Bad Breath may not be JUST Bad Breath
I'm Dr. Michelle Hucke with Jax Beaches Family Dentistry. I'm the owner and operator and I have an amazing team. My team includes my partner, Dr. Elizabeth Alfuente. I also work with some other incredible dentists. I work with Dr. Kelly Carrothers and Dr. Elena Lenz. And then we are blessed to have an amazing surgeon. His name is Steven Strout. And we're talking today about a topic that I'm sure we've all discussed at one point in our life. A lot of times people will come to me and say, "Oh my friend or relative has terrible breath. And I'm just too embarrassed to talk to them about it". Sometimes people will ask me to talk to their loved one about it, which I have done before in the past. But one thing to be sure, and one reason I'm doing this webinar is that if you have bad breath, you have mouth odor or you know someone, especially if it's a loved one that has mouth odor, it really is important to share that with your loved one because it can be a sign, not just of stuff going on in your mouth. You know, that's what we think about. Oh, you know, the person has mouth odor so they must have a mouth problem. And really mouth odor is a lot more complicated than that. As usual, when I'm doing these webinars and I do the research that's affiliated with producing the webinar, I learn a lot about what's going on with the topic that I'm discussing too. So we're going to go ahead and plunge into it. There's my amazing partner, Dr. Liz. Here's my incredible hygiene team. They are the people in my practice who are happy and blessed to help all of you keep your mouth healthy if you happen to be a patient and Jax Beaches Family Dentistry, and I'm going the wrong way. Here we go.
So bad breath might not just be bad breath, right? The good news about mouth odor is that 90% of mouth odor is in fact a result of bacteria. And because mouth odor and gum issues and decay are bacterial diseases, just like any other bacterial disease, right? It can be treated. So that's always the good news. It is impacted a lot by a couple of different things. It's impacted by the food that you eat, it’s also impacted a lot by our saliva. And I think most people know inherently that the saliva is important. But one thing that I do find though is that when people end up with a dry mouth, they don't necessarily think of it as something urgent. They don't think of it as something to share, not just with the dentist but also with their medical doctor. But it is really important when you find your saliva changing, either it gets thicker or there's less of it, that you discuss that with your physician and with your dentist.
Now I know a lot of times what physicians will say to you is, "Oh, well, you're on multiple medications and that's why your mouth is drying. There's just nothing that we can do about it because you have to stay on these medications." You're still going to want to really very quickly discuss that with your dentist because in a super short period of time, that can negatively impact your mouth. So most people know in the morning when they wake up, Oh, I've got morning breath and like rushed to the bathroom to brush your mouth. So the reason for that, and it's something often that my patients don't think about, but at night your saliva shuts completely down. So when your saliva shuts down at night, you know, that's when you have the worst mouth odor. There are also other things that impact your mouth odor, some of that we know is what we eat. If we eat onions and garlic, that goes into the bloodstream. Once it's in the bloodstream, it comes out of your lungs, which is why you feel like, Oh, I had garlic and now it's cutting out of all my body parts. Well, it's mostly because when it goes into your bloodstream, it then gets into your lungs and then you kind of breathe it back out.
And now that we're all wearing masks, we realize that when we have mouth odor, we have mouth odor because we're rebreathing our mouth odor. So I've had a lot more people talking to me about their mouth odor. Let's see. So yeah, it's interesting because you know, when you see slides online about people's mouth odor, you see them doing that thing where you're breathing it back in, but now we're doing it automatically because we have a mask on. As always, when I do these webinars, we do lots of research. My webinars from the past, I've done some on sleep, I've done some on childhood decay. You can find those on our Jax Beaches family dentistry YouTube site, very easy to search. and then also as always, which I've mentioned in the past, when you hear something that's interesting, intriguing or seems controversial to you, if you want to email me and I can send you the sources, I'd be happy to do that. So you'll see my email address at the end of the webinar. So what you eat like I just mentioned really does. It's definitely impacted by the types of foods that you're eating that come out in your breath and it comes out in your breath because you eat it, it goes into your bloodstream, and then it comes out of your lungs. So 60% of bad breath is also due, not just to that, but then the plaque ends up on your tongue and then that plaque and bacteria just don't go away cause it's stuck to your tongue. And one of the ways that you can temporarily get rid of that is by actually scraping your tongue. So you scraped the bacteria off of your tongue and that gets rid of the bacteria and improves your breath. It is important to know that that's essentially as a temporary remedy, right? Because the bacteria if it's in your mouth. Everybody thinks, oh, bacteria is bad, but really the bacteria in your mouth is a population of bacteria that helps with digestion. So we don't necessarily want to eliminate all of the bacteria. We just want to make sure that the bacteria that we have is good, it's working well. It's mixed in with your saliva. It helps with your digestion. And we can clean our mouth clean off some of the bad sticky bacteria that are on our tongue by scraping our tongue. And everybody knows this, right? Everyone knows everyone out there that’s listening to me that is a smoker is aware that you're not supposed to smoke and that it's not healthy for you. I don't really have to point that out. And when I do point it out, I'm doing it in a joking way because anyone that's a smoker knows that they shouldn't be smoking. One of the reasons that you end up with mouth odor when you're a smoker is not just because of the taste of the smoking, which then causes you to have math, but it also decreases your saliva. And when every single time you do something, when you take multiple medications, when you smoke, no matter what you do, that makes your mouth dry. You're always going to have an increase in mouth odor. So that's just important to now. And then the other thing that we've talked about too is if you're eating garlic and onion, you can have mouth odor just because of that because of the types of food, but then the other interesting thing. And again, this is something that people have in their mouth that they just kind of tolerate is when you're chewing food and it gets stuck in between the teeth and those food particles, aren't removed from your mouth, they break down in your mouth and that's called a food trap. And when that food is trapped in there, especially if you don't have a tendency to be flossier that decomposes, and then that creates mouth odor. Also, if you are a denture patient, you want to make sure that, you know, a lot of times I've had dental patients, especially when they've come from other offices where you get your dentures, especially if it's even more than one set and no one talks to you about how to take care of them, how to clean them, how to soak them, how to brush them. And that causes just, you know, bacteria and things to be trapped in the denture itself. Cause dentures are actually very porous. So if you are a denture patient and you're aware and you're having trouble with mouth odor, you know, you have a tendency not to go to the dentist regularly, especially if you have upper and lower, complete dentures, but you're having mouth odor when you're a denture wearer. Please feel free to call us and come in and we can check your dentures and make sure they're fitting properly, make sure they're, you know, they're not rubbing anywhere And we can talk to you about denture care, which will, will definitely help with mouth odor the real issue. You know, that concerns us and is definitely worth talking about when it comes to mouth odor is what things are not just like just breath problems, right? Because you ate too much garlic. What things really are health problems, especially when you find yourself, you know, using mints all the time, you're constantly concerned about your breath. You feel like you can't get close to people because of it. That's when we want to take a hard look at, you know, what could be going on and what could be a systemic issue that's causing an app loader, which makes it, you know, more of a concern.
So when you have dry mouth, we already talked about, you know, different things like smoking, right. There can cause dry mouth, but the problem with the mouth being dry is that that saliva isn't in there, it doesn't neutralize the plaque and neutralize the acidity and then wash away the cells, everything just accumulates. And that's where that's where the bad breath comes from. So, you know, other than smoking and multiple medications, there are certain kinds of medications that are, you know, kind of always cause bad breath. And that's ADHD medication. If you have a tendency to have allergies and you're just taking your own over the counter and a histamines that can cause problems, antidepressants, sleep, medications, and narcotics, those are all classic, dry mouth creators. So if you're on one of those and, or heaven forbid, right? You're on, you know, a narcotic and a sleep medication important to tell your dentist that you're having a dry mouth, take a look at things that you can do to prevent decay and or mouth odor because of your dry mouth and then the dentist and the physician. I know this sounds crazy might actually try to cooperate with one another to figure out if there are substitute medications or if there's a way maybe to get to the root cause of what the medications are being used for so that we can get some saliva. We do have to look at our health right, as it's your overall health. So it's great that you know, the four or five medications that you're taking are managing whatever diseases or problems that we're having, but it's our overall health, including the health of our mouth, including, you know, not getting decay and not having mouth odor is that improving. And can we figure out ways to balance all of those things? Now it can be a challenge. You know, some people are on medications that they just have to be on and there's really nothing that we can do about it.
The other interesting thing that I found that I really actually didn't have any idea about. And again, that's the beauty of, [inaudible 11:38] not only do I get to share really cool information with the public and with my patients, but I actually always learn something. So diabetics it, or it's very important when you're a diabetic to obviously see your physician regularly, you're checking your blood sugar regularly. And we all know why that's important. It is really important if you're a diabetic or if you have a loved one that's a diabetic to ask that loved one. When's the last time you saw a dentist, are you going regularly? Do you go every three months? Because what the research is showing that I looked up is that if you have a dry mouth, it can actually exacerbate the side effects of diabetes which then leads to problems with your glucose levels. The other thing that we've always known in dentistry is that you're not getting regular cleanings and you're not getting regular, really assertive, aggressive, or active, whatever word you want to use for it checks on your gum health that also can cause problems with sugar. And then when your sugar is out of control, your gum disease automatically gets out of control and it becomes this cycle. So apparently dry mouth also does the same thing, which is interesting, right? It's good information. It's good to know that if you're a diabetic and your mouth is feeling dry, that you know, other than dry mouth being annoying and causing mouth odor, you know, it's also a problem with that. So that's really interesting to know I think I'm going backwards. Mouth breathing and dry mouth. Yes, I am. All right. Sorry about that, everybody. So we're on mouth breathing, mouth breathing causes dry mouth for obvious reasons, right? If you're breathing in and out of your mouth and it's going to dry out your mouth and a lot of people at night are mouth breathing cause they're snoring. Snoring, you guys can go listen to my snoring and apnea webinar. That's really interesting, but snoring is a problem because snoring is a problem and snoring is a problem because it dries out your mouth. And when you dry out your mouth and you don't have any saliva, you know, it causes mouth odor. The other thing that's interesting is that a lot of times, so sometimes mouth breathing comes from snoring. Snoring can be a result of a deviated septum or an upper airway issue. That's one of the reasons that I work really closely with an awesome EMT. If you're a dentist out there and you're listening to this, I wouldn't do all that you can. When, if you're in a community that has a great EMT, go ahead and give him a call. Because most of the time when people are mouth breathing and they're snoring and are having trouble sleeping, they already know, Oh, I was told years ago that I have a deviated septum, but I just don't want to have the surgery because of X, Y, Z. But it really is a good idea for people to check in with the EMT. They have, you know, a lot of new technology, different ways, just like all surgeons do to do things less invasively and or try to deal with some of the issues, you know, nonsurgically, but again, we don't want to be mouth breathing. It bypasses your ability to make nitric oxide, which affects your overall health and the dry mouth thing. Not only causes mouth odor, but the dry mouth is not good in terms of decay prevention and other issues. The other thing I found interesting, I always had sort of heard that menopause, of course, since I'm in menopause, and I know menopause affects everything. Just like, you know, when you talk to pregnant women. It impacts like a hundred different things, but menopausal women have dry mouth because the hormones actually directly affect the salivary glands. So, you know, who knew, and that's why it impacts you in terms of having a dry mouth when you're in menopause. So yeah, I learned something new. Awesome.
And then, you know, one of the obvious things, like I mentioned before, when people are have mouth odor and they're struggling with it, they automatically assume, right? They either have a cavity or gum disease. It is in fact, a big issue with mouth odor. And certainly in addition to telling your physician that you're struggling with your mouth odor, you do want to quickly get to the dentist and get your gums checked. Now, when you're getting your gum checked, you should have a probing depths done. And you know, some really specific information should come out of that exam in terms of your gums, especially if you're telling the dentist that you have mouth odor. So very important. A lot of times I think that, you know, we go to the dentist and you're hoping they're going to find some stuff without us giving them any information. That's wrong. And it definitely helps to let the dentist know what you're concerned about. And then they can get back to you once they know what your concerns are, what they're finding. And even if they tell you, Oh, Hey, you don't have really advanced gum disease. You have Gingivitis. It's still important to jump on that and get that treated and have some sort of long-term preventative plan about that because it's really the precursor to things that are worse, like periodontal disease where you end up with bone loss. So we don't want to minimize, Oh, it's just Gingivitis. Because it is in fact the precursor to something that's a lot more serious. And another thing is like, we talked to you about before your lungs are a big thing. It's not just, you know, mouth odor coming from your mouth. A lot of times the mouth odor is coming from your lungs. We already beat the dead horse about the fact that when food goes into your bloodstream, it kind of excreted from your lungs. But also it is a sign potentially that you actually have a lung issue or a lung disorder. So when, if you find yourself eating a lot of filling with your breath, you want to make sure that it's not a serious lung issue and it has a certain type of order or a certain type of odor. So you when you're talking to your physician, you're going to want to not just let them know that you have mouth odor, but you're going to want to try to describe the type of odor when you have it. And that will help them figure out if they feel like it's more of systemic disease. Things like cystic fibrosis, asthma, kidney, and liver diseases all have kind of Flagstaff types of odor, and you will have the odor at different times of the day. So when you're describing the mouth odor to your physician, you're going to want to be real specific about what type of voter it is and when you have it. And what you'll notice like I mentioned before is that you'll be using mints, you'll be doing it, you'll be trying that. And it just, it's very persistent. So really important to be very specific with your physician. The alcohol thing, you know, if you have a bunch of glass, you know, glasses of red wine with dinner, and you feel like you have an odor from that, it's really just like the garlic and the onion that we were talking about before the alcohol goes into your system and it's created by your lungs and it's not going to go away until it passes.
The other thing, you know, most of us now have tonsils and tonsils have a tendency to have like crevices in them and they have a tendency to collect things and that the bacteria that are collected there causes bad breath. Now, one thing that I think is interesting with the whole COVID thing is that we're learning a lot about gargling and rinsing, especially with peroxide. So I will definitely encourage you to get a mouth rinse that has peroxide in it. Or you can take full-strength peroxide, cut it in half and not just rinse with it, but you can gargle with it. And essentially what you're trying to do is wash your tonsils or clean the back of your throat. It really does help with, you can also do it with saltwater. It helps with you know, prevention of diseases in general. I'm not going to put my foot on the line. It keeps you from getting COVID, but it certainly is a lot of studies to show that rinsing with salt water gargling, with hydrogen peroxide, keeping your mouth clean with peroxide, especially the peroxide gel, which I'll talk about in a minute are all very important in terms of your mouth odor, but also in terms of other diseases. So yes, your tonsils and, you know, and sinus issues and drainage, all of those things can lead to bad breath, which is why we have this slide, your sinuses and bad breath. When you have chronic sinus issues, when you have a tendency to get sinus infections, all of that is obviously going to show up in your breath and you know, it can, it can be assigned to you that, oh gosh, my face hurts. I feel like I have a toothache. I feel like I have pressure and I'm having mouth out or, you know, most likely it's time to go see your physician and maybe get some antibiotics and get, you know, get treatment for that problem.
The coffee and bad breath thing is interesting Cause I am a coffee drinker and people talk to me about coffee a lot because it stains your teeth And they ask me, Oh, is it bad for my mouth? And coffee is acidic. So it is in fact not great for your mouth because acidity causes cavities. The other issue is that caffeine just in general dries out your mouth. So acidity and dry mouth neither, or either one of those are good for the health of your mouth. But they interesting to hang about the coffee. Again, this is research because I'm doing a webinar, right? Is that coffee itself can actually inhibit some of the bacteria that caused that breath? So that was pretty interesting. The biggest problem with coffee is not just coffee, because we all know that most people don't just drink black coffee. I mean, I think if we were to like raise our hands, there might be, you know, two of the thousands of people that have their hands up, or two of the thousands of people that might watch this someday would be raising their hands. So the real problem with coffee is all the stuff we put in it. So the recommendation not going to study was to drink it black, which probably no one's going to do. And when you add sugar and when you add milk and cream, it that's, what's really causing the bad breath. So it's not necessarily the coffee itself. It's the dehydration effect. If you drink too much coffee and then it's the sugar and the milk and things that we add into it a little bit like, you know, potatoes might not be so bad, but you know, like in terms of what you eat, but you know, when you add butter and to have a grave and all that, yeah. That's so good for you.
And then one of my favorite topics, you know, partly because I, I struggle with my stomach issues is that stomach issues, especially reflux also cause trouble with your, with your mouth odor, anything where you're eating things and stuff is coming back up into your mouth is obviously going to cause pause mouth odor. So if you suffer from reflux, it really is important to get to the root cause of that. That's near and dear to my heart too, because I struggled with and struggled with really bad stomach problems. I was in a particular physician's office that didn't really care about the root cause. Not good, bad, and wrong. Just the practice philosophy where the root cause wasn't important. And I do think it is important to get to the root cause of what it is. That's upsetting your stomach, not just cover it over with medications, because ultimately it doesn't completely cure it.
And the reflux, the acidity can cause trouble with your teeth to cause trouble with all kinds of other dental issues. And it also, you know, it's not so great for your breath. So that is why a lot of, you know, dentists these days are using probiotics. We're taking a look at digestive enzymes as we age, we don't digest things as well. And you know, we're partnering with a lot of functional medicine people because we care about getting to the root cause of it. We can't keep your teeth healthy. We can't keep your teeth from eroding. We can't keep your gums healthy. If we have this constant battle, you know, that the mouth is really the beginning of the GI system. If we don't have saliva, then we're not digesting our food. If we have trouble with the digestive enzymes in our stomach, and then it's coming back up and it really just becomes a cyclical issue.
So I use a lot of probiotics and digestive enzymes which I will talk about a little bit later too. Liver disease also is a problem. In terms of your mouth owner if you, if your liver isn't metabolizing things problem properly, or you have liver failure, it's creates a certain kind of mouth odor again really important when you're describing the mouth out or to your physician, that you describe exactly how it tastes or smells. So when you have liver disease, it's more of a fishy smell or a fishy taste, and you'll have really considerable problems with your morning breath. And so again, don't just tell your physician, Oh, I have bad breath. You really want to describe it, you know, more accurately so that they can help get to the root cause of it. Now wash is awesome.
I really like to use mouthwash though, specifically to the patient's needs, same with any kind of products that you're using to treat your mouth. You want to let your dentists know what you're using, let them know why you're using it, and make sure that it matches what it is you're trying to accomplish. So we don't want to be rinsing with Listerine, especially if it has alcohol in it. If our problem is cavities because alcohol dries out our mouth and Listerine is really specific for gum issues as an example. So mouthwash is fine. It does, it does kill some of the bacteria. It will temporarily right, relieve leave mouth odor issue, but we want to make sure that we're matching the mouthwash with the actual problem and that essentially your products that you're using and buying just like anything, just like vitamins, just like anything that you're putting into your body or you're using really match the outcome and match the issues that are specific to what you have going on. There's a lot of, there's a lot of press right now, too, with the COVID virus about zinc. So zinc and how does your Peroxide are big in the news? And zinc does help with your, your bad breath that also helps to get zinc into your system helps ward off things like viruses. So it certainly is something that you can use. And there was a study by NIH, which is important, right? That is really diminished it diminished, let's see it diminished bad breath. And it did it in such a way that they felt like it was relevant in terms of a study that they did. So, so that's good. Yeah. And it kills bacteria. And so yeah, that's a really helpful, oh, it can, it eliminates the sulfur compounds. So that's why it was really effective yogurt also helps with bad breath. And again, that just goes back to what we were talking about with probiotics. If, if you use probiotics, especially if you know, one of the issues that you have are stomach issues, then it has a tendency to help with the breath because things aren't coming back up running back up. So then we're just going to do gum chewing also helps, but you have to be careful if you're chewing gum and you're having math out or because you're hungry, then ultimately at some point, the stomach acid is going to kick in. So if you notice, Oh, I'm chewing gum, it's helping my mouth odor. And then a few minutes later, your mouth odor gets worse. It could just be that you're hungry. So you might actually just need some food. So what are some good first steps to help with your mouth odor, certainly proper oral care, right? You need to brush and floss every day. That's when something that anybody needs to tell you about it is important to get proper professional dental care.
Some people think, Oh, well, I brush and floss every day as well. I'm good. Well, the real main reason that you get your teeth cleaned is to get that gum analysis, gum check like we talked about, and also to keep your gums healthy. If we don't keep our gum healthy and we don't hear and treat our gum disease, and you're always going to have an ALK odor, another thing is, you know, mints and gum with xylitol are really helpful. It stimulates salivary slow flow. And the more saliva, the better, like we talked about you have your mouth has to be moist. And that saliva is what helps diminish the acid, which helps again with the, with the math odor eating really good whole foods is really helpful too. And I learned this when I was doing the, the webinar that I did on decay. Not only are fruits and vegetables, just good for you, right? So when you're talking about a good diet for oral health, you assume, Oh, they want me to eat fruits and vegetables because they're good for me. And sugar is bad for me. Well, there, it's a little bit more complicated than that fruits and vegetables actually, when you're chewing them, stimulate, survive saliva. And when we have salivary flow, we're always going to be healthier. Obviously, we want to stop smoking and we want to breathe through our nose even during the day and actually easier right than controlling. Whether we breathe through our mouth or nose at night, we want to try to breathe through our nose during the day. It's easy to say hard to do. I found when I went to my sleep apnea class and they mentioned it, I realized that a lot of times throughout the day when I'm working out, I was breathing through my mouth and just didn't even realize it.
So if you do nothing else for yourself today, I'll even pick up some gum with xylitol in it, try focusing on whether you're breathing through your nose. It's super important. We also want to clean the dentures, as we talked about, and we want to limit dairy products, especially if you're sensitive to them. If you're lactose intolerant and you're just taking lactate and you keep eating dairy, then that can cause a lot of trouble. Now, my theory is right. It's causing trouble because things are repeating and coming upon us. So those are some of the first easy steps that you can do today. Also, obviously, prevention is a goal. You want to make sure that you're working with your physician to present, prevent all those different diseases that we talked about. If you react a lot, right, to, to things like onion and garlic, you want to just not eat them.
If you feel like your mouth is dry, you want to address all that. And then we also want to make sure that even if all we have, right, we just have Gingivitis. We won't don't want to walk down that road, periodontal disease. Now I rarely like to give people lectures about things, but if you are a smoker and you have any signs of gum disease, that's just another reason, right? To quit smoking because smoking exacerbates gum disease. And it just becomes a spiral similar to that spiral that we were talking about with diabetes, right? We don't want to get into anything. That's a spiral at all. These are the CTX products that we use in our office. A lot of BR they are amazing rinses and gels. Again, these, I always, what I tell people is we, we like to take a look at people. They have great they have kits that go together for people that are having specific issues.
Once you get your first kid, then you can auto-ship on Amazon, your refills, but it is important that your dentist picks the first batch of products that you use. And then you just refill them as you need them. So amazing company, you can Google them, look them up online. The company is called caries-free and the products are called CTX amazing products. The other amazing product that we use a lot in our office is called perio protect. It is a 1.7% peroxide gel delivered to the base of your periodontal pockets. That's the space between the gum and your teeth that goes up under the bone. And that's where the bacteria hide problem sometimes with rinses is if we have these deep pockets and the bacteria just kind of hangs out there and has its little gum disease party, and there's no way really to get at that bacteria unless you can force something up into the pocket.
So these special trays that have a gasket allow the peroxide gel to get shoved upon under the pockets. It oxygenates the pockets and kills the bacteria. That goes a long way towards having really pretty teeth. You can see here that this person's teeth got really white and it also eliminates all mouth odor within three days. The story I have to tell about myself, this is me where it says before and after that's actually Dr. Michelle and her teeth. They were not very lovely. I was really struggling with math odor and I also had chronic bleeding gums, no matter what I did. So after four to six weeks of using these amazing trays, my teeth are not only white. My gums are way healthier and you don't have to worry about math better anymore. So it's amazing. And you know, it's just good to know.
Good for everybody out there listening to now that we all struggle with these things, it's hard to talk about, but it is important to talk about again, especially with something you yourself are struggling with, please, don't be embarrassed to talk about it, especially with your dentist. And definitely, also something that you want to mention to your position. We practice complete health dentistry in our office. And what that means is that we love coordinating care with physicians. So not only do we talk about these things with our patients, if you're, if one of our patients is diabetic or they have heart issues, we'd like to discuss it with a physician to make sure that both people, both professionals know about it so that we know, right. If they're struggling with their sugar, it's potentially coming from the mouth and as we're treating it, we can let the other professional know whether it's a physician or a nurse practitioner that Hey, their gums are getting better.
How's their blood sugar, you know, how has that going? Or, you know, if those, if the struggle is, you know, stomach issues, we want, you know, we want them to know that the person's struggling with their stomach, cause they may not have told them. And then as that's resolving, are we seeing improvements in their mouth? Because it really, it goes both ways. You can't have a healthy body if you don't have a healthy mouth, but you know, a lot of times as Cintas, we, we do the same thing. We're struggling with the person's mouth and it doesn't Dawn on us, Dawn on us that, that, that there might be, you know, an underlying health issue. So easy to be critical of each other, but way better to collaborate together, to work it out, and to make everybody healthy. So we are done and with our webinar, but really we're just getting started.
We're just getting started with all of you getting healthier and all of you getting your questions answered. I work with an amazing group of health practitioners too. So I hope that you learned a lot from this webinar. I'm happy to share any other information. We have a great website, Jacksonville Beach, dentist.com. Please feel free to go on there. If you want to just talk to me or want to have a zoom chat, you can request an electronic consultation. And then this is our office phone number. And that is my actual, like a personal email address. I'm happy to hear from any of you, if you're a dentist and you're interested in complete health dentistry, please feel free to email me if you're a physician. And especially if you live in my area and you're interested in the health of your mouth, please feel free to email because I love sharing that.
So bad breath might not just be bad breath, right? The good news about mouth odor is that 90% of mouth odor is in fact a result of bacteria. And because mouth odor and gum issues and decay are bacterial diseases, just like any other bacterial disease, right? It can be treated. So that's always the good news. It is impacted a lot by a couple of different things. It's impacted by the food that you eat, it’s also impacted a lot by our saliva. And I think most people know inherently that the saliva is important. But one thing that I do find though is that when people end up with a dry mouth, they don't necessarily think of it as something urgent. They don't think of it as something to share, not just with the dentist but also with their medical doctor. But it is really important when you find your saliva changing, either it gets thicker or there's less of it, that you discuss that with your physician and with your dentist.
Now I know a lot of times what physicians will say to you is, "Oh, well, you're on multiple medications and that's why your mouth is drying. There's just nothing that we can do about it because you have to stay on these medications." You're still going to want to really very quickly discuss that with your dentist because in a super short period of time, that can negatively impact your mouth. So most people know in the morning when they wake up, Oh, I've got morning breath and like rushed to the bathroom to brush your mouth. So the reason for that, and it's something often that my patients don't think about, but at night your saliva shuts completely down. So when your saliva shuts down at night, you know, that's when you have the worst mouth odor. There are also other things that impact your mouth odor, some of that we know is what we eat. If we eat onions and garlic, that goes into the bloodstream. Once it's in the bloodstream, it comes out of your lungs, which is why you feel like, Oh, I had garlic and now it's cutting out of all my body parts. Well, it's mostly because when it goes into your bloodstream, it then gets into your lungs and then you kind of breathe it back out.
And now that we're all wearing masks, we realize that when we have mouth odor, we have mouth odor because we're rebreathing our mouth odor. So I've had a lot more people talking to me about their mouth odor. Let's see. So yeah, it's interesting because you know, when you see slides online about people's mouth odor, you see them doing that thing where you're breathing it back in, but now we're doing it automatically because we have a mask on. As always, when I do these webinars, we do lots of research. My webinars from the past, I've done some on sleep, I've done some on childhood decay. You can find those on our Jax Beaches family dentistry YouTube site, very easy to search. and then also as always, which I've mentioned in the past, when you hear something that's interesting, intriguing or seems controversial to you, if you want to email me and I can send you the sources, I'd be happy to do that. So you'll see my email address at the end of the webinar. So what you eat like I just mentioned really does. It's definitely impacted by the types of foods that you're eating that come out in your breath and it comes out in your breath because you eat it, it goes into your bloodstream, and then it comes out of your lungs. So 60% of bad breath is also due, not just to that, but then the plaque ends up on your tongue and then that plaque and bacteria just don't go away cause it's stuck to your tongue. And one of the ways that you can temporarily get rid of that is by actually scraping your tongue. So you scraped the bacteria off of your tongue and that gets rid of the bacteria and improves your breath. It is important to know that that's essentially as a temporary remedy, right? Because the bacteria if it's in your mouth. Everybody thinks, oh, bacteria is bad, but really the bacteria in your mouth is a population of bacteria that helps with digestion. So we don't necessarily want to eliminate all of the bacteria. We just want to make sure that the bacteria that we have is good, it's working well. It's mixed in with your saliva. It helps with your digestion. And we can clean our mouth clean off some of the bad sticky bacteria that are on our tongue by scraping our tongue. And everybody knows this, right? Everyone knows everyone out there that’s listening to me that is a smoker is aware that you're not supposed to smoke and that it's not healthy for you. I don't really have to point that out. And when I do point it out, I'm doing it in a joking way because anyone that's a smoker knows that they shouldn't be smoking. One of the reasons that you end up with mouth odor when you're a smoker is not just because of the taste of the smoking, which then causes you to have math, but it also decreases your saliva. And when every single time you do something, when you take multiple medications, when you smoke, no matter what you do, that makes your mouth dry. You're always going to have an increase in mouth odor. So that's just important to now. And then the other thing that we've talked about too is if you're eating garlic and onion, you can have mouth odor just because of that because of the types of food, but then the other interesting thing. And again, this is something that people have in their mouth that they just kind of tolerate is when you're chewing food and it gets stuck in between the teeth and those food particles, aren't removed from your mouth, they break down in your mouth and that's called a food trap. And when that food is trapped in there, especially if you don't have a tendency to be flossier that decomposes, and then that creates mouth odor. Also, if you are a denture patient, you want to make sure that, you know, a lot of times I've had dental patients, especially when they've come from other offices where you get your dentures, especially if it's even more than one set and no one talks to you about how to take care of them, how to clean them, how to soak them, how to brush them. And that causes just, you know, bacteria and things to be trapped in the denture itself. Cause dentures are actually very porous. So if you are a denture patient and you're aware and you're having trouble with mouth odor, you know, you have a tendency not to go to the dentist regularly, especially if you have upper and lower, complete dentures, but you're having mouth odor when you're a denture wearer. Please feel free to call us and come in and we can check your dentures and make sure they're fitting properly, make sure they're, you know, they're not rubbing anywhere And we can talk to you about denture care, which will, will definitely help with mouth odor the real issue. You know, that concerns us and is definitely worth talking about when it comes to mouth odor is what things are not just like just breath problems, right? Because you ate too much garlic. What things really are health problems, especially when you find yourself, you know, using mints all the time, you're constantly concerned about your breath. You feel like you can't get close to people because of it. That's when we want to take a hard look at, you know, what could be going on and what could be a systemic issue that's causing an app loader, which makes it, you know, more of a concern.
So when you have dry mouth, we already talked about, you know, different things like smoking, right. There can cause dry mouth, but the problem with the mouth being dry is that that saliva isn't in there, it doesn't neutralize the plaque and neutralize the acidity and then wash away the cells, everything just accumulates. And that's where that's where the bad breath comes from. So, you know, other than smoking and multiple medications, there are certain kinds of medications that are, you know, kind of always cause bad breath. And that's ADHD medication. If you have a tendency to have allergies and you're just taking your own over the counter and a histamines that can cause problems, antidepressants, sleep, medications, and narcotics, those are all classic, dry mouth creators. So if you're on one of those and, or heaven forbid, right? You're on, you know, a narcotic and a sleep medication important to tell your dentist that you're having a dry mouth, take a look at things that you can do to prevent decay and or mouth odor because of your dry mouth and then the dentist and the physician. I know this sounds crazy might actually try to cooperate with one another to figure out if there are substitute medications or if there's a way maybe to get to the root cause of what the medications are being used for so that we can get some saliva. We do have to look at our health right, as it's your overall health. So it's great that you know, the four or five medications that you're taking are managing whatever diseases or problems that we're having, but it's our overall health, including the health of our mouth, including, you know, not getting decay and not having mouth odor is that improving. And can we figure out ways to balance all of those things? Now it can be a challenge. You know, some people are on medications that they just have to be on and there's really nothing that we can do about it.
The other interesting thing that I found that I really actually didn't have any idea about. And again, that's the beauty of, [inaudible 11:38] not only do I get to share really cool information with the public and with my patients, but I actually always learn something. So diabetics it, or it's very important when you're a diabetic to obviously see your physician regularly, you're checking your blood sugar regularly. And we all know why that's important. It is really important if you're a diabetic or if you have a loved one that's a diabetic to ask that loved one. When's the last time you saw a dentist, are you going regularly? Do you go every three months? Because what the research is showing that I looked up is that if you have a dry mouth, it can actually exacerbate the side effects of diabetes which then leads to problems with your glucose levels. The other thing that we've always known in dentistry is that you're not getting regular cleanings and you're not getting regular, really assertive, aggressive, or active, whatever word you want to use for it checks on your gum health that also can cause problems with sugar. And then when your sugar is out of control, your gum disease automatically gets out of control and it becomes this cycle. So apparently dry mouth also does the same thing, which is interesting, right? It's good information. It's good to know that if you're a diabetic and your mouth is feeling dry, that you know, other than dry mouth being annoying and causing mouth odor, you know, it's also a problem with that. So that's really interesting to know I think I'm going backwards. Mouth breathing and dry mouth. Yes, I am. All right. Sorry about that, everybody. So we're on mouth breathing, mouth breathing causes dry mouth for obvious reasons, right? If you're breathing in and out of your mouth and it's going to dry out your mouth and a lot of people at night are mouth breathing cause they're snoring. Snoring, you guys can go listen to my snoring and apnea webinar. That's really interesting, but snoring is a problem because snoring is a problem and snoring is a problem because it dries out your mouth. And when you dry out your mouth and you don't have any saliva, you know, it causes mouth odor. The other thing that's interesting is that a lot of times, so sometimes mouth breathing comes from snoring. Snoring can be a result of a deviated septum or an upper airway issue. That's one of the reasons that I work really closely with an awesome EMT. If you're a dentist out there and you're listening to this, I wouldn't do all that you can. When, if you're in a community that has a great EMT, go ahead and give him a call. Because most of the time when people are mouth breathing and they're snoring and are having trouble sleeping, they already know, Oh, I was told years ago that I have a deviated septum, but I just don't want to have the surgery because of X, Y, Z. But it really is a good idea for people to check in with the EMT. They have, you know, a lot of new technology, different ways, just like all surgeons do to do things less invasively and or try to deal with some of the issues, you know, nonsurgically, but again, we don't want to be mouth breathing. It bypasses your ability to make nitric oxide, which affects your overall health and the dry mouth thing. Not only causes mouth odor, but the dry mouth is not good in terms of decay prevention and other issues. The other thing I found interesting, I always had sort of heard that menopause, of course, since I'm in menopause, and I know menopause affects everything. Just like, you know, when you talk to pregnant women. It impacts like a hundred different things, but menopausal women have dry mouth because the hormones actually directly affect the salivary glands. So, you know, who knew, and that's why it impacts you in terms of having a dry mouth when you're in menopause. So yeah, I learned something new. Awesome.
And then, you know, one of the obvious things, like I mentioned before, when people are have mouth odor and they're struggling with it, they automatically assume, right? They either have a cavity or gum disease. It is in fact, a big issue with mouth odor. And certainly in addition to telling your physician that you're struggling with your mouth odor, you do want to quickly get to the dentist and get your gums checked. Now, when you're getting your gum checked, you should have a probing depths done. And you know, some really specific information should come out of that exam in terms of your gums, especially if you're telling the dentist that you have mouth odor. So very important. A lot of times I think that, you know, we go to the dentist and you're hoping they're going to find some stuff without us giving them any information. That's wrong. And it definitely helps to let the dentist know what you're concerned about. And then they can get back to you once they know what your concerns are, what they're finding. And even if they tell you, Oh, Hey, you don't have really advanced gum disease. You have Gingivitis. It's still important to jump on that and get that treated and have some sort of long-term preventative plan about that because it's really the precursor to things that are worse, like periodontal disease where you end up with bone loss. So we don't want to minimize, Oh, it's just Gingivitis. Because it is in fact the precursor to something that's a lot more serious. And another thing is like, we talked to you about before your lungs are a big thing. It's not just, you know, mouth odor coming from your mouth. A lot of times the mouth odor is coming from your lungs. We already beat the dead horse about the fact that when food goes into your bloodstream, it kind of excreted from your lungs. But also it is a sign potentially that you actually have a lung issue or a lung disorder. So when, if you find yourself eating a lot of filling with your breath, you want to make sure that it's not a serious lung issue and it has a certain type of order or a certain type of odor. So you when you're talking to your physician, you're going to want to not just let them know that you have mouth odor, but you're going to want to try to describe the type of odor when you have it. And that will help them figure out if they feel like it's more of systemic disease. Things like cystic fibrosis, asthma, kidney, and liver diseases all have kind of Flagstaff types of odor, and you will have the odor at different times of the day. So when you're describing the mouth odor to your physician, you're going to want to be real specific about what type of voter it is and when you have it. And what you'll notice like I mentioned before is that you'll be using mints, you'll be doing it, you'll be trying that. And it just, it's very persistent. So really important to be very specific with your physician. The alcohol thing, you know, if you have a bunch of glass, you know, glasses of red wine with dinner, and you feel like you have an odor from that, it's really just like the garlic and the onion that we were talking about before the alcohol goes into your system and it's created by your lungs and it's not going to go away until it passes.
The other thing, you know, most of us now have tonsils and tonsils have a tendency to have like crevices in them and they have a tendency to collect things and that the bacteria that are collected there causes bad breath. Now, one thing that I think is interesting with the whole COVID thing is that we're learning a lot about gargling and rinsing, especially with peroxide. So I will definitely encourage you to get a mouth rinse that has peroxide in it. Or you can take full-strength peroxide, cut it in half and not just rinse with it, but you can gargle with it. And essentially what you're trying to do is wash your tonsils or clean the back of your throat. It really does help with, you can also do it with saltwater. It helps with you know, prevention of diseases in general. I'm not going to put my foot on the line. It keeps you from getting COVID, but it certainly is a lot of studies to show that rinsing with salt water gargling, with hydrogen peroxide, keeping your mouth clean with peroxide, especially the peroxide gel, which I'll talk about in a minute are all very important in terms of your mouth odor, but also in terms of other diseases. So yes, your tonsils and, you know, and sinus issues and drainage, all of those things can lead to bad breath, which is why we have this slide, your sinuses and bad breath. When you have chronic sinus issues, when you have a tendency to get sinus infections, all of that is obviously going to show up in your breath and you know, it can, it can be assigned to you that, oh gosh, my face hurts. I feel like I have a toothache. I feel like I have pressure and I'm having mouth out or, you know, most likely it's time to go see your physician and maybe get some antibiotics and get, you know, get treatment for that problem.
The coffee and bad breath thing is interesting Cause I am a coffee drinker and people talk to me about coffee a lot because it stains your teeth And they ask me, Oh, is it bad for my mouth? And coffee is acidic. So it is in fact not great for your mouth because acidity causes cavities. The other issue is that caffeine just in general dries out your mouth. So acidity and dry mouth neither, or either one of those are good for the health of your mouth. But they interesting to hang about the coffee. Again, this is research because I'm doing a webinar, right? Is that coffee itself can actually inhibit some of the bacteria that caused that breath? So that was pretty interesting. The biggest problem with coffee is not just coffee, because we all know that most people don't just drink black coffee. I mean, I think if we were to like raise our hands, there might be, you know, two of the thousands of people that have their hands up, or two of the thousands of people that might watch this someday would be raising their hands. So the real problem with coffee is all the stuff we put in it. So the recommendation not going to study was to drink it black, which probably no one's going to do. And when you add sugar and when you add milk and cream, it that's, what's really causing the bad breath. So it's not necessarily the coffee itself. It's the dehydration effect. If you drink too much coffee and then it's the sugar and the milk and things that we add into it a little bit like, you know, potatoes might not be so bad, but you know, like in terms of what you eat, but you know, when you add butter and to have a grave and all that, yeah. That's so good for you.
And then one of my favorite topics, you know, partly because I, I struggle with my stomach issues is that stomach issues, especially reflux also cause trouble with your, with your mouth odor, anything where you're eating things and stuff is coming back up into your mouth is obviously going to cause pause mouth odor. So if you suffer from reflux, it really is important to get to the root cause of that. That's near and dear to my heart too, because I struggled with and struggled with really bad stomach problems. I was in a particular physician's office that didn't really care about the root cause. Not good, bad, and wrong. Just the practice philosophy where the root cause wasn't important. And I do think it is important to get to the root cause of what it is. That's upsetting your stomach, not just cover it over with medications, because ultimately it doesn't completely cure it.
And the reflux, the acidity can cause trouble with your teeth to cause trouble with all kinds of other dental issues. And it also, you know, it's not so great for your breath. So that is why a lot of, you know, dentists these days are using probiotics. We're taking a look at digestive enzymes as we age, we don't digest things as well. And you know, we're partnering with a lot of functional medicine people because we care about getting to the root cause of it. We can't keep your teeth healthy. We can't keep your teeth from eroding. We can't keep your gums healthy. If we have this constant battle, you know, that the mouth is really the beginning of the GI system. If we don't have saliva, then we're not digesting our food. If we have trouble with the digestive enzymes in our stomach, and then it's coming back up and it really just becomes a cyclical issue.
So I use a lot of probiotics and digestive enzymes which I will talk about a little bit later too. Liver disease also is a problem. In terms of your mouth owner if you, if your liver isn't metabolizing things problem properly, or you have liver failure, it's creates a certain kind of mouth odor again really important when you're describing the mouth out or to your physician, that you describe exactly how it tastes or smells. So when you have liver disease, it's more of a fishy smell or a fishy taste, and you'll have really considerable problems with your morning breath. And so again, don't just tell your physician, Oh, I have bad breath. You really want to describe it, you know, more accurately so that they can help get to the root cause of it. Now wash is awesome.
I really like to use mouthwash though, specifically to the patient's needs, same with any kind of products that you're using to treat your mouth. You want to let your dentists know what you're using, let them know why you're using it, and make sure that it matches what it is you're trying to accomplish. So we don't want to be rinsing with Listerine, especially if it has alcohol in it. If our problem is cavities because alcohol dries out our mouth and Listerine is really specific for gum issues as an example. So mouthwash is fine. It does, it does kill some of the bacteria. It will temporarily right, relieve leave mouth odor issue, but we want to make sure that we're matching the mouthwash with the actual problem and that essentially your products that you're using and buying just like anything, just like vitamins, just like anything that you're putting into your body or you're using really match the outcome and match the issues that are specific to what you have going on. There's a lot of, there's a lot of press right now, too, with the COVID virus about zinc. So zinc and how does your Peroxide are big in the news? And zinc does help with your, your bad breath that also helps to get zinc into your system helps ward off things like viruses. So it certainly is something that you can use. And there was a study by NIH, which is important, right? That is really diminished it diminished, let's see it diminished bad breath. And it did it in such a way that they felt like it was relevant in terms of a study that they did. So, so that's good. Yeah. And it kills bacteria. And so yeah, that's a really helpful, oh, it can, it eliminates the sulfur compounds. So that's why it was really effective yogurt also helps with bad breath. And again, that just goes back to what we were talking about with probiotics. If, if you use probiotics, especially if you know, one of the issues that you have are stomach issues, then it has a tendency to help with the breath because things aren't coming back up running back up. So then we're just going to do gum chewing also helps, but you have to be careful if you're chewing gum and you're having math out or because you're hungry, then ultimately at some point, the stomach acid is going to kick in. So if you notice, Oh, I'm chewing gum, it's helping my mouth odor. And then a few minutes later, your mouth odor gets worse. It could just be that you're hungry. So you might actually just need some food. So what are some good first steps to help with your mouth odor, certainly proper oral care, right? You need to brush and floss every day. That's when something that anybody needs to tell you about it is important to get proper professional dental care.
Some people think, Oh, well, I brush and floss every day as well. I'm good. Well, the real main reason that you get your teeth cleaned is to get that gum analysis, gum check like we talked about, and also to keep your gums healthy. If we don't keep our gum healthy and we don't hear and treat our gum disease, and you're always going to have an ALK odor, another thing is, you know, mints and gum with xylitol are really helpful. It stimulates salivary slow flow. And the more saliva, the better, like we talked about you have your mouth has to be moist. And that saliva is what helps diminish the acid, which helps again with the, with the math odor eating really good whole foods is really helpful too. And I learned this when I was doing the, the webinar that I did on decay. Not only are fruits and vegetables, just good for you, right? So when you're talking about a good diet for oral health, you assume, Oh, they want me to eat fruits and vegetables because they're good for me. And sugar is bad for me. Well, there, it's a little bit more complicated than that fruits and vegetables actually, when you're chewing them, stimulate, survive saliva. And when we have salivary flow, we're always going to be healthier. Obviously, we want to stop smoking and we want to breathe through our nose even during the day and actually easier right than controlling. Whether we breathe through our mouth or nose at night, we want to try to breathe through our nose during the day. It's easy to say hard to do. I found when I went to my sleep apnea class and they mentioned it, I realized that a lot of times throughout the day when I'm working out, I was breathing through my mouth and just didn't even realize it.
So if you do nothing else for yourself today, I'll even pick up some gum with xylitol in it, try focusing on whether you're breathing through your nose. It's super important. We also want to clean the dentures, as we talked about, and we want to limit dairy products, especially if you're sensitive to them. If you're lactose intolerant and you're just taking lactate and you keep eating dairy, then that can cause a lot of trouble. Now, my theory is right. It's causing trouble because things are repeating and coming upon us. So those are some of the first easy steps that you can do today. Also, obviously, prevention is a goal. You want to make sure that you're working with your physician to present, prevent all those different diseases that we talked about. If you react a lot, right, to, to things like onion and garlic, you want to just not eat them.
If you feel like your mouth is dry, you want to address all that. And then we also want to make sure that even if all we have, right, we just have Gingivitis. We won't don't want to walk down that road, periodontal disease. Now I rarely like to give people lectures about things, but if you are a smoker and you have any signs of gum disease, that's just another reason, right? To quit smoking because smoking exacerbates gum disease. And it just becomes a spiral similar to that spiral that we were talking about with diabetes, right? We don't want to get into anything. That's a spiral at all. These are the CTX products that we use in our office. A lot of BR they are amazing rinses and gels. Again, these, I always, what I tell people is we, we like to take a look at people. They have great they have kits that go together for people that are having specific issues.
Once you get your first kid, then you can auto-ship on Amazon, your refills, but it is important that your dentist picks the first batch of products that you use. And then you just refill them as you need them. So amazing company, you can Google them, look them up online. The company is called caries-free and the products are called CTX amazing products. The other amazing product that we use a lot in our office is called perio protect. It is a 1.7% peroxide gel delivered to the base of your periodontal pockets. That's the space between the gum and your teeth that goes up under the bone. And that's where the bacteria hide problem sometimes with rinses is if we have these deep pockets and the bacteria just kind of hangs out there and has its little gum disease party, and there's no way really to get at that bacteria unless you can force something up into the pocket.
So these special trays that have a gasket allow the peroxide gel to get shoved upon under the pockets. It oxygenates the pockets and kills the bacteria. That goes a long way towards having really pretty teeth. You can see here that this person's teeth got really white and it also eliminates all mouth odor within three days. The story I have to tell about myself, this is me where it says before and after that's actually Dr. Michelle and her teeth. They were not very lovely. I was really struggling with math odor and I also had chronic bleeding gums, no matter what I did. So after four to six weeks of using these amazing trays, my teeth are not only white. My gums are way healthier and you don't have to worry about math better anymore. So it's amazing. And you know, it's just good to know.
Good for everybody out there listening to now that we all struggle with these things, it's hard to talk about, but it is important to talk about again, especially with something you yourself are struggling with, please, don't be embarrassed to talk about it, especially with your dentist. And definitely, also something that you want to mention to your position. We practice complete health dentistry in our office. And what that means is that we love coordinating care with physicians. So not only do we talk about these things with our patients, if you're, if one of our patients is diabetic or they have heart issues, we'd like to discuss it with a physician to make sure that both people, both professionals know about it so that we know, right. If they're struggling with their sugar, it's potentially coming from the mouth and as we're treating it, we can let the other professional know whether it's a physician or a nurse practitioner that Hey, their gums are getting better.
How's their blood sugar, you know, how has that going? Or, you know, if those, if the struggle is, you know, stomach issues, we want, you know, we want them to know that the person's struggling with their stomach, cause they may not have told them. And then as that's resolving, are we seeing improvements in their mouth? Because it really, it goes both ways. You can't have a healthy body if you don't have a healthy mouth, but you know, a lot of times as Cintas, we, we do the same thing. We're struggling with the person's mouth and it doesn't Dawn on us, Dawn on us that, that, that there might be, you know, an underlying health issue. So easy to be critical of each other, but way better to collaborate together, to work it out, and to make everybody healthy. So we are done and with our webinar, but really we're just getting started.
We're just getting started with all of you getting healthier and all of you getting your questions answered. I work with an amazing group of health practitioners too. So I hope that you learned a lot from this webinar. I'm happy to share any other information. We have a great website, Jacksonville Beach, dentist.com. Please feel free to go on there. If you want to just talk to me or want to have a zoom chat, you can request an electronic consultation. And then this is our office phone number. And that is my actual, like a personal email address. I'm happy to hear from any of you, if you're a dentist and you're interested in complete health dentistry, please feel free to email me if you're a physician. And especially if you live in my area and you're interested in the health of your mouth, please feel free to email because I love sharing that.