Does calcium carbonate remineralise teeth anywhere near as well as fluoride is supposed to?
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no, it does not. calcium carbonate doesn’t bind to your teeth, whereas the fluoride does, as well as helping the natural calcium in your saliva rebind to your teeth.
think of the fluoride as a very special epoxy that sticks to calcium and makes it stronger, as well as causing saliva calcium to stick to the places bacteria and acid caused to lose calcium.
by itself, calcium carbonate won’t interact with your teeth positively, although in certain forms a little bit *with* a fluoride *might* help remineralization.
No, for two main reasons. First the calcium carbonate cannot absorb into teeth to remineralize in any effective way. Teeth just don’t soak stuff into them that way. Calcium carbonate is added to toothpaste as a gentle abrasive, not to become part of the teeth.
The second reason is that fluoride doesn’t remineralize teeth either. Instead the fluoride reacts with hydroxyapatite crystals already present within the teeth to form fluorapatite which is more resistant to tooth decay. It isn’t adding minerals to your teeth, it is changing the minerals already there into a more durable kind.
My dentist told me to brush my teeth with 2000 ppm fluoride while most toothpaste have 1450 ppm; could we reach the same goal by putting more paste or brushing more often?
Hydroxyapatite (from calcium) which is found in your bones is much weaker than the fluorapatite (from fluoride) found in your teeth
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