A couple years ago on a trip to Korea I bought a few tubes of gold toothpaste. Or at least, that’s what the shiny golden box says — “500 PPM Au”, which is the only Latin-script text on it. A Korean colleague of mine read the rest of the box and confirmed that the toothpaste is said to contain gold. Strangely, it’s touted as helping lower blood pressure — no mention of any benefits to, you know, dental hygiene.
I’m assuming the blood pressure claim is bunkum. But are there any other advantages (or disadvantages) to brushing one’s teeth with toothpaste containing 500 parts per million of gold? I would think that metal is a pretty abrasive thing to put in toothpaste, but then again, gold is pretty soft, and I guess the concentration is pretty low. Is gold any harder than the usual scrubbing ingredients in toothpaste, such as chalk and baking soda? Will regular brushing with my golden Korean toothpaste make my teeth literally sparkle?
It is just a marketing ploy. It doesn’t help or hurt anything in the long-term because, as you said, pure gold is really soft. It is perfectly safe to eat or drink pure gold in small amounts. It is non-reactive and indigestible so it just goes right through you. The cool thing about gold is that a tiny amount can go a very long way because it is so malleable. It can be pounded into incredibly thin sheets that can be turned into gold leaf that can be added to desserts, fancy drinks or toothpaste. Some people think it looks really fancy but the overall quantity and cost of the gold content is extremely small.
During my medic days in the service, about a million years ago, gold therapy was touted for arthritis. Never heard of it being used for any other application. Live and learn.
I suspect it’s one of those snake-oil “natural remedies”, like rhino horns and shark fins, beloved of certain Chinese medicine traditionalists. I bought the toothpaste from a shop in Kaesong frequented by Chinese tourists; the entire display was in Chinese. I had to call the staff over to ask what the heck it was they were making such a big deal over.
Just for reference, edible gold leaf can easily be bought for 50 cents a sheet or less. A tube of toothpaste probably uses a fraction of a sheet so that is an excellent way to make something seem luxurious and jack up the price when even though it costs a minuscule amount. Come to think of it, I may have to start gold leafing everything myself.
I know it’s safe to eat, but eating is not the same thing as aggressively grinding it against your enamel for two minutes three times a day. That’s why I was wondering how its abrasiveness compares with typical toothpaste ingredients. Maybe gold, soft as it is, is still harder than tooth enamel, in which case it will erode your teeth (though maybe not much at the concentration used in this toothpaste).
Gold is 2.5 on the Mohs scale; apatite (the major component of tooth enamel) is 5. So teeth are quite a bit harder. I believe an old test for gold coins was to bite down on them to leave a mark.
And if you swallow one of those pills, the perfect place to excrete it is at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, in which one restroom has a fully functional 18-karat solid gold toilet.
J Hist Med Allied Sci. 2004 Jan;59(1):50-89.
The history of gold therapy for tuberculosis.
Benedek TG1.
Abstract
This is a historical study of the popularization of a medical therapy contrary to pertinent experimental findings. Presumably this circumstance reflects the desperation about tuberculosis: highly prevalent, highly fatal, and lacking any etiologically directed therapy. Gold compounds were introduced, based initially on the reputation of Robert Koch, who had found gold cyanide effective against M. tuberculosis in cultures, but not in experimentally infected animals. Treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis with these compounds was popularized, particularly by Danish physicians, in the mid-1920s, despite consistently negative experimental results, based on Paul Ehrlich’s theories of antimicrobial drug effects. Difficulties in the design of interpretable clinical studies were soon recognized but also generally ignored, thus permitting data to be interpreted as favorable to antituberculous gold therapy. Eventually toxicity was considered to outweigh the alleged therapeutic benefit of all gold compounds. This resulted in their discard shortly before the introduction of streptomycin therapy.
Solid gold, huh? How on earth do they prevent people from breaking or scraping off parts of it to sell? Do you need to go through a metal detector use it?
And hydrated silica is a likely abrasive in your toothpaste. Silica by itself is around 7. At the small particle size and level of hydration it’s present in the makers are going to claim it’s not a problem with proper use. Some sources disagree. But the alternate abrasives they might suggest are all likely harder than gold.
I remember two cases in particular. Two patients who had been getting regular monthly injections of a gold compound, were inadvertently administered a dosage of 10 times the usual amount. The doctors weren’t all that worried, but they did receive some sort of chelation(IIRC) therapy afterwards, to make the gold precipitate, which would’ve lead to quicker excretion. The patients took it all in stride, and though unrelated, referred to themselves as “The Gold Dust Twins.”