Admit it – there’s been many an occasion you’ve been standing there scrubbing your teeth, wondering why you can’t just do away with moral conduct and chow down on minty fresh toothpaste. Indeed, why aren’t we allowed to eat the stuff? We’re consenting adults – we want toothpaste sandwiches!

The sad reality is as follows – if you eat toothpaste you will begin frothing wildly at the mouth, become delusional, and then your brain will implode. This is due to fluoride, which is in most toothpaste. This stuff, when consumed in large quantities, will reduce you to a dribbling wreck. So… how does one replicate the toothpaste taste without succumbing to a fate worse than bad breath?

Toothpaste and Fluoride

The truth is usually hidden in the structure of a word, due to its etymological background and all that jazz. It’s easy to deduce toothpaste’s history and purpose – it’s a type of paste which is reserved for your teeth. If you rub it into your eyebrows, for instance, there will be no results (except some people might think you have dandruff in your eyebrows).

Fluoride is a tad more difficult to deduce in terms of its history, political leaning, and preference for brown or white bread. However, thanks to our genius minds we’ve solved it. Due to its two syllables, it’s clear flu-o-ride is a type of flu which hitches a ride on your teeth. Consequently, if it enters your gut and hitches a ride on your bowels, stomach lining, or oesophagus, you’ll gain a toothpaste version of the flu and die hideously (probably).

It’s as if these toothpaste companies are mocking you as you brush your teeth: “Here’s this minty deliciousness… you will not consume!” Which is kind of weird, because in the past we’ve consumed stuff like Red Bull, brake fluid (don’t ask), and anti-freeze (we thought it’d warm us up), but there aren’t government warnings about this, are there?! It’s ridiculous!

Centre Stage, Bonjela!

Then there’s bonjela, which is a sugar-free minty aniseed type thing which publicly ridicules and decimates any ulcers which have made friends with your mouth. It’s a bit like TCP (the pungent antiseptic fluid – it stands for Totally Crappy Putrescence), except it doesn’t make you want to run a mile and barf into a ditch.

Weird, isn’t it? Toothpaste, TCP, and bonjela… combine that lot together and you could have the world’s most effective, and disgusting, toothpaste known to humanity! Presumably, one isn’t allowed to drink TCP liberally either, the same with bonjela… but then we wouldn’t want to, so why are we all so fascinated with toothpaste? Well… we don’t bloody know, okay? Sometimes even we don’t have the answers. Sheesh!