Microbiomes and the World Within: Mark L. Cannon, DDS, MS on DarkHorse
Bret Weinstein speaks with Dr. Mark Cannon on the subject of the microbiome. Dr. Mark L Cannon is a Professor Emeritus from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago and Northwestern University. ***** Sponsors: Everyday Dose: Coffee plus collagen, mushrooms & nootropics – delicious! Get 45% off your first subscription order and also receive free gifts at http://everydaydose.com/darkhorse. Jolie: Beautiful shower heads that filter out the garbage without reducing water ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast Inside Rail.
This one is going to be fascinating, folks.
I am sitting with Mark Cannon, who is a professor emeritus from children's hospital in Chicago and Northwestern University.
He is in some sense a continuation of a little series that we've been doing here with uh Dr. Jones and Dr. Clancy, where we've talked a good deal about things that happen at the mucosal interfaces of the body.
And uh, well, let's just say there's a lot to talk about here, but before we do, let me just say, welcome, Dr. Cannon.
Thank you so much, Brett, for having me on.
I really appreciate this.
I feel it's really quite an honor to be on your podcast and to talk to you about something I'm very passionate about.
And people can tell it.
Like when I do a presentation at a meeting, I get very passionate.
I'm walking around excited.
I don't want to stop because there's so much we can share.
There's so much information out there.
Um, to be honest with you, what we can talk about today will be obsolete in six months.
Information will be absolutely archaic in a very short period of time because whenever I get like a presentation ready for a meeting, uh a healthcare meeting, I find myself changing things a day or two before, a week before because of new publications.
And so I I think to set this off, what got me going was just by chance, I I worked with a microbiologist, and this was back in 1974, 75, a little bit of a time ago, it seems like yesterday.
And he was way ahead of his time.
He was looking at pathogenic bacteria and how they had an influence on the immune system of the body, and we did not understand it.
No one did.
He had he was I think he is still around, but he is quite a bright individual.
But I got trained.
I went through my training and got my degree, went to children's hospital in Chicago, stayed, taught.
I became like everyone else, treating symptoms, not disease, not understanding the basis behind disease, thinking of everything in one dimension, not even two dimensions.
And then I had a a parent dress me down because I wasn't doing enough to prevent disease.
I was angry because I was doing everything by the book.
It's kind of funny when you get really upset.
Then you do some introspection.
I I thought maybe there was a valid point.
And you might call it self-doubt.
I I think it's more looking deeper for the answer.
And I started to really look into the role of commensals and good bacteria like the probiotics and teaching and lecturing in Europe.
I saw that they were really ahead of us.
I was instrumental in bringing some into the United States for the prevention of disease.
But then attending these conferences back like in the 1980s and 90s, there was immunologists there talking about the immune system, how important it was for these good bacteria, these commensals, these probiotics, how important it was for them to train our immune system.
Now, at the time being a pediatric dentist, I was the only pediatric dentist or any dental health professional attending these meetings.
But it was so important, Brett, because it brought to me the viewpoint that the oral microbiome, the bacteria of the mouth, The good guys are supposed to be there.
Have such an important role in total body health.
And just to divert for a second, the last two years, American Down Association has had a symposium on this.
Uh called Total Health Symposium.
Well, if I were to tell you everything, you would not believe it.
Well you might.
I I might believe it.
I've I've seen now so many of these cases where uh different branches of medicine so completely missed the boat on uh what the pathway to health is that it will not surprise me in the slightest to discover this in the area of dentistry.
Our first sponsor for this episode of the Dark Horse Inside Rail is Everyday Dose.
Everyday dose is coffee and more.
This isn't a coffee alternative.
It's coffee with functional mushrooms, collagen, and nootropics added.
It's delicious as coffee is, and it's got more goodness in it than coffee already does.
Everyday dose comes in a mild roast and a medium roast.
The mild is light and smooth with a mellow energy and low acidity that's easy on sensitive stomachs.
The medium roast is robust and full-bodied but smooth, providing an extra boost of energy.
Both roasts use 100% Arabica coffee, which is certified to be mold-free.
Everyday dose not only has delicious Arabica coffee in it, it also contains collagen, Ltheanine, and their unique mushroom blend that includes extracts of lion's mane and chaga.
And of course, there are no artificial additives, no GMOs, no herbicides, pesticides, no artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, or sweeteners.
Maybe you love coffee but want something more.
Try everyday dose.
You won't get jitters with everyday dose, but you will get daily collagen, which is supportive of skin, hair, nails, and joints.
Maybe there are some supplements that you want to take, but you keep forgetting.
With everyday dose, you get delicious coffee plus a bunch of other benefits in the form of vitamins and minerals.
And everyday dose has a fantastic offer for Dark Horse listeners.
Yes, truly fantastic.
Get forty-five percent off your first subscription order of 30 servings of coffee plus mild roast or coffee plus medium roast.
You'll also receive a starter kit with over a hundred dollars in free gifts, including a rechargeable frother and gunmetal serving spoon by going to everydaydose.com slash dark horse or entering Darkhorse at checkout.
You'll also get free gifts throughout the year.
That's everydaydose.com slash darkhorse for 45% off your first order.
Our second sponsor on this episode of the inside rail is Jolie.
Jolie is a beauty and wellness company that purifies the water we shower in.
Jolie's filtered shower heads help provide better skin, hair, and overall well-being.
Most municipal water systems, indeed most water systems, period, use chlorine to disinfect the water.
But chlorine is damaging to skin and hair.
Add to that the fact that a lot of water also contains heavy metals.
Also not good for your skin, hair, or your body.
Because the water we shower with also becomes water that we inhale in the form of aerosolized droplets, depending on your water source, you may be breathing chlorine and other contaminants when you shower, which goes straight to your lungs.
Jolie cures this problem.
Jolie makes a filtered shower head so that you can bathe in water that starts out clean.
Jolie's shower heads remove chlorine and heavy metals from your water and have been demonstrated to reduce the shedding of hair by 81% for people who use them.
After showering with Chili showerheads, people report that their hair is less frizzy, their skin is softer, and that they are having fewer breakouts.
But we've all experienced water filtration systems at some point, and one thing that seems to always happen is that the pressure is reduced.
Suddenly, where you had a nice high pressure stream, now you got a trickle.
This is not a problem with Jolie shower heads.
The water pressure is still very strong, and your water is clean and clear.
Also, these shower heads are quite beautiful.
The perfect combination of form and function.
And the plumbing pipe size is universal, so it's easy to install.
In fact, it comes with its own wrench.
When we were approached by Jolie, our first thought was we don't need this as our water is already quite clean.
But we tried out the Jolie shower head and liked it so much we installed one in each of our showers.
Recently, we had some remodeling done, and the subcontractors put in a fancy new shower head.
We tried it for a little while and then took it out and put back on our Jelly shower head.
It's just that much better.
Jolie will give you your best skin and hair, guaranteed.
Head to JolySkinco.com slash dark horse to try it out for yourself with free shipping.
That's J O L I E S K-I-N-C-O.com slash Darkhorse for free shipping.
And if you don't like it, you can return your Jolie for a full refund within 60 days, no questions asked.
Jolie is also available on Amazon and at Select Ulta Stores.
Get yours today.
I did want to go back though, and I feel bad saying it's even a correction of something you've said.
I know you're being cautious, and I want to be a little less cautious in one way, because I think it's uh it'll be clarifying.
You called these the good guys of the mouth commensals.
Right.
I know.
I was trying to simplify.
Well, and you're and you're being careful.
But the point, and I think my audience will resonate with it, is that they're not really commensals, they're actually symbionts.
And the difference is a commensal is some creature that gets nothing out of the interaction uh or does nothing to you in the interaction.
It's not a parasite, it's not beneficial.
But we're really talking about something that is both getting something, it's getting uh a habitat in which to live, it's getting sustenance, and it's doing something for us, it's providing uh an essential role.
And so the reason that that matters so crucially is that when you have a long-standing relationship, an evolutionary relationship with a symbiont, you can expect it to have found ways to improve your life, and for you to have found ways to improve its life.
So it should be no surprise at all that if there is a colony of symbionts living in our mouth or our gut or our lungs, that our ancestors would have taken care of them and vice versa.
Correct.
And that to have disrupted this relationship is like giving away the store.
It's just surrendering health for no reason.
And sadly, that's what we do every day.
We disrupt our symbionts, we create a problem for them.
We have done so with so many antimicrobial products that actually clear cut, they kill everything, and the pathogens tend to grow back faster.
So many studies actually have been done on that, showing that people have increased the number of pathogenic bacteria.
A lot of these bacteria that are bad, the pathogenic ones, um, are keystone.
And that term has been attacked strongly by some people.
But the reason they're called keystone is that they're systemic pathogens.
And that's one key thing that we have to talk about.
When you don't have those symbions, that space becomes occupied by the pathogens.
So how do we get there?
Interestingly enough, there's a lot of new research and a lot of debate.
But the dental disease bacteria, they're probably zoonotic.
Um, there was a study out of Japan.
They trace back the genetics of the bacteria that causes cavities, and it came to us from other primates.
And it's postulated that chimpanzees were eating fruit and they would drop the fruit, and the homo sapiens would come along, pick it up and finish eating it, and it got to us that way.
It is a relatively new bacteria, it's called Streptococcus mutants, because it is relatively new as mutated.
Now, hold on.
Let me ask the obvious question.
In many cases, some serious pathogen of humans that has come to us zotically is actually not terribly destructive to the creatures from which we got it.
Yes.
Are chimpanzees suffering cavities, or do they have some way of managing this?
And in us it causes cavities.
Yes.
That's the interesting thing about it.
Uh now, of course, you're going to think of tuberculosis and mycobacterium can be carried by cattle and transmitted to humans, but there was some recent work where they showed when it went back to cattle, it became uh harmful to the cattle.
They had to transfer through humans to go back.
But of course, tuberculosis is one of the things, but the bacteria is several of them, they're very involved with gum disease.
And this has all become very important later, like porphyrmonos stingivalis, that most likely came to humans from dogs, from proto-dogs from us hunting together with dogs, the protodogs, the first dogs, and a bacteria from them jumped to humans,
mutated, also went back to them, and both humans and dogs suffer terrible periodontal disease because it combined the traits between the um the virulence factors were combined.
And so that's why these poor dogs all the time are having gum surgery done and their teeth cleaned under general anesthetic, is because it's jumping.
Now there's probably a situation in the future we'll find that something that's zoonotic is more beneficial than bad.
But the thing with these bacteria that jumped to us from dogs, also some from pigs from swine, they came to us early on.
Um not so much the stuff like tuberculosis, that was much, much later in human development, as you know, and that's what we often talk about from caves to clinics, because when Homo sapiens spent a lot of time in caves with the fire at the at the entry to the cave for protection, um, other creatures joined us.
Rats and mice, and they ate our leftovers.
Surprise there, right?
That's such a surprise.
And because of that, they in humans, we can break down certain food groups that are from tubers.
You know the importance of tubers and human development, homo sapiens development, and how our dentition changed to help accommodate eating the tubers.
But after we roast them, we can eat them, and so did the rats and mice, and because of that, we can utilize certain polyols that other creatures like dogs cannot utilize.
So there's some good things that occur from all this too, which is really kind of fascinating.
But the key behind this is the formation of gateway microbiomes.
And this calls back to the Nobel assembly and at the Carolista Institute in 2017.
I was very happy to be there and honored.
But they agreed that the oral microbiome is one of the most important gateway microbiomes, because for your listeners, the beginning of the gastrointestinal tract, your digestive tract, yeah, that's your lips.
That's where it actually begins.
And like a pediatric gastroenterologist I would work at at children's work with at children's hospital, would say, I tell my fellows in my residents that the GI tract begins at the lips.
And when the first things you have to do when you look for diseases like IBD, IBS is always look in the mouth.
As it turns out, for Crohn's disease, you find the symptoms, the patches first in the mouth.
So in the mouth, we have all these really protective, wonderful bacteria.
I'll just quickly list a few.
You have your gluten metabolizers that break down your gluten for you.
A third of your gluten is broken down in your mouth and gluten metabolizers also inhibit.
They're all your rothia bacteria.
They inhibit a lot of bad bacteria.
You have your nitrate reducing bacteria.
They break down the greens and they give you nitrite.
And from the nitrite, when it hits the stomach, you get nitric oxide, which is so important that there is three individuals who got Nobel Prizes for it in 1998 because nitric oxide regulates your blood pressure, regulates your cholesterol, and helps prevent insulin resistance.
All that from nitric oxide.
And nitric oxide comes from the breakdown of the nitrates out of the mouth and also from your paranasal sinuses.
I know you've had speakers on who've talked about nasal and mouth breathing.
You've got to breathe through your nose because you need that nitric oxide.
And of course, things like erectile dysfunction occur because you don't have the nitric oxide you need.
That's why Cialis and Viagra all increase the efficacy of your blood pressure.
nitric oxide.
So you have this oral microbiome that we should just leave alone.
Can I tell you a funny story on that?
Just yesterday, they sent out a notice about a recently published, very recently, like last week.
Study out of Japan.
Big study.
Hundred thousand pregnancy.
They followed up four years later, had responses from about 74,000 families about their four-year-old children.
It was about oral health.
Lots wrong with this study, but it's been heavily quoted.
Um first of all, it's a parental report about if there's cavities or not.
Can't really trust that.
100%.
But they had lumped in.
Never using, never breastfeeding, and occasionally breastfeeding, they lumped it all into one group and compared that group to still breastfeeding at age four.
And they said those who had the extended breastfeeding, which was 2.2% of the study, had more cavities.
Now that's been quoted everywhere.
Don't do extended breastfeeding.
Child will get more decay.
H4.
It was 2.2%.
They didn't ask if if you stop to age one or age two or age three, which would make all the common sense in the world.
But here's another another little funny thing about they asked the question, do you use a fluoride toothpaste?
And how often you brush and all that stuff.
And it turned out that their results showed no difference between a fluoride toothpaste and a no fluoride toothpaste, but they didn't that's only in the supplemental data.
They did not put it in their results.
Didn't report it.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, that's how bad things are.
I mean, it's so funny, it's kind of laughable.
Um I I love to show these type of uh articles when I do presentations because I go like, this is how you get misled.
You read the abstract only.
Right?
Yeah, people people do not realize this.
How often you will look at a study thinking maybe you could uh extrapolate from the title or the abstract, and then you realize that the methodology doesn't actually support the conclusions in question, or that they discovered something that isn't highlighted.
It it's so regular that um you need to know that before you look at the literature and imagine that it's full of all kinds of useful information because of course it is, but you have to, you know, separate the wheat from the chaff.
Our final sponsor for this episode of the Dark Horse Inside Rail is Prima, which makes remarkable ancestral protein bars.
We've been eating for hundreds of millions of years.
Our diets have changed a lot since those early days, for better and recently for worse.
Real food, food that your grandmother would recognize as food, food that she would have served you from her own kitchen is best.
But often our lives and lifestyles mean that we need something faster, something packaged, something that will nourish us and keep us going until the next time we sit down to another one of grandma's home cooked meals.
The problem is the available options are mostly garbage.
Most of the protein bars on the market are made with seed oils or fine sugars and artificial flavors and colors.
Not so with Prima, the first ancestral protein bar, which has been crafted with many of nature's finest ingredients.
Prima is all about transparency.
Not only do their products contain no seed oils, refined sugars, or artificial flavors and colors, Primo works hard to source the highest quality, most nutrient-dense ingredients, which we've been eating for a very long time.
Prima bars have raw honey, sea salt, and organic cacao, coffee, coconut, agave, and vanilla.
Ingredients some of your ancestors would actually recognize.
And the grass-fed beef tallow in prima bars contains fatty acids that regulate insulin sensitivity and are a healthy alternative to the industrial seed oils used by other companies.
Prima bars come in three flavors: mocha, salted caramel, and cacao.
And here's the really surprising thing.
There are 16 grams of protein in every bar from a special blend of grass-fed collagen peptides and grass-fed whey protein concentrate.
Kobe, our spectacular and sometimes ridiculous 19-year-old son, worked long days on several farms this summer, often leaving the house well before 6 a.m. and not returning until after nine at night.
Farming is hard work and he needed to keep his energy up.
When our box of prima bars arrived, he took to them and he told us, quote, I found prima bars very useful while working on the farm because I often didn't have an appetite but knew I needed to eat.
I like these bars, especially the cacao flavor, as they're high in protein, relatively high calorie and easy to eat.
If you know that you're going to want food on the go and need something easy and transportable, but highly nutritious and delicious as well, try prima bars.
And now for our dark horse audience, Prima is offering 20% off their fantastic bars.
Go to eatprima.com/slash dark horse to get 20% off.
That's EATPRIMA.com slash dark horse to get 20% off.
Triprema ancestral protein bars today.
It is very true.
There is a great presentation by an Australian prostodontist.
I know in one of your presentations, you were talking about among your podcasts about getting some implants.
And she had done a very extensive meta-analysis study, a systematic review, all the literature on implants.
And she was at a lecture at their main group, and another speaker got up and talked about their meta-analysis, which had a completely different result from hers.
Completely different result.
Well, well, they were on survivabilities, how how survivable, what the long-term uh rate was of uh success.
And she got up and asked him after his presentation, so not to be embarrassing, said, I noticed you didn't refer to any of my research or my meta-analysis.
And he says, I never read it.
We never found it.
And it was interesting that the keywords were slightly off, and her abstract did not have the right keywords for the search engines to find.
So when they used a search engine, they'll look at the resource, they didn't find her research.
What she felt was better, she called her presentation the power of silence, kind of like a takeoff on power statistics and so on, power analysis, the power of silence, that somehow when they wrote the abstract, they f that they failed to put in the keywords they should have in the abstract.
Yeah, it's an easy error to make, actually.
Um, I've done it too.
Yeah, why um oh well.
Lesson learned, I guess.
Um, but before we before we move on, I want to make sure that people understand the significance of where we're headed, because it's very easy to hear a conversation like this and think, okay, yeah, I'm sure there's something about oral health, and people are sick of being lectured by their dentists about the fact that they have gum disease or whatever.
But we're talking about the route to some profound pathology.
So do you want to just preview some of the things that are downstream consequences of a disrupted uh microbiome?
As we have, as I say we, but as research has found out that the cavity producing bacteria, strep mutans, is also responsible for strokes.
It is cousin strepanginosis, probably up to 60% of strokes.
If you have a certain strep mutants, you're actually 16 times more likely to have a deep cerebral stroke.
The stats are startling.
If you're missing a tooth because of periodon disease, you can read this from the American College of Cardiology.
Their research on it, you're four times more likely to have cardiovascular event.
We can go down the list.
There's been studies on cavities and missing teeth that show not just the association, but now we have the links and the causation.
When we say keystone pathogens, we are looking at athlosclerosis, hardening of the arteries.
Mm-hmm.
We're looking at myocardial infarcts.
If you have uh abscess tooth, you're 14 times more likely to have a myocardial infarct.
So just to be clear, even after the tooth has been addressed.
Oh, you have to have the tooth removed, and it has to be healed.
Yeah.
Yeah, and this is before, but uh once it's healed, you go back to normal risk factor.
Okay.
But if you go down the whole list, Alzheimer's.
Big, and they've shown that these bacteria are actually present in the neurons and the microglia of the brain, and the called ginger pains, they're um actually uh genetic material that cause further reaction,
exosomes, I should say, and um miscarriages another big one, preeclampsia, the relationship between periodontal disease, gum disease, and pregnancy outcomes, no one doubts it anymore.
It's overwhelming.
And we'll go back to studies on this to show some of the overwhelming evidence that can make a huge difference.
Okay, one more question.
I I don't want to interrupt your list of pathologies.
Are there other biggies on there?
Oh, yeah, metabolic disorder and diabetes.
Uh, they've shown that that same bacteria ends up in your pancreas and your beta cells that produce your insulin and pushes them into senescence.
They go into hypofunction, you become insulin resistant, then you gain weight.
That's why they've been also linked to obesity.
So who cares about the GLP ones if you know the cause of all this happening?
Recently, since 2023, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, well known, well documented, many cases of that, oral squamous cell carcinoma, gastric cancer.
The list just keeps going on, even crazy relationships between this and acne in children in teenagers.
Which makes it it would answer such an important question.
It's obvious that something is disrupted.
You evolution would not have built a creature that gets acne in its teenage years.
So something is off.
Um, this would make perfect sense as an answer to that question.
And then, of course, what creates all this?
You know, and I know it's ultra-hyprocessed foods.
Yeah, ultra-hyp processed foods have all the extra sugar and all the preservatives.
I'll let you say something so I don't talk all the time.
No, no, you I want you to talk all the time, but I do have a question that I'm actually afraid of to hear the answer of.
In a kind of broad brush view from 30,000 feet way, you've got all of these profound pathologies that are downstream of a disrupted microbiome.
To the extent that people who have had disrupted microbiomes correct that situation, how much does their how much is this is damage already done, and how much is this you can reduce your risk of stroke of cardiac event of atherosclerosis of preeclampsia, miscarriage, many cancers, diet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The sad thing, I'm really afraid, doesn't get fixed is Alzheimer's.
Uh although there's people you absolutely slow the progress of it significantly.
And Alzheimer's is something that is really close to me because my wife has Alzheimer's in early onset and married uh 48 years now.
So the effects of Alzheimer's on the family is pretty significant.
I've done a lot of actual um paper research going into these.
We have actually I've applied for a few grants and and we've written a few protocols for some other uh animal model Research on Alzheimer's.
Um, I can see where there's future hope and there's a lot of things.
If you catch it early, you can do a ton.
This is the problem is catching it early, which we have to talk about diagnosis at some point.
But right now we have keystone pathogens.
If we focus on those, just if you ask chat GPT on a world level, if you were to reduce by what we know we can reduce the cost of periodonal disease, dental disease, athosclerosis, strokes, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, gastric cancer, right?
That's another one where they've shown a great correlation in the microbiome, and the they can show causation.
So we go down all that it comes out to be it just forget the people terms for right now, about a trillion dollars a year.
Trillion dollars a year globally.
Yeah.
If we were to address it, yeah, it's pretty darn scary, isn't it?
I mean, of course, that's AI generated, and I have to put that in big quotes.
That's AI generated because God only knows where it's pulling that information from.
But I think that everyone finally is understanding, at least in I see courses all the time now being offered an oral systemic health.
They're finally understanding that these pathogens are involved strongly.
And I have to hear, bring up one of my own studies.
It's the one I'm very proud of uh that was published in Neural Psy.
Uh, we looked at 30 children with autism, 30 kids that were perfectly normal, typical, and 30 kids from a blue zone in Columbia.
And we did the full metatranstriptin mix.
We did all the RNA orally because previous research has shown you can diagnose autism from the oral microbiome with the accuracy rate of 96%.
So if you take a hundred kids with autism, you don't even have to look at them.
You can pull out 96 of them with uh just by looking at their salivary sampling of their microbiome.
If you read that article, you'll see that we actually showed how and why all this was occurring.
There was a whole little sentence as we removed, but otherwise 96% is a is a high rate.
You're telling me if I took a thousand kids at random, you could find the autistic ones at a 96% rate of accuracy by the microbiome.
And what is it you'd be finding?
Um there's significant shifts.
There's significant shifts.
And yeah, there's a couple of pathogens that are pretty unusual pathogens that we really haven't seen in humans besides patients with cystic fibrosis.
And um, there's a xylobacter xylosogens.
I don't expect everyone to remember the name, but what it does is it breaks down neurotransmitters.
Now remember, your gut is responsible for the 60, I'm sorry, over 70% of the production of your neurotransmitters, the brain chemistry, over 70% comes from the gut.
And when you mess that up, you mess it all up.
So this is going to be not surprising to you.
I'm sure you've heard this.
But a gut dysbiosis is found almost always in anxiety depression cases.
They're also now finding it in ADD ADHD kids, right?
They all have a change gut microbiome.
The cavity-producing bacteria, the one that produces cavities, strokes, and cancer, oral cancers involved in that, and gastric cancer.
It can survive going down through the stomach.
It can.
It can.
A lot of them can.
They like an acid environment.
But what have we been doing, Brett?
We've been giving people PPIs.
Yeah, we have.
I have a uh a granddaughter who's eight months old, and the pediatrician put her on a PPI.
So this is the yeah proton pump inhibitors for everybody.
And of course, you know, people are doing the eat tums.
If you look at the sales rate on Tums, it's unbelievable.
But we're supposed to have stomach acid.
We need stomach acid to produce the nitric oxide that regulates our blood pressure.
And the nitric oxide gets into the bloodstream.
It comes out into the saliva, it's concentrated by a factor of 10 to kill off the bad bacteria.
And in fact, if you start getting worse teeth, the body senses that because there's this beautiful biofeedback system everywhere.
And you start producing more nitric oxide and a bunch of peptides from the saliva in the attempt to kill and remineralize and build a new scaffold to rebuild those teeth.
We're just not allowing our body systems to function because we have a constant exposure to highly processed foods with lots of free sugars.
Well, we do two things here, both of which are pet peeves of mine.
One is we change things in the environment in ways that are sure to cause pathology.
And then we look at those pathologies and we treat them as simple phenomena rather than realizing that the only game in town is to find the root cause and reverse it rather than to treat the symptoms and imagine that you're just not going to cause a cascade of new disruptions.
Um there was a great study recently published.
It was an autopsy study done on people who had completed suicide.
And they had controls where they had just had um normal individuals where they had done fecal samples and so on.
And they found much to their shock and horror, that two of the cavity-producing bacteria, including the one I first mentioned, were heavily found in the gut of people who had killed themselves.
No, I don't, but it was significantly greater because they didn't see it in the other group at all.
Really?
And what it does is this bacteria produces what's called a mutison, which kills the good bacteria, kills a good bacteria in the mouth, kills a good bacteria in the gut.
Now the NIH has known about this.
They they they funded a couple important studies on what was happening to the neurotransmitters out of the gut, because we've been treating that with pills with SSRIs, right?
You know, sustained serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
We want to make sure we treat everyone with a SSRI instead of boosting the level of serotonin to begin with.
So these people were chronically depressed, and they couldn't get out of it because neurochemically they were wrong.
Wow.
Um, you've got an autopsy study that shows that people who succeeded in killing themselves are disproportionately likely to have this tooth decay causing pathogen.
But they and they kind of reverted back to oh, there's some articles on anxiety and pressure on this, but it actually kind of makes a lot of sense because what happens when most people get depressed, what do they do?
Cheer themselves up.
Yeah, they eat more sugar.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that increases the growth of those guys down the gut who are just waiting for that overload of sugar.
But it's kind of funny because now they have mechanisms.
It's like why just a short while ago in 2020, in May of 2020, there was a great article came out on the Rollabacteria and cancer.
And they brought up the fact that when you look at cancer cells, they have within the cancer cell bacteria.
They're called intrabacterial, they're intracellular bacterial pathogens, IBPs.
Microbiologists saw that over a hundred years ago.
It took medicine a hundred years from 1920 to 2020 to recognize the fact that there's a lot of these IBPs and cancer cells.
Now, some famous researchers, I don't know if I can use names.
Can I use names?
Of course.
Susan Bowman.
Um, I mean, great research.
I I uh I I love using the person's name.
They deserve the acolytes, they deserve recognition.
And so her research on this one bacteria that is a gum disease bacteria and colorectal cancer.
She even showed that within those metastatic cells, those cancerous cells spreading around, they were loaded with a specific bacteria.
And it turns out you've heard the Warburg effect where cancer cells metabolize differently, and they've often wondered how that could happen, how they switch from oxidative phospholiforlation to aerobic glycolysis.
Well, it's because these bacteria, when they go inside, they secrete secretines that allow for more glucose pores.
So sugar can get inside those cancer cells, they can use it much easier.
All right.
So let me ask you uh a couple evolutionary questions.
Yeah.
It's interesting to find intracellular bacteria in a cancer.
And the question that this raises is this part of a bacterial life cycle and do bacteria get out of those cancers and continue to flourish, or like the cancer cells themselves, are they dead ends that are just happening to be there because it's a hospitable environment?
It's part of their immune evasion.
Uh, a lot of these bacteria have learned to evade our immune system by going intracellular.
So they do so on your lining.
Uh, I have psoriasis.
Strep pyogenus has gone into my keratinocytes on my skin, it hides in there.
That makes me actually a strep carrier, too.
It preserves them.
They live there, they make the cell become senescence.
When you get a lot of senescent skin cells, you get those patchy scaly areas.
It explains everything.
Uh, it's how it survives and it makes you a carrier.
Um, a lot of these bacterial pathogens we're talking about, uh, like the one that causes cavity strep mutans, some wonderful studies have been published showing how you can find them going from child to child in the back rows of a classroom.
Because kids tend to not be great at not touching things and sharing things, and can I have part of your candy bar?
Sure.
And they spread that way.
They can spread vertically from mom to child, they can spread horizontally from child to child.
And those cavities, those are only the canary and the coal mine.
Right.
And uh I will just say in passing to discover that there is a deep coherent complex story surrounding cavities, and to compare that to the mind-numbing and frankly insane intervention that we've been engaged in, where we're dumping the wrong fluoride even into municipal water supplies as if that's a way to address this problem.
When in fact, the point is this is actually a microbiome issue.
It always was and always will be.
And it always will be.
You address the microbiome, and you know, what's the uh collateral benefit of addressing your cavities?
Well, it reduces strokes, cardiac events, cancer, yeah, you know, everything.
Pretty much everything.
You know, uh chronic diseases, that's where we get our chronic diseases from.
Um, and there's I'm not making this up.
You can you can I challenge everyone to go out there in literature, start finding all the articles, they're gonna be really surprised at the research that's already been done.
That's why so many people are actually getting their eyes opened.
I mean, I the change the last two years has been significant.
Part of that was driven by COVID.
Of course.
Because we had the unbelievable difference in survivability.
If you had moderate periodal disease and got COVID at a certain age, I can't remember if it was 65 or 60, you are seven times more likely than some without periodontal disease to end up in ICU.
You're actually nine times more likely to die.
Interesting.
And that made a huge difference because, and they've shown this, you know, later on where they did the gastric lavage studies where they pulled the pathogens out of the lungs of the COVID victims, that they had gum disease bacteria all through there.
And by the way, um, we didn't even bring up the pulmonary.
I mean, some of these bacteria are responsible for um reactive asthma, you know, exercise induced asthma and so on.
And they change everything.
Um, the nasal microbiome, we haven't even talked about that.
I mean, we could talk all day all day about the oral, but the nasal is important because again, studies have shown if you have the right bacteria in your nose, you don't get allergic rhinitis, you don't get asthma.
That's why in the ENT literature right now, they're talking about doing nasal bacterial transplants.
Wow.
All right.
That makes a ton of sense.
So that answers the question I was going to ask you, which is is this reversible?
Or yeah.
Now in Australia, they've talked about doing the oral uh bacterial transplants.
And doing those, and they were talking about doing that in Sweden decades ago.
So you just take and and the last part of the work that Tor Medvid did with the Eve project.
I got to spend time with Tor Medvid from the Karolinsa Institute, brilliant individual, like 900 publications.
Um he's the one who was finding all the effects uh glyphosate of Roundup on the microbiome, gut microbiome, oral microbiome, all that saying again, our intervention has come back to bite us.
Oh, terribly so.
And you can watch in the case of glyphosate, the um insanity driven by the market.
So here you have a an herbicide that is paired with some genetically modified crops, where the basic idea is you immunize a crop to the pesticide and then you can spray it on liberally, which allows you to use a lot of it to kill all of the competing plants.
Okay, that's dumb enough as it is.
But then the manufacturer finds uses for it in the cases where they don't want to or can't modify an organism, like wheat, where we don't have roundup ready wheat.
And the answer is, oh, we're going to spray it on crops as a desiccant, which means spraying it on at the end when you're harvesting it, which means that the dose that the people who are eating the wheat get is that much greater.
You know, this is like if you understand complex systems at all, and you understand how sensitive they are to novel disruptions where you couldn't possibly uh anticipate the negative consequences, this is insanity.
Right?
The the idea that we would have allowed this is it's it's it's nuts.
And yet we do.
And then it disrupts gut microbiomes, it breaches the gut wall, where so you know, now bacteria are escaping the gut, even you have the wrong bacteria and they're in a position to escape the gut.
Uh of course, this is going to massively disrupt health.
How could it do anything else?
So here's another little story behind that.
This is also published, and and Tor was uh, he got uh he got knighted in in Sweden and became sore surtor medvid, and part of the research was determining what uh was happening to the salmon in the rivers of Sweden, and they traced it back to a lot of things that we're doing.
Um if you look at the gut microbiome, you have bacteria associated with some forms of autism.
Um, and we have to be careful when we talk about autism because there is autisms, there are multiple forms, and we don't want to be misleading people.
Um, one of which can be related to um uh sleep apnea during pregnancy, which is something that is extremely important to be discussed, and um, and sadly, people have not talked about pregnancy on set sleep apnea that affects everything too.
But you have these bad bacteria, certain forms of clostridia, and they inhibit a bacterial strain, and you can look up the species, it's Clostridius progenus, and Clostridius progenus is the only bacteria.
In fact, I just looked it up like six months ago, maybe.
So maybe someone has found something the last few months that produces three endolpropionic, and that is a plant oxum that makes plants bud.
It's essential for life.
Plants don't bud and leaf without having clostridia, sporogenous in the soil to make endopropionic acid, three endopropionic acid.
So you go like, well, that's that's interesting for soil health.
Uh glyphosate kills it.
Oh my goodness.
But wait, it gets even more interesting.
It turns out in all animal studies, that Clostridia spynous ends up in our gut.
It's necessary for neural protection.
Three endolpropionic is taking endol, which is neurotoxic, and the form of propionic, which would be neurotoxic, and combining them to make a non-neurotoxic neuroprotectant.
Um it's fascinating because it shows a relationship between plants and animals that has had to evolve for millions, hundreds of millions of years, right?
And we're messing with it.
So this is a product of normal plant physiology.
It's not a secondary compound.
This is something plants are using internally.
Yeah.
And we consume it because we consume plants, and it is necessary for the detoxification of otherwise neurotoxic substances, and it creates a protectant.
Yes.
And we are disrupting it agriculturally.
Yes.
And there's been several published studies showing a correlation between the use of glyphosate and autism in those countries.
And so it's it's controversial because again, we're looking at autisms out there, and you can actually do you can create autism in multiple fashion.
Um Derek McFabe, another famous neuroscientist, uh great researcher out of Canada, did a lot of work on autism and a preservative calcium propaneate.
And let me tell you this.
I think your listeners are like this.
If you do an animal study, in this animal study, let's say you're using uh Long Evans rat or whatever you're using, dogs or primates or pigs, like they did at University of Illinois.
If you want to make the animals um autistic, you give them this food preservative, calcium propionate.
Really?
Really?
That's how you do it.
So I will just work so quickly that we can Derek Maf, well, you can see these um videos he makes of rats who are autistic and not autistic, and they make them autistic with a calcium propionate, the behavior completely changes.
They go around little circles like they they stop being social.
I mean, it's very rapid.
How quick?
Oh, I mean, if you puff it directly in the brain, it's like within a minute.
Um, and is it reversible?
Yes.
It's reversible.
So I will say um I have become a great deal more aware of autism research and patterns and controversy uh after COVID,
which alerted me because I became aware of the frightening nature of the mRNA vaccines, and I started to discover that in fact the story that I had been telling about the elegance of uh so-called normal vaccines was not right either and that there's a lot even if the overarching story of vaccines is very elegant, the manufacturing is not and the platforms are all dangerous.
But anyway, let's leave that aside for a second.
I have become aware of a lot of work and patterns associated with autism.
And one of the things that you hear repeatedly is that there are it's often reported as mothers, a great many mothers who have successfully to one degree or another address the autism of their child with um radical interventions at the level of the gut microbiome.
You know, if it's it's the kind of thing if I had heard it once I would assume it was nothing but having heard it multiple times apparently this pattern does exist and it suggests that not only is there damage to the microbiome that causes this neurological disruption but that it is ongoing and therefore there are interventions to be had that are successful.
It's published in scientific reports uh research done at uh Arizona State University where they have done fecal transplants on kids with autism and they've had a tremendous success rate.
I mean I don't like to use hyperbolate to me looking at their reversal of autism of the symptoms of the gastrointestinal symptoms of the neurological symptoms I think they're re their success rate is very very good.
Shannon Rose, who's the other person down there, James Adams.
And they actually have gotten temporary success rates using antibiotic, metronidazole, because that actually clears out the gut and gets rid of a lot of those propionic-producing bacteria.
They're messing up the butyrate production that you need.
Butyrate's very protective for the gut and the brain.
But in my study, I never finished, I forgot to finish the clincher.
The 30 kids with autism, we did a 60-day intervention with a prebiotic with xylitol.
Six of them verbally improved very significantly.
And then we did a probiotic series for 60 days and three more.
should actually read the article.
It's really interesting.
we had uh a third have big improvements in mostly verbally but in behavior one young man I could I did not even recognize him I thought it was the wrong kid because he acted so differently.
Now, unfortunately, in some of these intervention studies, there have been a good number of them with just probiotics like in Italy.
I mean, you can go look at about maybe nine well-published studies like probiotics.
You have to keep it up.
There's a reason why this occurred, and you have to fix the reason why it occurred.
And the only ones I don't have hope with are the ones that are born autistic.
You do find those, and that's the non-reversible ones.
Too much happened during fluency.
fetal development and we know that this is most likely airway related with the mother and you have studies showing up that 40% of women during the third trimester will have sleep apnea.
And that does affect fetal development and again that's something that shouldn't be happening the sleep apnea is occurring um of course there's a a big load on the chest from during the third trimester but there's microbiome changes that occur in the nose and the nose lining swells up and in the mouth the gap I could list you the bacteria that change.
All right so I want to I want to draw a couple connections here.
So you say yes there's extra Weight on the chest during the third trimester of pregnancy, of course, there is, but of course, that's nothing new.
And so evolution has uh presumably successfully addressed that.
But now you have two themes that I've I've talked about here on dark horse coming together.
So one of them is microbiome disruption, the failure, and I want to get back to this the failure to have the correct amount of xylitol to support a proper microbiome.
But the other connection is I had a couple conversations with Mike Mew, orthodontist, and his point about sleep apnea and many other pathologies, actually, is that they are the result of improper mechanical feedback in child development,
that the child is supposed to be chewing on tough foods that cause a robust uh skull structure to emerge.
And in the absence of those tough foods, you get a collapse of the airway that makes us prone to things like sleep apnea, also ADHD, allergies, et cetera.
And so you can you can see the overarching lesson here is uh a match for what we often say on dark horse.
Heather and I often say, welcome to complex systems.
Anytime some surprising connection emerges, that's that's the lesson is you're dealing with a complex system and disruptions will cause pathology, often in ways you couldn't possibly have imagined.
And so anyway, the other lesson, which I think is you know the most important one, because it's actionable, is we ought to be investing tremendously in delivering people an environment that is as close a match to the one that they're evolved for as possible, because that is the thing that is liable to produce the best health outcomes.
And to the extent that there are perturbations and they cause small disruptions, that's much easier to deal with than somebody who is disrupted across system after system.
And so really we should be thinking about the next generation and how to ensure that they are effectively born with or very quickly inoculated with a healthy microbiome, that it is preserved, that it is protected from interventions like food preservatives, pesticides, any of the things that would disrupt it.
And any time you have a pathology, understanding his root cause so that you can fix the root cause rather than you know inflict pharmaceutical X on it.
Um, that's the right way to go.
Um, you know, so in some ways absolutely.
I mean, you hit the nail on the head.
We have to start off with maternal child health.
And one of the things I have going is called the maternal child initiative.
I have a lecture called Mothers' Microbiomes and Minds because it affects that.
And so we start off with prenatal care that includes here's a simple solution to a complex problem.
Um famous last words, right?
No, no, no, no, no.
I I I would I would say actually, it's not that every simple solution to a complex problem is a good solution, but the problems in a complex system almost have to be simple in order for them to be plausible.
Yeah, yeah.
So we start off, and I have Asha proposed this, and I have given presentations to some departments of public health on this at different states.
And 40% of the pregnancies in many states, 40 to 50 percent are actually uh covered by Medicaid, which I was surprising to me, but I guess not to most people.
Um, but we start off with maternal child health and having the mother work at not transmitting the bad bacteria from her to her child.
Now they have shown you you won't believe these stats either, but you can look them up.
If you do maternal intervention, not only will the child have fewer issues like cavities, age two and four, it goes all the way to age 19, where they had to stop the research because they had become adults.
So it goes at least to age 19.
At least to age 19.
As far as we know, it could go all the way through their entire life if you get a good microbiome to begin with.
Now my mother really believed in oral hygiene very strongly.
I have like three or four.
I'm in my mid-70s.
I have well, I have five or six little restorations that were done because they didn't have sealants back then.
They had deep pits, they just put silver filling in, one of which has fallen out.
I haven't replaced it.
It was just done preventatively back then.
Um, but it's because I got a good microbiome to begin with, because she was a fanatic.
So they have shown that you get the parents knowing, hit the parents understand no, you cannot eat for two, you can't have candy bars because you're pregnant.
That's a really bad idea.
You start with a xylitol gum.
You can also use probiotics, but just a xylitol gum has great efficacy.
And then if you look at the studies, like the P PAC study that was done in Malawi by Kirsty Argyard.
She's one of my heroes.
She's head of maternal fetal health that was at Baylor University in Houston.
They reduced preterm birth by 24%, maybe 26%.
It was like 24-26%.
That alone, if you just look at monetary savings, saves many billions of dollars.
So wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
They reduced the number of babies who were born.
Yeah.
Um, by more than a quarter.
Yes.
With roughly xylitol gum, was it?
Xylitol gum.
So that is amazing.
Now, my listeners will be familiar with xylitol from my conversations with Dr. Jones, with Nate Jones, uh, with Dr. Clancy.
Xylitol is a five-carbon sugar.
And I'm left in each of these conversations with both the impression that this is a key to radical improvements in health.
You've pointed to the fact that it's economically a slam dunk.
But here's what I'm left with.
Why is our relationship with xylitol so disturbed?
What happened?
I don't know, because homeless sapiens, we were exposed to a lot.
You know, I I like to talk about the same things you like to talk about.
Marine isotope stage six.
You know, where we were living on the caves on the coasts of Africa and so forth, and we ate all those tubers that were loaded with xylitol, ribidol, and nicitol and manitol and all that, and we had no problems.
Uh humans, mitochondria, we have uh our microchondria break down xylitol.
There's xylitol dehydrogenase enzyme.
We can utilize it as energy, which is a God's gift.
Yeah, when you look at things that separate us from other animals, that's one of the things that's separates us right there.
But um, yeah, if you go on following through with this whole logical thing, the return on investment is supposedly at 11 to 1.
So that's your return.
You save 11 dollars every dollar you spend on five carbon shards.
Yeah, on the xylitol gum.
It's so simple, they just continue it during the first few years of life.
You reduce the cavity rate by anywhere between 71 and 75% on those kids up to age five.
You the the state, the governments, the insurance companies, the patients, everyone benefits, but it's not just from reduction of cavities.
We know that those people with increased cavities end up having increased periodontal disease.
Now, we know that there's great research following all this.
There's a paper that came out, Turku Finland, published in JAMA network open in 2019.
They follow kids who had a lot of dental disease from childhood until adulthood.
The ones who had all the dental disease compared to the control group, they're the ones had early onset cardiovascular disease.
There's no question anymore.
Our NHANE studies here in the United States.
When we ignore oral health, we ignore all health.
There's even a phrase out there that's famous now.
No health without oral health.
That makes perfect sense.
But let me just emphasize it.
We still have a mystery as to why a xylitol intervention is so useful that implies that there should be more xylitol in our diets than there is.
Well, I think the mystery is we haven't really consumed the xylitol.
We evolved to consume for a long time.
But if you look back, and this is from uh a piece of birch tar from 10,000 years ago out of Scandinavia, they found human DNA embedded within this pete uh piece of tar.
So humans were chewing on birch tar 10,000 years ago.
And to this day, if you go to Russia, you go to Russian sauna where they get you really hot and they beat you with uh the branches and they put you in the ice bath and you sit in this pine box.
They give you the birch tar the chew on for oral cleansing.
So we've known about this for at least 10,000 years.
Okay, uh, help me out.
Birch tar is what?
Birch tar has xylitol in it.
No, but what is it?
It's just uh sap.
Sap.
That's what I was thinking of.
Okay.
Okay, so birch sap has xylitol in it, and there is evidence of people seeking it out.
I I will just say 10,000 years.
Okay, so 10,000 years, that's a lot.
That's uh like back to the beginning of agriculture.
Natufian phase, too, in the beginning of beer, horticulture and beer.
And you can't forget that beer was an answer, but part of the problem.
Beer saved civilization and allowed Levant, you know, period to exist and the and the building of those small little beginning of cities and towns because they have water they could drink.
Ergo, you know the story, the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock as they ran out of uh chip beer.
Um, and you know, people working on the pyramids, the Egyptians would get their special bonus of beer and all that.
But Egyptians, the wealthy had a lot of cavities.
You can say where they came from, the wart.
When you make beer, you got the leftover beet, uh the barley and the wheat and everything.
If you have you ever eaten that out of curiosity, have you tried it?
Nope.
It's like eating sweet porridge, it is so sweet.
All the sugar has come out of it.
I mean, and I could I I was given some hot from a brewer.
He says, Here, try this.
I said, Who was it gonna taste like?
Says, oh, it's yummy.
And I go, Wow, is that sweet?
I said, Do you guys add sugar to it?
He goes, No, that's just the sugar coming out.
And the wealthy would buy that and keep that and eat that all the time.
So they did have a problem with those people had problems with dental decay.
That's why you can always go back and find the unusual cases of people who had the issues with decay, whereas the normal population, I don't care if you're looking at the middle ages and so on, had a much lower rate than the noble people.
Interesting.
Um, okay.
So, as far as I'm concerned, and there's nothing wrong with a persistent mystery.
Um, but as far as I'm concerned, there's still a persistent mystery as to why we are deficient in five carbon sugars, even if some uh ancestors had ways of supplementing.
Well, we we moved away from them.
Fill it in.
If you if you know these tubers, the tubers, those big large tubers, those massive big tubers, yeah, those are in sub-Saharan Africa.
Okay.
So we moved.
They moved with us.
No one took them and planted them in Ireland.
They planted those things in Ireland that never have been the famine.
Yeah.
Potato famine.
I'm still I'm still struggling because you would imagine that the deficiency would result in us having discovered some new agricultural symbiont that supplemented correctly.
And it's pretty far afield here.
But I would also argue that even a tuber that didn't start out with this capacity would likely evolve the capacity to augment um because it has an interest in the population that is cultivating it surviving well.
So anyway, I still think there's a mystery.
Yeah, I know what you're saying.
However, the xylitol implants help preserve plants.
When you take strawberries, and you know you clean them and put them in your fridge.
A few days later, they can be pretty nasty.
It doesn't take long.
To preserve them, you take some xylitol powder, the sugar, xylatol sugar, sprinkle it on top of them, put them in the fridge.
They'll still be good like two weeks later.
Interesting.
Because it pathogens, a lot of bacteria cannot utilize this five carbon sugar.
And that's one of the reasons plants have it.
It was to protect the plant itself.
It doesn't take much.
I mean, you do find it, of course, in corn, you know, and the corn husk, you find it that's where a lot of xylitol comes from now is corn husk.
You do find it in the sh outside of the sugar cane to protect the sugar cane.
So you find it in a protective way, but I think that basically we would throw that stuff away.
And we never ate it ourselves.
As humans, you know, as humans, what we would do is go after the prime cuts and not eat the good liver that we should be eating.
Right, of course.
Um I will say anecdotally, um, it is often described in places where people harvest sugar cane, that you would expect that they had rotten teeth, and the opposite is true, which I've heard attributed to the mechanical fact of the roughness of sugar cane uh effectively scraping bad things off the teeth, but it would make a lot of sense if they were getting xylitol in conjunction with all of the glucose.
Yeah, but see the the kids who get the cavities, like in Egypt, which I've seen, um, they they do it because they and they drink the sugar water from the sugar cane.
Yeah, that won't happen.
It's a lot of work to chew to chew on sugar cane.
I just did that with uh a couple of grandkids, and it was it's a lot of work that is a lot of work, it's very tough.
Yes, tough stuff to chew on it, and they got bored real quick, and there's a lot of fiber left over, and you know actually, I'm sure at one time somebody was actually cooking that and trying to consume that fiber because that fiber probably is pretty good for you.
Yeah, no, it might be I I'm guessing on that.
Uh but you know, again, we talk about all the problems.
We haven't been really talking that much about solutions.
We started with the maternity child health, which is gonna be a phenomenal thing.
I I want every state doing it.
I want every state to pick up on this.
I wish the federal government would actually try to help in one way or the other.
Recently, um, just a few days ago, they published a study using uh arginine and toothpaste, and the high arginine toothpaste outperforms the fluoride toothpaste, which is no surprise.
Yep.
Uh, there's gonna be a tons of these research studies coming out now.
People were afraid to do it.
Uh I don't want to make it sound that way, but in a way, it's hard to I know this.
It's hard to publish something that people don't want published, because all it takes is one reviewer to not like your results, and they can make your life heck.
Yeah.
Well, and people need to understand that the published literature is a mess because of this, that peer review is a destructive force, and um that effectively science is supposed to tell you what you need to know rather than what you want to hear.
But a system in which people are in a position to suppress viewpoints that they view as hostile is one in which things that look like science are not scientific.
So now there's been a little bit of a mood shift.
We're seeing all these new articles coming out with other ways to improve oral hygiene without damaging the more beneficial bacteria, the symbionts.
We we can do it.
have the knowledge you're going to see more and more products out there that are remineralizing products to help reverse But we have to start with the children and get their biosis correct or dysbiosis, which includes working with a nasal microbiome and includes working with proper breathing, proper food, the first 1,000 days.
Okay.
I've tried to summarize that.
Okay, we've got the kids put off to the side.
Let's go now to the rest of us.
David Wong back in 2006 or 8 suggested saliva omics, and now it's a reality.
And what is surprising to many people is that saliva contains everything you need to know about a person.
You can, and in fact, at Northwestern, we're looking at over 1,100 to 1,500 biomarkers in saliva.
You can diagnose everything.
You can diagnose how well the chemotherapy is working.
The grim age.
All this is potentially possible.
Just recently for breast cancer, diagnosing breast cancer from tears and from saliva.
Um salivary tests for Alzheimer's for early diagnosis, which is a godsend.
Diagnosing early means you can reverse a lot of things.
You have to catch it early.
Remove.
What is what does one do if you catch it early?
Oh, for one thing, diet has been shown, and it was just published again to be as important as genetics.
Okay.
So remove the sugar.
When Mayo Clinic said that diabetes is that Alzheimer's is diabetes type three, they were not exaggerating.
Sugar has a lot to do with it.
Treat the periodional disease.
Get those gum pathogens out of there.
Get rid of them completely.
It can be done.
You know what?
You can still have those pathogens and not have bleeding gums.
This is the biggest issue we have with dentistry, is they go, they look at bleeding gums, they look at pocket depth, how how deep are the pockets around the teeth.
That's not it.
You have to actually look at the bacteria themselves and look at the strains themselves and look at the metabolites themselves.
So with saliva omics, you can look at everything the protein, the genomics, the stripent transcriptomics, you can look at all the RNA, everything that's in the mouth.
You can know exactly how to treat it because now we have this not to go away.
We have xylitol and probiotics, and we can throw now.
It's a prebiotic.
Okay, so we got prebiotics, probiotics, and another Peptides.
Okay.
So fill in those three terms prebiotic, probiotic, and peptide.
Yeah.
So what you want to do is the prebiotic is to get rid of the bad bacteria, encourage growth of the good bacteria.
The probiotics, the good bacteria, often replacing ones you no longer have.
Okay, look at the HUDSA tribe studies.
Compared to Europeans, they have 124 additional species that are important bacterial species that were missing.
Roughly about 20% of important species are missing in us that they have.
If you look at that same Hodset tribe area, you know, they just had that study a few years ago on their occlusion, how their teeth fit together, how they breathe, and all that.
They have really good bites, vast majority of them, and they have their wisdom teeth in.
I don't think people have looked at that research.
So it's just still recently the hunter gathers had a better occlusion.
Of course, Weston Price talked about that a lot.
So that kind of brings the whole airway thing in.
But going back to saliva omics, you look at a person, you know which bacteria they're missing, you know which pathogens they have, you can tailor it.
With peptides, you can use these antimicrobial peptides that can be more tailored.
You can place them where you need them.
So peptides are short proteins.
Yes.
Um what kinds of things are you talking about and what role are they playing?
Well, here's a common peptide insulin.
Okay.
But peptides can be used to stimulate growth to heal and to get rid of.
So you can use peptides that could be gently, you know, inserted around the teeth to kill, you could use multiple peptides to kill off the bad bacteria and cause the gums to heal, and then reseed.
So I I'm not even sure if we ever need to do the oral microbial transplants.
You know, with the kids with autism, the fecal matter transplants did a big deal.
But I'm even thinking that if we get started uh early enough of people using the prebiotics, the xylitol, the probiotics, and then the peptides, we could have a winning combination.
And 15 years from now, you might be looking back at this podcast, going like, oh yeah, we were talking about the PPP back then, and it's not the people's public uh propaganda wing.
But you're so what you're effectively describing is an analog to gardening.
That may not be obvious at the moment.
But when we garden, Heather and I use the phrase that we are intervening in competition between plants, right?
If you just let a patch of land go, you'll have certain superior competitors.
And when you garden, you're intervening to make some creature that might be inferior in if you just let the place go fallow, make it a superior competitor.
You can do that by pulling out the otherwise superior competitor.
You can do it by changing the environment so it's more hospitable to the thing you're trying to grow.
But what you're describing is intervening in the mouth in ways that favor the good uh symbionts and disfavor the pathogens.
Am I right?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And it everything goes kind of downhill.
Normally, everything goes from lips down through the anus, right?
Usually, unless you've been out partying too much, so it doesn't go the other direction.
Or if you have noravirus, it goes the other direction.
Okay, or both directions, who cares?
Uh so what happens is if we if we can get it healthy here, it gets healthier as it goes down.
Because these pathogens, uh, we did bring this up.
They survive going through the stomach because of PPIs and Tums, and then we clear cut the gut with antibiotics, so those pathogens can actually establish their colonies that the symbionts would not have allowed them to do.
We got rid of the really good bacteria, that's why you see such a relationship.
A great study of Europe, uh, looking at three million children in Scandinavian countries.
What is it maybe four?
And they found like uh 3,400 cases of uh celiac disease.
Computer showed the AI relationship of all of them to early antibiotic use.
Multiple doses of antibiotic use, and then what they did is it killed off the gluten metabolizing bacteria that normally breaks down your gluten into the 33 MER peptides and so on, beyond that, so you don't have that immunogenic peptide to cause the immune response.
And you know, it's in medicine.
I have to tell you, this is to me, it's just hysterical.
There is an article I just read.
What was it on?
I think it was Parkinson's.
And the author said, Parkinson's is a result of genetics and environment.
And of course, you know, I started laughing so hard.
I had to talk to one of my one of the residents about it, too.
I said, Yeah, well, that's like everything.
Right.
The environment.
That's like saying baseball is the result of physics.
Yeah.
I I laugh so hard, going like, oh, you just said nothing.
Yep.
You just said that's really nothing.
Yeah.
And of course, the there was uh uh oral microbiome relationship to Parkinson's too and the breakdown of the dopamine, why the dopamine breaks down then later the leva dopamine, and that's why dopa.
That's why they have a probiotic for it.
If you go through all the literature, you find for almost all these things that have a probiotic that shows benefits.
And okay, it's and treating sleep apnea too.
Because even with Alzheimer's, that too.
Probiotic, you're using xylitol as an example.
A probiotic is effectively a molecule that uh facilitates the growth of the good symbionts.
Oh, no, no, the probiotic is a bacteria.
Is what I'm describing.
Um the probiotic is the good symbiont itself.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Because there's many of them, like Lactopicelli Rotari, as you probably have heard that one.
That one, they postulate were in dinosaurs.
It's in humans, pigs, chickens, everything.
And it's been around a very, very long time.
It has co-evolved with us.
That's the whole au beyond again.
It co-evolved with us.
We need it.
We have to replace it.
We have to get it back into our system, and then we have to get our food back and remove what created the issue to begin with.
I know we're I'm beating a dead horse or dark horse.
Hopefully, the dark horse is not dead.
Yep.
Um, all right.
So I want to add just one other thing here.
I don't know, uh, presumably you're well versed in this, but uh back when I was a college student, I started thinking about adaptive evolution, and it was immediately clear to me that the story that was in my textbook about the appendix couldn't possibly be right.
Yes, the appendix is this vestigial organ that just happens to go, you know, gangrenous and kill lots of people.
No way.
Um, but I wasn't sure what it was for.
And then years later, I ran across evidence that suggests that it was a mechanism that not only had my instinct been right and the appendix couldn't possibly be a vestigial cecum because the there was no phylogenetic support for that hypothesis.
There was no ancestor that had the sea come uh that would have accounted for it being vestigial in us, but that what the appendix actually is a locale that maintains an isolate of the healthy gut microbiome,
so that when you do get sick with something, when bacterial warfare breaks out in your gut and you have diarrhea and you lose your gut microbiome, then it can be re-inoculated from the appendix, which has kept it in isolation.
So the question is we're talking about let's say autistic kids whose gut microbiomes are wildly distorted, presumably they do not have a healthy isolate of a healthy gut microbiome in their appendix, but is there a therapeutic approach in which the appendix could be restored to a useful function in modern people by maintaining some sort of ideal uh ideal community of gut microorganisms?
Yeah, that was the Eve project.
The Eve project in Sweden, and they started this before they really were computerized.
They started this with paper charts.
They looked at people who had never gone In for illness to for medical care.
They started to isolate this population.
They actually did it.
I actually have the book here about the Eve project.
It was signed by one of the Medvics.
They um isolated them and then went to great uh depth of back then.
This was really cutting edge work on maintaining their gut microbiome, even supporting all of the anaerobic bacteria and keeping them alive and keeping them going so they can maintain a standard, which is like having a fake appendix.
That they could go back to looking at this.
You're talking about externally technologically maintaining a proper community that you can inoculate with as needed.
Yeah, and they actually did make capsules out of this.
Um they would take some of the bacteria and they would make these special capsules that would have this good microbiome.
There is a company here in the United States that does it for you can only use it for C. diff.
That's the only thing they allow it for C. diffacil infection, but they made it there in um Sweden.
We cannot get it here in the United States.
But they it's an interesting project because they found that these people who were so healthy, they tend to live coastal towns, not big ones, smaller ones, and they would tend to eat a lot of seafood and they were very outdoorsish.
And by George, you think about it, you think that's probably where we were meant to live, evolutionary wise.
And they were very, very healthy.
And it was a funny story.
I was lecturing at the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting in uh Washington, DC.
I went out to grab myself a little dinner, and I was kind of in my mind practicing a presentation.
The hostess asked what I was thinking about, and I said, When I'm concentrating eating, uh I'm going to talk a little about about the Eve project, actually.
And she said, actually, a uh waitress here was part of the Eve project out of Sweden.
She told us about that, but none of us believed her.
I go, well, that makes sense because it sounds so weird how they picked the name Eve.
And so I'm sitting here, and all of a sudden, this waitress comes over, strikingly beautiful, healthy young lady, um, sat down and talked to me for quite a bit about her whole thing about in the Eve project, how she came from a small town, uh coastal town of Sweden.
Uh her family, no history anywhere in her family of any cancer, da-da-da-da, and how they've gone through all this testing, everything.
But she came to the United States to go to school at um uh not American University, uh, yeah, I think it was American University in uh Georgetown.
Am I right?
Uh and anyway, and as soon as she got to the United States, she said, I got sick all the time.
Yeah, just it only took a couple months.
She was sick all the time.
I've heard that from so many people.
Me too.
I've heard that frequently.
Uh people come from Europe and and they attribute it to the food.
It's the food.
And then on the opposite end, we have Americans who can't eat anything who go to Italy and they can have pizza and beer and bread.
I I can I can attest to this.
Uh I have a severe wheat allergy.
I can't eat any wheat.
I'm religious about avoiding it.
And I've always wanted to test the uh the claim that some people make that European wheat doesn't affect them, but I I never had enough time in Europe, and I never wanted to ruin a week over it.
And finally, uh this last year, Heather and I were in Spain for enough time that I was like, you know what?
I'm gonna run the experiment.
And wouldn't you know it?
European wheat did not trigger me.
I was I was stunned, I was sure it was going to.
No, there's there's so many stories I can tell you about that because uh there was even an Austrian bakery in in Chicago, it's no longer there, but I would talk to the baker, he would bring in his unbleached flour from Europe.
He would not bake in Chicago with any American flower because they he kept saying they bleach it, they put things in.
Now, when you bleach flour, you make it white, but you also kill the normal microbiome of the flower.
And that normal microbiome, by the way, I actually did a study on this, and it's actually published.
You can look at a couple of my published studies.
We we went to uh what's that one chain?
Golden Harvest.
And their air is full of Rothia area breaking down the gluten.
You could possibly even get yourself reinoculated with the bacteria you need by just getting a cup of coffee there and spending an hour just breathing in the air.
It's floating around everything.
I would sample the countertops and the hands, the bakers, and it's loaded with gluten metabolizers to break it down.
But there's for your guests for all of the audience.
Key thing, you can buy Italian pasta made in Italy.
Look for the word bronze.
Because that's essential.
They roll it with bronze rollers.
And they use bronze impellers.
And bronze maintains the microbiome.
We use stainless steel.
It does not.
Interesting.
Yeah.
That is interesting.
Um, I do crazy research.
I there's uh we have a reputation for doing really crazy research, like whole genome deep sequencing on special groups of patients because we want to understand the genetics behind it too.
What affects the nasal?
The first big real whole genome deep sequencing study of the nasal microbiome of the nose was mine.
Fascinating.
I know that's what everyone says.
Wait, this guy's a pediatric dentist, but he does all because I'm in the department of odalaryngology.
You know, at Northwestern, we're we're considered part of the overall health care.
So I'm part of the Institute of Public Health and Manag and Management.
I'm part of the OSHA group.
We we do total care.
So we have nutritionists, acupuncturists, everyone involved with total care.
All right, I have to ask you this, even though it's kind of not on topic, but you say you have action acupunctures.
My sense is that acupuncture works, that the Chinese have a metaphorical explanation for how it works that doesn't line up with our physical understanding or our physiological understanding, which doesn't mean it doesn't work.
But do you have a is there a way of describing the mechanism of action that fits with what we understand from let's say Western science for lack of a better term?
No, no, I wish I did.
Um, I would be lying if I said I knew how it worked.
Um, I do know a lot of people who've used acupuncturists and have had had success.
Yep.
So there's gotta be something there.
I could postulate and guess wildly.
No, no, it's probably electrically.
I mean, it's probably has something to do with neural impulses, it has to be doing something to communicate back to the brain, and then the brain communicates on.
Um, it's like we mentioned the perinasal sinuses and nitric oxide.
What's one of the fastest ways of getting to the brain?
Through the air.
I don't know.
Up the nose, right?
Okay, little cocaine, you know, stuff.
It's up there.
I mean, before you know it, you feel the results.
Uh back hey, back in the day when I first started with ENT, they still would talk about the glory days of using cocaine before doing nose surgery.
Oh, as an anesthetic, yeah, yeah, because it's a great local anesthetic, stops bleeding, all that stuff.
But no, it's up there, and that's where there's also issues because of our changed nasal microbiome.
Things can get into the brain that should not be Getting into the brain, because that is a direct pathway to the brain.
And oddly enough, um, you can stimulate that pathway, just going back to acupuncture with a red light.
You've seen these where you can put the red light LEDs up the nose, yeah, and goes up, the red light shines up into the ptergosphenal palating ganglia and or sphenol ganglia.
Um it has like three names Meckles ganglia.
Um, and it changes your blood pressure.
It drops your blood pressure.
It lowers it, yeah.
Yeah.
And it does so religiously.
So 15 minutes a day, you can maintain your your overall blood pressure by using photobiomodulation, and that goes back to airway.
And I know that when you do that, you change your nasal microbiome too.
Interesting.
All right.
It all is connected.
That's certainly the case.
So I want to make sure we don't miss any of the major threads that you're introducing here.
I realize we've scratched the surface on everything.
We've talked about the um disruption of the microbiome, especially in the mouth and the nose.
We've talked about a huge number of pathologies that seem to be the result of that disruption.
We've talked about the mother fetal connection.
Um, and we've talked about some remedies for older people who've been damaged by disruptions.
What have we missed?
Well, you've you summarized it all.
Um, we have this catastrophe that has occurred.
Um, much of it driven by the newest revolution in food, which is the fast food revolution.
I am hoping that people in power will actually take this seriously and they will work hard to reduce this, like they have in Europe.
And the difference people tell me in Europe has been pretty tremendous.
We're paying a fortune for this convenience of fast food.
We're paying unbelievable price in quality of life years, life years, and financial costs, right?
We've talked about the the importance of these microbiomes, the nasal and oral microbiome, and we can test these too.
We have the technology and we have AI to help us with all this.
And we've talked about using prebiotics and probiotics and peptides.
The prebiotics, they're here right now.
Xylitol spray, you can put it up in your nose, you can choose xylitol gum, you can use a xylatol toothpaste, you can use a xylaton mouthwash.
All that is available now, and there are no side effects.
And then, of course, probiotics.
Oh, I wouldn't say no side effects.
I would say they're all positive.
Yeah, yeah.
They're all positive effects.
Uh, but and the probiotics, they're getting there.
I mean, there's a lot of good probiotic products out there now, and I hope that we have more.
There's a whole bunch of beneficial bacteria that we have not allowed to be used as probiotics.
And there are bacteria, and I wonder why they won't let us use these strains that drop your uh your cholesterol levels.
They drop your LDLs.
I don't know why they're not letting us use these bacteria, because some people have them, and those people have it in their gut.
They can uh eat anything they want, and they're uh darn cholesterol levels are just perfectly fine, but for some reason, most of us have to do statins.
I I cannot think of a single reason other than the psychopathic nature of pharma.
Yeah, I just can't think about any reason.
So we talked about zoonotic origins of these keystone pathogens that have wrecked throughout the body that wreaked havoc throughout the body.
So um, hey, the good news is that we have uh a future.
We know what's going on, and more and more people are becoming aware of it.
And I want to thank you so much for letting me be on this podcast to talk to people about it.
And I and actually talking to you has always been something I wanted to do because I Have been dabbling in evolution forever.
I love all those phrases.
I don't believe in evolution because if it worked, I wouldn't still be here.
Well, uh, it's been a real pleasure having you on.
I know I've learned a ton, and uh, you know, I'm both excited and as is so often the case of late, just uh frustrated by the degree to which um we have waited too long for remedies that are right within reach.
This does not require some high-tech understanding that just a matter of fixing a microbiome that we evolved with, and that's comparatively simple.
Um so anyway, thank you for uh for joining me for this podcast.
