Functional Dentist: New Research Linking Bleeding Gums & Cancer! Your Oral Microbiome Can Kill You!

is there a link between our oral health and our fertility yes this is some of the newest research that's coming out and they found that over 90% of men who wasn't able to conceive with their Partners had a oral disease but those who got treated there was a 70% Improvement in pregnancy now researchers also found that if a woman has gum disease it takes them 2 months longer to conceive and I'm the only one who's talking about it and who are you I am the saliva Queen Dr Victoria Samson is the trailblazing dentist whose datadriven

research has uncovered the shocking link between our mouth and some of the world's most destructive conditions more than 90% of diseases can be traced back to our microbiomes and we Now understand that having an imbalance oral microbiome increases your risk of high blood pressure heart disease Alzheimer's rheumatoid arthritis and even men who have gum disease are 2.85 times more likely to have erectile dysfunction really yeah and then another study also showed there's oral bacteria that can make cancer more aggressive and harder to treat as well but what is it that causes all of this poor

oral hygiene sugar stress but also some of us genetically will have mutations which can cause disease but there's ways to fix it for example I had a patient who had terrible arthritis and terrible gum disease and when I treated the gum disease her rum arthritis got better to the point where she was actually able to walk again wow yeah so let's talk about what we can do about it is there any time where I shouldn't brush my teeth do I spit or rinse after I brushed my teeth what about regular toothpaste chewing gum coffee mouthwash

good or bad for me let's go through all of that so weirdly this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show so could I ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me

and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guest that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much Dr Victoria Samson what is the mission that you're on um my mission is to show people that the mouth is the gateway to the rest of the body and if they really want to achieve full body Health it starts with the mouth first I've never heard of the term oral microbiome really until I

met you and went through all of your work and your research and I think many people listening to this now also probably aren't familiar with that term or and also the importance of that term so if you had to make a case to someone like me who's really unfamiliar with this subject as to why it's so important from a very Topline perspective what would you say I think everyone knows that their gut has a microbiome and for the past 10 years we've always talked about how you can change your diet probiotics prebiotics for the gut

microbiome but what a lot of people don't understand is that the oral microbiome is the second largest and most diverse microbiome after the gut it's also a lot easier to change and actually it's been shown to have a massive impact on General Health so having an imbalanced oral microbiome increases your risk of oral diseases like gum disease and Decay but also can increase your risk of other systemic diseases like high blood pressure heart disease infertility Alzheimer's um and it's something that is so easy to manage and balance how many people does this impact and and

how many people is it relevant to so an understanding of my or oral microbiome is going to help me in a number of ways it relates to My overall health but how many people does it really really have an impact on I think it depends on what you're trying to get out of the oral microbiome testing um I would argue that it benefits everyone we all have teeth we all have mouths um and everything that we do every time we breathe we eat we drink we kiss uh we are impacting our oral microbiome every single

time and then every time we swallow or we breathe that bacteria that is putting into our mouth will travel elsewhere to the rest of the body cause problems elsewhere you said it's the second biggest microbiome in the body Y how many bacteria are in my oral microbiome so you have 700 approximately 700 different bacteria which make up two billion bacteria overall and what's also very weird about the or microbiome compared to any of the other microbiomes is that you've got lots of different environments or niches within the same mouth so if you think about the

bacteria that would like to live under the gums or at the back of your throat or on your teeth they're all very different environments some are hot cold you know wet and so you've got lots and lots of different parties of bacteria within the same microbiome in the mouth okay and you mentioned a second ago that things like kissing breathing swallowing have an impact on my oral microbiome yes in a significant way that I need to know about uh yes so it's more about how often you're doing those certain habits so you know for example

with kissing the research has shown that you need to kiss more than 11 times a day for you to be sharing the same bacteria or microbiome as your partner um but also even the habits that we have um the air quality that we have everything will dictate the environment that our mouths are living in and therefore what bacteria will live in our mouths and in the subject of oral diseases and things like tooth decay how many people are impacted globally by Oral diseases so the World Health Organization has come out um saying that 3.5 billion

people have some sort of oral disease they've also found that 10% of our world population are suffering from severe gum disease which makes gum disease one of the most prevalent inflammatory conditions um in the whole body this conversation around the oral microbiome have you seen it developing over over recent years have You' seen it become more sort of pertinent to people in society massively I think I've been doing this for for years it's been something that I've Loved um and no one really knew what I was talking about most of the time they all thought

I was a bit of a dreamer even dentists patients they all thought okay well doesn't really matter does it but in the last year or two I've had people traveling from all around the world just to get their oral microbiome tested to understand more about what's going on in their body and I think we're seeing a shift in the generations in terms of this new generation want to understand their health a lot more so we're all sitting there wearing you know trackables wearables we're you know calculating how much sleep we have how much we're eating

and for uh now we're actually also wanting to understand our oral health so that trust between a dentist and the patient is not necessary anymore we want to actually understand what's going on in our mouths and actually you know be able to track things see what bacteria we have how much inflammation we have our risk of diseases and what we can do to change that last question before I ask you a more sort of personal question about yourself um what other diseases in my body or sort of implications in my body are linked and can

be traced back to the oral microbiome We Now understand that more than 90% % of diseases can be traced back to an imbalanced microbiome uh if we Zone into just the oral microbiome it's got connections with infertility heart disease diabetes Alzheimer's rheumatoid arthritis um and the list goes on erectile dysfunction um and what's also very interesting going back to your question about you know is there been a new interest in this in the last few years we've actually been able to show that there is a strong connection and causation between the oral microbiome and general

diseases whereas prior to maybe 5 years ago there was a lot of kind of is this correlation is it just that okay there's the same risk factors with gum disease and with heart disease for example smoking and now we're actually seeing that no it's not just correlation there is strong causation between the two and who are you um I am Victoria Samson I'm a dentist um I do a lot on the oral microbiome um people call me the saliva Queen that's my name on the streets um and what's your sort of what professional experiences and

education have brought you here today and how long have you been doing that how many mouths and how much saliva have you seen give me a sort of a a big view on the the wealth of experience you have on this subject um so originally I trained as a dentist um and that's six years of training um I would say I was a pretty traditional conventional dentist as I graduated um I done some training um at The kolinska Institute during my University and the The kolinska Institute is the best dental school in the world um

but they're very focused on the mouth Body Connection on testing saliva um and what they thought was that you know you go to your doctor and you have a blood test why don't you go to your dentist and get a saliva test so from even dental school I had this in the back of my mind but I still didn't have the training and so I just became a dentist um I was working half NHS half private and then as time evolved I then um shifted to fully private um then when Co happened um I started

doing a lot of research and all the dental practices were closed across the country um and I thought that was crazy because basically the government was saying Dental practices uh or Dentistry is not a necessity so uh I thought that was insane and so I decided to do a lot of research and I wrote a paper which was connecting um oral health with poor with Co complications so what we found was that patients who had poor oral health or gum disease were at a much higher risk of Co complications um and then that evolved into

me doing some studies with universities and hospitals but the issue was that we couldn't go into um hospitals and check people's teeth and gums because they had Co so instead what we did was we would collect their saliva and we would take it to the lab and we had this beautiful snapshot of what was going on in a patient's mouth at that moment in time just from their saliva so we did a lot of research and we found that uh covid sufferers or patients who had gum disease were nine times more likely to have covid

complications but also what I took from that was that why aren't we using saliva you know more regularly why don't we use this in more commercial aspect and for our patients so after that I devoted a lot of time into developing oral microbiome testing we had gut microbiome testing you've got urinary microb you've got every single microbiome has a test but the oral microbiome didn't really have one so I built one of the first oral microbiome tests in Europe um and that was a couple of years ago and then now have come out and uh

kind of left and created my own one um about a couple of weeks ago that research you mentioned specifically the research paper which was titled could there be a link between oral hygiene and severity of covid infections was the first research paper to link gum disease with worse covid complications and I was reading that it was the most cited research paper by the one of the sort of Dentistry Publications yeah yeah so the British Dental Journal is one of the most cited and viewed articles um and what it also helped do was um the World

Health Organization and Sage picked that up and they said oh wait a second I think that oral health is really important for General Health and also we should reopen Dental practices so this also paved the way for dental practices reopening later on what's going on there can you explain that to me like a 10-year-old so if I have a bad or a unhealthy oral microbiome I'm nine times more likely to end up in ICU with Co complications what what's the link so there's a few so the first one is inflammation so covid we know um

it releases a lot of inflammatory markers so it's what we call the cyto storm so it's essentially the storm of lots and lots of inflammatory markers and gum disase disease separately um is essentially inflammation of the gums and so what gum disease does is it releases lots of inflammatory markers from the mouth elsewhere to the rest of the body so then when you add those together and you have your cytokine storm from covid and you've got your inflammatory markers from gum disease it's just adding petrol to the fire so you're just making that cyto Kine

storm even worse um but then on the separate side it's also bacteria so if you look at the um autopsies and the research of covid uh patients um most of didn't die from the virus itself no one really died from covid-19 they died from complications so the number one complication was actually a bacterial infection so imagine your body you've got covid you are really unwell and your immune system is on absolute overdrive this is the prime time for bacteria to come into your body and to cause what we call a bacterial super infection and so

actually when you look to the autops disas of a lot of these patients they had oral bacteria from their mouth traveling to their lungs and causing bacterial super infections which would result in things like pneumonia and that's actually the cause of death for most patients you don't really think that your oral microbiome can be fatal can kill you no and even I think as a dentist we weren't really taught how important bacteria was or how important the mouth was for the rest of the body uh the number the only one that we ever learned um

and a lot of people would know this one is that if you um have heart surgery you can actually have a hygiene for about 6 months after the heart surgery a dental hygiene yes and the reason for that is because you're at a very high res risk of something called infective endocarditis so this is oral bacteria which travels down to a faulty heart valve um and can actually cause death um so we know that but we never really look at it for other diseases or other problems I want to um I want to take a

step back before we go through the links between our oral microbiome and all of these diseases but also I really want to also talk about how what we can do about it because I've got so many questions around it I've got all of these products down below my chair from mouthwashes to toothpaste to all these kinds of things which I want to talk about as well but just taking a step back to something that one of my guests previously was telling me about I think it was James Nester he was telling me that the the

mouth itself and the jaw because of processed foods is an abnormal shape and when I say abnormal I mean um in relation to how it was supposed to develop because we're eating so many processed foods which aren't you know which are designed to be easy to chew the mouth itself and the jaw have changed is there any truth in that yeah 100% so there was a man called Western price um and he was a dentist and he basically suspected that and he was like this is strange why is it that um people who are in

more industrialized and westernized areas have higher levels of Decay and they have loads of crowding so they had basically lots of crowding of the teeth um and spoiler jaws and so he basically traveled around the world and he looked at lots of different um tribes Villages countries and he compared the teeth of uh for example twins one twin would be in a very industrialized westernized area and the other one was not and what he found was that in the twins who were in these non-industrialized areas they were eating harder Foods uh they were having less

sugar and actually their jaws developed a lot better so didn't have crowding they had perfect teeth actually and they had no Decay compared to the children or the the twins who were in more industrialized areas and it is because our food now has become so processed a lot of children are not having hard Foods um and so we don't develop the jaws and the muscles at an early age and so the teeth haven't changed size the teeth are exactly the same size as they were previously but what we're seeing is that those teeth um don't

have any space to grow anymore and that's when we're getting crowding and can you see that in any of those models so uh yeah in this model you can actually see at the very back so a lot of people will have wisdom teeth um and uh one of the biggest issues at the moment is that a lot of people have impacted wisdom teeth so this is basically imagine your teeth are all upright your wisdom tooth is coming out at a completely horizontal angle and it's pushing on the rest of the teeth it's an absolute nightmare

as a dentist to take out it's even more of a nightmare for a patient to have to endure but also we're seeing that there are a lot more impact acted wisdom teeth um in the last 30 40 years than there were previously uh because the diets have changed because the diets have changed a lot more children are needing orthodontic treatment now as well just because they have crowded teeth teeth are overlapping um and so they need braces to straighten those teeth out if you think about cavemen cavemen didn't have dentists they didn't have braces they

didn't even use toothpaste but they didn't die from gum disease or Decay or crowded teeth so it's been something in our industrialized or more kind of westernized diet that has changed that my wisdom tooth is coming through on my left side at the moment and I think I actually also on my right side at the same time and I'm 32 years old now so I'm like why the hell am I growing teeth at 32 years old I thought I was on my way out or something um so I got two questions just before we crack

on which is what the hell is a wisdom tooth why is it called a wisdom tooth and why is it coming through at 32 years old um so we have teeth erupting at different it's kind of times of our lives so usually you have your baby teeth they will erupt up to the age of about six or seven years old um and then you have your adult teeth coming through and usually they will stop erupting around 12 years old um and then you have nothing you're chilling you have nothing nothing nothing nothing until about maybe

18 19 years old and that's where you start to get your wisdom teeth the name behind wisdom teeth from what I understand is because it's it erupts when you're older it's when you have more wisdom and you're more wise wise now so you're just very wise makes sense and so some people will get it at 18 some people don't have any wisdom teeth some people will have wisdom teeth which erupt perfectly and are all completely fine and others will have their wisdom tooth erupt at 32 years old and maybe be a little bit impacted or

cause problems so they're also very strange teeth um they're very unpredictable the way that they are is there any evolutionary basis for why we need them there must be some kind of evolutionary reason for them not that I understand what is also happening is that um apparently and this is some research is that less people are having wisdom teeth because more children or or adults are getting their wisdom teeth taken out and as Evolution goes um eventually some people are actually not having wisdom teeth at all because their ancestors haven't had wisdom teeth so why

would they have wisdom teeth um but overall no there's no real need for wisdom teeth i' never like to take them out and less needed because I mean more teeth the better the better and you never know if you have to have something taken out then we can use your wisdom tooth for something if I were to look at my ancestors from 500 years ago you said they don't have dentists they don't have toothpaste and all those kinds of things but you also said they don't have tooth tooth decay yeah does that not therefore mean

that I shouldn't need a dentist and I shouldn't need toothpaste or mouthwash or floss if you had a caveman diet then potentially you might might not need toothpaste floss or even a toothbrush um and there's a lot of argument as to you know there's a lot of people out there saying no you don't need to use any toothpaste you don't need floss anything like that and fine go ahead do that but only if you are going to be eating you know meat a raw meat sometimes and you're only drinking water and you're not having anything

in your diet which has any sugar or carbohydrates in it I mean doesn't that speak to what the perfect diet is supposed to be can't we tell what the perfect diet is supposed to be by looking at the mouth yeah so uh another issue is that with a lot of the food that we eat now um they have a lot more sugar in them and that will impact the acidity of your saliva and essentially what decay is is uh you have sugar or you have some sort of carbohydrates and you've got this bacteria in your

mouth and they feed on that sugar and as they feed on that Sugar they release acid um and if that acid is left there then it can cause demineralization of your teeth and that demineralization will end up with Decay okay so let's talk about the personal oral microbiome um is my oral microbiome different from say Jack's over there and from my girlfriend's yes M massively different yes maybe massively I would say um so one of the issues that I used to have was I was doing lots of oral microbiome testing um and I would have

you know let's say you and your girlfriend doing oral microbiome test and both of you I would see your results and they would come out pretty much the same because we're only looking at certain bacteria we can't look all 700 so we would look at the top 20 bacteria that caused problems so I look at both of them and then I would look inside your mouth and one of you I don't know who in this case had raging gum disease and terrible terrible oral health and the other person would be completely fine so then I

realized that actually it's not just bacteria that causes disease or problems it's how your body respond responds to that bacteria and the strains of bacteria that you have as well so for every bacteria um there'll be multiple strains and some of those strains can be really aggressive and really horrible for your mouth and other strains are completely fine and are not going to cause you any problems so when I developed my test what we did is we looked at strains so we looked at the strains of certain bacteria um and we would be able to

differentiate between patients who had the really bad strains and the really good strains but then also we looked at the ratio of good and bad bacteria in someone's mouth so their diversity as well as their genetic mutations and also their inflammation so when you put all of it together and you it's like a puzzle piece then you can actually have a better insight into someone's oral health so I guess my answer is that everyone's oral microbiome is a little bit different but it's also how your body responds to that microbiome and bacteria that really dictates

whether or not you're going to have disease or problems so you could be someone who takes care of their teeth really really well but still have a bad oral microbiome relationship with the rest of your body effectively yeah and I see it every day and we have a lot of patients who suffer from terrible gum disease and they come to mean they brush three times a day they've never touched a cigarette they have Immaculate oral hygiene they eat very well but they have terrible gum disease and for those patients they might have genetic mutations that

predispose them to gum disease and to inflammation so even the smallest amount of bacteria their body responds in a very aggressive and inflammatory destructive way which can cause disease when I was speaking to I think it was Tim Spectre about the gut microbiome he was telling me that the gut microbiome turns over I.E the bacteria dies every couple of days or weeks or something how often does the oral microbiome guy turn over and why does that matter so what's interesting or different between the oral and gut microbiome the oral microbiome if someone doesn't go in

there and mechanically disrupt the bacteria and the plat in your mouth then that bacteria can stay forever so the gut what happens is you've got something called peristalsis you've got movement so the bacteria moves it it changes it regenerates there's turnover in the mouth so the teeth are the only non-shedding surfaces in the whole body so that non shedding surfaces so imagine if you if you never had a shower in your life uh you would still self-wash because the skin cells would shed MH but if you never brushed your teeth then your teeth are not

shedding they they're going to stay like that so that bacteria will just keep on growing and growing and growing and growing and you'll get this really thick plaque so that's why actually the oral microbiome you need to mechanically remove that bacteria and that's why brushing your teeth is super important or um using the correct toothpaste or Etc or going and seeing your hygienist because you need to mechanically remove that bacteria quite regularly okay and the the two ways I was reading in your work It said that the two ways that oral health impacts overall health

are by the spread of bacteria and the other sort of central issue is it causes inflammation so on this point of spreading bacteria I'm always concerned this is a bit of a superstitious thing but anytime that I'm sick I'm always like don't part of means like don't swallow because in my head I think if I'm sick in my mouth or if I've got um like a sore throat or something I'm like if I swallow it the rest of my body is going to get sick it's super super superstitious but is there any truth to any

of this um so not from just being sick like a common cold and it's actually really interesting I had a patient yesterday and bless him he's very young 7 years old um and he had exactly that same mindset he just randomly woke up one day and he said this is kind of gross why am I swallowing my saliva there's all these bad bugs and gross things in my saliva and I'm swallowing it every day and it's traveling to the rest of my body at 7 and so what he ended up doing was refusing to swallow

his own saliva and so he would basically just dribble and he would just wipe his the saliva off with a sleeve or he' carry a towel with him and just wipe it so bless he had big rash around his his um his face um and it it was a bit of a weird moment for me because I was like you're kind of right like I mean it is a bit weird especially as a child to sit there and think like yeah you've got 700 different bacteria two billion bacteria overall and then you're swallowing it and

it can travel elsewhere to the rest of the body so yes in in short yes bacteria from your mouth when you swallow it it can travel elsewhere to the rest of the body however a lot of the bacteria um dies so the acid in the stomach can kill a lot of the bacteria so it's only the really really bad bacteria that are able to survive and cause problems and that's why it's so important that you have a good oral microbiome and you balance it well and the other Central way that it can cause negative impacts

to your overall health is via inflammation what is the link between inflammation and my my oral microbiome so it's uh something that we call low grade chronic inflammation and imagine so you've got this delicate balance of bacteria in your mouth which is your microbiome and we all have bad bacteria in our mouths but most of us hopefully have better levels or higher levels of the good bacteria so there's always that balance and what happens in an imbalanced Ora microbiome is that shift changes so you get higher levels of bad bacteria and you don't have enough

good bacteria these bad bacteria firstly yes they can travel elsewhere to the rest of your body as you discussed the second is that they can release inflammatory markers so they basically release inflammation and this inflammation can travel from your mouth to the rest of your body and contribute to inflammation elsewhere so for example if you had rumoto arthritis and then you had inflammation from your gums that inflammation from your gums is making your arthritis in your wrists worse so it's contributing to it now what's also interesting and that's why it's called lowgrade chronic inflammation is

often you wouldn't even know that you have it I have so many patients who say oh you know my gums bleed but that's normal if your eye bludge or if your foot was bleeding every day you would be worried and You' think actually there's inflammation here there's a problem here but so many people have bleeding gums and they don't understand that bleeding gums is a sign it's your gum screaming to you saying that I have inflammation and that inflammation can travel and then the third mechanism as well so there's one more is um it's damaged

to your blood vessels so again the same bad bacteria in your mouth it releases these enzymes these toxic enzymes and they can travel through the rest of your body through your blood vessels and they can actually damage your blood vessels so these blood vessels are not able to dilate and constrict as well as they used to on that point of arthritis I read a stat which um I believe is true I think it actually came from some of your research that said people with rheumatoid arthritis are eight times more likely to develop gun disease than

patients without rheumatoid arthritis yes which is shocking yeah so there's a really strong um bidirectional relationship between rheumatoid arthritis and gum disease so that means that if you have really bad rheumatoid arthritis you'll have pretty bad gum disease and if you treat your rheumatoid arthritis your gum disease will get better and vice versa if you have if you treat the gum disease your rat arthritis will get better and that was actually one of the um first patients that really got me on my journey of the mouth Body Connection so like yeah was doing the saliva

testing I got it you know I was like okay cool we are quantifying oral health we're tracking things but even me I wasn't really fully sold on this whole mouth Body Connection how our mouth is connected to the rest of the body so I had a patient who was sent to me by um her functional medicine practitioner and she had been seen by uh four or five different practitioners she had terrible rumor arthritis and she um went to the spinal guy and he was the first guy to ever ask her have you ever had your

teeth checked what's happened and she said oh I've had a few teeth taken out in the last year or two about six teeth but you know it's just it is what it is and he was like I I don't think that's normal so he sent her to me and he was like can you do your saliva stuff that you do and see if there's anything up going on there and we did do saliva test we saw that she had super high levels of inflammation of collagen breakdown um high levels of bad bacteria and what was

the most important was that when I treated her gum disease she had terrible gum disease and that's why she was losing her teeth when I treated the gum disease properly and aggressively um yes her gums healed but more importantly her rat arthritis got better to the point where she was actually able to get off steroids and medication and be able to walk again wow yeah by treating her gum disease yeah and I think that you know sometimes as a dentist we treat a lot of gum disease and we treat a lot of things and we

don't necessarily see the systemic consequences because the patient doesn't come back or you know um or it's such a small impact that you don't necessarily see it but this was the one time where I was like wow like what we do is actually really really insightful and really important and you mentioned alongside that um inflammation also has an impact on cardiovascular functioning in health I believe it's the case that cardiovascular disease is the biggest killer in the world from what I understand um so I was wondering if if you knew any of the stats that

show the impact or the The increased likelihood of me having a heart attack or a stroke or something based on my oral microbiome so um the research has shown that if you have gum disease you are at a 20% higher chance of high blood pressure um but also they are now saying that up to 30 to 40% of cardiac um issues in hospital can be traced back to an oral bacteria um causing problems in in the heart valve um so the reason for this connection so yes inflammation but also going back to that third mechanism

I told you which was about the Vaso constriction so the blood vessels constricting and dilating so these toxic enzymes which are being released by the bacteria they travel through the blood um and they basically stop the blood vessels from being able to widen and lots of blood to travel to the heart and also to constrict and that also is um one of the biggest connections with heart disease I found this stat which might well be from your work or someone else's it's from the study called the association between parodontitis and blood pressure highlighted and systemic

systemically healthy individuals not mine but okay and it found that people with gun disease were twice as likely to have a heart attack and three times as likely to have a stroke than those without inflammatory gum disease which is absolutely staggering yeah and then another study also showed that when you treated someone's gum disease their s of CRP and CRP is an inflammatory marker that you can check in your blood the levels of CRP significantly reduced and for a lot of patients who suffer from heart conditions they will get their CRP quite regularly checked through

blood testing and so this is a way of reducing their inflammation is just by having a a simple hygiene and I've even seen um particularly in America there's a lot of um uh cardiac surgeons and um doctors related to to heart health um who are now actually working with dentists because they understand that if they work together then they're going to have far better results for their patients and this is this is that swallowing thing we're talking about this is because you're swallowing that bad bacteria yeah and your heart valve um imagine if it's been

it's faulty imagine you just had surgery I always think of it like it's sticky it's like Velcro so it's really prone to infection and problems it's just like if you fell over and you had a scab and you were rolling around in mud all the time you would get bacteria going into that scab and causing problems is the same thing with your heart Buffs doesn't the bacteria just travel on its own anyway cuz I feel like it's in my mouth so I feel like it I don't know these are living organisms don't they just like

find their way down even if I don't swallow yeah even through your blood um and also through your gums as well so you can swallow your bacteria breathe it or it can go through your blood at the start of this conversation we're talking you mentioned the sort of implications for your cardiovascular system and one of the things you said was erectile dysfunction and that was slightly alarming to me as a man yeah um who's trying to stay away from erectile dysfunction what is what is the research that supports this idea that my oral microb can

have an impact on my erectile functioning so men who have periodontal disease are 2.85 times more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction 2.8 times yeah is I'm pretty sure that's 280% isn't it yeah okay so what is this parodontal disease gum disease okay so uh it's kind of I would say it's a bit of a spectrum so the early stages of parodontal disease or gum disease is just gum inflammation so that's that patient who is brushing their teeth spits in the Basin and sees blood so that's the or you know the early inflammation if they

don't get that checked out and sortage that will just continue and continue and continue to what we call gum disease um and that's where yes you've got inflammation but actually you have really high levels of bad bacteria now and this bacteria is essentially eating away the gums and also your bone and uh it it's now become irreversible I'm just going to have a swig of this for your rectile dysfunction [ __ ] H and then at the very end of the spectrum is people who are losing their teeth having really terrible gum infections and all

of these kind of mouth body connections that we're talking about okay and that can you just explain as again as as if I'm 10 the how my how that gum disease that parodontitis is it called has an impact to my penis I don't understand like I don't understand the link it makes all of my blood vessels exactly yes so it essentially stops your blood vessels from dilating M and so you've got reduced blood flow to your penis okay and therefore doesn't work okay so this is an emergency this stuff this is really is important that's

the one statistic whenever I have a man in the chair and he's like oh I don't want to brush my teeth I'm like 2.85 times more likely to have a rectile dysfunction they usually will go straight to the bathroom to brush their teeth the other thing know but it's it's true but also the other thing that I I read in your research which I found really really um shocking is the link between my oral health my oral microbiome and cancer yeah I I was reading specifically about female breast cancer MH um which I know is

affects a lot of women and what is the link there between breast cancer cancer generally and our oral microbiome so this is um I would say some of the newest emerging research that's coming out so with breast cancer um I didn't know this before this research came out but your breast has uh its own microbiome so that tissue within the breast um different bacteria are able to grow and what they found was that in woman who had breast cancer they had high levels of certain oral bacteria in their breast microbiome so the oral bacteria is

called fusobacterium nucleatum and they compared the breast microbiomes of patients who didn't have breast cancer versus those who had breast cancer sorry what's an or what's a bre microbiome just the collection of bacteria on your breast okay yeah um I don't even know there was a microbiome in your breast either but apparently so and um so when they compared a healthy um woman uh her breasts to a woman who had breast cancer the woman who had breast cancer had very high levels of the specific oral bacteria called fusobacterium nucleatum in their breast um there's also

been research on coloral cancer um and actually Apple news came out with something something couple of months ago which was nice to see them kind of just spreading the word but what they found was that in patients who had coloral cancer um more than 50% of them had the the exact same oral bacteria from the breast cancer study that fuser bacterium nucleatum in the colons and what they found was that oral bacteria uh made the cancer more aggressive and harder to treat as well I was reading about a study in mice um that linked that

oral bacteria to tumor growth MH are you familiar with that study yes and it's that specific oral bacteria so the fusobacterium nucleatum which has been shown to accelerate tumor growth um within mice but also um for coloral cancer and breast cancer as well and what's your belief there I know this research is fairly new but do you think there is a a causal relationship a significant causal relationship between the health of our oral microbiome and our probability of developing some form of cancer I wouldn't yet say causal I think that for most cancers it is

multifactorial and there are a lot of things that can impact whether or not you get the cancer and how aggressive the cancer is um I do think that oral health and some specific oral bacteria um are risk factors and can definitely increase the um aggression of those cancers or even the initiation of them um there's also been research and I think I'm waiting for the research to be published on what they're doing is they've created a antibiotic which only kills that oral bacteria that I was talking about so fuser bacterium nucleatum and they are going

to be issuing that uh antibiotic to those patients who have the colar rectal cancer which has the oral bacteria to see whether or not it slows down their progression or improves their their prognosis so if I see those results and it shows it then there's for sure a strong cause link between the two but for now I would say that it's multifactorial and it's definitely a risk factor that oral bacteria that you describing that you called it fusobacterium yeah what is it that causes that is it something that I'm eating is it a lifestyle Choice

I'm making uh multiple things poor oral hygiene um some of us genetically will have higher levels of it um it's what we eat it's who we're kissing it's what we're breathing in does my girlfriend have it so we would have to see um but it's and that's the thing that's the beauty of being able to test these things now is that you can actually see and also what's it's strange is that green tea um you know something so simple is extremely effective at killing Fuso bacterium Nuclear So it's just knowing those types of things being

able to do the test knowing the right treatment plans and recommendations based from that we know green tea is good for us and now we can really understand why okay that's interesting you have actually tested Jack over there right and you said to me before we started recording that he's got a ton of that fuzo bacterium uh yes he does yeah it's really getting out of control that's what he said it's really badly out of control so I've um I've given him a big Vass of green tea as a gift green tea yes green tea

this guy's going to edit that out this is the problem green tea yeah that's good for my own micro biome yeah really good stains but really good um it's anti-inflammatory um it helps with what we call oxidative stress so this is um basically stress for the body um and it's antibacterial so it actually is very effective at killing Fuso bacterium nucleatum what is your opinion of the impact that coffee has on my oral microbiome I'm slightly biased because I love coffee okay um but there is no negative impact of coffee on the oral microbiome directly

um coffee does dry your mouth out um and so you have reduced saliva and that can actually cause problems for the oral microbiome so the saliva is super important in your mouth it provides all of the food the proteins everything for the bacteria in your mouth so it's kind of like this delivery service your delivery Roots traveling around providing all the food and bacteria um sorry food to the bacteria and that's what keeps the good bacteria alive and happy so when you have a dry mouth let's say you're drinking lots of coffee or you're very

nervous or you are on anti-depressants for example um which are a big one then you just don't have as much saliva so you those bacteria don't have as much food and those bacteria die and then you get bad bacteria growing in replacement what about tea We're a nation of tea drinkers in the UK um similar so it also does dry your mouth not as bad as coffee but otherwise no problems other than staining what about if I put loads of sugar in it cuz a lot of people put a lot of sugar okay yeah no

no never no no so actually sugar in your tea is even worse than you having a biscuit for example um so because the sugar dissolves in your hot tea and the tea is hot when you drink it um it can actually cause more problems uh another thing with sugar is um I have a sweet tooth I love sugar but it's about how you eat your sugar so let's say if you have your hot tea with five lumps of sugar in there and you're sipping it over an hour or two that's where you start to see

a lot of problems so actually you need to be having a sugar attack so just all the sugar in one go and that way your mouth has all the sugar in one go and it's able to neutralize the saliva and get back to a good State as quickly as possible every time you sip your your tea with sugar what happens is that the saliva has to go from acidic back to neutral acidic back to neutral acidic and then it starts to just not work properly and the saliva just stays acidic and that's where you start

to see Decay so you want to just down the te down the the tea or I don't know if you're a &m guy have all your M&M's in one go don't snack on M&M's every 10 minutes what about other drinks like I don't know you know coca-colas and these other sort of fizzy drinks that might have artificial Sweetness in things like that so they're not as bad as your natural sugars um but for example something like your Coke or or fanto or whatever it's also um very acidic um and it can actually cause erosion as

well so this is essentially where the layer of your tooth so the enamel is just worn away from having lots and lots of these fizzy drinks okay so that it's not going to cause decay in the same way but it might change the acidic balance which then decays my tooth which makes me more susceptible to when I eat sugara having a problem got you so going back to what we were talking about the the implications of an oral microbiome in the rest of my body brain health is one thing that I was really curious about

um we've had lots of conversations on this show about Alzheimer's and Dementia and just general sort of optimal cognitive perform as I age something I'm thinking a lot about I want to have a sharp brain it's quite important because of what I do um so is there a link between my oral microbiome and my cognitive and brain health yes um so if we look at actually just the the occurrence of Alzheimer's um and gum disease or or oral health a lot of research has shown that um if you have gum disease for more than 10

years you have a 70% increased chance of developing Alzheimer's so that was a study that was done on over 20,000 people and they followed them for 20 years and they saw okay if you had gum disease um at Baseline whether or not you get Alzheimer's at 10 years or 20 years so a 70% increase chance of it um they've also done a lot of research where uh they've been looking at Oral bacteria and what they found was that there are certain oral bacteria so uh one called penales and that's one of the worst oral bacteria

I would say out of all of them so this pen jaalis is able to travel from your mouth to your brain it's only it's quite close by anyway and what's unique about this bacteria is it's able to cross the barrier between in your brain so the blood brain barrier um and it releases these toxic enzymes so these enzymes are called gingi paints and they're imagine these like horrible firefighter things and they can break down neurons they can break down um a lot of brain tissue and so when they looked at the cerebros spinal fluid and

the Brain fluid or tissue of Alzheimer's sufferers they found that 97% of them had these toxic enzymes these Ginger pains in their brains compared to zero for the patients who did not have Alzheimer's so this is you know the first study shows yes there's some sort of correlation but there's a lot of other risk factors the second one which is looking at your Ginger pains is showing that there's definitely a strong causitive Factor um between the two and then another study which was very interesting was um looking at cognitive cognitive decline so okay fine you

have Alzheimer's unfortunately um is it is it too late should you stop brushing your teeth or what's the point and so what they did was they had uh patients um who had Alzheimer's and they checked their cognitive function and they also checked their oral health and then uh 6 months later they reviewed them and they found that the patients who had gum disease had a much more rapid cognitive decline than those patients who didn't have gum disease so again is still important if you do get Alzheimer's that you maintain your oral health that you have

someone help you brush your teeth because your cognitive decline um will be faster how do they unpick that from other causal factors that might be going on like bad food choices because in my head I was thinking well if someone's drinking sugary fizzy drinks every day they're more likely to have gum disease but maybe also that the chemicals within that phys are impacting their chances of dementia maybe they're also someone that has an unhealthy lifestyle maybe they're more sedentary if they're eating bad things maybe they're more sedentary and maybe it's that that's causing the rapid

cognitive decline versus the gum disease itself is it possible to untangle all of this I mean is very difficult I think that for those types of things you either you're right diet lifestyle is super important and we know that Alzheimer's is again multifactorial um I think it's really about the quantity of patients that they check so they need need to be looking at a huge number of patients and they did um to check whether or not there is a strong correlation between them um also going back to the ginger pain study so the one about

the bacteria that shows it doesn't it's not diet or lifestyle or or nutrition it is a specific oral bacteria that has traveled to the brain and released these enzymes which are then breaking down neurons so there there's definitely a strong causitive um effect that is um fascinating it's really really fascinating because dementia and Alzheimer still seem to be a bit of a mystery it is and and I work um with uh a team for Alzheimer's and what they've done similar to what you were saying is that they've kind of separated all of the the causes

of Alzheimer's that we know um or the risk factors and thankfully they've put oral health as one of them as well and I think from all of the other risk factors so uh you know for example if you have uh the genetic mutations got the apo4 or any of those mutations that's you can't change that unfortunately some of us have mutations which means that we are at a much higher risk of suff of getting Alzheimer's in the future but something like that oral bacteria p gingivalis and those Ginger paines you can get rid of P

jingus really easily again if you tested it you can even test for gingi pains um and then you can get rid of the bacteria before it starts causing problems the test that you offered does it test for Gingy pains it does yeah so we're the only ones um on the market who do because that was something that I thought was super important what's the point in US telling you that you have a bacteria if we can't tell you that that bacteria is being really bad in your mouth and causing a lot of problems and people

think I'm joking but you have actually tested several members of my team including myself so I am actually going to find out the results today um on the subject matter of the brain is there a link between my mental health depression anxiety and my oral microbiome so again there's been a lot of research um I think it's difficult for something like mental health and um and gum disease which you know with the Chicken and the Egg which one came first um because one of the issues is if you have a decline in your mental health

you are less likely to take care of your oral health um and therefore that can exacerbate issues so there has been a lot of research to show that you know uh there's a correlation between poor mental health and poor oral health but in my person opinion that causitive connection is not there yet um there's also been some research with things like schizophrenia but again it's the jury still l in my opinion are you able to tell the state of someone's mental health by looking at their oral microbiome in your view um you can know if

something's up like for example I I had a patient relatively recently I've been treating her for five six years now and I know that she takes good care of her her teeth she's she takes good care of herself and a few weeks ago she came in and she was not taking care of her gums or her teeth at all everything was an absolute mess in there and um so I did pull her aside and I was like what's wrong like something's happened here and I think it is quite a big um sign for a lot

of people it's the first thing that they kind of let go of is their oral health and is that because of you know they start certain self- soothing behaviors because they're stressed in other parts of their Liv so if they're having a bad time in their relationship ship or work and they're stressed they might start eating sugar more or or just not brushing smoking or drinking more okay or just not brushing like with this woman she just wasn't brushing her teeth anymore another thing that we can also see I mean it's kind of a bit

on a tangent but also um Eating Disorders as well so things like bmia um or even sometimes anorexia you can see in the mouth so there's a lot of times where we'll see young teenagers um and I'll know that they are Bic because they have certain issues in their mouth which they shouldn't have and that again is a Telltale sign is that because the stomach acid is coming through their mouth yeah so they get a lot of erosion on the on their teeth and then in some cases you can also get these marks on the

roof of your mouth so if they're trying to force themselves to to vomit then you can see that um and that's something that you know you have to pull the patient aside or tell their mother and explain that to them as well and is there a relationship between stress and my oral health so if I'm more stressed and my cortisol levels are higher is that going to make everything in my mouth worse yes even outside of the lifestyle CH choices I might make in such a state yes just that stress will increase your inflammatory markers

your inflammation um it also will dry your mouth out and all of those things will be linked um uh we do a lot of testing at my clinic and so one of the tests that we look at is collagen breakdown so um we have lots of different types of collagen all over our bodies and our gums are made up of a certain collagen so we look at an enzyme called a M mp8 and this enzyme is responsible for breaking down that specific collagen um so we test the coll that enzyme all the time with our

patients it's a really nice way of knowing like um whether or not someone's about to have gum disease um how much collagen breakdown is happening from a biomolecular level so I had a woman very healthy always been fine um and then she had her collagen breakdown tested and her levels were through the roof her gums looked fine she didn't look like she had any problems but I've never seen such a high level in my life and so you know I'm trying to think of what could be causing it all of that and she had lost

her baby couple of days before and that type of intense stress on someone's body can have so many effects and impacts on the rest of your body um and that was one of them when we retested her 6 months later she was back to normal again but you can see even your mouth you know stress can really impact you on this subject I was thinking about I mentioned Jam James Nester earlier who was telling me about the research of um how the the mouth has changed shape because of the foods we're eating and how that

that's caused a bunch of Downstream implications for us one of the also one of the other things he also mentioned was about mouth breathing and nose breathing yes and there's a lot of people that have become incredibly interested in whether we should be breathing through our mouths or our nose and I was wondering if you had a perspective on that um and also the other thing that he mentioned to me was that there's a link between mouth breathing and things like ADHD what is your point of view I completely agree with all of that so

actually my sister she is an orthodontist um so she works at our clinic and um we run it together with our mother and um she is very very hot on um mouth breathing and what she um mainly does is she basically tries to stop children in particular from breathing with their mouths open and what she has found is that most of her patients um who come to her um are mouth breathers they often have some sort of um ADHD they have or some sort of attention deficit um they are uh bed wetters they grind their

teeth a lot of the time um and they have a whole Cascade of other problems and uh she can treat it then and it's relatively easy She would argue that it's very difficult but to me I think it's easy I'm like yeah there we go you can do what you do um and because the the jaws of a child are very very malleable so they haven't fully solidified so you can still move things you can um get the teeth to meet so if you get the teeth to meet correctly then uh the child won't want

to breathe with their mouth open the annoying thing is is that uh a lot of adults are mouth breathers because their teeth do not meet correctly or their jaws are in the incorrect position and uh at that point it is quite difficult to move the Jaws into the correct position or to get the teeth to close in a way so that the lips are at rest and you breathe with your nose instead of your mouth but again I see those types of patients because they all come to me with a lot of other problems so

again same thing a lot of them have uh a lot of them have suffered from long covid a lot of them have inflammatory conditions um are always tired they a lot of them chronic fatigue it you know there's a lot of connections now uh between mouth breathing and those types of issues as well is there a link between the health of my oral microbiome and whether I breathe through my nose or mouth cuz James was explaining to me that the nose is effectively like a a filter system yeah there's a certain temperature in there yeah

um there's like sinuses and stuff which are have some kind of mucus which helps to catch bacteria so if I'm breathing through my mouth am I more likely to have uh unhealthy oral microbiome 100% so exactly the same thing you're you're you've got a filter in your nose and so it will stop a lot of bad things from coming through but the mouth uh there is no filter I mean you breathe it in it goes straight into your lungs so there's no way of stopping anything a lot of people now are starting to mouth tape

um and that's become kind of trendy and cool um it's not the easiest thing to do if it seems a bit weird to tape your mouth at nighttime um but for anyone who's worried that they breathe with their mouth open mouth taping in my opinion is a really nice way of just like testing it out and seeing whether or not you do breathe with your mouth open because you'll do some mouth taping and you can see whether or not you sleep better so if you have a wearable you can see oh wow my oxygen levels

are so much better I had such a deep sleep and if that's the case you might be more inclined to straighten your teeth or sort out the reason that you're breathing with your mouth open I I took notes of a study which kind of is interconnected to the point we were making about mouth Brea breathing which said in a six-year study of 11,000 children it was found that children who suffered from sleep disorder breathing were 50 to 90% more likely to develop ADHD like symptoms than were normal breathers who breathe through their nose correctly which

is absolutely staggering 50 to 90% more likely to suffer from ADHD like symptoms just because they breathe through their mouth at night have disordered breathing and it's it's mainly to do with also oxygen being delivered to your brain right so there's not as much good oxygen um like real rich oxygen filtered oxygen traveling to the brain and so that's basically not allowing your brain to function as well you mention kissing earlier on yes um I'm still supposed to kiss my partner right yes I hope you do many times you you said if I kiss her

more than 11 times a day or something then are oral microbiomes synchronized in some way yeah so there is um passage of bacteria from you to her and her to you um they have also shown that uh for example they did a study where one uh partner chewed lots and lots of probiotic so like good bacteria and then had a super long smooch with their partner and actually was able to transfer nearly 60 or 70% of that good bacteria into their partner so it's not necessarily long lasting I wouldn't say that um you know if

you kiss someone once on a night out that you are going to terribly impact your microbiome it's fine you can go and kiss but it's more for long-term Partners if you're kissing regularly and for a long time then yes your microbiomes will start to um be quite similar um another Factor as well is that obviously your lifestyles are probably pretty similar you're probably using the same toothpaste eating the same food so it's difficult to fully put it on just kissing but yeah what about oral sex and the implications that will have so if we're if

me and my partner are doing oral sex on each other is that going to impact our oral microbiome yes so actually there's been a few case reports which have shown um uh there's one in particular and I had a patient as well who had this a woman who um had a new partner and she liked to perform oral sex on him and then she came to me because she was complaining of very inflamed gums and she was getting gingivitis and you know it's not something I really ask like I'm not going to be like how's

your how's your sex life going these days like so I didn't ask it but she kept on coming back to me no my gums are still in flame no my gums are still inflamed and then she asked she was like is it maybe because I have a new partner I was like okay maybe you guys are kissing a lot and she was like no no no no and and then she explained to me um and then I was like okay fine why don't you go and test and uh ask him whether or not he has

any issues and um and it turns out that he was having recurrent urinary infections and so actually they were transferring bacteria and she was having inflammation in her gums because she was yeah performing her oral sex so yeah there is transfer again I wouldn't be scared and Say Never Do It um I once made an ex-boyfriend do an oral microbiome test uh just to check and just to make sure everything was okay you made him do it yeah I don't it's not a it's not a um prerequisite anymore but it was at the time I

was like H let me see let me of course it is you must you must think that when you meet people you must think God I wonder what their all microbiome is saying like in a romantic context because you know the significance of it yeah I think it's a you know I spend a lot of time and energy making sure my oral microbiome is very nice and balanced so I wouldn't want anyone messing that up for me so it's important are you in a relationship now yes I am have you tested their all micob I've

been trying to but he won't let me you've asked him of course I have and what did he say but I did give him an oral microbiome test so hopefully he'll just use it I said you can even use a fake name I don't care I don't I'm not going to test I'm not going to check it I just want you to do the test for me for for you for me yeah and what's his what's his rebuttal he's like I don't he was like what happens if you break up with me if I have

a really imbalanced oral microbiome and I was like I hope that our relationship is stronger than just your oral microbiome but there's ways to fix it and that's the beauty of the AA microbiome is that it's actually pretty easy to to fix and to change if his results came back and he had a terrible oral microbiome one of the worst you've ever seen yeah are you less likely to kiss him that day that day yet where you going don't do the test my friend no no no don't do the test that day yes there's no

upside to him doing this test I completely understand and then I would go and creep into his bathroom and change all of his oral products personalize everything for him and then you've done that already I already have it he tests everything out for me as because I get a lot of products sent to me so I'm always getting him to to try things out for me as well okay so no [ __ ] if they've got um issues down there yeah okay and we don't really know if they've got issues down there unless they admit

it or do some kind of test yeah yeah okay what about fertility is there a link between our oral health and our fertility yes um so if we look at men to start with um there was a study done and they found so they looked at a group of subel men so Men Who um weren't able to conceive with their partners and they checked all of their mouths and they found that over 90% of these men had some sort of oral infection or dental disease of some sort going on they split the group into two

half the group had the uh treatment that was needed so I don't know if they had a gum disease or a Decay they they got it fixed and the other half were left to their own devices um after eight months there was a 70% Improvement um in their success for pregnancy the men who'd had their oral infection sorted um and they had a much better Improvement in their sperm quality and motility as well and what did they do to those men in that group where they saw the significant Improvement so for example if the man

had um gum disease they would treat it with a hygiene or if they had an infected tooth maybe they would take it out or do a root canal or Etc they would just have to treat that infection so I speak a lot about gum disease all the time but actually there's so many other oral diseases like Decay um or tooth a or all those types of things that can also contribute inflammation and problems in that study 6 months after that their sperm had improved by 20% and after 8 months 50% of their wives were pregnant

yes that is staggering yeah what about women though is is there a similar sort of result as it relates to women's fertility yes so um researchers also found that if a woman has gum disease um she is less likely to ovulate um and also she's going to have uh issues with conception so they found that woman with gum disease it takes them two months longer to conceive versus a woman who doesn't have gum disease um but once the woman has conceived um the issue is still not over she still has to maintain her gums so

firstly a lot of women will have um pregnancy gingivitis so this is basically super inflamed puffy gums because of all the hormones um and so they should be goinging very regularly to see their hygienist um but also what the research has found is that women who are pregnant and have gum disease are at a much higher risk of pre-term birth so premature uh babies low birth weight um and also preclampsia as well so they did a study in Malawi um it was on 10,000 women so Malawi has the highest rate of pre-term birth in the

world at just about I think just under 20% um and pre-term birth is a a big issue for for government for hospitals it's really expensive you need to keep the woman and the child in the hospital for a lot longer but also that child will have a whole Myriad of problems afterwards as well so weirdly Wrigley um the sugar the chewing gum company sponsored this uh study they went to Malawi they had these 10,000 women they split them up into two 5,000 of those women uh were given sugar-free chewing gum tooth brush and some toothpaste

and the other half were left alone and they found that there was a 20% Improv Improvement um or 20% sorry reduction in pre-term birth in the woman who'd haded the sugar-free chewing gum compared to the woman who hadn't had it so something so cheap and so easy like chewing gum was able to actually reduce the risk of pre-term birth for these women how and why so if you look into the research a little bit more um you're going to get your chewing gum now yes um so sugar-free chewing gum um has been shown to um

stimulate your saliva so it helps with what we were talking about earlier saliva is super important um it provides all the good food for uh your bacteria um but then also if it's sugar-free um let's say it's using xylol that's naturally antibacterial so it's killing a lot of the bacteria in the mouth and what they found is that there are certain oral bacteria that can travel down to the placenta um and can also uh cause problems there and essentially um increase the chance of pre-term breath you sufficiently convinced me that diver is an important thing

and I actually did one of your tests let me go grab the results okay every single time you eat you have an opportunity to improve your health that's why I love Zoe because it helps me to make the smartest food choices for my body as you guys probably know Zoe is a sponsor of my podcast I'm also an investor in the company which is important to say I invested in the company because Zoe combines My Health Data with their worldclass science using these two things Zoe guides me to Better Health every single time I make

a food choice and eat which means I have more energy better sleep better mood and I'm less hungry and the best part about Zoe is that it's backed by their recent clinical trial something called the method study which is the gold standard of scientific research I started Zoe just over a year ago now and I've been able to track my progress week after week so I can learn how to be even smarter the week after and if you haven't joined Zoe yet I'm going to give you 10% off when you join Zoe today just use

the code steven1 at checkout so many of you have asked me for bloody code for Zoe and here is your opportunity Steven turn it check out there may not be another one and here are the results okay I've not actually seen them yet so this is exciting um I'll give them to you so you can explain them to me okay it's I don't care so this is the test that I did right yes you did yeah and the test I did contains this little kit that basically in the middle of yes office one day someone

came up to me and said Steve can you spit in this and I said sure yep and then they took my spit away yes um and it turns out it was upon on request from you yes exactly I wanted your saliva yeah which is just to check to make sure if I could do this interview so this is the test that I did I spat in this little thing sent it off back to you you ran the test how long does it take to do this test uh it would probably take you about 2 minutes

to do spe yourself and then you get the results three to four weeks later what did you find out from doing my test well okay let's go through your results so um we found that you have quite a diverse microbiome so that means that you have a nice ratio of good bacteria versus bad bacteria and this has been compared to healthy and disease subject so you are really right on the top of the bell curve so very good with that so happy um then we predict your diverse is better uh arguably yes yeah okay um

then what we have is we've created this algorithm that predicts your risk of certain um issues or diseases in the mouth so those are things like bad breath gum disease um Decay and general inflammation so your risk of bad breath was low you didn't have a a high risk for that gum disease was medium so slight maybe there's a bit of inflammation going on there your risk for uh Decay was also medium and your risk for General inflammation so this is inflammation throughout the rest of your body um was quite low um and then if

we zoom in we then look at your good bacteria so we're also quite unique because we thought that it was unfair that a lot of tests don't look at the good stuff so we look at all of the bacteria which has been shown to be the most beneficial in a microbiome so for you you had pretty much High to very high levels of uh good bacteria which is great no problems with that and then we look at bad bacteria so we actually uh look at about 500 different bacteria but then we zoom into the top

20 bad ones which are really associated with things like gum disease Decay bad breath so for you out of all the bacteria that we looked at you only had quite high levels of one bacteria which was bad for you um and so this bacteria is very strongly associated with basically a lot of buildup of um plat in your mouth so having not looked in your mouth I no idea about your dental health or anything like that I would assume that basically um you're a bit overdue on a hygiene maybe maybe there's a lot of plaque

buildup going on um from that result but the rest of the bad bacteria so all of these ones we're talking about the erectile dysfunction one erectile dysfunction one's fine um your pen jaalis is fine you know F nucleum those ones were actually uh very good um then also on top of that going back to the Alzheimer so we look at those veillance factors associated with p and vus and you had none of those virulence factors which is also really good okay then we look at your genetic mutations so uh We've identified about 10 different genetic

mutations which increase your risk of Decay and gum disease so uh for the Decay out of the five genetic mutations we looked at four out of five of them you had so that means that you and maybe you you have stopped it but you are at a higher chance of having a sweet tooth of having more acidic saliva on top of that it might be that you if you're stressed out or you're really unhappy some people will run to the casino others will run to the bottle and for you you might actually be someone who

goes and has a chocolate bar and actually enjoys sugar no comment um on top of that if your business let's say you've had your sugar because you are stressed out or whatever you also have been shown to have a genetic mutation which means that your taste perception is lower so you need two bars of chocolate not no comment to make you feel that's the end of this podcast that's the end of this episode I'll the file close your document how dare you no I mean it it all squares with reality so please do keep going

um so that's your Decay um situation in terms of gum disease again we look at um certain mutations so there are some mutations that can triple your risk of gum disease um they can increase the amount of inflammation that you release from your mouth so imagine um you there are some people who even the smallest amounts of bacteria they might have great hygiene they have a few small bad bacteria in their mouth they have mutations which means that they respond in a very hyperinflammatory and very aggressive way and they will be at a very high

chance of gum disease so in your case um you had one mutation and I would say out of all of the mutations for gum disease it was the best one so it basically means that you have um genetically you're more predisposed to bacteria collecting around your gumps okay so you might be someone who actually needs to go really regularly for a hygiene and it's kind of a bit annoying because you keep on getting built up or they keep telling you to come back because actually genetically you have that in your saliva MH um then afterwards

we give you personalized recommendations so we tell you based on um everything that we've seen the bacteria your mutations what your input from the questionnaire we tell you what toothbrush would be good for you what supplements you should be taking what uh toothpaste floss um everything basically even chew sugarfree gum all of those types of things to um improve your oral health and rebalance your microbiome and you could tell all of that just from me spitting in a tube once yes and then at the very end we have a list of all of the detected

organisms so like I said we look at the top 20 which we know are really bad for you but actually sometimes in some patients we'll have like weird bacteria really high levels of weird bacteria so I had one patient she had really bad breath and her gums were kind of okay her teeth were okay there were no problems but she was I don't know what's going on so she did the saliva test and she had 40% of her oral microbiome was made out of one bacteria so uh I was searching this bacteria I I've never

heard of this bacteria before it is extremely prevalent in dogs so then I got back to her I'm like do you have any dogs and she was like yeah yeah I have four four or five dogs at home and I was like do you kiss your dogs she was like yeah of course I do like they're my they're my babies so she was kissing her dogs and she was getting transfer of bacteria from her dogs into her mouth and that was what was making up her whole microbiome and that was giving her bad breath yeah

yeah so what I did was I gave her um a a treatment or recommendation and no I gave all of her dogs I said you need to take this specific um it's not medication it's like a supplement so it basically stops uh like buildup of plaque in dogs teeth so I was like your dogs have gum disease basically so they need to be treated if you want to get better and after everyone got treated her bad breath went and so did her dogs as well uh so our dog owner is more likely to have bad

breath if you are smooching your dog then yeah kind of and your dog has gum disease if you're kissing your dog yeah okay interesting so what are the very having seen my results but generally from seeing the thousands and thousands of results that you've seen yeah what are some of the the easiest things that I could do to help correct that situation and have perfect oral health and a perfect oral microbiome so um what we've done is if you were to do the test you would have all of the personalized recommendations for you so we

tell you to have green tea to have honey all of those types of things which have been shown um through research to benefit your microbiome in your case specifically but if we were just talking about someone who hasn't done the microbiome test and wants to just make sure that they have um as balanced of a microbiome as possible um diet is obviously very important so what we're talking about that Sugar attack making sure that you only have one sugar attack a day um you're not having sugar consistently because it does alter your saliva um pH

uh the type of toothpaste that you're using I like to keep it simple you don't need to we don't need to make things super complicated you don't have to spend that much money having the right toothpaste right toothbrush and the right floss is honestly as much as is the most necessar thing that need okay so in terms of brushing though you give some sort of practical advice around when we should brush MH what is that and is there any time where I shouldn't brush my teeth uh you should never brush straight after anything acidic or

sugary so what you end up doing is is grinding the sugar or the acid into your teeth so actually you should wait 30 minutes until you brush your teeth that's interesting because when I eat something sugary I feel like I need to brush my teeth to get rid of it yeah no no so you want to wait 30 minutes so instead you can chew some sugar-free gum or um there are lots of pastels that we use so like I use like chewable mints um and you can chew one of those and it will actually neutralize

your saliva really quickly so that you don't have that assage causing the demineralization okay so it's because of the sort of change in acidity in my mouth that's going to impact my teeth um I've got loads of products here that I got from a pharmacy and from boots and from other places in the UK um I wanted your advice on what kind of products I should be using to promote good oral health [Music] um so this is mouthwash yes good or bad for me um I would say overall bad if you have no problems you

shouldn't be needing to use mouthwash mouthwash actually will kill everything in your mouth and sometimes that can imbalance your microbiome even more so I would only be using mouthwash either as like a I call it like a cologne so I don't know you just had a lot of garlic and you're about to go on a date fine have some mouthwash that's okay but it shouldn't be a regular occurrence or it should be prescribed by your dentist or through an oral microbiome test so we see what bacteria you have high levels of and we tell you

exactly what mouthwash to use based on that to kill only those bacteria what is it about the mouthwash that's not good for me so um some mouthwashes have alcohol in them so there are absolutely no no never touch those types of uh mouthwashes for the others a lot of them are very broad spectrum so that means that they just kind of kill everything they kill the good and they kill the bad and what happens with that is it can imbalance your or microbiome if you have actually great gums great teeth no bad breath then you're

just imbalancing things for yourself because you're constantly attacking it with something antibacterial you mentioned alcohol there yeah in wine you have both sugar and alcohol yes so is that extra bad for your oral microbiome uh yes out of all of the alcohols if you are dying for a drink you should have Straight Tequila that's the best one Straight Tequila wi um doesn't have any sugar and it's the most pure so wine yes the sugar and the alcohol together are much worse and for the mouth the reason we don't like alcohol in mouthwash is it can

actually disturb the the lining of your mouth the inner lining um and it's been shown that having a lot of alcohol or constantly you know impacting your mouth like that increases your chance of oral cancer as well okay so if I'm drinking regularly as well if I'm drinking alcohol regularly similar I would say with the mouthwash because you sit there and you gargle for a minute two minutes it's even worse but we do know of course that alcohol has a a strong association with with oral cancer and with other cancers as well so yeah ideally

avoid if you can what about regular toothpaste good or bad for me um I would say good you should definitely be using uh toothpaste I would say a takeaway would be um try and get a toothpaste which doesn't have sodium Laurel sulfate in it so SLS that's a foaming agent um and we have it a lot in conditioners in soaps um it's unnecessary and it can actually strip the um inner lining of your mouth and cause a lot of problem so avoid that this one is one I got off the shelf it's a very popular

brand and it does have the sodium Laurel sulfate on the ingredients list yeah so that's a bad one yes cuz that's going to strip the inner lining of my mouth Yes and a lot of people are actually strangely allergic to it so I'm allergic so what happens is when I brush my teeth and anyone can become allergic by the way when I brush my teeth with that type of toothpaste the next day my tongue feels so raw my gums are really sore it's because it's it's stripping the the lining of my gums and and my

mouth okay so bad bad um chewing gum yep sugar-free good for me bad for me good if it's sugar-free love it like xylol sort of chewing gum fantastic particularly after a meal increases your saliva now I believe you brought this collection of stuff I did and what is this collection of stuff I'm actually going to slide it over to you so you can explain to me what it is okay um right so this is not for everyone but these are kind of things that I do really like so we were talking about having a sugar

attack so for you with all your genetic mutations you should you should have one of these so don't make it personal come on so um this is really good for someone if you have sugar you pop one of these mints in it's got green tea it's got Xylitol um and it helps to neutralize the saliva and it's also naturally antibacterial so it will um basically get your saliva back to a good state so if I have a sweet treat I'll pop one of these in my math right after and it just helps reduce my chances

of of Decay afterwards okay um let me have a look at that brand okay I'll link all of these products below so this is the first one you mentioned just going to open it and see what it looks like inside and try one oh it's just a mint yeah okay yeah they're actually really yummy okay okay cool yeah Dr H cool and that was actually made by a university so for some reason I kind of like it more because it's like University based and you know and they've done a lot of studies on it too

okay um then next up is I'm going to save those for later floss um we should all be flossing so 30% of bacteria is actually found in between the teeth um and gum disas starts in between the teeth so if you're not flossing you're only doing 70% of the job um what floss you use is up to you some people will also use inad Dental brushes instead it's you know your your hygienist or your dentist should be the best one to tell you what um this is personally my favorite floss um reason being is it's

got prebiotics in it so this is like good food sorry food for good bacteria um it's got hydroxy appetite so that's a really good mineralizing Agent so it strengthens in between your teeth um and it tastes of cocoa butter so it actually tastes nice it's quite thick so it means that when you slide it inside and between your teeth it gets rid of all the bacteria really well I sometimes you know from doing this podcast for quite a long time I think I just I wonder why we need to do any of this stuff cuz

I as we said earlier I just reflect on my ancestors I was born in Botswana my mother's Nigerian I'm half Nigerian and I just think out like in I don't know in Nigeria some of my ancestors had really remarkable teeth mhm and they didn't do any of this stuff yeah yeah but the problem is is that we have so many more risk factors now in our lifestyles that mean that we kind of have to do these things to protect the teeth we have an unnatural life so we need to do unnatural things yeah so I

always compare it to sunscreen so you know centuries ago we didn't use sunscreen we didn't get sunburn or anything like that but also because of uh we were Smarter with how we were we wouldn't sit outside on the beach for hours in olive oil um but also uh global warming has changed things so now we have to all wear SPF and change the way that we are to reduce our chance of problems what about that toothpaste is that toothpaste yes okay what's that so um these are a few different toothpastes this one um is also

actually made by a university by my University what's that um biomin yeah uh the reason I like biomin is because it is very very good for sensitivity it's very strengthening on the teeth so it uh uses this very unique U method of action so it actually delivers calcium phosphate and also fluoride as well um a lot of people I would say at the moment are quite worried about fluoride and whether or not it's good or bad for you um and what is quite beautiful about biomin is that uh it's got a little bit of floride

in it enough to strengthen the teeth but not too much so a normal toothpaste would have um about 2 ,800 parts per millimeter of fluoride um and this toothpaste has 400 so it's got very little but because of the method of action it's able to have the same effect as a high fluoride toothpaste but with much less fluoride so this is good for someone who's a bit on the fence they're hearing a lot online they don't know what they want to do they've heard fluid's good for them um but they've also heard that fluorid is

bad for them so this is the the perfect one this off-the-shelf toothpaste that I've got here has three to four times that much fluoride in it yes four times more fluoride than the one you've got there yes which is which is a lot wow yeah and that's a normal toothpaste and it's you know I'm not anti fluoride at all um but I think that a lot of um listeners out there can go to a shop and get a toothpaste which has fluoride in it a lot of people don't know about the alternative options which are

still safe and good for their teeth if they don't want to go for the fluoride options and you you said that I should brush my teeth first thing in the morning and last thing before I go to bed yes okay just because that's the sort of biggest window I guess that's the best way to yeah the most important time to brush your teeth is right before you go to bed um because you spend two minutes spreading all this lovely goodness on your teeth um and then when you go to sleep going back to saliva when

you sleep your saliva flow reduces massively so all of a sudden these bacteria are left to their own devices and if you don't have good toothpaste there then they can cause a lot of problems and do I spit or do I rinse after I've brushed my teeth spit so you should never rinse your mouth out with water after you brush your teeth so brush brush brush spit into the Basin and that's it reason being again going back to my sunscreen analogy um imagine you spend 2 minutes putting all this lovely sunscreen all over your skin

to then just go and have a shower right before you go into the Sun so with the toothpaste you you spend two minutes putting all of that on your teeth and then if you rinse it then you're actually removing all of that goodness from your teeth and gums and it's kind of like you haven't done anything toothbrushes yes which toothbrush should I use this one one or an electric one um I generally prefer an electric toothbrush why um usually they kind of do the work for you so it just means that patients have better oral

health because most people don't know how to brush their teeth properly actually we're never really taught or trained or we get taught by our parents our parents don't really know they've been taught by their parents so a lot of people don't actually know how to brush their teeth number one number two we often don't brush for as long as we think that we are so we're meant to brush for 2 minutes the average is 20 to 30 seconds uh and we think that we're brushing for 2 minutes but we're not so with an electric toothbrush

it times you and then also a pressure sensor so the electric toothbrush often will have a pressure sensor which will show you whether or not you're brushing too hard or you're brushing at the right pressure and that will reduce your chance of recession can you show me on one of those tooth models in front of you the area of the mouth and teeth that people most often Overlook yes can I have your teeth so so I would say the area that people usually um struggle with the most is the insides of their very back bottom

teeth so inside W next to my tongue basically yeah just near your tongue basically what a lot of people will do is they'll kind of they'll go on the inside they brush their teeth like this okay whereas actually you want to get your elbow up and you want to brush a lot more at like a 90° angle when you're getting there it looks like you're brushing the gums a little bit a little bit yes you actually do want to brush the gums a little bit and then when we're on the outside of the teeth uh

we want to kind of brush at a 30° angle so rotational movements and at a 30° angle so not straight like a 90° but kind of towards the gum margin and by doing circular Mo U movements we're essentially kind of massaging the gums and getting rid of the bacteria from under the gum and then flicking it out okay yeah so just like that and then I always tell everyone it's really important to kind of have um a method behind your toothbrushing so don't go like brush and then go there and then up there and you

know cuz you'll never brush properly um so always start let's say on the left hand side go do all the outsides and then do all the biting surfaces and then do all the insides and then do the same on the top teeth as well and that model there you've got another model in front of you which is like a see-through model what does that show us um so this is to show you um what an implant looks like a lot of people don't know what implants look like um and how it looks like if it

was within your jaw also what all the roots look like and then also if you look on the other side you can see um this tooth which has the black within it yeah um and it's got like a red bubble at the root of it so this is a tooth that's had a root canal done to it and has an infection at the root of that tooth so that's an abscess um and a lot of people don't actually know what that looks like um they only feel toothache but this is what toothache is actually in

their jaw when our teeth get teeths is that the right word is that a plural when our tooths what's the plural of teeth it's teeth teeth yeah when our teeth get stained yes what we often do is we'll take some sort of white light in toothpaste or we'll go to a a dentist or a hygienist or something and ask them to whiten our teeth now I've always been a bit scared of that because there must be a cost to this whitening industry should we be whitening our teeth is there any healthy way to whiten our

teeth yes um so you've got two different types of staining one which is extrinsic so that's basically your coffee your tea your smoking super easy to get rid of um you just have to go to your hygienist and get a hygiene done and they'll get rid of the stains um pretty quickly um or you can try a whitening toothpaste be very careful with a lot of those whitening toothpaste because they can be quite abrasive and damage the enamel actually so it's kind of like exfoliating your teeth but your teeth don't grow back so if you

keep on exfoliating and and getting rid of that surface layer of enamel over a long amount of time that can be quite an issue and quite problematic you get sensitive teeth yeah sensitive teeth and then the underlying um tooth will start to shine through and that's quite yellow so you actually start ending up doing the the opposite of what you wanted to do um then whitening so you could you should do that professionally um don't go and buy some over the counter online thing um because a lot of the time either they don't have the

the right percentages and they can actually damage the teeth and the gums uh really badly so you want to get that done professionally um if you get it done by a good brand and even within the professional World there are some whitening um products out there which are really bad for the teeth and others which are actually really good for the teeth so we use one in particular um it's called Enlighten and uh the whitening for one day is the equivalent of having a Coca-Cola um so thinking about it I mean I'm sure everyone has

had one a Coca-Cola in their life having a Coca-Cola every day for let's say five or six days is okay and the grand scheme of things it's not going to massively damage your your teeth at all okay so there is safe ways to do yeah okay good and is there any way to remove plaque yourself without having to go to a dental hygienist um so you can try a water flosser um I've just bought one of those things but it doesn't feel powerful enough cuz when I go to the hygienist I don't know what they're

using but it like it like it's so strong yeah that it like blasts my mouth off my mouth feels so different after yeah and I wanted to know if I could buy one of those from my home but I think it's a little bit dangerous um well the reason I think that the water flossers are not that high intensity is because people can um damage their teeth if they don't use it correctly so kind of know there are some supplements that you can take to reduce the amount of plaque that builds up um and that

actually does work quite effectively I mean what are you there were two more there there's a couple more things there that you have in your pile that we not talked about these are probiotics okay so going back to our microbiome uh probiotics are basically good bacteria so um not everyone needs them but a probiotic uh essentially will uh put good bacteria into the microbiome and if it's got the right environment to live in then it will continue to grow there basically if you're eating the right things exactly if you're eating the right things you've got

prebiotics you know all of those types of things then then this will be really effective so these are two different options this is a mouthwash um and again on the microbiome test that we've created oralis one um we look at all the levels of good bacteria and then we'll recommend a probiotic based on what good bacteria you are missing so a lot of us are actually genetically we've been born without certain good bacteria in our microbiomes and so this is really lovely to supplement them so this is um it's a mouthwash but it's in a

powder form so you take a teaspoon you mix it with some water and that activates the probiotic and then you rinse it around um and you swallow it so it's a kind of a two in one for your gut this is a pill so it's a tablet you chew it um and then you can swallow it so this is again this is super easy too um and and I love these as well very easy to use Victoria what's the most important thing that we haven't talked about today that we should have talked about today uh

the only thing thing that I think you haven't mentioned that your viewers might benefit from is the use of straws straws are very very important to to use um for sugar and also for acid so drinking through a straw actually helps you bypass um all of your teeth so if you're having something acidic or really sugary or even something staining then it bypasses the teeth and it goes straight to back of your throat so you can swallow it um so this helps reduces your chance of decay of toothwear and also staining as well but specifically

if it's bad for you because you I'm sure there's some things which are good for the oral microbiome that you do want to be in the mouth yes yeah yeah so if you're taking your probiotics or whatever then of course those are great um like for example um you know I'm human I like a nice Coca-Cola once in a while and I'll drink it through a straw um or if I have alcohol I'll also drink that through a straw as long as it's not wine but about smoking and vaping um so yeah smoking and vaping

neither of them are good for the oral microbiome um it goes back to um dry mouth so smoking will dry your mouth out and then you don't have the saliva and the saliva can't do what it wants to it stops um vascularization so it stops blood flow to your mouth and so a lot of uh smokers actually will not have bleeding gums that doesn't mean that they don't have gum disease but because they um are smoking so much the blood vessels are already really tight and constricted from the nicotine um so they don't ever get

bleeding gums even though they have gum disease um and then the third thing is that actually we know that smoking is very strongly Associated one of the biggest risk factors for gum disease if someone's now curious about their all microbiome and the work that you're doing what is the sort of easiest entry point to learn more to get themselves checked or to I don't know to resolve some of the issues that are causal or a consequence of having a unhealthy microb where where do they start how do they find you we have a clinic in

central London called the health Society um we open about a year and a half ago now and our aim was to put the mouth back into the body to explain to patients exactly what's going on in their mouth and we can do that through microbiome testing other saliva tests um we look at your blood glucose levels your vitamin D levels we've got packages we have an infrared sauna we have a nutritionist and the idea is that we're working all together because one of the issues I was seeing was that patients they want to understand what's

going on in their mouth and they want to optimize it but they don't understand a lot of what Dentistry is all about we used to live in a world where the dentist would say okay you need two fillings and you've got gum disease and you're not brushing your teeth and that was the end of it and you would just listen to them and you get your work done but now we are trying to essentially decode dentistry and explain it in a way that patients can understand so i' would say was I'm biased but come over

come to the clinic we can explain everything um or you can do an oral microbiome test and you can actually understand yourself what bacteria what genetic mutations you have what inflammation you have what products you should start using and then based on that decide on what dentist you want to go to for any treatment if needed what if I'm in Australia or Canada or New Zealand or America what can I do um so we're actually rolling out the oral microbiome test to all of those countries um so you can actually buy at the moment uh

through that uh you just have to email us but otherwise there you know I'm not the only one there are other people who are doing this type of Dentistry um and are thinking in this type of way so you would have to do a little bit of research but um I guess maybe follow me on Instagram and I can give some top tips I'll I'll link all your your website your social channels below and if anyone wants to send you an email you might get a couple of emails warning you now um so you got

to be careful what you wish for but but I I'll put all those details below um we have a closing TR on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving at for okay and the question that's been left for you is what is the most important relationship in your life and why um this is going to cause you problems yeah I know so um I would say um my mother I think that is the most important relationship for uh me I think she um has been

uh one of my biggest mentors she's been my biggest cheerleader my supporter um she's hard on us but that has led to me being the person that I am um and I think that that if I don't have a good relationship with her um then I can't have a good relationship with other people she's taught me respect she's taught me how to you know handle myself around people um so yeah I guess uh big up to my mom is she is she Iranian she is yeah she's Iranian yeah and your father he is French American

French American and if we sit here in 10 years time what are you hoping the world looks like as it relates to the oral microbiome people's understanding a bit the the regulations what are you hoping for if you could wave a wand I am hoping that um the mouth is put back into the body in the sense that Dentistry and Medicine are fully integrated within each other so you can go to your dentist and you can get a saliva test and that could flag up issues with your heart or diabetes and you will go and

see your diabetologist um and we link everything together uh also my other dream is that people start testing their saliva and they understand that you know blood is not the only way that we can understand things that are going on within our body Dr Victoria Samson thank you so much I find this so unbelievably fascinating in part because I've never heard about any of this stuff before and I I do this job you know I've done it quite a few times now so I've spoken to a lot of Health experts that talk about the brain

or I know infertility or um the gut microbiome but never one that looks at the body and our overall picture of Hell through the front door or the lens of our oral microbiome and so it's really really inspired me and I think sometimes on this podcast I just love having these conversations because sometimes it you just need a little bit more information about the importance of something to make even a small change in your life and as it relates to our microbiomes our oral health um our brain health and all of these things even a

small change can have a big Downstream impact when we're talking about areas of our health where things compound over time and can either compound for us or against us and so thank you so much for doing the work that you do in shining a light on this your work has been really seminal in sort of driving the conversation but also turning the lights on to to the state and importance of our oral health and I'm sure that if we sit here in 10 years time you would have impacted many many many millions of people um

and their overall picture of how through the lens of their oral microbiome because of the work you're doing and the message you're putting out there and that is quite something so congratulations well done and thank you thank you so much thanks probably shouldn't be sharing this yet but you are our dire of a CO community so I wanted to give you a small first look at a product that we're about to launch exclusively this is the 1% diary if you know me you'll know that one of the most uttered phrases in the walls of my

office is the 1% mindset it is a philosophy a mindset and a habit that has absolutely changed my life and if you ask me it is the reason that this podcast has grown in the way that it has by understanding the power of compounding 1% you can absolutely change your outcomes in your life it isn't about drastic Transformations or quick wins it's about the small consistent actions that have a lasting change in your outcomes so two years ago we started the process of creating this beautiful diary and it's truly beautiful inside there's lots of pictures

lots of inspiration and motivation as well some interactive elements and the purpose of this diary is to help you identify stay focused on develop consistency with the 1% that will ultimately change your life we have a limited number of these 1% Diaries and if you want to do with me then join our waiting list I can't guarantee all of you that joined the waiting list will be able to get one but if you join now you have a higher chance the waiting list can be found atth diary.com I'll link it below but that isthe diary.com

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