Oral Health Link to Whole Body Health: A Blog

Do Whitening Chewing Gums Really Make Your Teeth Whiter?

19 May 2016

Duane Kelly

Used as part of your dental hygiene routine, chewing sugar-free gum can help keep your teeth and gums healthier. Some gums also claim to have properties that may whiten your teeth as well as keep them healthy. How can a gum make your teeth look whiter and how much of a difference might a whitening gum make?

Chewing Gum Gives You More Saliva

When you chew any sugar-free gum, your mouth gets wetter. The action of chewing stimulates your salivary glands, adding saliva to your mouth. This fluid is a useful oral cleanser. As saliva washes around your teeth, it cleans off food particles and plaque and helps protect your mouth against tooth-harmful substances such as sugars and acids.

As well as keeping your mouth in a good condition, extra saliva may also help keep your teeth cleaner. Plaque can make your teeth look a little grey; if plaque turns into tartar, your teeth may look more yellow or stained. Your saliva can help wash plaque off your teeth before it takes hold and turns into tartar; it may also prevent staining foods from getting a grip on your teeth by washing them off.

Whitening Gums May Contain Cleaning Agents

If you chew a sugar-free gum with whitening properties, you get the general benefits of chewing a gum with some added extras. Typically, whitening gums contain additional ingredients that target tooth whitening. For example, gums may contain tiny amounts of abrasives, such as baking soda. As you chew, the abrasive ingredients in the gum are supposed to rub against stains and remove them from your teeth.

Some gums also contain ingredients that can make your teeth look whiter by preventing stains from taking hold in the first place. Alternatively, these ingredients may break existing stains down. For example, a study on the dental effects of sodium hexametaphosphate in a chewing gum found that the gum actively helped prevent staining and made stain removal easier.

How Effective Are Whitening Chewing Gums?

Any chewing gum may make your teeth look a little cleaner, especially during the day and early evening when you are between your regular toothbrushing times. A whitening gum may add something to the mix by focusing on stain prevention and removal. While chewing gum may help keep your teeth looking whiter, gums won't change the colour of your teeth. It's important to remember that gums have a cleaning rather than a bleaching effect.

If you are looking for a better whiteness boost, you may want to start by having a professional clean and polish at your dental practice. This will clean off existing staining; it will also deal with any plaque and tartar that have built up on your teeth. Once you know how white your teeth look under all that, you can decide whether to have your teeth professionally whitened at a dental practice.

Share