Nitric oxide

So I think I got to take the story back a little bit to help your listeners understand what it is.

We're going to be talking about nitric oxide.

That's the molecule that we're talking about and what it does in our bodies and how the scientific community came to understand what it is and how it functions.

Bizarrely, the story starts in a dynamite factory back in 1860, where Arthur Nobel invented nitroglycerin.

Yeah.

However, it also saved millions of people.

And so I'm going to tell you that story and that's how we'll get to nitric oxide.

So back in 1860, when Nobel invented nitroglycerin, he had hundreds of people working in his factory.

They're high in dietary nitrates.

These have nitrates that convert into nitric oxide under the right conditions.

And nitric oxide does one critical thing.

It tells your arteries to relax and widen.

That means lower blood pressure, smoother blood flow, less mechanical stress on your vessel walls.

If your arteries are slightly constricted all day long, What happens over years? What about decades? So are you wondering what are the conditions that allow dietary nitrates to be protectants? So when you eat nitrates like these greens from arugula or onions, they come packaged with vitamin C, polyphenols, magnesium, potassium, fiber.

These things matter because they guide nitrates down a protective pathway.

Nitrate becomes nitrite, which becomes nitric oxide.

But no, Stephen, it's a very important question.

Nitric oxide is a gas.

It's not a pill you can swallow.

You don't get it from beets, as many companies try to convince you.

Sure.

For the past 15

years, I was in academia as a professor of molecular medicine, really researching nitric oxide, how the human body makes it, what goes wrong in people that have lost the ability to make it, and then how do we restore that? And as you mentioned, we've made a lot of discoveries, have product technology.

Now we've got drug discovery.

There are even more nitrates found in celery, And in beet greens, they're very, very high in nitrates, even higher than bacon.

So we have bacteria in our mouth that actually use these nitrates and they convert them into nitric oxide, which is very healthy and very good for you and helps keep your blood pressure And also we secrete nitrate from our circulation into our saliva, into our mouth, just so the good bacteria can convert the nitrate into nitric oxide, which we then swallow and goes into our circulation.

Why is nitric oxide such a big deal? Well, for many reasons, but the one that's relevant to this video is that having a good supply of nitric oxide from the good bacteria in your mouth can help keep your blood pressure anywhere from three to 10 points lower than it would be otherwise.

And there's multiple research studies that shows this to be true.

I'll link to them down in the show notes.

So you don't want to decimate or annihilate or carpet bomb the good bacteria in your mouth.

When you do that, you actually don't get enough nitric oxide and therefore your blood pressure is higher than it could be otherwise.

And I suspect that for many people who used to take two or three blood pressure medications every day, They're now eating a very low carbohydrate diet and their blood pressure is better, but they still have to take a low dose of that one blood pressure medicine.