Dr. Gundry – Dr. Dome, welcome to the podcast. It’s great to see you again.
Dr. Dome – Thank you for having me, Steven.
Dr. Gundry – We had dinner together really just a few weeks ago in London, England, where we were both speaking at the Health Optimization Summit. And my wife said, “You gotta get this crazy guy on your podcast.” And I agree, we need this crazy guy on the podcast, and thank you for coming all the way to America just for us. No, I mean, so let’s dive right in. In my latest book, “Gut Check,” I discuss leaky mouth, but I’d like to hear how did you discover that the mouth and dentistry was far more than making pretty smiles and filling cavities?
Dr. Dome – Thank you for having me and for the question. So basically in dental school you learn how to repair teeth. Teeth are basically little tiny biting instruments that are hard as stone, and if there’s a problem, you just drill it and fill it, maybe later bill it. And I was always very fascinated about the mechanical work, because you have to be a craftsman and good with your hands, good with your fingers. I also like the aesthetic approach to it, but during the complete university, something was missing. I didn’t know what it was, but I realized right after in residency that what I was missing was the part that I can help patients heal overall by starting in the mouth. So I was already trying to fix my own health during university and got into nutrition and supplementation and fitness and bodybuilding, all these things. So I was quite interested on that side of things for me personally, but didn’t really connect it with it. But as soon as I started in residency as a surgeon, as a oral surgeon, let’s say my boss back then, he would place amalgam fillings. And amalgam fillings are these silver black fillings that I couldn’t place just by aesthetics. And I knew from my dad, he’s also a dentist, that he wouldn’t do it for the last 20 years. But in university, we didn’t know about it, learn about it, we just learned it’s a great stuff, insurance pays for it, easy to work with it. But I just found it ugly and told the boss, “Sorry, I won’t do it. I’ll bring in composites and ceramics, more white stuff, more aesthetic stuff. And I had to look up why would I do this. So YouTube just started back then 20 years ago, and I was looking into heavy metal toxicity, mercury, these fillings contain 50% of mercury, and a whole new realm opened up for me. Functional medicine, lots of great integrative medical doctors already talking about heavy metal toxicity. So I thought, wow, there’s something more I can help patients really heal overall. And from there onwards, I tried to implement all the strategies and create a new concept that evolves around the mouse starting to be like optimal healthy, which is completely overlooked in conventional dentistry at least.
Dr. Gundry – So, you know, you say if oral health is bad, then overall health is too. So for our audience, can you explain how the oral microbiome influences the entire body’s wellbeing?
Dr. Dome – We have lots of different microbiomes in the body, as you know, the biggest one probably in the gut, but the second largest is actually in the mouth, and the most diversified. They found up to 700 different species in the mouth, and we swallow about 140 billion a day. That means 50% of our gut microbiome comes from the mouth. So if our mouth is already in dysbiosis, meaning imbalanced, chances that the gut is too are quite high. And this is where nutrition comes into play, it’s obviously same for the gut, but also all the stuff we do as dentists, let’s say dental repair, can change that microbiome on a daily basis. And what our goal should be is to get it as natural as possible.
Dr. Gundry – Did you start reading about this, or did you change your practice and then you saw changes in your patients? Or, how did that process come about for you?
Dr. Dome – It was mainly seeing patients suffering from chronic health issues back in the day. And me digging into that heavy metal issue, at the beginning I thought, wow, if I remove heavy metal safely or mercury filling safely, all my patients will be super healthy. But I realized it’s not the case, so there will be more. So I just started to investigate and basically travel the world and saw lots of different experts from functional medicine to Chinese medicine, everything you can imagine, because I needed to kind of like create a new sort of doctor that I would’ve needed or these patients would’ve needed, because I realized, okay, there will be a lot of health benefits if, for example, removing mercury, heavy metal fillings with protection, but patients will still suffer from chronic health issues even though I optimize their diet and nutrition. So I realized there’s more to oral health such as things like root canal-treated teeth, or things like cavitations that are not really known in university anyways. So I was just very curious, and I still am, that’s just my nature. I’m just curious to learn. There’s new things. I’m always questioning stuff that I get trained in. I’m not the guy that just accept things. I would always be curious and ask, wait a second, what am I learning here right now in university? That doesn’t make sense to my own studies. So just by my own healing journey as well as working with thousands of patients, you discover tiny differences. You see, okay, if we remove the metal safely, it works a little bit, but there’s more. What about these root canals? Oh, those are chronic infections. Then you learn about chronic inflammation being a main trigger for chronic health issues. So if you see super sick patients for quite some time and you want to help them, I have this moral obligation, you just dig in and search and search and search until you find more and more. And now obviously 15 years later, it’s a full concept that evolves around optimal oral health, but it’s about the bigger picture, how to optimize the overall health by starting in the mouth. So it’s step-by-step learning, doing, trying new things, experimenting on my body, experimenting with, not really experimenting, but trying it and-
Dr. Gundry – Trying, yeah, sure.
Dr. Dome – See what helps and then obviously use what is useful, reject what is not, and add your uniquely own, and at one point you get out of the dogmatic state, can become more a master of things, and yeah, see that it works.
Dr. Gundry – Now you talk about the teeth are actually an extension of your brain. Can you elaborate on that?
Dr. Dome – Yeah, so if you see an anatomical chart just off the brain nerves, you know we have 12 cranial nerves, I don’t have to tell you, but for the audience, they start in the brainstem and they basically have three branches. One goes to the lower jaw, one upper jaw, and one to here. And at the end of this trigeminal nerve, we have the teeth. So they’re really literally attached to a nerve. So that’s also why tooth pain is so insane, because it’s like neuralgia, goes directly into your brainstem. But also if you understand what we do as dentists for just restoring bites and smiles, we use various different materials, not just the mercury-contained fillings. We use various metals or leave dead body parts in the body, stuff that seems to be outside body for dentists, and most medical doctors too, mouth seems to be not part of the body. So we can do whatever you want in there and on there. But all the stuff, all the material can be transported through the tooth itself, is a vital organ with blood supply, limb supply, nervous system. So it will affect with cytokines, but it also can travel through that nerve back into the brain, like that’s called retrograde axonal transport. And has been shown a hundred years ago in like dog teeth when they put in toxic croton oil in it and they could find it within 24 hours in the hypothalamus, pituitary, all the ganglia. So whatever we do here is working systemically and affects your brain straight away. So teeth are literally like your eyes or your nose, an extension of the brain.
Dr. Gundry – So just getting a white smile doesn’t mean that things are doing well in the brain for instance.
Dr. Dome – Exactly. That’s a bit of the problem with dentistry that we are actually trained to basically use our hands and make, fix the bites again and maybe make a nice smile, which is great. And I don’t think that biodentistry what I’m teaching is controversial. It’s just the next levels. It’s the dental evolution so that we understand, okay, if we anyways have to do repair, why not do it with materials that don’t affect the body, that are neutral to the body? And obviously I’m completely fine with the vanity, everyone should have white teeth if they want. But we are able to cover up dead body parts, like say a root canal usually over time just decomposes, gets more dark. But if you put like a wide cap on top, and you smile, you look still perfect. But if you see it on an X-ray, it looks more like super unnatural creature underneath there and it might be a trigger for your nervous and immune system that holds you back from superhuman health.
Dr. Gundry – We talked at dinner about cavitations. And tell me what that means.
Dr. Dome – So cavitations is more like the layman’s term for chronic jaw bone inflammations. They’re better known as let’s say NICO, it’s neuralgia-inducing cavitational osteonecrosis, or FDOJ, fatty degenerative osteonecrotic jawbone. That’s the perfect description to be fair, like just from an anatomy point of view. Problem here is this is something you don’t learn in university. So a normal dentist won’t diagnose it or will probably tell you that’s bullshit, yeah, because if it’s more like in the woo-woo section still, but there’s great research about it. One of my colleagues, and I call him the Yoda of cavitations, is Dr. Johann Lechner from Munich in Germany. He devoted his complete life to just these cavitations and wrote four books, lots of research, clinical research. But the problem is like, it’s not really always getting accepted. But what’s fascinating about these cavitations is it’s obviously another chronic silent inflammation. You know, chronic silent inflammation is a big trigger to stress because we don’t hear it anymore. It’s not painful anymore, it usually doesn’t hurt. So basically the body just turns the volume down, but it’s still affecting the system through various cytokines. And one of these specific chemokines that are in these cavitations is something called a RANTES, R-A-N-T-E-S, or in medical terms CCL5, chemokine ligand five. And if you look that up on a Google Scholar or PubMed research and you type in CCL5 plus, let’s say, multiple sclerosis or any sort of, let’s say, rheumatoid arthritis, you will find tons of research. So medical world is looking for this. Dental world doesn’t know about it. So we need to combine this and make a system out of it so people understand that there might be something holding them back. And this is, the cavitations is why I always ask one, I always ask three questions on every keynote that I’m giving for all the audience. Number one is, are there any metals in your mouth? Stand up, remain standing. Have you ever had a root canal? Stand up? And the third question is, did they remove your wisdom teeth? And usually by that question, 90% of the audience would stand up, and we see, wow, there’s something to optimize. Even on the Health Optimization Summit where you think that most people are already quite healthy, 90% would stand up, and cavitations can actually just happen as a problem of not being in a healing state before you do surgery. And this is why the systemic healing comes into place.
Dr. Gundry – In my practice, I have interesting stories. I have two dental hygienists, I have a lot more, but I had two that had chronic markers of inflammation, hs-CRP, C-reactive protein. And I looked in all the usual spots, urinary tract infections, autoimmune, and they were all negative. And with both of them, I said, “I think it’s in your mouth.” And they both, of course, “Are you kidding me? I’m a dental hygienist, don’t you think I’d know if there was something in my mouth?” I said, “I’ve just looked everywhere. Have you ever gotten a CT scan of of your mouth?” And they said, “No, we don’t do it in our office.” And I go, “Tell you what, humor me. Go get a CT scan. And of course both of these women had a root canal with a cap and they had an abscess, of course, that they didn’t feel ’cause the nerve was dead. And when the, you know, the crown came off, pus came rolling out both of them. And obviously the end of the story is their C-reactive proteins, you know, went to normal. But they were unaware that this process was going on.
Dr. Dome – I feel that oral health is still like not connected to overall body health, and especially the hs-CRP. One of my first patients in residency was an older lady having had high levels like your hygienists. And she asked me as the newbie, “Do you think it could be connected to my systemic issues from, it’s coming from the mouth maybe?” And I’m like, “Yeah, why not? Why not? Could be.” But then my boss comes in and is like, “No way, it’s not possible at all. It can’t be connected.” So I was like, okay, I’m sorry that I said it, but that’s the problem. No one knows about it. And this is why I always say, if you already have optimized everything, like the dental hygienist, the oral hygiene will be perfect. But they don’t have dental repair on their mind yet that this could be the trigger holding them back. So if you are trying to optimize anything already, nutrition’s on point, sleep is on point, all the stuff we’re talking in health optimization, biohacking, but you do not feel superhuman yet, then it’s time to look for these things and maybe get a cone beam scan, like a CT scan of your jawbone and see three dimensionally, and then you will be amazed that there might be something holding you back lurking in your mouth.
Dr. Gundry – All right, so for all the audiences, so you have everybody stand up, and, okay, so a lot of people still have amalgam fillings. Do you tell every one of them you gotta get these things out, or how do you approach this? Number one.
Dr. Dome – Okay, number one is I’m not here to scare anyone. It’s just more information for you guys. So if you look into your mouth and there’s silver black fillings, don’t freak out. They contain 50% mercury, but the main thing is if you want to replace them, you need to have someone skilled to do so safely. Because conventionally we’re just trained to drill it out, maybe using a rubber dam, but that’s it. It’s too little, because what these fillings do on a daily basis, intoxicate you with tiny, tiny amounts of mercury vapor. It’s only two to three microns per day. But it adds up. It’s chronically infecting. So mercury fillings are still the number one source for heavy metal toxicity in the body. It’s not the fish you’re eating. So that’s one thing. But don’t freak out. Find a dentist that is trained in how to remove these safely. So in the US, there’s the IAOMT that certifies dentists to become SMART certified, S-M-A-R-T, stands for safe mercury amalgam removal technique. You can look them up. My dentist that I’m training are called the real biodentists. There’s also directory. They will also know about this obviously, and know how to do it safely. So don’t freak out, don’t just go to anyone, find a strategy first. All of them need to be replaced.
Dr. Gundry – Okay, and what about root canals? Lots of people have root canals.
Dr. Dome – Yeah, so root canal is probably still one of the biggest controversies in dentistry, because I understand it is a fine art. To be a really good endodontologist, a dentist that knows how to do these root canals, you have to be very skilled. The good ones really use electron microscope and work with this. But for me, it’s another approach. I’m just looking, of course you can bite on root canal, it’s no problem out there, yeah. It’s not an issue for biting. But this root canal is a dead body part. Because you had massive pain, we had to help you accurately to get rid of it. So we take out the blood supply, the lymph supply, the autonomic nervous system, and then basically put plastic in there and keep it as a dead body part. But if you look to the tooth on a electro microscope, you see that per square millimeter, there’s about 30 to 75,000 dentin tubules, which are the perfect cave for anaerobic bacteria, microbes that anyways live with you, but they can just jump in there and live there. And because there’s no more blood, no more pulp in there, there’s no more immune system. And research was like quite clear, if this immune system is still there, the tooth is alive, it will attack those invaders, but if it’s not, perfect cave. But then your immune system, the innate macrophage is the immune system. It’ll just build like let’s say a cyst around it, an abscess, but something chronically infecting. And if you wanna diagnose that correctly, you need another CT scan, cone beam scan to really look at the tip of the root three dimensionally. So from a holistic, or let’s say health optimization point of view, our patients, we always plan to remove all metal safely. We take out all the root canal-treated teeth very safely and immediately replace them with ceramic implants, not with titanium. And we also obviously take care of these cavitations. That’s, I mean the concept is called biodentistry 3.0, which is the melting of the high tech dentistry, biologic dentistry, with functional medicine and health optimization in order to restore the mouth to as natural as possible. Because this bit, if it’s metal, root canals, or chronic silent inflammation, the jaw bone, is the one part of chronic stress that you can’t biohack yourself away. You need someone skilled to renew it or reactivate it.
Dr. Gundry – So I can’t just chew activated charcoal and Chlorella all day long and take care of the mercury fillings.
Dr. Dome – It is maybe a compensatory strategy, yeah, to compensate for the toxicity. You might be good with taking lots of binders, what I mean.
Dr. Gundry – Better to get them out in the first place.
Dr. Dome – In my opinion, it’s better to get rid of the source first. I think, and also this is very important. If you for example, have a medical doctor that wants to do a heavy metal chelation, you should have a perfectly clean mouth. There shouldn’t be any root canal, cavitation, or metal anymore, because you cannot chelate as long as you have the source still in there. It’s kind of like showering and trying to rub yourself at the same time, but in a negative way, because it can really create chaos in the system. So it’s timing. This one is a foundational part of the healing journey to get rid of it safely.
Dr. Gundry – All right, now you mentioned wisdom teeth. Now I’m really scared, because I had my wisdom teeth taken out I think when I was a teenager, ’cause they were impacted.
Dr. Dome – Yeah, of course.
Dr. Gundry – And they were painful. So what, people listening, am I gonna die early ’cause I lost my wisdom teeth? Or maybe I’m not very smart anymore ’cause my wisdom teeth are gone. Tell me why that’s of interest to us.
Dr. Dome – It’s of interest, because we have to take our wisdom teeth. Unfortunately in the western world, quite often, I would say in 80% of all cases, we do not have enough space anymore for them. So yours were impacted. Mine were impacted too. It’s obviously because I needed orthodontic treatment. You might have too. You didn’t. Okay, cool. They took it out when I was 14, 15 years old. That’s the norm. Like during teenage years. Problem is, us as dentists or oral surgeons, we don’t look systemically. We just basically tell you we have to take out these wisdom tooth, which might be totally correct, they have no space. But we just tell you in the content it’s gonna be very painful, you will have swollen cheeks, and you have to take ibuprofen and maybe an antibiotic, and you have a school leave for a week, which is the good part if you, yeah, right? Problem here is that this body is not prepared, is not in a healing mode, is not anabolic. And this surgery comes as a shock for that little system. So oftentimes I would, again, it’s just estimation, 80% of all patients develop something called dry sockets, or don’t really heal, only secondary, meaning what we need is blood. But if it’s in a shock, body is like in stress mode, or has a nutrient depletion, it doesn’t really form a blood clot, and then it’s very painful. So patients come in and need local antibiotics to be placed like every single day. And then it only closes itself secondarily. So what the body does is just because of a lack of preparation and nutrition, maybe closes the gum and also closes the hard part of the bone, which is called the cortical part. But inside where you have sponge bone will be not enough material to basically finish the construction site. So it’s becoming an ongoing construction site. Again, a hole in your jawbone that over time becomes ischemic. So less oxygen, perfect breeding ground for parasites, viruses, fungi, mold, found a lot of mold toxicity in there, especially from American patients that fly in, mold is a big issue here. And these balls tend to live in there, and glyphosate’s mercury. So it’s kind of like a huge dumping area. And the problem is it’s not really in your body anymore. Your body has it outside, it’s blocked, so to speak, and you don’t feel it. That’s the main issue. It’s a chronic silent inflammation.
Dr. Gundry – How would anybody know that that’s happening? I mean, will a regular dental x-ray show it?
Dr. Dome – All the patients flying from all over the world sent the irregular panoramic X-rays, so I have an idea. If I look at it and see their wisdom teeth are gone, I estimate there will be a cavitation above 90% of all cases because most patients are not prepared for that surgery. So just an estimation, but really finding it, you need a cone beam scan, a three-dimensional one, which we then do once the patient’s in the office, and again, in 90% of all cases, we were correct.
Dr. Gundry – There it is.
Dr. Dome – There it is. It’s just what we see on a cone beam is just osteolytic jaw bone. We have measures to see if it’s more like in the liquids or if it’s just hollow. It’s called a Hounsfield scale. So we can really read it. But usually there’s just no sponges bone, and it’s just dark. And from doing more than 10,000 surgeries that way, I just know how it probably will present itself clinically. So usually what you do, it’s just a very minor surgery, and you can’t do that without scarring. It’s not a problem. You just have to know the skills, open it, clean it out. And it’s usually just fatty tissue. It looks like, when you open it, it looks like a chicken soup, like all the oil comes out, it’s all fatty. Sometimes I can just literally suck it out and then clean it, reactivate it, use a ton of ozone. But obviously we only do this after preparing the patients for quite some time so that they’re coming in boosted and can really heal. I don’t wanna do a surgery twice, because I know they didn’t heal it 20 years ago. If I do the same thing again, they won’t heal it too, because it’s kind of like a wisdom tooth surgery. Just, my goal is to have no swelling, no pain, nothing, and good healing. But therefore it’s systemic bone healing that we involve in all this.
Dr. Gundry – So that’s a good question. How do you get somebody ready for surgery?
Dr. Dome – Yeah, so this is one of the biodentistry 3.0 parts is how to design the proper, I call it food design concept. How to design the proper nutrition for patients in order to be in a healing mode. Let’s say anabolic meaning building tissue, not catabolic. Most patients are actually catabolic, even though they eat a lot of calories, but not really enough nutrients. I don’t have to tell you. So it’s the same approach. So basically what we do is an elimination sort of diet. Step one is remove all the pro-inflammatory triggers, gluten-containing grains, lectins ideally. We also go conventional dairy-free for a while. Also casein is a big problem. And seed oils is a big one right now in biohacking, health optimization, we do that anyways. No fried food and basically no processed foods. And obviously any dentist will tell you no sugar. So that’s the one, the core four that we leave out. And then we teach them how to think in nutrients. Protein is macronutrient one mainly important for building, it’s a building block of life. So they get a protein target to hit. It’s like one gram per pound of ideal body weight, that’s round about the best strategy for really building. Not to sustain, but if you wanna have like built something, it’s good. And then the other two nutrients, let’s say carbohydrates and fats, we would just adjust according to their body composition. If they’re more athletic, more carbs, if they’re less athletic, maybe more fats, more paleo approach. But just basically eat real foods and prepare that way, from the macronutrient point of view. So that’s the food design concept. And they do that by themselves. It’s just a booklet. It’s very self-explanatory. Dentists obviously that I’m training, the real biodentists, they know exactly how to do this. Because once patients come in for the health optimization week, we can then fine tune it and see, okay, this is what they need specifically more maybe. Maybe they’re vegans, maybe they’re carnivores. So you have to be able to have an umbrella above all the nutritional mindsets that work for everyone. Because I don’t wanna take away your mindset. If you wanna be a vegan or carnivore, it’s fine, no problem. You just have to know how to optimize it. And if you have the macros optimized, we go into something called bone-healing protocol, the bone-healing science, which is basically the micronutrients. And there’s solid science behind how the body builds bone tissue, but also teeth.
Dr. Gundry – And so I mean we’re talking supplements?
Dr. Dome – Oh, yeah. So the boning protocol initially evolved around high doses of vitamin D3, which is basically a hormone, as you know, built in the sun, if you go out in the sun, which is no problem here. But a big problem where I come from, Germany is six month out of the years basically no vitamin D3 production. So you have to supplement starting in October till probably April. So vitamin D3, let’s say is the king nutrient to bring in calcium to reabsorb from kidney and large intestine into the bloodstream. But we don’t wanna have calcium bricks lying around in bloodstream making arteriosclerosis or like calcifying your arteries. We wanna bring these calcium bricks towards your bones and your teeth. We can remineralize teeth and bones too. So it’s anti-osteoporosis, and therefore we need co-factors such as vitamin K2, magnesium, boron, zinc, methylation, B vitamins, omega-3 fatty acid. So this is nowadays maybe the bone-healing protocol that started with high dose of vitamin D3, and me being a surgeon and looking for that ceramic implant developed into a complete health matrix protocol that basically heals the complete system starting from here to the end. So if they come in for the health optimization week and then stay on this protocol for three to four months, that’s how long, for example, the bone takes to heal and the ceramic implants to osteointegrate. They stay on it, and be 100% consequent with the diet and the supplements, they also heal their complete gut system, and maybe lose 10, 20, 30 pounds of body fat at the same time.
Dr. Gundry – At the same time, yeah.
Dr. Dome – It’s health and then anesthetics. Form follows function.
Dr. Gundry – So now most surgeons tell my patients and oral surgeons, you have to stop all your supplements for two weeks before I’m gonna even come near you. So you’re saying-
Dr. Dome – Because of blood thinning or what?
Dr. Gundry – Yeah, blood thinning.
Dr. Dome – No, I say the opposite.
Dr. Gundry – Exactly.
Dr. Dome – You need to come in, and you would probably say the same, right? Come in boosted. Actually I would rather have a more expensive urine than having a little too little, because we need all that. And if it’s like, for example, I don’t, I’m a surgeon, but I don’t want to do surgery just because I love surgeries. I wanna help my patients heal overall by doing this. I don’t wanna see them again. So the approach is if we have that finished, and at the end, the nice teeth on top and they can bite, I don’t wanna see you as a dental patient again. Maybe for health optimization to further help you, but not for any dental repair. It’s a complete new approach to dentistry that we are focusing on overall health and not any repair anymore. So therefore the nutrition and the nutrients become important the whole life. You don’t wanna be in a deficiency, because for example, tooth decay is chronic disease number one. Yeah, it’s 90% incidence. It’s more than 50% in the Western world actually. And that means our teeth become soft, we become soft, we decay, and we can see that one glance in the mouth. And it has nothing to do with oral hygiene. Not at all. Maybe a tiny little bit, but it’s mainly our lifestyle. We became sedentary. We became soft. Our teeth show that too. We don’t even have to chew our foods anymore. We can just drink a smoothie. And I’m not against smoothies, but you know what I mean? We are totally living an unnatural lifestyle. And this happened within 100 years, 150 years.
Dr. Gundry – Yeah, no, I make a joke. You’ve been visiting San Diego and you went to the zoo, and I tell my patients, :Look, let’s go to the San Diego Zoo, look in all the cages, see if we can find a juicer or a smoothie machine, and there aren’t any.
Dr. Dome – No. And none of these animals would have tooth decay. They might have bad breath, but that’s just our point of view, because we think that breath needs to smell like mint. I don’t know what happened in nature if you just eat real food and don’t clean your teeth or brush your teeth. Because if we ideally eat the way we’re supposed to eat, we wouldn’t get tooth decay. Our immune system is immune against tooth decay and bleeding gums. Unfortunately, if we look at the average person in the Western world, we have bleeding gums, we have tooth decay. So that’s why the overall oral healthcare regimen is designed as a bandaid for that subject. The goal should be to teach patients how to get out of that problem, and they never have to see a dentist again. How cool is this? No more drilling, no more filling.
Dr. Gundry – Well, you know, that was the whole premise of Weston A. Price.
Dr. Dome – Exactly, a dentist.
Dr. Gundry – Yeah, it was actually one of the first books I read. And you know, he was, he couldn’t figure out, he was a, you know, amateur anthropologist, and he couldn’t figure out how all these skulls of people even 2,000 years ago had perfect dental arches and perfect teeth. And yet he was seeing, you know, all these kids with crowded teeth and cavities in Cleveland, Ohio or Toledo, Ohio. And he’s going, what the heck? How do these people with no dental care have perfect alignment and no cavities? And they didn’t brush their teeth or anything. And that’s actually what started him off. And he was right.
Dr. Dome – Yeah, he was totally right, and what many people don’t know, he was the chairman of the American Dental Association for a lot of years. And he was obviously looking very deep into nutrition. He visited the Aborigines, he visited Africa. I think he probably had to do that by boat. So lots of exploring, and the book nutrition and physical degeneration is amazing. Problem is he already realized, oh, wow, it’s nutrition that leads to the wrong diet, leads to decay, leads to spacing issues, crowded teeth, mouths breathing, tooth decay, bleeding gums. And if you eat ancestrally, you have beautiful arches, you have space for actually two sets of wisdom teeth, no scoliosis, nothing. So he combined it already, and basically started the first bone-healing or tooth-healing protocol. But what a lot of people don’t know is that he also was the first one going or suspecting root canals to be chronic health triggers. He actually did the most studies. He has thousands, I mean, he did the famous rabbit studies. He was suspecting that his patients that came in with chronic health issues and a root canal, that it might be connected, because it started soon after. So he asked them, can we remove that root canal tooth? And then he implanted under the skin of rabbits, of thousands of rabbits. And he probably sacrificed a lot of rabbits on like the altar of like medicine. But anyways, what he realized was these rabbits would get the same chronic health issues 80% of the time as the host. And when it was heart problems, 100% the same. And he continued this for 30 years, and then Hal Huggins redid this studies in the 70s, but it’s not accepted because the problem was root canals already like one of the number one treatments we do as dentists. Because obviously people have tooth decay and pain, they need a root canal acutely. But this is why we need the change coming in. And yeah, imagine 50.3% of all the Western world, we have the most access towards dental hygienists, towards like the aisles full of the fluorides and the Listerines. But we have the most health issues, oral health issues, comparison to, let’s say, Africa or Asia. They don’t have all these-
Dr. Gundry – Issues, yeah.
Dr. Dome – They don’t have these issues. Especially not if they eat their real food, then they don’t even have it. They don’t even know a dentist, does not existing. They have perfect teeth, hard as stone, and they can bite.
Dr. Gundry – All right, so people are gonna listen to this, and they’re gonna go, “Well, I like my dentist. I’ve known my dentist a long time, and I like my dentist.” How do they approach a conventional dentist that they like with these ideas?
Dr. Dome – Two options. So if you have a dentist that is a bit more open-minded, just talk to them, because they might be very much interested in it. Because there is a shift towards more health-centered approaches. I mean, I had fair share of arrows in my back for the last decade from my colleagues because I wanna bring change and they don’t necessarily wanna do that. So if they’re emotional about it, you won’t convert them. But if they’re a little bit interested in, just point it towards my book or that there is new ideas. Ask them, “Can we have a ceramic implant instead of titanium?” For example, in Germany, finally in 2023, a ceramic implant, what I’m specialist in, is now medical guideline.
Dr. Gundry – Really?
Dr. Dome – Now it is, since one year ago. But before, like you would get attacked a lot, because the standard is a titanium implant. So an implant is if you have lost a tooth, yeah, you need a new root. It’s usually made out of metal, drilled into your bone. We do that with ceramic for more than a decade. Still 99.7% of all dentists will tell you that doesn’t work. So you have to figure out if your dentist is open-minded. And some would maybe start just with the metals, find a SMART certified. They might not know about the root canals. They maybe tell you root canals are no problem, or they don’t know about cavitations. But at least they are open for that metal approach, so they will maybe be open to learn more. And I’m always about sharing. So it’s all about co-elevating. I’m not competing with any of my colleagues. That’s why I’m training, why I created the new tribe of real biodentists, to bring that information to as many people as possible, because people are suffering out there, and we can change that.
Dr. Gundry – One trick our listeners can do today or starting tomorrow to improve their oral health.
Dr. Dome – Yeah.
Dr. Gundry – Got any, one trick?
Dr. Dome – One trick?
Dr. Gundry – Two tricks?
Dr. Dome – Yeah, I have a couple of tricks. So what you could do straight away is ditch that conventional toothpaste. That is full of toxins. I mean it contains fluoride, which is normally endorsed by dentists, but it’s full of chemicals such as triglycine, carrageenans, sodium lauryl sulfate, all the stuff we don’t actually wanna have in our mouth, because, as you know, there’s a microbiome and we will nuke it. So find a toothpaste that is completely neutral, something that you would eat, maybe coconut oil-based, xylitol, some probiotics in it. And as an active ingredient, and I’ve been on that quest here also on every supermarket, I’ll check if I can find something. So if you can find something that has an active ingredient such as hydroxyapatite in it, that would be perfect. Because that is the same as fluoride, just in a healthy way. So this is something you could do straight away. As well as if you have something like Listerine at home, this one is designed to clean the floor, ditch that, maybe clean your floor with it.
Dr. Gundry – Or clean the floor with it.
Dr. Dome – Yeah, clean the floor with, or the toilet. And get yourself a jar of extra virgin coconut oil and just start coconut oil pulling, which is perfect for your oral microbiome. It soothes it, it helps the microbiome, it’s more modulating. It’s antivirals, it’s antibacterial. It stores a few toxins and you can spit it out afterwards. Five minutes in the mouth, spit it out, for free basically. And it will help. And don’t disinfect anything.
Dr. Gundry – Can I do olive oil pulling?
Dr. Dome – Yeah.
Dr. Gundry – Oh, shoot, thank you.
Dr. Dome – If you, yeah, I know, you’ll be, If you don’t like coconut oil, olive oil is fine too. You could do various sorts of cold pressed oils are fine. Just don’t do the seed oils.
Dr. Gundry – Yeah.
Dr. Dome – That’s not a good idea.
Dr. Gundry – All right. As I warned you, we have an audience question. And I want you to take this one on. This one comes from Forever Young on YouTube. Is teeth whitening toxic for my gut health? And what do you think about blue light whiteners like Dave Asprey pushes? Any other safe ways to whiten teeth?
Dr. Dome – Yes, so I get the vanity. I can understand that you wanna have white teeth, not a problem at all. Personally, from my experience, I would go see a professional for this. Like just go to see the dentist, or the dental hygienist maybe does that in the US, to get an in-office bleaching or maybe get a splint for at home, but done by a professional. Because this will usually not hurt the tooth. Problem with conventional, let’s say, tooth-whitening stuff that you can find in the store that I can see here on my quest. Usually these toothpaste are containing more abrasives, meaning they basically file down the hard part of your tooth, which is the enamel. And if you do use these whitening toothpaste, over time, you actually get more yellow teeth because you file it down. What you focus on is, and also swallowing it, there’s, again, fluoride and lots of toxins, it will probably affect your gut health by swallowing it. So I wouldn’t do it. You could try the charcoal approach and just do it yourself. Put a little of charcoal in it. I don’t think it will do the trick as effectively as going to a dentist. Just go to a dentist route in this case, and support your body with the right minerals, again. The bone healing helps your teeth too. So these minerals, if the coat go in your teeth, a more mineral-rich tooth is actually whiter, because it’s more reflecting, it’s more like a crystal structure, reflects the light better, and then you can use this approach. And the second question was regarding these-
Dr. Gundry – The blue light whitening.
Dr. Dome – The blue light whitening, it’s more like a gadget. I personally, I have to say, I haven’t tried it. I have one at home. It seems promising. It depends again on, are you doing it? How sensitive are your teeth? If you prepare your teeth well, so if you’re on a, let’s say, the bone-healing protocol, and you have enough vitamin D3, magnesium, K2, and all these things in your diet, your teeth are quite robust and don’t get as sensitive. Because what people oftentimes complain when it comes to tooth whitening is that these teeth get so sensitive, because of the hydroxy peroxide and stuff. So if you prepare that well, you might be good with it and give it a try.
Dr. Gundry – Thanks so much for watching this episode, but don’t go anywhere. I think you’re gonna love this next one. Drinking juice fills your mouth and your gut with fructose, gives bad bacteria, bad fungi the things they want, and then impairs your immune system’s ability to fight those bad bacteria.
