Okay, let's talk about mouthwash or mouthwashes plural. At the beginning of today's episode, I said, let's determine what category of oral health you are in. Are you somebody who pays a lot of attention to oral health? You brush and floss at least twice a day. You're using mouthwashes, tooth whiteners, perhaps as well.

Or are you in category two or three? Well, here's the deal. Most all, most all, not all, but most all mouthwashes, especially those containing alcohol are terrible for oral health. Simply put, they deplete certain components of the mucosal lining of the mouth, and they disrupt the healthy components of the oral microbiome.

So for those of you that rely on such mouthwashes, I would really encourage you to learn more about them. You're about to do that now. You're already doing that now. And to really consider whether or not they are helping or harming your oral health. Now, I'm not suggesting that you create a scenario where your breath is causing other people to dissolve into a puddle of tears or back away from you quickly.

That's not what you want. That's not what I want. That's not what anyone wants. But I think it's important to realize that these alcohol-based mouthwashes are not good for us. In addition, there are antiseptic mouthwashes, some of which contain alcohol, some of which don't, which sometimes are prescribed for very serious bacterial overgrowth and infections of the oral cavity.

If your dentist or physician or periodontist prescribes those, I certainly am not going to try and get in the way of that prescription. That's between you and your healthcare professional. But you would be wise to ask them whether or not these chlorhexidine-type mouthwashes, et cetera, are potentially bad for other components of oral health or microbiota in the gut generally.

Because in some cases, they have been shown to be not good for us. At the same time, we don't want overproliferation of really bad bacteria in the mouth, so we don't want infections to run wild either. Most people, however, are using mouthwashes to freshen their breath and to kill off additional bacteria in the mouth that they might believe they couldn't get with brushing or flossing.

If you are somebody who really wants to use a mouthwash for that reason, I encourage you to try and find a mouthwash that is not alcohol-based and that is not a strong antiseptic, or that if it is an antiseptic, that it's not alcohol-based, okay? And such mouthwashes exist out there.

They're a little bit hard to find. I'll provide a link to at least a couple of them in the "Show Note" captions. Here, I have to say I have not tried those mouthwashes yet. They do come from sources in which they were developed by licensed dental healthcare professionals, but this is always the case when somebody's selling something, it's worthwhile to do diligence.

Now, as we talk about toothpaste and mints and gums and mouthwashes, I think it's worth taking a step back and also asking the question, are there any zero or very, very low cost or even cost-saving alternatives to any of this? And the great answer is yes. There are actually a number of things that you can do with basic over-the-counter stuff from the grocery store that all the dentists I spoke to said, yeah, that's a pretty good option.

It's not the best option available perhaps, but it's a pretty good option. And in many cases, it's better than the typical commercially available toothpaste or mouthwash. For instance, I would imagine, based on everything I now know about the structure of teeth, that using something like baking soda to brush the teeth would indeed scrape off the biofilm, perhaps even whiten the teeth a little bit, although as we talked about earlier, you're not really whitening the teeth, you're actually just changing the reflectiveness and some of the composition of that enamel, which is translucent so that you can see the underlying components better.

Well, I talked to several dentists and they told me that baking soda actually is fairly low on the abrasiveness rating scale. They have a specific rating scale for this that we don't have to go into, but it's actually considered quite safe for the enamel of the teeth, especially if you're brushing with a soft toothbrush and you're not like really grinding the stuff against your teeth at maximum intensity or even near maximum intensity.

So it turns out that baking soda and water is actually a pretty good toothpaste if you're not going to go buy a toothpaste. So that's good news. Now, you may have heard that you can make a sort of mouthwash or mouth rinse with baking soda, water, and a little bit of hydrogen peroxide.

I want to emphasize a little bit, but I'm also going to emphasize, I don't think this is a good idea at all. Why is it not a good idea at all? Well, first of all, when we were kids, we used to take baking soda and hydrogen peroxide and put them together to simulate volcanoes.

So that tells you right there, the kind of chemical reaction that you're going to get. But in addition to that, it's pretty clear that hydrogen peroxide, unless there's a specific medical recommendation to do so, is not something you want to introduce to the oral cavity. Now, this is something that I'm very familiar with because when I was a postdoc, so this is in the 2005 to 2010 stretch, I started to get some pretty bad canker sores.

I don't know about you, but canker sores feel awful to me. I hate them. When you eat, they hurt. When you swallow, they hurt. When you do anything, they pretty much hurt. And someone gave me the recommendation to use a little bit of baking soda dissolved in some water and a little bit of hydrogen peroxide and to use that as a oral rinse.

And of course, then to spit it out. And I did that. And actually what happened to me is I got almost quarter-sized ulcers on the roof of my mouth and on the sides of my mouth. It took those little canker sores, which were annoying and kind of painful, and turned them into full-blown ulcers.

I know this because when I stopped using it, those healed up almost immediately. And then when I spoke to some dentists and periodontists, they said, "Oh yeah, yeah. "Hydrogen peroxide is just far too abrasive "for the mouth cavity." And the reason I raise this is because I don't think I'm alone in that if you kind of venture into some of the, let's call it, alternative recommendation space for oral health, you may hear that things like hydrogen peroxide can be useful for gargling with or swishing with if you are starting to get a little bit of a throat tickle, maybe an infection.

It turns out it's a really bad idea. Now, if there are physicians or oral health experts out there that strongly believe in the use of hydrogen peroxide rinses or gargling with it to promote oral health for any reason, let me know in the show note captions. I don't wanna go against any of those recommendations, but this now considered kind of old school recommendation of creating one's own mouthwash with a little bit of baking soda, some hydrogen peroxide and water, does not seem like a good idea, not just based on my experience, but every one of the dental professionals that I spoke to.

That said, it does seem that creating a high salt solution, so taking some salt, putting it in water, dissolving it, and then finding the point at which it won't quite dissolve because the concentration of sodium is just high enough, and using that as, of course, not something to swallow, but rather as a dental rinse, so putting your mouth and swishing it around, and then spitting it out, and it's gonna taste very salty, and then taking a swig of water, just plain water, and then swishing it around and then spitting it out, that actually provides a really nice milieu for the production of healthy mouth bacteria.

It's near zero cost. I suppose you need a little bit of salt, a little water, and a glass to put it in, but it's basically zero cost. And if you think about it, that high saline or high salinity solution is a lot like the sort of brines and the liquid that comes from these low sugar probiotic foods that earlier I was suggesting, and in other episodes I've suggested could be really healthy for swallowing for the gut microbiota.

But again, I wanna be very clear. Do not, do not swallow high salt concentration fluid. We're talking about a swish and then a spitting it out as a way to improve the overall milieu of the mouth, to get their pH right, to promote the proliferation of healthy microbiota components.

Okay, so we've talked about some commercially available gums and mints containing xylitol. We've talked about some commercially available toothpaste, indeed some toothpaste that, you know, almost fall into the very boutique category because they have all these things that are known by dentists and periodontists to be great for oral health, but those can run some cost, right?

And so I do think it's important that we also talked about the use of just baking soda with a soft toothbrush and some water and gently brushing the teeth as a great way to disrupt the biofilm and clean your teeth, and a high salt solution as a swish and spit, followed by, you know, swish and spit with clear water, clean water, no salt in it, as a essentially very low cost or zero cost mouthwash, far in a way different from the heavily scented alcohol-based antiseptic mouthwashes that are commercially available and that we know are basically not good for our oral microbiome.

In addition, I'd like to point out that those alcohol-based mouthwashes that many people in the world use are also known to reduce the amount of nitric oxide that's produced in the oral cavity, and that's very important for the production of nitric oxide elsewhere in the body. Why is that important?

Well, nitric oxide promotes vasodilation, not just within the blood vessels that line and feed the oral cavity, but also the throat, also in the nose, also in the brain, also in the heart. So what we're talking about here is a substance that is indeed increased when we, for instance, nasal breathe, we know that, dramatically increases nitric oxide.

We're talking about a substance that when the oral microbiome is preserved in its healthy state, tends to increase in production. And we're talking about a substance that's really good for small capillary, vein, and arterial health, because it allows for the passage of blood, both for the delivery of oxygen and other nutrients to tissues, but also the removal of waste products from tissues.

So we don't want to do anything that reduces nitric oxide unless there's some specific medical condition that leads us to want to do that. So for most people, increasing nitric oxide or keeping nitric oxide levels stable is the state that we want to seek. And these alcohol-based mouthwashes are known to deplete the production of nitric oxide.

So there's yet another reason to avoid the use of these alcohol-based, more typical over-the-counter mouthwashes. By the way, this is not a scare tactic against mouthwashes. I'm sure that if you use mouthwashes, you're still producing some nitric oxide. But I think nowadays, many, hopefully all of you, are interested in doing whatever you can to improve your mental health, physical health, and performance.

And if there are things that you are doing that are inhibiting those in any way, that you'd potentially want to at least think about those, maybe remove them from your protocols, especially if there's a cost to them that you can remove. In other words, you can save on costs.

So again, lots of reasons to move away from the alcohol-based standard antiseptic mouthwashes. Aside from the improvement in your breath, that by the way, can be better achieved by supporting the oral microbiome other ways that we've discussed, there's really no clear advantage as to why one would use one.

And there apparently are a number of disadvantages. (upbeat music)