Love Your Gut

Ep. 72: Why Gut Symptoms Might Start in Your Mouth with Dr. Michelle Jorgenson

• Heather Finley

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You’ve addressed your gut from every angle including diet, lifestyle & supplement protocols...but the bloating, constipation, or fatigue won’t budge. What if the root cause is actually in your mouth?

In this episode, I’m joined by biological dentist Dr. Michelle Jorgenson to unpack the powerful connection between oral health and gut health. From cavities as a sign of mineral depletion to the impact of mercury fillings, we explore how your dental history might be the reason your gut still isn’t healing.

We’re covering:

  • How gum disease, mouth breathing, and dry mouth disrupt digestion
  • The link between oral infections and gut dysbiosis (including H. pylori)
  • Why you can’t have a healthy gut with an unhealthy mouth
  • What cavities may reveal about nutrient absorption and mineral status
  • The biggest mistakes people make with oral hygiene—and what to use instead
  • How to evaluate whether your root canal or fillings are affecting your health

Mentioned in this episode:

 → Shop for Dr. Michelle Jorgenson’s products and book (use drfinley at checkout for 10% off) 

 → IAOMT Safe Mercury Removal Directory: www.iaomt.org

Connect with Dr. Heather Finley 

 → Follow Dr. Heather Instagram: @drheatherfinley

→ Ready to get to the root of your GI issues for good? Apply for gutTogether® here

Connect with Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

 Website: Living Well with Dr. Michelle

 Instagram: @livingwellwithdrmichelle

Dr. Heather Finley:

Welcome to the Love Your Gut Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Heather Finley, registered dietitian and gut health specialist. I understand the frustration of dealing with GI issues because I've been there and I spent over two decades searching for answers for my own gut issues of constipation, bloating, and stomach pain. I've dedicated my life to understanding and solving my own gut issues. And now I'm here to guide you. On this podcast, I'll help you identify the true root causes of your discomfort. So you can finally ditch your symptoms for good. My goal is to empower you with the knowledge and tools you need so that you can love your gut and it will love you right back. So if you're ready to learn a lot, gain a deeper understanding of your gut and find lasting relief. You are in the right place. Welcome to the love your gut podcast. Welcome back to the next episode of the Love Your Gut podcast. I am so glad to be here today with Michelle. She is a dentist, and we're going to talk today about something that you may not have even thought about, which is how your mouth and your oral health can actually impact your. Overall health, it's often a huge missing piece that we see with our clients. And so when Michelle reached out, I was really excited to have her on the podcast. So Michelle, welcome to the show.

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

Thank you. I'm excited to talk. There's a lot of things I think we're gonna be able to talk about today. I.

Dr. Heather Finley:

Yes, there are a lot of things. So why don't you just give us kind of the lay of the land a little bit. Tell us a little bit about who you are, why you do what you do, why you're passionate about this, and then I have tons of questions for you that I know everyone will be excited to hear.

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

You know, and I always really like to start about out with why am I here and what, who am I and why, why am I even doing this? And it is not an intentional place. I did not intend to be where I am at where I am today. I am a, was am a general dentist, continue to be, but uh, was practicing as a general dentist, was doing a lot of cosmetic dentistry. I was loving what I was doing. My father was a dentist as well, and I just thought I would do it forever. He's in his mid seventies, he's still practicing, you know, I just thought that this was my life, but about a decade in, I got really sick and it started with gut health problems and trustingly enough. Uh, you deal with a lot of that and when you have gut health issues. You just do what everybody else does, right? You start changing your diet, you start throwing away all your food. You know, you just, we. And so we started doing a lot of that and it helped some, but it didn't help a lot. And the other issues were, I couldn't remember things anymore. And I've always had a good me memory. I couldn't complete sentences. I couldn't remember patients' names from room to room. I mean, something was really wrong. And the big one was numbness. I had just painful numbness down my hands. Arms. I couldn't sleep at night. I couldn't blow dry my hair. And I was losing dexterity. I wasn't able to hold my instruments anymore. So I actually put my practice for sale because doctors couldn't tell me what was wrong. They all just said nothing's wrong. You know, maybe you have some IBS, which I despise that because I'm like, okay, great, thank you. Now what? You know, that does nothing for me to tell me I have irritable bowel syndrome. Thank you very much. Um, so really they couldn't gimme any help, any answers, and I didn't know how I was gonna continue, but. I was in my mid thirties, four young kids. This was our entire livelihood. My husband worked for the practice as well, so this was a big deal. And, um, started just looking for other options for work. And I thought, well, I could be a nutritionist. I've learned a lot about diet. Now maybe I can help somebody else in another field with this. And ran into another dentist who said, you know, actually you have a lot of the same symptoms I had. Have you ever looked into Mercury as potentially the problem? And I knew that silver fillings had mercury in them. We as dentists are all taught this in dental school. First year of dental school we're taught this. Uh, but I said, well, I don't have any filling. In my mouth. And you know, I've taught they're perfectly safe. And he said, despite what you've been told and despite the fact that you don't have any, he said, first of all, it's not the ones you have, it's the ones you've been drilling out for the last decade with no protection. And he said, maybe you should just get tested. So I got tested, and that's what it was. Mercury poisonings poisoning off the charts. So all of a sudden, all of my symptoms made sense because Ner Mercury affects gut function. Mercury affects brain function. It's a neurologic toxin, and mercury affects. Hands and nerves and all of the above. So the doctor said, well, if you're gonna get better, now that we know what it is, if you're gonna get it out, you can't keep putting it in. And I was a cosmetic dentist. I was drilling out all kinds of fillings every single day.'cause people didn't like the way they looked. So he said, you gotta figure out, you're either gonna have to give this all up or you have to figure out how to do it safely. I found an organization that had protocol for removing these silver fillings in a way that that mercury wasn't released.'cause that's what happens. You drill on it. The mercury that's in those fillings, they're literally 50% mercury. The mercury that's in there released as a gas, it comes up right into the dentist's head, but also the patient's head. You know, that's getting this work done. So I found out there were protocols to do this safely. Started doing that. Patients started noticing when you walk in and a gas mask into their, their office, their procedure, they're saying, uh. Okay, what's going on here? Something's a little different. So I would explain to them, and they were always grateful that maybe this was helpful for them too, you know, from a health perspective. And then they would start sharing this with friends or family or doctors or people that they knew were kind of, you know, looking for something like this. And that's how I learned. A doctor would come to me and say, well, have you heard about the concern with root canals? Or, what do you really know about fluoride? You know, these are the questions that they were asking me. I to all of them would say, well, I don't know anything. All I know is what I was taught in school. And you know, there's some really some really sacred cows inside a dentistry. You know that these are safe and they always will be. And we can't change our mind. And even if research shows, anyway, I had to, I had to. Be able to bend and say, all right, research is showing differently and my own experience is showing me differently. So how does the mouth really impact overall health? And so that's where I am at now. We have a multi-specialty, multi-doctor practice. We get people from all over the world coming to see us because there's literally so much connection. Research shows 60 to 80% of chronic disease can start in your mouth. So that's where I'm at. Why I'm here today is because of simply the place that I was myself.

Dr. Heather Finley:

Wow, what an incredible story and how amazing that it, like one conversation changed everything and you were about to sell your practice. How long did it take you to start feeling better once you identified that Mercury was the issue?

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

So I started having some incremental improvement within, you know, a few months time, but I was about eight years before I felt like I had my brain back. I don't even know if I ever really completely be back to what I was before, but there's some other really interesting tie-ins about how. Anyway, where, where else Mercury comes from that added to that, I think it probably started even before I was a dentist and uh, just was this cumulative build. So anytime you have cumulative toxic buildup like that, it doesn't just go away overnight.

Dr. Heather Finley:

No, it does not at all. That, that's incredible. So someone might be listening to this. Just completely shocked thinking I had no idea that my oral health impacted my overall health. So let's focus on the gut since most people listening to this have GI issues. So can you just explain briefly how oral health affects gut health and vice versa, and like what you tend to see in your clients?

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

Yeah, it's so interesting to me because, you know, even back in the early 19 hundreds. Medicine started specializing and started breaking off into little areas of expertise in the entire body. And really what that's done is it's changed the way we all think about ourselves. You know, this body that we house, that we're live, that we live inside of the mouth is part of the digestive tract. Mouth is part of, yeah, it's, it's the first part, but we, yeah, we call it oral health and gut health. I'm like, it's the same thing. It's the same. It's an open tube off the bottom. Yeah, exactly. From the top. Is the mouth going into the other end? Is the outside going out? You know, it's one big tube. And it's interesting because I've heard this talked about, and if you think about it, it's actually open. It's an opening in our body. It's, you know, it's, it's an opening spot from the mouth all the way down to the other end, and that that opening is cell connected top to bottom. So mouth health is the starting point of the digestive tract. So there's all sorts of ways we could go with this. Number one, you know. Infection in the mouth is going to also contribute to gut unhealthy, and I will tell people this all the time. You simply cannot have a healthy mouth with an unhealthy gut or vice versa. You can't have a healthy gut with an unhealthy mouth because it's all one and the same thing. So if you have gum infection. If you have a reinfected root canal tooth, which is silent, you often don't know what's happening. If you have infection in the jaw bone where you had a wisdom tooth removed, if you have any of those infections in the mouth, you cannot have a healthy gut no matter what. The mouth is connected a hundred percent. And you mentioned before we even went on today, h pylori, they found that h pylori, which is the cause of, or the usual cause of a lot of ulcers and issues that way. Originates oftentimes in the mouth. Yeah. So these bugs in the mouth are there for a reason. The mouth's actually a, it's a pretty, um, it's a war zone because if you think about it, everything that we put into the body, nearly everything that we put into the body comes in through the mouth, right. Our food comes in through the mouth. Our air comes in through the mouth, our water comes in through the mouth. Everything comes into the body through the mouth. So there has to be some pretty fierce warriors in that mouth to be able to fight because there's also bad things that come in through the mouth, right. There's bad bugs in all sorts of things, and air, water, food, all of the above. So there have to be some pretty intense bugs living in the mouth to actually be able to defend us. Well, sometimes those pretty intense bugs get outta control, and then there, then there are ones that we actually don't want, and those will spread elsewhere. So if you have gut dysbiosis, gut problems with the biome and the bugs living in your gut, you need to look at your mouth. Say, do I have something going on there as well? So that's the easiest most, you know, the easiest to understand connection is just the bacteria.

Dr. Heather Finley:

Yeah. Yeah. And what, obviously you swallow and then we're looking at stomach acid and if someone doesn't have enough stomach acid and yes, it's, anything that doesn't get killed off ends up in the gut, so. Yep. I think I read in your book you said the mouth is the mirror of the body. And Yeah, it's like it, everything is connected. Like you said, the GI tract really starts with your mouth and your oral health, so. What are some of the signs then that might indicate that the mouth is the sign of some deeper gut issues, maybe dysbiosis or SIBO or h pylori, some of the, those are some of the top things that we see.

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

Yeah. I love this question because it's something that I talk about every single day with patients. Um, we were all told by our moms that if we eat sugar or don't brush our teeth, we're gonna get cavities. Right? Yeah. That's true, but it's only a tiny piece of the truth. The mom didn't know everything. Unfortunately, nobody's talking about this. Hopefully now more moms are gonna find this out. But if, if I see a patient and they've had a clean mouth, I. Nothing's really been going on. In fact, I'll always remember, I see patients like this all the time, but I'll remember, I remember this woman, her name was Kim, and she was just the most diligent patient on the planet. You know, you know the type, they'll do every single thing that we ask them to do no matter what. So she came in every single, every six months on the dot, like on the day she was there every six months, getting her teeth cleaned, getting her teeth examined, all of the above. She really didn't have tooth to case she'd had someone, she was younger, but we figured it was probably diet related. Some other issues. She hadn't had a cavity for forever. Well, she came in at her six month appointment and she had four cavities all along the gum line, two molars on each side. She started freaking out. Of course. Yeah. And um, I just said, you have gut problems. There's something going on in your gut, you're not absorbing food properly. And she said, well, how the heck, how do you know that? Well, the reason is because the body is all connected head to toe, and it needs a balance of everything. And if gut function is not, I mean, this is your world. If you have low stomach acid and you're not ion ionizing minerals properly, what happens is you the minerals pass through and don't stop on the way and go and take care of the cells. Well. The brain needs certain amount of minerals. The heart needs certain amount of minerals, and those are life sustaining operations in the body. Life will not continue if your heart doesn't continue working and your brain doesn't continue working well, guess what's not. Life sustaining teeth. So your body can actually live without teeth. It can also live without bones because teeth and bones are comparable in this, in this scenario. But your, you can live without teeth. People do. So your body knows this. And this says, all right, if I'm not getting enough nutrients, if I'm not getting enough minerals through, either because I'm not eating them or because I'm not absorbing them crop properly, I will have to go find them elsewhere. And so teeth are already made bank of minerals. So if you're getting tooth decay along the gum line, you have. Core gut function. Mm-hmm. The tooth is thinnest along the gum line, so the body's literally mining minerals from the tooth top to bottom, but it's thinnest at the gum line, so that's where the hole will show up first. So this is basically your body just trying to take care of itself elsewhere. So that's the first sign I see is if I see a lot, if I see a lot of decay period and people brush their teeth.'cause we can tell, like I can look, I can tell looking in your mouth whether you brush your teeth or not. Even if you did it just like really well yesterday I can, I can tell it was like a, a onetime deal, you know, or, uh, no, I've been doing this every single day of my life. I can, we can tell. So if I look in our mouth and your teeth look beautiful, I can tell you're brushing. I can tell you're cleaning, you're doing everything right and you have. Nonstop tooth decay. You know, you're the kid that always had two cavities when they went into the dentist, or you're the mom who every single time you go to the dentist, you have another couple cavities and you just don't know what to do.'cause you like, you're literally doing everything you know to do. It's a gut function. It's a gut function issue, a hundred percent.

Dr. Heather Finley:

Do you see this a lot with pregnant and nursing moms as well with just like how many minerals they're depleting because I've heard it so many times from our clients where they're like, I never had cavities until I was breastfeeding. Yeah. And then we'll run an HTMA on them and like they're in a four lows pattern. They're minerals are super depleted. And I'm like, well, yeah. You know, calcium bones, like all the things, it makes total sense. So.

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

Exactly right. So there's three times. I see this happen teenage years. So what's going on in teenage years? Well, you're growing your own bones. Think of the growth that happens during teenage years and you know, I, there's a lady who brought her daughter in, she was 18, she just moved to college and like visited a dentist in her college town and he said she had 16 cavities and her mom was freaking out. So she brought her in for a second opinion. I said, she doesn't have 16 cavities, she actually has 17. Then they really freaked out and I said, this is her gut. This is her gut. She is growing faster than her minerals can keep up with. So either gut function or she's just not getting enough period. You know, she's, you know, college, she's living on pizza and ramen, you know, whatever. So she's just not getting what she needs. So in that situation, you've gotta supplement, you've got to add more minerals, period. You just have to do it. The second one is pregnancy and nursing, because you're not growing your own bones, you're growing somebody else's bones. You're growing a baby, you're growing a human that has bones and teeth and all sorts of need for those minerals. And then the third one is during menopause years, because estrogen, estrogen drops and estrogen actually is what helps maintain mineral balance in the bones. That helps maintain a lot of different things. So you got that estrogen drop and you actually need an increase in minerals. So we start to see decay around bound menopause age as well. So. It's interesting. Years ago they talked about what caused cavities. There was a re a whole research, uh, continuum that kind of came together and all these researchers came and one guy brought this idea that sugar causes cavities. Basically sugar eats. Or bacteria eat sugar. They lead to acid, which leads to cavities. Another guy, Dr. Weston Price, which a lot of people in the nutrition world have heard about, he brought his research that says Nutrition actually leads to the cavities, to nutritional deficiencies, lead to cavities. And another researcher, Dr. Melvin Page said, actually, my research shows that hormones lead to cavities, hormone changes, lead to cavities. Well, I think they're all right. It was voted on in the. Sugar equals cavities. One got chosen, so that's the one that we were all taught and told forever. This was literally the 1930s. They did this. I think they were all right, and they were all right, kind of for the same reason. You know, the body needs minerals to stay well, so it needs minerals on the teeth, and sugar eating bacteria will strip those. It needs minerals in the body, otherwise your body will strip those and those times increase during hormone changes. So these things are all true. It's all back to the mineral.

Dr. Heather Finley:

Yeah, it's like I always talk about this. Minerals are the foundation of health and then you also need to be able to absorb the minerals as well. Vitamin, there's

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

three K too, and acid uhhuh.

Dr. Heather Finley:

There's the, there's the second part of it. So another hot topic that I feel like is becoming more. Common or commonly known about is mouth breathing. So how does mouth breathing affect gut health digestion, or even mineral balance? I think mouth taping has become very popular. But even that, like you're seeing a lot of, dental airway specialists. I know my daughter's dentist is specializing in this and we've done expansion and all the things and have seen like amazing results, so. Yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that and just kind of explain to the listeners about that. Yeah,

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

so this trend of mouth taping is really an interesting one because the body naturally should be keeping the mouth closed at night. I. But, so we're gonna go two directions with this. I'm gonna talk about why this is in need, why your daughter had to see you, had to do some expansion, you know, why that's even happening. And then what are we missing out on when we're not breathing through the mouth at night? What is it doing to the gut function? What is it doing to all those things? So first of all, why are we, why do we even have this need today? Why are we not able to keep our our mouths together? You know, our lips? Together at nighttime. Why are we not able to breathe through our nose properly? Well, this again goes back to Dr. Weston Price. He was studying all these different societies in the 1930s and looking at what led to healthy people, what diet, what food led to healthy people. And he found that people who were healthier had higher levels of vitamins, fat soluble vitamins, vitamin D three, K two, and water soluble vitamins. You know, they're the ones we talk about all the time. Vitamin C, vitamin B, vitamin, you know, these are, these are the ones that we get. People had higher levels of those, they had better health. I mean, we all know this, right? Yeah. But what he also found is that the people who were healthier had wider mouths, wider faces, wider noses. Okay. Interesting. Right? What about that made a difference? Well, when you have a wider nose and a wider mouth and you're able to keep your lips together at night, air passes through the nose and it's really important to do that because the nose is a filter, so it filters out. I mean, that's what boogers are. It's why I tell kill Xlo ton. It's what your boogers are. It's all the stuff that, that you actually don't wanna be breathing in. But if you're breathing in through your mouth, there's no filter. The tonsils act as a filter, so this often leads to swollen tonsils. So what do we do? We take the tonsils out. Oh, great. Now we've just removed the last barrier between the lungs and all those boogers. Right? So we need to breathe through the nose because it filters. It also warms up the air. So it makes it easier for our lungs to use it humidifies. It moistens the air so our lungs can use it better. It also, when you're breathing through the nose, it creates something called nitric oxide, which leads to expansion of your blood vessels. So that air then gets further into the brain, deeper into the muscles, further into the heart. All of those places we need to be breathing through our noses. Mm-hmm. This is really important for growth and development of children, particularly, so I'm so glad you're doing this with your child growth and development, that nitric oxide leads to growth hormone increases all of these things. So why do so many people struggle with this? Why do so many people have crooked teeth? Need braces, need expansion? Why are no mouths fitting wisdom teeth anymore? A hundred, 200, 300 years ago, we see skulls of people who had all 32 teeth, you know, so all their wisdom teeth in their mouths and straight teeth. So what's going on here? This is a nutrient deficiency issue. The first bone affected by malnutrition is your top jaw. I learned this because I adopted a little boy at two and a half. His top jaw was so small, it fit completely inside his bottom jaw. That's the opposite of what should happen if you look at your teeth. The top jaw's on the outside, his teeth were lined up like runway, like airplanes on a runway. They were so terrible, and his birth mother said. One of the reasons we chose you to adopt him is because we know you're a dentist and we know you're gonna be able to fix what's going on with his mouth. Well, he was incredibly malnourished. He'd been born at 21 week, like 20, what was he, 23 weeks like super premature. He had been fed through a feeding tube for the first year of his life. He couldn't hardly eat food, so his jaw did not develop. If your top jaw develops too narrow. The bottom jaw has to develop narrow to fit inside of it, and so now we have really crooked teeth. The top jaw is also the floor of the nose. So if your top jaw develops narrow, your nose develops narrow. So we all like these nice, skinny, petite looking noses. So I joke that it used to be that like Meryl Monroe and Robert Redford were like the beautiful faces in our world. But now we look at Justin Bieber with a super skinny nose and Angelina Jolie with a super skinny nose get, guess what? Angelina Jo Lee and Dustin Justin Bieber, they don't breathe. Almost guarantee it. They cannot breathe. We need wide noses. So when we have skinny jaws. We have skinny noses, and so what happens to happen is the mouth has to drop open to be able to get enough air to actually survive. As soon as the mouth drops open, it changes the growth and development of the face. It grows more narrow, more long, more skinny, higher arch on the roof of the mouth. And now the problem is perpetuated. So nobody's breathing through the mouths at night or breathing through the nose at night. They're all hanging their mouths open. They're getting unfiltered, hot, dry, dirty air, right down their tonsils. It's up their tonsils. It's leading to airway issues. It's leading to kids who are grinding their teeth at night, who have to have tonsils out, who need braces, all of these things. So mouth taping. As a result of this, like we have this whole generation of people who can't breathe because of malnutrition. This comes back to your world. Malnutrition. We gotta get nutrients in their guts, but because of malnutrition,'cause we're not getting the nutrients we need outta the food that we're eating, food doesn't have it anymore. And because we're just not absorbing, our guts aren't, aren't working very well, everybody's malnourished. We don't have rooms in our mouth for all of our teeth anymore. Everything's narrow and skinny. So they said, all right, let's tape those dang lips closed. Does it help? Sure. Right. If you can continue to breathe through. My husband, Nate tapes his mouth at night every single night because if you have, if your mouth breathing, you are gonna change the biome. You're gonna change the bugs that live in your mouth. You're gonna dry out your gums leading to gum disease. You're going to dry out your teeth leading to tooth decay. So we see increases in tooth decay, creases in gum disease when people are mouth breathing. And it just feels like the Sahara Desert when you wake up, like it feels terrible and you get bad breath. I mean, it's like awful. So he. Tapes, his mouth closed at night, but he breathes out the sides. I hear it. He goes, you know, he is like breathing out the sides of the tape, like it didn't fix the problem. Does that make sense? It didn't fix anything, but it makes it less dry. It's better for tooth decay and gum disease, but the bigger thing is to do what you did with your daughter is to go and actually have. That top jaw expanded out, which will also expand out the nose and give the natural room that the body needs to get air in the way it needs to come in, rather than artificially band-aiding it by putting some tape here. But I mean, the tape is better than nothing, but I would much prefer expand and we can expand in adults and in kiddos. We can make everything bigger the way it should have been, the way it should have grown, but didn't. So if you have crooked teeth, there's no room for wisdom teeth. These are all signs. That your jaw did not grow big enough and most likely this was a nutrition problem.

Dr. Heather Finley:

Yeah, no, it was actually miraculous. My daughter, she was mouth breathing and, she failed her hearing test because her adenoids were so swollen and at the time we didn't know it, but we had mold in our house. So that was obviously a big piece there. Which we've addressed since then. But yeah, she failed her hearing test and it was pretty amazing. Now she's, her hearing just fine. She, and it was way less traumatic as a kid. I had the herps, which was so traumatic. Yes. Um, with the key and like, you literally feel like your nose is growing, as you know, and mm-hmm. Hers was much better. So we were very appreciative for her dentist that walked us through that. But. It's, it's wild. Just how common I feel like it is now and you know how much nutrition actually matters and plays a role and comes down to also not only what you eat, but what you can absorb, like you said. So. Yep. Let's chat a little bit about. Saliva and how saliva is a part of the digestive process and what happens when someone has dry mouth or just poor salivary flow. I think that goes along with some of the airway issues as well. So just kind of building on that.

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

Yep. So absolutely mouth breathing will lead to dry mouth for sure. Which, like I said, will lead to. Sensitive gums, more gum inflammation. It will lead to drying out the teeth, which leads to plaque buildup, which leads to tooth decay, all those kinds of things. There are also some hormone changes in autoimmune conditions that will lead to low salivary flow as well. So when you put food in your mouth and even sometimes before you put food in your mouth, when you look at food, your mouth starts watering, right? Yeah. It's the first, it's the start of the digestive process, and so it secretes something called amylase. It's an enzyme that's mouth specific, so I'm sure that you know all about this, but there are certain enzymes. Enzymes break down food. There are certain enzymes that our body has naturally, there are also enzymes that come in with our food. This is why it's so important to eat raw foods, because enzymes are killed at about 130 degrees. So we do need some raw foods that bring their own enzymes with them because it helps to break down the food that's raw and the food that's not, but. The mouth secretes something called amylase that's an enzyme in the mouth that starts the breakdown of food right here. Mm-hmm. So if you don't have that, if you don't have good salivary flow, you are now sending food down the gut. That hasn't already started that process and the amylase travels with the food. So it's still breaking it down as it moves down, and then it hits other enzymes as we hit the stomach. There's other enzymes there as it, you know, there's different things that it go, that goes to this process of digestion. So if you don't have that salivary flow and that amylase at the very beginning, it really impairs the abo the ability to digest that food down the road as well. So there's some things you can do to stimulate salivary flow. One of the things people used to always do was bitters. This is interesting. I love learning some of the old traditional things that people would do. Um, like if you would go to Germany, there were like kind of, you know, unspoken rules that you should have at least six pickles on the table during a meal. So you had your, your, uh, spectral and your, like a few other things, but then you would have. Pickles, all different kinds of pickled vegetables. Why? Well, those are bitter and they create more saliva. Isn't this interesting? So they actually have natural probiotics, natural other things as well with them along with it. But a lot of times you can introduce help. For your low salivary flow. So if you're not getting enough saliva, if your mouth feels dry, you need to do bitter foods. You need to do things that are gonna increase that salivary flow. Even a little bit of lemon in your water will help to increase that salivary flow. I also have a mouthwash that has marshmallow root. Marshmallow root is very good at. Also increasing salivary flow. So you can use a marshmallow root rinse to try to kickstart things. You need it to be able to digest properly. So saliva's, super important saliva's also where bacteria live. So this is why when you have bug bugs in your mouth, they get to your gut. Because the saliva's going down with the food. So if you have bad bugs that are living in your mouth, they're going crazy. You have gum disease, you're swallowing all those bugs, and they're hit in the stomach too. Now, stomach acid will kill some of them, but not all of them. And this is where the whole SIBO idea is, where it's like the right bugs in the wrong place. Well. This is potentially a source for where SIBO is coming from, as well as bugs that are, should be here and up here. Body can't deal with them there. They're in the wrong place. So saliva is super important. Use Bitters to try to stimulate it and marshmallow root Lemon are great things as well to stimulate it.

Dr. Heather Finley:

Yes. I love that you mentioned bitters because that's one of the very common things that we recommend to our clients as well as bitter foods which I love incorporating, like add some arugula to that. Add some, you know, dandelion greens and That's so true actually, when I went to Germany. They did always have like sauerkraut or something else on the table, which I love. Those are just foods I enjoy anyways, so we live in a very antibacterial world, as you know, and everything is antibacterial, like kill off all the bacteria. And you and I both know that that's not necessarily helpful, so. What common oral hygiene practices may be harming the oral and gut microbiome? Like, where are we overdoing it and what's, what do you see in your practice?

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

Love this question because it goes all the way back to oral care products. Um, commercial toothpaste. If you look on the tube, you're gonna see that there's a whole bunch of ingredients that you can't pronounce. One of them is Tricent. You can actually pronounce that one, but you probably have no clue what that is. It's a really potent antibacterial. So what it's doing is it's killing all the bugs in the mouth. We don't wanna do that because if you kill off all the good bugs, what's going to happen is the bad bugs are gonna flourish, including yeasts. So there's so much yeast. I'm sure you see a lot of yeast, don't you? A lot of yeast proliferation and guts.

Dr. Heather Finley:

Oh

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

yeah, exactly right. You kill off all the, all the bacteria, the yeasts are gonna have a heyday. So Triclosan and other antimicrobials that are in toothpaste are really damaging to the gut biome and to the oral biome to both.'cause it's all the same thing, you know? So it is to the biome in general, they're very damaging. So I don't recommend any tooth care products that have any antimicrobials in them at all. So that's a starting point. Um, the next one is mouthwash that burn that you get with like a Listerine. It's because of alcohol. Mm-hmm. These mouth washes are over 50% alcohol. Well, what does alcohol kill? Bacteria. Right? This is why when you go to the hospital and you're getting your blood draw and they use a little alcohol wipe on the arm because it's gonna disinfect the area, it's gonna kill any bugs that are on that surface. Well, when you're rinsing with that, you're killing all the bugs in the mouth and you're absolutely swallowing that. There's no way you're rinsing with something that you're not swallowing as well, so you're swallowing that alcohol. It's going down as changing the gut biome as well. So no. Alcohol containing mouth washes ever should be used, period. So what do I recommend instead for a tooth care product? Absolutely recommend Hydroxyapatite products that don't have any kind of antimicrobial in it. So my tooth powder actually has essential oils, which some people will say that's an antimicrobial, and it's true. Essential oils are really great at controlling bacterial growth. It depends on the amount. If I had. Dumped an entire capsule of peppermint oil in that tooth powder. It sure is. It's gonna help control or it's gonna kill some bugs. We're like, it's the whiff of essential oil in there to make it taste right, because I didn't wanna put any artificial flavors in there, or artificial sweeteners or artificial anything else is so it's just enough to make it right, but it's not enough to kill any bugs. The other one is in our mouthwash, we use colloidal silver, which a lot of people will say also, this is gonna do the same thing. It's gonna kill all the bugs. It depends on the parts per million. So the dosage of. The colloidal silver is, if you have high parts per million high dosage, it will, it'll kill any bugs just like the alcohol did. If you have low, it will selectively kill only bad bugs, not good bugs. So it's really important to make sure that what you're using for tooth care is keeping you healthy as well.

Dr. Heather Finley:

I love that. And that's a big recommendation that we often give to our clients is just making little swaps. You know, it can feel super overwhelming to overhaul everything, but it's like, okay, when you run outta something, let's just replace it with a different thing and you know, it doesn't all have to be at one time. We can do it. We can do it systematically. So. How do you recommend simultaneously supporting the oral and the gut microbiomes? Like what are, what are some strategies, specific routines, foods, probiotics, whatever it might be that you recommend starting with.

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

Yep. So one of the things you can start doing at home that's a real simple swap as well, is tongue scraping. And this is an old Ayurvedic technique from India, and they swear that it alters gut biome as well, that it does not just, you know, your oral biome changes, but it does gut biome as well, whether it does that or not. And some research shows that it's true. But like I said, it's all the same biome. It's all the same bugs. So what. Oil. Oh, excuse me. There's two things that Ayurveda recommended. Oil pulling and tongue scraping. So let's talk about both of those. So oil pulling every bug in your mouth, every bug in your body, doesn't matter where it is or what it is, is surrounded by fats. This is just the way they're made All of our cells are too. It's called the fatty lipid layer around the outside of every single one of our cells. So it's surrounded by fats. So when you put the tablespoon of coconut oil in your mouth and you swish it around. The fat in that oil will attract the fat in the bacteria, and they'll literally. Pull to each other. So this is why it's called oil pulling. It will pull bacteria from every nook and cranny in the mouth. It's not selective, so it's gonna pull bad bugs, good bugs, all bugs. This is why I don't recommend oil pulling every day of your life because I believe it's gonna remove too many bacteria. So I recommend if you have gum disease, you're gonna do it about five days in a row. And then you're only gonna do it every four to five days just to kind of keep things under control, but not to eliminate and eradicate all bugs in general. So that's one thing people don't often say about oil, oil pulling. They think that it's good every day of your life. I don't agree. I. I

Dr. Heather Finley:

think

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

it's a once a week kind of touchup thing if you need it. If you have gum disease, I don't oil pull at all unless I have something that's coming along. If I feel like I've got a yeast infection. And how can you tell? I get a white tongue, so if you get a white tongue, often that's a sign of yeast infection. If I have that going on, I I'll oil pull for about three days. Just try to get things kind of back into, back into balance again. So the second one is tongue scraping. Um, I want to challenge people to do a test at home because oftentimes people say, well, I already brushed my tongue. It's fine. Well, the tongue's like a shag carpet. There's so much that can get trapped down in that shag carpet, and we think that just brushing alone is doing the job, but it's not. So this is the test I want you to do. I want you to get a tongue scraper. I have a copper one. The reason I like copper is because it's antimicrobial. So when you actually scrape with it and then you go stick it in your bathroom cupboard. There's not bugs that are still living on it. The next time you put it back in your mouth, you're not just adding yesterday's bugs back to it because they can't live on that copper. So that's why I like the copper. But you know, there's lots of different versions of tongue scrapers. I want you to get a tongue scraper. So I want you to brush your tongue as good as you always have done. And then I want you to tongue scrape and I want you to see what's left on there that you didn't know was left on there.

Dr. Heather Finley:

And I think it's pretty amazing. I've done that before and it's, yeah, it's eye. It's like

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

I thought I was doing a really great job here. So what I like to do, the order of things is. You're going to, I actually like to brush then floss because if you brush with hydroxy appetite, flossing after brings the hydroxy appetite down between the teeth. So brush, floss, rinse. If you're using a hydroxy appetite mouthwash like what I have.'cause you're adding it all back in. And then, sorry, I jumped ahead. Brush floss. Tongue scrape. I want all that junk off of there. The last thing you're gonna do is rinse, because I actually want those antimicrobials from the coil silver to get into that tongue surface. And I want that crud cleaned off of there. So this is the way I always tell people. Brush floss, tongue scrape, rinse. Seven minutes a day, that's all it takes. This isn't anything fancy or extra anything else, it's just what you're already doing. Super simple ways to keep it under control. I just have a brand new mouthwash that actually has a prebiotic in it, and that is what's going to encourage good bacterial growth in the mouth and in the gut as well. So there's a lot of other dental prebiotics that you can take or probiotics that you can take. I don't think they're that essential if you just keep everything balanced on a daily basis. I don't think you need to take an extra pill or an extra anything else to give you other oral probiotics.

Dr. Heather Finley:

Okay, well that kind of answers my next question. I was gonna rapid fire a couple questions, but you already answered most of'em. It was gonna be, do we need oral probiotics? No. No.

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

And you're staying on top of it.

Dr. Heather Finley:

Okay. One thing to stop doing today for oral health, I think that this one you already answered too, but

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

using an alcohol containing mouthwash or a toothpaste with triclosan in it,

Dr. Heather Finley:

and then oil pulling overhyped are helpful. There we go. You put that as well. And then the last one you haven't touched on is xylitol. Yes or no?

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

Okay. Xylitol is an interesting one. There's some controversy about it, but it's all about the dosage. So xylitol, starves. Bacteria. They can't eat it, so it's a sugar that they don't like. So really the reason that cavities develop sugar doesn't cause cavities. That's not, it's not that direct of a relationship. What happens is the bacteria that live in your mouth, they like sugar, they eat sugar, and they poop out acid. So like basically they excrete acid. That acid then dissolves the minerals on your tooth. So does sugar cause cavities? Sure. In a roundabout way, right? Bacteria eat sugar, whatever. So if you feed them sugar that they can't eat, then they can't poop out acid. Does that make sense? So there are, there's a ton of research showing that xylitol leads to less ate. This is why, but the problem comes when you start using it for everything. So there have been shown, there's research showing issues with gut function. Research is, you know, with issues with other functions in the body when you're using X xylitol on a large amount. So if you're replacing xylitol as your sweetener of choice, when you're making a batch of cookies or you're, you know, putting whatever it is. That is not how we're gonna use it. You're gonna use it in a tooth care product. So I actually joke my, not my tooth powder. I figured out the research article that showed the damages or the dangers with xylitol. I figured out you'd have to eat 13 jars of this powder a day to get as much xylitol as they were using to test and show. Problems with it. So if you wanna eat 13 powders, uh, jars of this powder a day, then you're gonna have problems with xylitol. But if you're using it in very small amounts and tooth care products, you're okay. You're just not gonna use it as a replacement sugar in your baking and cooking and everyday life.

Dr. Heather Finley:

Okay. That's super helpful. So last question, just to kind of tie up the loose end that we were talking at the beginning of the episode about root canals and amalgam fillings is we know that these can be problematic because you described even just your own journey. What should somebody do if they. Need to have a root canal or have been recommended to have a root canal, or they have amalgam fillings that they feel like are impacting their health. Like what were, what are the steps that they should go through, or what kind of practitioners should they look for?

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

So first thing is mercury fillings do release mercury 24 7. When I was in school, I was told that if I told you that I would lose my license. Now I can tell you that because it's been backed and shown by research. So they do release mercury 24 7. So if people have symptoms and mercury goes to gut function, mercury impacts zinc, which leads to stomach acid creation. So if you have mercury levels in your body, it can lead to low stomach acid and gut issues. So if this is something you feel like. Maybe this is a piece of my puzzle. Maybe I need to address this. You absolutely wanna go to a dentist that will remove them safely because you're gonna get the most mercury release during that removal procedure. And if you just do it at a normal dentist where you're swallowing it and breathing it in, and it's way, way, way worse, I tell people, leave'em alone. Unless you're gonna do it safely. So go to a dentist. There's a two directories you can go to. One is on my website, living well with dr michelle.com. I have a dentist directory on there of people who do this kind of thing. The other one is called I-A-O-M-T. Hopefully you can put that in the show notes. IAOM t.org. It's also dentists who will remove mercury fillings safely. And what does that look like? You are covered, like your face is covered'cause mercury is absorbed through the skin. Your nose is covered, everything is covered, you're not swallowing in it. There's a giant vacuum that's at the edge of your, the base of your chin, so it's sucking all the vapor that direction. That's how you wanna'em removed if you're going to do it. Root canals, this is a whole hour talk on its own, but I'll give you the 32nd version. Basically the problem is. When you have a root canal, the tooth is not completely clean after no matter what, because there's main canals and there's little side channels. I like to think of it as the super highway and the little roads, the exit ramps and the roads that go off through the cities. Those roads can't be cleaned. You always have dead tissue left in a root canal tooth, no matter what. You can get a root canal, but understand it's a place saver. It's gonna hold that space, hold that tooth in the mouth for a while. If you already have chronic disease, I do not recommend it because what it's going to do is your body is gonna have to deal with that dead tissue and low grade chronic infection 24 7, and it's going to impact you. So if you already have chronic disease, if you're already struggling, what do you do instead? If the tooth is still alive, we save it. We use ozone, and we actually keep the tooth alive. We fill right over it and we keep it alive. If it's already dead, we remove it and we replace it with a ceramic dental implant. I have a dental implant right up here. Nobody knows it's there. It chews like a tooth. It smiles like a tooth. It's fabulous. I tell people all the time, I can replace your teeth. I can't replace your health. So if this dead tooth in your body leads to chronic disease and nothing else is taken care of it, it's time to get that tooth out. And how do you find out? You do what's called a cone beam CT scan, cone beam CT scan shows. Is your root canal healthy or is there an issue? And I find these daily massive infections that nobody knows about, contributing to gut health, contributing to sinus infections, contributing to all the above, and it's a failed root canal. I.

Dr. Heather Finley:

So interesting. It's crazy how it is all connected and just,, I love how you said, we started separating medicine, we started separating everything and I think hopefully at the end now everyone is realizing, I. We can't separate it. Everything is all connected. So Dr. Michelle, this has been amazing and so informative. I've learned a ton. I know that the listeners have, you just had a book that came out. So tell everybody about your book, where they can find you, where your practice is, in case they wanna work with you and come see you, all the things.

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

Yep. So the book is actually, there's a little bit about dentistry in there, but it's. It's the answer to a lot of concern that we have today, which is where do I start? I want to get better. I want to do the right things for my health, but I don't have a clue where to start. Like there's all these people telling me different things and there's so much overwhelm in the health world today. So it actually has an assessment in it that uses your symptoms. You plug your symptoms in and it tells you which of your cells need help first, and it puts you in a season. So gut health is a big one in there, and you just need to know, is the gut the first place to start? Or is my liver, do I need to detox first? Or is it, you know, whatever. Whatever it might be. It tells you which. Cells to start with first, and then it tells you what to do about it. So that's what the book's all about and really it is changing the way we stay. Well, that is found@livingwellbook.com. So check that out. But also all the products I've talked about, all you know, all of the everything information, all sorts of free stuff all over the place at Living Well with dr michelle.com. And the office is@totalcaredental.com. So those are the three places to check out the book, the practice, and the products, and then the dental office.

Dr. Heather Finley:

Amazing. Thanks so much for joining us. Last question actually that I always ask every guest is, how do you love your gut?

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

You know, it's interesting because I have struggled with gut health since I was a teenager, and I love my gut by listening to it.

Dr. Heather Finley:

I love that. Thanks so much, Dr. Michelle.

Dr. Michelle Jorgenson:

Thank you.

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