Bear Flag Blog

So, I'll break the champagne bottle over this blog by inaugurating my first category: Useful Information. Although I fully intend to spend most of my time ranting or linking to things that make me rant, or more rarely to things which are cool, I also want to record and disseminate for the general public things that are useful and yet don't seem to have widespread awareness.

One of these things is: Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, in toothpaste, causes canker sores. If you suffer from canker sores, change your toothpaste to one that does not contain Sodium Lauryl Sulfate. Your canker sores will greatly decrease.

Now, before I get slapped with legal papers...

...

Now, before I get slapped with legal papers by Proctor & Gamble or Unilever or whoever makes 'Tom's of Maine', let me expand upon my statement. For many years - decades - I suffered from canker sores. Every three to six months a new crop would break out and cause me great distress for weeks. If I bit the interior of my mouth, that meant a guaranteed canker sore.

In my ignorance I worried that canker sores were akin to cold sores, i.e. were a form of herpes. Happily, they are nothing of the sort - canker sores are an auto-immune misreaction. Your body's immune system is attacking the interior lining of your mouth. They are thus in no way communicable.

Even more fortunately, I read somewhere on the Internet (repository of all information, both true and false) that Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, in toothpaste, was a cause of canker sores. This hadn't been scientifically proven and seemed like a slightly wacky theory - especially given the website's use of rainbow colors and the blink tag - but I was in pain and willing to try anything.

I went down to my local organic market and found that, with the exception of they SLS-loving Tom's of Maine, none of the many toothpastes they sold contained any SLS. Hooray! However, none of them contained any fluoride, either!

I'm not someone who believes that capitalist industry is out to harm people. I lived in a town that voted to ban adding fluoride to the muncipal water supply, because people there are stupid. I believe in science. Fluoride works. Toothpaste without fluoride is, in my opinion, about as useful as a eunuch's erect penis.

Fortunately, after much rummaging, I found a brand with both fluoride and no sodium lauryl sulfate. It had a silly name (J/A/S/O/N, with the various letters adorned with umlauts and accent graves and other dumbass flourishes) but it tasted okay and seemed to do the trick.

Since then - many years ago at this point - I have had perhaps three canker sores per year. If I bite my mouth, I don't get a canker sore any more. I still use J/A/S/O/N toothpaste. The sort with fluoride.

Other canker sore sufferers (I.F., I'm looking at you) have related similar stories to me. Find a toothpaste without SLS, and 90% of your canker sore outbreaks just go away.

Sodium Lauryl Sulfate is a detergent. It's in shampoo. It foams. In fact, the foaminess of it is why it's added to toothpaste. People want their toothpaste to foam. Makes it seem like it's working. For most of the population that's just fine. But for some of us, the SLS irritates the lining of our mouth enough to cause our immune system to attack it.

So. If you are a canker sore sufferer, change your toothpaste. This will require a trip to an organic grocery store since, as far as I can tell, all of the major store brands contain SLS. It also means you will pay $12 rather than $6 dollars for a tube.

But how much are you willing to pay, to not be in pain?