The Root of The Matter

Healing from the Roots: Overcoming Periodontal Disease Naturally With Dr. Lauralee Nygaard

• Dr. Rachaele Carver, D.M.D. Board-Certified, Biologic, Naturopathic Dentist • Season 2 • Episode 22

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Curious about the hidden link between your oral health and overall well-being? Join me, Dr. Rachaele Carver, as we welcome the insightful Dr. Lauralee Nygaard, a periodontist who champions a holistic approach to dental care. Dr. Nygaard shares her captivating journey into the world of periodontics, including a life-altering moment when she faced a possible stroke during surgery. Together, we unravel the connections between oral health and systemic conditions, discussing how accessible treatments can play a crucial role in preventing chronic diseases like heart disease and dementia.

In our engaging discussion, we explore how dietary choices can significantly impact your gum health. Discover the surprising benefits of protein-rich diets for reducing inflammation and why plant-based diets might leave your oral health lacking. We also delve into the effectiveness of modern laser surgery over traditional antibiotics in treating periodontal disease, underscoring the importance of stable blood sugar levels and informed dietary choices for better oral and overall health.

We don't shy away from addressing the complexities of medications on oral health, specifically the unexpected side effects of drugs like statins and GLP-1. Dr. Nygaard and I share innovative at-home dental care tips, from dry brushing to using a water pick, offering listeners practical strategies for maintaining their oral health. We also touch on the potential of epigenetics in overcoming genetic predispositions to dental issues, empowering you to take charge of your health and prevent chronic diseases. Join us for a transformative episode filled with knowledge and actionable insights.

Connect with Dr. Lauralee Nygaard https://www.drnygaard.com/

To learn more about holistic dentistry, check out Dr. Carver's website:

http://carverfamilydentistry.com

To contact Dr. Carver directly, email her at drcarver@carverfamilydentistry.com

Want to talk with someone at Dr. Carver's office?  Call her practice: 413-663-7372

Reverse Gum Disease In 6 Weeks! With Dr. Rachaele Carver Online Course!

Learn more about here: https://reversegumdiseaseinsixweeks.info/optinpage



Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. Information discussed is not intended for diagnosis, curing, or prevention of any disease and is not intended to replace advice given by a licensed healthcare practitioner. Before using any products mentioned or attempting methods discussed, please speak with a licensed healthcare provider. This podcast disclaims responsibility from any possible adverse reactions associated with products or methods discussed. Opinions from guests are their own, and this podcast does not condone or endorse opinions made by guests. We do not provide guarantees about the guests' qualifications or credibility. This podcast and its guests may have direct or indirect financial interests associated with products mentioned.

Speaker 1:

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Root of the Matter. I am your host, dr Rachel Carver, and today we are very lucky to have, I think, our first periodontist or gum specialist on the podcast, dr Laura Lee Nygaard. This is very exciting. You guys have heard me talk so much about terrain theory and really the root cause of cavities and gum disease and that if we really want to try to heal it, we really need to understand instead of always just trying to kill the bad bacteria. I'm really excited to have this conversation to give you guys some really good tips and how we can really reverse this, because we know the data is clear that the bugs that we often see in periodontal disease are linked to dementia and heart disease and preterm birth rates and every chronic disease basically on the planet. We need to fix this.

Speaker 1:

The exciting thing is the mouth is super accessible. It's a lot easier to try to treat the mouth versus dealing with IBS or something like that. So we're going to give you really great tips, lots of great information, so we can prevent this disease. That is a precursor to a lot of chronic issues. So welcome. Thank you so much for taking time on your Friday afternoon to be with us. So maybe tell us a little bit about how you got into dentistry and how you got more along that more kind of holistic whole body.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for having me. I'm very honored to be able to join you as the first periodontist. I love periodontics and I'm excited to share what I have learned in my journey. I became a dentist largely because I thought I wanted to be a physician. In high school, when I took an aptitude test, dentists kept coming up no matter how I tried to fake the test and so I reluctantly thought, okay, I guess I should be a dentist. And my second year of dental school I thought I'd made a really big mistake because I did not love the tooth classes. I was totally into more of the physical assessment classes pathology, immunology and all that stuff.

Speaker 2:

In my second year of dental school, dr Peter Nordland, who was a periodontist in California, took an afternoon office practice and came in and showed the first published connective tissue graft procedures where you could actually regenerate and regrow gums, and I was like in awe, like I knew that's what I wanted to be when I grew up and I left that lecture determining I was going to do everything I could to score high enough on my test. I could go into my specialty program with the dream of maybe having an aesthetic focused periodontal plastic surgery practice, which I did, started a practice from scratch when I graduated from Dallas School in 1995, and I was busy treating all the periodontal disease that I could get my hands on. Doing. Very much, a practice focused on aesthetic periodontal procedures and it was, I believe, a Wednesday afternoon. I was doing surgery on a patient and I'm in a multi-dental building. So one of the dentists from across the hall popped her head in my surgery and said, hey, pause for a second and answer some questions on a case.

Speaker 2:

And so I stepped away to consult with her on a case and stepped back into my surgery, put my surgical loops on and realized I couldn't see anything. And so I rocked my head back and forth, thinking my loops got, you know, messed up, and I pretty quickly realized what I was thinking I wasn't seeing was actually TV snow. I literally couldn't get my eyes to focus and if you know anything about dental specialties, we're the nerds in periodontics, about everything science and I very quickly realized that I was having a stroke, most likely. I knew that blood wasn't getting through to my brain because my eyes weren't working like they were supposed to. I was clearly sending the message and nothing was happening. And so I moved my hands, I moved my seat, I took my pulse, I thought, okay, everything's working.

Speaker 2:

But I realized I needed aspirin really quick, and so I was able to get up and walk down the hall to my sterilization, where I asked my assistants for two, three 25 milligram aspirins which I chewed, sucked under my tongue and then went to do a hygiene exam. And by this time my speech was very slurred, so I sounded like I was drunk, and so my hygienist, very, in a very animated way, said what is the matter with you? And I was embarrassed and I did a quick exam, said as little as I could, and I walked back down the hall to my surgery, sat down and tried to pick up my suture needles to finish, I had two sutures to tie and I could not tie my sutures, and so my surgical assistant put her hands over mine and together we tied the last two sutures and I finished the case and I went up to my office manager and said hey, I feel weird. I think I'm going to go home. She goes, oh no, she goes, I'm going to drive you home. And the thing that sounds crazy as I'm telling the story, is I didn't feel like I was in danger in the moment that all this was happening and I went home that night just feeling weird and I remember hoping I wake up again.

Speaker 2:

After I went to sleep and I got up the next day, I think my husband drove me to work and then he checked in on me mid-morning and I guess I was just slower than normal who kind of looked at me condescendingly and said oh, laura, lee had a migraine, you're fine. And I'm like no, I know, I had a neurologic event. And he said just to prove to you that you're a hypochondriac, I'll order an MRI and just let you know that. No, it was just a migraine. And so that was Wednesday when I had the event. I wasn't scheduled for the MRI till the following Friday, so it was about a week and a half. I did the MRI with contrast. That Monday he called me and said I don't want you to freak out, but we found a spot in your brain. I've referred you to a stroke specialist. He didn't even say a stroke specialist. He said I referred you to a neurologist who will see you Tuesday over his lunch hour because he has no openings until November. And this was May, and so I pretty much hung up and anyway I got.

Speaker 2:

I went in to see the neurologist and I had three months of testing. I think I had two or three MRIs with eye contrast, I had multiple echocardiograms but tons of blood work and after all of that he basically said you had a cryptogenic stroke, which means it was a clot stroke went up the occipital artery and that's why your vision was affected. He said you saved your life by chewing two aspirin and he said here's my card. I have no idea why this happened, but if you have symptoms again, give me a call. And I remember leaving his office feeling a little bit let down because I know enough about biology to know you just don't throw a clot for no reason. My kids at the time, I think, were five and seven and you envision not growing and not being with them as they were growing up or whatever. And so I came back to my office the following week and was relaying my story to a patient at the time that was a cardiac nurse and she said Laura Lee, she said you could do something about that. She said I think you should go in for a more advanced cardiac preventative workup. And so that's how I was.

Speaker 2:

I was scheduled to see Amy Donene at the heart Attack and Stroke Prevention Center to figure out what was going on. And interestingly, at the time that I saw her, my OBGYN took me off my birth control pills in a nanosecond and he said he was like in his opinion I had been on them for more than 10 years and he was adamant that I was done like yesterday. And it was interesting, I got really different information from all three different physicians. So my neurologist said the birth control pills had nothing to do with it. My OBGYN was like birth control pills, you're done.

Speaker 2:

And then Amy Donene, because of her approach, was to try to look for some genetic root cause of cholesterol. And at the time, with the advanced cardiac testing they did, my cholesterol was not high but my particle size was what they called dangerous, which in hindsight, with what I know now, just means I was eating nothing but sugar. I was on a very for years. I had never eaten fat, I'd only eaten carbohydrates, and so a lot of my lipid profile wasn't so much, in my opinion, about disease but more about my metabolic dysfunction and stress. But anyway, at the time that information wasn't really available, because this was what in 2005.

Speaker 2:

And they started me on a very aggressive cardiac prevention regimen of drugs, so many drugs that even my pharmacist asked me why in the world are you taking all this stuff? Because I was skinny and little and looked young and they were in shock that I was on blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication. Anyway, long story short, I went along like this for a while and then, no matter what I did in terms of following the American Heart Association diet or taking all my drugs, I could not get my inflammation under control, and LPPLA2, which is a marker in the blood for an enzyme that shows that your plaque in your arteries is destabilizing, in spite of me being on this regimen, was like going up and up. And so, about two years into this regimen, amy Donin said to me hey, what's your periodontal health like? Maybe you should have an oral DNA test? And I'm like, excuse me, do you know what I do? I am a periodontist, that is, gum dentist. I can assure you I do not have gum disease and I was a little bit off-put.

Speaker 2:

And then the whole idea back then about bacteria testing really was off-putting to me because when I was in my residency late 80s, early 90s, all this genetic testing was getting going and they really couldn't connect it to any of the oral things that were happening. And so I wasn't super open at all to do the testing and I really poo-pooed it because if you know anything about periodontal disease, your biome there's 800 organisms on average, or 700, 800 in your mouth, and I never really believed it was a specific infection process, because it's more a dysbiosis that creates an immune response. So I was just not open to this. Let's look at bacteria. But as my inflammatory markers were raging, I was starting to get afraid of maybe having another event. So I acquiesced and said, oh fine, I'll do the DNA test.

Speaker 2:

And I did the DNA test and I came back with my. Aa was a little elevated and I think TF, but it wasn't crazy, it was just a little bit. So I thought, ok, I'm going to do an experiment. I thought, ok, I'm going to do an experiment. I thought, okay, I'm going to have my teeth cleaned. So, embarrassingly, when Amy said what's your gum disease status, I went back to look at my records and it had been three years since I had my teeth cleaned and for people listening that might sound ridiculous, but when you're a dentist in the grind you do not get in the chair unless there's a cancellation in your schedule and the hygiene schedule. And it's just. I was totally in the grind, not taking care of myself, pretty much subsisting on three frappuccinos and a Coca-Cola a day, and I was just a hot mess.

Speaker 2:

And the other thing about my charting that sort of I looked at is I had only two teeth that had one four millimeter pocket on them and I thought, well, that's not herd all disease In 2005,. That was barely gingivitis, like everyone had fours in their molars. So I thought I heard all disease in 2005. That was barely gingivitis, like everyone had fours in their molars. So I thought I don't have gum disease. So I was a little surprised when my um oral dna test came back showing these pathogens and I thought, okay, I'm in a humor, amy, don't need a long and I'm gonna. Okay, I'll have my teeth cleaned and I'll commit to flossing every day for three months, which again sounds embarrassingly like dentists to do it right. But I will say my hygienists are great. I'm like the rest of y'all. I'm not, I think, because I know dentists that could replace my teeth if something happened. It was just not. I'm still like.

Speaker 2:

I never floss my teeth, maybe every other day or every third day when I wasn't doing it really consistently. So I really made an effort in this experiment to floss every day and have my teeth cleaned really well using ultrasonics, in this experiment to floss every day and have my teeth cleaned really well using ultrasonics, and three months later I had a blood marker test for LPPLA2 enzyme and then I had another oral DNA test done and what was really interesting is in a three-month period of time my LPPLA2 fell over 90 points, which took me from high-risk stroke to a normal range. And if that had been a drug it would have been marketed all over the place, okay. So that was really interesting to me and very educational. That, wow, the flossing really does. It really works.

Speaker 2:

But that sort of began my, I would say, journey into this whole holistic or this whole oral systemic health connection because of what happened to me and then, in addition to that, about the time this was happening, I guess maybe a year or so after that, my son got really sick with a skin condition that nobody could figure out and I, through lots of my research, had him tested for celiac disease and he had severe celiac disease and his microbiome was destroyed. So he had 50 food sensitivities. He was a mess he was at the time we diagnosed him. He'd been given steroids every three months by the dermatologist. Nobody could help him and he was sick, very depressed in college anyway. He was sick, very depressed in college anyway. So that sort of connected me to learning about how the oral biome, or how your gut health, basically connects to your oral health and how that has a huge role in periodontal conditions. And I look now at periodontal disease as the warning light on your dashboard for your car If you have pockets that bleed, or even just no pockets but your gums bleed. That's like your check engine warning light. And there's so periodontal disease.

Speaker 2:

It's often discussed by dentists as an infection. It is actually a dysbiosis, much like having gut dysbiosis. So what? And there's many things that can trigger a dysbiosis. Certain medications can not brushingbiosis, certain medications can not brushing and flossing your teeth can. Eating a highly processed food diet can. Having a lot of stress in your life can. So there's all these triggers that create an overgrowth or dysbiosis.

Speaker 2:

So dysbiosis happens when you have good guy bugs and bad guy bugs. Both grow in the mouth. Good guy bugs tend to be more oxygen loving and bad guy bugs and grow in the mouth. Good guy bugs tend to be more oxygen loving and bad guy bugs, and so you can take a good organism, never brush or floss, and those organisms multiply, pile on, cut the blood supply off to the first organisms that show up and you take what was once an okay bacteria and you create kind of a monster where, because you cut the oxygen supply off, it becomes what we call facultative anaerobic, starts to secrete a toxin and then the toxin then in turn turns on an immune response in your body. So the actual destruction of gum and bone is not from the bacteria creating an infection, it's from your body's response, literally chewing away your bone and your gum tissue in your mouth.

Speaker 1:

I just want to stop because this is so important, and I love that you're saying this, because when I've given lots of lectures and webinars and you look up the definition of periodontal disease and it's always it's an infectious disease and this is so important and so important to understanding how we can reverse this and prevent it in the first place. Okay, so I really I want to reiterate what Dr Loralee said. Right, it is not about the bacteria, right? So we have to stop thinking about kill-kill with all these harsh mouth rinses and antibiotics. It is a response. It is we talk about it all the time a change in the environment, right, the terrain.

Speaker 1:

So we talk about this theory called pleomorphism, right, where those healthy, oxygen-loving, nice bacteria that we need? Right, because they help us absorb our nutrients, they help our immune system. There's so many things that they do when they lose that oxygen right, they lose, or the nutrients, right, we're living a highly processed diet, right. So they become how I explain it? They become hangry. Think about you when you're really hungry, like your whole personality can change, right, same thing. That's what's happening with these microbes they become hangry, they change form and change shape and, as Lorelei said, it's the toxin that they give off that activates the immune system.

Speaker 1:

So I think of periodontal disease just like an autoimmune condition, because that's basically the definition. Your body starts attacking itself, but not because of the bacteria, because of the toxins the bacteria are relieving, because the environment in the body has changed. We don't all of a sudden one day swallow these pathogenic bacteria and get gum disease or genetics. Right, my mother had it, so I'm going to have it. No, it's about the environment and the body and it's this immune reaction. So I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it's so important that people get them.

Speaker 2:

I'm so glad you did and I so am excited that you talk about it the same way I do, because I have actually been criticized by peers for not talking about it as an infection. I'm like it's not an infection at all and it's. And the other thing that goes along with this is that if you are metabolically unhealthy or you are hyperinsulinemic which 89 of a population america is, so I think it's only one in eight of us it's metabolically healthy. When your insulin hormone spikes, your endothelial lining inside your capillaries opens up and leaks.

Speaker 2:

When you are on the yo crap food diet, like I was on, where I was eating sugar constantly, my gums bled every time I had my teeth cleaned because I was creating an environment where I was opening up the little tiny blood vessels in the mouth and those toxins were there and I was giving them a complete invitation to enter my bloodstream. And the metabolic stuff related to gum disease is huge. I just lectured last month and I think it I don't remember I think it was a journal of dental research. It looked at almost 300 patients that, according to the numbers, seemed healthy and they correlated what the insulin levels were related to periodontal inflammation and what they found was that if somebody had five millimeter pockets that bled, it was a 92% correlation that they were insulin resistant. Wow, say that one more time that they were insulin resistant.

Speaker 2:

Wow, say that one more time. So in other words, for patients who were having gum exams that were considered healthy when they did insulin sensitivity screening tests to see if they were metabolically healthy, patients with pockets that were 5 millimeters that bled had a 92% correlation with being diagnosed with insulin resistance.

Speaker 1:

And insulin resistance is a major risk factor for patients everything.

Speaker 1:

We know diabetes, obviously, but this is, I think, what leads to cholesterol. High blood pressure, like having that insulin high is really a problem. And so it's interesting what you said, too, about the endothelial lining. Just as we talk about all the time, the gut lining, one cell layer, that seen as the endothelium, so the endothelium is that lining of our blood vessels, right, and this is what causes cholesterol to get high. When we have inflammation in the blood vessel, it's a signal to the liver I have damage. Right, send me some LDL, which we think of, or we're taught to think of, as the bad cholesterol when in fact that's the band-aid.

Speaker 2:

Send me a band-aid, yes. So cholesterol then forms to keep the endothelial lining intact so you don't rupture something.

Speaker 1:

Exactly. And the problem is when we keep. If our gums keep bleeding, for one example, and we keep getting those toxins and they keep scratching and tearing the endothelium, we make more and we need more and more LDL right. So instead of stopping when we take a statin, we're saying don't make any more LDL. Well now what's going to repair the gum line, the endothelial lining right? No, we're going to have more and more holes right and it's going to be problematic. We're going to have more blood pressure issues, all sorts of issues. So the problem really is those toxins right. So get the gums healthy, so we reduce that or all the other ways we can reduce toxin.

Speaker 1:

But that's really important to understand that the statin is really doing something we don't want it to do. We need cholesterol. That is how we repair and ideally you have damage. Then the body, the HDL, the good cholesterol, comes along and removes the plaque once it's repaired. But, like I said, when we have that chronic assault to the endothelial lining we get. Everybody, usually by this time, has heard of leaky gut, but leaky gums same thing. Leaky vessels, leaky blood, brain barrier, anywhere you have a barrier.

Speaker 2:

These toxins create leak barriers, right. And here's one even more interesting, and then maybe you've seen this data but P gingivalis, so one of the what I call the parasitic. So there is something called the red complex, which I call the parasitic pathogens. They actually gorge on the red blood vessels of your gums and they are very difficult to get rid of. They act almost what we call them keystone bacteria, or call them like the drug lord in the neighborhood who, when other bacteria that would otherwise behave good is in the presence of these keystone bacteria, they become hoodlums. They create much more damage and become much more toxic. But P gingivalis in your bloodstream actually binds to the toll receptors in your islet cells in your pancreas and makes you insulin resistant.

Speaker 1:

And new research has shown that they are the ones that activate the glial cells in the brain, leading to the plaques in the brain and dementia. So yeah, peach and javaus, that's the real bad ones.

Speaker 2:

So what I find even more intriguing is okay, it's not an infection, but these organisms are so powerful they are interacting at a cellular level, turning on and turning off your normal biologic processes cellular level turning on and turning off your normal biologic processes. So again. So I would say, for me, what I say to patients is look, if you don't care about your tooth. I get that because that was me. But I floss because I want my brain to function and I don't want to have another stroke and I don't want to have a heart attack. And so my motivation now to take care of my gums is much different than I was ever taught, because I was taught it was all about a tooth, all about not getting a cavity, and for me those are not on the hierarchy of deeds really high up for me.

Speaker 2:

But having brain dysfunction I think there's so many of us dealing with family members with dementia that is something that when you start to talk to people about where their values are and what's important to them, when you can connect the dots about why the oral systemic stuff matters in those regards, a lot of times people are a lot more willing to listen and the metabolic stuff is game changing. I've been using glucose monitors with people, and if I can get them to get their blood sugar stable and learn how the foods are responding, their inflammation in their gums totally goes away, totally goes away, and I have a few people that have even done the carnivore diet. It's unbelievable the difference, and I think the carnivore diet for periodontal disease has a couple inputs that are really important. I think protein is a big issue for connective tissue healing and for bone health, and I think, as a rule, even encourage people who are anti-meat if they're willing to put collagen into their coffee. I even see improvement in their connective tissue, and so I think the protein thing is really important.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. My brother-in-law is one of them. I've talked about him on the podcast all the time. He went carnivore. January 1st he had lost like 160 some odd pounds, and he said to me one day he said you know what the really interesting thing is, my gums never bleed anymore. I haven't changed anything and I said absolutely. It took all the toxins out of there. And that's the other thing too.

Speaker 1:

As we get older, we actually need more protein and we tend to eat less and less, a lot of times because our digestion was challenged, we may not be able to break down. So that's why I'm a big advocate of digestive enzymes. I use a lot of that in my perio patients too. That's fascinating, see, we're both seeing those same kind of results, and not that we're necessarily advocating that long-term.

Speaker 1:

But when you change your diet so radically and you remove all that, the processing and all the toxins and it's absolutely without protein, without amino acids, you cannot heal tissue. It's important, I try it. The thing is, plant protein is not the same as animal protein and people have their reasons for not wanting to eat meat and it's not about judgment, but from a healthcare practitioner's point of view. You do not get the fat soluble vitamins and the proper minerals and the right type of protein and iron. You're not getting the right kind of iron for repair. I just tell it how. It is what I see. But again, people make their own decisions. But I think some of my vegan patients have the unhealthiest mouths I've ever seen. You can even tell.

Speaker 2:

I can look in a vegan's mouth and tell that they're vegan because their teeth are awful. The enamel is not formed correctly. They usually have very dry, inflamed tissues because B12 deficiency creates a whole bunch of oral mucositis challenges, and so that has been interesting. In the spaces I've started to connect the dots where you really can look at someone and I, and sometimes it'll startle patients because I'll, I can not, they haven't said anything, but I'll just look in their mouth and I'll say this is the diet that you eat and they're alarmed a little bit and I'm, and they're like how did you know? I'm like cause I can tell by what's happening in your mouth.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. Yeah, it's fascinating. That's one cool thing about being a dentist. I think you can look at the tongue and you look at the texture and there's so much. This is the start of the gut. You can see so much about a person's overall health right there.

Speaker 2:

And just to circle back to this, periodontal disease is an infection. Part of when I was learning this and all this oral DNA testing was coming out, and this is still happening. Everywhere people will do an oral DNA test and put patients on antibiotics, and I did about I don't know more than a dozen cases in a row where I treated everybody the same. So I did the oral DNA test, I did the antibiotics that were recommended and I retested six weeks later and in every case the oral pathogen load was almost twice what it was before I started. So then I thought that's not what I want, forget that. So then what I did is I'm a LENAP, so LENAP surgery or laser surgery doctor, and so I said I'm going to forget the antibiotics. Let me do LENAP on these cases and see what happened.

Speaker 2:

Lenap cases were the most dramatic reduction in oral pathogens to get people to, especially the red, complex ones, those blood sucking ones. The only way to get rid of those is doing laser osseous surgery. And it was dramatic when I would do tests, do full mouth laser surgery, then retest huge change in their oral biome for the good, like just significantly better. But it was really eye-opening because I being doing my residency in the late 80s, early 90s. I mean we were putting paper points in people's pockets and we were putting everybody on amoxicillin, metronidazole for three weeks. I mean it was crazy how many antibiotics we were giving people and of course it didn't work. And I'm very much and I've seen cases where, unfortunately, patients that are treated that way they develop very resistant, difficult to treat periodontal conditions and then I think I have had the same experience and I was like I got frustrated, like regardless of what these results are, the recommendation is just antibiotics.

Speaker 1:

And at that time I was like that's really not great for the gut. And in my case I was seeing some resolution, but at the same time I'm like, but that's not long term and that's not really getting at the problem. So I said same with you. I was like, forget that, and I didn't have my laser at the time. But I just started giving patients oxygen, right, because I'm like what do the good bugs actually mean? Some oxygen, maybe switch the little hydrogen peroxide this was years ago when I first started this and give them the digestive enzymes and biotoxin, like a finder kind of charcoal-based. And it was really interesting. I had anywhere from 20% reduction to 60% reduction in just four weeks. What was fascinating? Every single person on that regimen there was zero. We got rid of all the P gingivalis and I was like, wow, so obviously there are alternatives. And so talk to us a little bit about the laser. What's the mechanism there? Why does that work so well?

Speaker 2:

So there's. So lasers are not all the same. So the laser that I use is the Periolase laser and it's the one that has it's FDA approved for treatment of periodontal disease. And what makes it unique is it is not a cutting laser, so it and it is only the energy in that light wavelength is only absorbed by dark, pigmented things. All of the bad guy pathogens are dark. They're small and dark, and so when you shine the laser into a pocket, those bugs vaporize and you literally create a sterilization in the pocket, but the bone doesn't heat up and the connective tissue doesn't heat up and then you can go back and create a very stable blood clot. And in those areas it has changed my practice.

Speaker 2:

I probably had my laser for 10 years maybe, and I have many cases where I thought people's teeth were going to totally fall out of their heads. And they still have their teeth today. And I even had patients who, for I've been practicing almost 30 years, so I've been doing this for a long time. But I have patients who for years we struggle with their teeth hurting and them being miserable having their teeth clean. We treat them with the laser. The pain goes away. They're like it's night and day difference. It's their whole, their the skin, their complexion would get better.

Speaker 2:

It was the weirdest thing. I would do this treatment. They would come back and I'm like, why are they? Just? They would look different, they would look less sick, they really would. Because I think it's such an effective oral biome wash. Basically it just it gets rid of everything and then creates a baseline and then if you're supporting gut health, supporting the oxygenation, doing digestive enzymes and you're looking at things more holistically, you really get people back to a level of stability. Because when I was first starting out, people would go through full mouth surgery or full mouth root planning and a year to three years later they were back right at the beginning and it was like very I thought I'm not really helping these people.

Speaker 1:

Maintaining. You know that's like you're maintaining a disease.

Speaker 2:

And then this kills me. I just lectured a month ago and the hygienist put up her hand and said the pocket's been five millimeters for 10 years. Like she said, isn't that stable? And I'm like not. If it's bleeding they're probably diabetic or insulin resistant. So there you do. I think there is, and you can get to a place in periodontics where you don't know the difference between disease and health and the square surface area of your periodontal pockets are like your fore, I think, isn't it the forearm, or your hand is the whole surface area. So if every time you touched your forearm it was bleeding, would you be worried about that? Because patients will go oh, my gums have bled for 10 years and I'm like that isn't normal.

Speaker 1:

It's like when people have an abscess. I said this just the other day If you had an abscess on your arm and it would just ooze every once in a while with pus, then it would get better, but then it would ooze again. I was like would you just leave it there forever, even if it didn't hurt? People are like, oh, I'm like, yeah, oh, that's traveling all and again.

Speaker 1:

Think about that, those pockets, the so many blood vessels, right, that's going directly. And what's scary is when we think about top teeth, right, you've got the sinus and the brain Like there's not much space between upper teeth and the brain and we have to realize that so much of our lymph, 20% of our lymph, is right in the head and neck, so any of those toxins like that's traveling through your entire body. I don't know why in modern medicine I know it's more convenient for the insurance companies to cut the head off from the rest of the body. We are one being and everything is connected. And it's interesting that it's only been in the last few years that all this research is coming out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I think what I've observed is that we as dentists know a lot more about medicine than MDs know about what we do, and so I have tried to partner with MDs about especially getting early diagnosis for insulin resistance, and I pretty much gave up because the standard tests that they do is they'll do a two-hour glucose challenge test with 75 grams of glucose and the problem is, in 47% of the cases it misses insulin resistance. It is just not an accurate test, and so I've gone to ordering myself. I ordered through Quest Laboratories. It's called the CardioIQ insulin Sensitivity Test and what is very interesting in this space is the insulin issues that I see. Causing direct periodontal problems can happen 10 years before you become diabetic, and physicians won't look at this because it's not glucose. They think it's all about sugar and it has nothing to do with sugar. The hormone insulin is what the problem is. It's not the sugar. So you can have a normal A1C, your fasting glucose can be 100, and you can have three times the acceptable insulin in your bloodstream and your doctor is going to tell you you're perfectly okay. And I'm looking in their mouth going. I know they're not okay, everything's bleeding all over the place, but I struggle with. I'm just the dentist, they're just what do I know.

Speaker 2:

And I just had a patient who he lost an implant. I think it was probably over a year ago and I was worried at the time that his insulin, so his A1C, was nine. Okay, so that A1C should be less than 5.4 for normal metabolic health. So at nine, the problem with an A1C that high is it affects your connective tissue healing, so your collagen is not laying down appropriately, so your implants are not going to integrate correctly. And when his implant failed, of course he just blamed me. I guess it wasn't anything he had to do. And he came in and said my doctor told me when that implant failed that I was fine. But now he's on Wygovie and he's lost 35 pounds and his blood sugar is better and he's feeling better. And I'm like I hate to tell you this, but your implant failure was like the check engine light and I guarantee you you're hyperinsulinemic and unfortunately you have a great doctor, but they don't understand what I know.

Speaker 2:

And it's not about the glucose, it's about what your insulin is doing. I said you need to think of this as the fact that you are allergic to carbohydrates. You need to limit how many carbohydrates you're eating because you have to keep your insulin low, and the people that are excited or want to do blood glucose monitors. I think the glucose monitor for me really helped me understand our bio-individuality, because I think prior to that I was much more in the camp where one diet was for everybody and the reason that doesn't work is that we're not in each other's lives in terms of our emotional stress, our biomes, our environmental toxin load, and food doesn't fuel everybody or isn't broken down by everybody the same way. I would encourage you to go to Dexcomcom and you can order Stello. It is a direct-to-market for you.

Speaker 2:

Glucose monitor I think it's $89 if you do more than one month at a time and really you just need to wear it for about three months, I think, or even three months is plenty. I think if you do it even a month, you're going to learn some really interesting things about why you eat it. I'll give you an example, like for me. I ate a green apple with almond butter, which everyone says is good. My blood sugar went to 270. I about fell over and I realized that I had been eating all this stuff that people were saying was healthy, but for me. It was not keeping my blood sugar where it needed to be, and I was metabolically so damaged by the time I figured this out. I had to go much lower carbohydrate, yeah.

Speaker 1:

That's interesting. I recently just had this stello because I had some blood work done and my HbA1c was creeping up and I was thinking, oh, this is not I just. I was working with a nutritionist who had me eating more. He said you're not eating enough carbohydrates. That's affecting your thyroid and all these things. And I'm like, oh okay, and he was putting it to the side. No, you need to eat this many carbs. And I said I want to get a monitor because that's concerning to me. And so I got the Stello.

Speaker 1:

I think mine was like $99 for two months. They're the easiest things to wear, it's so convenient and I always loved learning everything about my body. So I thought it was fascinating and I was like, wow, my blood sugar was really staying at 100. I didn't have any. Over the whole month I didn't have any. I think my biggest spike was like 140. And I can't even remember what I ate. But I was surprised, like my resting and again, I guess the tissue it's interstitial versus blood, so it's a little bit higher. But I was like man, mine is still sitting at a hundred here. I was like I need to think about this.

Speaker 1:

And so for me I noticed if I eat a little fat, then protein and then carbs, I'm okay. But if I start my meal with a carb and then have the fat and protein, it goes higher. And it's so true. There are so many things that we think will activate us, and I thought I'm going to eat sourdough bread because that's better, and I'll lather it with butter, but no grains, for me sky high. So individuality is important, yeah, but I also think it's important what you said about just like having that P gingivalis, so even just oral bacteria affecting the insulin. So it could be a combination. So that's why the monitor is great, right? Is it the carbs or is it the bacteria in my mouth that is creating insulin? And I think that's something that probably very few physicians, if any, really understand that connection. They just say just don't have any carbs Because it's a problem, because our liver and our brain function primarily on glucose. So we do need some glucose.

Speaker 2:

But again, it's trying to find what's your right lane that's going to be best for you and your metabolism, I think yeah, not to interrupt you, but I think the other thing that happens is if you have eaten unhealthy like I did for years, I've got so much glucose stored in my liver that I got in order for me to finally get to a healthy metabolic state, I've got to fast enough to burn what's in my liver.

Speaker 1:

Yes, and that's why carnivore, I think, is good too, because you're burning off all those excess stores.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, I think it's why it works so well for so many people, even as a short-term reset. But I have found like for me, I'm probably more carnivore-ish. I do eat arugula for nitric oxide. I do like red peppers for vitamin C, so there's some. I do limited vegetables, but I have. I really have to be careful with fruits, like even blueberries. I will go over 140. If I eat more, like a half a cup of blueberries, I'll go over 140. If I do a quarter cup, I'm totally fine. So it's very interesting.

Speaker 2:

So for me, having that feedback in the monitor, I've even been able to figure out oh it's the amount that I'm eating that matters, which has been really interesting, but it's from a gum health standpoint. That probably is the most dramatic change I see that people can make is when they do glucose monitors, and unfortunately I have a lot of patients that are type 2 diabetics or even whose A1Cs are 9, 11. The doctors don't do anything and I've even prescribed monitors for those patients to say look, I need you to get your blood sugar flat and stable like a hundred. You know we can't do this yo-yoing around and I've had really positive results in the patients who I've done that for and they're so grateful that I'm willing to help them because they finally get stuff dialed in. And it makes me so sad because they are seeing their physicians three or four times a year and for some reason I know why. My daughter's in naturopathic medical school and she's being taught that people won't change their behavior in naturopathic medical school. Yep, no.

Speaker 1:

I know and I as a dentist.

Speaker 2:

I'm sure you've found this too, dr Carver is that people will change their behavior if you spend the time educating them on the value 100%, 100%. We just can't assume, people know I didn't know.

Speaker 1:

I'm so educated to know Exactly. It's not about your level of education and everything. When you just sit down and you explain these common sense just like we did about the LDL cholesterol, explaining it like that, that common sense makes sense Patients will look at you and be like, oh yeah, that makes sense, and that's all they need is that education and somebody who's going to partner with them to help them understand it and make a difference. So I've heard that too from family members who are doctors. They're not going to change, they just want a pill. And I'm like that's just not true and that's why we've gotten into the problem we have with medicine and all these side effects and all this chronic disease. And now people are fed up because they don't just want the pill, because they feel worse.

Speaker 2:

And if you circle back to a statin, statins are depleting on B vitamins so they cause a bunch of oral mucositis. They actually make you insulin resistant. So my story going back to the stroke, I was put on a statin, which I was on for 10 years, and when I was first diagnosed with a stroke I was completely metabolically healthy. By the time I took myself off the statin, my A1c had gone from healthy five to a nine, wow, wow. And I was solidly on the precipice of being a full-blown type 2 diabetic.

Speaker 1:

I don't understand that. I don't know if that's even listed as a side effect, right?

Speaker 2:

I think in the black box warnings. I think it is actually and, but it also. Statins also affect thyroid function, which was one of the first things I was complaining about, and my prevention nurse was like I a pill for an ill is. There's always consequences and dentally we see a lot of consequences for many medications that patients take and as a periodontist it's not unusual for the patient to come out on 45 medications. Wow.

Speaker 2:

When I first started practice 30 years ago, somebody had a complicated medical history. If they were on five medications, I would say 50% of my population is, on average, eight to 10 drugs. They're on antidepressants, they're on statins, they're on metformin or Ygovy, they're on then a thyroid medication and a bladder medication. It's really unbelievable. And of course, dentally you can imagine what that does to their oral cavities. They're dry, they have decay, they have vitamin deficiencies, they have a hard time managing their gum inflammation, especially these drugs like the GLP-1 drugs. I'm noticing patients have horrible periodontal conditions on those drugs and I think it's because they increase insulin. That's why you lose, or are they? I think they act on the insulin receptor, but I'm seeing this really weird inflammation and I haven't done a lot of research into it yet. But I'm just that's one thing in the back of my mind. I'm going to be observing to see what I see over time in those cases.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's fascinating stuff. Yeah, this is great stuff and I think you know the more people are aware of these things and know. So you take a patient in. They have these problems. You're doing the laser. You're seeing a really big difference. What other kind of therapies Are there? Any at-home therapies? What do you recommend to the patient? They're not in your office every day for laser, so how long do you see that lasting?

Speaker 2:

And then what do you do to try to help? Obviously, the diet changes. Is there anything else? Hygiene wise or supplement wise? You recommend yes.

Speaker 2:

So hygiene wise, my favorite thing to recommend is dry brushing using a Nimbus toothbrush. So I initially, when people are coming in with a lot of dysbiosis and a lot of plaque is they don't know. I don't want them putting slimy toothpaste on a toothbrush and trying to get the slimy biofilm off their teeth because physically speaking, if you put snot against snot you're not going to get it off, and so we use a dry. So the Nimbus has a micro bristle, which is a very fine point, and you can angle it into the gums and do circles and the plaque comes off like easily. And so people get a lot. They get very quick results because without a lot of extra time spent the biofilm gets removed much, much easier. So that's usually the first thing I'll do. I don't keep people off toothpaste forever, but initially, as they're trying to learn the proper angle technique and the proper habit for brushing, I will have them do that.

Speaker 2:

I personally love the cocoa floss. That's my favorite floss. I have a lot of elderly patients and men with big hands and if they're not going to floss, then I always tell them a proxy brush is the first cousin to floss. You need to stick something between your teeth, I don't care, you've got to disturb the colonies. And when I talk to people about daily home care, I give them the analogy that we need to oxygenate the colonies. So the main reason you're brushing isn't to remove all the plaque. It's like we're tilling the ground. We just need to oxygenate things. So we make the bacteria in the mouth the friendlier, happier, kind, and we're trying to oxygenate so we don't have as much of the bad guys develop. And so I'm a little bit of a. I need to know the why, and so I do find when people understand that's the reason, they're actually more open to do it, and they don't have to do it perfectly all at once. The idea is just you got to oxygenate it, so you got to sit down someday and till around the bacteria. I find that helpful.

Speaker 2:

I do like a water pick, because it does work a little bit better for modal bacteria in the mouth, and so that I have found to be very effective. It also gets food debris out, and if you leave food debris anywhere, it's like a mini mart for bacteria. So you're going to grow tons of bugs if there's food debris left behind. And I myself I had adult orthodontics and the only thing that got me through it was a water pick and after I went back to my flossing. But I was shocked at how much food still comes out if I use a water pick, so I've just kept that habit up.

Speaker 2:

In terms of toothpaste, I prefer the Nano Hydroxyapatite toothpaste and I think everybody has their favorite. My personal one that I probably use the most is Boca, although I've also used Revitin and Coco Floss and a few other ones. But I have noticed we made a change on that. Probably.

Speaker 2:

I was brainwashed, as most dentists, that fluoride was good for you and I remember coming across an article I think it was on Frontiers in Biology, where it talked about how fluoride actually worked and I was like it's an antibiotic. I was never taught that it literally destroys your biome. I was taught that it somehow mineralized the tooth and I remember thinking I never once was neighborhood or in my town for not wanting to have patients be on fluoride. But I have just seen much more reduction of inflammation. Taking that out of the equation Now. Certainly I have seen caries develop and those are in cases where we didn't maybe do oral biome testing. There's other issues. Almost always there's a sleep apnea component to those rampant caries patients, so there's other levers that are creating that. It's not about the fluoride but unfortunately, as dentists we were just really taught not science in terms of fluoride. We were taught that fluoride was the end-all, be-all to protect you against everything, and it really, in my opinion, has more detriment than it is helpful.

Speaker 1:

Well, it's not just your opinion. The big lawsuit just came out, in September, showing that it poses an unreasonable risk for neuroplasticity. And, as you said, it is fluoride. And apparently, as RFK has said, that's one of the first thing he wants to work on is getting rid of water fluorination, which, whoa. If that happens, that's crazy, but finally people might really see the real science behind it. That's why I tell people.

Speaker 2:

So I think you definitely need to brush and floss. I really tell patients, brush twice a day, floss once, you don't have to do it meticulously like two or three. You don't. Three times a day is too much. You can actually overbrush and overfloss, just so you know you will cause a lot of gum recession damage if you're over brushing, and I am not a fan of power toothbrushes because I see significant amount of bone loss and tissue damage in people with a more fragile what we call phenotype or just their genetic susceptibility and also, I think also poor connective tissue sets some people up for literal bone loss and tissue loss with the use of a Sonicare or Oral-B or Braun toothbrush, and so I've seen a lot of damage and my own story is I've had seven gum grafts and when I was the first one was 20 years ago and I was using a Sonicare because that's what I was taught, and about two years later I realized I had brushed off everything I had repaired. And again, much of what I recommend has come out of my own experience and I was at a meeting where I was introduced to the Nimbus toothbrush and it was like game changing my sensitivity went away because I wasn't abrading my dental tubules and my recession was way more stable and, I think, bad Venn too. When I was having a lot of that damage occur, I was eating the American Heart Association diet and I was not getting enough protein. I was not getting enough good fats. I was definitely in a really bad place and what I learned, actually through the Weston Price Diet and Weston Price Foundation and going back to my dental roots, so to speak was when I stopped all my cardiac meds and literally started eating like ribeyes, butter, eggs and raw milk. My HDL finally got to a normal level. My total cholesterol was high, but my body's happiest about 270. That's just where it is, and when I was in dental school, high cholesterol wasn't until you're over 300. 270 was considered normal when I was in school. But what was really interesting is my depression went away, my hormone function came back, my hangriness went away. My muscle I had extreme muscle pain which I thought was related to my dental career. I was doing massage every week because I was in so much pain. All of that went away and so that has been. An interesting side thing is just adding fat back in and realizing, wow, what a difference Fat is your friend In terms of periodontal health.

Speaker 2:

What do I tell patients? Brush and floss? I'm not.

Speaker 2:

I don't want them using mouth rinses because mouth rinses will kill near nitric oxide bacteria and elevate your blood pressure. I'm not a big rinse person. Now I do use Stella Life coconut rinse sometimes in my lichen planus type patients, so there'll be times that I'll use that, but in general there's no reason to use any mouthwash. I do want them to avoid liquid sugar. So I usually will say that means no juice, no soda, no coffee sweetener in your coffee. And I don't want people eating seed oils because seed oils spike insulin. And so I will tell them if you're a coffee person, no coffee creamer, because coffee creamer is 80% seed oils, it's canola oil and soybean oil. It's not real food. And so if they want a coffee that's creamy, I'll either get them to do collagen and butter and whip it up if they're open to that, or just to throw coconut if they can't do dairy coconut cream or coconut milk, or to do full fat dairy so cream or half and half usually is what I recommend in their coffee habits. And it's so funny patients.

Speaker 2:

So I had a patient who was post chemotherapy. I think we had done a lot of extractions on him I think maybe some implants and he was literally starving, like he was just whittling way to nothing. And I said you know what I said, just add butter and collagen into your coffee. And I saw him like a month later you should have seen he looked significantly better. And I explained to him that you're not going to onboard the dental vitamins that you need if you don't have fat in your diet. And I said so. You need to get some protein and some fat, and butter is my favorite fat for dental health. So I always tell people spring butter, put it in everything, like you can't eat too much of it. So they usually look at me strange, but that's my favorite. I would say dental fat, and I encourage patients to switch over to clean fats.

Speaker 2:

So any animal fats, pure olive oil the only one that you, but not what you buy at the grocery store, so Kirkland, their brand is pure or you can go to a local. We have a local olive oil store that tests everything here, so that's another option. Avocado oil, but again, even avocado oil now can be cut with canola oil. So you have to be careful of your brands and then certainly your safest is all your animal fats in terms of cooking. But people are funny, they'll go. I don't eat sugar. I'm like, tell me what do you have for breakfast? Raisin bran. I'm like that's pure sugar. That's all you're getting is sugar for breakfast. So I think there's still we're brainwashed in this mindset that we don't really know what breakfast food looks like unless it's coming out of a cereal box.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, it's like dessert, right. I have patients tell me all the time. They say, tell me about your diet. I eat healthy. And I think what does that mean? Some people they think Raisin Bran is healthy right, it's fibers and it's fruit. And everybody's view, for instance, like I can't eat a lot of cruciferous vegetables. My body, my microbiome can't handle that. But that's supposed to be the healthiest. And I had a patient tell me, telling her that story and she said, oh she's. I eat lots of broccoli and cauliflower because it's supposed to be good for me, but I always feel terrible when I eat that. And I said don't listen to the blogs or whatever. I was like listen to your body.

Speaker 2:

Listen to your body. Well, I just had a food sensitivity test come back on a patient who's got this crazy gut inflammation and it was interesting. Those were her food sensitivities like broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and that's exactly what I thought when I got the test back. I'm like who would have thought those foods are problematic? Because what do most people do? They go on a paleo diet if they're not feeling well, and cauliflowers and everything. And so it was very interesting to her. Root cause was gluten and that was where her leaky gut started. But then she had a lot of other food sensitivities that had developed.

Speaker 2:

But so I usually, in terms of what do I tell people? Brush and floss, dry brush or dry brush, do something in between the teeth? I want patients to drink half their body weight in water a day, because dehydration actually has a big role in sticky plaque formation and it can actually create a dysbiosis if you're dehydrated. For easy math, if I weigh 100 pounds, I need 50 ounces of base hydration a day and I do like that to have some electrolyte in it, but I prefer I just personally, I just do Himalayan salts or some Celtic salt, just a couple little granules in my water. So simple, you don't have to go out and buy a bunch of stuff.

Speaker 1:

Just that. You know, powders have a lot of added ingredients and dyes and, yeah, maybe they make it taste a little better, but I would do just a little bit of. I use Redmond's real salt too, rather than you know same thing, Well pinch in your water or lime juice and that's the natural.

Speaker 1:

I think it's important. Sometimes we feel like you drink so much water and jive that you're publicly lacking those minerals and those electrolytes. You really need those to be able to absorb the water and, honestly, there's a lot of research on the fats. One of the reasons I think ketogenic diet can be helpful, and just fats in general, is because it's healthy fats that actually create structured water in the body right and it's like inside of our cells we have this structured water.

Speaker 1:

It's not like water like we drink. And Gerald Pollack, who came up with the whole idea of the fourth phase of water? He never drinks any water. He eats lots of healthy fats, and so I used to wonder too. I was like my dog when she was a puppy. She never drank water and I was like how can she get through, how could she even pee if she never drinks anything? I think her diet. And when I learned that, I was like, oh, maybe she's getting plenty of fat in her diet that she doesn't need as much water.

Speaker 2:

So it's really they think that's the mechanism of action with the periolase laser is a structured water in the cells.

Speaker 1:

Yeah yeah, they're suggesting this and the laser is phenomenal. I've had now all my hygienists have been trained to use those lasers and we said no more antibodies, the more resting let's just. Let's do our due diligence. But I'm super excited to look up that nimbus brushing. It makes so much sense what you say versus if you're putting slimy stuff on slimy stuff. That's really. And if we think back to our, our ancestors, the cavemen, they didn't have toothbrushes and things like that they would eat like. In India they have the neem branches of the neem trees and that was a mechanical way to remove plaque.

Speaker 2:

There's also a study I came across I think it was. Alvin Dannenberg published it and they did it in, I want to say in Sweden. So they created an enclosure, like a prehistoric enclosure, and they did dental exams on a family. So how much plaque, how much bleeding on probing, how much inflammation, what were the pocket depths? They put them in this enclosure for three weeks, which is what used to be the timeline for experimental gingivitis. So if we wanted to study a dental product, we would say don't brush your teeth for three weeks, you use the product, we'll see what happens. So they did a three weeks. So, because that was very much in the literature, they chose three weeks.

Speaker 2:

They put them into this enclosure. They had no brushes, no floss, they could pick up twigs and then they were fed a prehistoric diet. So I think they had chickens and they had goats and whatever they could forage. So for three weeks they basically ate ancestrally. Three weeks of time they come back for the dental exams. They had higher levels of plaque and lower gingival inflammation. So the conclusion of the study was the gingivitis model of three weeks doesn't work without processed foods in the DNA. Huh, because there was no inflammation, so their dental disease had not gotten worse, in spite of them not brushing their teeth.

Speaker 1:

And that's a really key takeaway that I'm trying to teach all of my patients and the audiences here right that it's so much about the diet, so much about the quality of the diet, the amount of nutrition is so key. So you've given us some really awesome tips here and really super interesting stuff For the last few minutes. Tell us, is there anything else that you'd like to share with us? And maybe tell us, is there anything else that you'd like to share with us, and maybe tell us, if anybody has any questions or maybe they're in your area how they can reach out to you.

Speaker 2:

So I think if I was to maybe suggest what, is there one thing that you can do, I would maybe start off with the water thing. First, if you're drinking a lot of junk, just try to get hydrated, because I do see huge difference in my patient's oral conditions when they have proper hydration and it's just not water, but maybe a slice of lemon and a little bit of some pink salt, so not a lot, but just a tiny bit, and you just sip it throughout the day. You can't drink water Like when you do those formulations let's say, I need 50 ounces of water. I tell patients you cannot do it the American way, which means you don't guzzle it in one sitting and check the box. It doesn't work that way and people usually resist because they're afraid they're going to have to go to the bathroom when your body's running dehydrated. Your cells don't know what to do with water initially. So sip it slow and it's going to take a week or two, but you will not be going to the bathroom more. It just doesn't happen, because once your cells are functioning hydrated, the first thing you'll notice is your brain will work better, and so I think that's probably.

Speaker 2:

If there's one takeaway, I would say that I would say the second thing is really don't drink your food. You need to. Your dental, your teeth and your dentition and your musculature needs you to chew. So this smoothie thing for breakfast in the morning I'm not a huge fan of. I think real food is not a smoothie. I think you need to actually chew things and I think that I would really encourage everybody listening if you haven't done the whole glucose monitor thing, best money you'll ever invest because you need to know how the food you're eating is nourishing you and what it is doing to your blood sugar. And remember the reason it matters is your insulin is going to go up anytime. Your blood sugar goes up and the goal really is to keep everything humming along flat. If you eat a meal, you don't want it to go up more than 20 points or 40 points at the most right. You want it to not skyrocket, like I did with my snack, to 270. Anything. I think it was Dr Kate Shanahan who wrote that any blood sugar spike above 140 lays down cholesterol in your arteries, and in some of her work in deep nutrition she also wrote that any blood sugar spike over 89 causes endothelial leaking as well, and so I think that's why, when you get people on a carnivore diet or they're getting on a glucose monitor and you're keeping things flatter, you're actually supporting the integrity of your blood vessel lining and I think that is one thing then that you have a little built-in protection against the dysbiosis that's happening in your mouth and the other toxins and those types of things.

Speaker 2:

If people want to find me in my area, you can go to. I just got a partner, so my practice name has just changed, but I think our new website is Nygaard Puvi Periodontics or if you Google, laura Lee Nygaard, I think everything else is coming up, but we're in the phone book on Google so you can look us up. We practice in Spokane Valley and I would just encourage people listening to. If you've been discouraged about your dental health and you think it's just your genetics, that what you took away from your parents is their poor nutrition and their bad dietary habits, you do not have to be captive by your genetics. With epigenetics you are not subject. Your DNA actually has very little to do about your health status and you have a lot more control and power to choose to have dental wellness than what you realize.

Speaker 1:

So Lule was all in control, and that's one of the reasons why we do this podcast is just create awareness. I don't know how it is out and where you are, but trying to get in to see any kind of doctor, you're waiting six months a year. It's becoming problematic. So if we can all be our own and maybe then you won't get the best advice and maybe you'll be put on too many things so if we all can learn how to be our own best doctors, we're going to have a much healthier world, and I feel really passionate about trying to help everyone understand how things work so that we can all get at that root of it and prevent all this chronic disease that's really taxing our healthcare system in a big way.

Speaker 2:

I would say too. I don't know if we touched on this, but people often will ask me is there any supplements I can take? And I think what I really encourage patients is I like a vitamin D3K2 supplement because you want to boost immunity, because periodontal disease has that immune component to it. And then certainly there has been shown in some literature some benefits of omega-3s. But I think we've thrown omega-3s on everything and really if you just take omega-6 out of your diet and don't eat seed oils and process garbage those oils that our body cannot metabolize, I don't know where the literature would stand on the benefit of omega-3s. I think we're using those to combat the toxicity.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot of controversy on that and saying too much of that actually oxidizes and that becomes a problem. I did a podcast about that, yeah, and I think that's true.

Speaker 2:

So I usually just do vitamin D3K2. Usually that's the only supplement that I really recommend, and then probiotics to patients usually.

Speaker 1:

This has been a fabulous hour and I so appreciate your time on this afternoon and I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. It made me take some notes that I need to go work on my little course that I'm creating about reversing the dumpsy, so I thank you for educating me and again spending the time with all of us. I hope everyone enjoyed it. Please let us know if you have any questions, have any other thoughts for other topics, and we'll see you guys on the next episode. Have a great day everyone.

Speaker 1:

Hello, I'm Dr Rachel Carver, a board-certified naturopathic biologic dentist and a certified health coach. Did you know that over 80% of the US population has some form of gum disease? Many of us don't even know that we have this source of chronic infection and inflammation in our mouth that's been linked to serious consequences like heart disease, diabetes, stroke, dementia, colon cancer, kidney disease, even pregnancy complications. Would you like to learn how to reverse and prevent these chronic debilitating conditions without spending a lot of time and money at the dentist? Join me for my six-week course where I will teach you the root cause of disease. You'll learn how to be your own best doctor. Are you ready to get started? Let's go.