The Dr. Hyman Show - The Mouth-Body Connection: How Oral Health Shapes Whole-Body Healing

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

Most people don’t realize that what happens in the mouth can ripple through the whole body. The balance of the oral microbiome—the community of bacteria living in our mouths—can either protect us or trigger widespread inflammation that affects the heart, joints, and brain. Hidden dental infections or mercury fillings can quietly drive fatigue, autoimmune issues, or dementia—and fixing the mouth often helps the rest of the body heal, too. The good news is that with simple steps like eating whole foods (often removing gluten), cleaning the mouth well, and breathing through the nose, we can protect both our smile and our overall health. When we care for the mouth as part of the body, lasting wellness becomes possible from the inside out. In this episode, Dr. Todd LePine, Dr. Elizabeth Boham, James Nestor, and I talk about how a healthy mouth microbiome is a key to whole-body wellness. Dr. Todd LePine graduated from Dartmouth Medical School and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, specializing in Integrative Functional Medicine. He is an Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner. Prior to joining The UltraWellness Center, he worked as a physician at Canyon Ranch in Lenox, MA, for 10 years. Dr. LePine’s focus at The UltraWellness Center is to help his patients achieve optimal health and vitality by restoring the natural balance to both the mind and the body. His areas of interest include optimal aging, bio-detoxification, functional gastrointestinal health, systemic inflammation, autoimmune disorders, and the neurobiology of mood and cognitive disorders. Dr. Elizabeth Boham is Board Certified in Family Medicine from Albany Medical School, and she is an Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner and the Medical Director of The UltraWellness Center. Dr. Boham lectures on a variety of topics, including Women’s Health and Breast Cancer Prevention, insulin resistance, heart health, weight control and allergies. She is on the faculty for the Institute for Functional Medicine. James Nestor is an author and journalist who has written for Scientific American, Outside, The New York Times, and more. His book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, was an instant New York Times and London Sunday Times bestseller. Breath explores how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly—and how to get it back. Breath spent 18 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in the first year of release, and will be translated into more than 30 languages. Breath was awarded the Best General Nonfiction Book of 2020 by the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and was nominated for Best Science Book of 2021 by the Royal Society. Nestor has spoken at Stanford Medical School, Yale School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, The United Nations, Global Classroom, and appeared on more than 60 radio and television shows, including Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Joe Rogan Show, and more. He lives and breathes in San Francisco. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN to save 15%. Full-length episodes can be found here:The Functional Medicine Approach To Oral Health Getting Rid of Cold Sores and Canker Sores The Power Of Breath As Medicine

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show. And there's a lot of organisms that are in the mouth. In fact, the oral organisms, and we have hundreds of oral organisms, there's about a 45% concordance between the bacteria that we find in the mouth and the bacteria that we find in the digestive tract. And you can think of the whole body as being like a tube. Magnesium is like the body's natural chill switch. It helps regulate stress, sleep, mood, and more.

But most people are deficient. And most supplements don't give you the full spectrum. That's why I recommend magnesium breakthrough, the only formula with all seven forms of magnesium. Feel calmer, sleep better, and give your body what it's missing. Bioptimizers has increased their discount for my audience. Go to bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use code Hyman to get 15% off your order today. Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey.

While I wish I could work with everyone one-on-one, there just isn't enough time in the day, so I've built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the Hyman Hive for live Q&A's exclusive content and direct connection. For real-time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated doctor-trusted supplements and health products at Dr.hyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget, you can enjoy every episode of

this podcast, add-free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple podcasts and tap try free to start your seven-day free trial. the gut is sort of where everything starts and it can either lead you down the path of health or it can lead you down the path of disease and the beginning of the gut is the mouth so as you mentioned you know in in medical school we didn't learn anything about the mouth that was like for the dentist you know we'll just ignore that and the dentist just basically stay in the mouth and they don't really realize that there's a whole body connected to the mouth or some of the dentist don't and and this is where I think a lot of both you know even

functional medicine positions and dentists really miss the connection. So unless you're working with a holistic smart dentist or a functional medicine doctor who's aware of the connection between the mouth and the gut and systemic immune system, you're going to be missing a lot of things. And as you mentioned before, you know, there are a host of conditions, including premature birth, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and even dementia that are directly connected to poor oral health. It's incredible, yeah, I mean dementia. And they're finding that the microbes in the mouth get absorbed and then go up into the brain

and create inflammation in the brain. Absolutely. We know that your risk of having heart attacks is higher if you have gum disease. We know that even, you know, weight and metabolism are related to what's going on in your mouth. So, you know, what's, so what's wrong with traditional dentistry and its overall approach? Because, you know, a dentist does your teeth cleaning. They might treat your gum disease. They'll fill your cavities.

They'll thicken root canals. So what, tell us what is the problem with traditional approaches to dentistry. Though, you know, traditional dentistry and dentistry has gone a long way. You know, the original dentists were actually barbers. You remember that. The barbers used to, like, pull the teeth. out. And the dentist have come a long way since being barbers. But a lot of, you know, dentists are what we call drill and fill. And, you know, then you can do root canals and then you can do implants and those kinds of things. A lot of that's related to structure function and cosmetics. People want to have white teeth and you don't realize, okay, you just have, because you have white teeth doesn't mean you have a healthy oral microbiome. And you really have to look at the, you know, the whole picture because, you know, the beginning of digestion starts with your mouth,

starts with healthy saliva, and all of those things are interrelated to being able to digest and absorb your nutrients from the get-dell. You need to have a proper salivary pH. You need to have sufficient amylase. So there's a lot of happening in the mouth that is the beginning of digestion. All right. So, you know, one of the challenges is traditional dentistry is they use certain techniques that we find problematic, for example, putting in silver fillings or mercury fillings. And recently you sent me a link to the FDA's new ruling that fillings were not acceptable for pregnant women and babies and kids. So why is it good for the rest of us? It's not good. It's not good for the rest of us. And, you know, the thing is, is that interesting

I think, you know, as you said before, there's no safe level of mercury. You know, that mercury is a known neurotoxin. And some people are better able to detoxify it. My father is an example of that. My father, you practiced dentistry up until his 80s, and he used to literally handle a malbum in his hands, and he'd be, you know, throwing it on the floor and, and every, I can remember going to his office and playing with the mercury in his office. And lo and behold, you know, people, there are some people who are better at detoxifying mercury, and there are others that don't detoxify mercury as well. But mercury is definitely, for some people, a real problematic issue. I think is you experience that yourself.

And there's testing that we do for mercury. You can check for mercury body burden, and you can check for both organic and inorganic mercury. One of the labs quicksilver that we use does is that, does that test. And it can tell you how you're excreating both organic and inorganic mercury. And the one from fillings is the inorganic mercury, which is the more toxic to the brain. Right. And so we've got the filling problem, which really nobody should ever.

have silver fillings and if you have them, you know, it's tricky. You know, do you get them out? Do you not get them out? How do you determine when? I think you need to know that there are biological dentists who do it safely. And there's a website called IAOMT.org and put the show notes, IAOMT.org, which is a resource of learning more about biological dentistry and finding a biological dentist in your area who knows how to practice safe removal and all and other dental techniques that actually help to rejuvenate your mouth. One of the other challenges is root canals. I think, you know, people are getting a lot of root canals.

I certainly had one, and I had to take it out. But tell me what is the problem with root canals? Why should we be concerned? And should everybody with root canals have their teeth pulled or what do we do? All right. So, okay, so I'm not an endodontist who does root canals. And I spoke with my family members about this. And if somebody is really, really skilled at doing a root canal, you can do a root canal.

The real, I think the key thing about root canal, doing a root canal is to make sure that you're dealing with a sterile environment, which is very, very difficult in the mouth because, you know, when you're doing a root canal, my sister, Gail, she made a comment that like a root canal is basically a dead tooth. And if you had a dead spleen, would you leave a dead spleen in your body? No. You just, you know, you want to remove a dead organ. And a tooth that's devitalized doesn't have nerves. So if you get an infection, you often. it won't get pain unless it starts surrounding to the other area. You don't have a lymphatic system to drain infections. You don't have blood supply, arterial, and venous supply. So you can really get these, you know, these stealth infections. And by that, you know, we typically think of an infection as someone who's, you know, got a fever, there's swelling, et cetera, but you can have these smoldering infections. And I've seen, you know, just this past week, I've had two patients who had a history of root canal issues that were manifesting as systemic issues. And they really didn't have a whole lot of oral issues.

They're having peripheral issues. Yeah, that's interesting. Exactly, yeah. And then when they open those root canals up, if it's a bad root canal, root canal gone bad, they often find these anaerobic infections. And they are foul smelling. They're, you know, the anaerobic bacteria produce things like putrescine and cadaverine. And you don't want a lot of cadaverine.

body, Mr. Cadaver. And Petrotin is very sure. Doesn't sound good either. And there's a lot of, yeah, right. And there's a lot of organisms that are in the mouth. In fact, the oral organisms, and we have hundreds of oral organisms, there's about a 45% concordance between the bacteria that we find in the mouth and the bacteria that we find in the digestive tract.

And you can think of the whole body as being like a two. and the opening of the tube starts at the mouth, and then it goes all the way down into the stomach, the small intestine, large intestine, and then out the anus. And those bacteria that are in the mouth get swallowed by the body. I mean, you will swallow about 10 billion bacteria per day. And some of those bacteria, when you swallow them, can actually cause systemic inflammation. and those systemic inflammation can manifest in the joints, in the heart, or in the brain. It can also promote systemic inflammatory diabetes, as you well know.

So it's a real, you know, important issue, and it's not just, you know, just having, okay, my teeth look white, everything's fine. You can't see the types of bacteria that you have in your mouth, and not only that, but your individual immune response to the bacteria is really critical. We know that in terms of, you know, like, say for example, COVID, you know, COVID is a virus, and as a virus, you know, for the vast majority of people, it's not going to kill you. You get it and you may be totally asymptomatic. You may have a mild cold or you may die from it. The same thing with certain types of bacteria. Everybody's immune system is unique. And when certain people are exposed to certain organisms at critical levels, it provokes a low-grade inflammatory response or in some cases actually even more acute. And that can lead to a whole host of systemic issues. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think both of us have seen patients who, when addressing their dental issues, often resolve other systemic issues. So maybe you can share a little bit about some of the patients you might have seen that

have links to their systemic health from their oral health. Oh, absolutely. I have three cases real briefly. The first case is a patient. Actually, was a friend of mine. And I remember we were talking over a beer and he was telling me, you know, some of his health issues. And, you know, he was bemoaning the fact that he was having all these symptoms and nobody could figure it out. And I said, well, why don't you come see me?

I'll, you know, I'll do a consult on you. You'll take a look at it. That's what's sort of what I do. And he told me, you know, in going over his history, that he had a Cadillac in his mouth. And I said, you're going to have a Cadillac in your mouth. the guy. I got about $40,000 worth of dental work in my mouth. And he goes, you know, the dentist said, I have weak enamel. And I said, well, what do you mean weak enamel? And I said, you know, weak enamel is not normal. I said, did he tell you why you have weak enamel? And the first thing that popped into my head is that he probably had undiagnosed celiac disease, which we thought weak enamel. And lo and behold, I tested him. And sure enough, he had marked a response to Ludin. And when he got off of it, I mean, all of the, a lot of the symptoms, they didn't affect his teeth because, you know, the horse was already out of the barn, but he also was having sort of unexplained fatigue and malaise and all that kind of stuff. And actually just getting off of gluten cleared up those other conditions. And we all, you know, you and you and I well know that there are multiple autoimmune conditions that are associated with gluten sensitivity. But weak enamel is one of those things. And I also, I try to get my patients and the dentist who I see, or as patients or dentists who I meet in social circles to really be aware of that because

I just think it's below everybody's radar. Yeah, it's incredible. Yeah, it was really, and it was a very life-changing for him. Another case is a patient who I saw who was diagnosed as having rheumatoid arthritis. And this is a woman over from Europe and she wasn't getting anywhere in the European system. Not that the European system is better or worse. is just different than our system. But she was not getting any significant help over there.

They wanted to use the disease modifying anti-Rumologic drugs for the DMARs. And when I did a workup on her, he did a deep dive in her, and she had seropositive rheumatoid arthritis. And by seropositive, meaning that when you check for rheumatoid arthritis, you can have a positive rheumatoid factor or you can have a positive CCP antibody or both of them. one of the other or both of them, you can also have seronegative rheumatolythritis. And as we talked about earlier, rheumatoid arthritis is just a label that we put on things and lots of different things can cause rheumatoor arthritis. The most virulent, aggressive type of rheumatoid arthritis is the one that has both RA positive

and CCP antibody positive. Now, if you go into the medical literature, CCP antibodies are associated with periodontal disease. So anytime I see a rheumatoid patient who's got a positive CCP, there are other things that can do that. Epstein-Barr virus can do it also, but it's strongly associated with the periodontal disease. And then they have to start doing a deep dive. So what I did with her, they did a deep dive. And lo and behold, she had a lot of dental issues. She had old root canals.

She had silent infections. And I did as much as I could. And then I also referred her to a very good colleague of mine, Doug Thompson, who runs the Wellness Dentistry Network out of Michigan. And he helps to teach other physicians about integrative dentistry. So I referred my patient to see him, and he did all of all the different things that he did. In addition to having rheumvirumatoid arthritis, she also had undiagnosed Lyme disease. So she had. Yeah, exactly.

So she had two things going against that can affect the joints. So I basically treated her Lyme disease, did that successfully over a period of time, had her see an inspirative dentist. We did testing on her oral microbiome. He did his thing. And she had a dramatic improvement. She also really changed her diet. And all of those factors really, really made a huge difference in her life. She was basically not able to function.

and when we treated, you know, the underlying causes, the root causes, she had a dramatic improvement in her health. And then one other case, and this is a really anecdotal case, and I really like this case. And Mark, you probably have seen some patients or, you know, I'm in certain your career that you've seen a lot, is a patient who has a frontal temporal dementia. Yeah. Right. That's a bad thing.

And it's like Louie Body, you know, we don't really understand, you know, these kinds of conditions. And I saw the lady, and she was actually quite advanced with her frontal temporal temporal dementia when I saw her. And I did a big workup, did the ion test, nutritional metabolic testing, testing for leaky gut, testing for heavy metals. And I did actually at the time, I did relatively new tests, which is the my periopath test, which is looking at the DNA of the oral microbiome.

and she had one of the worst oral bacterial microbiologist that I've ever seen. And my hypothesis was that I think her frontal temporal dementia was really being driven by undiagnosed severe periodontal disease that was spreading up to her brain. Modern life makes it surprisingly easy to run low on magnesium. Stress, screens, sugar, they all deplete this essential mineral. magnesium supports over 300 functions in your body from stress and sleep to recovery and energy that's why i take magnesium breakthrough the only supplement with all seven forms your body needs most formulas just one or two bioptimizers has increased their discount for my audience go to bioptimizers dot com slash hymen and use code hymen to get 15% off your order today I just want to highlight a couple of things. One, there is an oral microbiome.

Yes. And just like there's an intestinal microbiome. And that has implications for your health. And there's ways that now we can test this. And this is not something you're going to get at your traditional doctor. It's what we do here at the Ultra Wellness Center that's so unique. We go to dig down below the layers to see what's really going on. There's also genomic variations in our own DNA that affect our risk of periodal disease.

And there's also a test we can look at to look at the heavy metals in the mouth and see if the mercury in your feelings is getting off gased and if you're absorbing it and detoxifying it or not. So there's a lot of tests that we do in functional medicine. They can be very helpful to identify whether the issues you're having are oral. So the other thing is, you know, what do we do to change our diet to keep our gums healthy and keep our teeth healthy? And what do we know about food and nutrition and oral health? of course, basic lifestyle hygiene stuff that we should all be paying attention to. Yeah. So I actually, Mark, when I prepared for this, I made a couple of slides which should be

available as an add-on for the podcast, for those who want to look at it. But the big thing is the introduction in the diet, in the modern-day diet, the standard American modern-day diet, is the introduction of accellular, starchy fiber or foods. And when you think of this, it's very simple to think of it. These are the things like, you know, rice crackers and pretzels. They basically have very little nutritional value and then sugars. And the modern American diet is very high in these types of foods. And these types of foods are basically instant sugar.

And they feed the oral bacteria. And those bacteria also will multiply in the body. We obviously know that, you know, you can have bacteria that can cause. dental caries and tooth decay, but they can also feed some of these other pathogenic bacteria. And you mentioned the role of the various types of bacteria. There's a couple of bacteria, which I like to see on the myperopath test, which is pusobacterium nucleotum. And then another one, which is a real bad actor, which is the porphamonis ginger ballas. And these organisms are in the mouth and you're swallowing them.

So the diet that you eat will feed both the bacteria in the mouth and then also the bacteria in the gut. So some simple things that you can do is avoid snacking, you know, drink water after you've had a meal, watch for, you know, processed carbs, sort of fake food, if you will, in your diet. Chewing xylitol gum is actually something that is a simple thing to do that can actually have an anti-dental caries type of an effect. And then using an electric toothbrush.

That's another thing that is a simple thing to do. I pretty much recommend that for all my patients. And you can use that right after you eat. And then also having lots of fiber in your diet. When you eat or eating fiber, it basically is cleaning the teeth. And we all know we've all woken up in the morning with that film over our mouth. Well, you know, that film is actually a biofilm. And unless you're actually keeping your.

your oral hygiene clean, you're going to get, you know, some slime on your teeth. And that's really where the bacteria really sort of take hold in the mouth. And good integrative dentists will actually work on oral biofilms also. That's great. And, you know, often there's a lot of things we can do to improve our oral health through supplementation. Things like CO-Q10 is very important. Proethosatidins from colorful plant foods, vitamin C for gum disease.

even things like vitamin D to help the bone structure and prevent osteoporosis in the jaw, which can cause gum, you know, weak teeth and so forth. So there's a lot of things you can do to actually help improve your overall oral health. One of the things that I loved was developed by a friend of mine who was a dentist in Lennox years ago. It's called the Dental tooth and herb gum tonic. And essentially it's a series of herbs. It was amazing. He basically showed me he would scrape my mouth. He would put it on a slide and he showed all the little bugs swimming around, I'd do the dental swish with this dental tooth and gum tonic, this herbal tooth and gum tonic, and it was just totally different.

And all the bad spirochetes and things that are causes of gum disease would improve. So there's a lot of simple things you can do from, you know, I've select your toothbrush to water picks and flossing to, you know, using these different kinds of herbal tonics that can really help to keep your teeth and gum healthy. And it is really important because your oral health is so connected to your overall health. That's interesting that you mentioned that, Mark, because I, there's probably knew him, remember. He was in Lenox years ago. I don't remember, but you know what? There's a, there's a company, I believe it's up in the Hampshire. I don't know if it's the same company or are they,

there's another company that uses, it's like a, a tooth tonic, if you will, which is an antimicrobial. So yeah, that's actually quite interesting. The other thing is, is, which I'll mentioned because this is, it sounds sort of hokey, but it's actually, it's in the medical literature. In fact, I, by preparing for the talk, I actually looked on PubMed, and there's an article from 2020 about oil pulling and the benefits of oil pulling on oral, the oral microbiome and oral hygiene. So you can do that with a variety of different oils. You can do it with coconut oil. I don't know if you've ever done it, Mark, but it also leaves the mouth with a very clean taste, a very clean feeling in the body. And then that also comes.

comes out to the other aspect of the oral, oral hygiene is halitosis. So somebody has really bad. Bad breath. Yeah, bad breath. Exactly. So bad breath is not just, you know, an embarrassment. It's telling you that you've got some bugs in there that are producing chemicals that are not very good for your body.

And these are usually the, some of the bacteria that can actually reside in the tongue and the tongue fissures. And they're what we call sulfite or sulfur reducing bacteria. And there's a dentist who came up with a product, which is a very effective one. It's called Therobrath, which I oftentimes will have patients use. And that's a very effective way of dealing with helitosis, but then also then looking at, how can we actually improve the oral microbiome in addition. And there are some products that are out there with some lack of bacillus salivarius and such

that are oral probiotics to also help balance out the microbiome. Canker sores sores. What are canker sores? We've all probably had them one time or another. Why are they a problem? And what do they signify? And how do we think about them differently in functional medicine than traditional medicine? Absolutely. So canker sores sores are those ulcers, those sores that you get in your mouth. They're usually at the side of your mouth. You know, by your cheek, inside of your cheek, that is, underneath your tongue. Those are some typical places for them. And they are about three to five millimeters in size, and they are a sore that comes.

If you look at them, they'll look like a round circle. They're reddish. Sometimes they'll have like a yellow coating on it, yeah. And they hurt like heck. They hurt like heck. Yes. And like you said, most of us have. have had them at least once or twice, and having one once or twice is not a big deal,

right, or even more than that. But what we get concerned about or what we want to talk a little bit about are those people that are getting lots and lots of cancassores. And could that mean that there's something we need to be looking into and thinking about? Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I think, you know, in traditional medicine, we go, oh, well, cancorsors, it's not a big deal. You know, swish your mouth with, like, tetracycline and Benadryl was the cocktail we used to use. and that'll help reduce the pain and inflammation.

But it really wasn't ever a conversation about, well, what was the cause of these? And how do we diagnose the root cause and make it so people don't get him anymore? Absolutely. And, you know, what does a functional medicine doctor think when they see a canker sore? You know, again, if it's been like, if it's an isolated incident, it might not be a big deal at all. But if people are getting them all the time or even a couple times a month or even, you know, five or six times, a year, you make sure you want to ask that question, why, what could be going on? And there could be many things from from celiac disease to an impact in the immune system not working

properly, to eating a food that causes inflammation for your body. So celiac disease, it would be gluten, but there's other foods that for people can be inflammatory for them. It's like a food sensitivity or food reaction. Definitely we see it with some food additives. So some food coloring and some food additives people will get canker sores. There are some more rare situations where people get lots and lots of canker sores sores sores. They'll get sores in their mouth and other areas of their body. So that's an autoimmune process. Another autoimmune process, lupus can cause some recurrent sores in the mouth as well. And of course, nutritional deficiencies. You know, that's something I think about all the

time. We know B-12 deficiencies, B-vitamin deficiencies. So I'm thinking when somebody's coming in with recurrent cancassores, those are things I'm thinking about. Yeah, so it could be some of the foods we're eating or the chemicals in our food. There's, you know, the average American needs three to five pounds of food additives a year. And we think, oh, it's a little additive here. When you add it all up with all the crap we eat, it's three to five pounds. And there are a lot of these things are really immunoreactive. It can be very inflammatory, irritating, and can cause these cancars sores sores. But, you know, we mentioned also Bichettes and lupus. These are autoimmune diseases. But what's really striking to me and after doing functional medicine for decades

is that so many people with cancorsesorts really have gluten problems. Absolutely. And I remember one of my friends was a Harvard trained doctor who started having really severe recurrent cancorsors. We call it affidstomatitis. But it's like a really nasty, nasty case of this. And I said, have you checked yourself for celiac disease? He's like, no. And I'm like, well, check. And he had it. And he stopped eating gluten and everything went away.

I see that all the time. I mean, that's probably one of the most common reasons when we have people who have a lot of canker sores, you know, whether they test positive for celiac or just we think it's gluten sensitivity or we don't have a full, full positive syliac test. But when they take away gluten, they often will clear up, which is, phenomenal and a wonderful response. The other thing, you know, I was thinking when you were talking about the food additives and food coloring, you know, Halloween is a time where kids will get cancrasors all the time

right after Halloween, you know, all of those, all of that, you know, the candies that have, they're eating so much of it with a lot of additives and coloring and stuff. And so, you know, people will notice that that's a time where they get a lot of them. That's true. You know, I remember when I was really sick with, you know, chronic fatigue and my immune system wasn't working right and my gut was a mess. I used to get tons of canker sores. It was terrible.

I get them in my tongue. I'd get them in my cheeks. It was horrible. Once you start to get things back in balance and fix your gut and your nutritional status really, really makes a huge difference. So tell us about this patient you had. It was a young woman who had really bad canker source. Yeah.

You know, I just want to mention one thing about that. And then we'll delve into this case. You know, when things are out of balance in the digestive system, there's a lot of inflammation in there. And so the ability for the body to digest and absorb your nutrients is much less. And so and the the oral mucosa, the cells in your mouth and the digestive system, you know, need a lot of regular nutrition. So so many times we see nutritional deficiencies show up first in the mouth and the gut area

because they're just getting turned over so quickly. And so, you know, you think a lot about those B vitamins that are necessary for healing and zinc that's necessary for healing. So when you mentioned when your body was depleted, you know, there may have been some just decreased absorption of some nutrients that are that are so necessary. Yeah, I think you're right. And you get those cracking at the corners of your mouth. That's called chelosis. That can be also from B vitamins, yeah, I had that. I mean, it's interesting to see what happens when you start looking at this stuff. You go, wow, because you teach a whole course on the nutrition physical examination. Yes. Or through looking at various signs on your

your body, you can pick up nutritional deficiencies that may be related to some of these things. Yeah. So with Dr. Michael Stone, so that's fun. So yeah, so this, this woman was a 25-year-old woman who had regular cancrasaurus, her whole life. She had them as a kid. She had them in her teenage years. She was getting them probably once a month. And sometimes she'd have multiple cancassers. And they were kind of, they were painful and no fun like, you know, you mentioned. And she was always thin. So she was always on the thin side. She had some digestive issues, some diarrhea, some bloating.

But otherwise, you know, she was healthy. Oh, she was told she had iron deficiency. So she was low in iron. But otherwise, not really anything that would make you think she was ill or sick in any way. But she just wasn't, you know, she wanted to kind of deal with these cancassores and came in. And so we decided to test her for psiliac disease because, Because as we are mentioning, it's gluten and wheat can be a common cause of these cancras source for some people.

And it also cause irritable bowel and prevent you from absorbing iron and make you not be able to gain weight, all the things she was exhibiting. Exactly. Exactly. And so, and she tested positive conventionally with regular celiac testing. She was, she was positive. Her tissue transglutaminase was elevated. So we were like, oh, my goodness, you have celiac disease.

And so she stopped eating gluten. It was kind of. She stopped eating gluten and the kangrasors went away. And so did irritable bowel and her iron deficiency. Exactly. She started gaining weight, I'm sure. She did. I mean, the iron and the weight took a little bit more time, but the cancrasores and the

irritable bowel went away right away. It's pretty amazing when you think about how common this is, you know, because, you know, we've talked a lot about gluten on this podcast, but, you know, even people who don't have celiac, they can have non-celiac gluten sensitivity. So they're not on the full-blown celiac numbers on the lab tests, but they're in that continuum. And they can still have all the same problems. And the thing people don't realize is that doctors don't realize is that they, you know, they think, oh, the problem you have is canker soresors. That's the diagnosis. That's just not the diagnosis. That's just the symptom. What's the cause? And that's what's so different about functional

medicine. It's what we do here at the ultra-wolone center that's so unique as we really medical detectives that look at the cause, and it may be different for different people. Some people's cancer disorders might be caused by a food additive, or maybe it's because of a food sensitivity, or maybe it's gluten, or maybe something else. So I think that's really the beautiful thing about functional medicines. We can kind of drill down. Yeah, you want to look for that underlying root cause. And then, you know, if it is more of an autoimmune, if for somebody it's more of an autoimmune condition, then you have to ask that question, why? Why do they have this autoimmune condition? What is out of balance in their body? What's true?

triggering it. And we can't always answer those questions, but they're really important questions to ask because that really influences how we treat them. So we're not just treating the outward symptom of the cancassore, but looking for that underlying root cause. Yeah, amazing. And people don't have to suffer from it because it's so annoying. Yeah. People are disconnected from their breathing when their mouth breathing at night, when they're over breathing in the day, when they're hunched over and their posture is bad. They are perpetuating this feedback loop of constant stress. And breathing is the quickest way of breaking that stress feedback loop. So you can change your breathing and break your stress. And you can measure what happens to your body when you do that. You know, as a doctor,

you know, it's really clear when you look at the biology of breathing that that there, I mean, There's a lot going on, and often people are shallow breathers or their mouth breathers. There's all kinds of challenges that happen biologically when you do that. But one of the things that people don't realize is that their diaphragm, which is basically the muscle that moves when you breathe, expands and contracts in order to actually fill up and empty your lungs, the main nerve that relaxes your body goes through there. And that's why when you take a deep breath, you relax. And it's called the vagus nerve. And what's fascinating is there's all this incredible science around how we have to do, you know,

injections around the vagus nerve, or we do sort of certain kinds of, you know, like magnetic therapies for the vagus nerve, all this different things. But we always have access to be able to activate the vagus nerve through our breath. So can you kind of explain how that all works and why the diaper is so important and why we need to understand how to breathe differently and what it does to our biology? Sure, that vagus nerve travels right along our throats as well. So this is one of the reasons why yoga practices have a lot of humming and singing and ohm that allows for better vagal tone.

It calms you down. But the vagus nerve is also, I mean, it spreads throughout the whole abdomen. It's the longest nerve in the body, Vegas, like a vagrant. It's a wandering nerve. So when you are breathing in a shallow way, you are sending messages through the vagus nerve and the phrenic nerve to your brain that you are stressed. So 80% of the messages between the body and the brain are coming from the body. So you can send your brain if you want to do this constant stress signals by breathing too much

and by breathing in a shallow way. And the lungs don't inflate themselves, right? They need something to do that, and that's what the diaphragm does. So most people understand the role of the diaphragm in expanding the lungs and deflating the lungs. But what I didn't know, and I'm learning more recently, is that the diaphragm is also essential, that diaphragmatic movement is essential in the circulation of lymph fluid and in circulation of blood. This is a pump. This is like you can think of your body as a, there's a piston. in your body, okay? It's the diaphragm. And you need those fluids constantly moving in an efficient

way. You can get by by breathing in this very short and stilted way. A lot of people do, but compensation is different than being healthy. Yeah, well, this is a very important point because the, you know, the body, we think, you know, exhales carbon dioxide as a way of detoxifying something that can actually be harmful to us in excess, right? And that's what the breath does. You breathe out carbon dioxide, you're breathing oxygen. But also what you're saying, is that it detoxifies us in way more complicated ways through the lymph system, which actually clears out all the waste and metabolites from your tissues and your cells and brings it back to the heart, to filter and do all that stuff that has to do with the liver and clean it up.

So if you don't have your lymph circulating, you're going to get sick. And I actually had a podcast with Dr. Mehmetaz and his father-in-law, Jerry LaMole, talking about the importance of lymph and lymph function to health and breath. like you said, is one of the most powerful doorways to actually activate lymph circulation. So very, very important. Tell me, tell me how you got into breath because I think you had a particular story that was quite interesting. And it really kind of led you down this rabbit hole researching what actually was causing

some of your issues. Yeah, as a science journalist, you don't think that you're going to one day write a book about breathing, which seems like such simple and simple. mundane and completely boring subject, but I had, this was a long time ago about 10 years ago, plus I had constant respiratory problems. I was eating the right food. I was exercising all the time. I was sleeping eight hours a night. I was tuned into my health, but I kept getting bronchitis. I kept getting mild pneumonia. I was wheezing when I was working out every time I went to my doctor. I was told it was normal. And whenever I got mild pneumonia, you know, I'd get a Z-pack

can be sent on my way. And it worked, but it didn't fix the core problem. Every year I kept coming back. And they were just like, oh, you're back. You have pneumonia? Yeah, I have pneumonia again. And so it just something seemed a little off. That went on for years until one doctor friend said, oh, you should explore a breathing class. I said, what does breathing have to do with immune function or my chances of getting pneumonia or bronchitis? She said she had had experience with yoga. She said, you'd be surprised. So in San Francisco, you know, it's hard to throw a tennis ball and not hit four different breathing classes. So I just sort of spun the roulette wheel, found one, and had an extremely powerful experience.

But as a journalist, I'm not going to write a memoir about breathing. So I didn't know what to do with this experience. And years went by before I found a way to tell a larger story. And it was specifically learning from free divers, people who are doing things that are supposed to be medically impossible with their body. And they do it every day. Like 10 minutes underneath. Right.

It's a whole doorway to health that we hadn't really thought about. And, you know, a lot of us, you know, we don't think about our breath, but we often don't breathe very well. My mother, you know, had a lung issues, and she was a mouth breather. And I was always trying to get her to breathe through her nose. And she just couldn't do it. But tell us about the distinction between nose breathing and mouth breathing, you know, why is mouth beating not good for you and why is nose breathing good for you?

So when we breathe through our mouths, we're exposing ourselves to everything in the environment. If you live in a city like me, that means pollen, that means pollutants, it means smog, it means mold. And there's nothing filtering that air all day long. If you breathe through the nose, and I so happen to have a special guest here, is a cross section of a human head. head. And if you see what happens when you breathe through the nose here, you're forcing this air through all of these very ornate structures. And as that air goes through these structures, it's heated up, it's moistened, it's filtered. And you get this huge profusion of nitric oxide as well, which guess what? Nitric oxide helps kill viruses and bacteria.

Yes. And it's a vasodilator. So when you're breathing through the mouth, you get none of those advantages. You can survive mouth breathing, but it's going to wear you down and make you sick. And that's just how things work. And you can very clearly see this by just looking at our physiology and looking at our anatomy.

It's quite amazing. What you just brought up is really important because we had Louis Ignaro on the podcast who won the Nobel Prize or his discovery of nitric oxide. He's cute little like 80-year-old Italian guy who'd think he'd be like your uncle or something. And he's so sweet.

And he just really explained how important it is to breathe through your nose and how nitric oxide is produced, which is, like you said, antimicrobial and also increases your ability to fight inflammation as an antioxidant. And, you know, it's the main thing that happens when you take Viagra, which is you increase nitric oxide, which includes dilation of blood vessels and so forth. So it's fascinating. And he even said, this was fascinating. They were doing some preliminary studies around COVID, where they were giving nitric oxide gas

to COVID patients and seeing remarkable changes in their biology and improvement in their lung function and their overall health. So it's kind of interesting that our body knows what to do, but we often have sort of lapped in these habits around mouth breathing. And actually there's this kind of new trend out there. I'd love to hear what you think about it using mouth tape at night for people to breathe through their nose at night instead of through their mouth. What do you think about that? Well, what I learned about nitric oxide was from Ignaro. So he won the Nobel in the 90s. And I think last time, last interview I heard with him, he said there were 11 clinical trials

looking at patients who had severe COVID and giving them nitric oxide. Some of those trials have come out. They're official published studies. And it works incredibly well because, of course, it does. You know, it's just we're supplementing what our natural body in its natural form would be doing otherwise. It's important to note, too, if you hum, you increase that nitric oxide, 15-fold.

So I think that this would be an interesting thing to explore. And a lot of yoga practices have you hum. I wish someone would do this study. You know, it's never going to get funded. But he's an amazing guy. I've learned so much from him. That's so great. And you did an interesting study where you were at Stanford when you were sort of researching

the breath for your book where your nose was completely plugged for 10, days and you had to breathe just through your mouth. So what was that study and what did you find out? So I've been working with a chief of rhinology research at Stanford, a guy named Dr. Jayakar Nyak, who probably knows more about the nose and nasal breathing than anyone on the planet. So we had had several interviews. And there had been animal studies looking at what happens when you make an animal, a monkey specifically, a mouth breather and all the awful things that happened to their health and their facial structure. Don't read those studies. They're horrendous. But I asked NIAC, I said, has there ever been a human study of this? And he said, no. And I said, well, why don't

you do it? You're at Stanford. You study this stuff all the time. He said, doing so would be unethical because he knew of all the damage it could do. So I said, well, why don't I volunteer for an experiment? I'll try to inform consent. Right. Yeah. And to, you know, I wish it were 100 people. we had to pay for the study ourselves, which at Stanford was not cheap. And the longest we were allowed to do this was for 10 days, 10 days, just mouth breathing, 10 days nasal breathing. And as advertised, it completely destroyed us. And we have all the data to show that.

There was extreme fatigue. My blood pressure went through the roof. I got home after about three hours of mouth breathing. My blood pressure was 158 over 100, which was about. three tired than I had ever seen it. And I said, oh, you know, I'm stressed out. I need to go to sleep. For the first time that I'm aware of, I started snoring. Then I started getting sleep apnea. It got worse and worse. The longer we have this, the other subject in the study had the exact same thing at the same time. We had trouble focusing. Our mouths were completely dry. We were

miserable athletic performance plummeted. I mean, this, to be clear, two people in an experiment means nothing. What I was doing was personally experiencing what science has known for literally decades and decades. Well, there are end of one studies, so I don't think it's meaningless. You know, there are, there is a whole science and the NIH is actually advancing this, which is looking at changes in an individual and that being relevant. And if you measure changes before and after, it's actually not insignificant.

So I wouldn't discount what you're saying as being more widely available to sort of think about. And I think that, you know, you actually have a lot of different things that you talk about as a way of fixing your breathing pattern. Maybe you can share a little bit of one of the tips. How should we breathing? How do we get enough quality breath? How do we stop mouth breathing? What do we have to do?

Luckily in that Stanford study, we did 10 days of mouth breathing, followed by 10 days of just nasal breathing. This is where the sleep tape comes in. So it's easy to nasal breathing the day. You just shut your mouth. But at night, more than 60% of us breathe through our mouths. And so how do you keep your mouth shut at night? About 100 years ago, they used to have chin straps. So they knew how damaging mouth breathing was 100 years ago.

We seem to have lost that knowledge. But nowadays, we have tape. So I learned from a breathing therapist at Stanford. She prescribes tape for her patients, for every one of her patients to tape their mouths at night. This is not full-on hostage situation stuff. It's not duct tape. No. And there's a little hole in it.

There's a little hole in it. There's a specific tape. It's a surgical tape. It's called micropore tape, and it's very light adhesive. You want to take this stuff off with your tongue. Never pull it off of your lips. That's where people go wrong. But what this tape does is it's just a gentle reminder.

At any time in the night, you can go if you're uncomfortable and it pops off. But this has been, all of that snoring that I was doing mouth breathing immediately went away by just with one hack closing my mouth. And this is the one thing. I've literally heard this from thousands of people have written. And they said this was the most profound health hack that they've experienced. it's for a lot of people i've heard the same thing and i'm not saying it's going to work for everyone especially with advanced severe sleep apnea you're going to need more treatments but it's free and breathing through your nose is only going to help you so you may benefit a little or you may

benefit a lot and it i i cannot sleep i mean i technically i can sleep but i can't sleep well without sleep tape now uh it's it's a real affliction hey everyone it's dr mark now something i get more and more excited about every year is personalized medicine now when i began practicing functional medicine over 20 years ago it was clear to me we have to look at how unique each body is now with technology advancing in amazing ways we can truly take that concept to the next level like one of the tools that i recently discovered that can help us all do this from home is inside tracker founded in 2009 by top scientists and aging genetics and genetics and and biometric data from MIT Tufts and Harvard, Inside Tracker is a personalized health and

wellness platform like no other. It's purpose built to help you live a longer, more productive life. Their cutting-edge technology, it analyzes your blood, DNA, your lifestyle to give you highly personalized recommendations. Then using the app, you can track your progress every day. InsideTracker tells you what to do and why, so your health goals are clear and actionable and most importantly based on exactly what your body needs. you can connect Inside Tracker with your Apple Watch to unlock deeper, more precise insights into your health. With real-time exercise, resting heart rate, and sleep data synced with your inside tracker plan, you can truly wear your health on your sleeve. My team took Inside Tracker

for a spin and really loved it. They discovered some important things about their health that led them to stop procrastinating when it comes to certain parts of their health, like, for example, finally taking a vitamin D supplement after seeing they were deficient, or eating more iron-rich foods due to low ferritin and hemoglobin and making an effort to embrace stress reduction techniques after seeing high cortisol levels. Now, health is not black and white. Your wellness plan shouldn't be either.

If you're curious about getting your own health program dialed in to your unique needs, I highly recommend checking out Inside Tracker. Right now, they're offering my community 20% off at inside tracker.com forward slash Dr. Hyman. That's I-N-S-I-D-E-T-R-C-E-R dot com slash D-R-Hyman. That's me, Dr. Hyman, and you'll see the discount quote in your cart. Now, let's get back to this week's episode of the doctor's pharmacy. All right, James, so tell us what tape you use and what are the options out there for people

because it sounds like after this conversation, a lot of people are going around and want to buy tape, but I don't want them to get like scotch tape or some masking tape or something. It's not the right tape. Well, there's so many different types of tape that work, and it really depends on the person and their preference. I went through about 30 different types of tape before I found one that I really liked and that worked for me. I'm not getting paid to say this. It is a micro-pore tape, a surgical tape by 3M, has a really light adhesive for sensitive skin.

That's the best stuff I've found. Other people like different brands. There's specific brands now that are just sleep tape that you can buy on Amazon or wherever else. they work great so i would say play around find something you like you want something with a very light adhesive and most importantly as i mentioned you don't need a very fat strip of this stuff all you need is something about the size of a posted stamp this is the whole technology here that's sleep tape okay it's just keep i can even talk to you when i have this stuff on when i take it off you take it off with your tongue not don't rip it off take it off with your tongue and you won't get

any irritation to your mouth that way love that that's amazing okay that's a wonderful hack you think everybody should do that or how many people breathe through their mouth tonight is it a common thing or why why would we if it's not supposed to is it like just because we're unhealthy or because we're stressed or what i think that about 60 percent this is the the percentage i heard more than 60 percent of us breathe through her mouth at night and if you were like me you would go to sleep with a huge mug of water because you would wake up throughout the night and be hitting on this water because your mouth was so dry. Breathing through the mouth at night, especially eight hours at a time will also change the pH in your mouth and make you much more susceptible

to having cavities in periodontal disease. So everyone should be breathing through their noses at night. You need to find a way of doing this. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social. media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman, please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center,

my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest's opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast and endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only, and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner.

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