)
1 minute after eating	6.00
5 minutes after eating	6.25
15 minutes after eating	6.25

The idea was to get a baseline measurement of how oral acidity was affected over time by eating grapefruit. You see, according to my dentist, the problem is with leaving acidity to lie on the surface of the teeth, which allows the acidity time to soften the enamel… Which can then be eroded by brushing or chipped by chewing.

I was expecting the acidity to start off high, then taper off rapidly, and decline to a steady plateau. (An inverse exponential curve, if you care.)

But this first test showed that I wouldn’t be able to complete my experiment as planned, for two possible reasons. First, the strips just weren’t accurate enough to detect subtle variations in pH. On top of that, the color matching was error prone, making the measurement somewhat of a guess. Second, it was also possible that the measurable acidity declined too rapidly to make an accurate comparison between various remedies.

Plan B, a.k.a. “Adventures in Home Chemistry”

So, giving up on that, I decided to just try testing various items for fun.

Item	Acidity
Red wine	4.50
Almond milk	6.50
Plain tap water	7.00
Baking soda in water	8.50

Notice that the baking soda water is basic — the opposite of acidic — and just what we need to neutralize acidity.

This led me to investigate the optimal concentration of baking soda. The idea is that water with baking soda can get only so basic. After that, adding baking soda should fail to increase the pH significantly. In other words, there should be a point of diminishing returns.

To test this, I started with 1 cup of tap water, to which I added baking soda 1/8 of a tea spoon at a time.

Baking soda	Water	Ratio	pH
0 tsp.	1 cup	0 : 384	6.5
1/8 tsp.	1 cup	1 : 384	8.0
2/8 tsp.	1 cup	2 : 384	8.5
3/8 tsp.	1 cup	3 : 384	8.5
4/8 tsp.	1 cup	4 : 384	8.5

This meant the “sweet spot” was somewhere between 1 : 384 and 2 : 384.

So I did the same thing again, this time with 2 cups of water:

Baking soda	Water	Ratio	pH
0 tsp.	2 cups	0 : 768	6.50
1/8 tsp.	2 cups	1 : 768	7.25
2/8 tsp.	2 cups	2 : 768	8.00
3/8 tsp.	2 cups	3 : 768	8.50
4/8 tsp.	2 cups	4 : 768	8.50

Conclusion

So, we can get an 8.5 pH solution with a 3 : 768 ratio of baking soda to tap water. This is equivalent to a 1 : 256 ratio. Mixing 3 tea spoons of baking soda into a gallon of tap water will yield this ratio.

You can mix some ahead of time, preferrably stored in a glass container.

After meals, snacks, and drinks — especially those involving fruits (citrus and otherwise), sour items, and other acidic foods — thoroughly swish some of the baking soda solution in your mouth, twice. Finish with a rinse of plain water.

If you don’t have access to your stash of baking soda water (eating out?) then go ahead and rinse with plain water.

Also, be wary of using baking soda itself for brushing your teeth. If your enamel has been softened by acid, then the abrasive baking soda could contribute to erosion.

And that is a simple and cost-effective home remedy to help neutralize acidity that leads to softening of tooth enamel.

Leave a quick comment below!

Raw Food Health | Chuck August 16, 2009

3 Comments

By Beth, October 5, 2009 @ 7:20 am

Interesting experiments.
I have been rinsing with plain water after meals / eating for some time now (about a year) and have noticed that it has helped.
More recently (1-2 months) I have been using Tooth Swish (from ToothSoap.com) which seems to be similar to the baking soda & water mix you came up with. The difference being that Tooth Swish also contains whole food calcium and magnesium. I have found better results since starting Tooth Swish.
By Chuck, October 5, 2009 @ 7:26 am

Thanks for sharing Beth… What kind of results are you seeing with the Tooth Swish? How has it been helping you?
By Kim, December 31, 2009 @ 8:18 am

You can also drink the baking soda and water mixture since it’s supposed to be fantastic for creating an alkaline environment in your whole body, but be careful not to drink too much because your body can be TOO alkaline which is bad for you. I drink 1 tsp in a big glass of water every night before I go to bed. LOVE your site! Very informative and helpful during my transition to raw foods. Thanks!

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