Are Fruits a Good Natural Teeth Whitener?
There are many who advise against using commercial teeth whitening products, suggesting several natural alternatives instead. One of the most popular alternatives that gets mentioned almost every time is fruit. Two fruits in particular are favored: lemons and strawberries. The idea is that you can use a mix of lemon juice and salt, or perhaps even rub the inside of a lemon peel across your teeth, or else you can mash up some strawberries and actually brush your teeth with them.
So how well do they actually work? Those who advocate the use of these fruits as natural whiteners often claim that a noticeable improvement in the color of the teeth will be seen as early as a few days after you start using them. And this may indeed be the result. But despite these glowing reports, using lemons or strawberries may not turn out to be the best solution after all, healthy as they both seem.
What happens with lemons is that the citric acid leeches calcium from the tooth enamel. It’s actually this calcium that causes the teeth to be a sort of off white rather than white color, so removing it will certainly fulfill the promise of helping to make the teeth much whiter. Yet your teeth need calcium to be strong and healthy, so this use of lemon would in fact be making them weaker. The enamel would become thinner, and you know that fruit contains sugar, so obviously more cavities would be the inevitable result.
And unfortunately, strawberries don’t fare much better. To begin with, the seeds act as an abrasive and can scrape and damage the teeth by being brushed across them too vigorously. And these berries, just like lemons, contain acid that can damage the enamel on the surface of the teeth. In fact, the acid actually makes the enamel softer, even when you’re merely eating strawberries and aren’t mashing them across the teeth. Because of this, even after simply eating these berries, some advise that you wait twenty minutes before brushing your teeth, which would give your saliva a chance to replenish the minerals in the enamel. If this is a worry after only eating strawberries whole, then actually using a mashed strawberry pulp to brush your teeth is not a good idea at all.
There are some things anyone must consider when looking for a non-commercial teeth whitening method. One is that not everyone’s natural tooth color is pure white, so any measures they take to try to make their teeth that color will inevitably be damaging to their teeth. The enamel is semi-translucent, meaning the color of the material underneath it is what determines most of its color. And that material, the dentin, is often yellowish.
This means that another side effect specific to using lemons or strawberries is that as the enamel on your teeth erodes, it will become easier to see the deeper layers beneath it. And that, in turn, means that the final color of your teeth will likely be more yellowish than it was when you started. It may turn out to be much more important that you keep your teeth healthy than that you make them whiter. But if you still want to try, using lemons or strawberries is not a good idea.
