How to Improve Oral Health & Its Critical Role in Brain & Body Health

When you go to sleep, you need to know you're not producing very much saliva, and that's the critical time to make sure that there is as little opportunity as possible for strep mutants and other bacteria to feed on sugars or other food products and thereby to create acid that creates cavities ... If there is a most critical time of day or night to brush your teeth and floss and clean your teeth, it's at nighttime.

Most all mouthwashes, especially those containing alcohol, are terrible for oral health. Simply put they deplete certain components of the mucosal lining of the mouth and they disrupt the healthy components of the oral microbiome.

The degree to which your mouth is in a demin state or a remin state and the degree to which cavities have the opportunity to form is dependent on the amount of time—the amount of time in which your mouth is net acidic or net alkaline, the amount of time that you are in a demineralization mode or remineralization mode.

Here, when we say alcohol is not good for oral health and for tooth health, what we're talking about is the disruption that alcohol creates to the microbiome and the way that it alters the pH of your saliva and places the mouth and the teeth into a demineralization state. That's very clear. It also kills certain cells of the mouth.

Also stimulants like Adderall, Vyvanse, etc., those stimulants, basically any drug that increases epinephrine and norepinephrine, adrenaline and noradrenaline are the other names for those, are going to have a negative effect on oral health...

Turns out that no specific food, not even sugar, causes cavities. Cavities are not caused by sugar. Cavities are caused by bacteria that feed on sugar.

Most people in the world have strep mutans or will get strep mutans, and it lives in the mouth ... Strep mutans is there, and it's hungry. What's it hungry for? Sugar. When there are sugar present, it eats it. It produces acid. The acid produces cavities, taking teeth from a state of remineralization to demineralization.

Stimulants encourage mouth-breathing. Watch a meth addict or watch somebody who's on a high dose of stimulants, and they tend to mouth-breathe because of the shifts in autonomic nervous system function. They tend to be mouth-breathers.

If you eat sugar, try and rinse your mouth after—and ideally, you would brush, maybe even floss after.

Having a stretch of time of maybe 2, 4, 6 hours or more where you're not eating anything or ingesting anything that's acidic in terms of liquids can be very beneficial. Now, this is a vote in support of so-called intermittent fasting.

You need to floss correctly. You can't just pull the floss down onto the gum in between the tooth. You need to glide down the side of the tooth, get a little bit underneath the gum, and use a circular motion, and then lift up from between the two, which frankly is a lot easier if your teeth aren't very very close together.

The bacteria streptococcus mutans loves to eat xylitol, but when streptococcus mutans eats xylitol... it cannot produce the acid that normally would demineralize the teeth and create cavities. In addition to that, when streptococcus mutans eats xylitol, it kills streptococcus mutans.

By chewing a few of these xylitol mints or by chewing a xylitol-based gum immediately after a meal, you're taking substantial steps towards improving the chemical milieu of your mouth and inhibiting the proliferation of cavity-forming streptococcus mutans.

Oral health is inextricably linked to all aspects of brain and bodily health—both in the short-term and in the long-term—and it is perhaps the most overlooked aspect of mental health and physical health.

Turns out that dryness of the mouth is one of the ways that you really can throw off your oral health in major ways. In fact, its one of the leading causes of tooth decay in people like methamphetamine addicts or if you see people that are mouth-breathers—their oral health and their teeth, generally, but certainly their oral health, is severely depleted.

If you are at all concerned about fluoride in the drinking water, the simple answer is to just filter the water that comes out of The tap.

If you want to know why there's fluoride in drinking water, it's because governments figured out, hey, well if we want to reduce tooth decay, what's the simplest low-cost method to do that? Well, it's to put fluoride in the drinking water.

Most mouthwashes, terrible, terrible for your oral health, especially alcohol-based or antiseptic-based mouthwashes...

I'm not going to demonstrate how to brush your teeth, but one very actionable protocol that was told to me by all the dental professionals was to use a soft toothbrush.

One of the major suggestions from people in the dental and periodontal field, at least the ones I spoke to, was to actually brush your gums lightly to increase circulation of blood and other nutrients to the deeper portions of the tooth that actually extend into the bone.

I think it's fair to say, based on what we all now know about xylitol, that if you can find a toothpaste that contains xylitol as a sweetener, that can only be a good thing.

The best way to support a quote-unquote healthy gut microbiome is to consume at least 1-4 servings of low-sugar fermented foods per day.

They all suggested that you use a separate toothbrush to brush your tongue than you use to brush your teeth.

If somebody has a metal filling that likely has mercury in it, do they need to have that metal filling removed? And all of the dentists I spoke to said it depends, but generally the practice is to leave those fillings in and try not to disrupt them.