The video in words:
Dr. Hisham Abdalla: Hi, I’m Dr. Hisham, laser cosmetic dentist, and welcome to my home lab in my kitchen.
Human teeth last forever once we’re dead—literally forever. What is it that causes them to dissolve and decay and erode while we’re alive?
I’m here to show you in very simple home experiments what causes this problem and how you can avoid it. So what is it that dissolves human teeth or any kind of teeth or any kind of mineral? It’s acid.
There is only one thing that destroys teeth: acid. Where does acid come from?
There’s three source: One is food and drinks: what we take in. Two is bacteria in the mouth that ferment sugar to produce acid and literally pee that acid onto our teeth. The third source is from the stomach. If you have reflux, or you throw up a lot, or something like that, then that acid, which is very aggressive, comes back, and that can dissolve teeth.
Let me show you what food acids we consume the most, in terms of drinks and food, and how they react with the mineral in our teeth to dissolve the teeth, and how can we overcome that problem.
One of the most common acids that people consume is in lemons: citric acid. Actually, it’s in all citrus fruit, hence the word citrus fruit. It comes either as the fruit itself or the drinks we make out of them, or, of course, the extracted and dried form of citric acid, which is very common in preserved, canned food, in all preserved drinks. That’s energy drinks, fruit juices, and many other forms. I’ll show you some of those drinks later on, and we’ll talk about them specifically.
So people end up consuming a lot of citric acid, which, in itself, is a preservative for the product, but it is a very aggressive acid on teeth. What happens when we add an alkaline mineral to the acid? I’m going to use baking soda, which is sodium bicarbonate, an alkaline mineral, which is also what we have in teeth, an alkaline mineral with calcium. You get this fizzing, which is acid destroying the alkaline mineral, the baking soda, and that’s what happens when acid attacks our teeth.
So let’s see what happens when we soak normal human teeth in some very common drinks.
This is a cola drink, and the color change is because of the acid driving the color from within the tooth. And this is common, everyday orange juice, a more subtle color change there. This is a very common energy drink, very big color change there. And one of the most highly-consumed sports drinks, beautiful color change. Like I said, it’s the acid dissolving the tooth, driving the color from of the tooth itself. It’s not just a stain. This is obviously an exaggeration of what happens over a long period of time, consuming these, but we’re trying to make it happen in a very short period of time.
The point is the acid. So, whatever drink you’re drinking, and don’t be fooled by diet drinks, it’s the acid that is in all of these drinks, diet or non-diet, that destroys teeth.
Acid is not just in drinks that we consume every day, there is a lot of acid in many common mouth rinses, and when you soak the teeth in those acidic mouth rinses, you get another color change. Here' another one, a standard one from the supermarket, and you can see the color change there with acid.
To follow through from our first experiment, we’re gonna add the baking soda, the alkaline mineral, into these drinks and see what happens. What do you expect? Cola, the orange juice, the energy drink, and the sports drink: same fizzing reaction. We aren’t going to use the bicarbonate in the mouth rinses because they are weaker acids than the acids here, therefore there won’t be that much of a fizz. However, I’ll show you the acid level with a pH meter. This is actually how we measure the acidity or neutrality or alkalinity of any solution.
So anything below seven on a pH meter, from one to fourteen, one is very acidic, like battery acid, fourteen is like caustic soda: extremely alkaline, which is also not good either. Seven is neutral, which is what most of the body fluids are as well. Anything below seven is acid. The lower the number, the stronger the acid. Anything above seven is alkaline. Eight, nine is good, ten to fourteen is too alkaline for the human body. What we’re looking at here is 4.4. Citric acid would normally be about 2—2.5. This is 4.4. Weaker acid, however, is still acid, and that’s not very good to use every day.
To show this acid-mineral reaction again, we’re gonna use an egg, which has mineral on the outside shell like teeth have. When you put an egg in citric acid solution, you start to see the bubbles immediately start to form around the eggshell. And you’ll see that the eggshell is reacting with the acid. Basically, the acid is attacking the mineral, dissolving away, same bubbling reaction that we saw before. The eggs are dissolving to the extent that, if I showed you one that was soaked a few hours ago in citric acid, you’ll see very clearly what is happening to that eggshell. The eggshell is totally destroyed, and the longer you leave it, or the more acid you keep putting in, refreshing that acid, the more this eggshell will dissolve until there’s nothing left. There’s just a soft yolk.
What’s even worse is when the acid softens the mineral on the outside, if you brush it off, what I’m doing is scraping the mineral off with my finger, similar to what you’d do with a toothbrush.
Brushing your teeth away when they’ve just been acidified by orange juice, alcohol, vomiting, or something like that, you’re actually scrubbing that mineral away. It’s gone forever, and that’s how teeth become thinner and thinner and thinner. So don’t brush your teeth after an acid attack. Neutralize the acid so that it stops attacking your teeth, the mineral goes back in, and then you can brush later.
Now that we know acid is the worst thing that can attack teeth and anything that’s got mineral in it, surely you would think that anything we use to clean our teeth and take care of our mouths with is actually neutralizing that acid, because that’s part of the deal, isn’t it? Well, let’s see. We just take a conventional toothpaste and put a big blob of it in citric acid and try to dissolve that. First of all, it is hard to dissolve, some of it dissolves, some of it doesn’t, and the point is, it’s not reacting to neutralize the acid.
Let’s try something that actually is made to be alkaline while it cleans your mouth and kills bacteria and everything else, which is the Ozospa dental powder. There you see it: the alkaline minerals in the Ozospa powder neutralizing the acid that would have normally attacked and dissolved and destroyed your teeth.
And this is why I designed all of the Ozospa products in the whole system to be alkaline.
Now you know it! Your teeth should last forever as long as they don’t get attacked by acid. So be on acid alert.
Watch for where the acid is coming from in your life. How much are you eating or consuming or drinking of these acids? Try to cut down, that’s the first step, you try to cut down the attack, and then you try to increase the defense: alkaline stuff like green vegetables. If you just chew on a piece of cucumber or a parsley leaf, that’s alkalizing. It neutralizes the acid, and it’s easy and safe. You can use baking soda as a mouth rinse, a little bit in your mouth, or a piece of cheese. Even chewing a little bit of cheese is neutralizing to the acids. Or also you can use the Ozospa dental products, which we made to be alkaline and neutralizing, as we’ve just explained.