Hippie Homemade Toothpaste...

Ok, so I've bought just about every kind of toothpaste the store has to offer.  Every "WHITENING" toothpaste just left my teeth even more dingy and yellow looking, and I started to notice that the inside of my mouth felt burned quite often.  I was even having the skin on the inside of my cheeks and lips peel off throughout the day.  Gross.

I finally settled on Tom's of Maine as my favorite because it didn't have fluoride or many of those strange mystery ingredients that all other toothpaste has.  What's more, the kind I was buying, which made no claims to teeth whitening, started making my smile whiter and brighter!  Imagine that!!  But...$4-$5 for a tube of toothpaste was beginning to take it's toll on my pocket book!

It began innocently enough.  Reading the ingredient list on the back of my Tom's while brushing my teeth one morning.  I noticed that the first ingredient was CALCIUM CARBONATE.  Having just watched an awesome episode of Myth Busters where they used calcium carbonate to blast open the door of a jail cell, I knew right away that this was the primary ingredient in antacids.  I kept reading... GLYCERINE - well, I still had some of that from a failed batch of handsoap I had tried to make, WATER - yup, plenty of that around, SODIUM BICARBONATE - good ol' baking soda.  I quickly realized that I had most of the ingredients already in my house!  So I set off to create my own.

Admittedly, the first few batches didn't turn out so well.  Sure they did the job, but they tasted simply awful, and my kids wanted nothing to do with the stuff.  Then today I came across this super helpful blog post and even though I didn't use her recipe, the last few pieces fell into place on my own recipe.  You could absolutely use some essential oils to make the flavor better, but I just opted to use some peppermint flavored antacids to save a little dough.

Ingredients:
40 tablets Calcium Carbonate Antacid (I bought the Equate brand because it was cheap) - choose whatever flavor sounds good!
2 Tbls. Organic Coconut Oil
1 Tbls. Xylitol (you could use Stevia instead, though I haven't tried this)
1 tsp. baking soda

Crush the antacid tablets.  (I used a well cleaned electric coffee grinder to crush those things into a fine powder.)  In a bowl, mix the crushed antacid, the coconut oil, xylitol, and baking soda.  This should make a good paste the same consistency as the store bought stuff.  Pour into a small condiment container, or even a travel shampoo bottle, it just needs to have a screw-on lid with a hole so you can squeeze the toothpaste out.  There you have it!  Homemade hippie toothpaste with no fluoride, and at a fraction of the cost of the store bought stuff!  Happy brushing!