Home made Ayurvedic tooth powder, or garam masala for your mouth!

All the way from West Africa to India, I’ve watched people clean their teeth by chewing laboriously on improbably bitter neem sticks. My maternal grandfather used umikari, a combination of charred rice husk and salt, and “monkey brand” tooth powder giving his gums daily massages which he swore were the reason behind his long, robust oral health. So when the younger of my two boys returned from a visit to his grandparents with a newspaper clipping of a recipe for a tooth powder that promised the flavors of garam masala in my mouth–I jumped at it. 

The Indian kitchen is an apothecary. A richer one or a sparser one, but an apothecary nonetheless. Any kitchen that has produced a rasam for a cold, any cook who has bought one bunch of greens for their warming or cooling properties, or treated joint pains with an additive to dosa batter, prescribed daily intake of soaked methi seeds for menstrual cramps, or even simply added turmeric to hot milk with a little black pepper (well before the age of so-called “golden lattes”), knows well that feeding the body is also and always about making fine-tuned daily medicinal adjustments in response to illness, the weather, the altitude, ageing, the time of the month. “Folk knowledge” and your grandmother’s “home-remedies”–these are not just about ingredients or recipes, but whole ways of being in the world. உணவே மருந்து, மருந்தே உணவு …as the Tamil Siddha saying goes. Unave marunthu, marunthe unavu: food is medicine, medicine is food.

These are insights that are barely accessible to the Western world where “insurance companies are set up to pay for medication, not lifestyle change; and physicians are taught pharmacology, not nutrition” and where juice bars have long set the bar for chic heath-consciousness. Those heavily processed environments, all solutions come in the form of products, be these drugs or ‘heart-healthy’ bottles of POM. But that story is unraveling. Studies are finding that diet and lifestyle change result in dramatic improvements for Alzheimer’s patients, and individuals finely crafting their diets find routes to reverse type-2 diabetes. We’ve forgotten the importance of chewing, and we ignore the worth of the “skin on an apple, the seeds in raspberries and the membranes that hold orange segments together” when we assume that a juiced fruit has the same nutritional value as a whole one. Similarly, we’ve forgotten the importance of rubbing our gums and we ignore the worth of daily massages when we assume that pastes do the same work as powders. 

They don’t. I’m not waiting for a study to confirm it. Never mind that we have no real idea what goes into making tooth pastes, the point is they hardly encourage you to massage your gums daily or really work to get plaque out. Aside from the big claim to fighting cavities with fluoride, we don’t really know what they do for oral health, and whether we could well be doing more. 

To boot, our contemporary toothpastes come in type#4 plastic tubes which are technically recyclable but practically never included in recycling collections. Not to speak of the use of plastic toothbrushes, though I know bamboo ones are becoming more available and viable these days.

A one-stop-shop solution is just tooth powder made mostly from common household and natural ingredients long known to Ayurvedic physicians, along with the use of your very own very tactile, versatile finger (or neem sticks, if you can find them and if you have the patience to chew them into toothbrush-like ends).

Here then is a spice-mix to clean your teeth–a garam masala for your mouth. Which tells us, among other things, that ingestable spices can have topical applications also, in much the sense that tamarind can be a digestive aid and a scrub for dulled brass. 

The recipe follows, along with explanations of each ingredient.  Note please that each ingredient has not one, but several curative properties, depending on mode of use. While these tooth powders are assembled on the assumption that miniscule amounts will invariably be ingested, note that they’re not meant to be in this preparation. 

A shout-out here to the author of the 2014 column in The Hindu whose recipe got me started on this path. I don’t know her name (I recall the voice as being that of a woman), because I didn’t see fit at the time to record anything other than the list of ingredients–a decision I now regret. I recall the year only because it was associated with a family visit. I have made an adjustment or two (adding umikari with salt, neem) but the core recipe comes from that original source, which I have since been unable to track and find.

Garam masala for your teeth!

• 1 part whole green cardamom — refreshing, anti-bacterial
• 1 part cloves  — mouth-freshning, anti-bacterial
• 1 part cinnamon bark  — mouth-freshning, anti-bacterial
• 1 part neem bark (preferably) or neem leaf powder– antibacterial, anti-fungal, anti-inflammatory, whitening; used in treatment of gum disease
• 2 parts pure sea salt — whitening, antiseptic
• 1 1/2 parts fennel — mouth-freshning, digestive aid
• 1 1/2 parts masiphala or oak galls —quercus infectoria–used to treat oral inflammation (including gingivitis), mouth ulcers and other oral wounds; has antiseptic properties
• 1 1/2 parts jatiphala or nutmeg — antiseptic, pain-relieving, contains re-mineralizing trace elements: manganese, potassium, iron and calcium
• 1 part trikatu (three pungents: ginger, black pepper, and long pepper in a 1:1:1 ratio), each credited with wide-ranging topical and ingested medicinal virtues, including the stimulation of healthy digestion
  • Ginger, Zingiber officinale–thought to have originated in Gingi, near Pondicherry, and thus acquired the name “inji” in Tamil, and eventually “ginger,” though in Sanskrit it is srngaveram, ‘of horned appearance’ (referring to its shape). [Source: Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne, A History of Food, 2008: 447]–used here in dried form or “sukku.”
  • Black pepper, Piper nigrum, milagu
  • Long pepper, Piper longum, thippili–the origin of the name “pepper” (see below)
• 1 part triphala (3 myrobalans: haritaki, bibhitaki, and amalaki in a 1:1:1 ratio)
  • Amla, Amalaki, Indian gooseberry, emblic myrobalans (Phyllanthus emblica), Emblica officinalis — astringent, anti-bacterial, digestive
  • Bibhitaki, fruit of the aksha tree, Belliric myrobalans (Terminalia bellirica) — astringent, anti-inflammatory, used to control mouth odours and ulcers
  • Haritaki, Harad (Hindi), Ink nut, Chebulic myrobalans (Terminalia chebula) — digestive, purgative, effective in treating mouth ulcers
• 1 part pure camphor — Cinnamomum camphora–karpuura–used to treat Pyorrhoea or periodontitis, and skin disorders. Also acts as a preservative.
• Up to 1 part umikari (without salt, preferably, but with only salt added is ok, too), but see the note below

A word about peppers

“Three hundred years before our own era Theophrastus, the disciple of Aristotle and Plato, wrote his Inquiry into Plants, the first true European botanical treatise, naming those plants of Asiatic origin which had reached Europe in the aftermath of Alexander’s conquests. He explains the difference between the two peppers. One is a round seed, resembling the bayberry. The other, preferred in classical times, is a long seed, and has a stronger flavour. That flavour, which is in fact rather bitter, may explain the Romans’ preference; their palates were not nearly as refined as they liked to think. Theophrastus says that the main use of pepper is as an antidote…” [Source: Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne, A History of Food, 2008: 443]

Pepper is among the oldest known and longest used of any Indian spice, described in Ayurvedic texts as medicament more than ingredient. Hippocrates is the first European to mention it; Pliny tells us it was once “bought by weight like gold or silver.” The Romans knew both ordinary peppercorns as well as long pepper and preferred the latter; it was once indispensable to Roman gastronomy. The word “pepper” derives, of course, from the Indian “pippali.” In India, pippali is known to have detoxifying and digestive properties in addition to being important to “rasayana” therapies (rasa+ayana, or the pathway for the essence), improving absorption and bioavailability of other nutrients.

The two pepper forms become a trio of pungents with dry ginger added–tri-katu

Trikatu, or the 3 pungents: ginger, round black pepper, long pepper

Triphala, or the 3 myrobalans: bibhitaki, haritaki, and amalaki

Method of Preparation

Assemble all the ingredients except camphor and umikari in the right proportions and using a fixed (i.e. 1 cup or 1/2 cup) measure as “1 part”. There will be slight variations in weight here and there, and that’s ok.

Grind these in small batches. A coffee grinder or other heavy-duty spice grinder is optimal. You may need to use a mortar and pestle to crush some of these first, before you grind.

Next, sieve the whole ground mixture to separate the larger particles that will still remain. Return the larger bits to the grinder again, and repeat the sieving process until you have a reasonably consistent, fine powder. What you are looking for is a powder about as fine as commercially ground rice flour–this was from a dentist to whom I spoke about this. Discard any bits that refuse to be ground.

Now add the camphor, blitz a few times to powder finely. Divide this mixture into two bottles with tight-fitting caps.

To one half of the tooth powder, add the umikari. Leave the other half without. This allows you to use the more abrasive powder less frequently than the one with umikari added–use that consciously, only when you want a plaque-removing cleansing (about once a week). The powder without umikari is fine for daily use, provided it’s as fine a mix as you can possibly have made it.

Have fun massaging your gums! You’re doing good things for your mouth and teeth!