Are You Ruining Your Teeth With Mouthwash & Toothpaste? Safer Alternatives & Oral Health Tips | Be Well Moments

0:00Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10I've heard a lot about like a morning routine of like swirling water around your mouth. Is that a good trick? And do we do it with mouthwash? Do we do it with just warm water? And, you know, I said to you before the show when we were talking in the newsletter, Compassionate Cure, I used to always buy mouthwash. that used to like burn my mouth because I'd be like, it's great. It's going to like kill everything in my mouth. I'm going to have really hot, fresh breath. And then I read your book and thought, oh, I've just killed everything. I'm not actually doing a very good, I'm not actually doing something very good.

0:42So let's talk about that. Are we meant to have a morning routine of swishing water around or mouthwash around? And how should we be looking at what mouthwashers to buy? Yeah. So we always want to try and be as gentle as possible. And so if something says kills 99.9 % of bacteria, that's not good. And I did this, I told you as well, we would make our mouthwash extra concentrated so that it would burn. But the commensal bacteria or the beneficial bacteria of our mouth are actually easier to kill than the bad pathogens. FN is really, really difficult to treat, for example. And so when you put harsh chemicals in your mouth, you're going to kill off the good stuff first, and then you'll kill off the bad stuff.

1:22And if anything survives, is going to be the bad. And so you want to try and avoid things like killing off 99.9 % of the bacteria, unless you do have a dysbiosis that has been diagnosed properly with a saliva test. Then we may purge your microbiome for a couple of weeks and try and wipe it all out and then start again by rebuilding it with what should be there. But on average, no, don't kill it off during the day. In terms of is mouthwash beneficial? So, you know, I would say it's not going to be the thing that gives you a robust microbiome unless again we're trying to correct something that is wrong so swishing with water is great um for sure what that's going to do is just kind of break up any last pieces of plaque or debris that's in there and then you can spit it out in the sink i like to freshen breath with mouthwash so i'll use super gentle non-toxic mouthwashes at the end of my morning routine just to kind of give me that extra bit of freshness after doing everything and then I can kind of spit out any free-floating bacteria or plaque that are there.

2:24But no, mouthwashes do not make or break your oral health unless you're rinsing with scope or alcohol, Listerine. I also want to mention that – yeah, I'm glad that you mentioned that brand. I didn't want to say – I wasn't sure whether I was going to mention a brand. But you said obviously natural. But then I also read that essential oils can disrupt your microbiome. So I think we have to distinguish what is natural here because people will say oh this is full of essential oils it's all natural it's like got no fluoride in which is nothing i want to talk to you about and then you're telling me in the book that that also disrupts the microbiome so what like what is what should we be looking at when we're making these choices of toothpaste and and mouthwash like what are the products yeah and there are you know i i'm pretty sure but um pretty sure scope does but listerine for example makes a non-alcoholic mouthwash.

3:13So even they're getting more on the scope of alcohol-free now, but they do have other harmful chemicals that I'd be leery of. Yes, there are certain essential oils that can disrupt the oral microbiome. For example, tea tree oil is a really good antimicrobial essential oil, and a lot of people will rinse with tea tree oil. But again, you have to be really careful with that because that can disrupt the oral microbiome. So I would, you know, it's okay to use essential oils if you want to like freshen breath, for example, but I would stay away from anything that is considered antimicrobial or antibacterial essential oils.

3:49And so that's why a lot of people just choose to rinse with water now and not rinse with anything else. Another big one is coconut oil. A lot of people want to do oil pulling. You know, I always tell people like, if you are wanting to oil pull to do it effectively, you really have to switch this around for about 15 minutes to get the effects of this. I can't even get people to brush and floss twice a day for two minutes each. So I'm like, let's forget about the oil pulling and just do the basics, right? There are some antimicrobial effects of oil pulling. There's anti-inflammatory effects. There's, you know, really good fats that are in there that are great for our oral health.

4:29It's a really great lubricant. It can disrupt some of the bonding of restorations. So you got to be careful if you have a lot of fillings in your mouth because it can affect that. But that is not, that shouldn't be your go-to thing for improving your oral health, right? Like do everything else first. One billion people worldwide are deficient in this nutrient that so many of you guys might not be aware of. And women, if you're listening, you are more risk of being deficient in this nutrient. So I'm going to first of all explain what the physical symptoms are. If you have cold hands and feet, pale skin, extreme lack of energy or fatigue, then you might be suffering with iron deficiency or anemia.

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5:53You can pick it up in boots or buy online at Amazon. but please do not ignore this it is really critical to make sure your iron levels are in check so what about fluoride because there's this huge kind of conversation around fluoride that fluoride is good fluoride is bad it's now being put into obviously tap water to help with reducing tooth decay and there's a lot of uproar about these things like when we're looking at a toothpaste my my dentists will always say use pro enamel toothpaste use like sensodyne these type of things are very good for you how and then other people say no use fully natural toothpaste that's not got any fluoride in where should we be looking at when we come to toothpaste and products that we're buying for our for our teeth this is a really big topic of conversation in the u.s right now um i just came across something saying that utah is i think it's utah is pulling fluoride from their tap water.

6:51The EPA has come out basically saying that there's been studies showing that fluoride exposure lowers IQ in children. So it's really a hot topic. And what I will say is that now we have some alternatives to fluoride that are safer or that we think are safer from based on the research that we have. And so people can use things like arginine. Arginine is a really potent desensitizing agent. And it also is really good for killing the bacteria in the mouth that cause cavities. So if you look at your Sensodyne or Pronamel, oftentimes they'll have really high levels of arginine in them. So arginine is great if you're trying to reduce sensitivity or prevent cavities.

7:35Another really good compound that you can look for is nano hydroxyapatite. It needs to be nano because if you just use regular hydroxyapatite, those particles are too big to incorporate into the enamel to try and remineralize lesions. So in NASA, for example, NASA was who helped develop the nano hydroxyapatite compounds to help keep their astronauts safe in space. So it's good enough for NASA. It's good enough for me. So toothpaste that have nano hydroxyapatite are going to be great as well as arginine. You know, I think the key thing here is we need to prevent decay and disease because once decay passes through the enamel and gets into the second layer of tooth structure, which is dentin, dentin is alive.

8:20And dentin is connected directly to the pulp of our tooth, which is where the blood vessel and nerves are. And once it gets to dentin, dentin is really soft. And so it can progress very rapidly and get and infect the life force of the tooth, which is the pulp. And then that's when we get things like tooth infections and abscesses. And so that is much worse for our health than using a little bit of fluoride in toothpaste. So while there are better products on the market, and I would recommend them, I certainly would never tell a patient that has rampant decay or is high risk for cavities or who has fillings on every tooth, like you should go fluoride free, right?

9:01Because there are such high risk factors for having a systemic component to dental infection that I would say, we need to fix your diet. We got to fix your lifestyle, your oral hygiene habits. We got to fix this decay. You know, let's get everything rebalanced and then we can talk about, you know, going fluoride free. So I think the conversation is too focused on one thing and we're not really looking holistically at the issue. But yes, there are safer alternatives out there, but you got to look at the patient. Well, I also think there's another area of toothpaste that we've not mentioned, which is whitening toothpaste, where I think there was a huge craze at one point where everyone was getting whitening toothpaste because obviously everybody wants whiter teeth and you wrote in your book titanium dioxide is in many toothpaste brands which is mostly ones that have like the whitening in is that bad should we stay away from anything that's like severely trying to whiten our teeth is that going to like disrupt our microbiome it can disrupt the microbiome oftentimes what it is is it's really abrasive to the teeth and so people will say i have really sensitive teeth and i'll say well what toothpaste are you using and they say that they use a whitening toothpaste.

10:07Well, those whitening toothpaste are just full of really abrasive, like titanium dioxide particles in there that as you're brushing, it's actually removing portions of your enamel. And when you remove your enamel, your enamel is like a helmet to your tooth. It's a really hard, innate structure. It's harder than our bones actually, which is interesting because people say, oh, I broke a tooth and they act like it's no big deal. And I'm like, your teeth are the hardest substance in your body. If you're breaking your teeth, like your bones would be crushed. you know let's back up and talk about that but that's a whole nother uh whole nother thing but yes it can disrupt the microbiome um and it can also cause tooth sensitivity so but you also need to look at you know it kind of depends because if your teeth are dark because you're drinking coffee or tea or whatever okay sure that's an appropriate time to use that but other people will have lost enamel on their teeth because of aging or erosion or something like that once you lose your enamel your enamel is the only thing that can whiten.

11:03So if you've lost enamel on your teeth, the dentin, which is more gray and yellow, shows through. So the thinner your enamel gets, the more gray and yellow your teeth look. That will never whiten. So if you're using a whitened toothpaste to whiten thin enamel teeth or grayish teeth, gray teeth won't whiten. Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description. Thank you.