oral health is (and always was) the new gut health
Oral health = longevity
Many studies have DEFINITIVELY demonstrated a link between poor oral health and chronic health conditions -endocrine (hormonal), respiratory, gut, neurological and metabolic. Places you’d never think to link with your mouth. It’s even been linked to Covid severity and sleep disorders.
And none of these are tenuous links. They all rest on the basis of microbiome cross-talk. Just like the famous gut-brain axis, we have an axis linking every microbiome in our body. The oral microbiome, you can imagine, travels everywhere when you swallow.
Let’s start with one of the world’s most prevalent and preventable chronic illnesses - type 2 diabetes.
There is a strong link between the bacteria that causes gingivitis (gum disease) and the risk of diabetes. This could be because it increases insulin resistance or destroys islet b-cells, which then leads to diabetes or obesity. The gingivitis bacteria has been found everywhere in the gut. We’ll see later that it can even travel to the brain.
A totally different angle from chronic disease : infectious disease.
In covid, the virus attacks ACE2 receptors in the lungs, but these receptors are also found in your oral cavity, the gut, heart, kidneys, liver … everywhere really. Another part to this is that you have opportunistic bacteria that live in your mouth, when there’s an infection like covid, and your immune system is down, they take the chance to adhere to cells and act as a co-infection which is partly why some people get covid worse than others, and why seemingly perfectly healthy people died from covid -secondary bacterial infection from oral dysbiosis.
What about your brain? Chronic neurological issues? Surely that’s seperate from the oral microbiome?
When we think about alzheimers and dementia, we think about them in a vacuum of pure cognitive decline. We never really ask what causes the cognitive decline beyond looking at brain dysfunction itself. But alzheimers has been directly linked to poor, lifetime, oral hygiene. Those same bacteria of gingivitis found to aggravate risk of diabetes, can also travel from the mouth to the brain, there they release gingipain enzymes which can destroy nerve cells and snowball into alzheimer’s.
Interestingly, dementia and alzheimers are being called ‘type 3 diabetes’. The link between their onset and gut / oral microbiome is so definitive.
Oral hygiene is simple; tongue scrape, floss, then brush. You can also chew on high EO herbs (the EO’s are normally antimicrobial). Bilberry (blueberry) and hawthorn berry both stabilise collagen which strengthens gum tissue. Liquorice root is antibacterial and reduces plaques and can be chewed on (just watch out if you have high blood pressure). General chewing of herbal sticks (bitter, acrid or astringent tasting wood). This is where the use of neem as a herbal dental support comes from -chewing the stick. It probably isn’t as effective when made into a paste as the action of chewing a stick works to clean between the teeth and strengthen them too.
I’m convinced that simply chewing on common herbs like rosemary, fennel, or liquorice root can dramatically improve your oral hygiene. Probably drinking herbal tea throughout the day will have benefit too.
