The Oral Microbiome: Gateway to Health with Dr. Ryan Bentley

With Ryan Bentley

Ryan Bentley, MD, DC, is a board-certified family physician and chiropractor with Vitalis Health in Holland, Michigan. He is a graduate of University of Indiana-Bloomington. He earned an addtional undergraduate degree and his doctor of chiropractic from National University of Health Sciences. He earned his medical degree from University of Science Arts and Technology. He completed his family medicine residency with Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine.

Dr. Bentley’s clinical and research interests include preventative, lifestyle, and regenerative medicine.

HERE are the slides Dr Bentley referred to in the podcast.

Dr Bentley has given The Urban Monk community a 10% discount on his oral probiotic product- CLICK HERE to redeem that.

Listen to the episode on Spotify here or on your favorite podcast platform and check out the Urban Monk Academy here.

Podcast transcript:

Welcome back to the urban monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai. Dr. Ryan Bentley, my guest today, doing some really interesting work in the field of microbiome as it relates to the mouth, as it relates to the gut. Really cool research, , some innovative, , processes that they’re doing and they’re getting some great results.

I’m hearing it all around. So this is something that I’d like for you to pay attention to because it works. Uh, everything that we’re talking about here in the realm of oral health, you can get a lot more help by watching gateway to health. You can get your all access media pass for free on the urban monk.com. And there is a masterclass I created after doing that eight part docu series about oral health. Called the oral healing masterclass.

And as part of that, I’m working with Dr. Bentley to create, uh, protocols using the stuff he’s talking about.

As part of the overall protocol as the science progresses. So do my masterclasses, enjoy the podcast.

Dr. Bentley, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. Excited to have you. I love this conversation that we’re going to have. I’ve been in and out of it for a few years now, and I am shocked at how often I encounter Physicians who still are just not up to speed on this information, let alone the general, you know, public, uh, it has a lot to do with oral health, what we called the gateway to health in my a part series that I did a few, I don’t know, three years back.

And, uh, at that point. We were following some of the revolutionary science, uh, of the microbiome and how the mouth was the gateway. And since then, there’s just been innovation after innovation every month, there’s studies and really amazing things coming out. So you’re now fully immersed in this. What got you into this work around the oral microbiome?

Well, it started way back probably around 2010. I was first approached about a specific probiotic product that actually survives the stomach acid to get into the gut to do the very good that it was meant to do. And so ultimately helped formulate the, uh, probiotic. probiotic called probiotics through a company called humarion, uh, first liquid probiotic that was out there and to survive the stomach acid 10 times more than the leading physician brand at the time.

And I basically got to a point that I just quit recommending probiotics because I knew just these dry capsules with freeze dried probiotics are going to get killed off by the stomach acid and. When it gets into the stomach acid, these probiotics would absorb what nutrients around or what fluid around them.

And well, that’s stomach acid. So now they go from this dry powder to absorbing the acid, which ultimately would kill them. Uh, so that’s how I first got into this aspect. But around 2015, I started learning about IGY technology, um, and looking at, um, different ways to help target very specifically with regards to bacteria and not disrupt the entire microbiome.

And then you fast forward. Um, at this time, I was already in medical school, but when I went into residency, residency was, and to be clear, I went back to medical school as an adult and did residency as an adult, uh, not a young adult. I had already had my chiropractic degree, went back, did my MD PhD. So I was already working with you Marionette during this entire time.

But I worked in a, area where people, my clientele that and the patients that I had the pleasure to work with were either living at the mission, living on the streets, didn’t have access to good dental care, a lot of social disparities. They weren’t in control what food, uh, that they were going to have for the day, those types of things.

And what really dawned on me was how important Oral health was because again, no matter what food that we could provide these people, if they can’t chew the food and break it down naturally into the smallest particles to get the nutrients out of it, it’s all pointless. Anyways. And I remember going back through medical school, hearing specifically that you’re not going to see nutritional deficiencies in the industrialized world because we fortified breads and different things like that.

And I beg to differ. It’s working in Kalamazoo, Michigan, um, and working with the Pete, the homeless and people with these social disparities. I was seeing all out nutritional deficiencies. And in fact, my grand rounds that I gave as I was exiting was clinical nutrition, uh, nutritional deficiencies in clinical practice.

And every picture that I demonstrated were not things from a Google search. These were things that I collected over three years while in the hospital and seeing some of these people that were had all these core mobilities and didn’t have good oral health. And that’s what I saw in the very beginning.

So it really. help me emphasize the ide the gateway to health is health is the gateway to poor and because oral hea cardiovascular disease, a disease. There’s so many starts in the gut. You kn All diseases begin in the gut. Well, your gut is in your digestive system. To me is from your mouth all the way down to the end at the rectum and everything in between, but it all starts right here in the mouth, starting from the saliva to how your food, chew your food and many medications that people were on, uh, block people’s saliva.

And, you know, there’s some interesting facts on saliva that we could dive into, but ultimately to answer your question, that’s kind of how I got into it was it started off as a probiotic company that led to me, uh, Uh, studying different technologies and I. G. Y. Technology specifically, which led me to start diving into oral health as I was seeing these micronutrient deficiencies that I was told I would never see unless I was in a third world country.

But I was seeing these social disparities, uh, amongst the very people that I was cohabitating with on a daily basis. And it made me go, you know what, we’ve got to start with oral health to really dive in here and, and make some changes. I appreciate that. And I appreciate you pumping the brakes, uh, and doing your work there for the good of humanity.

And there’s a lot to be said for, you know, us being a first world country and having these third world problems, but that’s a different show. Um, yeah, but you know, this, this concept that you alluded to the, uh, from router to tutor, if you will, for me to colloquialize it right is, uh, yeah. One of the things that I took for granted and, you know, really helped me understand what we were talking about with my leaky gut back in the day when I first kind of came out of school bright eyed and bushy tailed is that if you take the cavity between the mouth all the way down to the anus, that is still what goes into that pipe is still outside your body.

And then it has to cross into the body and get absorbed. And so the tissue from the mouth all the way down has a lot to do with your immunity, has a lot to do with your ability to break down and assimilate. And the first place you can see that tissue without any scopes or anything is just open your mouth.

Right? You can see the tongue, you can see the gums. And so this idea that most people, I mean, periodontal disease and gingivitis are just rampant. Can we talk about just that and its relationship with say chronic disease and maybe diabetes and all these things that we now know that most people are taking for granted?

Yeah, absolutely. It’s, you know, it’s estimated right now that 50 percent of people over the age of 30 have some form of periodontal disease. Where is you’re starting to get inflammation and break down the very structures that hold your teeth together and into your mouth and keep things nice and healthy.

And as you mentioned, uh, intestinal permeability, people talk about leaky gut, but we also have what’s called leaky gums and your oral health is a gateway. To your bloodstream as well. And so if someone has periodontal disease and the structures are being broken down, it creates a portal, so to speak, to get into the bloodstream.

And our mouth is home to over 700 different species of bacteria and that that makes one of the most diverse microbiomes in the entire body. And so it’s a gateway to your respiratory health, your digestive. Uh, your cardiovascular health, it’s been implicated with regards to Alzheimer’s disease and stroke, um, in including diabetes.

And so when it comes to the body and our immunity, it’s, it’s. It’s our first line of defense. And I mean, people’s saliva is a superpower. I mean, it’s got over 2000 different proteins to help fight off bad bacteria while nourishing beneficial bacteria. I mean, you’ve got lysosomes that have antimicrobial proteins to break things down.

We have lactoferrin that binds up iron to keep it from bacteria because bacteria love iron. So it inhibits that growth. Uh, we got, uh, What is it? Histostatins, um, which are peptides that have antifungal and wound healing properties in there specifically against pathogens like Candida, um, which we’ve talked about, you know, defensins is another one.

So, you know, the saliva also helps balance, you know, so if you start to think about, you know, amylase, you know, amylase is known for breaking down carbohydrates. Um, but also we have in our saliva, not only the amylase, but neutralizing things like, uh, that buffer the pH of our, of our mouth. So people talk about cavities.

Cavities is the breakdown from a bacteria called strep mutans. There are other bacteria implicated as well, but streptococcus mutans is one of the most prevalent ones. And streptococcus mutans has, um, basically it binds to our teeth. And then when it’s fed sugar, that’s why people say sugar is bad because it’ll ferment and then create this acidic medium around the tooth and start to eat away at the enamel.

And then it starts to eat away at your tooth, creating tooth decay. And then you start to lose your tooth. Or you have to get it drilled and have it filled. And so it doesn’t get to the nerve root and get a portal directly into your bloodstream. So strep mutans is just one of the bacteria. And then we talk about porphyroma, porphyroma is gingivalis.

Porphyroma is gingivalis is the main bacteria that has, ginger pains, . Ginger pains is a proteolytic enzyme that it’s got like little gloves that will bind to like the, You know, your periodontal, the odontoid ligaments that hold your teeth, start to break those down.

And then it will just start to break down more proteolytic enzymes, break down proteins, and that bacteria will just start to colonate. into the area and start to make teeth loose, start to break down the gum lines, and then you start to get this bacteria into your bloodstream. And porphyromis gingivalis has been implicated.

If you, when people pass away, they have Alzheimer’s, they found porphyromis gingivalis in the Alzheimer’s inside the beta amyloid plaques. They’ve also find it in the plaques of cardiovascular disease. So when someone passes away, they’ll find strains of this bacteria in the arterial plaques. It’s also been implicated in rheumatoid arthritis through molecular mimicry, but the question is, how did this bacteria get into our brain, into our cardiovascular system, into our joints that are when there’s autoimmune disease that starts to attack our joints?

And when you think about autoimmune disease, something has to enter your body and things enter our body through one of two ways, through our skin or our mucous membranes from our nose down to the rectum. Okay. So if 70 percent of our immune system is around the gut, where do you think most things are getting in?

It’s through our digestive system from the mouth to the end. And so if we go back to oral health, if you got leaky gums, That’s a portal of entry for this porphyromis gingivalis to get in there for the tooth decay to start to kick in for you to not to have the teeth to break down the very good food that were to have in our body to Provide the nutrients that our body needs to function.

I mean, let’s get real A car is made to run off of gasoline or a battery these days And our body is made to run off of vitamins minerals proteins fats carbohydrates water and oxygen And if you start to get deficient in those or even toxic in some of those, it has wrecks havoc in our body. And we just have to be mindful of that.

And so going back to this portal of entry, that’s why oral health is so important. It’s something that, like you said, we can see. It’s like a colonoscopy when you go up the other end. But we can visually see, and I’ve seen teeth, people coming in there with very poor teeth. They’re concerned about halitosis and having bad breath.

Well, that’s really an, an effective, uh, either decay of tissue, uh, such as when you get strep, mutans. Overgrowing, or. Porphyromis gingivalis, breaking down your own tissues with proteic enzymes or an overgrowth of bad bacteria because you’re not salivating properly, uh, because you’re taking certain medications for something else.

And the side effect is dry mouth. Um, but when it comes to this gateway, when it comes to autoimmune disease from the beginning to end, whether or not, if you got leaky gut. or leaky intestinal permeability or leaky gums. Something’s enters into your bloodstream. Like porphyromis gingivalis says your immune cells say, boop, kill anything that looks like this, just like a barcode at the grocery store.

And if it looks similar to your joints, you’re going to get audit. You’re going to get rheumatoid arthritis. If it looks like your myelin sheath, you’re to get multiple sclerosis. If it looks like your thyroid, you might get Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Now that’s autoimmune disease in a very basic nature. But that’s how molecular mimicry occurs.

And that’s why your oral health can lead to autoimmune disease, cardiovascular disease. brain issues and Alzheimer’s. It’s implicated in all of it. Okay. So the conventional wisdom is like, okay, that sounds really horrible, but I can take my, this toothpaste that I buy from target and floss every once in a while when I remember to, and that should take care of the P.

gingivalis and the strep mucans. Let’s just nuke those two specific bad players and move on. Um, what is wrong with that thinking doc? So. I’m not taking away from brushing the teeth and flossing because, you know, flossing helps you break up biofilms and keep those things from starting to build up. It keeps food from being stuck in between your teeth, feeding back bacteria as it starts to rot and ferment and break down.

If you got meat stuck in between your teeth, causing inflammation, creating another portal. So I believe that those techniques are good. However, is the chemicals that are in the toothpastes, the chemicals that are in the mouth, Washes that you’re going in there and nuking the mouth, so to speak. You’re just killing off the good bacteria, the bad bacteria.

And that’s where I don’t like that because if you, people that typically use mouthwash, especially like they’d take it before they go to bed, they wake up in the morning and man, their breath is worse than it was when they went to bed. And again, it’s because they just wiped out all their good bacteria in their mouth.

And so they just basically just nuked the good and the bad all at the same time. Well, then the bad start to overgrow just like spiders keep the insect population in check. Um, you know, it’s about the good bacteria keeping the bad population in check. Um, if you think about Oftentimes people recognize within female health and the way the anatomy is, is that oftentimes, sometimes women will get a vaginal yeast infection or Candida infection if they take an antibiotic.

Well, the antibiotic kills off the good bacteria that allow the Candida or, which is part of our normal flora to start to overpopulate and overgrow. Cause we don’t have our checkpoints anymore. And so that’s where at Humerian, we started to decide how do we come up with something that is very targeted, targeted.

without damaging our good bacteria, but yet eradicating and eliminating the bad guys, the ones that are very implicated in breakdown of your teeth, breakdown and leading to gingivitis and periodontal disease. How can we do that? And that’s why we started using very targeted IGY technology so we can go in there and basically just bind those things up like a magnet and pluck them out.

And so that’s why when it comes to toothpastes, the conventional ones, there are some decent toothpastes that are out there. Um, And the mouthwashes, you’ve got to be very careful when you start utilizing those things because again, they’ve got all kinds of chemicals and things in there that will break down your good bacteria as well as your bad bacteria.

And then it just almost makes you, it’s like, um, it’s like Pavlov’s dog, every time the bell rings, they salivate. Well, in this case, every time you get bad breath, you go and do mouthwash again, which you just keep destroying your microbiome. Those 700 different bacteria that are there, you’re just destroying them every time.

Yeah, I had a guest, a doctor who was talking about the nitric oxide producers that reside in our mouth and predominantly on the tongue. It’s V. atypica, V. dispara. I mean, there’s, there’s about four or five, uh, species that specifically break down certain foods to create nitric oxide. Now, the problem with nitric oxide is about, you know, past our forties, uh, you know, we start to diminish anyways.

And then, uh, What is left is in the mouth and mouthwash decimates this. Now, where do we need nitric oxide in our lives? It’s for cardiovascular health. It’s for sexual health. I mean, it’s, it’s a critical piece to the longevity equation mouthwash. Oops. Right. And so. You brought up this IGY deal and I really want to understand this better I want if you could kind of help explain how this works and how this is a targeted approach For this particular problem, that’d be helpful.

I think yeah, so most people understand passive immunity So when a baby is born the mother’s mother makes breast milk and in there you have colostrum You also have antibodies in there that will bind up things in the baby’s digestive system because the baby can’t really mount antibody production. The immune system isn’t starting to get mature until about six months to a year.

And so that’s where really when most breast milk is the most beneficial is from time of birth up until about a year. And then you start to lose the effectiveness over time. Um, and, and the full benefit of it that you get from the very beginning. And so passive immunity is basically antibodies are kind of America’s most wanted posters.

If you will, it takes his scans just like I talked about with autoimmune disease. It scans something and, uh, you know, and says, boop, kill anything that looks like this, and it’ll make antibodies. The antibodies will, in these America’s Most Wanted posters, it’s like a lock and key mechanism. It will only bind to an antibody that’s very, or to an antigen, which is a foreign product, that’s very similar.

So this antibody comes in and binds to it, and in the human body, it, we’ve got what’s called a FC region, and that starts to release, uh, other secondary chemicals to be released to call in the immune system over to the specific area to fight this virus, this bacteria, whatever it is that’s foreign to the body.

And so that’s the effect of antibodies. Well, passive immunity doesn’t call in all the other warriors. Passive immunity is like in breast milk. The baby swallows the breast milk. It’ll bind up the bad bacteria from these antibodies that are made. And so, And then it’ll just detach it from the intestinal system.

And then the baby will poop it out, kind of neutralizes it. So to speak, it’s not killing it or anything like that per se. Um, but it’s actually just kind of binding it up, carrying it out to lessen the burden and lessen the load onto the baby. So that same concept we have in our body, what are called IgG antibodies.

We have a number of them. IgE antibodies are your antibodies for anaphylaxis and. You know, allergy type symptoms. IGA is our antibody that protects our mucus membranes from the nose all the way down to the rectum. Uh, secretary iga a is a big part of our immune system, and so we also have IGM, which are kind of your first responders, and then there’s IgG, which is in our bloodstream, and.

IgG antibodies in the bloodstream are almost, I don’t want to say they’re identical, but they’re very similar in structure. As you’ll see in the, in the slides that I sent to sent to you, the IgG is very similar to the IgY antibody. The thing is, is that it doesn’t have an FC region. that binds to the human aspect of it.

So it’s just passive immunity. So it’s not triggering this cascade effect of triggering your immune system because people might ask, well, if my immune system is already in disarray and inflamed, well, I don’t want to take this product because it might actually stimulate that. And it doesn’t do that. Um, avian antibodies from the chickens don’t do that.

So what do we do specifically? Think of it this way. The chickens make IGY antibodies, which are very similar in structure to our IgG. The difference is. IGY antibodies bind tighter to whatever we make that against whatever antigen it is. So in this case, we made a product called smile guard. Smile guard is a product that has IGY antibodies to streptococcus mutans and porphyromis gingivalis.

So these lodgings have these chicken egg antibodies. So what we do is we inoculate a chicken against very specific protein sequences of porphyromis gingivalis. and the, uh, streptococcus mutans against very targeted areas. So we could basically put on mittens onto the fingers that grab onto your teeth, so to speak.

And so you take this lozenge and all of a sudden it will act like a magnet and go bind to that bacteria. We’ll detach it from your teeth, from the gum lines, and then you swallow it, goes to your digestive system and you ultimately poop it out. No harm, no foul. You literally have plucked out these bad bacteria off your teeth.

Without smoke bombing the good bacteria, um, specifically like lactobacillus ruteri, streptococcus salvarius, you know, these are good bacteria in our oral cavity and you don’t want to kill those off. So we’re just very targeted. So that’s the essence of how IGY works. It binds tighter to the antigen, whatever it is.

So we can inoculate a chicken with whatever we want it to be. It’ll make antibodies goes into the egg yolk. We concentrate that antibody into the products that we use that are very targeted and very specific. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s great.

Quick commercial interruption here. Check out the oral healing masterclass. Go to the urban monk.com. That course taught by the who’s who in my gateway to health series. He teaches you how to restore the microbiome in your mouth, how to take care of the oral and gut microbiome and how to turn your stars around.

Really when it comes to the stuff we’re talking about here, I’m including Dr. Bentley’s protocols in the course. As this science has progressed, I continue to update the protocols inside of my masterclasses. This stuff works. You just got to do it. We’ll see you there.

And it sounds like tip of the iceberg. So if you could use this same mechanism to solve problems, what else, what else are you chasing?

Like what are you busy working on that you could tell me about? Yeah. So a couple of things that the things that I look at this is ultimately down the line. Um, ultimately from a human humanitarian standpoint is that there’s over 3 million people that die every year due to some type of infectious, uh, diarrhea secondary to not having clean water.

So ultimately I have in development a product that I would like to have as a rescue remedy to help serve people in these countries, um, and supply missions with that. Um, but our first product that we’ve come out of the gate with is the smile guard with this. We also have, um, we’ve already got in the clinical studies as well.

We got clinical studies for our product, uh, which I shared with you in the slides that you could put at the end. Um, but We’ve got one specifically against H. pylori that works very, very good against, um, H. pylori is a bacteria that’s implicated in ulcers in the stomach and the duodenum and so it binds that up, kind of degloves.

It keeps it from attaching, um, and neutralizing it, so to speak. So that’s been helpful. We’ve used that. We’ve got one against Candida. So we can kind of in there and pluck when Candida starts to get overgrown in there, um, and neutralize that aspect of it. And then more specifically, the one I’m most excited about, cause we’re going to be able to roll these out in certain stages is LPS, which stands for lipopolysaccharides.

Um, that has been implicated in just about every chronic low grade inflammatory condition in the entire body and the body gets exposure to these LPS is which fuels and it’s like adding gasoline to a fire when someone has autoimmune disease, um, or even neurodegenerative diseases. So we don’t have a targeted treatment for that.

Um, Traditionally. And now we do with the IGY, which is pretty exciting. So I’m pretty excited about that. So those are some of the things that we have down in the pipeline, uh, with regards to this. So we’ve been working really hard at this. Um, and we just want to be very targeted, very scientific and be able to validate exactly what we say.

Uh, the product is able to, uh, help with and go from there. That’s very exciting. Um, LPS, you know, arguably endotoxemia is leading to 80 percent of the chronic disease and the comorbidities that we see in the Western world. I mean, it is a big smoking gun. So if you could help neutralize tag, grab and pull it out.

Uh, before it crosses, you know, a, a compromised gut barrier. That is huge. That is huge. Now, that does not mean, and I want, you know, people hear this and they’re like, Oh, that’s amazing. Now I can eat how I want. Right? I mean, if you keep feeding the gram negative bacteria that are producing LPS, uh, you know, that, that’s a recipe for disaster.

So, uh, Cleaning up the diet, you know, making sure you brush your teeth. I mean, none of this stuff is excused from the hygiene party, right? These are all interventions that, that help us kind of get out ahead of this for a change. Yeah. And it’s, it’s, it’s to lessen the burden because you know, you, you hear those people that are like, I have cavities again.

I brush every day. I’m flossing every day and I got cavities again. Or I do everything and I still got periodontal disease. There are certain people that have an overgrowth of these bacteria and it’s to lessen the load, lessen the burden while we do the things that we know that are very beneficial for us.

You know, we don’t need another groundbreaking study to show that eating healthy and the foods that our bodies intended to have is good for you, or that exercise is good for you. It’s the question becomes more, why don’t you? Why don’t You know, so many people live in such a stressful life and stressful world and these high caloric foods and nutrient deficient foods, um, often are the junk foods that people are eating on a daily basis that not became a treat anymore.

It’s become a staple. And What we’ve shown is that ultimately, for a short period of time, they start to create beta endorphins, which block physical pain, and serotonin levels start to go up, and dopamine, because they get the feel good sensation, because all the different chemicals that are in these frankenfoods, so to speak, have these neurotoxic type capabilities to stimulate our nervous system in a way that makes you almost addicted, but people are ultimately, uh, start to eat away their physical and emotional pain and they become addicted to it.

And it just becomes a feed forward problem. I tell people, I say, look, it’s expensive doc to eat healthy. And I’m like, can you afford to be sick? You know, if you keep doing what you’re doing right now in five years, you see yourself healthier, sicker, sicker. Do you see yourself on more or less medications?

More. Can you afford that? No. So, going to things that are prebiotic rich foods, and prebiotic means the very things, the type of fibers that are found in foods like garlic, and onions, and green bananas, and the things that give these fiber are good bacteria to eat, and then they start to ferment that and start to create what we call postbiotics.

And that’s where I mentioned earlier about probionics, which is the, the probiotic company that I helped start with the IGY company. Um, it’s the one of the only probiotics that’s out there that has a prebiotic, a probiotic and a postbiotic and postbiotics are the very good stuff that feed the other beneficial bacteria.

And so other things that help feed good bacteria are the things like the polyphenols. Well, what are polyphenols? You know, as much as I do, it’s having a colorful plate. It’s having a rainbow rainbow plate. If you look at, um, sorry, Dairy Queen and McDonald’s. But if you look at their commercials, if you look at their beautiful looking food, it’s all Brown, you know, it’s fried breaded chicken with some French fries.

There’s no color in there. You don’t have the reds and the purples and the yellows. Deanna minute PhD. She has says eat the rainbow. And again, why? Because there are foods high in these polyphenols. And so people are like, Hey, that gives me my dark chocolate. So I’m going to eat my chocolate cake and drink a bottle of red wine so I can get the, you know, um, pycnogenol that’s in there.

And then resveratrol. Thank you. Thank you. You’re not going to get enough resveratrol in a bottle of wine. I’m sorry to do that. And then you get the effects of the alcohol. That’s going to cause leaky gut, disrupt your microbiome, so on and so forth.

So the resveratrol is definitely in concentration in grapes, but I would eat the red grapes. Let’s do that. Get the skins. You get the fiber, get all those good things. So. And avoiding the high refined, uh, caloric, rich, nutrient deficient, sugary, high carbohydrate, nasty fat, seed oil foods out of your body and put the things in it that the body was intended to have.

Amen. Amen, brother. So there’s a piece of something that you showed me that I want to bring to light. Um, here, and that is some of the studies that you all did around the probing deaths of gums. And the, you know, I’m married to a dentist, I’ve been around dentists a lot. And you know, the, the conventional wisdom is periodontal disease.

You just wait until you, you know, you slow it and then eventually you got to get the surgery and you know, that’s it. And so you all are seeing some of that. Very interesting results clinically, uh, with what you’re doing. So I want you to talk to that because a lot of people are kind of given a message of hopelessness, um, by traditional dentists.

Yeah. So we’ve, we’ve done studies with, uh, dental colleges and we’ve been able to show that just in a month’s time, which is phenomenal. I mean, four weeks of using the lozenges that we’re seeing significant changing. I mean, so. When you talked about probing depth. So many people have experienced when they go to the general dentist that they will say, Oh, it’s time for us to do our check.

And then they’ll take this little probe and someone’s over on the computer and they will start on one side and they’ll, they won three. to and what they’re checking is the probing depth. And so we’ve been able to show. So the larger the depth, the worse off you and decrease integrity of the structures that you have, likely due to porphyromis gingivalis to the proteolytic enzymes that the gingivanes is releasing.

And so that’s just causing the breakdown. So you get bigger probing depths. So you keep going deeper and deeper. So the higher the number, the worse off it is because you have breakdown of the structures. So we’ve been able to show a change by a millimeter already in four weeks of using the lozenge.

We’ve also seen changes in the gum lines, as far as the inflammation and the redness and the tenderness of just using the lodgings. We’ve had dentists tell us, man, within like three days that they’ve noticing a significant change. in the tenderness when they’ve used it with their staff or even themselves.

Um, so it’s really cool to be able to see those changes, changes, excuse me. And then something also, if people aren’t familiar with flossing and they don’t do it routinely, they’ll do it and they’ll have a mouthful of blood. And so they get, you also get what’s called bleeding on probing. And so that just shows you the fragility of the tissue, the breakdown, the thinness of it.

I mean, our, our mouth should be nice and robust, right? So. what’s happening is like the probing, they start t we showed a significant d of bleeding on probing by in a four week time. And is that we did another st Um, uh, PCR, uh, polymerase chain reaction basically allows us to look at the DNA to determine how many bacteria are present.

And so we’re looking at the DNA of Porphyromis gingivalis. So, what they do is they will check it right at the level of the gum lines, and that’s it. In the study, the control group would have the traditional dental treatment of the rooting and scraping that they do to break down the biofilms, remove it.

And after a week, you’ll see their score of porphyromis gingivalis on PCR is like zero compared to the baseline being all the way up here. And so, and, and for those of you that are visual, um, he’s got the images that he’ll be able to show you, but for those of you that are listening, uh, imagine that the control group and the treatment group both got rooting and scraping done.

The treatment group in the study also continued with a lozenge of the IGY against Porphyromis gingivalis. So what you’ll see in the graph is like both of them went from being high in both groups to being down at basically zero. But after four weeks, you’ll see a greater than four times greater amount of Porphyromis gingivalis in the control group that did just the rooting and scraping, which basically tells you that you start back at a baseline that Porphyromis gingivalis is just going to come back and keep growing and growing where you are.

People in the treatment group continue with the lozenge. There is a very small increase, but significantly decreased compared to the control group of doing nothing as far as the maintenance. So once you get the rooting and scraping done, the IGY technology has allowed us to keep the burden of the Porphyromis gingivalis at more of a decline, allowing the tissues to start to regenerate and regrow and to rebuild.

And to that point, when it comes to strep mutans, uh, we’ve got a couple of different studies with regards to that and showing the before and afters. But what’s interesting and what listeners might want to go back and watch on YouTube is actually the tubes of saliva that were stained for streptococcus mutans, that you can see it sticking to the tubes.

And then you see these blue dots stuck all over the place, and then you add the IGY in there, shake it up, and you see that they’re no longer on the, on the vials, and the before and after pictures is the, the very tube that it was previously. We took that to the teeth, and had people where dental hygienists often will come into schools, have lozenge, and it’ll stain for strep mutans on the teeth.

And so you’ll see all these little pink clots on the teeth. And clumps of things of the bacteria showing the student that, Hey, look, you’re not brushing your teeth good enough. Cause this should all be good. Well then we have them take the lozenge and then take it before and after. And you’ll see that all the pink is pretty much gone now off the tooth, uh, which is kind of cool to be able to see those things.

A visualization of that is. It’s pretty epic to be able to see that in a before and after. And I’ve got people, you know, you wake up in the morning. Oftentimes people have a film on their teeth and they’ll feel it there. So fun fact is I use a very healthy toothpaste and I was just on a trip down to Nashville, forgot it, had my toothbrush, but I did have my IGY, the smile guard with me.

So I took two capsules, chewed it up in my mouth and then brushed my teeth with it. And man, it was like squeaky clean. It was pretty cool to be able to have that and be very targeted against strep mutans and porphyromis gingivalis without damaging anything else in there. So that’s what I did in a pension over the weekend.

Um, I’ve not having my toothpaste with there and you’ll feel the film just completely dissolve off your teeth. And it’s kind of a cool thing. Cause you can not only see it visually, but you can also feel it. You know, the problem with oral health is. Unless it’s, you know, vanity, people tend not to care until it hurts, right?

Which is kind of where healthcare is, right? It’s, Oh, you know, I have toothache. I’m going into the dentist. And, and what you had alluded to at this scraping is obviously you go in, you see the hygienist, the hygienist, you know, scrapes and does all this stuff. Uh, and you’re good for a minute. And they say, you know, for some people, three months, some people, six months, depending on, you know, how far gone you are.

, but this, Idea that when they’re doing this or when you’re at home doing it yourself, you’re flossing and you’re getting blood and people are like, Oh, that must not be good. I mean, you know, getting bleeding gums probably isn’t a good sign for anything. But I want to talk about What that signals to the body when you have flowing blood in the same cavity as trillions of bacteria and food particles and all of these things.

I mean, everyone talks about leaky gut and not realizing that leaky gums are just like, Boom right there. This is the, the battle that’s happening and all of the things, the sequelae of that, uh, people don’t understand. I don’t think how serious that is to your body. It’s a three bell alarm. I’d love to talk about that.

Yeah. So you brought up a very interesting point. Unless it’s about vanity, people wait till it hurts. And here’s one of the key things. If you have bleeding gums, when you floss, you’ve got breakdown of tissue, you’ve got a portal of entry for bacteria, for LPS, for all these things to enter into your bloodstream, for bigger proteins, to enter into your bloodstream, for things to trigger your immune system.

So for people that are suffering with autoimmune disease, if they’re not taking care of their oral health. they’re just adding gasli with cardiovascular disea low grade inflammatory co of cases, um, leading to health. So people talk ab predispositions and thing But there’s also epigenetic factors that come into play.

And those are things that are of external influence. And again, as you mentioned in the very beginning of this is that the oral cavity and the digestive system is still technically outside the body. So this is certainly going to affect our body and our overall function all the way down at the level of the cells.

I mean, Let’s get real. I mean, if we look at vitamin D alone, vitamin D alone really works with over 4 percent of our genes. It actually transcribes our genes and turn the genes off and on 4 percent of our DNA. That’s impressive. Just from vitamin D. Which is interesting why it’s called a vitamin when it actually should be more kind of like a hormone, but, um, people, it’s just called vitamin D.

So it is what it is. Um, but that’s very important. So if we look at this and having that gateway to the body, it, as you mentioned, your entire series, the gateway to health, your oral health is absolutely. So if you’ve got bleeding gums, You’re creating that portal for these things that enter into your bloodstream to cause havoc, to lead to more inflammation, to which inflammation puts a cog in the wheel into your mitochondria, which the mitochondria are your powerhouse of yourselves to give you the energy for your body to regenerate for your body to heal.

So if you’re feeling fatigued, perhaps it’s starting at your oral health. All of it’s connected. We can’t take things in isolation. That’s what we like to do is think that, Oh, because we live in industrialized society, we’ll never have these micronutrient deficiencies and that’s false. Um, You know, we’re, you know, we’re trying to take emergency care medicine and apply that philosophy to chronic lifestyle and health conditions.

And it doesn’t work. It’s, it’s similar to me. I want to remodel my house. Am I going to call the fire department to come in with their axes and hoses and remodel my house? No, I’m going to call a handyman with a different set of tools. Likewise, when my house is on fire, I’m going to call the fire department to come in and put the fire out with their axes and hoses.

I’m not going to call it a handyman with his little tool by it with this tool bag. No, I’m going to call the right people. And so again, I think when it comes to our overall health and chronic disease is what people are plagued with these days. I’m sorry. Cardiovascular disease is a chronic disease. Yes.

It’s an acute emergency when you have a heart attack, but that didn’t just happen. That was 20 years of poor living as 20 years of things going awry or things going undetected. micronutrient deficiencies, not getting enough B12 because you don’t chew your food to get the R binder to bind with the, with the B12 in the food that you’re eating to protect it from the stomach acid.

And then your body, you take a proton pump inhibitor because you ate crap. And then that proton pump inhibitor inhibits your body from releasing from the parietal cells, intrinsic factor, as well as the hydrochloric acid. So now you don’t unbind the vitamin B 12 from the R binder, if you even have that.

And then it can’t get absorbed into the distal ileum into your body. And now you have increased homocysteine, homocysteine levels go up because now that creates, it acts like a brillipad in your artery. And now you start to get, inflammation in your artery. And then what comes to protect your artery?

Well, What is used in cellular mechanisms to help heal? Oh, that happens to be cholesterol. So now cholesterol goes in there to help heal the arterial lining, which is the innocent bystander due to the inflammation that happened because they had poor oral health and didn’t get the nutrients extracted out of their food to get the B12 that led to the homocysteine that caused that.

So it’s a chain reaction. And now is that the cause of every person with heart disease? No, that’s why it’s multifactorial. We can’t take this reductionistic standpoint of breaking things down to one molecule or one thing, and that’s going to fix it. Uh, we’ve been taking statin drugs for 40 years and we still have heart disease as the number one killer of Americans,

so what are we doing here? You know, do they have high cholesterol because of a statin deficiency? Or is it because they’re putting in these high caloric, sugary, fladen foods with nutrient deficiencies, uh, into their body? Causing insulin to spike. Oh, and what does insulin do? It simulates the HMG CoA reductase enzyme, which is the enzyme that increases cholesterol production.

So, and then the, then the extra sugar feeds the bad bacteria in your body, which makes your body more pro inflammatory. The sugar is also reactive oxygen species. And so you create these AGEs, these advanced glycated end products, and it’s just a big feed forward cycle. And so it’s a snowball effect.

So people do what we know to be beneficial and do it well. You know, do your personal hygiene, brush your teeth with something good. Don’t use the nasty mouthwashes floss your teeth, but feed your body what it’s meant to have, and is it going to stave off every disease process known to man? No, but you know what?

It gives you a good foundation. You don’t build a house on a Sandy foundation, right? You got to build it on a rock and a rock comes back to what we do to our bodies. We’ve got one lifetime here in this timeline right now. And if we look at that from beginning to end. It’s about the quality of life that you have there and it’s, none of us are getting out alive.

We’re all going to pass. It becomes down to that quality. And so every person listening to this has a circle of influence at some level, and you can serve that purpose and that circle of influence much better when you feel vibrant. I mean, who wants to go help thy neighbor when the, when you’re feeling, when you have the flu.

You want to go help them snow, the snow in their d I live in michigan. So th as an analogy, but you do to do that. Your immune s

You know, keep your energy robust, provide your body with the fuel that it needs and do the proper things. And, and be mindful of what you put onto your body. Listen, we’re out of time. Um, I love what you’re doing. I can’t wait till the LPS blockers and the Candida blockers and all these things kind of come through the woodworks of, uh, laboratory science into clinical science and all that.

 I. find this to be a very, very leveraged part of where we can enhance health, uh, with the microbiome. So I’m very happy to know you and know the corner of the world that you’re working in. Um, I think, I think you have a lot to offer this chronic health deal with what you’re doing. So, uh, I know that you had put together a bundle for our folks.

I’ll put it, uh, so wherever you’re listening to this, just go to the urban bunk. com slash podcast. Uh, look up this show, I will put a link to the video with the slides that we alluded to. Um, and I will also put a link to the products that he talked about here, uh, with an urban monk community discount, for my folks. And I appreciate you doing that doc. Keep up the good work.

Well, thank you so much. And thanks for allowing me to share the message and thank you for all you do and helping bring insightful things for people to achieve the health that they desire. Appreciate your work. Thank you. Thank you, my friend.

All right. That’s a wrap. Hope you enjoyed it. Got a little science-y. You got a little geeky. Sometimes you got to do that. Uh, so if you want to do the full protocols as taught in the oral healing masterclass, just go to the urban monk.com. Check out the course you can get the courses have standalone.

Of course you can subscribe to the urban monk academy. And that course is included along with everything else in the academy, which is what I recommend because that’s where I support my students. I’m on live weekly calls. It’s definitely the place to be. Um, you just need to be there. Uh, if you are the type of person who doesn’t want to learn stuff and say, just give me the products, I will put a link to the products. , in the show notes for this particular podcast, go to the urban monk.com/podcast.

Find this podcast and I will put a link there. He helped create a bundle for my audience, with the discount. So if you’re going to get it, get it there because you’ll save money. Um, what do I recommend? Listen. Uh, highest bar is always learn what you’re doing, understand what you’re doing. Do the oral healing masterclass.

This protocol is incorporated in there. If you just want to say, look, I want to try the lozenges and go from there. That’s available to you as well. Do what you gotta do to make yourself healthy. And keep doing that. I promise that’s the way forward. I’ll see you in the next one.

 

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Dr. Pedram Shojai

NY Times Best Selling author and film maker. Taoist Abbot and Qigong master. Husband and dad. I’m here to help you find your way and be healthy and happy. I don’t want to be your guru…just someone who’ll help point the way. If you’re looking for a real person who’s done the work, I’m your guy. I can light the path and walk along it with you but can’t walk for you.