Oral hygiene

The podcast for curious and passionate dental hygienists.

Research questions the accuracy of oral health advice given by non-professionals by Today's RDH Research.

Maternal oral health is a determining factor in a child's risk factor of decay.

Many people don't realize that a mother's dental practices while pregnant and after the child's birth can affect a child's risk of caries as they age.

We are joined here today by Dr. Wyman Chan again and Dr. Nikki Shah.

Nikki Shah is part of DOCS, Direct Oral Care Solutions.

He's a general dentist.

He's one of us, one of the good guys, and, uh, he's been in this game long enough since he made some observations.

Having treated countless patients, Dr. Gene has developed a keen eye for the detection of systemic problems that first appear in the mouth.

Oftentimes, poor oral health is the silent harbinger of more widely spread dysfunction or disease.

Think of your gums, your teeth, and your tongue as the proverbial canaries in the coal mine.

Dr. Gene, then, is like the augurer interpreting the flight of those prophetic birds.

I see wear on teeth.

So many things that open a window into a person.

And oral health works the other way around, too, because when, when your mouth isn't healthy it affects your entire body.

Sure.

Go to your dentist.

Take care of your oral health.

Brush and floss regularly.

I think it's become clear that we need to do that.

Number five is to, to maintain a healthy body weight.

And then last but not least, go to see your dentist.

Take good care of your teeth and your oral health.

Oh, man, you just gave them a playbook for lowering the risk of cancer.

Peptides are pretty amazing.

And I wrote an article on, I have many articles on oral care on our site, but there's a newer one.

And we talk about the use of peptides sort of before surgery, after surgery, or just in general for oral care.

That frontier, it already exists, but it's so huge because we have about 70 peptides.

Peptides are all made from short chain amino acids.

We of course don't want women smoking or vaping.

We want to encourage oral health because oral health plays a big role in how well we digest our nitrates, recycle them, and reutilize them to make nitric oxide, and we can get to that in a minute.

So some of the things we do to protect oral health are to avoid antimicrobial oral care products in the, in the mouth.

So it's the things like the mouth rinses, mouthwashes, really heavily antiseptic oral care products, things like that.

It plays a big role in how we populate the oral microbiome And the oral microbiome carries at least nine different families of microbes, and within each family are dozens of individual species.

They're pulled in with a very specific transport protein called sialin, pulls the nitrates from the bloodstream into the oral cavity, into the salivary glands.

All day long as we salivate, we are excreting stored nitrates that, from that spinach salad the day before, where [laughs] we've recycled the nitrates, we're secreting them into the mouth, and now we start the process of augmenting our nitric oxide production all over again with the help of these microbes.

There is a big connection, you'll hear in the oral systemic health world, that oral health is the starting point for cardiovascular health.