Everyone knows that it’s important to care for your oral health every day, to keep your teeth and gums healthy, and to prevent cavities and gum disease. But did you know that caring for your mouth is also vital to the health of your whole body? The presumptions of modern medicine may have us believe otherwise, but the body is not just a patchwork compilation of many unrelated pieces and parts. It is an interconnected whole system, where the health of each body part and organ system directly affects the health of every other part.
Eastern medicinal traditions have known this for thousands of years, and Chinese medicine practitioners still to this day will diagnose and treat ailments by assessing the body as a whole system, not just the part of the body that is having issues. Organs work in systems, each having ripple effects of health or sickness onto other organ systems. The energy meridians are all connected through our circulatory and nervous systems.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the health of the teeth and bones is intimately connected with the kidney system – the jing, or vital essence of the body. Even beyond that, the teeth themselves are connected to all the meridians of the body, very similar to how the feet are viewed in reflexology. The teeth have their own reflexology, where each tooth is connected to a different organ system, and are considered to be similar to acupuncture points.
As an example, the front teeth on the top and bottom (the incisors) are connected to the pineal gland, kidneys, bladder, prostate and uterus through the circulatory and nervous systems. Various molars (back teeth) are connected to the stomach, spleen and pancreas, the organs responsible for digesting and assimilating nutrients. The premolars (bicuspids) are connected to the lung and large intestine. The canine teeth (cuspids) are connected to the eyes, liver and gallbladder. These organ groupings reflect the organ systems used in TCM.
If you are experiencing prolonged issues with a specific tooth, this weakness can radiate to the corresponding organ system. Likewise, if you are having an issue with a specific organ, it may show up in one or more teeth associated with that organ.
Modern dentistry often urges proactive removal of the wisdom teeth, usually in the late teens or early 20s, to “prevent issues down the road”, even if the wisdom teeth seem to be growing in just fine, and there is plenty of space for them. Unfortunately, since the wisdom teeth are energetically connected with the heart, small intestine and endocrine systems (which produces essential hormones), removing them in the absence of acute issues could affect those organ systems down the road. Energetically, the heart center is the home of our wisdom as humans, so it’s no wonder that they are called the “wisdom” teeth.
We encourage holistically caring for your oral health, knowing that the effects of this care or negligence go far beyond the mouth. Daily home care should always be the foundation of our oral health practices. Beyond that, appropriate dental care from a holistically inclined dentist can ensure that more significant issues are prevented or handled promptly, without unnecessarily invasive procedures that could detrimentally affect the body as a whole.
The potential harms of sodium fluoride and glycerin
We all know that brushing and flossing is an important daily ritual, to keep bacteria in check that could cause decay and infection. These are the basics, but many of us do not question the details of these practices. What kind of toothpaste should we use? Can some types of toothpaste cause more harm than good? Why do we floss, and is it really that important?
Most conventional toothpaste contains sodium fluoride and other chemical additives. Excessive use of fluoride (especially during tooth development) can disrupt enamel-forming cells, leading to hypo-mineralization – a condition known as dental fluorosis. Fluoride can interfere with calcium-phosphate balance, interrupting hydroxyapatite formation, the primary mineral of healthy enamel. This can cause enamel to become brittle and form micro-cracks over time. It can also irritate the soft tissues of the mouth, like the gums and mucosal lining, and disrupt the balance of beneficial bacteria.
Many argue that using fluoride in toothpaste in small amounts won’t cause any harm, but cumulative exposure from multiple sources – like toothpaste, mouthwash, and fluoridated tap water – can make it easy to exceed optimal levels. Fluoride itself is found in nature and can support dental health, but the sodium fluoride added to water supplies and dental products is a synthetic chemical. Many people already consume natural fluoride through foods and beverages like green tea, seafood, and mineral-rich water.
Another issue with conventional toothpaste (and even many brands labeled as natural) is the glycerin or glycerol content. It is mainly used in toothpaste as a preservative, binder, and texture and flavor enhancer, not because it benefits oral health. The issue with glycerin is it coats the teeth and forms a thin barrier, which can prevent the saliva from coming in direct contact with the tooth surface, inhibiting mineralization of the enamel.
Daily oral care methods for strong, vibrant teeth and gums
We prefer using toothpastes or tooth powders made entirely of natural substances and herbs, with every ingredient chosen for its beneficial effects on oral health. With no fillers or unnecessary ingredients, you know that what you’re using on your teeth is pure, natural, and concentrated enough to maintain and improve your oral health over time.
Our Tooth Care System contains two powders that fit this bill perfectly. The Daily Tooth Cleanser is a white powder meant to be used for daily brushing. It has a refreshing flavor and invigorating feel, leaving your teeth feeling spotless, clean and refreshed. The Tooth Polish is a black powder, meant to be used a few times per week as a deep clean, to remove stains and plaque buildup, naturally whitening the teeth. Unlike most polishing or whitening products, our Tooth Polish is gentle enough to be used long term with excellent results.
If you’re used to using pastes instead of powders to brush your teeth, these work a little bit differently: you just add a small pinch of powder onto a dry toothbrush, and then brush your teeth normally. While the powder is dry initially, it becomes wet by mixing with your saliva during brushing. This is more beneficial for your teeth and gums than the wet filler ingredients added to most toothpastes, which dilute and compromise any beneficial effects they may have.
What about mouth washes and rinses? Most conventional mouth washes contain fluoride, glycerin, alcohol, synthetic chemicals, artificial dyes, preservatives and artificial sweeteners. These can be harsh on the oral microbiome and the sensitive soft tissues of the mouth, and can also prevent proper mineralization. Some people enjoy the “fresh” feel of using a mouth wash, and that’s for a good reason: natural, high quality mouth rinse products are an excellent addition to your oral care routine.
We have two that only contain natural, supportive, highly potent ingredients to support the health of your teeth, gums, and overall oral microbiome, with none of the potentially harmful side effects of conventional mouth washes: Pearl Mouth Rinse and Pearl Protect Rinse.
Pearl Mouth Rinse is a tooth and gum rejuvenator that’s loaded with bioavailable minerals, amino acids and bacterial balancing elements. It helps strengthen your tooth enamel and the soft tissues of your mouth by increasing circulation and delivering natural, bioavailable nutrients directly to your teeth and gums. It kills any excess of bad bacteria while maintaining healthy levels of good bacteria, and freshens the breath. It is centered around medicinal grade pearl, which has been used in traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic herbalism for oral health, and is a natural source of highly bioavailable calcium carbonate, as well as being a gentle abrasive substance. Pearl is combined with an earth mineral complex and marine plasma minerals, as well as a combination of pure and potent Japanese herbs.
Pearl Protect Rinse contains similar ingredients, but is even more potent and medicinal, designed as a deep cleanse. It contains several of the same foundational ingredients as our regular Pearl Rinse, plus our Protect Mint formula and food grade hydrogen peroxide.
Our Tooth Spa Bundle contains all four of our pure and potent oral care products – the two powders and two rinses – at a bundle discount. Here’s how you would use all four products as a full oral care routine:
First use the white Daily Tooth Cleanser powder as your daily “toothpaste” at night to get your teeth clean from the food residues of the day, and in the morning to remove overnight bacterial buildup.
In the evening after using your Tooth Cleanser, 3-4 times per week you can use the black Tooth Polish powder to get a deeper clean, removing stains and whitening the teeth naturally.
After brushing, use the Pearl Protect Rinse as a deep clean for the gums, to increase circulation and remove bad bacteria. Swish the rinse for 3-4 minutes, then spit out.
Your final step is the Pearl Mouth Rinse, to refresh, rejuvenate and remineralize your teeth and gums. Swish this one for another few minutes, then spit out and rinse with water. After this routine, you will have sparkling, healthy teeth, invigorated gums and the freshest breath!
Traditional Ayurvedic oral hygiene: oil pulling and tongue scraping
One extra step you can do in the morning is oil pulling. If you haven’t heard of oil pulling, this involves swishing specific types of natural oils in the mouth for 10-20 minutes, which can pull impurities from deeper parts of the mouth and gums, removing toxins, heavy metals, and bad bacteria that can cause cavities and gum disease. The tradition of oil pulling has been recommended by Ayurvedic herbalism for thousands of years, and has a long track record of beneficial use. Pure, cold processed sesame seed oil is the most common traditional oil used for this purpose.
Oil pulling is best to do first thing in the morning, before brushing your teeth, but after using our Pearl Protect Rinse. You just add about a tablespoon of oil into your mouth, and gently swish or “pull” the oil between your teeth, until it’s fully mixed with your saliva and has lost its thick texture. Then you spit it out (in the trash can or outside, as it isn’t great for your bathroom sink drain), rinse with water, then brush your teeth.
Oil pulling with our Gobo Root Oil is the best of all! Gobo is burdock root, a blood purifying and liver supportive herb, infused in cold-processed sesame oil, the traditional oil used for oil pulling. The burdock infusion enhances the detoxification and overall health effects of pulling with this oil.
Another traditional Ayurvedic mouth cleansing technique is tongue scraping. Tongue scrapers are U-shaped manual devices usually made of copper, which is anti-bacterial. You hold the two ends with your hands, and the curved part is used to scrape all the buildup off your tongue, especially in the morning right when you wake up. Tongue scraping removes toxins, mucus and dead skin cells that build up on the tongue overnight, improving bad breath and taste sensation. As soon as you see what you’re able to remove from your mouth when you start doing this, you will be hooked, and wonder how you ever survived without it!
The benefits of flossing: much more than just removing chunks of food
Now what about flossing? Everyone has heard that this should be a staple in your daily oral care routine, but why should we do it? Many people believe that we only floss to get noticeable chunks of food out from between our teeth, but there is a much more important reason to floss that has nothing to do with those annoying, obvious food particles.
There are bacterial colonies that live in our mouths – some considered “good” (beneficial) bacteria, and some that are opportunistic or “bad”. In truth, we cannot – and wouldn’t want to – totally eliminate all the “bad” bacteria. These opportunistic bacteria do serve a purpose in our mouths – they consume, and remove, toxins that would otherwise harm us. This is why we don’t want to eliminate them completely. These bacteria can only cause harm to us if their colonies grow to high numbers, due to an absence or insufficiency of necessary beneficial bacteria – and when they are allowed to form structured colonies.
It takes about 24 hours for a group of opportunistic bacteria to form the basic components of a structured community, and begin to protect themselves with a shell of proteins, polysaccharides and other substances, called biofilms. If these bacterial colonies are disrupted at least once every 24 hours, they will not be able to build their fortresses and “take over the town”. These bacteria don’t like it when you brush your teeth and eat fibrous food, as it agitates and disrupts them. To stay protected, where do you think they hide? Between your teeth and along your gum line, where they have pockets and crevices to hide in, to prevent disturbance and build their structures in peace.
If you floss between all your teeth every 24 hours, you are basically deconstructing these bacterial fortresses every single day. When flossing is done properly, and combined with other beneficial oral care practices, these bacteria will never be able to get ahead enough to cause tooth decay between the teeth and along the gum line, or to reach under your gums and create the deep pockets that can cause periodontal disease.
This is also why it’s good to brush along your gum line when you brush your teeth, angling your toothbrush at a 45-degree angle towards your gum line, which is the other most common area where these bacteria most like to hide.
Health-sustaining versus harmful dentistry
For various reasons, whether due to insufficient oral care, poor nutrition, chronic stress, genetic influences, and even accidents and injuries, teeth and gums do not always stay perfectly healthy. Most of us go to see a dentist regularly or occasionally, often just for preventative exams and cleanings, and sometimes for more serious reparative purposes. It’s difficult or impossible to go through life completely physically unscathed, especially the more years you accrue on Earth. You can certainly prevent a lot of physical issues with good self-care, but sometimes things happen that seem out of our control, and we require outside assistance with health issues.
Dentists and doctors are the people we often seek out when we are physically struggling. Especially in modern times with diets of highly-processed, nutrient-deficient, sugary foods being the norm, dental issues are part of many peoples’ daily lives – from bad breath, dental decay (cavities), crowded or crooked teeth, gingivitis and periodontal disease, to infected teeth that leave root canals and extractions as the only remaining option.
How do we choose a dentist that can address our oral health issues and help us restore good health, without causing more systemic damage in the process? In the past, dentists approached treatments in an isolated, mechanized way, doing whatever needed to be done to seemingly resolve the issue, but with a limited selection of tools and techniques, as well as a limited understanding of the mouth and its connection to holistic health. Mainstream, conventional dentists often remove decayed tooth material haphazardly, also removing healthy tooth material in the process, as if every millimeter of your original unaffected tooth is not precious and vitally important. Then they often replace the missing tooth material with substances that are biologically harmful, and unsuitable in consistency and hardness to act as a functional replacement for either dentin or enamel.
A good example are “silver” fillings, which are primarily made from the metal mercury, which is highly toxic when exposed to human tissue. When mercury fillings are in the mouth, tiny particles of mercury are leached out daily, as you chew food, brush your teeth, and if you ever clench or grind your teeth. Over many years and even decades, these mercury particles build up in the body and the brain, becoming a factor in a variety of chronic health issues. Another problem with mercury fillings is they are extremely hard – much harder than the natural dentin that makes up the tooth – potentially stressing and breaking teeth over time.
The best cavity filling materials are those that are non-toxic and biocompatible, so the body doesn’t react poorly and mount an immune response to the material. The best materials also have a similar hardness/pliability level as the dentin itself, so that as the tooth naturally expands and contracts like the living tissue that it is, the filling material moves in harmony with the tooth. Most dentists who are aware of the importance of proper materials for dental fillings use various kinds of composite resins that are free of BPA and other endocrine disruptors, to replace the dentin. Many also then use porcelain to replace the outer enamel, which mimics the hardness of natural enamel.
Another very important consideration that highly educated holistic modern dentists prioritize is the removal of the least possible amount of healthy tooth structure. As soon as any of the enamel is removed from the outside of the tooth, the dental tubules in the dentin underneath become exposed, making that part of the tooth significantly more vulnerable to decay in the future.
If you’re looking for dentist who values all of these approaches, you will want to look for a holistic, biological dentist who practices biomimetic dentistry. Biomimetic means “mimicking biology”, pointing to the extensive research that has been done in this field about how teeth actually function, and what we can do to address diseased teeth that retains their natural structure and function as much as possible.
These dentists have the most minimally invasive, longest lasting techniques that can support your optimal health. Their cavity filling techniques are more complex and sophisticated than conventional dentists, and even many dentists who consider themselves holistic, which usually results in a filling lasting far longer without leaking, falling out, or becoming susceptible to decay in the tooth underneath the filling. Many of them offer blood tests to make sure that the materials used in your dental treatments are compatible with your body, since everyone is slightly different. Even without these tests, they choose only materials with exceptionally safe track records, that work for the majority of people.
Nutritional approaches for optimal tooth and gum health
One vitally important way you can prevent tooth and gum issues before they start is with optimal nutrition. The link between nutrition and dental health was not widely known until dentist and researcher Weston A. Price traveled the world studying the dental health of both indigenous and modern populations back in the early to mid 1900s. As a conventional dentist, he had a major epiphany after discovering that tribes of natural people living on the land and eating their ancestral, native diet had only a tiny fraction of the tooth decay of those eating modern diets of sugary, processed foods.
His research culminated in a book titled Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, written in 1939, documenting his findings of the stellar oral health, face and jaw structure, and almost completely absent tooth decay of indigenous tribes. His explorations and research led him to the conclusion that the primary reason for this major difference in oral health between modern vs. indigenous people is the presence and quantity of dietary fat soluble vitamins, especially vitamins A, D3 and K2, which are abundant in the fat of healthy animals (meat and organs) and their products (milk and eggs). He found that cows eating fast growing green grass produced milk with much higher vitamin K2 content, a magical and mysterious substance he named “Activator X”, before K2 as a vitamin was discovered scientifically.
He went back home and began incorporating nutrition into the treatment of his dental patients, especially children, and reported astounding success at reversing early stages of tooth decay, and preventing further decay. His methods included adding rich sources of fat soluble vitamins to the diet – including cod liver oil (high in vitamin D3) and a rich extract of the oil from butter (rich in K2) – as well as removing processed sugar and grains.
Almost a century later, Dr. Price’s work has had a powerful ripple effect on health conscious individuals, as well as modern dentistry, and birthed the fields of holistic and biological dentistry, where every factor that influences human health is considered when addressing dental health – a holistic viewpoint.
Although Weston Price considered animal foods to be the foundation of good dentition, many other foods contribute to excellent oral health, as well. If we look back to Ayurvedic cultures, their view of nutrition and oral health has been deeply intertwined for thousands of years. Ayurveda emphasizes seasonal, whole, fresh, and properly prepared foods. They advised healthy fats and mineral rich foods for building and maintaining strong teeth. Sesame seeds, sesame butter and sesame oil were thought to strengthen teeth, bones and gums, due to the their oily nature and rich content of calcium, phosphorous and trace minerals. They also emphasized leafy greens, seaweeds, natural salt and various herbs, all rich in minerals. Milk and ghee (clarified butter) from grass-fed cows was their primary source of fat soluble vitamins.
Shen Blossom sources highly quality, extremely nutritionally dense food products, and we are especially proud of our sesame seed butters, toasted sesame oil, and variety of sea vegetables, all of which support strong ojas or jing (the body’s vital essence), strengthening the hormones, bones and teeth.
Other foods that we love for whole body nourishment, which also support healthy teeth and gums:
- Green Elements – Full Spectrum Nutrient Formula: fills in the gaps of our mineral-deficient diets with concentrated green foods that are rich in macro and trace minerals
- He Shou Wu Formula: this highly renowned ancient tonic herb restores kidney or jing essence, strengthening bones, teeth, and bone marrow
- Our wide selection of sea vegetables, rich in macro and trace minerals: Kazumi Seaweed Powder – Coral Seaweed – Prepared Wakame – Nori Sprinkle – Premium Hand Harvested Kombu
- Biocean Marine Plasma Minerals: full spectrum mineral supplement from natural sea plasma, to fill in macro and trace mineral gaps in the right ratios for human health
- Potent-C: vitamin C rich herbs and fruit concentrates with seaweed sourced collagen for optimal absorption, important for gum health and tissue integrity
Earlier in this article, we went into detail about our exceptionally pure and potent tooth care products, which we created to be the foundation of an excellent oral care routine.
Taking care of your mouth is taking care of your health, and is essential for a long life full of vitality!