Making Your Own Toothpaste at Home
Keeping your mouth healthy isn’t just about brushing and flossing, as our patients and regular readers of this blog know. Crucially, it involves eating right, going for nutrient-dense foods while avoiding sugars, refined grains, and other fermentable carbs - foods...
Tips to Get Kids Eating More Healthfully
The good news: Kids are eating healthier these days. According to a large study published last year in JAMA, the proportion of kids eating a poor quality diet plummeted from 76.8% to 56.1%. Meantime, the proportion eating an intermediate quality diet jumped up from...
Both Mouth & Body Can Benefit from Naturally Nitrate-Rich Foods
“Avoid nitrates,” we’re told, as if all nitrates were alike. But plenty of perfectly healthy foods contain them naturally: beets, radishes, turnips, leafy green vegetables, onion, garlic, apples, watermelon, grapes, and more. No, what the infamous “they” are...
Treating Gum Disease May Improve Metabolic Control, Confirms New Study
While it might seem like the links between gum disease and other inflammatory conditions is something that’s only been recently discovered, some of them have been known for many decades. Researchers were talking about the oral/heart health relationship way back in...
Being Stressed Can Stress Out Your Mouth
Since the start of the pandemic, there’s been a fair amount of talk about how spiking stress levels seem to have contributed to more dental problems. More than 70% of dentists surveyed saw an increase of patients experiencing teeth grinding and clenching,...
So Is Olive Oil as Good as Coconut for Oil Pulling?
So if olive oil can help you keep your gums healthy, should you switch to that for oil pulling? Not necessarily, says a small study recently published in the Journal of Orofacial Research. Thirty-four adults took part, half of whom were told to pull with coconut...
Healthier Gums Through…Olive Oil
A Mediterranean diet is an anti-inflammatory one, so you’d think that it might be especially helpful in lowering the risk of gum disease, which is marked by chronic inflammation and linked with other inflammatory conditions. That’s exactly what a new study in the...
Harmful Bacteria in the Mouth May Affect Heart Disease Risk for Those with RA
Once upon a time, if you said that conditions in the mouth could have any kind of impact on whole body health, folks might have looked at you funny. Because of the historic divide between dentistry and medicine, the mouth was long treated almost as if it didn’t...
The Benefit of Adding Some Mushrooms to Your Diet
Mushrooms are pretty amazing, from how they grow - - to the nutritional boost they can offer, as emphasized by new research published last month in Food Science & Nutrition. The study shows that simply adding a small serving to your diet each day - 84 grams, or...
What’s On YOUR Toothbrush?
Every few years, it seems there’s a big freakout about how your toothbrush could be speckled with bits of fecal matter courtesy of open-lid toilet flushes. It’s no wonder, really. A poo-covered toothbrush isn’t particularly nice to think about. Only, your brush may...
