The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Most Replayed Moment: Don’t Brush Your Teeth After Sugar! The Best Oral Care Routine

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Dr Victoria Sampson is a leading integrative dentist, researcher, and founder of The Health Society clinic in London. She is internationally recognised for her pioneering work on the oral microbiome and its links to systemic health. In today’s Moment, Dr Sampson reveals the link between oral bacteria and cancers, and how your daily habits - like when you brush your teeth or what you drink - can significantly influence your oral microbiome. She shares practical tips to protect your mouth and the domino effect that can have on your overall health. Listen to the full episode here: Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/cB5kBuhQ4Xb Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/m1rg8qkQ4Xb Watch the Episodes On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos The Health Society Clinic: https://www.thehealthsociety.co.uk/

I was reading about a study in mice that linked that oral bacteria to tumour growth. Are you familiar with that study? Yes, and it's that specific oral bacteria, so the fusobacterium nucleotum, which has been shown to accelerate tumour growth within mice, but also for colorectal cancer and breast cancer as well. And what's your belief there? I know this research is fairly new, but do you think there is a causal relationship, of a significant causal relationship between the health of our oral microbiome

and our probability of developing some form of cancer? I wouldn't yet say causal. I think that for most cancers, it is multifactorial, and there are a lot of things that can impact whether or not you get the cancer and how aggressive the cancer is. I do think that oral health and some specific oral bacteria are risk factors and can definitely. increase the aggression of those cancers or even the initiation of them.

There's also been research, and I think I'm waiting for the research to be published, on what they're doing is they've created a antibiotic, which only kills that oral bacteria that I was talking about, so fusobacterium nucleotum. And they are going to be issuing that antibiotic to those patients who have the colorectal cancer, which has the oral bacteria, to see whether or not it slows down their progression or improves their prognosis. So if I see those results and it shows it,

then there's for sure a strong causative link between the two. But for now, I would say that it's multifactorial and it's definitely a risk factor. That oral bacteria that you're describing, you called it fuzobacterium? Yeah. What is it that causes that? Is it something that I'm eating?

Is it a lifestyle choice I'm making? Multiple things. Poor oral hygiene. Some of us genetically will have higher levels of it. it's what we eat it's who we're kissing it's what we're breathing in does my girlfriend have it so we'll have to see um but it's and that's the thing that's the beauty of being able to test these things now is that you can actually see and also what's it's strange is that green tea um you know something so simple is extremely effective at killing fuso bacterium nucleotum so it's just knowing those

types of things being able to do the test knowing the right treatment plans and recommendations based from that we know green tea is good for us and now we can really understand why okay that's interesting you have actually tested jack over there right and you said to me before we started recording that he's got a ton of that fuzobacterium uh yes he does yeah and it's really getting out of control it's really badly out of control yeah so i've um i've given him a big vats of green tea as a gift green tea yes green tea this guy's going to edit that up this is the problem Definitely. Green tea?

Yeah. That's good for my own microbiome. Yeah, really good. How? It's anti-inflammatory. It helps with what we call oxidative stress. This is basically stress for the body. And it's antibacterial.

So it actually is very effective at killing fusobacterium nucleotum. What is your opinion of the impact that coffee has on my oral microbiome? I'm slightly biased because I love coffee. Okay. But there is no negative impact of coffee on the oral microbiome directly. Coffee does dry your mouth out, and so you have reduced saliva, and that can actually cause problems for the oral microbiome. So the saliva is super important in your mouth.

It provides all of the food, the proteins, everything for the bacteria in your mouth. So it's kind of like this delivery service. deliver roots, traveling around, providing all of the food and bacteria, sorry, food to the bacteria. And that's what keeps the good bacteria alive and happy. So when you have a dry mouth, let's say you're drinking lots of coffee or you're very nervous or you are on antidepressants, for example, which are a big one, then you just don't have as much saliva. So those bacteria don't have as much food and those bacteria die and then you get bad bacteria growing in replacement. What about tea? We're a nation of tea drinkers in the UK. Similar. So it also does dry

your mouth not as bad as coffee, but otherwise no problems other than staining. What about if I put loads of sugar in it? Because a lot of people put a lot of sugar. Okay, yeah. No, no, no. So actually sugar in your tea is even worse than you having a biscuit, for example. So because the sugar dissolves in your hot tea and the tea is hot, when you drink it, it can actually cause more problems. Another thing with sugar is, I have a sweet tooth, I love sugar, but it's about how you eat your sugar. So let's say if you have your hot tea with five lumps of sugar in there and you're sipping it over an hour or two, that's where you start to see a lot of problems. So actually, you need to be having a sugar attack, so just all the sugar in one go. And that way, your mouth has all the

sugar in one go and it's able to neutralize the saliva and get back to a good state as quickly as possible. Every time you sip your tea with sugar, what happens is that the saliva has to go from acidic, back to neutral acidic, back to neutral acidic. And then it starts to just not work properly, and the saliva just stays acidic. And that's where you start to see decay. So you want to just down the tea? Down the tea, or I don't know if you're an M&M guy, have all your M&M's in one go. Don't snack on M&Ms every 10 minutes. What about other drinks like, I don't know, Coca-Cola's and these other sort of fizzy drinks that might have artificial sweet. in, things like that.

So they're not as bad as your natural sugars, but for example, something like your Coke or Fanta or whatever, it's also very acidic and it can actually cause erosion as well. So this is essentially where the ulcer layer of your tooth, so the enamel, is just worn away from having lots and lots of these fizzy drinks. So what are the very, having seen my results, but generally from seeing the thousands and thousands of results that you've seen. Yeah. What are some of the easiest things that I could do to help correct that situation

and have perfect oral health and a perfect oral microbiome? So what we've done is if you were to do the test, you would have all of the personalized recommendations for you. So we tell you to have green tea, to have honey, all of those types of things, which have been shown through research to benefit your microbiome in your case specifically. But if we were just talking about someone who hasn't done the microbeautil, bio-biome test and wants to just make sure that they have as balanced of a microbiome as possible.

Diet is obviously very important. So what we're talking about, that sugar attack, making sure that you only have one sugar attack a day, you're not having sugar consistently because it does alter your saliva pH. The type of toothpaste that you're using, I like to keep it simple. You don't need to, we don't need to make things super complicated. You don't have to spend that much money. Having the right toothpaste, right toothbrush and the right floss is honestly, as much as is the most necessarily thing that you need.

Okay, so in terms of brushing, though, you give some sort of practical advice around when we should brush. What is that? And is there any time where I shouldn't brush my teeth? You should never brush straight after anything acidic or sugary. So what you end up doing is grinding the sugar or the acid into your teeth. So actually, you should wait 30 minutes until you brush your teeth. That's interesting, because when I eat something sugary,

I feel like I need to brush my teeth to get rid of it. Yeah, no, no. So you want to wait 30 minutes. So instead, you can chew some sugar-free gum or there are lots of pastels that we use. So, like, I use, like, chewable mints. And you can chew one of those. And it will actually neutralize your saliva really quickly

so that you don't have that acid causing the demineralization. And you said that I should brush my teeth first thing in the morning and last thing before I go to bed? Yes. Okay, just because that's the sort of biggest window, I guess, the best way to. Yeah, the most important time to brush your teeth is right before you go to bed because you spend two minutes spreading all this lovely goodness on your teeth. And then when you go to sleep, going back to saliva, when you sleep, your saliva flow reduces massively. So all of a sudden

these bacteria are left to their own devices. And if you don't have good toothpaste there, then they can cause a lot of problems. And do I spit or do I rinse after I've brushed my teeth? Spits. So you should never rinse your mouth out with water after you brush your teeth. teeth. So brush, brush, brush, spit into the basin, and that's it. Reason being, again, going back to my sunscreen analogy, imagine you spend two minutes putting all this lovely sunscreen all over your skin to then just go and have a shower right before you go into the sun. So with the toothpaste, you spend two minutes putting all of that on your teeth, and then if you rinse it, then you're actually removing all of that goodness from your teeth and gums, and it's kind of like

you haven't done anything. Toothbrushes. Yes. Which toothbrush should I use? This one or an electric one? I generally prefer an electric toothbrush. Why? Usually, they kind of do the work for you. So it just means that patients have better oral health

because most people don't know how to brush their teeth properly, actually. We're never really taught or trained or we get taught by our parents. Our parents don't really know. They've been taught by their parents. So a lot of people don't actually know how to brush their teeth, number one. Number two, we often don't brush for as long as we think that we, are. So we're meant to brush for two minutes. The average is 20 to 30 seconds. And we think that we're brushing for two minutes, but we're not. So with an electric toothbrush, it times you. And then also

a pressure sensor. So the electric toothbrush often will have a pressure sensor, which will show you whether or not you're brushing too hard or you're brushing at the right pressure. And that will reduce your chance of recession. Can you show me on one of those tooth models in front of you, the area of the mouth and teeth that people most often overlook? Yes. Can I have your So I would say the area that people usually struggle with the most is the insides of their very back bottom teeth. So inside, where next to my tongue? Basically, yeah, just near your tongue, basically. What a lot of people will do is they'll kind of, they'll go on the inside and they brush their teeth like this.

Okay? Whereas actually you want to get your elbow up and you want to brush a lot more at like a 90 degree angle when you're getting there. It looks like you're brushing the gums a little bit. A little bit, yeah. So you actually do want to brush the gums. a little bit. And then when we're on the outsides of the teeth, we want to kind of brush at a 30 degree angle. So rotational movements and at a 30 degree angle. So not straight like a 90 degree, but kind of towards the gum margin. And by doing circular movements, we're essentially kind of

massaging the gums and getting rid of the bacteria from under the gum and then flicking it out. Okay. Yeah. So just like that. And then I always tell everyone it's really important to kind of have a method behind your toothbrushing. So don't go like brush and then go there. and then up there, you know, because you'll never brush properly. So always start, let's say, on the left-hand side, go do all the outsides and then do all the biting surfaces and then do all the insides and then do the same one, the top teeth as well. And that model there, you've got another model in front of you, which is like a see-through model. What does that show us?

So this is to show you what an implant looks like. A lot of people don't know what implants look like and how it looks like if it was within your jaw. Also what all the roots look like. and then also if you look on the other side you can see this tooth which has the black within it and it's got like a red bubble at the root of it so this is a tooth

that's had a root canal done to it and has an infection at the root of that tooth so that's an abscess and a lot of people don't actually know what that looks like they only feel toothache but this is what toothache is actually in their jaw when our teeth get teeths

is that the right word is that a plural when our tooth's what's the plural of teeth it's teeth yeah when our teeth get stained, what we often do is we'll take some sort of whitening toothpaste or we'll go to a dentist or a hygienist or something and ask them to whiten our teeth. Now, I've always been a bit scared of that because there must be a cost to this whitening industry. Should we be whitening our teeth? Is there any healthy way to whiten our teeth? Yes. So you've got two different types of staining.

One, which is extrinsic. So that's basically your coffee, your tea, you're smoking. Super easy to get rid of you just have to go to your hygienist and get a hygiene done and they'll get rid of the stains pretty quickly or you can try a whitening toothpaste be very careful with a lot of those whitening toothpaste because they can be quite abrasive and damage the enamel actually so it's kind of like exfoliating your teeth but your teeth don't grow back so if you keep on exfoliating and getting rid of that surface layer of enamel over a long amount of time that can be quite an issue and quite problematic you get sensitive teeth yeah sensitive teeth and then the underlying um tooth will start to shine through and that's quite yellow so you actually start ending up

doing the opposite of what you wanted to do. Then whitening so you could you should do that professionally. Don't go and buy some over-the-counter online thing because a lot of the time either they don't have the right percentages and they can actually damage the teeth and the gums really badly. So you want to get that done professionally. If you get it done by a good brand and even within the professional world. There are some whitening products out there which are really bad for the teeth and others which are actually really good for the teeth. So we use one in particular. It's called Enlighten and the whitening for one day is the equivalent of having a Coca-Cola. So thinking about it, I mean, I'm sure everyone has had a Coca-Cola in their life. Having a Coca-Cola every day for,

let's say, five or six days is okay in the grand scheme of things. It's not going to massively damage your teeth at all. So there is safe ways to do it. Yeah. Okay, good. And is there any way to remove plaque yourself without having to go to a dental hygienist? So you can try a water flosser.

I've just bought one of those things, but it doesn't feel powerful enough. Because when I go to the hygienist, I don't know what they're using, but it like, it's so strong that it like blasts my mouth off. My mouth feels so different after. Yeah.

And I wondered to know if I could buy one of those for my home. But I think it's a little bit dangerous. Well, the reason I think that the water flossers are not that high intent. is because people can damage their teeth if they don't use it correctly. So kind of know, there are some supplements that you can take to reduce the amount of plaque that builds up. And that actually does work quite effectively.

I mean, there were two more there. There's a couple more things there that you have in your pile that we not talked about. These are probiotics. Okay. So going back to our microbiome, probiotics are basically good bacteria. So not everyone needs them, but a probiotic essentially will, put good bacteria into the microbiome and if it's got the right environment to live in then it will

continue to grow there basically if you're eating the right things exactly if you're eating the right things you've got prebiotics you know all of those types of things then then this will be really effective so these are two different options this is a mouthwash and again on the microbiome test that we've created or Alice one we look at all the levels of good bacteria and then we'll recommend a probiotic based on what good bacteria you are missing so a lot of us are actually genetic we've been born without certain good bacteria in our microbiomes. And so this is really lovely to supplement them. So this is, it's a mouthwash, but it's in a powder form.

So you take a teaspoon, you mix it with some water, and that activates the probiotic, and then you rinse it around, and you swallow it. So it's a two and one for your gut. This is a pill, so it's a tablet, you chew it, and then you can swallow it. So this is super easy too, and I love these as well, very easy to use. Victora, what's the most important thing that we haven't talked about today that we should have talked about today? The only thing that I think you haven't mentioned that your viewers might benefit from is the use of straws. Straws are very, very important to use for sugar and also for acid.

So drinking through a straw actually helps you bypass all of your teeth. So if you're having something acidic or really sugary or even something staining, then it bypasses the teeth and goes straight to back of your throat so you can swallow it. So this helps reduce your chance of decay of tooth wear and also staining as well. But specifically if it's bad for you, because I'm sure there's some things which are good for the oral microbiome that you do want to be in the mouth. Yes. Yeah, yeah. So if you're taking your probiotics or whatever, then of course those are great. Like, for example, you know, I'm human. I like a nice Coca-Cola once in a while and I'll drink it through a straw. Or if I have alcohol, I'll also drink that through a straw as long as it's not wine.

About smoking and vaping? So, yeah, smoking and vaping, neither of them are good for the oral microbiome. It goes back to dry mouth. So smoking will dry your mouth out and then you don't have the saliva and the saliva can't do what it wants to. It stops vascularization, so it stops blood flow to your mouth. And so a lot of smokers actually will not have bleeding gums. That doesn't mean that they don't have gum disease. But because they are smoking so much, the blood vessels are all.

already really tight and constricted from the nicotine. So they don't ever get bleeding gums, even though they have gum disease. And then the third thing is that actually we know that smoking is very strongly associated. It's one of the biggest risk factors for gum disease. If someone's now curious about their all microbiome and the work that you're doing, what is the sort of easiest entry point to learn more to get themselves checked or to, I don't know, to resolve some of the issues that are causal or a consequence of having an unhealthy microband? Where do they start? How do they find you? We have a clinic in central London called

the Health Society. We opened about a year and a half ago now. And our aim was to put the mouth back into the body, to explain to patients exactly what's going on in their mouth. And we can do that through microbiome testing, other saliva tests. We look at your blood glucose levels, your vitamin D levels. We've got packages. We have an infrared sauna. We have a a nutritionist and the ideas that we're working all together because one of the issues I was seeing was that patients, they want to understand what's going on in their mouth and they want to optimize it, but they don't understand a lot of what dentistry is all about. We used to live in a world where the dentist would say, okay, you need two fillings and you've got gum disease

and you're not brushing your teeth. And that was the end of it. And you would just listen to them and you get your work done. But now we are trying to essentially decode dentistry and explain it in a way that patients can understand. So I would say I'm biased, but come over, come to the clinic, we can explain everything, or you can do an oral microbiome test, and you can actually understand yourself what bacteria, what genetic mutations you have, what inflammation you have, what products you should start using, and then based on that, decide on what dentist you want to go to for any treatment if needed. What if I'm in Australia or Canada or New Zealand or America, what can I do? So we're actually rolling out the oral microbiome test to all of those countries, so you can

actually buy at the moment through that. You just have to email us. But otherwise, you know, I'm not the only one. There are other people who are doing this type of dentistry and are thinking in this type of way. So you would have to do a little bit of research. But I guess maybe follow me on Instagram and I can give some top tips. And if we sit here in 10 years time, what are you hoping the world looks like as it relates to the oral microbiome? People's understanding a bit, the regulations. What are you hoping for if you could waive a wand? I am hoping that. I am hoping that, that the mouth has put back into the body in the sense that dentistry and medicine

are fully integrated within each other. So you can go to your dentist and you can get a saliva test and that could flag up issues with your heart or diabetes and you will go and see your diabetologist. And we link everything together. Also, my other dream is that people start testing their saliva

and they understand that, you know, blood is not the only way that we can understand things that are going on within our body. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you. A couple of weeks ago, we took all of our team here at the Dyer of a CEO to Miorca.

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