So this is for people as well, if you're struggling with gum health, but particularly for people who are trying to repair or prevent cavities. Stop injuring your teeth! You are basically putting your teeth at risk.
It is possible to protect your teeth; you just have to think it out. You may have questions about cavities, and today in this video, I want to talk about why you get cavities and how we have three really simple and affordable ways for you to protect yourself from cavities, stop them from forming, and even help you to reverse them if you already have a cavity or you've been told you have a cavity in a tooth. As a dentist, I always gave my patients the opportunity to reverse a cavity.
You may have never heard of people reversing cavities. I felt it was really important because if we could reverse a cavity and avoid a filling, that is a huge advantage for anybody and everybody. The problem with a filling is it doesn't address why you got the cavity.
A filling doesn't solve the problem. It is like a Band-Aid on the top of a wound. We want to know why that cavity happened.
What I teach people is that cavities are a long process. They are a process of the teeth gradually softening, disintegrating, and turning into this hole or cavity. Now, during that process of softening, we can come in there and actually harden it up, get rid of the infection, and rebuild the tooth with natural minerals that are in your mouth.
So how do we do it? What are these three easy, simple things that anybody can do if you've been told you have a cavity or if you simply want to prevent them from forming? Well, the first thing is to realize that every time you eat, every time you drink anything, you are thinning the liquid in your mouth, you're thinning its consistency, and you are basically putting your teeth at risk either for a loss of minerals or for minerals to actually exit your teeth in a huge quick burst.
That occurs when we eat meals because if the meals have any kind of acidity, they are potentially going to pull, almost like a vacuum, on the outside of your tooth. If you're eating, say, a grapefruit or a lemon, or you're drinking lemonade, this is going to pull minerals—literally pull them out of your teeth. It's a process of chelation with your saliva.
We don't need to go into all the chemistry, but it pulls minerals out of your teeth. If you eat anything sugary, it feeds bacteria that, in essence, do the same kind of thing—they create acids, and these acids immediately—if you haven't got time to go brush your teeth or clean your teeth or clean them before you eat—this is going to occur. So instead of getting worked up about what you're eating or what you're drinking, eat and drink and be happy, and at the end of that eating and drinking period, which ideally you want to keep to about 30 to 60 minutes maximum, what you need to do now is stop eating and drinking, and therefore stop injuring your teeth.
Ideally, if you can rinse your mouth with some water—and I say rinse, just swish it a little bit around your teeth before you drink it down. You're not necessarily spitting it out; you're just washing your mouth with either water or some other safe liquid. A safe liquid would be something like whole milk, which is very good for teeth.
It's full of the calcium and the phosphates that teeth like. So a glass of whole milk or a little bit of whole milk at the end of a meal would be really helpful. Similarly, an unsweetened yogurt, even though it's somewhat acidic, has the calcium and the phosphates, and it would be protective of your teeth.
So, I think, you know, depending on the foods that you like the best, the five ideal foods to end your meal: I would say cheese is always an easy one; salty nuts are usually around in most people's snack break rooms. You can get some salty nuts. And then, obviously, water is a good way to wash your teeth clean.
Milk would be another one. If you have the opportunity to get whole milk, you could end your meal with some milk. And ideally, of course, the one that I love the most is xylitol because xylitol does even more.
Xylitol helps to feed the good bacteria in your mouth while you are not eating and drinking. After the meal, it's actually promoting better oral health after your meal than you had before it. The second thing that xylitol does is it stimulates a special flow of saliva into your mouth.
It doesn't just wait for the saliva to come into your mouth, which it will do at the end of a meal, but xylitol has a hygroscopic pull. It means it literally reels the saliva into your mouth, and that saliva, because it's pulled there by the xylitol, is going to be more densely packed with minerals than if it had just flowed into your mouth. Anyone who is struggling to repair a cavity, anyone who's been told they have a cavity and they really, really want to get rid of this, if you give yourself a period of about 3 to 6 months and make sure you're doing all your eating and drinking in these little packaged contained periods of time, followed by a tooth-protective any form will work.
You can get xylitol in a granular form in most countries, and you just take a fifth of a teaspoon or a tiny little bit and put it in the center of your mouth. Finland, I know you guys have had xylitol candies and chewing gum for decades too—friendly xylitol mints and gum and chewable candies—and most of those will work really well. You just don't want to chew the gum for too long.
The xylitol comes out of the gum within two to five minutes, and it's best to get the xylitol in your mouth and then get rid of the gum. Don’t keep chewing and chewing. And this sort of feeds into what we just talked about because the problem with continuously chewing the gum is you've now got rid of the xylitol.
It's come out of the gum, it's done its work, it's brought the good mineral-dense saliva into your mouth. If you carry on chewing and chewing, you are going to start generating a different kind of saliva. It comes from the mastication—the squeezing of the gland that's in your cheeks.
So, the importance of mouth rest is to give your teeth time to mineralize. Mineralize means that minerals that are in your liquids, in the saliva, in the spit in your mouth, simply need time to percolate, to go into the surface of your teeth. You don't need special toothpaste.
You don't need anything except to give your teeth the time. If you have just had xylitol right before this period of time, you will also be feeding the good bacteria in your mouth, and because xylitol stimulates a flow of special saliva, that stimulated saliva not only has more minerals in it, but it also has special immune cells that help heal your gum tissue. So this is for people as well if you're struggling with gum health, but particularly for people who are trying to repair or prevent cavities.
Simple thing: eat, drink, and then enjoy. An hour is good; if you go longer, you get even more benefits. You get the benefits of producing nitric oxide in your mouth, and that will help your heart health, your breathing, and your brain health.
So I would recommend one to two hours of mouth resting so that not only do you benefit your teeth and stop preventing cavities, but you also help your cognition—how you think. You'll feel brighter, you'll breathe better, and your heart will be having a better time pumping. It’ll be more relaxed; it'll be better for your blood pressure.
So all of these wonderful things occur from mouth resting. So, along with xylitol, which helps stimulate good saliva flow, there are other things you can do that will make your saliva more mineralizing. One of them is to make sure that you have the best possible gut health.
That would be taking maybe a probiotic; certainly, you know, eating a fiber-rich diet would be my recommendation so that you're going to absorb as many minerals as possible from the foods you eat. This is another reason I think diet is so important. I recommend a lot of green leafy vegetables and salads because we know they contain nitrates, which get absorbed through your healthy gut into your body.
It circulates around your body, and an hour after eating—this is what's so incredible—your salivary glands transfer these nutrients into the gland that then transports it into your mouth. There is a direct exchange between the blood vessels that have carried these nutrients from your gut around your body, and they get picked up by your salivary glands, and then condensed, changed a little bit, concentrated, and then pumped into your mouth. So, an hour after you've had a nice healthy meal, you will find that your mouth has these nutrients in your mouth ready to do the work we wanted them to do.
So, healthy diet is important for salivary health, for the health of your teeth. Alongside that, we can make that exchange work even better if you exercise. Exercise, as you can imagine, is going to circulate things around your body in healthy circulation, and exercises like yoga, to me, are very interesting because they also often are with your head down lower than your heart so that, potentially, you are percolating into your salivary glands, helping them get concentrated in contact with your circulation.
In other words, you're trying to put your body's circulation in good shape, in good contact with your salivary glands. Nature has its own rhythm, and this rhythm works—it's called a circadian rhythm. It has a 24-hour cycle.
You've probably heard of it because of going to sleep at night, the melatonin that's produced as the sun sets. And when the sun rises, you know, we wake up, and there are lots of things in our body that work on this clock—this 24-hour clock. Interestingly, our salivary health or salivary content works on the same 24-hour rhythm.
The thing that is most important to know, I think, is that it is worst at night. In the middle of the night, your salivary content is almost nil. It's not helping you; it's gone to sleep, which leaves your teeth in a nightmare situation if you didn't clean them or prepare them prior to going to sleep.
During these nighttime hours, when it's dark outside, your teeth are struggling to survive, and that's why I believe it's non-negotiable to care for your teeth in the best possible way right before you go to bed. And I say care for your teeth because it's not just brushing them. If you massage your gums, that's one thing that could get some circulation in them, but the toothpaste that you choose to use is critical.
If you choose a toothpaste because you think it's going to whiten your teeth, it may be sucking the minerals out of them, and you don't want to do that right before you go to bed at night. I would not advise a toothpaste with whitening. I would not advise a toothpaste with baking soda because that's going to strip away the mouth protection.
So, miswak sticks are pretty available in parts of the Middle East and Africa, in countries where you may not be able to get any of the products that I recommend that are part of my complete mouth care system. If you live in England, there are alternatives. In Australia and New Zealand, there is a company that will distribute the products that I recommend.
If you go to the video that's attached here, it will send you to, if you don't know about my complete mouth care system, exactly what to use and how to use the products. But they will protect your teeth at night when your mouth, your saliva, cannot—it doesn't have the ability to help you. Conversely, it's worth knowing that the best time for your saliva to help you is immediately after lunch.
So, make sure if you possibly can, if you're fighting cavities, your ideal scenario is to have a very healthy lunch with salads and greens and all these good things—beets and celery—and end with a tooth-protective food. Have some xylitol, whole milk, and then don't eat or drink for two hours in the afternoon. Those afternoon salivary hours are priceless.
Don't waste them sipping coffee, sipping soda, sipping anything. And if you're a worker who is awake at night and sleeps during the day, you can use the same principles. Think about going to work—maybe you clean your teeth with my complete mouth care system right before you go to work, have your meal, clean your teeth, and then don't eat or drink for as long as you can during the nighttime, early nighttime hours.
Then when you take a break, eat, and then have your 2-hour break. And then when you get home, prior to going to sleep during the daytime, you can use the complete mouth care system right before you go to sleep. And then, while you're sleeping, you will have the benefits of this daytime perfect salivary flow.
So, it is possible to protect your teeth; you just have to think it out, knowing that midday is the best, and that midnight is probably the worst saliva for your teeth. So, if you are now asking the question, "What about children? " I do have a video that is completely about how to look after children's teeth, and we'll link to it here.
But quickly, it's very similar. Just realize that cavities in baby teeth do not reverse. But children start getting adult teeth at the age of five, so preventing or reversing or using the same strategies should begin even in preschool children.
And sadly, America is so far behind in this. They've usually thought baby teeth don't matter. In Europe and countries that are the first, you know, they have the best oral health, they begin immediately when baby teeth come into the mouth, using xylitol.
Xylitol is the key there. They hand out xylitol in preschool during the ages of three and four. They understand about mouth resting—they chew the gum, throw it in the trash, and then don't eat or drink for hours afterward.
So they have shown, in the last 70 years, in some of these countries, that you can prevent cavities in children with these very simple, inexpensive techniques. Now, cleaning your child's teeth at night is important. They have the same problem with salivary flow at night; they don't have any benefit from their saliva.
The problem is that cleaning children's teeth is a challenge. If you can simply get them to wash their mouth, that is ideal. If you can get them to use—as they're old enough to rinse and spit, I would suggest a dilute 0.
05 sodium fluoride mouthwash for a child of five, six, seven years old. Toothbrushing is never going to be able to clean everywhere in a child's mouth. It's more of a game to play to make a happy attitude and maybe clean some of the plaque off their teeth, but rinsing, when they're old enough to know how to rinse and spit, is very important.
I would start doing that as soon as you feel safe they're not going to be drinking it. Then, after they've done that brushing for fun, the rinsing the best they can. Finally, I would give a child of any age, old enough to chew and eat, a little bit of xylitol, either as crystals if they're real tiny, or as a mint when they start to be able to deal having a story before bed.
As they go to sleep, they're going to be mouth resting. No more water, no more drinking, no more eating, no more snacking, no candies—nothing. Because then, while they're sleeping, the xylitol will be feeding the good bacteria in their mouth, setting them up for a lifetime of mouth health.
So, you're an adult trying to prevent cavities. I think in this video, it's made clear that it's about the mouth resting after meals and this period of time, along with the nighttime care, the products that you use to clean your teeth, how important that is, and the use of xylitol. Now, with children, as I mentioned, you can do the xylitol, you can do the night care, but what about this mouth resting?
You have a toddler—they don't want a mouth rest. They want to eat continuously. Believe me, I'm a mother of five.
I have eight and a half grandchildren, so I know the difficulties. And I would suggest that you learn, again, these foods, or at least understand why we choose these tooth-protective foods that have no sugar, they're not carbohydrates, and they're usually either salty or fatty. You can try and find the foods that your toddler or child would appreciate, and in those intervals between their so-called meals, maybe you can provide—if your child drinks milk, that's fine.
Put some, maybe, you cut the milk in with some water, but it's milky water in a bottle if they're going to be sipping in a sippy cup or have a bottle. You could also consider putting some xylitol the water up to dissolve the xylitol, but then you can chill it if your child likes cold water, and there'll be a little bit of xylitol in this liquid. That will taste better than plain water.
Often, children don't want to drink just plain water. You could also use avocado, carrots, apples, fibrous foods like that. I know children don't usually like celery, but some do.
And then there are nuts if your child's old enough and likes salty peanuts or little pieces of meat. There's nothing wrong with eating some chicken or some meat or, ideally, again, little pieces of cheese. So we have quite a selection in the fruits and vegetables, the nuts, the grains, and even dairy that is safe for teeth in between these times of major food eating.
snacks for 12 to 16 hours per day. You will be undoing all the good you do with your tooth care and protection.
