Can baking soda whiten teeth?

Baking soda, also known as sodium bicarbonate, plays an important role in medicine, cleaning, food, beauty, chemical industry and many other fields. According to folklore, putting a little baking soda in toothpaste when brushing teeth can make teeth whiten quickly, so does it have the magical effect of whitening teeth spread by the people? We need to analyze and judge the physical and chemical properties of baking soda itself.

Baking soda is weakly alkaline when dissolved in water, and can be used to clean household dirt and deodorize. These properties of baking soda show that it does have the function of cleaning and decontamination. Therefore, many people firmly believe that adding baking soda to toothpaste will have a miraculous effect on tooth whitening, and even an attractive label for rapid tooth whitening has appeared. From a scientific point of view, we confirm that baking soda can help to decontaminate teeth. First, adding baking soda to toothpaste can make baking soda particles directly rub teeth and help clean tartar. Secondly, baking soda has a slight corrosive effect, showing a weak alkaline environment when it meets water, while the environment in which tartar grows is weak acid. Therefore, adding baking soda to toothpaste can destroy the environment where tartar grows, thus removing tartar.

But there are a few points that deserve our scrutiny.

First of all, many toothpastes on the market can achieve the effect of baking soda, and the effect is not worse than baking soda. Toothpaste+baking soda does not necessarily have the effect of 1+ 1=2. Even because of the proportion or other factors, it is better to believe the research results of regular toothpaste manufacturers and use their own formula to make special toothpaste.

Secondly, I believe you have some experience. The whitening effect of baking soda on teeth is not obvious. The whitening mechanism of baking soda is similar to that of toothpaste, which helps to clean tartar, but it has no obvious effect on the pigment deeply attached to the tooth surface, so it is not a quick whitening. Some methods that can really achieve rapid whitening, including cold light whitening and tooth bleaching, are completely different from baking soda. They use high-intensity light with a specific wavelength to initiate free radical redox pigment molecules to achieve rapid whitening.

In this way, it seems that it is difficult to achieve satisfactory results by simply removing tartar with baking soda for rapid tooth whitening. Friends who want to whiten their teeth had better go to a regular stomatological hospital instead of relying on some so-called folk remedies.