00:00:00
Is there a link between our oral health and our fertility? Yes. This is some of the newest research that's coming out and they found that
00:00:06
over 90% of men who wasn't able to conceive with their partners had an oral disease. With those who got treated,
00:00:11
there was a 70% improvement in pregnancy. Now, research has also found that if a woman has gum disease, it
00:00:16
takes them 2 months longer to conceive. And I'm the only one who's talking about it. And who are you?
00:00:22
I am the saliva queen. Dr. Dr. Victoria Samson is the trailblazing dentist whose datadriven research has uncovered
00:00:28
the shocking link between our mouths and some of the world's most destructive conditions. More than 90% of diseases
00:00:34
can be traced back to our microbiomes. And we now understand that having an imbalanced oral microbiome increases
00:00:39
your risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, Alzheimer's, rheumatoid arthritis, and even men who have gum
00:00:45
disease are 2.85 times more likely to have erectile dysfunction. Really? Yeah. And then another study also showed
00:00:51
there's oral bacteria that can make cancer more aggressive and harder to treat as well. But what is it that causes all of this?
00:00:57
Poor oral hygiene, sugar, stress, but also some of us genetically will have mutations which can cause disease. But
00:01:04
there's ways to fix it. For example, I had a patient who had terrible arthritis and terrible gum disease. And when I
00:01:09
treated the gum disease, her rheumatoid arthritis got better to the point where she was actually able to walk again.
00:01:14
Wow. Yeah. So, let's talk about what we can do about it. Is there any time where I shouldn't brush my teeth? Do I spit or
00:01:20
rinse after I've brushed my teeth? Chewing gum, coffee, mouthwash, good or bad for me? Let's go through all of that. So,
00:01:27
weirdly, this has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show
00:01:33
regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So, could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show
00:01:38
and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment
00:01:45
to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen
00:01:52
to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so
00:01:57
much. Dr. Victoria Samson, what is the mission
00:02:05
that you're on? Um, my mission is to show people that the mouth is the gateway to the rest of
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the body. And if they really want to achieve full body health, it starts with the mouth first. I've never heard of the term oral
00:02:18
microbiome really until I met you and went through all of your work and your research and I
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think many people listening to this now also probably aren't familiar with that term or and also the importance of that term. So if you had to make a case to
00:02:32
someone like me who's really unfamiliar with this subject as to why it's so important from a very topline
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perspective, what would you say? I think everyone knows that their gut has a microbiome.
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And for the past 10 years, we've always talked about how you can change your diet, probiotics, prebiotics for the gut
00:02:48
microbiome. But what a lot of people don't understand is that the oral microbiome is the second largest and
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most diverse microbiome after the gut. It's also a lot easier to change and actually it's been shown to have a
00:03:00
massive impact on general health. So, uh, having an imbalanced oral microbiome increases your risk of oral diseases
00:03:07
like gum disease and decay, but also can increase your risk of other systemic diseases like high blood pressure, heart
00:03:13
disease, infertility, Alzheimer's. Um, and it's something that is so easy to
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manage and balance. How many people does this impact and how many people is it relevant to? So, an
00:03:24
understanding of my or oral microbiome is going to help me in a number of ways as it relates to my overall health. But how many people does it really really
00:03:31
have an impact on? I think it depends on what you're trying to get out of the oral microbiome
00:03:36
testing. Um, I would argue that it benefits everyone. We all have teeth. We all have mouths. Um, and everything that
00:03:44
we do, every time we breathe, we eat, we drink, we kiss, uh, we are impacting our oral microbiome every single time. And
00:03:51
then every time we swallow or we breathe that bacteria that is putting into our
00:03:56
mouth will travel elsewhere to the rest of the body and cause problems elsewhere. You said it's the second biggest microbiome in the body.
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Yeah. How many bacteria are in my oral microbiome? So you have 700 approximately 700
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different bacteria which make up two billion bacteria overall. And what's also very weird about the oral
00:04:13
microbiome compared to any of the other microbiomes is that you've got lots of different environments or niches within
00:04:19
the same mouth. So, if you think about the bacteria that would like to live under the gums or at the back of your
00:04:25
throat or on your teeth, they're all very different environments. Some are hot, cold, you know, wet. And so, you've
00:04:32
got lots and lots of different parties of bacteria within the same microbiome in the mouth.
00:04:37
Okay. And you mentioned a second ago that things like kissing, breathing, swallowing have an impact on my oral
00:04:44
microbiome. Yes. In a significant way that I need to know about. Uh, yes. So, it's more about how often
00:04:50
you're doing those certain habits. So, you know, for example, with kissing, the research has shown that you need to kiss
00:04:56
more than 11 times a day for you to be sharing the same bacteria or microbiome as your partner. Um, but also even the
00:05:02
habits that we have, um, the air quality that we have, everything will dictate the environment that our mouths are
00:05:09
living in and therefore what bacteria will live in our mouths. And on the subject of oral diseases and things like
00:05:15
tooth decay, how many people are impacted globally by oral diseases?
00:05:21
So the World Health Organization has come out um saying that 3.5 billion people have some sort of oral disease.
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They've also found that 10% of our world population are suffering from severe gum
00:05:33
disease which makes gum disease one of the most prevalent inflammatory conditions um in the whole body. this
00:05:40
conversation around the oral microbiome. Have you seen it developing over the over recent years, have you seen it
00:05:45
become more sort of pertinent to people in society? Massively. I think I've been doing this
00:05:50
for for years. It's been something that I've loved. Um, and no one really knew what I was talking about most of the
00:05:56
time. They all thought I was a bit of a dreamer. Even dentists, patients, they all thought, okay, well, doesn't really
00:06:01
matter, does it? But in the last year or two, I've had people traveling from all around the world just to get their oral
00:06:07
microbiome tested to understand more about what's going on in their body. And I think we're seeing a shift in the
00:06:12
generations in terms of this new generation want to understand their health a lot more. So we're all sitting
00:06:18
there wearing, you know, trackables, wearables. We're, you know, calculating how much sleep we have, how much we're
00:06:23
eating. And for uh now we're actually also wanting to understand our oral
00:06:28
health. So that trust between a dentist and the patient is not necessary
00:06:34
anymore. We want to actually understand what's going on in their mouths and actually, you know, be able to track things, see what bacteria we have, how
00:06:40
much inflammation we have, our risk of diseases, and what we can do to change that.
00:06:45
Last question before I ask you a more sort of personal question about yourself. Um, what other diseases in my body or sort of implications in my body
00:06:52
are linked and can be traced back to the oral microbiome? We now understand that more than 90% of diseases can be traced
00:07:00
back to an imbalanced microbiome. Uh if we zone into just the oral microbiome,
00:07:05
it's got connections with infertility, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's,
00:07:10
rheumatoid arthritis. Um and the list goes on. Erectile dysfunction. Um and
00:07:17
what's also very interesting going back to your question about you know is there been a new interest in this in the last
00:07:22
few years we've actually been able to show that there is a strong connection and causation between the oral
00:07:29
microbiome and general diseases whereas prior to maybe 5 years ago there was a
00:07:34
lot of kind of is this correlation is it just that okay there's the same risk factors with gum disease and with heart
00:07:40
disease for example smoking and now we're actually seeing that no it's not just correlation there is strong
00:07:46
causation between the two. And who are you? Um, I am Victoria Samson. I'm a dentist.
00:07:53
Um, I do a lot on the oral microbiome. Um, people call me the saliva queen. That's my name on the streets.
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And what's your sort of what professional experiences and education have brought you here today? And how
00:08:06
long have you been doing that? How many mouths and how much saliva have you seen? Give me a a sort of a a big view
00:08:11
on the the wealth of experience you have on this subject. Um so originally I
00:08:16
trained as a dentist. Um and that's six years of training. Um I would say I was a pretty traditional conventional
00:08:24
dentist as I graduated. Um I'd done some training um at the Karolinska Institute
00:08:29
during my university and the the Karolinska Institute is the best dental school in the world. Um but they're very
00:08:36
focused on the mouthbody connection on testing saliva. Um, and what they thought was that, you know, you go to
00:08:43
your doctor and you have a blood test. Why don't you go to your dentist and get a saliva test? So, from even dental
00:08:48
school, I had this in the back of my mind, but I still didn't have the training. And so, I just became a
00:08:53
dentist. Um, I was working half NHS, half private, and then as time evolved,
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I then, um, shifted to fully private. Um, and then when COVID happened, um, I
00:09:05
started doing a lot of research and all the dental practices were closed across the country. Um, and I thought that was
00:09:11
crazy because basically the government was saying dental practices, uh, or dentistry is not a necessity. So, uh, I
00:09:18
thought that was insane. And so I decided to do a lot of research and I wrote a paper which was connecting, um,
00:09:26
oral health with poor with CO complications. So what we found was that patients who had poor oral health or gum
00:09:32
disease were at a much higher risk of COVID complications. Um and then that
00:09:38
evolved into me doing some studies with universities and hospitals. But the issue was that we couldn't go into um
00:09:45
hospitals and check people's teeth and gums because they had CO. So instead what we did was we would collect their
00:09:50
saliva and we would take it to the lab and we had this beautiful snapshot of what was going on in a patient's mouth
00:09:57
at that moment in time just from their saliva. So we did a lot of research and we found that uh COVID sufferers or
00:10:04
patients who had gum disease were nine times more likely to have COVID complications. But also what I took from
00:10:10
that was that why aren't we using saliva you know more regularly? Why don't we use this in more commercial aspect and
00:10:16
for our patients. So after that I devoted a lot of time into developing
00:10:21
oral microbiome testing. We had gut microbiome testing. you've got urinary microbial, you've got every single
00:10:27
microbiome has a test, but the oral microbiome didn't really have one. So, I built one of the first oral microbiome
00:10:33
tests in Europe um and that was a couple of years ago and then now have come out and uh kind of left and created my own
00:10:41
one um about a couple of weeks ago. That research you mentioned,
00:10:46
specifically the research paper which was titled, could there be a link between oral hygiene and severity of co
00:10:52
infections was the first research paper to link gum disease with worse co complications and
00:10:59
I was reading that it was the most cited research paper by the one of the sort of
00:11:05
dentistry publications. Yeah. Yeah. So the British dental journal is one of the most cited and viewed articles. Um and what it also
00:11:12
helped do was um the World Health Organization and SAGE picked that up and they said, "Oh, wait a second. I think
00:11:19
that oral health is really important for general health and also we should reopen dental practices." So this also paved
00:11:25
the way for dental practices reopening later on. What's going on there? Can you explain that to me like a 10-year-old? So if I
00:11:32
have a bad or a unhealthy oral microbiome, I'm nine times more likely
00:11:38
to end up in ICU with CO complications. What what's the link? So there's a few. So the first one is
00:11:45
inflammation. So CO we know um it releases a lot of inflammatory markers.
00:11:51
So it's what we call the cytoine storm. So it's essentially the storm of lots and lots of inflammatory markers. And
00:11:57
gum disease separately um is essentially inflammation of the gums. And so what gum disease does is it releases lots of
00:12:04
inflammatory markers from the mouth elsewhere to the rest of the body. So then when you add those together and you
00:12:09
have your cytoine storm from COVID and you've got your inflammatory markers from gum disease, it's just adding
00:12:15
petrol to the fire. So you're just making that cytoine storm even worse. Um but then on the separate side, it's
00:12:20
also bacteria. So if you look at the um autopsies and the research of CO uh
00:12:26
patients um most of them didn't die from the virus itself. You no one really died from COVID 19. They died from
00:12:32
complications. So the number one complication was actually a bacterial infection. So imagine your body you've
00:12:38
got COVID you are really unwell and your immune system is on absolute overdrive.
00:12:44
This is the prime time for bacteria to come into your body and to cause what we call a bacterial super infection. And so
00:12:50
actually when you looked at the autopsies of a lot of these patients, they had oral bacteria from their mouth
00:12:56
traveling to their lungs and causing bacterial super infections which would result in things like pneumonia. And
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that's actually the cause of death for most patients. You don't really think that your oral
00:13:07
microbiome can be fatal. It can kill you. No. And even I think as a dentist we
00:13:15
weren't really taught how important bacteria was or how important the mouth
00:13:20
was for the rest of the body. Uh the number the only one that we ever learned um and a lot of people would know this
00:13:26
one is that if you um have heart surgery you can't actually have a hygiene for
00:13:32
about 6 months after the heart surgery. A dental hygiene. Yes. And the reason for that is because
00:13:37
you're at a very high risk risk of something called infective endocarditis. So this is oral bacteria which travels
00:13:43
down to a faulty heart valve um and can actually cause death. Um so we know that
00:13:48
but we never really look at it for other diseases or other problems. I want to um I want to take a step back
00:13:55
before we go through the links between our oral microbiome and all of these diseases. But also I really want to also
00:14:00
talk about how what we can do about it because I've got so many questions around it. I've got all of these products down below my chair from
00:14:06
mouthwashes to toothpaste to all these kinds of things which I want to talk about as well. But just taking a step back to something that one of my guests
00:14:12
previously was telling me about. I think it was James Nester. He was telling me that the the mouth itself and the jaw
00:14:19
because of processed foods is an abnormal shape. And when I say abnormal,
00:14:24
I mean um in relation to how it was supposed to develop because we're eating so many processed foods which aren't,
00:14:30
you know, which are designed to be easy to chew. the mouth itself and the jaw have changed. Is there any truth in
00:14:35
that? Yeah, 100%. So, there was a man called Western Price um and he was a dentist
00:14:42
and he basically suspected that and he was like, "This is strange. Why is it that um people who are in more
00:14:49
industrialized and westernized areas have higher levels of decay and they have loads of crowding?" So, they had
00:14:55
basically lots of crowding of the teeth um and sper jaws. And so he basically traveled around the world and he looked
00:15:02
at lots of different um tribes, villages, countries and he compared the
00:15:08
teeth of uh for example twins. One twin would be in a very industrialized westernized area and the other one was
00:15:15
not. And what he found was that in the twins who were in these non-industrialized areas, they were
00:15:21
eating harder foods. Uh they were having less sugar and actually their jaws developed a lot better. So they didn't
00:15:27
have crowding. They had perfect teeth actually and they had no decay compared to the children or the the twins who are
00:15:34
in more industrialized areas and it is because our food now has become so
00:15:39
processed. A lot of children are not having hard foods. Um and so we don't develop the jaws and the muscles at an
00:15:46
early age and so the teeth haven't changed size. The teeth are exactly the same size as they were previously. But
00:15:51
what we're seeing is that those teeth um don't have any space to grow anymore and that's when we're getting crowding. And
00:15:57
can you see that in any of those models? So, uh, yeah, in this model you can actually see at the very back. So, a lot
00:16:03
of people will have wisdom teeth. Um, and, uh, one of the biggest issues at the moment is that a lot of people have
00:16:09
impacted wisdom teeth. So, this is basically, imagine your teeth are all upright. Your wisdom tooth is coming out
00:16:15
at a completely horizontal angle and it's pushing on the rest of the teeth. It's an absolute nightmare as a dentist
00:16:21
to take out. It's even more of a nightmare for a patient to have to endure. But also we're seeing that there
00:16:26
are a lot more impacted wisdom teeth um in the last 30 40 years than there were previously
00:16:32
uh because the diets have changed. Because the diets have changed a lot more children are needing orthodontic treatment now as well just because they
00:16:38
have crowded teeth. Teeth are overlapping um and so they need braces to straighten those teeth out. If you
00:16:44
think about cavemen, cavemen didn't have dentists. They didn't have braces. They didn't even use toothpaste. But they
00:16:51
didn't die from gum disease or decay or crowded teeth. So, it's been something
00:16:56
in our industrialized or more kind of westernized diet that has changed that.
00:17:02
My wisdom tooth is coming through on my left side at the moment and I think actually also my right side at the same time. And I'm 32 years old now. So, I'm
00:17:09
like, why why the hell am I growing teeth at 32 years old? I thought I was on my way out or something. Um, so I got
00:17:14
two questions just before we crack on, which is what the hell is a wisdom tooth? Why is it called a wisdom tooth and why is it coming through at 32 years
00:17:20
old? Um, so we have teeth erupting at different kind of times of our lives. So
00:17:28
usually you have your baby teeth, they will erupt up to the age of about 6 or 7 years old. Um, and then you have your
00:17:34
adult teeth coming through and usually they will stop erupting around 12 years old. Um, and then you have nothing.
00:17:40
You're chilling. You have nothing, nothing, nothing nothing until about maybe 18, 19 years old. And that's where
00:17:46
you start to get your wisdom teeth. The name behind wisdom teeth from what I understand is because it's it erupts
00:17:54
when you're older. It's when you have more wisdom and you're more wise. So I'm wise now. So you're just very wise.
00:17:59
Okay, makes sense. And so some people will get it at 18. Some people don't have any wisdom teeth.
00:18:05
Some people will have wisdom teeth which erupt perfectly and are all completely fine. and others will have their wisdom
00:18:10
teeth tooth erupt at 32 years old and maybe be a little bit impacted or cause problems. So, they're also very strange
00:18:18
teeth. Um, they're very unpredictable the way that they are. Is there any evolutionary basis for why
00:18:23
we need them? There must be some kind of evolutionary reason for them. Not that I understand. What is also
00:18:30
happening is that um apparently and this is some research is that less people are having wisdom teeth because more
00:18:37
children or or adults are getting their wisdom teeth taken out and as evolution goes um eventually some people are
00:18:45
actually not having wisdom teeth at all because their ancestors haven't had wisdom teeth so why would they have wisdom teeth? Um but overall no there's
00:18:52
no real need for wisdom teeth. I never like to take them out unless needed
00:18:58
because I mean more teeth the better the better and you never know if you have to have something taken out and we
00:19:04
can use your wisdom teeth for something. If I were to look at my ancestors from
00:19:09
500 years ago, you said they don't have dentists, they don't have toothpaste and all those kinds of things. But you also said they don't have tooth tooth decay.
00:19:16
Yeah. Does that not therefore mean that I shouldn't need a dentist and I shouldn't need toothpaste or mouthwash or floss?
00:19:23
If you had a caveman diet, then potentially you might not need toothpaste, floss, or even a toothbrush.
00:19:31
Um, and there's a lot of argument as to, you know, there's a lot of people out there saying, you know, you don't need to use any toothpaste, you don't need
00:19:37
floss, anything like that. And fine, go ahead, do that. But only if you are
00:19:42
going to be eating, you know, meat, raw meat sometimes, and you're only drinking
00:19:47
water and you're not having anything in your diet which has any sugar or carbohydrates in it.
00:19:53
I mean, doesn't that speak to what the perfect diet is supposed to be? Can't we tell what the perfect diet is supposed to be by looking at the mouth?
00:19:59
Yeah. So, uh, another issue is that with a lot of the food that we eat now, um,
00:20:05
they have a lot more sugar in them and that will impact the acidity of your saliva. And essentially what decay is
00:20:11
is, uh, you have sugar or you have some sort of carbohydrates and you've got this bacteria in your mouth and they
00:20:18
feed on that sugar. And as they feed on that sugar, they release acid. Um, and if that acid is left there, then it can
00:20:25
cause demineralization of your teeth. and that demineralization will end up with decay.
00:20:31
Okay. So, let's talk about the personal oral microbiome. Um, is my oral
00:20:37
microbiome different from say Jack's over there and from my girlfriends? Yes. Massively.
00:20:43
Massively different. Yes. Maybe massively I would say. Um, so
00:20:48
one of the issues that I used to have was I was doing lots of oral microbiome testing. Um, and I would have, you know,
00:20:55
let's say you and your girlfriend do an oral microbiome test and both of you, I would see your results and they would come out pretty much the same because
00:21:02
we're only looking at certain bacteria. We can't look at all 700. So, we would look at the top 20 bacteria that cause
00:21:08
problems. So, I would look at both of them and then I would look inside your mouth and one of you, I don't know in
00:21:14
this case, had raging gum disease and terrible, terrible oral health and the other person would be completely fine.
00:21:20
So then I realized that actually it's not just bacteria that causes disease or problems, it's how your body responds to
00:21:27
that bacteria and the strains of bacteria that you have as well. So for every bacteria um there'll be multiple
00:21:34
strains and some of those strains can be really aggressive and really horrible for your mouth and other strains are
00:21:39
completely fine and are not going to cause you any problems. So when I developed my test, what we did is we
00:21:45
looked at strains. So we looked at the strains of certain bacteria um and we would be able to differentiate between
00:21:50
patients who had the really bad strains and the really good strains. But then also we looked at the ratio of good and
00:21:56
bad bacteria in someone's mouth. So their diversity as well as their genetic mutations and also their inflammation.
00:22:02
So when you put all of it together and you it's like a puzzle piece then you can actually have a better insight into
00:22:08
someone's oral health. So, I guess my answer is that everyone's oral microbiome is a little bit different,
00:22:14
but it's also how your body responds to that microbiome and bacteria that really dictates whether or not you're going to
00:22:20
have disease or problems. So, you could be someone who takes care of their teeth really, really well, but still have a bad oral microbiome
00:22:27
relationship with the rest of your body effectively. Yeah. And I see it every day. And we have a lot of patients who suffer from
00:22:33
terrible gum disease and they come to me and they brush three times a day. They've never touched a cigarette. They have immaculate oral hygiene. They eat
00:22:41
very well, but they have terrible gum disease. And for those patients, they might have genetic mutations that
00:22:46
predispose them to gum disease and to inflammation. So even the smallest amount of bacteria, their body responds
00:22:53
in a very aggressive and inflammatory destructive way, which can cause disease. When I was speaking to I think it was
00:22:59
Tim Spectre about the gut microbiome, he was telling me that the gut microbiome turns over, i.e. the bacteria dies every
00:23:06
couple of days or weeks or something. How often does the oral microbiome die
00:23:14
turn over and why does that matter? So, what's interesting or different
00:23:19
between the oral and gut microbiome? The oral microbiome, if someone doesn't go in there and mechanically disrupt the
00:23:25
bacteria and the plaque in your mouth, then that bacteria can stay forever. So, the gut, what happens is you've got
00:23:31
something called paristelis. got movement. So the bacteria moves, it it changes, it regenerates, there's
00:23:37
turnover in the mouth. So the teeth are the only non-shedding surfaces in the whole body. So that
00:23:42
non-shedding surfaces. So imagine if you if you never had a shower in your life. Uh you would still
00:23:49
selfwash because the skin cells would shed. Mhm. But if you never brushed your teeth,
00:23:55
then your teeth are not shedding. They're going to stay like that. So that bacteria will just keep on growing and
00:24:00
growing and growing and growing and you'll get this really thick plaque. So that's why actually the oral microbiome
00:24:07
you need to mechanically remove that bacteria and that's why brushing your teeth is super important or um using the
00:24:13
correct toothpaste or etc. going and seeing your hygienist because you need to mechanically remove that bacteria
00:24:19
quite regularly. Okay. And the the two ways I was reading in your work it said that the two ways that oral health impacts overall health
00:24:26
are by the spreading of bacteria and the other sort of central issue is it causes inflammation.
00:24:31
So on this point of spreading bacteria I'm always concerned this is a bit of a superstitious thing but anytime that I'm
00:24:38
sick I'm always like don't part of me is like don't swallow because in my head I think if I'm sick in my mouth or if I've
00:24:44
got um like a sore throat or something I'm like if I swallow it the rest of my body is going to get sick. It's super
00:24:50
super superstitious, but is there any truth to any of this? Um, so not from just being sick like a
00:24:56
common cold. And it's actually really interesting. I had a patient yesterday and bless him, he's very young, 7 years old. Um, and he had exactly that same
00:25:05
mindset. He just randomly woke up one day and he said, "This is kind of gross. Why am I swallowing my saliva? There's
00:25:11
all these bad bugs and gross things in my saliva and I'm swallowing it every day and it's traveling to the rest of my
00:25:16
body at seven." And so what he ended up doing was refusing to swallow his own
00:25:22
saliva. And so he would basically just dribble and he would just wipe his the
00:25:27
saliva off with a sleeve or he'd carry a towel with him and just wipe it. So bless him, he had a big rash around his
00:25:32
his um his face. Um and it it was a bit of a weird moment for me because I was
00:25:39
like, you're kind of right. Like I mean it is a bit weird especially as a child to sit there and think like yeah you've
00:25:45
got 700 different bacteria two billion bacteria overall and then you're swallowing it and it can travel
00:25:50
elsewhere to the rest of the body. So yes in in short yes bacteria from your
00:25:55
mouth when you swallow it can travel elsewhere to the rest of the body. However a lot of the bacteria um dies.
00:26:02
So the acid in the stomach can kill a lot of the bacteria. So it's only the really really bad bacteria that are able
00:26:09
to survive and cause problems. And that's why it's so important that you have a good oral microbiome and you balance it well.
00:26:14
And the other central way that it can cause negative impacts to your overall health
00:26:19
is via inflammation. What is the link between inflammation and my my oral
00:26:24
microbiome? So it's uh something that we call lowgrade chronic inflammation and
00:26:30
imagine so you've got this delicate balance of bacteria in your mouth which is your microbiome and we all have bad
00:26:36
bacteria in our mouths but most of us hopefully have better levels or higher
00:26:42
levels of the good bacteria. So there's always that balance and what happens in an imbalanced oral microbiome is that
00:26:48
shift changes. So you get higher levels of bad bacteria and you don't have enough good bacteria. These bad bacteria
00:26:55
firstly yes they can travel elsewhere to the rest of your body as you discussed. The second is that they can release inflammatory markers. So they basically
00:27:02
release inflammation and this inflammation can travel from your mouth to the rest of your body and contribute
00:27:08
to inflammation elsewhere. So for example if you had rheumatoid arthritis and then you had inflammation from your
00:27:14
gums that inflammation from your gums is making your arthritis in your wrists worse. So it's contributing to it. Now
00:27:22
what's also interesting and that's why it's called lowgrade chronic inflammation is often you wouldn't even know that you have it. I have so many
00:27:29
patients who say oh you know my gums bleed but that's normal. If your eye bled or if your foot was bleeding every
00:27:36
day you would be worried and you would think actually there's inflammation here. There's a problem here. But so
00:27:42
many people have bleeding gums and they don't understand that bleeding gums is a sign. It's your gums screaming to you
00:27:47
saying that I have inflammation and that inflammation can travel. And then the third mechanism as well. So there's one
00:27:54
more is um it's damage to your blood vessels. So again the same bad bacteria in your mouth. It releases these
00:28:00
enzymes, these toxic enzymes and they can travel through the rest of your body through your blood vessels and they can
00:28:06
actually damage your blood vessels. So these blood vessels are not able to dilate and constrict as well as they
00:28:12
used to. On that point of arthritis, I read a stat which um I believe is true. I think
00:28:17
it actually came from some of your research that said people with rheumatoid arthritis are eight times more likely to develop gum disease than
00:28:23
patients without rheumatoid arthritis. Yes. Which is shocking.
00:28:28
Yeah. So there's a really strong um birectional relationship between rheumatoid arthritis and gum disease. So
00:28:34
that means that if you have really bad rheumatoid arthritis, you will have pretty bad gum disease. And if you treat
00:28:40
your rheumatoid arthritis, your gum disease will get better. and vice versa. If you have if you treat the gum
00:28:46
disease, your rheumatoid arthritis will get better. And that was actually one of the um first patients that really got me
00:28:53
on my journey of the mouthbody connection. So like yeah, I was doing the saliva testing. I got it. You know, I was like, "Okay, cool. We are
00:29:00
quantifying oral health. We're tracking things." But even me, I wasn't really
00:29:06
fully sold on this whole mouthbody connection, how our mouth is connected to the rest of the body. So, I had a
00:29:11
patient who was sent to me by um her functional medicine practitioner and she had been seen by uh four or five
00:29:18
different practitioners. She had terrible rheumatoid arthritis and she um
00:29:23
went to this final guy and he was the first guy to ever ask her, "Have you ever had your teeth checked? What's happened?" And she said, "Oh, I've had a
00:29:30
few teeth taken out in the last year or two, about six teeth, but you know, it's just it is what it is." And he was like,
00:29:36
"I I don't think that's normal." So he sent her to me and he was like, "Can you do your saliva stuff that you do and see
00:29:42
if there's anything up going on there?" And we did do a saliva test, we saw that she had super high levels of
00:29:48
inflammation, of collagen breakdown, um high levels of bad bacteria. And what
00:29:54
was the most important was that when I treated her gum disease, she had terrible gum disease and that's why she
00:29:59
was losing her teeth. When I treated the gum disease properly and aggressively, um, yes, her gums healed, but more
00:30:05
importantly, her rheumatoid arthritis got better to the point where she was actually able to get off steroids and
00:30:11
medication and be able to walk again. Wow. Yeah. By treating her gum disease.
00:30:17
Yeah. And I think that, you know, sometimes as a dentist, we treat a lot of gum disease and we treat a lot of
00:30:23
things and we don't necessarily see the systemic consequences because the
00:30:28
patient doesn't come back or you know um or it's such a small impact that you don't necessarily see it. But this was
00:30:35
the one time where I was like wow like what we do is actually really really
00:30:40
insightful and really important. And you mentioned alongside that um inflammation also has an impact on cardiovascular
00:30:46
functioning and health. I believe it's the case that cardiovascular disease is the biggest killer in the world from
00:30:52
what I understand. Um so I was wondering if if you knew any of the stats that show the impact or the the increased
00:31:00
likelihood of me having a heart attack or a stroke or something based on my oral microbiome.
00:31:06
So um the research has shown that if you have gum disease you are at a 20% higher
00:31:11
chance of high blood pressure. Um but also they are now saying that up to 30
00:31:16
to 40% of cardiac um issues in hospital can be traced back to an oral bacteria
00:31:25
um causing problems in the heart valve. Um so the reason for this connection so
00:31:30
yes inflammation but also going back to that third mechanism I told you which
00:31:35
was about the vasoc constriction so the blood vessels constricting and dilating. So these toxic enzymes which are being
00:31:41
released by the bacteria they travel through the blood um and they basically stop the blood vessels from being able
00:31:48
to widen and lots of blood to travel to the heart and also to constrict and that also is um one of the biggest
00:31:55
connections with uh heart disease. I found this stat which might well be from your work or someone else's. It's
00:32:00
from the study called the association between parodontitis and blood pressure highlighted in systemic systemically
00:32:06
healthy individuals. Not mine but okay. And it found that people with gum disease were twice as
00:32:12
likely to have a heart attack and three times as likely to have a stroke than those without inflammatory gum disease,
00:32:18
which is absolutely staggering. Yeah. And then another study also showed that when you treated someone's gum
00:32:25
disease, their levels of CRP, and CRP is an inflammatory marker that you can
00:32:30
check in your blood, the levels of CRP significantly reduced. And for a lot of patients who suffer from heart
00:32:36
conditions, they will get their CRP quite regularly checked through blood testing. And so this is a way of reducing their
00:32:42
inflammation is just by having a a simple hygiene. And I've even seen um particularly in America, there's a lot
00:32:48
of um uh cardiac surgeons and um doctors related to to heart health um who are
00:32:55
now actually working with dentists because they understand that if they work together, then they're going to
00:33:01
have far better results for their patients. And this is this is that swallowing thing we're talking about. This is because you're swallowing that
00:33:07
bad bacteria. Yeah. And your heart valve um imagine if it's been it's faulty. Imagine you just
00:33:12
had surgery. I always think of it like it's sticky. It's like velcro. So it's really prone to infection and problems.
00:33:19
It's just like if you fell over and you had a scab and you were rolling around in mud all the time, you would get
00:33:25
bacteria going into that scab and causing problems. There's the same thing with your heart valves. Doesn't the bacteria just travel on its
00:33:30
own anyway? Cuz I feel like it's in my mouth. So I feel like it I don't know these are living organisms don't they just like find their way down even if I
00:33:37
don't swallow. Yeah even through your blood um and also through your gums as well. So you can
00:33:43
swallow your bacteria breathe it or it can go through your blood. At the start of this conversation we're
00:33:48
talking you mentioned the sort of implications for your cardiovascular system and one of the things you said was erectile dysfunction and that was
00:33:55
slightly alarming to me as a man um who's trying to stay away from erectile dysfunction. What is what is
00:34:00
the research that supports this idea that my oral microbiome can have an impact on my erectile functioning?
00:34:08
So men who have periodontal disease are 2.85 times more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction.
00:34:14
2.8 times. Yeah. Is I'm pretty sure that's 280% isn't it? Yeah.
00:34:19
Okay. So what is this perodontal disease? Gum disease. Okay. So uh it's kind of I
00:34:24
would say it's a bit of a spectrum. So the early stages of perodontal disease or gum disease is just gum inflammation.
00:34:31
So that's that patient who is brushing their teeth, spits in the basin and sees blood. So that's the you know the early
00:34:37
inflammation. If they don't get that checked out and sorted that will just continue and continue and continue to
00:34:43
what we call gum disease. Um and that's where yes you've got inflammation but actually you have really high levels of
00:34:49
bad bacteria now. And this bacteria is essentially eating away the gums and also your bone. And uh it's it's now
00:34:57
become irreversible. I'm just going to have a swig of this for your thought this
00:35:04
and then at the very end of the spectrum is people who are losing their teeth
00:35:10
having really terrible gum infections and all of these kind of mouthbody connections that we're talking about.
00:35:16
Okay. And that can you just explain again as if I'm 10 the how my how that
00:35:23
gum disease that parodontitis is it called has an impact on my penis I don't understand like I don't understand the
00:35:28
link it makes all of my blood vessels exactly yes so it essentially stops your blood
00:35:33
vessels from dilating and so you've got reduced blood flow to your penis okay
00:35:38
and therefore doesn't work okay so this is an emergency this stuff this is really is important
00:35:44
that's the one statistic whenever I have a and in the chair and he's like, "Oh, I don't want to brush my teeth." I'm like 2.85 times more likely to have erectile
00:35:51
dysfunction. They usually will go straight to the bathroom to brush their teeth. The other thing, no, but it's true, but
00:35:56
also the other thing that I I read in your research, which I found really really um shocking is the link between
00:36:03
my oral health, my oral microbiome, and cancer. Yeah. I was reading specifically about female
00:36:10
breast cancer, um which I know is affects a lot of women. um what is the link there between
00:36:15
breast cancer cancer generally and our oral microbiome. So this is um I would say some of the
00:36:21
newest emerging research that's coming out. So with breast cancer um I didn't
00:36:26
know this before this research came out but your breast has uh its own microbiome. So that tissue within the
00:36:32
breast um different bacteria are able to grow. And what they found was that in
00:36:37
women who had breast cancer, they had high levels of certain oral bacteria in their breast microbiome. So the oral
00:36:44
bacteria is called fusobacterium nucleatum. And they compared the breast microbiomes of patients who didn't have
00:36:52
breast cancer versus those who had breast cancer. Sorry, what's an oral what's a breast microbiome?
00:36:57
Just the collection of bacteria in your breast. Okay. Yeah. Um I didn't even know there was a microbiome in your breast either, but
00:37:03
apparently so. And um so when they compared a healthy um woman uh her
00:37:09
breasts to a woman who had breast cancer, the woman who had breast cancer had very high levels of the specific
00:37:15
oral bacteria called fusobacterium nucleotum in their breast. Um there's
00:37:20
also been research on colurectal cancer. Um and actually Apple News came out with
00:37:26
something couple of months ago which was nice to see them kind of just spreading the word. But what they found was that
00:37:32
in patients who had colarctal cancer um more than 50% of them had the the exact
00:37:39
same oral bacteria from the breast cancer study that fusobacterium nucleotum in the colons and what they
00:37:45
found was that oral bacteria uh made the cancer more aggressive and harder to
00:37:51
treat as well. I was reading about a study in mice um that linked that oral bacteria to tumor
00:37:58
growth. Mhm. Are you familiar with that study? Yes. And it's that specific oral bacteria. So the fusacter nucleotum
00:38:05
which has been shown to accelerate tumor growth um within mice but also um for
00:38:10
colorectal cancer and breast cancer as well. And what's your belief there? I know this research is fairly new but do you
00:38:17
think there is a a causal relationship a significant causal relationship between the health of our oral microbiome and
00:38:22
our probability of developing some form of cancer? I wouldn't yet say causal. I think that
00:38:30
for most cancers it is multiffactorial and there are a lot of things that can
00:38:37
impact whether or not you get the cancer and how aggressive the cancer is. Um I do think that oral health and some
00:38:44
specific oral bacteria um are risk factors and can definitely increase the
00:38:50
um aggression of those cancers or even the initiation of them. Um there's also been research and I think I'm waiting
00:38:57
for the research to be published on what they're doing is they've created a antibiotic which only kills that oral
00:39:04
bacteria that I was talking about. So fusobacterium nucleiatum and they are going to be issuing that uh antibiotic
00:39:11
to those patients who have the colctal cancer which has the oral bacteria to see whether or not it slows down their
00:39:18
progression or improves their their prognosis. So if I see those results and it shows it, then there's for sure a
00:39:25
strong positive link between the two. But for now, I would say that it's multiffactorial and it's definitely a
00:39:30
risk factor. That oral bacteria that you're describing that you called it fuzo bacterium. Yeah.
00:39:36
What is it that causes that? Is it something that I'm eating? Is it a lifestyle choice I'm making?
00:39:41
Uh multiple things. Poor oral hygiene. Um some of us genetically will have higher levels of it. Um it's what we
00:39:48
eat. It's who we're kissing. It's what we're breathing in. Does my girlfriend have it?
00:39:54
So, we would have to see. Um, but it's uh and that's the thing. That's the beauty of being able to test these things now is that you can actually see
00:40:00
and also what's it's strange is that green tea um you know something so
00:40:05
simple is extremely effective at killing fusoacterium nucleotum. So, it's just knowing those types of things, being
00:40:11
able to do the test, knowing the right treatment plans and recommendations based from that. We know green tea is
00:40:17
good for us and now we can really understand why. Okay, that's interesting. You you have actually tested Jack over there, right?
00:40:23
And you said to me before we started recording that he's got a ton of that fuzo bacterium. Uh yes, he does. Yeah.
00:40:29
And it's really getting out of control. That's what you said. Really badly out of control. Yeah. So, I've um
00:40:36
I've given him a big vat of green tea as a gift. Green tea? Yes,
00:40:41
green tea. This guy's going to edit that out. This is the problem.
00:40:48
me up. Green tea. Yeah, that's good for my own microbiome.
00:40:53
Yeah, really good. Stains, but really good. Um, it's anti-inflammatory. Um, it
00:40:59
helps with what we call oxidative stress. So, this is um, basically stress of for the body. Um, and it's
00:41:05
antibacterial. So, it actually is very effective at killing fusobacterium nuclei.
00:41:10
What is your opinion of the impact that coffee has on my oral microbiome? I'm
00:41:15
slightly biased because I love coffee. Okay. But there is no negative impact of
00:41:21
coffee on the oral microbiome directly. Um coffee does dry your mouth out. Um
00:41:28
and so you have reduced saliva and that can actually cause problems for the oral microbiome. So the saliva is super
00:41:36
important in your mouth. It provides all of the food, the proteins, everything for the bacteria in your mouth. So, it's
00:41:42
kind of like this delivery service. Your delivery roots traveling around providing all the food and bacteria um
00:41:49
sorry, food to the bacteria and that's what keeps the good bacteria alive and happy. So, when you have a dry mouth,
00:41:55
let's say you're drinking lots of coffee or you're very nervous or you are on anti-depressants for example, um which
00:42:01
are a big one, then you just don't have as much saliva. So you those bacteria
00:42:06
don't have as much food and those bacteria die and then you get bad bacteria growing in replacement.
00:42:12
What about tea? We're a nation of tea drinkers in the UK. Um similar. So it also does dry your
00:42:18
mouth. Not as bad as coffee, but otherwise no problems other than staining. What about if I put loads of sugar in
00:42:23
it? Cuz a lot of people put a lot of sugar. Okay. Yeah. No, no, no. Never. No. No. So actually sugar in your tea is even
00:42:29
worse than you having a biscuit for example. Um so because the sugar
00:42:34
dissolves in your hot tea and the tea is hot when you drink it um it can actually cause more problems. Uh another thing
00:42:42
with sugar is um I have a sweet tooth. I love sugar. But it's about how you eat your sugar. So let's say if you have
00:42:48
your hot tea with five lumps of sugar in there and you're sipping it over an hour
00:42:53
or two, that's where you start to see a lot of problems. So actually you need to be having a sugar attack. So just all
00:43:00
the sugar in one go. And that way your mouth has all the sugar in one go and it's able to neutralize the saliva and
00:43:06
get back to a good state as quickly as possible. Every time you sip your your tea with sugar, what happens is that the
00:43:13
saliva has to go from acidic back to neutral, acidic, back to neutral, acidic, and then it starts to just not
00:43:19
work properly and the saliva just stays acidic and that's where you start to see decay. So you want to just down the tea,
00:43:25
down the tea or I don't know if you're a M&M guy, have all your M&M's in one go.
00:43:30
Don't snack on M&M's every 10 minutes. What about other drinks like, I don't know, you know, Coca-Cas and these other
00:43:35
sort of fizzy drinks that might have artificial sweeteners in things like that. So, they're not as bad as your natural
00:43:43
sugars. Um, but for example, something like your Coke or or Fanta or whatever,
00:43:48
it's also um very acidic. Um, and it can actually cause erosion as well. So this
00:43:54
is essentially where the outer layer of your tooth, so the enamel is just worn away from having lots and lots of these
00:44:00
fizzy drinks. Okay. So that it's not going to cause decay in the same way, but it might change the acidic balance which then
00:44:06
decays my tooth, which makes me more susceptible to when I eat sugar to having a problem. Okay, got
00:44:12
so going back to what we were talking about the the implications of an oral microbiome and the rest of my body, brain health is one thing that I was
00:44:17
really curious about. Um, we've had lots of conversations on this show about Alzheimer's and dementia and just
00:44:23
general sort of optimal cognitive performance as I age. Something I'm thinking a lot about. I want to have a sharp brain. It's quite important
00:44:29
because of what I do. Um, so is there a link between my oral microbiome and my cognitive and brain health?
00:44:35
Yes. Um so if we look at actually just the the occurrence of Alzheimer's um and
00:44:42
gum disease or oral health, a lot of research has shown that um if you have
00:44:49
gum disease for more than 10 years, you have a 70% increased chance of
00:44:54
developing Alzheimer's. So that was a study that was done on over 20,000 people and they followed them for 20
00:45:01
years and they saw okay if you had gum disease um at baseline whether or not
00:45:06
you get Alzheimer's at 10 years or 20 years so a 70% increased chance of it um
00:45:11
they've also done a lot of research where uh they've been looking at oral bacteria and what they found was that
00:45:18
there are certain oral bacteria so uh one called p gingeralis that's one of the worst oral bacteria I would say out
00:45:25
of all of them. So this penjavalis is able to travel from your mouth to your brain. It's only it's quite close by
00:45:32
anyway. And what's unique about this bacteria is it's able to cross the barrier between uh in your brain. So the
00:45:39
bloodb brain barrier um and it releases these toxic enzymes. So these enzymes are called gingipes and they're imagined
00:45:45
these like horrible firefighter things and they can break down neurons. They can break down um a lot of brain tissue.
00:45:53
And so when they looked at the cerebral spinal fluid and the brain fluid or tissue of Alzheimer's sufferers, they
00:45:59
found that 97% of them had these toxic enzymes, these ginger pains in their
00:46:05
brains compared to zero for the patients who did not have Alzheimer's. So this
00:46:10
is, you know, the first study shows, yes, there's some sort of correlation, but there's a lot of other risk factors.
00:46:15
The second one, which is looking at your ginger pains, is showing that there's definitely a strong causitive factor um
00:46:21
between the two. And then another study which was very interesting was um
00:46:26
looking at cognitive cognitive decline. So okay fine you have Alzheimer's unfortunately um is it is it too late
00:46:34
should you stop brushing your teeth or what's the point? And so what they did was they had uh patients um who had
00:46:40
Alzheimer's and they checked their cognitive function and they also checked their oral health. And then uh six
00:46:46
months later they reviewed them and they found that the patients who had gum disease had a much more rapid cognitive
00:46:53
decline than those patients who didn't have gum disease. So again, it is still important if you do get Alzheimer's that
00:46:59
you maintain your oral health, that you have someone help you brush your teeth because your cognitive decline um will
00:47:06
be faster. How do they unpick that from other causal factors that might be going on
00:47:11
like bad food choices? Because in my head I was thinking, well, if someone's drinking sugary, fizzy drinks every day,
00:47:19
they're more likely to have gum disease, but maybe also that the chemicals within
00:47:24
that fizzy drink are impacting their chances of dementia. Maybe they're also someone that has an unhealthy lifestyle.
00:47:30
Maybe they're more sedentary. If they're eating bad things, maybe they're more sedentary. And maybe it's that that's causing the rapid cognitive decline
00:47:37
versus the gum disease itself. Is it possible to untangle all of this? I mean, it is very difficult. I think
00:47:42
that for those types of things, you either, you're right, diet, lifestyle is super important and we know that
00:47:48
Alzheimer's is again multiffactorial. Um I think it's really about the quantity of patients that they check. So they
00:47:55
need to be looking at a huge number of patients and they did um to check
00:48:00
whether or not there is a strong correlation between them. Um, also going
00:48:06
back to the ginger pain study, so the one about the bacteria that shows it doesn't it's not diet or lifestyle or or
00:48:13
nutrition. It is a specific oral bacteria that has traveled to the brain and released these enzymes which are
00:48:18
then breaking down neurons. So there there's definitely a strong positive um
00:48:24
effect. That is um fascinating. It's really really fascinating because dementia and Alzheimer's still seem to be a bit of a
00:48:29
mystery. it is and and I work um with a team for Alzheimer's and what they've
00:48:36
done similar to what you were saying is that they've kind of separated all of the the causes of Alzheimer's that we
00:48:42
know um or the risk factors and thankfully they've put oral health as one of them as well and I think from all
00:48:49
of the other risk factors so uh you know for example if you have uh the genetic
00:48:54
mutations you got the APO4 or any of those mutations that's you can't change that unfortunately some of us have
00:49:00
mutations which means that we are at a much higher risk of suff of getting Alzheimer's in the future. But something
00:49:07
like that oral bacteria p gingalis and those gingi pains you can get rid of p ging javalis really easily again if you
00:49:13
tested it you can even test for gingi pains um and then you can get rid of the bacteria before it starts causing
00:49:19
problems. The test that you offer does it test for gingi pains? It does. Yeah. So, we're the only ones
00:49:25
um on the market who do because that was something that I thought was super important. What's the point in us
00:49:31
telling you that you have a bacteria if we can't tell you that that bacteria is being really bad in your mouth and
00:49:37
causing a lot of problems? And people think I'm joking, but you have actually tested several members of my team, including myself. So, I am
00:49:43
actually going to find out the results today. Um on the subject matter of the brain, is there a link between my mental
00:49:48
health, depression, anxiety, and my oral microbiome?
00:49:54
So again, there's been a lot of research. Um I think it's difficult for something like mental health and um and
00:50:03
gum disease, which you know, with the chicken and the egg, which one came first? Um because one of the issues is
00:50:09
if you have a decline in your mental health, you are less likely to take care of your oral health. um and therefore
00:50:15
that can exacerbate issues. So there has been a lot of research to show that you know
00:50:20
uh there's a correlation between poor mental health and poor oral health. But in my personal opinion that causitive
00:50:27
connection is not there yet. Um there's also been some research with things like schizophrenia, but again it's the jury
00:50:35
still in my opinion. Are you able to tell the state of someone's mental health by looking at
00:50:40
their oral microbiome in your view? um you can know if something's up. Like
00:50:46
for example, I I had a patient relatively recently. I've been treating her for five, six years now, and I know
00:50:52
that she takes good care of her her teeth. She she takes good care of herself. And a few weeks ago, she came
00:50:58
in and she was not taking care of her gums or her teeth at all. Everything was an absolute mess in there. And um so I
00:51:05
did pull her aside and I was like, "What's wrong?" Like something's happened here. And I think it is quite a big um sign for a lot of people. It's
00:51:13
the first thing that they kind of let go of is their oral health. And is that because of, you know, they
00:51:19
start certain self soothing behaviors because they're stressed in other parts of their life. So if they're having a bad time in their relationship or work
00:51:25
and they're stressed, they might start eating sugar more or or just not brushing, smoking or drinking more. Okay.
00:51:31
Or just not brushing. Like with this woman, she just wasn't brushing her teeth anymore. Another thing that we can
00:51:36
also see, I mean it's kind of a bit on a tangent, but also um eating disorders as
00:51:42
well. So things like bulimia um or even sometimes anorexia, you can see in the
00:51:47
mouth. So there's a lot of times where we'll see young teenagers um and I'll know that they are bulimic because they
00:51:53
have certain issues in their mouth which they shouldn't have and that again is a telltale sign. Is that because the stomach acid is
00:51:59
coming through their mouth? Yeah. So they get a lot of erosion on the on their teeth and then in some cases you can also get these marks on
00:52:06
the roof of your mouth. So if they're trying to force themselves to to vomit then you can see that. Um and that's
00:52:12
something that you know you have to pull the patient aside or tell their mother and explain that to them as well.
00:52:17
And is there a relationship between stress and my oral health? So if I'm more stressed and my cortisol levels are
00:52:22
higher, is that going to make everything in my mouth worse? Yes. Even outside of the lifestyle choices I
00:52:28
might make in such a state. Yes. just that stress will increase your inflammatory markers, your inflammation.
00:52:34
Um, it also will dry your mouth out and all of those things will be linked. Um,
00:52:39
uh, we do a lot of testing at my clinic and so one of the tests that we look at is collagen breakdown. So, um, we have
00:52:47
lots of different types of collagen all over our bodies and our gums are made up of a certain collagen. So we look at an
00:52:53
enzyme called ammpn and this enzyme is responsible for breaking down that specific collagen. Um so we test the
00:53:01
coll that enzyme all the time with our patients. It's a really nice way of knowing like um whether or not someone's
00:53:07
about to have gum disease. Um how much collagen breakdown is happening from a biomolelecular level. So I had a woman
00:53:14
very healthy, always been fine. Um and then she had her collagen breakdown tested and her levels were through the
00:53:21
roof. her gums looked fine. She didn't look like she had any problems, but I've never seen such a high level in my life.
00:53:27
And so, you know, I'm trying to think of what could be causing it. All of that. And she had lost her baby a couple of
00:53:33
days before. And that type of intense stress on someone's body can have so
00:53:39
many effects and impacts on the rest of your body. Um, and that was one of them. When we retested her six months later,
00:53:46
she was back to normal again. But you can see even your mouth, you know, stress can really impact you.
00:53:52
On this subject, I was thinking about I mentioned Jame James Nester earlier who was telling me about the research of um
00:53:58
how the the mouth has changed shape because of the foods we're eating and how that that's caused a bunch of downstream implications for us. One of
00:54:05
the also one of the other things he also mentioned was about mouth breathing and nose breathing. Yes.
00:54:11
And there's a lot of people that have become incredibly interested in whether we should be breathing through our mouths or our nose. And I was wondering
00:54:17
if you had a perspective on that. Um, and also the other thing that he
00:54:22
mentioned to me was that there's a link between mouth breathing and things like ADHD. What is your point of view?
00:54:30
Uh, completely agree with all of that. So actually my sister, she is an orthodontist. Um so she works at our
00:54:37
clinic and um we run it together with our mother and um she is very very hot
00:54:42
on um mouth breathing. And what she um mainly does is she basically tries to
00:54:50
stop children in particular from breathing with their mouths open. And what she has found is that most of her
00:54:55
patients um who come to her um are mouth breathers. They often have some sort of
00:55:00
um ADHD. they have or some sort of attention deficit. Um they are uh bed
00:55:07
wetters. They grind their teeth a lot of the time. Um and they have a whole cascade of other problems and uh she can
00:55:14
treat it then and it's relatively easy. She would argue that it's very difficult, but to me I think it's easy.
00:55:20
I'm like, "Yeah, there we go. You can do what you do." Um and because the the jaws of a child are very malleable, so
00:55:25
they haven't fully solidified, so you can still move things. You can um get the teeth to meet. So if you get the
00:55:30
teeth to meet correctly then uh the child won't want to breathe with their mouth open. The annoying thing is is
00:55:37
that uh a lot of adults are mouth breathers because their teeth do not meet correctly or their jaws are in the
00:55:43
incorrect position and uh at that point it is quite difficult to move the jaws
00:55:48
into the correct position or to get the teeth to close in a way so that the lips are at rest and you breathe with your
00:55:55
nose instead of your mouth. But again, I see those types of patients because they all come to me with a lot of other
00:56:01
problems. So again, same thing. A lot of them have uh a lot of them have suffered from long COVID. A lot of them have
00:56:07
inflammatory conditions. Um are always tired. They a lot of them chronic
00:56:12
fatigue. It you know there's a lot of connections now uh between mouth breathing and those types of issues as
00:56:18
well. Is there a link between the health of my oral microbiome and whether I breathe through my nose or mouth? cuz James was
00:56:24
explaining to me that the nose is effectively like a a filter system. Yeah. There's a certain temperature in there.
00:56:30
Yeah. Um there's like sinuses and stuff which are have some kind of mucus which helps to catch bacteria. So if I'm breathing
00:56:37
through my mouth, am I more likely to have unhealthy oral microbiome? 100%. So exactly the same thing. You're
00:56:43
you're you've got a filter in your nose and so it will stop a lot of bad things from coming through. But the mouth uh
00:56:50
there is no filter. I mean you breathe it in, it goes straight into your lungs. So, there's no way of stopping anything.
00:56:55
A lot of people now are starting to mouth tape. Um, and that's become kind of trendy and cool. Um, it's not the
00:57:02
easiest thing to do. If it seems a bit weird to tape your mouth at night time,
00:57:08
um, but for anyone who's worried that they breathe with their mouth open, mouth taping, in my opinion, is a really
00:57:14
nice way of just like testing it out and seeing whether or not you do breathe with your mouth open because you'll do
00:57:19
some mouth taping and you can see whether or not you sleep better. So, if you have a wearable, you can see, "Oh, wow. My oxygen levels are so much
00:57:25
better. I had such a deep sleep." And if that's the case, you might be more inclined to straighten your teeth or
00:57:31
sort out the reason that you're breathing with your mouth open. I I uh took notes of a study which kind
00:57:38
of is interconnected to the point we were making about mouth brea breathing which said in a six-year study of 11,000
00:57:43
children. It was found that children who suffered from sleep disordered breathing were 50 to 90% more likely to develop
00:57:50
ADHD like symptoms than were normal breathers who breathe through their nose correctly which is absolutely
00:57:57
staggering. 50 to 90% more likely to suffer from ADHD like symptoms just
00:58:03
because they breathe through their mouth at night and disordered breathing. And it's it's mainly to do with also
00:58:08
oxygen being delivered to your brain, right? So there's not as much good oxygen um
00:58:14
like real rich oxygen, filtered oxygen traveling to the brain and so that's basically not allowing your brain to
00:58:21
function as well. You mentioned kissing earlier on. Yes. Um I'm still supposed to kiss my partner, right?
00:58:27
Yes. I hope you do many times. You you said if I kiss her more than 11 times a day or something then our oral
00:58:33
microbiomes synchronize in some way. Yeah. So there is um passage of bacteria
00:58:39
from you to her and her to you. Um they have also shown that uh for example they
00:58:44
did a study where one uh partner chewed lots and lots of probiotics or like good
00:58:49
bacteria and then had a super long smooch with their partner and actually
00:58:55
was able to transfer nearly 60 or 70% of that good bacteria into their partner.
00:59:01
So it's not necessarily longlasting. I wouldn't say that um you know if you kiss someone once on a night out that
00:59:07
you are going to terribly impact your microbiome. it's fine. You can go and kiss, but it's more for long-term
00:59:13
partners. If you're kissing regularly and for a long time, then yes, your microbiomes will start to um be quite
00:59:19
similar. Um, another factor as well is that obviously your lifestyles are probably pretty similar. You're probably
00:59:24
using the same toothpaste, eating the same food. So, it's difficult to fully put it on just kissing, but yeah.
00:59:30
What about oral sex and the implications that will have? So, if we're if me and my partner are doing oral sex on each
00:59:37
other, is that going to impact our oral microbiome? Yes. So, actually there's been a few case reports which have shown
00:59:43
um uh there's one in particular and I had a patient as well who had this a woman who um had a new partner and she
00:59:52
liked to perform oral sex on him and then she came to me because she was complaining of very inflamed gums and
00:59:59
she was getting gingivitis and you know it's not something I really ask like I'm not going to be like how's
01:00:04
your how's your sex life going these days like so I didn't ask it but she kept on coming back to me No, my gums
01:00:09
are still inflamed. No, my gums are still inflamed. And then she asked, she was like, "Is it maybe because I have a new partner?" I was like, "Okay, maybe
01:00:15
you guys are kissing a lot." And she was like, "No, no, no, no." And and then she explained to me. Um, and then I was like, "Okay, fine. Why don't you go and
01:00:21
test and ask him whether or not he has any issues." Um, and it turns out that he was having recurrent urinary
01:00:27
infections. And so, actually, they were transferring bacteria and she was having inflammation in her gums because she was
01:00:35
Yeah. performing her oral sex. So, yeah, there is transfer. Again, I wouldn't be
01:00:40
scared and say never do it. Um, I once made an ex-boyfriend do an oral microbiome test uh just to check and
01:00:47
just to make sure everything was okay. You made him do it. Yeah. I don't It's not a It's not a um a
01:00:54
prerequisite anymore, but it was at the time. I was like, "H, let me see. Let me
01:00:59
You must think that when you meet people. You must think, God, I wonder what their own microbiome is saying like in a romantic context cuz you know the
01:01:05
significance of it." Yeah. I think it's a, you know, I spend a lot of time and energy making sure my oral microbiome is very nice and
01:01:11
balanced. So, I wouldn't want anyone messing that up for me. So, it's important. Are you in a relationship now?
01:01:16
Yes, I am. Have you tested their oral microbiome? I've been trying to, but he won't let me.
01:01:21
You've asked him. Yeah, of course I have. And what did he say? Mind your own business. But I did give him an oral microbiome
01:01:27
test. So, hopefully he will just use it. I said, "You can even use a fake name. I don't care. I don't I'm not going to test. I'm not going to check it. I just
01:01:33
want you to do the test for me. For for you? For me? Yeah. And what's his what's his rebuttal? He's
01:01:39
like, I don't He was like, what happens if you break up with me if I have a really imbalanced oral microbiome? And I was like, I hope
01:01:44
that our relationship is stronger than just your oral microbiome. But there's ways to fix it. And that's the beauty of the oral microbiome is that it's
01:01:51
actually pretty easy to to fix and to change. If his results came back and he had a terrible oral microbiome, one of the
01:01:57
worst you've ever seen. Yeah. Are you less likely to kiss him that day? that day. Yes.
01:02:03
There you go. Don't do the test, my friend. No, no, no. Don't do the test that day. Yes. There's no upside to him doing this
01:02:09
test. I completely understand. And then I would go and creep into his bathroom and change all of his oral products. This is what he's scared
01:02:15
about. Personalize everything for him. And then you've done that already. I already have. He tests everything out
01:02:21
for me as well because I get a lot of products sent to me. So, I'm always getting him to to try things out for me as well. Okay. So, no if they've got um
01:02:29
issues down there. Yeah. Okay. And we don't really know if they've got issues down there unless they admit it
01:02:34
or do some kind of test. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What about fertility? Is there a link between our oral health and our
01:02:40
fertility? Yes. Um so if we look at men to start
01:02:46
with um there was a study done and they found so they looked at a group of
01:02:52
subfertile men. So, men who um weren't able to conceive with their partners and
01:02:57
they checked all of their mouths and they found that over 90% of these men had some sort of oral infection or
01:03:04
dental disease of some sort going on. They split the group into two. Half the group had the uh treatment that was
01:03:10
needed. So, I don't know if they had gum disease or decay. They they got it fixed and the other half were left to their
01:03:16
own devices. Um after eight months there was a 70% improvement um in their
01:03:23
success for pregnancy. The men who'd had their oral infection sorted um and they
01:03:28
had a much better improvement in their sperm quality and motility as well. And what did they do to those men in
01:03:34
that group where they saw the significant improvement? So, for example, if the man had um gum disease,
01:03:41
they would treat it with hygiene or if they had an infected tooth, maybe they would take it out or do a root canal or
01:03:48
etc. They would just have to treat that infection. So, I speak a lot about gum disease all the time, but actually
01:03:53
there's so many other oral diseases like decay um or tooth a types of things that
01:03:59
can also contribute inflammation and problems. In that study, 6 months after that, their sperm had improved by 20%.
01:04:06
And after 8 months, 50% of their wives were pregnant. Yes. That is staggering.
01:04:11
Yeah. What about women though? Is is there a similar sort of result as it relates to women's fertility?
01:04:17
Yes. So, um research has also found that if a woman has gum disease, um she is
01:04:23
less likely to ovulate. Um and also she's going to have uh issues with
01:04:28
conception. So they found that women with gum disease it takes them two months longer to conceive versus a woman
01:04:34
who doesn't have gum disease. Um but once the woman has conceived um the issue is still not over. She still has
01:04:40
to maintain her gums. So firstly a lot of women will have um pregnancy gingivitis. So this is basically super
01:04:47
inflamed puffy gums because of all the hormones. Um and so they should be going very regularly to see their hygienist.
01:04:54
Um but also what the research has found is that women who are pregnant and have gum disease are at a much higher risk of
01:05:00
preterm birth so premature uh babies low birth weight um and also preclampsia as
01:05:06
well. So they did a study in Malawi um it was on 10,000 women. So Malawi has the highest rate of preterm birth in the
01:05:14
world at just about I think just under 20%. Um, and preterm birth is
01:05:21
a a big issue for for governments, for hospitals. It's really expensive. You need to keep the woman and the child in
01:05:28
the hospital for a lot longer, but also that child will have a whole myriad of problems afterwards as well. So,
01:05:34
weirdly, Wrigley's um the sugar the chewing gum company sponsored this uh
01:05:40
study. They went to Malawi. They had these 10,000 women. They split them up into two. 5,000 of those women uh were
01:05:46
given sugar-free chewing gum, toothbrush, and some toothpaste. And the other half were left alone. And they
01:05:52
found that there was a 20% improvement um or 20% sorry, reduction in preterm
01:05:58
birth in the woman who'd had the sugar-free chewing gum compared to the woman who hadn't had it. So something so
01:06:04
cheap and so easy like chewing gum was able to actually reduce the risk of preterm birth for these women.
01:06:10
How and why? So, if you look into the research a little bit more, um you're going to get your chewing gum now.
01:06:17
Yes. Um so, sugar-free chewing gum um has been shown to um stimulate your saliva.
01:06:25
So, it helps with what we were talking about earlier, saliva is super important, um and it provides all the good food for uh your bacteria. Um but
01:06:32
then also, if it's sugar-free, um let's say it's using xylitol, that's naturally antibacterial, so it's killing a lot of
01:06:38
the bacteria in the mouth. And what they found is that there are certain oral bacteria that can travel down to the
01:06:44
placenta um and can also uh cause problems there and essentially um
01:06:50
increase the chance of preterm birth. You sufficiently convinced me that saliva is an important thing and I actually did one of your tests. Let me
01:06:57
go grab the results. Okay. Every single time you eat, you have an opportunity to improve your health.
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01:08:00
And here are the results. Okay. I've not actually seen them yet, so this
01:08:06
is exciting. Um, I'll give them to you so you can explain them to me. Okay. Is that okay? So, this is the test that
01:08:11
I did, right? Yes, you did. Yeah. And the test I did contains
01:08:21
this little kit that basically in the middle of the office one day, someone came up to me and said, "Steve, can you
01:08:26
spit in this?" And I said, "Sure." Yeah. And then they took my spit away. Um, it
01:08:32
turns out it was upon request from you. Yes, exactly. I wanted your saliva. Yeah. Which is
01:08:37
just to check to make sure if I could do this interview, right? Okay. So, this is the test that I did. I spat
01:08:43
in this little thing, sent it off back to you. You ran the test. How long does it take to do this test?
01:08:48
Uh, it would probably take you about 2 minutes to do spe yourself and then you get the results three to four weeks
01:08:54
later. What did you find out from doing my test? Well, okay,
01:08:59
let's go through your results. So um we found that you have quite a diverse
01:09:04
microbiome. So that means that you have a nice ratio of good bacteria versus bad
01:09:10
bacteria and this has been compared to healthy and diseased subjects. So you are really right on the top of the bell
01:09:16
curve. So very good with that. So happy. Um then we predict your
01:09:21
diverse is better. Uh arguably yes. Yeah. Okay. Um then what we have is we've
01:09:26
created this algorithm that predicts your risk of certain um issues or diseases in the mouth. So those are
01:09:32
things like bad breath, gum disease, um decay and general inflammation. So your risk of bad breath was low. You
01:09:40
didn't have a high risk for that. Gum disease was medium. So slight maybe there's a bit of inflammation going on
01:09:47
there. Your risk for uh decay was also medium. And your risk for general
01:09:52
inflammation. So this is inflammation throughout the rest of your body. Um was quite low. Um and then if we zoom in, we
01:10:00
then look at your good bacteria. So we're also quite unique because we thought that it was unfair that a lot of
01:10:06
tests don't look at the good stuff. So we look at all of the bacteria which has been shown to be the most beneficial in
01:10:12
the microbiome. So for you, you had pretty much high to very high levels of uh good bacteria, which is great. Uh no
01:10:20
problems with that. And then we look at bad bacteria. So we actually uh look at
01:10:26
about 500 different bacteria, but then we zoom into the top 20 bad ones which
01:10:31
are really associated with things like gum disease, decay, bad breath. So for you, out of all the bacteria that we
01:10:37
looked at, you only had quite high levels of one bacteria which was bad for you. Um and so this bacteria is very
01:10:44
strongly associated with basically a lot of buildup of um plaque in your mouth.
01:10:50
So, having not looked in your mouth, I have no idea about your dental health or anything like that. I would assume that
01:10:57
basically um you're a bit overdue on a hygiene. Maybe maybe there's a lot of plaque buildup going on um from that
01:11:03
result. But the rest of the bad bacteria, so all of these ones we're talking about, the erectile dysfunction,
01:11:08
your erectile dysfunction ones fine. Um your pen javalis is fine, you know,
01:11:13
fucleatum, those ones were actually uh very good. Um then also on top of that
01:11:19
going back to the Alzheimer's. So we look at those virolence factors associated with punjavalis and you had
01:11:24
none of those virilence factors which is also really good. Okay. Then we look at your genetic mutations.
01:11:31
So uh we've identified about 10 different genetic mutations which increase your risk of decay and gum
01:11:37
disease. So uh for the decay out of the five genetic mutations we looked at four
01:11:43
out of five of them you hatch. So that means that you and maybe you you have
01:11:48
stopped it, but you are at a higher chance of having a sweet tooth, of having more acidic saliva. On top of
01:11:55
that, it might be that you if you're stressed out or you're really unhappy, some people will run to the casino,
01:12:02
others will run to the bottle. And for you, you might actually be someone who goes and has a chocolate bar and actually enjoys sugar.
01:12:08
No comment. Um, on top of that, make your business. Let's say you've had your sugar because
01:12:13
you are stressed out or whatever. You also have been shown to have a genetic mutation which means that your taste
01:12:20
perception is lower. So you need two bars of chocolate, not just one. No comment
01:12:25
to make you feel That's the end of this podcast. That's the end of this episode. I'll give you my card.
01:12:32
Close your document. How dare you? No, I mean it all it all squares with
01:12:37
reality. So please do keep going. Um so that's your decay. uh situation in
01:12:42
terms of gum disease. Again, we look at um certain mutations. So, there are some mutations that can triple your risk of
01:12:49
gum disease. Um they can increase the amount of inflammation that you release from your mouth. So imagine um you there
01:12:57
are some people who even the smallest amounts of bacteria they might have great hygiene they have a few small bad
01:13:02
bacteria in their mouths they have mutations which means that they respond in a very hyperinflammatory and very
01:13:08
aggressive way and they will be at a very high chance of gum disease. So in your case um you had one mutation and I
01:13:17
would say out of all of the mutations for gum disease it was the best one. So it basically means that you have um
01:13:24
genetically you're more predisposed to bacteria collecting around your gums. Okay? So you might be someone who actually
01:13:30
needs to go really regularly for a hygiene and it's kind of a bit annoying because you keep on getting build up or they keep telling you to come back
01:13:37
because actually genetically you have that in your saliva. Mhm. Um then afterwards we give you
01:13:43
personalized recommendations. So, we tell you based on um everything that we've seen, the bacteria, your
01:13:49
mutations, what your input from the questionnaire, we tell you what toothbrush would be good for you, what supplements you should be taking, what
01:13:56
uh toothpaste, floss, um everything basically, even chew sugar-free gum, all
01:14:02
of those types of things to um improve your oral health and rebalance your microbiome. And you could tell all of that just from
01:14:08
me spitting in a tube once. Yes. And then at the very end, we have a list of all of the detected organisms.
01:14:15
So, like I said, we look at the top 20, which we know are really bad for you, but actually sometimes in some patients
01:14:20
will have like weird bacteria, really high levels of weird bacteria. So, I had one patient, she had really bad breath
01:14:27
and her gums were kind of okay, her teeth were okay, there were no problems, but she was like, I don't know what's going on. So, she did the saliva test
01:14:34
and she had 40% of her oral microbiome was made out of one bacteria. So, uh I
01:14:40
was searching this bacteria. I was like, I've never heard of this bacteria before. It is extremely prevalent in dogs. So then I get back to her. I'm
01:14:48
like, "Do you have any dogs?" And she was like, "Yeah, yeah, I have four four or five dogs at home." And I was like, "Do you kiss your dogs?" She was like,
01:14:53
"Yeah, of course I do. Like they're my they're my babies." So she was kissing her dogs and she was getting transfer of
01:14:58
bacteria from her dogs into her mouth and that was what was making up her whole microbiome. And that was giving her bad breath.
01:15:04
Yeah. Yeah. So what I did was I gave her um a treatment recommendation
01:15:10
and no I gave all of her dogs I said you need to take the specific um it's not medication it's like a supplement so it
01:15:16
basically stops uh like buildup of plaque in dogs teeth. So I was like your dogs have gum disease basically so they
01:15:23
need to be treated if you wants to get better. And after everyone got treated her bad breath went and so did her dogs
01:15:30
as well. Uh, so are dog owners more likely to have bad breath?
01:15:35
If you are smooching your dog then, yeah, kind of. And your dog has gum disease. If you're kissing your dog.
01:15:40
Yeah. Okay. Interesting. So, what are the very having seen my results, but generally
01:15:47
from seeing the thousands and thousands of results that you've seen? Yeah. What are some of the the easiest things that I could do to help correct
01:15:55
that situation and have perfect oral health and a perfect oral microbiome?
01:16:00
So, um, what we've done is if you were to do the test, you would have all of the personalized recommendations for
01:16:06
you. So, we tell you to have green tea, to have honey, all of those types of things which have been shown um through
01:16:12
research to benefit your microbiome in your case specifically. But if we were
01:16:18
just talking about someone who hasn't done the microbiome test and wants to just make sure that they have as
01:16:23
balanced of a microbiome as possible, um diet is obviously very important. So, what we're talking about that sugar
01:16:29
attack, making sure that you only have one sugar attack a day. Um you're not having sugar consistently because it
01:16:35
does alter your saliva um pH. Uh the type of toothpaste that you're using. I like to keep it simple. You don't need
01:16:41
to we don't need to make things super complicated. You don't have to spend that much money. Having the right toothpaste, right toothbrush, and the
01:16:48
right floss is honestly as much as is the most necessary thing that you need.
01:16:54
Okay. So, in terms of brushing though, you give some sort of practical advice around when we should brush.
01:17:00
Mhm. What is that? And is there any time where I shouldn't brush my teeth? Uh, you should never brush straight
01:17:05
after anything acidic or sugary. So, what you end up doing is is grinding the
01:17:11
sugar or the acid into your teeth. So, actually, you should wait 30 minutes
01:17:16
until you brush your teeth. That's interesting because when I eat something sugary, I feel like I need to brush my teeth to get rid of it.
01:17:21
Yeah. No. No. So, you want to wait 30 minutes. So, instead, you can chew some sugar-free gum or um there are lots of
01:17:29
pastals that we use. So, like I use like chewable mints um and you can chew one of those and it will actually neutralize
01:17:35
your saliva really quickly so that you don't have that acid causing the demineralization. And do I spit or do I
01:17:43
rinse after I've brushed my teeth? Spit. So, you should never rinse your mouth out with water after you brush
01:17:48
your teeth. So, brush, brush, brush, spit into the basin, and that's it. Reason being, again, going back to my
01:17:54
sunscreen analogy. Um, imagine you spend 2 minutes putting all this lovely sunscreen all over your skin to then
01:18:00
just go and have a shower right before you go into the sun. So, with the toothpaste, you you spend 2 minutes
01:18:06
putting all of that on your teeth. And then if you rinse it, then you're actually removing all of that goodness from your teeth and gums, and it's kind
01:18:13
of like you haven't done anything. Toothbrushes. Yes. Which toothbrush should I use? This one
01:18:19
or an electric one? Um, I generally prefer an electric toothbrush.
01:18:24
Um, usually they kind of do the work for you. So, it just means that patients
01:18:30
have better oral health because most people don't know how to brush their teeth properly. Actually, we're never
01:18:35
really taught or trained or we get taught by our parents. Our parents don't really know. They've been taught by their parents. So, a lot of people don't
01:18:41
actually know how to brush their teeth. Number one. Number two, we often don't brush for as long as we think that we
01:18:46
are. So, we're meant to brush for 2 minutes. The average is 20 to 30 seconds. And we think that we're
01:18:52
brushing for 2 minutes, but we're not. So, with an electric toothbrush, it times you and then also a pressure sensor. So, the electric toothbrush
01:18:58
often will have a pressure sensor which will show you whether or not you're brushing too hard or you're brushing at the right pressure and that will reduce
01:19:05
your chance of recession. Can you show me on one of those tooth models in front of you the area of the
01:19:11
mouth and teeth that people most often overlook? Yes. Can I have your teeth?
01:19:19
So, I would say the area that people usually um struggle with the most is the
01:19:24
insides of their very back bottom teeth. So inside where next to my tongue basically. Yeah. Just near your tongue
01:19:30
basically. What a lot of people will do is they'll kind of they'll go on the inside and they brush their teeth like
01:19:35
this. Okay. Whereas actually you want to get your elbow up and you want to brush a lot more at like a a 90° angle when
01:19:42
you're getting there. It looks like you're brushing the gums a little bit. A little bit. Yeah. So you actually do want to brush the gums a little bit. And
01:19:47
then when we're on the outsides of the teeth, uh we want to kind of brush at a 30° angle. So rotational movements and
01:19:54
at a 30° angle. So, not straight like a 90°, but kind of towards the gum margin. And by doing circular mo movements,
01:20:01
we're essentially kind of massaging the gums and getting rid of the bacteria from under the gum and then flicking it out.
01:20:07
Okay. Yeah. So, just like that. And then I always tell everyone it's really important to kind of have um a method
01:20:14
behind your toothbrushing. So, don't go like brush and then go there and then up there and you know cuz you'll never brush properly. Um, so always start,
01:20:21
let's say, on the left hand side, go do all the outsides and then do all the biting surfaces and then do all the
01:20:26
insides and then do the same on the top teeth as well. And that model there, you've got another model in front of you which is like a
01:20:32
see-through model. What does that show us? Um, so this is to show you um what an
01:20:38
implant looks like. A lot of people don't know what implants look like um and how it looks like if it was within your jaw.
01:20:43
Also what all the roots look like. And then also if you look on the other side, you can see um this tooth which has the
01:20:49
black within it. Yeah. Um and it's got like a red bubble at the root of it. So this is a tooth that's
01:20:55
had a root canal done to it and has an infection at the root of that tooth. So that's an abscess. Um and a lot of
01:21:00
people don't actually know what that looks like. Um they only feel toothache, but this is what toothache is actually
01:21:06
in their jaw. When our teeth get teeths, is that the right word? Is that a plural? When our tooths, what's the plural of teeth? It's
01:21:13
teeth. Is it teeth? Yeah. Yeah. When our teeth get stained, yes, what we often do is we'll take some sort
01:21:18
of whitening toothpaste or we'll go to a a dentist or a hygienist or something and ask them to whiten our teeth.
01:21:23
Now, I've always been a bit scared of that because there must be a cost to this whitening industry. Should we be
01:21:30
whitening our teeth? Is there any healthy way to whiten our teeth? Yes. Um, so you've got two different
01:21:38
types of staining. One which is extrinsic. So that's basically your coffee, your tea, your smoking. super
01:21:43
easy to get rid of. Um you just have to go to your hygienist and get a hygiene done and they'll get rid of the stains
01:21:48
um pretty quickly. Um or you can try a whitening toothpaste. Be very careful with a lot of those whitening toothpaste
01:21:54
because they can be quite abrasive and damage the enamel actually. So it's kind of like exfoliating your teeth, but your
01:22:01
teeth don't grow back. So if you keep on exfoliating and and getting rid of that surface layer of enamel over a long
01:22:07
amount of time, that can be quite uh an issue and quite problematic. You get sensitive teeth. Yeah, sensitive
01:22:12
teeth and then the underlying um tooth will start to shine through and that's quite yellow. So, you actually start
01:22:17
ending up doing the the opposite of what you wanted to do. Um then whitening. So,
01:22:22
you could you should do that professionally. Um don't go and buy some over the counter online thing. Um
01:22:28
because a lot of the time either they don't have the the right percentages and they can actually damage the teeth and
01:22:34
the gums uh really badly. So, you want to get that done professionally. um if you get it done by a good brand and even
01:22:41
within the professional world there are some whitening um products out there which are really bad for the teeth and
01:22:47
others which are actually really good for the teeth. So we use one in particular um it's called a niton and uh
01:22:53
the whitening for one day is the equivalent of having a Coca-Cola. Um so
01:22:59
thinking about it I mean I'm sure everyone has had one Coca-Cola in their life. Having a Coca-Cola every day for
01:23:05
let's say five or six days is okay in the grand scheme of things. is not going to massively damage your your teeth at
01:23:10
all. Okay. So, there is safe ways to do it. Okay, good. And is there any way to remove plaque yourself without having to
01:23:16
go to a dental hygienist? Um, so you can try a water flosser. Um, I've just bought one of those things,
01:23:21
but it doesn't feel powerful enough cuz when I go to the hygienist, I don't know what they're using, but it like it like
01:23:27
it's so strong. Yeah. That it like blasts my mouth off. My mouth feels so different after.
01:23:33
Yeah. And I wanted to know if I could buy one of those for my home, but I think it's a little bit dangerous. Um well the reason I think that the
01:23:39
water flossers are not that high intensity is because people can um damage their teeth if they don't use it
01:23:45
correctly. So kind of no there are some supplements that you can take to reduce
01:23:50
the amount of plaque that builds up um and that actually does work quite effectively.
01:23:56
I mean what are you there are two more there there's a couple more things there that you have in your pile that we not talked about. These are probiotics.
01:24:01
Okay. So going back to our microbiome uh probiotics are basically good bacteria.
01:24:07
So, um, not everyone needs them, but a probiotic, uh, essentially will, uh, put
01:24:12
good bacteria into the microbiome, and if it's got the right environment to live in, then it will continue to grow
01:24:18
there. Basically, if you're eating the right things, Exactly. If you're eating the right things, you've got prebiotics, you're, you know, all of those types of things,
01:24:24
then, then this will be really effective. So, these are two different options. This is a mouthwash. Um and again on the microbiome test that we've
01:24:31
created or Alice one um we look at all the levels of good bacteria and then we'll recommend a probiotic based on
01:24:38
what good bacteria you are missing. So a lot of us are actually genetically we've been born without certain good bacteria
01:24:45
in our microbiomes and so this is really lovely to supplement them. So this is um it's a mouthwash but it's in a powder
01:24:51
form. So, you take a teaspoon, you mix it with some water, and that activates the probiotic, and then you rinse it
01:24:58
around, um, and you swallow it. So, it's a kind of a twoin one for your gut. This is a pill, so it's a tablet. You chew
01:25:04
it, um, and then you can swallow it. So, this is again, this is super easy, too. Um, and and I love these as well. Very
01:25:10
easy to use. Victoria, what's the most important thing that we haven't talked about today that we should have talked about today?
01:25:17
Uh the only thing that I think you haven't mentioned that your viewers might benefit from is the use of straws.
01:25:23
Straws are very very important to to use um for sugar and also for acid. So
01:25:29
drinking through a straw actually helps you bypass um all of your teeth. So if you're having something acidic or really
01:25:35
sugary or even something staining, then it bypasses the teeth and goes straight to back of your throat so you can
01:25:41
swallow it. Um so this helps reduces your chance of decay of tooth wear and also staining as well. But specifically
01:25:47
if it's bad for you because you I'm sure there's some things which are good for the oral microbiome that you do want to be in the mouth.
01:25:53
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So if you're taking your probiotics or whatever then of course those are great. Um like for example um you know I'm human. I like a
01:26:00
nice Coca-Cola once in a while and I'll drink it through a straw. Um or if I have alcohol I'll also drink that
01:26:06
through a straw as long as it's not wine. But about smoking and vaping. Um so yeah smoking and vaping. Neither
01:26:13
of them are good for the oral microbiome. Um it goes back to um dry
01:26:19
mouth. So smoking will dry your mouth out and then you don't have the saliva and the saliva can't do what it wants to. It stops um vascularization. So it
01:26:27
stops blood flow to your mouth. And so a lot of uh smokers actually will not have
01:26:33
bleeding gums. That doesn't mean that they don't have gum disease, but because they um are smoking so much, the blood
01:26:39
vessels are already really tight and constricted from the nicotine. Um so they don't ever get bleeding gums even
01:26:45
though they have gum disease. Um and then the third thing is that actually we know that smoking is very strongly
01:26:51
associated one of the biggest risk factors for gum disease. If someone's now curious about their own
01:26:57
microbiome and the work that you're doing what is the sort of easiest entry point to learn more to get themselves
01:27:05
checked or to I don't know to resolve some of the issues that are causal or a
01:27:10
consequence of having an unhealthy microbiome. Where where do they start? How do they find you? We have a clinic in central London
01:27:16
called the Health Society. Um we opened about a year and a half ago now. And our aim was to put their mouth back into the
01:27:23
body to explain to patients exactly what's going on in their mouth. And we can do that through microbiome testing,
01:27:29
other saliva tests. Um we look at your blood glucose levels, your vitamin D levels. We've got packages. We have an
01:27:35
infrared sauna. We have a nutritionist. And the idea is that we're working all together because one of the issues I was
01:27:41
seeing was that patients, they want to understand what's going on in their mouth and they want to optimize it, but
01:27:47
they don't understand a lot of what dentistry is all about. We used to live in a world where the dentist would say,
01:27:53
"Okay, you need two fillings and you've got gum disease and you're not brushing your teeth." And that was the end of it. And you would just listen to them and
01:27:59
you get your work done. But now we are trying to essentially decode dentistry
01:28:05
and explain it in a way that patients can understand. So I would say I'm biased but come over, come to the
01:28:10
clinic, we can explain everything. Um or you can do an oral microbiome test and you can actually understand yourself
01:28:16
what bacteria, what genetic mutations you have, what inflammation you have, what products you should start using and
01:28:21
then based on that decide on what dentist you want to go to for any treatment if needed. What if I'm in Australia or Canada or
01:28:28
New Zealand or America? what can I do? Um, so we're actually rolling out the oral microbiome test to all of those
01:28:33
countries. Um, so you can actually buy at the moment uh through that. Uh, you'd have to email us, but otherwise that,
01:28:40
you know, I'm not the only one. There are other people who are doing this type of dentistry um, and are thinking in
01:28:46
this type of way. So, you would have to do a little bit of research, but um, I guess maybe follow me on Instagram and I
01:28:52
can give some top tips. I'll I'll link all your your website, your social channels below, and if anyone wants to
01:28:57
send you an email, you might get a couple of emails warning you now. Um, so you got to be careful what you wish for,
01:29:03
but but I'll I'll put all those details below. Um, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest
01:29:08
leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. Okay. And the question that's been left for
01:29:14
you is, what is the most important relationship in your life and why?
01:29:21
Um this is going to cause you problems. Yeah, I know. So um I would say um my mother I think that
01:29:30
is the most important relationship for uh me. I think she um has been uh one of
01:29:37
my biggest mentors. She's been my biggest cheerleader, my supporter. Um she's hard on us, but that has led to me
01:29:45
being the person that I am. Um, and I think that if I don't have a good relationship with her, um, then I can't
01:29:52
have a good relationship with other people. She's taught me respect. She's taught me how to, you know, handle
01:29:57
myself around people. Um, so yeah, I guess, uh, big up to my mom.
01:30:02
Is she Is she Iranian? She is. Yeah, she's Iranian. Yeah. And your father? He is French American.
01:30:08
French American. And if we sit here in 10 years time, what are you hoping the world looks like as it relates to the
01:30:14
oral microbiome, people's understanding of it, the the regulations? What are you hoping for? If you could wave a wand.
01:30:20
I am hoping that um the mouth is put back into the body in the sense that
01:30:26
dentistry and medicine are fully integrated within each other. So you can go to your dentist and you can get a
01:30:31
saliva test and that could flag up issues with your heart or diabetes and
01:30:36
you will go and see your diabetist. Um and we link everything together. Uh also
01:30:42
my other dream is that people start testing their saliva and they understand that you know blood is not the only way
01:30:48
that we can understand things that are going on within our body. Dr. Victoria Samson, thank you so much.
01:30:54
Uh, I find this so unbelievably fascinating in part because I've never heard about any of this stuff before.
01:30:59
And I I do this job, you know, I've done it quite a few times now. So, I've spoken to a lot of health experts that talk about the brain or I don't know,
01:31:06
infertility or um the gut microbiome, but never one that looks at the body and
01:31:11
our overall picture of health through the front door or the lens of our oral microbiome. And so, it's really really
01:31:17
inspired me. And I think sometimes on this podcast, I just love having these conversations because sometimes it you just need a little bit more information
01:31:23
about the importance of something to make even a small change in your life. And as it relates to our microbiomes,
01:31:30
our oral health, um our brain health, and all of these things, even a small change can have a big downstream impact
01:31:37
when we're talking about areas of our health where things compound over time and can either compound for us or
01:31:43
against us. And so, thank you so much for doing the work that you do and shining a light on this. work has been really seinal in sort of driving the
01:31:49
conversation but also turning the lights on to to the state and importance of our oral health and I'm sure that if we sit
01:31:56
here in 10 years time you would have impacted many many many millions of people um and their overall picture of
01:32:02
health through the lens of the oral microbiome because of the work you're doing and the message you're putting out there and that is quite something. So
01:32:08
congratulations well done and thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks.
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