It used to be that the mouth could clean itself. The oral microflora kept the discreet parts of your mouth running the way they should…

The teeth, gingival sulcus, tongue, cheeks, hard and soft palates, and tonsils. Each of those separate areas is its own ecosystem. And ecosystems are designed by nature to regulate themselves through a delicate balance of bacteria. 

And then we discovered sugar cane. And refined carbohydrates. Even citrus fruits can turn your mouth into the devil’s playground.

From there, you know the rest.

Cavities are rampant. Root canals. Periodontal disease. Bleeding gums. And oral health is much more insidious than we think – when debris and bad bacteria can find a path underneath the gums, they can travel through the bloodstream to the brain, heart, lungs, and more. 

But much like the ecosystem of the gut flora, we’ve learned that the best way to win a fight against unhealthy bacteria isn’t by killing bacteria with antibiotics and antibacterial products…

It’s bringing in the good guy bacteria to overpower the bad.

You see, the bad isn’t supposed to be there. It isn’t natural for bad bacteria like Streptococcus mutans, a particularly vicious strain, to not only survive but thrive.

We’re giving it all the tools it needs to breed. 

The S. Mutans Breeding Ground

Here’s what you need to know about this strain of bacteria: 

• It eats sugar (and anything that turns into sugar – like refined carbohydrates.)
• When it gets fed lots of sugar, its population grows. It reproduces.
• When it actually eats the sugar, it’s able to produce lactic acid.
• Lactic acid is your mouth’s worst nightmare. 

Let’s talk about lactic acid a little bit.

In the body, it shows up all kinds of places. The body will produce lactic acid if it’s fed too much sugar, if it’s low on oxygen (necessary for the conversion of glucose into energy), and that lactic acid can lead to erosion in the body, muscle cramping, cell degeneration, and in this case…

It’s your mouth’s major enemy because it eats away at the calcium phosphate in tooth enamel. That first step allows a cavity to form. Once there’s a hole in your tooth, you’ve vulnerable to blood infections, gum disease, brain disease, and more, not to mention painful correctional surgeries.

So let’s review: S. mutans? Bad. Lactic acid? Real bad.

Where’s a hero when you need one?

Enter A12 and the Probiotic Army 

We take probiotics to encourage the helpful flora in our guts to flourish.

Scientists are suggesting the oral flora needs the same kind of attention.

A bacterial strain called A12 has been shown to stop S. mutans in its tracks. Not an easy thing to do, because the very nature of S. mutans creates an environment in the mouth almost too hostile for bacteria to survive. 

But A12’s plan of attack is triple-faceted. 

Here’s how it combats S. mutans…

1. First, it can produce hydrogen peroxide. If you’ve ever poured hydrogen peroxide onto a scraped knee, you know its purpose: it kills bad bacteria.

2. It prevents a biofilm from forming on the teeth by disrupting chemical message signalling. Simply put? In order to form a biofilm, or plaque, S. mutans must be able to communicate with other bacteria in the mouth. A12 acts like a scrambler and renders communication useless.

3. And finally, it produces ammonia. If you don’t remember from high school chemistry, ammonia is basic. It neutralizes the effect of acid… as in, lactic acid.

The more we promote A12 in the oral microbiome, the more we overpower S. mutans.

And that’s only the beginning.

Scientists and field experts are only recently starting to open wide and say “Ahhh,” examining the mouth as the hot seat of more than 200 unique bacterial strains, each having a different effect on our overall health.

And even while they’re making incredible strides in their research…

You shouldn’t expect to see any of their groundbreaking findings make their way into your dentist’s office any time soon.

No, to stay on the cutting edge…

You have to travel to the fringes of the medical community. Where the experiments and trials are being conducted. 

Where like-minded, curious, educated, and brilliant doctors are pushing through the barriers of mainstream dental health.
Click here to watch them do it, and find out the truth about what’s living in your mouth.

The post One Crucial Bug Living in your Mouth appeared first on The Urban Monk.

Probably.

About 90% of the population admits to it. 

Bleeding gums, as we know, is generally a sign that your gums are inflamed. And if there’s anything we know about inflammation, it’s that it’s bad news when any body part is inflamed. It’s a symptom of infection. It means something isn’t right.

If you’re like most of the population, your understanding of what goes on in your mouth is limited. Basically, you notice when something out of the ordinary happens. But… 

What if — in a country where nearly a hundred million people don’t have dental healthcare or can’t afford elective surgeries, exploratory appointments, or experimental treatments — poor oral health is normal?

What most people don’t know…

Is that poor oral hygiene is much more insidious than they think. 

And part of the problem?

The way that we’re brushing our teeth.

Hurting Yourself in the Name of Health

Brushing your teeth twice in a day is the recommended standard. But don’t pat yourself on the back once you’re finished — it’s entirely likely that you’ve done more harm than good.

There are a bunch of cardinal errors we’re making as a population that are negatively affecting the state of our mouths, and in fact, our entire bodies. (More on that later.)

Let’s cover some of the biggest mistakes we make brushing our teeth…

1. Bristle Strength: You might think: “harder bristles, tougher on plaque.” But you would be wrong.

Dentists actually recommend soft bristles. The reason is that soft bristles can bend, and can therefore sneak underneath the gums and into corners where food particles would otherwise be lost. 

And since gums bleed when they’re inflamed… and a cause of inflammation can be food particles getting trapped in the gums…

It’s critical that your toothbrush can move the food, bacteria, and plaque away from your teeth and gums. 

2. Brush Strength: Similarly, bearing down with Herculean force onto your teeth is actually a huge problem… 

You see, when you scrub like that, you’re removing protective enamel that your teeth need and increasing the likelihood that your teeth will decay, not to mention demineralize. 

Demineralization is what happens when plaque, or your toothbrush, erodes the enamel and loses minerals like calcium and phosphate. 

Brush softly. 

3. Relying On Toothpaste Promises: This may come as a shock, but toothpaste actually has almost nothing to do with the health of your teeth. Despite making decisions based on tooth whiteness, enamel-building, cavity-preventing, or other such claims, toothpaste exists mainly to freshen breath.

There are certain toothpastes that can help reverse cavities and make your mouth healthier. More on that here. 

4. Brushing in a Straight Line: The reason dentists harp on brushing in soft little circles across your teeth is that when you brush in a straight line…

You’re just shoving plaque and particles from one end of your teeth to the other, and often back under the gums.

Brushing in a circular motion helps to dislodge and disorganize the biofilm on your teeth, pushing undesirables away so that you can spit them out. Like sweeping dust out of the door instead of under the rug.

5. Brushing Right After Meals: Those who are hyper-concerned with dental health tend to brush whenever they’ve eaten, imagining that they’re engaging in preventive, proactive maintenance. 

Actually… brushing right after meals means that all the food particles still fresh in your mouth have a higher chance of being tucked under the gum line and lost, free to wreak infectious havoc on the mouth, which has actually been linked to a number of chronic conditions.

Instead, wait 30-45 minutes after eating to brush your teeth. 

Now, all of those tips are certainly helpful, and it’s better to use the resources at your disposal correctly than to botch the job and make it worse by ignoring the advice.

But the truth is…

Even that advice is out of date.

The brightest minds in the medical and dental sphere have already determined that what we think we know about dental health is disastrously inadequate. And they want to do something about it.

They’ve come together with me to publish their findings in a landmark new series…

Including a revolutionary new way to brush your teeth that will finally sever the tie between chronic disease and gum inflammation.

And all you’ve got to do is watch it to find out.

The post Can Changing The Way You Brush Your Teeth Rid You Of Chronic Disease? appeared first on The Urban Monk.

… 

According to a recent survey conducted by the Delta Dental Plans Association, only 15% of you should have raised your hands. 

In fact, for the second year in a row, dentists ranked highest on a list of health practitioners Americans thought they needed to see more often. 

The problem?

The current dental health world is based on old science, some of which stopped progressing at the same rate as other health fields as long as 150 years ago. On average, it takes about 17 years for accredited research that’s academically accepted to make it into textbooks, through medical school, and into your doctor’s office.

So even if the 25% of American who don’t currently have dental healthcare coverage (that’s about 73 million, just for the record) felt that they could afford to handle dental health, let alone dental emergencies…

New research on the incredible cavity that is your mouth hasn’t even reached the desks of your dentists. That means it certainly hasn’t informed their practices.

Dental health is precarious for many reasons, but the main reason is that to the average layperson, the mouth is a mystery.

And we use it all the time…

When There’s Something Amiss in Your Mouth

Many years ago, dental preventive maintenance existed in its barest, most primitive form. Babylonians had chew sticks 5,000 years ago, the Chinese had used a rough toothbrush made of coarse hair 3,000 years ago, and there are even plants in nature that our ancestors determined could prevent ulcers or slow plaque growth (the Salvadora persica.) And when teeth got infected, they got pulled.

What people didn’t know was how connected their oral hygiene was to the health of the rest of their bodies.

Today, we know bleeding gums indicates inflammation, which can lead to infection, which can lead to bad bacteria in the bloodstream, the brain, the heart, the lungs, and more. 

We know we’re supposed to brush our teeth using a certain technique, floss on a regular basis, and we think we’re supposed to flood our mouths with antibacterial mouthwash every day.

Those without insurance also know there are lots of homeopathic remedies for mouth maladies — coconut oil pulling, brushing with baking soda, etc.

It seems like there’s enough evidence to support strong oral hygiene for better reasons than pearly whites, sweet breath, gap coverage.

But there’s one reason that’s more important than everything else…

Your Mouth is the Gatekeeper

We spend a lot of time talking about how important the gut’s microbiome is. It regulates and affects so many other systems in the body that its maintenance and balance is of critical importance. No problem in the body is solvable without recruiting the gut’s assistance.

And the gut microbiome?

It starts in your mouth.

The first step in digestion occurs the moment you take a bite of your food.

That means that your diet is just as important to your teeth as how you care for them afterwards…

It also means that more attention should be paid to the goings-on in your mouth than we’ve been paying. From the bacterial content and structure of plaque, to the size of your teeth, to the effect of food on tooth placement and crowding, to the connection between: gum disease and diabetes, stress and tooth decay, jaw infections and heart disease…

The mouth, like the gut, is its own ecosystem, its own universe. And just like the gut’s microbiome, it has massive implications for the rest of your health.

And even if it doesn’t seem like it…

The world’s leading scientists are taking notice. 

In fact, they’ve gotten together with me to answer these impactful and wide-reaching questions in a new series called Gateway to Health…

And you’ll learn not only the secrets that have been hiding in between your teeth, under your gums, in your saliva (most of which isn’t yours, by the way)…

But the groundbreaking methods scientists are developing to change the frontier of dental health forever (hint: there are lasers.)

And this health revolution all starts when you simply open your mouth.
Click here to find out more.

The post Everything Flows from the Mouth of the River Microbiome appeared first on The Urban Monk.

When I shifted my focus from clinical practice to media and education, I set out to put myself out of business. 

I wanted to do for people what doctors couldn’t: Follow them around and tell them about their own bodies so they could learn to prevent problems, not be forced to solve them once multiple systems had collapsed.

That’s what my friend Dr. Marvin Singh does too – he runs Precisione Clinic, which offers a highly individualized approach to health, wellness, and longevity based on your unique genes and biomes.

But he’s also a pioneer in the field of integrative gastroenterology. That means he has an incredibly deep well of knowledge regarding the bacteria living in our bodies.

He invited me onto his podcast so that we could talk about something we’ve both done a lot of work in…

The oral microbiome. 

Begin at the Beginning

My wife’s a dentist. In fact, tons of people in my family are dentists. I hear about how to care for your mouth all the time.

But I only woke up to its influence on whole body health pretty recently.

We swallow over a trillion bacteria a day – that’s normal!

When we let bad bacteria build up – through negligence in care or poor diets or any number of other factors – bad things start to happen. Our gums bleed. The bad bacteria in our mouths seep into the bloodstream. 

We’ve found oral bacteria in heart valves, in the uterus, inside the brains of people with Alzheimers. 

The thing is, these microbes aren’t necessarily evil. They just don’t belong anywhere but in the mouth.

And when our diets are out of line, our lifestyles are unbalanced, and we’re not taking an integrative view of our health, we get what I’m calling leaky mouth.

Sound familiar?

It’s a lot like…

Leaky Gut and the Oral Microbiome

We tend to forget, it’s all one tube from your mouth to your digestive tract. 

We have a whole lot of complex universes inside of us, but they don’t require terrifically complex management. In fact, most of them really want the same things to stay healthy.

Our new research is being modeled on ecology and forestry – the way that every living colony affects every other living colony.  

We just need to feed them the right things so that the good bacteria can manage the bad bacteria. 

Check out the podcast episode I did with Dr. Singh and find out what you need to do to foster a flourishing gut, starting with a flourishing oral biome.

Learn about the insidious effects of sugar, how periodontal disease can increase your chances of becoming diabetic, how alkaline foods help starve bad bacteria, dry mouth from Big Pharma pills, and so much more.

Plus, it’s free to listen to!

You might remember Dr. Singh from the series I released, Interconnected. We were lucky to have him as a featured expert because of his groundbreaking work in fine-tuning our approach to medicine. 

Filming that series and learning everything I learned about our own unique bacterial and genetic expressions led me to develop the Gut Healing Master Class. 

It’s a seven-week course designed to teach just how much influence your gut has in the body, and to help you get your gut back on track.

There’s so much we just haven’t been taught about the way our bodies’ function – don’t waste another second not knowing.

Give the podcast a listen and find out for yourself!

The post Understanding the Gateway to Health Podcast appeared first on The Urban Monk.

But it doesn’t always look the way we think it will… It doesn’t always look like self-soothing. It doesn’t always look like saying “yes” to our momentary flashes of whims that we believe will stave off discomfort. It doesn’t always look like abdicating our responsibilities when we don’t believe there’s any more gas in the tank.

Caring for your gums isn’t exactly sexy work – it definitely doesn’t feel as luxurious and decadent as wine, cheese, and a bubble bath.

Except when you consider all the favors you’re doing future-you when you care for them. Improper gum care, and downright neglect of the oral microbiome, cracks the door ajar for chronic diseases down the line.

And you know who makes the best patients? The chronically diseased. 

Remember when we said taking care of yourself was radical? That’s why. 

The problem is, most people are criminally undereducated about the microbiomes inside the human body in general, let alone how to support them.

3,000 years ago, before we had dentists, private health insurance, oral surgery, and crippling medical debt, we had oil pulling.

Or rather, Ayurvedic medicine had oil pulling. 

What Exactly Is It?

Oil pulling may sound mysterious, but it’s actually pretty straight-forward – you’re pulling gunk (made of harmful bacteria that doesn’t belong in your mouth) out of your gums by swishing with oil. 

Also called kavala and gundusha, you typically use coconut oil for its antibacterial, antifungal, and antimicrobial properties (plus, it’s got vitamin E. More on that later.)

You can also use olive, sesame, sunflower, or any other kind of oil you want! But since it’s going to be in your mouth for 20 minutes, you probably want to use oil that tastes nice and does the best job. 

Put simply?

1. Take a tablespoon of oil into your mouth.

2. Gently swish it around for 20 minutes without swallowing any of it. Swish gently – you don’t want your jaw to lock up! Not as roughly as with mouthwash, but consistent. 

3. Spit it into the trash when you’re through.

The reason oil pulling gained so much traction is that by primarily solving one problem – ridding the body of toxins and bad bacteria – dozens of ancillary problems get solved as well.

Think about how many ailments stem from an overgrowth of harmful flora in the oral microbiome…

Gingivitis. Periodontitis. Chronic headaches. Halitosis. Cavities. Blood infections. Tooth decay. Much more.

Without the bacteria build-up, you reduce the population that’s causing all of those problems.

How Does It Work?

The problem is, there is very little formal research done into oil pulling. Most of the evidence in favor of it is enthusiastic, anecdotal, and holistic.

S. mutans, one of the worst bacterial offenders in plaque (the film that builds up on your teeth and under your gums when you don’t make dental care a priority), gets swept away and trapped within the viscous oil as you’re swishing. When you spit it out, you spit the harmful bacteria, fungi, and microbes out with it. 

It’s recommended that you do it for 20 minutes per day, but if you’ve got to start out smaller, that’s quite alright! 

But swishing 20 minutes per day has been shown to reduce harmful bacteria quantities in as little as two weeks. The vitamin E in the coconut oil also supports gum regrowth and health.  

Now, there’s also a bevy of benefits uncorroborated by rigorous, peer review studies.

A lot of people report whiter teeth. Some say it cures hangovers. Others insist it’ll get rid of a headache. 

What it certainly does is remove plague and junk while also using the lauric acid and monolaurin in coconut oil to kill pathogens. 

Because gum disease is so destructive, difficult, and expensive to treat, trying oil pulling makes a lot of sense. 

When you think about how you can pamper your body, mind, and soul, think about how you can be proactive in preventing problems for yourself. 20 minutes every morning may go a long way!

The post Don’t Gum Up the Works: What Does Oil Pulling Do? appeared first on The Urban Monk.