Is Charcoal Toothpaste OK, 8 Crucial Mouth Beauty & Oral Health Tips, Peptides For Oral Care, The Invisible Dental Flow In Your Mouth & Much More With Nadine Artemis.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, any dentist that really is leading edge and biological and knows their stuff has basically had to undo what they've learned. Which is kind of the same with like, functional medicine. For me in body care and my relationship to my body, it's like, where is actually, like, where should I be getting out of the way and letting the body do what it's supposed to do? If you just ditched anything commercial and used baking soda and sea salt for the rest of your life, your whole mouth would be so much better off.

Than using Crest Health, Performance, nutrition, longevity, Ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Today's show is with Nadine Artemis, who has been sending me beauty products to try and. And my wife has been stealing them all. So if my wife has looked extra beautiful of late on social media, not that she's not banging hot anyways. And yes, you can tell her I said that on a podcast. She's, she's, she's looking even better because she's using these Leaving Libations products, smearing them all over her face and her arms and legs and wherever women smear personal care products. Anyways, though, Nadine Artemis is really cool. She, she designs these really cool beauty products. She has this wonderful company called Living Lib. I want to get her on the show to talk mostly about teeth because she has a really interesting perspective on oral health. But both her books are really good. You're about to learn about them. Well, folks, you know me. I'm super into beauty and self love and self care. If any of you follow me on Instagram, you see me rolling around with my clay masks and my coffee enemas and seaweed wraps all over my face, doing all these things that modern males, I guess, are supposed to do to be naturally radiant. And I actually get a lot of questions about beauty. In my recent book, I had a whole chapter on beauty and symmetry and self care when it comes to your teeth and your skin and your hair and beyond. And although this wasn't something I've always been interested in, it's certainly something I have become more interested in not only as I age, but as I just realized how important overall face and skin and hair and oral care and even genital care and things like this are to overall health and longevity. How integral they're all tied together. Anyways, I recently read two really good books on these type of topics. One was a book on holistic dental care that I thought was going to be just like the same old, same old, you know, natural dental care type of book. But it wound up just blowing my mind as far as tons of practical tips on healthy teeth and gums from a very unique perspective. And then the other book, which was equally good was called Renegade Beauty. My wife stole it from me and I had to get it back eventually when she was done with it. But Renegade Beauty was also really, really good. And it's like this full color, fun to read guide that shows you not only how to care for your skin, but this whole process of the skin biome, the microbiome, the bacterial profile within the mouth, the interplay between all these different systems in our body that contribute to beauty. Probably one of the best books on beauty being that I have ever read. So the author of both of these books was the same person, Nadine Artemis, who, no surprises, is my guest on today's show. So everything that we talk about you're gonna be able to find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Nadine. And Nadine is spelled N A D I N E. I will also link to both these books, the holistic dental care book and then also the Renegade Beauty book. So who is Nadine? Well, she is the creator of Living Libations, which is this luxury of wild crafted non GMO serums and elixirs and essential oils and beauty products. She's also an aroma college, so she develops different formulas and medicinal blends in the realm of aromatherapy. She produces dental serums that are used all around the world. Really, really good oral care products. And she's actually been featured all over the place in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, National Post, Goop, Vogue, people, you name it. She's works with a of celebrities for their beauty like Renee Zellweger and Julianne Moore, Carrie Anne Moss, Mandy Moore. Alanis Morissette describes her as a true sense visionary. And she also, interestingly enough, opened the first aromatherapy store ever in North America when she was just 22 years old. So, Nadine, welcome to the show.

Hi. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

Yeah, well, I'm, I'm stoked to talk to you. I feel like after reading your books, this is one of those podcasts that could go for like 10 hours if you really wanted to. But there's, there's some specific little rabbit holes that I want to, I want to go down. But I'm very, very curious because you have such a unique spin that, that folks are going to get filled in on as we go down the Beauty and the. The oral rabbit hole here. I'm curious just. Just how you. How you developed this body of knowledge, especially starting an aromatherapy store when you were. When you were 22 years old. How did this all come to be for you?

Well, it's certainly been such a fun adventure. You know, I don't know if it's always this direct path, but with hindsight as you get. You get a little bit of hindsight as you grow. And what I see is this sort of kaleidoscope of moments that just sort of divinely designed my life in a way. And it's even from seemingly meaningless micro moments of like, mushing mud and pressing petals and getting into my mom's powders and perfumes and putting the mud in there, you know, or taking the skull and crossbones bottle and mixing that with her Joy perfume. I mean, those were really early meanderings, but just adoring nature and just focusing it, collecting saps, putting it in shells, leaving them in my drawers to rot to the delight of my mom, you know, and. Or just declaring in grade five to my family, I would never work in an office building or work 9 to 5 or like the grade 9 science fair where I literally got to make perfumes and realize, you know, where they come came from, and the history in Egypt, and then going to my first health food store to find these things called essential oils and getting a whiff of, you know, this other world. I didn't quite know at the time the difference between naturals and synthetics. And, you know, I was knee deep in a teenage hood at the time where I think consumer culture was at its zenith. So I had it all. And it was a really quick dive. And I had fun, you know, giving my friends makeovers on long school trips to, like, Washington in the back of the bus and all this fun stuff. Then I got to university and I was 18 and living on my own, which was great, and making food more, you know, all this independent stuff. I got to explore some really great. It was in some good subjects. So I got to, like, dive into things like studying midwifery, which I'd never heard about before, or, you know, looking at Madonna and her effect on pop culture, or examining the horrors of IUD or birth control pills. We were reading Our Bodies Ourselves as a textbook in one of my classes, which was amazing. I wrote my thesis on the female orgasm. So I was doing all that at home. I. At the. At my university home. I was like, mixing things up. And then I, you know, would skip class Sometimes. And I saw Lisa Benet on Donahue.

I don't know who that is. Lisa Bennet.

Oh, so she's married to Jason Moana.

I don't know who that is either. But I'm. But I'm. I'm so disconnected from pop culture.

It's okay. It took me years to know who the Kardashians were, so it's okay.

I still don't really know who they are, aside from people make butt jokes about them.

Well, Lisa Bonet is a lovely, lovely lady. And she was on, like, shows when I was. She was on the Bill Cosby show, the one where. Yeah. And so. But then this was, like, later than that. And then she was on the talk show that was, like, Oprah.

Okay.

At the time. So anyway, Lisa Benet, they were talking actually about Diet for a New America, which was talking about the connection between, like, food and the environment and it. You know, and pesticides and, like, we didn't even realize back then that food and health were connected. So that was just fascinating. And that. That led me to just dive into health and health food stores. They even had a little health food store that I walked home every day by. Every day it was in this house, and it was called Grains and Beans and things. And I bought every book and every bean in there, and I just was into a whole new world. Making oat milk and, you know, all this really early stuff. But I really started understanding how the supermarket and the food system worked and that whole conglomerate and reading labels and just the BS layered into that system, which was just so easy to go, oh, my God, let me look at what I think is my green beauty products. And then it just all came together so quickly. It was really only a period of a few weeks where I just transitioned to never eating processed food, only eating organic, and then really diving into making my own skincare because I didn't want to put that stuff on my body. And again, I just. It realized it was all this. Just this, like, petroleum promised land.

Yeah.

Just put with fancy labels, you know, there was no. There's no dewberry berry. There's no, like, the body shop had, like, this fuzzy peach bath oil that I like, but there's no peach in there, you know, and there's no cucumber.

So even when a beauty product says something like peach or cucumber, that's not actually what it is.

Yeah.

So what is it like? Like, how do they get that same flavor or I guess I should say, like. Like, aroma of, say, peach or cucumber? And don't tell me the beaver anus extract thing, because that's. That's all I hear.

Well, that. That's in that world, but it's been going on for decades. And it's a very crafty area of the food and flavor industry. And I mean crafty in the sense of like, I mean, there it is. I mean, the skills of the synthetic world and creating nature identicals is fancy and decades old. I mean, now they're even growing scents out of bacteria and stuff for perfumes. But they'll take something that's natural and then isolate it. So from peppermint and also most of the essential oils that have been in production in the world for the past 60, 70 years, they're not for the sweet little aromatherapy industry. They're for the food and flavor industry. Peppermint would be grown and then menthol would be then extracted and syntheticized to create nature identicals and that kind of thing. And that's also because the price is crazy. So true. Rose auto distilled from beautiful roses is about $20,000 a kilo.

Holy cow.

And synthetic rose is like, whatever, 20 bucks a kilo.

Okay. So that's why when my wife is buying beauty products and she's getting stuff like, you know what, I have a hard time keeping track of the brands that she's using. I've seen living libations in her drawer before, but then I think it's Anne Marie is another one. And I use some of the olitura stuff, but the price tag is definitely higher than if you're just shopping the bargains on Amazon or Macy's or something like that. And so a big part of it is the actual ingredients being actual natural ingredients.

Yeah. And then how is it being made? You know, is it being made by humans like that are paid well, and where are the raw materials coming from? And is that a whole ethical situation? So that would make a difference. But at the same time, you can get a totally petroleum Dow synthetic situation for $1000 too, if you want.

Wow. Okay, so I want to. I want to ask you a few questions about your book, because I found some things really intriguing. And I think people should read both of your books, the holistic dental care one, and then also Renn Renegade Beauty. But of course, I always like to use these podcasts as a way to get into some of the nitty gritties that I'm personally curious about, because I always read all my author's books cover to cover, and I have. Actually, surprising to me, I have more pages kind of folded over in your dental care book than in Renegade Beauty. But I almost feel like there's so much in both books. I could possibly interview you twice about both of these. But the first thing that you get into, at least one of the things that you talked about that I hadn't heard of before, was that our teeth actually have something very similar to almost like a lymph flow system. We have this fluid that moves around through our mouth. This blew my mind. I'd never read about this so called dentinal fluid system before. Can you explain what that is and how it actually works?

Yes, and you really nailed it. This is the key thing that is huge and unknown and so vital to our understanding of teeth. And you know how I found this? It's a lot easier to find now, but in the early aughts I was doing my research here and trying to understand the scope of teeth because I didn't think we had it right as a culture. I had this really rare book from Dr. Hal Huggins, who was just a great renegade dentist who was speaking about the horrors of mercury filling since 1963. And he wrote a book called, I believe I have right. Called why Raise Ugly Kids, which is a kind of tongue in cheek kind of guy. But there was a chapter on dental care which I devoured. And there was just this one little paragraph where he talked about everything he'd ever learned about in school was washed away like sandcastles on a beach when he talked to Dr. Ralph Steinem. So I endeavored to find his, this research and I found it. And now since then, there's a whole book that you can buy of all of his studies, which were thousands of them. And so it's become a lot more accessible. But here, this is sort of the story behind it. Up until about the 1950s, the generally held belief was that a tooth was this sort of inert or dead appendage in the mouth and a cavity occurred, which was based on an acogenic theory. So all the cavities were just coming from like acids and sugar sitting on the teeth. That was what was deemed the theories at the time, even by the dental association.

I think a lot of people still think kind of sort of thing when I talk.

Oh, yes, yeah. Because that's. Nothing's changed in the schooling of dentists. Any, any dentist that really is leading edge and biological and knows their stuff has basically had to undo what they've learned, which is kind of the same with like functional medicine. So at this time, Dr. Ralph Steinem was, you know, just like a normal dentist guy. And he. But he had severe allergies that would stop him completely from working in August. And he was able to cure his allergies by eliminating what he called all the white food. So that's like, you know, the 1950s, bread and sugar and all that, and milk and dairy. So he knew there must be a systemic connection of the teeth and the body. And he really started to question these beliefs so much, in fact, that he closed down his practice and just solely went into the studying and answering the question of how are the teeth connected to the body? And really, I feel like this is even understanding, like, even where we left off from, like Descartes theories, right. Where we're just separated from our bodies. Like, we're really recovering that from that philosophy in so many ways with our bodies and our health. And of course, it's come up with the relationship to our teeth. So he developed a technique using fluorescent dye, which is the type use in X rays. And of course, this is all with lab rats because, you know, that's what they use. But he was able to visualize the fluid flow inside the teeth, and he was able to trace it from the intestines. He found that indeed there really is a fluid, a lymphatic fluid that originates in the intestines and flows up to and through the roots of the teeth into the pulp chamber, much like a tree, drawing in nutrients from the roots into the SAP. And so this fluid gets pushed into the pulp chamber and then pushed up and out onto the teeth through the odontoblasts, where it's like this microscopic sweat that ends up like these microbeads on the enamel, providing, you know, again, a very microscopic crazy.

So our teeth basically sweat?

Yeah, they totally sweat. And then they're coalescing with the saliva, which is like a whole dance of information and nutrients and protection and. Oh, like, let's go to that tooth because it's showing signs of stress. So there's. So, you know, of course, we're completely designed brilliantly by infinite intelligence, and our bodies have something within it because we weren't born with a toothbrush in our hands, so to speak. Right. So what are the systems? It's like, I really like to maximize systems, but I'm really always trying to find the part where there's the least amount of effort.

Yeah.

So for me in body care and my relationship to my body, it's like, where is that? Where is actually, like, where should I be getting out of the way and letting the Body do what it's supposed to do.

Okay, so this dentinal flow, it basically kind of like flushes toxins out from the tooth and brings nutrients into the matrix of the tooth and kind of repels a lot of the microbial biofilm that would form on the tooth surfaces. And it's literally just like flowing in and out of our mouths throughout the day. And it sounds like it kind of originates. Does it actually originate in the gut, like in the intestine and flow up to the tooth from there, or does it originate from somewhere else?

That's a great question. And Dr. Steinem really wanted to know that as well. So he paired up with an endocrinologist and they found that the switch, of course, is the hypothalamus. And I say of course because I feel like everything goes back to that. And so what happens is we chew and those substrates activate the parotid glands, which are largest salivary glands in the mouth, and then that releases hormonal communications to the hypothalamus, which then is creating cascade of information throughout the body. So it actually, I mean, the journey starts in the mouth when you're chewing to send the signals and the food, and then it does connect in the gut. But then once, and it's interesting because apparently from the whole chemical communication system from sort of the mouth to when it happens to the gut takes about six minutes. But then from the root of the tooth up until where it's going to go to the top of the teeth, like sort of come out as this microscopic sweat. Apparently that short journey actually takes an hour, but the longer journey takes about six minutes.

Okay, so it's coming from the hypothalamus.

Yeah, I mean, as a messenger molecule, as a messaging system. But this is the interesting thing, or it's like all interesting, of course, but when this system is compromised, so that's when the dentinal flow will actually, it will at first stagnate when the body is stressed or, you know, your minerals and sugar is off, but not because it's sitting on your tooth, but because of like, of the blood sugar situation. Because we know once we have high blood sugar, there's a whole series of body systems that start to rebel. And so, or, you know, it could be chatting on your cell phone with that cell phone right near your parotid gland or, you know, other chemicals that are stressing you or high peak hormonal times, sort of like pregnancy or teenage years, there can be stress. So what at first happens is this flow stagnates. So you're not getting that the nutrients coming as abundantly, but then if it's just continuing down that path, it actually reverses. So instead of the flow flowing inwards and upwards and being nutritive, what happens is it reverses and the mouth begins to suck in stuff from the mouth like a straw. So it actually reverses. And then we're bringing in, we're sucking in acids and microbes into the tooth, which then inflames the pulp inside the tooth, causing oxidative damage, demineralization, or rotting roots. And that's actually the genesis of how cavities are formed.

Wow. And one, one thing that I thought was really interesting because you talked about the parotid gland and, and how integral it is to this secretion of, you know, this, this tooth sweat, which is what I'm going to call it, because it just sounds better.

Yeah, I love that.

So what was interesting was you commented about fluoride and how fluoride could actually suppress hormonal secretion by the parotid gland, which would then cause a decrease in this dentinal flow, which just blows my mind because fluoride is found in most toothpaste.

Exactly. I mean, and then there's everything else fluoride does, which it really is sort of messing up with the molecules. Like it will make skin stiff, but bone soft. You know, it's like it's really. Because it's really tripping a main switch in the enzymatic systems.

Yeah. I'm not a huge, huge fan of fluoride. Aside from. I have seen some data that shows that it can prevent cavities, but the problem is once it gets out of the teeth and absorbed into the bloodstream and finds its way into the rest of the body, or little bits get swallowed down into the digestive system, it appears to be somewhat problematic. I'm not convinced it's a huge issue for just like the surface of the teeth, teeth, but it seems to have a lot of other full body effects that considering there are some alternatives. And I actually want to talk to you about a few of the things that you do for your own dental care. I'm just not convinced that it's God's gift to dental kind.

Yeah. And there's other options that just don't have those side effects.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. So one of the things that you have that's really intriguing in the book is you have eight different steps for dental care. And these are not things like just brush your teeth twice a day. I think you've got some really interesting tips. So I want to unpack a few of these tips. One of the tips that you say is to keep a saltwater solution where you brush your teeth. What are you doing with that salt water solution? Why would you have a saltwater solution where you brush your teeth?

So, yeah, it's like the place where you start. So it can be salt water. Some people also do baking soda or a combo of each. And that's just like a salty brine you can keep in a mason jar in your fridge. And then you could have, like, different shot glasses for family members or whatever. But the main thing there is you're kind of just setting the tone, setting the stage for the mouth. Maybe you've eaten things during the day that were a little more acidic, and this way you're getting the saliva in its happy alkaline flow.

Okay.

And you can just be rinsing out other stuff. It's also good for kids because they, you know, teeth brushing is a skill that doesn't fully develop till there's more dexterity.

Okay. So. So the salt. Are you. Are you kind of. Because I coconut oil pull in the morning. Meaning I make these little coconut pulling molds. It's. It's super simple. I just get a few drops of essential oil. I melt the coconut oil in on the stovetop on a. In a. What do you call it? A pot. And then I, after it's melted, I just pour it into little molds. Like the same kind molds you would use to make little dark chocolates. Mine are. Mine are shaped like Reese's peanut butter cup. So every morning it feels like you get to eat a Reese's peanut butter cup. And I chew. Actually, I only eat about half of it, and I let it swish around in my mouth. I always use the different essential oils. And right now I'm using thieves, which is great with COVID and everything going around and my immune system needing a little extra support. So I coconut oil pull with this thieves essential oil, and I just spit it out in the trash can after like 10 or 15 minutes and swish it all over in my mouth during that time. And so are you doing something similar with the salt water before you brush your teeth?

It's like just setting this. I love oil pulling, but actually I do recommend that a bit later.

Okay.

After you've cleansed. So you're getting to a deeper cleaning. But you totally. I have recipe for that, for that too. And you're right. Like making these. You can make it convenient and make it for the Kids. And you can even get the tiny little square ones and then. Yeah, use it for fun.

But you're talking about the coconut oil.

Yeah, sorry, yeah, the coconut oil. So melt that down. But you can put so many fun things in there. Like you said, the essential oils, like, you know, oregano, peppermint, tea tree, frankincense, clove, cardamom, cinnamon, you know, all these ones have been used for, since ancient times.

Oh, yeah. Well, you have one recipe in your book where you put, you call them probiotic tooth butter cups. And you put all that stuff in there. But you also put. But in addition to essential oil, I noticed you recommend a little bit of activated charcoal in there. I want to talk to you about charcoal toothpaste later on, and then a little bit of baking soda for the alkalinity. But then you put probiotics in the coconut pulling oil, which I was kind of curious about, because the way I was thinking was that if you have a bunch of essential oils in there, would it just kind of neutralize the probiotics or are those actually seeding the biome of your mouth when you're doing the coconut oil pulling? So I was trying to figure that out, you know, because I thought it was kind of antibacterial, yet there's probiotics getting mixed into it. So help me understand that.

Yeah, that's a great question. And I love essential oils so much because they're not just these aromatherapy sort of potpourri things. But if they're true genuine distillates, we have got, you know, such pure plant medicine that we can use. And I like to refer to them as botanical biotics because they're selective, they have a selective intelligence. And what's so neat now that we're understanding and researching the microbiome is now we know why these plants have been used for thousands of years for oral health or otherwise. And we get to see it against the modern science of the microbiome. So what we now know is that essential oils act as quorum sensing inhibitors in a very effective manner, which is really something that's so needed right now because we're at this moment of here we are in the aftermath of a lot of antibiotic resistance. And we've been using antibiotics like crazy in the feed and, you know, over prescribed and, you know, there's triclosan in our milk or whatever. It's everywhere. They've been overused. So we don't have the same sort of stealth weapons if we want to bust through biofilms and that kind of thing. But now we can see, or now we have the studies that show that quorum sensing, the essential oils, can inhibit that. And what quorum sensing is, it's a way for the pathogens to communicate and coordinate their group behavior to gain traction and to regulate gene expression. And so the essential oils, like clove, rose, you know, tea tree, some of the ones I mentioned, they really show promising results that they can reduce the QSI activity. And in one study, I think it was clove showed that it could reduce quorum sensing by up to 70%. So what we're seeing is that the essential oils can create anti infective activity that can coexist with our flora while cleaning up the periodontal pathogens.

Hmm, interesting. So quorum sensing, that's just the regulation of gene expression that's going to happen in response to something like exposure to aromatherapy or essential oils.

Yeah, well, the molecules can go in there and bust up the biofilm in a way that an antibiotic can. And it can, which is good because it's like the biofilms prevent the respiration cycle of our teeth because our teeth also breathe, which is why it's important to not use something even as simple. It seems benign, like glycerin in toothpaste, because it will coat the teeth even if after you've rinsed it and you can't, you know, the saliva and the teeth aren't having this sort of respiration cycle.

Before we close the loop on coconut oil pulling, at what time of day would you coconut oil pull if you were going to do it? Because you mentioned you might not do it the same time I'm doing it.

Yeah, well, I think the same time, but I would just do a few steps first. And it really is debatable. Some people still oil pull before they do the eight step. I just like doing it after because I've cleared away stuff and then I feel like the oil pulling can just go a bit deeper and get to the deeper work, if that makes sense. And so I do it around right after I've done the eight steps as part of the TLC and aftercare. Okay, but you can also. But that's a. It's a great fun to, you know, like, I think I recall in one of your podcasts, you talked about making spilanthes infused coconut oil.

Oh, yeah. The electric tooth barrier that I found out in Hawaii. Yeah.

Like, so you could use. You could make the tooth buttercups out of that.

Yeah, I did that one time. I'm ahead of you, Nadine. I got that figured out. Yeah. And they actually tasted really good. And they cause a bunch of salivary flow, too. And for those of you who missed the memo on that, I went down to Kauai Organic Pharmacy, shout out to my friend Doug down there, and he introduced me to this tiny little berry that when you pop it in your mouth, not only does it clean the mouth and have a ton of really cool antibacterial effects, but it feels like a party in your mouth and you produce all this saliva. It's got this. This weird tart, tart, sourish taste. And so I thought, dude, I wish this could grow up in Washington. And so I just bought some little potters and, you know, a little, you know, something similar like a cannabis grow light, stuck it down my office, ordered some seeds off Amazon and plant them in soil in my office, and they just grew like weed. So I had tons of these toothberries. Then I planted them outside, and they grew outside, too. And so amazing. And then I could just harvest them and mix them with. With some oils or just pop them after a meal. And they're amazing. And people would come over to our house and they'd pop one in their mouth. Their mind would be blown. Some people didn't like the weird, tart, sourish salivary flavor. Yeah. But they're really cool. They're called the electric toothberry. The spilanthes barrier. You can just buy the seeds on Amazon.

And so that's a fun thing to oil pull with as well. You can make it fun. And you can even add some C60 or you can anoint C60 on your gums afterwards, too.

You like C60 for oral care?

Yeah.

Cool. Just as an antioxidant.

Yeah. And just, you know, just. You could add it to dental serums. I think it's just. It's showing promising things in skincare, too. And really the gums are a type of tissue.

Gotcha. All right, so you get up and you have this warm water, kind of like a warm brine water that you keep in the bathroom that maybe you'll add a little bit of essential oil to. And you're just kind of swishing. Swishing and spitting that in the morning.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, so that one's easy. Just like a nice swish gargle. Always good.

Okay, so that's going to introduce some alkalinity for the other steps that you take.

Yes.

Okay, gotcha.

The next step is tongue scraping. Do it a few times and I think you'll find as the weeks Progress. There's just less and less stuff coming out off the tongue, which is good.

And I have actually started doing that. It's super easy because it only takes me two seconds. You think about some of this stuff and you're like, oh, man, how do you do this and that? And honestly, it adds up. It seems like it add up, but it doesn't take that much time. And I'm always listening to an audiobook or something in the morning, and it just feels really good to be taking care of my whole body right when I get up. So when I scrape my tongue, it gets all this. This kind of like white microbial mucus y stuff off of my tongue as I scrape that from back to front. I think I'm using the. The tongue scraper right now from. It's like a copper tongue scraper. I think it's dirt, who I got it from.

We have a couple tongue scrapers too. The copper one as well.

Oh, Living Libations has one.

Yeah.

Okay, cool. I'll have to connect you after the show and see if we can get some kind of a discount code for people to use on your $8 billion products that are just chock full of natural ingredients. Okay. So you scrape your tongue from back to the front and you see all this plaque being removed from the tongue, which I think is really cool. And one thing I was curious about, just a little thing I got a little bit nervous about, was are you cleaning the tongue scraper pretty intensively? Because I'm just running mine in a little hot water and soap. Just because again, I'm trying to save time in the morning.

Oh, yeah, I just do hot water and soap, too. And then, you know, once in a while, like once a month, I'll just dip everything in hydrogen peroxide overnight.

Okay, gotcha. And then you go on and you brush. But you say that you start with brushing the gums, not the teeth. So fill me in on that.

Yeah, so we really, we really, as a whole culture need to get just a little softer and more mindful about our gums. Because it's like one of the keys keeping the teeth in place and preventing things from, you know, feeling sensitive. Because teeth sensitivity is actually a gum issue. It's not really a tooth issue. So you want to brush. You want to get that manual brush just right up, you know, if you're at the top row, right up into your cheek practically and you're brushing down towards the teeth, you're not going back and forth. It's down, you know, lift off, down that you're obviously, it's going to take a moment to retrain, but again, it will come more naturally because the sulca, that place where the gum line and the teeth join up, is just so precious and so vulnerable. And you know, we're definitely a nation of receding gum lines and we've got to bring the gums back around the teeth more like turtlenecks instead of the current sort of cowl neck situation where the gum pockets are like 6, 7, 8, 9. For a lot of people it's very important because also when that enamel gets exposed, that was previously under the gum line, it's a different type of enamel, it's weaker. And gum line cavities are a big issue.

Interesting. Yeah. I never thought too much about brushing the gums. And even when I've been to the dentist, I think this is because my coconut oil pulling. They tell me I have really healthy gums, but I'm sure you do. I think I need to think a little bit more about this. Now. What toothbrush do you use for this?

Well, I love an ionic toothbrush, which is, it's nice because it kind of sort of magnetizes the plaque off.

That sounds really expensive. An ionic toothbrush.

They're not, luckily they're like 20, 30 bucks.

Okay.

Yeah, Dr. Tung's has, has it. We had them, but they're, they're out right now, but they're pretty easy to find. But also just a, just a manual one or there's a one that's called a blotting brush, which again, it's just really about the gums. And always soft. Whether you're a 200 pound firefighter or a baby, we need to use soft.

I've always gone medium. That sucks. I just ordered a bunch of new bamboo tubes, toothbrushes. I think I ordered medium. So I'm so sort of small.

Just go a little bit lighter then on your, with your wrist action more carefully.

Okay. And then, and then the, the ionic toothbrush that just makes like negative ions that, that help to clean up plaque.

Yeah. And it just, it, it just, even without toothpaste, it's actually removing apparently from the studies 40% more plaque, which I don't know percentage wise, but you can definitely feel the difference. Like if you just took a normal brush with water or that one, you would feel the difference.

Okay.

So yeah, and that, that's that. So. And also you're adding a drop hopefully of dental serum or botanical about it because you want to, you know, get, bring some like energy and nutrients and Vascularization to the gums.

Yeah, I've seen you, you sell those, right? There's these dental serums.

Yes.

What are those exactly?

Well, they're, I think I kind of invented them. I think that even though there's many sort of knockoffs now, but they're their blends. We've got the Yogi 2 serum, the Happy Gumdrops oil. We've got a mint and myrrh version. We've got matching swishing serums which are our oil pulling serums which we add like CoQ10 and probiotics and different things like that to them as well. So. But I always love to give the. You don't need to buy anything from me. And you can literally, you know, turn your mouth around with common things you can find at home. Like so get a new toothbrush. If you've been working with commercial toothpaste because you just want to have a fresh, clean, clean bristles. And if you just bought baking soda and sea salt and then just ditched anything commercial and used baking soda and sea salt for the rest of your life, your, your whole mouth would be so much better off than using crust and that kind of thing.

Interesting. Okay, cool. Now you brush the gums. But then I would imagine you also brush your teeth, don't you?

Yeah. So then the next step four is to focus on the teeth and you're going to polish them with an electric toothbrush. At this part, for this stage, I like the smaller round headed electric brushes because they get into a different, there's a different shape than sort of the classic toothbrush. But soon I've been researching for years and finally have found a toothbrush that's a special angle and it's sonic. So we're gonna be introducing that. It has a special pick, like a brush pick that also comes through sonic. So it's like really the most plaque I felt.

Oh, it's got like a, like a, like a water pick type of thing built into it.

Yeah, kind of. Well, the more like a little. Oh God. We call almost like a little tuft of a bristle. So it's just tiny and you can get right in between.

Okay. You have to remember to tell me when this comes out, my dentist is gonna hate you because I'm never gonna go to the dentist to get cleaned again after learning all this stuff.

Yeah, well, you gotta go to a good dentist for the cleaning too. And yeah, hopefully you'll be going less and less because we can really take care of our mouths at home. And really wherever your mouth is at. Because it can be. Once you go into understanding sort of the horrors of modern dentistry and some of the things we've been doing, it can be a bit overwhelming or your teeth are sensitive or you're bleeding, you know, you've got. We can be a feel a bit down in the mouth after we've been to the dentist because we feel like there's a lot of problems that are hard to solve. But truly I want people to know that you really can turn your mouth around. And that's because it is connected to the rest of the body because it is inextricably bound. And if we can, you know, saliva flowing and we can help gum pockets come back down to a healthy two or three, bleeding and receding can cease in a couple of days. So really people, you know, can turn around their mouth. And I have found these eight steps really help to evolve and make people's even dental visits more successful if they do these eight steps for a month.

We only made it to step four so far. We started with the saltwater rinse and then you scrape your tongue, then you brush your gums, then you polish your teeth, preferably using one of these space ag toothbrushes that Nadine just described. And I'll link to all this stuff in the show notes, I'll hunt it all down. And then checking the gum lines is step five. That sounds really laborious. What's that involvement?

Well, it's not too, too laborious, but you just take like a rubber tip tool or like an inter dental thing and you just go right around the gum line. Once you have done it a few times, you'll get pretty fast at it, but you'll see why. Because all of a sudden a whole bunch more plaque will come off. And again, this is the area we really want to keep free and clear of plaque because the plaque kind of makes the gums go oh, you know, and they keep kind of scaling back, getting pushed back by the plaque.

Okay. And you use a special tool for this?

Well, you can. There's so many out now and actually I am inventing another one that should be out in the fall and it's made out of silicone. But until that time there's a, like it's called it's by gum, that classic one and it's a rubber tipped tool. So just something soft that can move along the gum line and you'll see why when you're doing it.

Okay.

And then to upgrade that, just put a little dental serum on the tip. So like a drop of like the Yogi 2 serum or like a peppermint essential oil. And then you can get it in the those crevices and in between the teeth as well, which is where that detail is needed.

Okay, got it. I think the next step people are probably going to be familiar with, and that's flossing. Do you have any special way of flossing or did you just say floss?

Well, generally you floss. Find a good floss that works for your teeth because you know all different spaces between the teeth. But you want to floss and I say do it twice and you'll know why you do it the second time. Because we, it's a lot of stuff comes out in the second round. But to truly upgrade that and to get all the special ingredients up in between each teeth, you want to take one drop of a dental serum and slide that along the floss and then do your flossing. And it's just, it's such a game changer.

Okay. And as far as the floss goes, you're fine with just the standard dental floss.

We don't like petroleum waxing. You know, we, we sell a Dr. Tung's floss, which I like, but also by the time this podcast air, we'll have our new Zero Waste floss, which comes in little glass jars. And we've infused with frankincense. And then we've done another flavor that we've infused with charcoal and lemongrass and wintergreen.

Alright, got it. So we've got the saltwater solution. Then you scrape the tongue, brush your gums, brush your teeth, check for any plaque with this little gum line checker. And then floss. And then what would. That's six steps. What would step seven be?

Step seven is doing another mouth rinse with your salt water switch.

Another one?

Yep. Because now you've loosened everything up.

Okay.

You know, there'll be things that came off on the floss, but kind of halfway so you get that out. You can also add maybe even a couple drops of liquid magnesium to that as well. That's a nice alkalinizer. And then this is where you could do your oil pulling or your tooth butter cups. So you're swishing, swishing, swishing.

Okay, got it. Now how long are you doing that swish for?

10 to 15 minutes.

Oh, geez. Ideally, how long are you in the bathroom in the morning?

Well, hey, no, I'm just doing that. All the steps for about two, three minutes.

Okay.

Then I'm swishing and then I'll walk around and do other stuff.

Okay, so you're walking around. That's what I do when I coconut oil pole is I'm walking around.

Oh yeah.

Getting stuff done. Yeah. Otherwise it seems like, yeah, I don't.

Have too much tolerance.

I don't stand there looking at myself in the mirror, flexing my muscles while I'm oil pulling. Okay, and then what's step eight then?

Step eight is just like an extra care step. So a lot of people have like receding gums or maybe one spot is bleeding or something like that. So at that point maybe you have to pull out your dental mirror, check on things in the back or whatever's going on your mouth that needs the special care. And then you will anoint a botanical biotic or something to that area that needs the extra care, a dental serum. And you'll know that when it comes to your mouth. And we also have these syringes that are blunt tipped that for that extra care you can get, you can put things in there like dental serum or hydrogen peroxide. And then you can just. It's kind of like a very, very micro controlled water pick, but it's a lot more fine. And it's really, it's actually easier and really simple to travel with as well because it's just a little syringe and then you can really flush out those gum lines are in between the teeth. So eight, the step eight is really just the extra care that your teeth might need.

Okay, now you have all these steps really well detailed in your book. But, but I think perhaps one of the things that is probably causing a great deal of people listening in right now to think, what in the hell, how much time, why are you spending so much time on these white things inside your mouth? But one thing you get into in the book that I think doesn't get talked about much is the relationship between the teeth and all the other organs. And this is more of like a traditional Chinese medicine concept. But it is really interesting that teeth have a certain effect on certain organs to the extent to where like I had some crowns put in and I only work with a holistic dentist, which is great. So they're using all natural materials and they're cleaning the air and, you know, making sure metals aren't getting in my mouth, etc. But when I had my crowns done, you know, they kind of shaved down the teeth underneath the crowns that they put on. And I was looking over the meridian chart because I had a really, really tender upper right quadrant after they'd been working especially on I think it would be. I don't even know the numbering system used for the teeth, but it was kind of like close to the incisors. And I looked it up and it was the two teeth associated with gallbladder and liver function because they're apparently like key lines or electrical meridians that run from the teeth to different organs of the body. Now is that true? Could you get dental work done on a certain tooth and actually have it affect the organ? Or could you have a tooth that maybe because you weren't using a lot of the steps that you detail in the book, the tooth gets unhealthy. How much can that affect the health of the organ? Has this stuff ever been researched?

I definitely believe that there are key lines and energy meridians in the body and there's a whole network. I mean, think of ancient traditional Chinese medicine or acupuncture. That's the system it's based on. So I think there's a lot of validity to that. I don't know if it has fully been studied, but I have definitely seen what I feel is like I've sort of seen proof in my own world is when I look at thermography images that have been taken now, they're not. So this is a thermography is like a type of imaging that can be done for instead, like for breast health to see if there's anything going on instead of a mammography, or it can be part of that toolkit and it doesn't have the radiation and the dangers of a mammogram. So the thermography readings show the heat line signatures and when they include the head with the upper body for these imaging, you can see the heat line signatures going from a root canal to the breast, and you can just see the lines. And some of those back molars are related to the breast organs as well. So that was knowing about the tooth organ chart before, and then seeing the thermography images was quite an eye opener. But definitely because it's interconnected to the body and every tooth contains like blood vessels, cranial sacral fluid, the dentine fluid. Of course it's going to be connected to the body physiological functions.

Yeah, I think there's definitely something to that, because we know, for example, and this isn't necessarily due to invisible electrical lines that run through the body, but more inflammation. From what I understand that teeth health is very intimately related to cardiovascular health. And that's something I really explored with a previous fellow that I had on the show about holistic dentistry. So I won't dwell upon that topic too much, but I will later link to that other interview I did a few weeks ago with the author of a different book on holistic dentistry. And we got into the pretty significant link between cardiovascular health and oral health, which is actually fascinating in and of itself. Yeah, his name was Dominique. German guy. I forget his last name. I don't have it in front of me right now. But anyways, I'll link to it in the show notes.

I recently did a podcast with Dr. Gundry, and he did an experiment with flowers, flossing, and some control groups, and they found that the people that had flossed had much less inflammation in their bodies.

Yeah, it's interesting, but then again, maybe you start flossing and you also start eating healthy and you also start exercising. You know, like, some of these lifestyle changes kind of tend to stack. But, yeah, I think there's probably something to be said. Okay, so I promised that I would mention this, so I'd be remiss not to. But I did a podcast a while back, and it was kind of like a refutation of this Vice article that came out, just shoving a ton of holistic health practices under the bus. You know, everything from coffee enemas and detox protocols to charcoal toothpaste. And they were very concerned about a British. I think it was a British dental journal or a British medical journal article that came out claiming that charcoal could wear away enamel. And that in particular that it was really kind of like a marketing gimmick. And that ultimately what they found was that the charcoal toothpaste was too abrasive for the teeth and was actually inhibiting oral health and not helping the teeth. And I'm curious to hear your take on that because there are a few places within the book where you seem to be okay with using charcoal to clean the teeth.

I do like charcoal, and I heard about that article, too. And so we've definitely gone into it a bit more and rechecked what we thought. But still, we actually feel that activated charcoal is still safe for oral care. And this is. This is how we're thinking about it, and it seems pretty legit because this is how they measure the abrasivity of dental products. So there's two ways to gauge the abrasivity safety, and one is called the MO hardness value. It's spelled moh. And the other one is the relative dentin abrasivity called RDA. So Moh is a 1 to 10 scale of hardness. So one would be like talic powder, and 10 is a diamond tooth enamel is about a 5.5 and the dentin is about a 2.5. So when you use the Mohs scale to determine if a substance is too abrasive for the enamel, then you would compare the MOH hardness value of a compound against the hardness of tooth enamel. Activated charcoal is a 1 to 2 on the Mohs scale. And for comparison, baking soda is about a 2.5 on the same scale. So it shouldn't scratch the teeth during brushing because it's significantly less hard, less hard than enamel and dentin. And also we know baking soda is safe, even though that gets quite questioned a lot too, because then if we look at the other test, which is the rda, which is used to gauge the erosiveness of abrasives in oral care products. So this is a, you know, this is the test. And so a higher, the RDA value is then higher the chance of abrasion. So 70 and under is considered low and anything over 200 is considered unsafe for oral care. The RDA of baking soda is a 7. So it's very, very gentle. And we do get dentists that are like, oh, I don't know about baking soda. So it's a seven. And our toothpaste are generally, that's their abrasive factor is just the baking soda. So we have very gentle toothpaste and we have one paste made with activated charcoal and the charcoal. Activated Charcoal has an RDA value of 70. So it's a bit higher than baking soda. But check this out. The RDA of Crest is 106. Crest Pro Health is 189. Toms of Maine for sensitive teeth is a softer 49. Toms of Maine Regular is in 93. Nature's Gait is 176. So that's something you could find at the health food store. Sensodyne 93, Colgate and Colgate, something like a Colgate tartar control is 165.

Well, that's one of the problems is like research that gets released, then gets distorted by media and bloggers who kind of like crank up the neutral statement and say that it's actually making a black and white statement or something that calls for further study. They turn that into some kind of a serious warning. When really, you know, all those, you know, those, those British studies seem to say was be careful, it may be too abrasive. But when you actually dig into the description here, apparently the, the what used the rda, the relative dentin abrasivity is just way too low for it. To cause an issue.

Yeah, and gentler than everything we're generally using as a population every day to clean our teeth.

All right, good to know. So activated charcoal is. Okay. All right. And then I've got a few other questions for you. I've talked about peptides on the show before, and I recently found out from you that there are certain peptides that can actually be used for periodontal disease or oral care or cavitation cleanups or extraction. So what kind of peptides are dentists using in the mouth? Now, I keep wanting to say oral cavity or something like that because it makes me feel more scientific on the show, but I'm just gonna say mouth. Your gaping maw.

The good old mouth. Well, there's a really. First, I think that peptides are a wonderful tool. I think they're very paramount and very practical for periodontal care, which could be your scientific word for mouth. So I think they're really good for us to have as tools, especially if you haven't been to the dentist for a while or you've got some revisionist dentistry coming up, or there's anything. Any kind of minor dental thing or even a cleaning, because cleanings release a lot of bacteria into the bloodstream. So much so, in fact, that you're not able to donate blood within 48 hours of having a dental cleaning. So I think we really should boost our immune system and our tissue care with peptides. So I really feel there's a. In the family of the peptide biologics. I feel there's a good trifecta that I think could be foundational for people to do in the one to three months leading up to a dentist appointment or a minor dental surgery. And that would be probably a lot of classics for your audience that you already know of them, but the thymosin alpha one.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very good. One for immune system.

Yeah, it's like an immune superhero.

Yeah. And to clarify, a lot of these peptides are delivered systemically. So are you just injecting, like, subcutaneously around the abdomen, or are these getting injected into or near the. The mouth?

I have a mouth protocol, which we could go into. Right. Because these ones, I'm. It's just sub Q. Wherever you like to do your peptide injections. You don't have to do it around the mouth. It will. It will travel there, or it will do what it needs to do in the body, but for the mouth. And we'll write this out so. Because it's. It's pretty detailed with information but there's a very specific, I think, pretty revolutionary peptide protocol with BPC157 for receding gums that is having success with some really leading edge biological dentists. And so what you do is you dilute BPC157. You've got, generally you got a 5 mil vial of the powder and then you're going to add in a milliliter of naci, which is not the typical bacteriostatic water because that's a little bit too painful for gum injections. Then you apply some, a drop of organic peppermint oil along the gum line a few minutes beforehand. That will clean and also provide a tiny bit of natural kind of analgesic. Peppermint's nice and numbing. Then you just inject 0.25 mil, so like a quarter into the receding gum area and you do each quadrant.

So you're actually injecting into the gums.

Yeah. Now you would ideally be doing this with your holistic dentist or hygienist.

Yeah, I think most people be pretty careful with needles near their mouth, but this is something that you could go and ask your dentist about or potentially even direct your dentist towards something like is this something that they could learn from an organization such as the International Peptide Society, for example?

Yes, I think that would be a great place to learn about it. And. Or you could take these instructions to your dentist and you could even bring them the BPC already diluted and have them do it for you.

Oh, wow. I wonder how many dentists would actually do that though. If you bring some random syringe full of stuff and ask them to inject in your mouth, it seems like they would be concerned about the potential.

Well, you know, talk to your dentist. Oh, true, true. Yeah, yeah. But you can prepare your dentist, but people are seeing in 10 days visible effects and this is a very tricky area to heal. So it is pretty revolutionary.

Okay, so that's super interesting. And then the other thing is that you have a really, really handy list of questions that anyone should go into their dentist armed with to be able to ask their dentist. What are those questions? Because I thought that they were actually really helpful. I actually, actually asked my dentist, Dr. Craig Simmons here in Spokane, who's a great holistic dentist, these questions and his answers seemed pretty satisfactory in terms of the same type of answers that you recommended to be looking for. But what are the questions, what are the questions that people should really be asking their dentist right now?

Yeah, it's good for people to hone in and discern who's the best dentist for them. I have those in my book. You know what? I've recently thought of three more that I would like to talk about. First, because I feel like if these three, if you could get, if you get a yes to them, it's not the right dentist. So I feel like I even simplified it more. And that would be, do you do implants with titanium?

With titanium, yeah.

So if they do that you do not want to do, go to that dentist. Your dentist should not have titanium implants anywhere in their practice. So that's. If you get a tooth removed and then you're going to have a tooth implant. And then the rod under the gum line classically is made with titanium, which is one of the most toxic metals.

Oh, really?

Yeah. And that will create basically jaw rot or jaw cavitation.

So no titanium. That's number one.

No titanium. The other, they hopefully know about zirconium, which is a crystalline structure that seems to be the most immune autoimmune compatible, which has been used in Europe for about 30 years. And the leading edge dentists in North America know about zirconium.

Okay.

So I mean, hopefully, you know, maybe you're getting to a situation where you don't have to do an implant too. But anyway, so if they have, if they use titanium, no go. The other question is, do you do root canals? The answer should be no, never. If it's. Sometimes maybe that's not good enough stuff. The dentists that truly know know that all root canals are a hundred percent toxic to the body. They are not sterile.

Yeah, I did talk about that quite a bit in another podcast. Obviously, you know, we could take a deep dive into root canals. But yeah, we, we talked about that quite a bit in my other dental podcast that'll link to again. The shownotes for this one are BenGreenfieldFitness.com Nadine N A D I N Any so go listen to other podcasts if you want the full skinny on root canal. So just don't go to your dentist if they do them.

Yeah, they should just really. Because if they get it, they'll know when the dentist gets it. They can't perform them. You know what I mean? They just can't. And then the other question would be, do you leave in the periodontal ligament when doing an extraction? Because if the answer is yes, that's. That's incorrect. That'd be. You're off the show.

That can accumulate an infection. That ligament.

Yeah. So that's classic to Leave it in. So anytime a tooth is extracted, or a wisdom tooth generally, the whole protocol has been you leave it in. What that is akin to is kind of like leaving the placenta in after giving birth. And then the gum just grows over that ligament and causes jaw rot, which is a jaw cavitation. And jaw cavitations aren't visible on an X ray until it's 80% corrode, eroded. And so it's not something that can be seen a lot visually. But biological dentists know that anytime a tooth is extracted, that periodontal ligament has to be removed. And what biological dentists will do is if you have had previous extractions, like your wisdom teeth out, they will check those sites. And, you know, nine times out of 10, they have to clean out with their tiny instruments. They scrape the jawbone in that area, scrape away the infection, allow blood flow to the area, allow a blood clot to form, then they will inject ozone and then your own blood plasma in there to heal the area.

Okay. All right. So we're asking. We're asking them about that. And then in addition to the root canal, the periodontal ligament, the titanium, the. There are a few other interesting ones. You actually have a whole list in your book. And there are just a couple I want to focus on in the book, because obviously we could spend a lot of time on each of these questions, but you wanted to make sure they use ozone or lasers for cleaning the mouth as opposed to what would normally be used instead of ozone or lasers?

Well, they would just use classic dental stuff, which actually a lot of that paste that they use for the dental cleaning is this really abrasive proxy. And they are now realizing that that actually removes this thin film called the pellicle, the salivary pellicle. And so now dental, they're rethinking about using the abrasive prophy paste in twice a year cleanings because they're realizing that they're messing with the enamel a bit because it's too abrasive. Speaking about abrasivity. And so you need. We need new ways to be cleaning and getting rid of microbes rather than just, again, with abrasiveness and antibiotics.

Okay, got it. And then a couple other, that other questions I thought were interesting was you recommended that your dentist have IV vitamin C drips available during the procedure. Is that even a thing that a dentist does these days?

Yeah, really good ones will do vitamin C right after some do, I think some, I don't know if it's during, but they'll Pre prep you, post prep you.

Okay, interesting.

Yeah. It's going to help you heal from the situation. Now, I think with peptides and different things, I think we've got way more options than having to rely on the IV drips of vitamin C. Okay. But that's like to me, the really good dentists have that in their office.

Wow, interesting. Okay. I haven't found any dentist that has that, but that's, that's super interesting. And then the one of the other questions was on the X rays, apparently there's different types of X rays that are going to expose you to less radiation. Radiation. So you can actually ask your dentist about the type of X rays that they use.

Yes, there's. The more the cone beam X ray is, actually gives them way more data. It's very like full panoramic but with about 90% less radiation. So, you know, there's digital X rays most again, a classic dental office might be kind of outdated in their equipment, but if you're, you know, the leading edge dentists, while they're more natural, they're also really using the latest equipment too because a lot of. There's a lot of innovation in things like the lasers and X rays that we can take advantage of.

Okay, interesting. Wow. There's so much in this book. And then your book Renegade Beauty we didn't even start to get into. But this one also, I mean, my wife was just eating this thing up. As far as the, the skin beauty and even you have like sexual care and some different things. What do you call it? The noni? Is that what you call it? The noni.

Yoni.

The yoni, yeah. What did I say?

I love.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean botanical suppositories that you can use to restore the bacterial status of the colon. I mean just tons of stuff in both these books. So I think that they are their quite excellent. And you know, I didn't get a chance to delve into some of the stuff that I wanted to ask you about in Renegade Beauty. But there actually is one thing that I did think was intriguing and that was this whole idea of stop seal seed, which I think is probably one of the crucial things within the Renegade Beauty book that goes beyond what we've been talking about. You know, the oral care and kind of gets into skin care. So if you've got time, can you just briefly describe the overall concept behind stop seal seed?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I love that because it does help explain what we kind of need to do. You remember in the beginning I spoke about like I love getting out of the way of my body system. So I feel like the stop seal seed is like the ticket for that. So first we want to stop like putting petroleum on our face over exfoliating, using chemicals to deal with acne, showering in chlorine, laser abrasion, you know, all that, all that really harsh picking and prodding that we do to our skin and which includes stop using surfactants and foaming soapy cleansers to wash our face. We really want to move away from this idea of squeaky clean because now that we understand the microbiome, we understand that the, these squeaky clean surfactants are actually getting lodged into our stratum corneum, which is the top, top layer of the top layer of our skin. And these surfactants are like these micro splinters that get stuck in our pores and then they disrupt the whole landscape for the bacteria. And the bacteria are really our beautician. As kind of gross as that sounds. We have to get out of the way. We have to stop putting chemicals on our face and over scrubbing, getting rid of, of the skin cells too early or the sebum, because that's what the bacteria kind of needs to feed on. There's a whole ecosystem there.

Wait, so if somebody is doing like a, like a derma rolling, how, how often should they be doing that?

Never.

Never. Because I do it like once a week and it's amazing for my skin.

It is amazing and there will be good results. But I don't think we have to like tear down the skin to make it respond.

What about something like a, like a salt scrub?

Yes, but again, you're going to want to not over exfoliate when we get rid of, when we're over exfoliating, which, you know, some chemicals do that, some there's an abrasivity factor obviously to these things as well. If we get rid of the dead skin cells or that top layer too early, the young cells underneath are too young and too vulnerable and it throws off the microbiome. So it's kind of like leaving your skin a little more vulnerable, like kind of leaving your front door open on vacation. And so we don't want to go into the world, we want to go into the world with our microbiome on our skin intact. And next to the gut, the skin microbiome is, is one of the, is the largest in the body.

Okay, so so basically just stop over cleaning your skin. Stop scraping away too many of the skin cells. Don't overdo that component.

Yeah. And then that brings to the next step, which is seal. Because we've kind of got like, we have leaky guts. And if you got bleeding, receding gums, that's kind of like leaky gums. And then when we're over exfoliating and doing stuff like that to our skin, then it's kind of like creating some leaks in that beautiful system. So as I've said to stop washing with soap. Soap you just want to have for, like, pits and bits. There's no. Your arm, your thigh, you know, your face does not need soap. And to seal the skin, we use oil, which is an ancient way of cleansing the face. And it lifts up dirt, it cares for the sebum. And I love, love, love using jojoba oil as sort of a main oil because it's actually a liquid wax as opposed to an oil. Even though it looks like oil feels.

Like oil, you're using the oil to clean. Yeah. Okay.

People with, like, cystic acne for 20 years are, like, really nervous, right? They're like, really?

Yeah. But it sounds like all these cleansers that different companies send me that have, you know, all the different soapy type of components in them, I could instead, when I wash my face in the morning, just use something like. Well, usually I'll use. Use warm water plus one of these cleansers. Would I use warm water plus oil or just, you know, oil and warm water plus oil. Warm water plus oil. Okay, I'll try it.

I'm sure we've sent you like, a bottle of our best skin ever. I think the frankincense. Best skin ever or something.

I don't know. I have a hard time keeping track of all this stuff. I'm sure I can hunt it down.

Ask your wife.

Okay. Yeah, my wife just steals stuff, so I'll go steal it out of her bathroom drawer. That's probably where it's at.

So try that. We have these beautiful organic hemp claws, which have a nice texture, but it's soft. You would just sort of put warm water in that, splash your face, put a squirt of oil on, run that over your face, another splash, you're good to go. Or one more squirt for moisture. So we. We've kind of created the best scene evers as the one bottle to do it all, whether you're a man, woman, or child. But essentially, you know, or just use jojoba or beautiful olive oil. And it's such a game changer. And people with, you know, often if people do have things like Severe acne or eczema. I'm obviously going to be looking at dietary and gut issues, but what I love is that some people just do this. They just switch to washing with oil and they get off the chemical train and severe acne and very harsh skin conditions evolve, like by the day, by the hour, by the week as they're doing this, and sometimes with no dietary change whatsoever.

Interesting. Okay, so we stop using a lot of these things that are super abrasive to the face or that get rid of the biome or some of the cells in the face. Then we seal by using oils instead of soaps. And then the last component is seed.

Yes. So seeding. So the thought that what's applied to the skin goes in, and so we want to apply the right things because this skin's ability to absorb is like such a gift for us, what we can put into our body transdermally. And so we don't want to be putting things in, like, with that have petroleum or different chemicals and stuff, you know, so hopefully we've got a good diet we can reseed with, you know, our food, eating prebiotics, probiotics. And then you can seed the skin, too, by, like, being in the sun, which helps to generate microbial peptides. You can use like a honey mask, which is full of enzymes and prebiotics. And so that's just like feeding and putting the nutrients back into your skin, whether that's through diet or transdermally.

Okay, got it, got it. And, you know, when it comes to the seeding of the skin, I would imagine that part of this goes hand in hand with this whole notion that a lot of people have these days of not showering or bathing too regularly to maintain the body biome of the skin.

Yeah. Again, if you're just, you know, have. If you have a good source of water, you know, you could shower, bathe every day, but you don't need to soap every day.

Okay, okay, got it. So you could. You could use water. And that's not going to be as intensive at getting rid of the natural biome on the skin.

No, I would. Yeah. Go to town with the water. It's more about the chemicals, you know, through the water or that you're applying to your skin.

Right. Okay, cool. Wow, there's a lot there. And again, the book, Renegade Beauty is the one that has the whole protocol for stop seal seed. If you guys want to read that one, it's really good. And then holistic Dental care, just because I like to geek out on Oral care. And I'm getting more and more interested in it these days. Maybe I missed my true calling. Maybe I should have been a dentist. I don't know. But that also is a really, really good book. This holistic dental care book. So good. Actually, I had a dental student over at my house the other day and I loaned it to him. I had to hunt him down and get it back like a couple days before this podcast. I'm like, oh, crap, I don't own the book. I need to review some of these questions. All right, well, cool. What I'm going to do is I'm going to link to all this stuff. If you're listening and you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Nadine that's n a D I N E. And in the show notes, I'll not only link to these books, but some of the products that we discuss. And I'll also link to Nadine's company, which is called Living Libations and really, really cool company. It's gotta be if my wife stole it all and I can't even find it. So go check out some of these Living Libations products as well if you want to pick up some of the things that Nadine and I were talking about when it comes to, especially like the gum and the teeth care and also some of the stop seal seed components. I know her products are really popular, really well made, and don't have beaver anus gland extract used for the peach or the cucumber components as we established earlier. So that being said, Nadine, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us. I love the work that you're doing. These books are great.

Oh, thank you so much. I think we got to know there's a lot of information out there and there's a clear path to some beautiful things that can help us all.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, folks, again you can leave your questions, your comments, your feedback over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Nadine and until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Nadine Artemis of Living Libations signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over @Ben Greenfield Fitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.