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Comment by trws | Hacker News Reader

What do you consider necessary for “good quality toothpaste?”

I’m not OP or american, but i can comment. >1,500ppm concentration of fluoride is prescription only (so you either pay for a pointless dentist visit or get it on the grey market), despite being safe and much more effective at remineralisation. There are also experimental ingredients such as nanohydroxyapatite and Novamin which are difficult to find on the american market due to the FDA

Novamin used to be available via Sensodyne Pronamel in Canada. I was surprised to see that at some point it disappeared from our market - no longer able to buy at any grocery store or pharmacy or on Amazon, whereas it used to be available in all of these places.

It's now in Sensodyne repair and protect and I usually buy it from walmart.ca 6-10 tubes at a time. There was about 2 years there where I had to buy it on ebay shipped from India though. I did try Biomin and I think that even if the material performs better than novamin, the rest of the toothpaste is so inferior to sensodyne that as a whole it works worse, for me at least.

It's still available, look for "Sensodyne Repair and Protect" (no other name). Shoppers Drug Mart has it, Superstore, Walmart, etc. Most everywhere. We also have other options here with nanohydroxyapatite that are easy to get too, from X-Pur to Davids Toothpaste. Those products tend to be more expensive though due to higher %, whereas Sensodyne tops out at 5% Novamin.

Also as a Canadian you should avoid Amazon for groceries and most hygiene goods, they're overpriced even compared to Shoppers Drug Mart most of the time, half of the time the goods aren't even offered by the company but instead by a random middleman charging absurd markup.

IME high fluoride can agitate the digestive system, so perhaps the limit is for good reason?

Don't swallow the toothpaste!

I don't.

Novamin works wonders. It took me the last 30% of the way to not being sensitive to heat/cold/acid.i got about 20% there with just normal sensodyne toothpaste and another big chunk with vitamin k complex and vitamin d supplementation (this took about six months to be really noticeable). The order was dictated by me figuring out what i wanted to try and general availability in the case of novamin. So i cant really say if the relative help from each intervention would be different if tried in a different order unfortunately.

For the record, the only clinical evidence about Novamin is very vague.

Just try it for a week. The glassiness feeling it imparts to your teeth is real.

For the record, the rest of the stuff I mentioned has middling evidence for effectiveness as well, it's just the things that worked out of the myriad of things I tried that didn't. The vitamin k complex and d thing especially has limited evidence (and recently a paper came out that showed k2 increasing artery calcification, which is concerning but maybe not as bad as one thinks since the really dangerous part of arterial calcification is when it is in process. it also didn't control for vitamin d status and the hypothesis of k2 causing bone/teeth remineralization and not soft tissue mineralization usually hinges on d status being adequate).

Reminds me a lot of my struggle with migraines before the recent, good treatments came out. I was facing a certainty of at least one migraine per day everyday of my life. Led me to trying all sorts of stuff. Not exactly the best experience but better than migraines.

I just tinker as a hobby. If i live long enough even the minor annoyances in my life will eventually get iterated on and improved. The teeth thing was a medium to major annoyance so got attention first.

Warning: Excessive fluoride is known to stain teeth with white steaks. You see it a lot in people who drink certain types of Chinese tea, high in fluoride.

This is called fluorosis and it only affects children. Ingestion of excess fluoride in early life changes the development of permanent teeth and causes white speckles.

Carifree sells (expensive) hydroxyapatite toothpaste in the US.

> >1,500ppm concentration of fluoride is prescription only

Man that's silly. Where I am (Australia), 5000ppm is chemist-only, but doesn't need a prescription

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