Green Tea Removes Plaque Better Than Cancer-Causing Listerine

Like flossing, rinsing your mouth with mouthwash is a regular part of many people’s oral care routine. However, if you’re not careful, the mouthwash you’re using could be doing more harm than good.

Dangers of Listerine

The popular mouthwash brand Listerine – and other mouthwashes containing alcohol – has been proven to increase your risk of developing oral cancer. This cancer that appears in the mouth takes the life of one American every hour.

The alcohol found in Listerine and other store-bought mouthwashes causes a dryness in your mouth. Most of us experience this dryness as that burning sensation. It is this dryness that causes more of your cells to die, potentially leading to cancer.

Making Your Own Mouthwash

A safer – and cheaper – form of mouthwash may be sitting in your kitchen cupboard right now. But first, the oral health benefits of a vegetarian diet ought to be noted.

Do vegetarians have better teeth?

The effects of a vegetarian diet on systemic diseases like cancer, diabetes, and heart diseases have been studied and have revealed predominantly less systemic diseases in those eating plant-based diets. However, there have only been a few studies on oral health.

What’s the latest? In a study of 100 vegetarians compared to a 100 non-vegetarians, the vegetarians had better periodontal conditions, showing less signs of inflammation like gum bleeding, less periodontal damage, and better dental home care, brushing and flossing 2.17 times a day compared to 2.02 times a day.

The difference in home hygiene is not that large, though, so maybe it was something about their diet. However, vegetarians may have a healthier lifestyle overall beyond just avoiding meat.

The researchers controlled for smoking, but other factors like obesity can adversely affect oral health, so there may be confounding factors. What we need is an interventional study, where researchers take people eating the standard Western diet, improve their diets, and see what happens. But no such study existed… until now.

The link between diet and health

With professional support of nutritionists, the participants of the study with existing periodontal disease changed their dietary patterns to so-called “wholesome nutrition,” a diet emphasizing veggies, fruits, whole grains, potatoes, beans, peas, lentils, and spices, with water as the preferred beverage. To make sure any changes they witnessed were due to the diet, researchers made subjects maintain their same oral hygiene before and after the dietary change.

What did they find?

They found that eating healthier appeared to lead to a significant reduction of probing pocket depth, gingival inflammation, and levels of inflammatory cytokines, which mediate the tissue destruction in periodontal disease. Therefore, the researchers conclude that wholesome nutrition may improve periodontal health.

Why might diet help? Plant-based diets have a number of nutritional benefits in terms of nutrient density, but it also may be about improving balance between free radicals and our antioxidant defense system. Traditionally, dietary advice for oral health was just about avoiding sugar, which feed the bad bacteria on our teeth. We now realize that some foods and beverages, like green tea, possess antimicrobial properties to combat the plaque producing bacteria directly.

The effects of green tea on oral health

If plaque is caused by bacteria, why not use antibiotics? Many such attempts have been made, however undesirable side-effects such as “antibiotic resistance, vomiting, diarrhea and teeth stains have precluded their use.” In a petri dish, green tea phytonutrients effectively inhibit the growth of these bacteria, but what about in our mouths?

Researchers found that rinsing with green tea strongly inhibited the growth of the plaque bacteria on our teeth within minutes. Seven minutes after swishing with green tea, the number of harmful bacteria in the plaque scraped from people’s teeth was cut nearly in half.