What Is Your Mouth Telling You About Your Overall Health?

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Going deeper and then in my research I came across gluten and gluten causing enamel defects, gluten, you know, causing inflammation in the gut, which therefore could translate into poor oral hygiene and or just conditioning of the gums and the teeth. And so that was just kind of another step in that process.

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. My main goal with diet is to use food as medicine. But even when we eat super well, most of us are missing out on certain essential nutrients. Our soils have become depleted and our digestive tracts just aren't working so great. They're compromised by stress and toxins and they just can't absorb nutrients as efficiently as they should. And that's why I always use, and I recommend to my patients, a multivitamin mineral as nutritional insurance. It covers the basics for all our day-to-day body functions, all the things that we need that our food might be missing. But there are so many products out there I wouldn't go near because they contain artificial fillers or inactive ingredients, and you have to be pretty picky. The one I trust and take myself is Athletic Greens. They use high-quality, highly absorbable forms of vitamins and nutrients from real whole foods. Athletic Greens comes in a powder that tastes great and mixes easily with water or smoothies, and specifically supports my gut health, immunity, energy, and recovery. And it's not just vitamins and minerals. It has phytonutrient-rich superfoods and adaptogens and pre and probiotics and even digestive enzymes. I love that they add the digestive support in their powder since so much of our immune strength and overall wellness starts in the gut. It's really one supplement that covers so many bases, and you'd be hard-pressed to find something else in this comprehensive form in any single other product. I use Athletic Greens in the morning as part of my daily routine, and I love having it with me whenever I travel. I also love that it's diet friendly, whether you're vegan, paleo, keto, dairy free or gluten free. Right now Athletic Greens is offering my audience a full year supply of their Vitamin D3K2 liquid formula free with your first purchase. These two nutrients are also so vital for a strong immune system and strong bones, and many of us are not getting enough of them. I use the Athletic Greens powder and their D3K2 formula to make sure I get extra nutrients that complement my diet. They're also going to give you five free travel packs as well. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hymen to get your free year's supply of vitamin D3 and K2 and five free travel packs with your first purchase. You'll get it delivered straight to your door and I promise you'll feel the difference Athletic Greens can make in your daily wellness routine. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/hymen. Now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hi, I'm Kaya Perowich, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Many individuals who have experienced their own health crisis can relate to having a number of seemingly vague and unrelated symptoms. Yet approaching the body as one unique integrated system is often a pivotal step in the path to healing. In Dr. Hyman's conversation with Dr. Cynthia Lee, she shared her personal journey through.

Autoimmunity and the unexpected insight she gained from a visit to the dentist's office. I began to shift my thinking in relationship to health and disease in a much more living sort of embodied way. So when my thyroid was out of whack, it wasn't just my thyroid. It was my whole hormone system, which is tied then to the digestive system, which is tied to the immune system. Like it suddenly started making sense.

Bones connected to the thigh bone, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Like that all sounds.

And the body is connected to the brain.

Which is actually amazing. that our entire training teaches us the.

Opposite, that there's all these organ systems, right? We take the GI system and the liver and the lungs and the brain and the heart and the hormone, and.

You go to specialists for every different part of you, and nobody connects the dots.

Right. And then the gluten issue came up, you know, I was really skeptical of it, you know?

It's one of the biggest drivers of thyroid disease, Hashimoto's.

Yes, yes. And the celiac experts know that, but endocrinologists don't. So there's no crosstalk there either. And this is in conventional medicine, right? And I do remember asking my endocrinologist, what can I do? What can I do? And he said, nothing. It's genetic.

Oh, gosh, no, it's not.

Right, right. It's a genetic predisposition, but not predetermination. But the gluten thing didn't actually arise. I think I was partly in denial about it. There were lots of rabbit holes that I knew about and I just didn't want to go down as long as I was steadily getting better. It was my older daughter who, she was five at the time, I was taking her to her first dentist visit. And I felt like, as a family, we ate pretty well. She didn't do a lot of sweets, but she had not just one cavity at her visit. She had six cavities.

Wow.

Yeah.

And I was floored. So, you know, and the dentist kept saying, well, don't feel guilty, don't feel guilty, you know? And I was like, wait a minute, I wasn't feeling guilty until you just said that. But it made me investigate like something else is going on. Like, I know how we eat, I know how she brushes, and I know cavities happen, but like six, it just, it didn't compute. So I started researching and that's when I came across Weston A. Price's work around the condition of teeth tied directly to diet. But then going deeper, and then in my research, I came across gluten and gluten causing enamel defects, gluten causing inflammation in the gut, which therefore could translate into poor oral hygiene or just conditioning of the gums and the teeth. So that was just kind of another step in that process when I realized, oh, I gotta go back. And again, this is not unconventional.

This is traditional.

Hippocrates said all diseases begin in the gut. So we're just kind of going back. I removed gluten and I had massive withdrawal. Diarrhea, irritable bowel, and again, this was kind of before the time that I realized I understood about detox and how healing happens is that often, gets a lot worse before it gets better and that it could be a good sign. So I was really frightened by how severe my reaction was when I stopped gluten. So I was thinking it was a bad thing. But then, you know what? I stuck with it and a week later it calmed down and then my health improved a notch. And not only that, but we changed the way that our whole family ate. And my younger daughter, so my older daughter's teeth really basically resolved. I mean, they became really strong. Some of her cavities even filled, like they recalcified and didn't have to get filled.

Dr. Hyman also spoke with Dr. Todd LePine about the crucial role that oral health plays in total body wellness.

So, you know, most people who go to medical school, We don't really learn much about the mouth. We know you've got gum disease or you can have sores in your mouth. I mean, a few things here and there, but it's just amazing how much of a vacuum in our education oral health is. But as it turns out, it's been linked to everything from Alzheimer's to heart disease to cancer and to autoimmune diseases and on and on and on. And the question is, you know, what is going on with the connection between our oral health and our overall health?

We know that in functional medicine, the gut is sort of where everything starts and it can either lead you down the path of health or it can lead you down the path of disease. And the beginning of the gut is the mouth. So as you mentioned, in medical school, we didn't learn anything about the mouth. That was like for the dentist, we'll just ignore that. And the dentists just basically stay in the mouth and they don't really realize that there's a whole body connected to the mouth or some of the dentists don't. And this is where I think a lot of both, you know, even functional medicine physicians and dentists really miss the connections.

Yeah, I think that's true. And I think both of us have seen patients who, when addressing their dental issues, often resolve other systemic issues. So maybe you could share a little bit about some of the patients you might have seen that have links to their systemic health from their oral health.

Oh, absolutely. I have three cases. Real briefly, the first case is a patient who actually was a friend of mine. And I remember we were talking over a beer and he was telling me some of his health issues. And he was bemoaning the fact that he was having all these symptoms and nobody could figure it out. And I said, well, why don't you come see me? I'll do a consult on you. We'll take a look at it. That's sort of what I do. and he told me, you know, in going over his history, that he had a Cadillac in his mouth. And I said, you don't even have a Cadillac in your mouth. Yeah, I got about $40,000 worth of dental work in my mouth. And he goes, you know, the dentist said, I have weak enamel. And I said, well, what do you mean weak enamel? And I said, you know, weak enamel is not normal. I said, did he tell you why you have weak enamel? And the first thing that popped into my head is that he probably had undiagnosed celiac disease. which can cause weak enamel. And lo and behold, I tested him and sure enough, he had marked a response to gluten. And when he got off of it, I mean, a lot of his symptoms, they didn't affect his teeth because the horse was already out of the barn, but he also was having sort of unexplained fatigue and malaise and all that kind of stuff. And actually just getting off of gluten cleared up those other conditions. And we all, you know, you and I well know that there are multiple autoimmune conditions that are associated with gluten sensitivity. But weak enamel is one of those things. And I also, I try to get my patients and the dentists who I see, either as patients or dentists who I meet in social circles, to really be aware of that, 'cause I just think it's below everybody's radar. And as you mentioned before, you know, there are a host of conditions, including premature birth, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and even dementia that are directly connected to poor oral health. It's incredible.

Yeah, I mean, dementia. And, and they're finding that the microbes in the mouth get absorbed, then go up into the brain and create inflammation in the brain.

And there's a, there's a lot of organisms that are, uh, in the mouth. Uh, in fact, the oral organisms, and we have hundreds of oral organisms, there's about a 45% concordance between the bacteria that we find in the mouth and the bacteria that we find in the digestive tract. And you can think of the whole body as being like a tube, and the opening of the tube starts at the mouth, and then it goes all the way down into the stomach, the small intestine, large intestine, and out the anus. And those bacteria that are in the mouth, get swallowed by the body. I mean, you will swallow about 10 billion bacteria per day. And some of those bacteria, when you swallow them, can actually cause systemic inflammation. And those systemic inflammation can manifest in the joints, in the heart, or in the brain. It can also promote systemic inflammatory diobesity, as you well know. so it's a real, you know, important issue. Everybody's immune system is unique. And when certain people are exposed to certain organisms at critical levels, it provokes a low-grade inflammatory response, or in some cases actually even more acute, and that can lead to a whole host of systemic issues. So the diet that you eat will feed both the bacteria in the mouth and then also the bacteria in the gut. So some simple things that you can do is avoid snacking, drink water after you've had a meal, watch for processed carbs, sort of fake food if you will, in your diet. Chewing xylitol gum is actually something that is a simple thing to do that can actually have an anti-dental caries type of an effect. And then using an electric toothbrush, that's another thing that is a simple thing to do. pretty much recommend that for all my patients. And you can use that right after you eat. And then also having lots of fiber in your diet, when you eat or eating fiber, it basically is cleaning the teeth.

It's great. And, you know, it's often there's a lot of things we can do to improve our oral health through supplementation. Things like CoQ10 is very important, proanthocyanidins from colorful plant foods, vitamin C for gum disease, even things like vitamin D to help the bone structure and prevent osteoporosis in the jaw, which can cause gum, you know, weak teeth and so forth. So there's a lot of things you can do to actually help improve your overall oral health. So from a functional medicine perspective, we really deal very differently through diets, through nutritional supplementation, through various herbal therapies and other things that can actually help us. And we also focus on the big issues that are somewhat controversial, which is heavy metals in the mouth and mercury and even root canals can be a problem. I don't think all root canals are a problem for everybody. But they can become infected and it's often missed. This is really a new frontier of oral health and systemic health. And I think we really don't pay enough attention to it in medicine.

The mouth is a part of the.

Body that is too often overlooked when it comes to health and wellness. And it can act as a gateway to a multitude of health problems. From infectious and chronic diseases to chronic low energy, inflammation, and even protection from Alzheimer's, everything is tied to the health of your mouth, gums, teeth, and saliva. By educating ourselves about this, we can make better choices that will impact our health right now and for years to come. If you'd like to learn more about any of the topics you heard in today's episode, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Dr. Cynthia Lee and Dr. Todd Lappee. If you have any people in your life who could benefit from this information, please consider sharing this episode with your community. We need each other to create a healthier us.

Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Hi everyone, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make.

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