Toothpaste and Other Non-Food Items

Toothpaste can contain a great deal of glycerin, plus emulsifiers and flavours, none of which need be certified. It goes in your mouth. And it is widely used without certification — for reasons that are instructive about how this category works.

The first line of reasoning

Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky held that uncertified toothpaste could be used even where it might contain as much as thirty per cent glycerin along with potentially non-kosher emulsifiers and flavours.

The argument rests on what toothpaste mostly is. Historically the primary ingredient was calcium carbonate — chalk — which is not edible. Where the bulk of a mixture is not food, the principle that taste is treated as substance does not apply in the usual way, and it is enough that the non-kosher components are outnumbered by a simple majority rather than by the larger proportion.

The second line of reasoning

Rav Schachter accepts that reasoning and adds a further one that is simpler and reaches further: toothpaste is nifsal mei'achila — unfit for consumption as food.

On that view it is permitted regardless of the proportions, because it is not food at all. You are not eating it; you are cleaning your teeth with it and spitting it out.

The difference matters, because the first argument depends on facts about the formulation and the second does not.

Why that difference became practical

A survey of more than twenty-five varieties across five brands found the formulation had shifted. Calcium carbonate is largely no longer used, replaced by hydrated silica — also a non-food item, so far so good.

But hydrated silica is generally not the primary ingredient. Even where it is listed first, the edible ingredients together — glycerin, sorbitol and water — may well outweigh it.

And there is a subtlety that catches people. Manufacturers list ingredients by weight; nullification is reckoned by volume. Hydrated silica and calcium carbonate are considerably denser than the food ingredients around them. So a label stating there is more silica than glycerin may, in the terms that actually matter, mean the opposite.

That is a good illustration of why reading an ingredient panel is not the same as answering a halachic question.

The general principle

What carries across to other products is this: something genuinely unfit to be eaten is not food, and the food prohibitions do not straightforwardly attach to it. That reasoning is what lies behind the lenient treatment of a range of items people worry about unnecessarily.

It also has limits, and they are exactly where you should ask rather than extrapolate — mouthwash, lipstick, chewable anything, and products genuinely intended to be swallowed are all different cases.

Your rav will tell you what your household should use.