Total Wellbeing

Naturopathy in Sunshine Victoria

Naturopathy

Smoothie Etiquette 101

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In my opinion there really isn't much to smoothie making, and being a somewhat lazy chef, I seldom follow recipes. There is wisdom however in occasionally trying out a smoothie recipe from another's repertoire, as I found a couple of months ago when adapting this recipe from an IsoWhey newsletter that arrived on my desk. Pure gold! Definitely a winner for the taste buds there. Check out this recipe for the Rasberry Coconut Water Smoothie.

Measurements are also a tricky thing when making a smoothie. If you are freestyling with what you've got on hand to pop into your blender, it is quite easy to overdo things and end up with novelty size glasses of delicious liquid. The answer to this problem is… smoothies are made to share! Alternately, if there are no willing participants for your smoothie experiment, they also work really well in popsicle moulds for a creamy frozen treat on a future hot day.

Rules for a successful smoothie

  1. The main ingredients for a smoothie are fruit, protein powder of your choice and milk. Easy! Start simple if you are introducing smoothies to children or those not appreciative of new tastes. Aka, fussy friends, parents, husbands etc. Banana and berry is pretty much something any palate can appreciate. Pair it with vanilla, plain or chocolate protein powders and your choice of milk, coconut water, juice or water and you're set.
  2. Freeze your bananas! This is one of the easiest ways to make a smoothie irresistibly creamy. That hand of bananas getting decidedly ripe in your fruit bowl has a fabulous destiny you never imagined when you bought too many at the fruit shop. Peel and chop before popping into a freezer proof container. I try to always chop a banana into 8 pieces. That way, 4 pieces will always be around half a banana, when estimating serves. In addition, ice is also a great addition to your smoothie's texture, especially on a hot day.
  3. The hidden depths of a smoothie can disguise many an otherwise tiresome supplement to swallow. Cracking the capsules of a probiotic, sprinkling in some calcium powder, soluble fibre like inulin or more nutty flavours like flax meal, psyllium or chia seeds can flex your smoothie muscles in terms of food as medicine. Healthy oils like flaxseed or evening primrose can also blend well, and let's not forget yoghurt! A dollop of creamy goodness with digestive assistants can easily synchronise with other smoothie ingredients.
  4. Let's talk about spices! This is especially relevant if you are attempting a smoothie in cooler months. Cinnamon and ginger are warming favourites of mine however, turmeric can work well in a mango and banana smoothie, for an extra anti-inflammatory punch.

That's pretty much it. If you're making something experimental or you're putting in greens for the first time, go slow and blend up the usual things first. Taste as you go, both before and after adding the new ingredients. That way you can pick the point of no return for next time if it tastes somewhat “healthy” but you're unsure if you're actually keen on making it again 😉 Science experiments in the kitchen? Always 🙂

Christmas Salad Pick

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I love salad, and contrary to what Homer Simpson says, an impressive salad can certainly win friends and influence people, at least in my circle 😉

This wonderful recipe from Kate Taylor is a colourful addition to any Christmas buffet with beetroot, carrot and salad greens bringing the visual drama! In fact, arranged on a white plate in a wreath, this could even serve as an edible centrepiece!

As Kate says:

This salad is as flavorful and nutritious as its bold colours would suggest. It’s a meal-in-a-bowl version of my simple beet and arugula salad that helped me find some much-needed balance during my totally ungraceful day.

And if we're happening to be talking about adding a moment of detox into a Christmas Day feast, this salad could be the lifesaver that gets you between turkey course and pavlova.

Ingredients

Salad

  • ½ cup uncooked quinoa, rinsed
  • 1 cup frozen organic edamame (find it in the frozen section – enamame are soy beans, either in a pod or shelled, mine were in a pod and I shelled them after cooking)
  • ⅓ cup slivered almonds or pepitas (green pumpkin seeds) (I used both!)
  • 1 medium raw beetroot, peeled
  • 1 medium-to-large carrot, peeled
  • 2 cups packed baby spinach or arugula roughly chopped (arugula = rocket, this is what I used, I didn’t chop it though),
  • 1 avocado, cubed

Vinaigrette

  • 3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
  • 2 tablespoons lime juice
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon chopped fresh mint or cilantro (cilantro – coriander, I opted for 1 of each)
  • 2 tablespoons honey or maple syrup or agave nectar (I used 1 tsp of coconut sugar, you could use any sweetener)
  • ½ to 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard, to taste
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Instructions

Follow the link to Kate's original post for the instructions. You'll end up with a beautiful pink salad if you toss it really well!

Enjoy!

 

 

Rasberry Coconut Water Smoothie

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Smoothies are the desert of the health queen. And this little gem is a reward to all who strive for refined-sugar free living, even though we may still remember fondly the heady joy of a wild night digging into a party bag 😉

I do find it hard to make smoothies in quantities which are reasonable for only 1 person, but the measurements in this recipe are perfect for a generous glass for one 🙂 This recipe is adapted from the genius of the Isowhey kitchen. They have loads of great ideas, and you can find more of their recipes here.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon vanilla protein powder (I'm using Bare Blends Organic Vanilla Bean WPI at the moment, but do let me know if you have a favourite yourself – especially if it come in sustainable packaging!)

1 banana, frozen

1 handful of raspberries, frozen or fresh

1 large dollop of yoghurt (I used Jalna BioDynamic Organic Yoghurt for this one)

1/2 cup coconut water

Method

Put everything in your blender, liquids first, then everything else. Blend until smooth.

Pour into a glass, garnish as desired and enjoy!

To Sardine or Not to Sardine

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It did take some time to work up to eating sardines, these healthy little fish, with fabulous health benefits were not immediately appealing. I can understand your hesitation if you have not yet cultivated a taste for them. On my path to eating more of my Omega 3's in food, rather than swallowing them in capsules, I found this particular recipe to be very helpful. Try it out and let me know what you think – for me, this was certainly a gateway recipe.

Recipe for Parsley, Lemon and Garlic Sardine Pasta

I found this recipe here by Melissa Joulwan and added extra parsley and lemon (as below). Thanks, Melissa this recipe has become something of a favourite!

INGREDIENTS:

  • a pile of raw zucchini noodles or cooked pasta of your choice (I like making long strips of zucchini in place of pasta from time to time)
  • 1 large clove garlic, crushed
  • 1 generous bunch of fresh parsley, chopped
  • 1 can sardines packed in olive oil (the King Oscar brand is accessible in Australian supermarkets are preferred ) — Melissa suggests you do not drain the oil!
  • lemon juice and zest of 1 lemon
  • salt, pepper, crushed red pepper flakes, to taste

DIRECTIONS:

  1. Heat a large sauté pan over medium-high heat until it’s hot. Add the vegie pasta and toss with two wooden spoons until the pasta is hot, but not mushy. You want them al dente. This takes, maybe, 2-3 minutes.
  2. When the pasta is hot, turn the heat to medium-low, push the noodles to the side, and pour about 1 tablespoon of the oil from the sardines into the pan. Drop the crushed garlic right into the oil, and when it’s fragrant, toss the noodles with the wooden spoons again to coat them with the oil. Throw in the parsley, salt, pepper, and the sardines, breaking them up into chunks with the wooden spoon. Toss, toss, toss.
  3. Pour onto a plate and sprinkle with crushed red pepper flakes. Twirl on a fork and shove into your well-deserving mouth.

Extra health benefits are found in raw garlic so, for bonus points, if you can manage it, omit the garlic from the cooking and add in just before serving. This is amazing for your circulation, and ticks another box in the Microcirculation Diet I have been loving, since seeing Kerry Bone present his research on the results at a Naturopathic seminar series recently. I'll write more about this next time! PS Kerry's diet presentation also included a prescribed 20g of dark chocolate (85% cacao) every day. Things are definitely looking up!

Is Kale easy to eat?

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Fresh, organic greens are a real delight, so when I was recently gifted with a bouquet of freshly picked, garden grown kale and chard varieties, I was understandably impressed. I love the deep earthy flavour of these greens and will often eat them with a simple dressing of lemon juice and a little Himalayan salt over finely chopped leaves, or add them to a scramble of eggs with some chilli flakes for a delicious omelette. This time, my generous friend also arrived with a new take on a classic vinaigrette dressing to tantalise my taste buds. Try this one out for yourself!

Full of vitamin C to enhance the absorption of iron from the greens, a sprinkling of anti-inflammatory spices, omega 3 oils from flaxseeds and some apple cider vinegar to spark digestion and lower the glycaemic load of my meal, topping kale with this dressing is certainly adhering to food as medicine standards!

Kale itself is part of the broccoli family, which has a fabulous reputation in terms of health benefits. With relatives including arugula (known more commonly in Australia as roquette), bok choy, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, collard greens, horseradish, radishes, rutabaga, turnips, watercress and wasabi, kale is basically dark green vegetable royalty.

Brassica vegetables possess high levels of antioxidant metabolites associated with beneficial health effects.

Read more here: Identification of Antioxidant Capacity in Brassica oleracea

kaleThe superfood mantle seems to be well deserved, although standard farming practices contribute to high pesticide residues, meaning that kale is one of those vegetables that you really can insist on buying organically grown.

Ingredients:

  • Juice of 1 orange
  • 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
  • 1/4 tsp of ground ginger
  • 1/4 tsp of turmeric or paprika
  • 2 tablespoons flaxseed oil
  • Himalayan salt to taste
  • Black pepper to taste

Method:

Combine all ingredients in a glass jar and shake to combine. Pour over your finely sliced fresh kale leaves, and throw in a handful of chopped walnuts and a sprinkling pepitas for a satisfying crunch.

Serve as a side dish or an appetiser and your dinner guests will be sparkling with health and tapping you on the shoulder for another serve.

Is kale easy to eat? Most definitely!

Does dieting make you gain weight?

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Being at a healthy weight helps reduce your risk of chronic illness, helps you maintain an active lifestyle and seems to be recommended by all health experts. Right? So, why is it that dieting is so often linked to yo-yo successes? Sometimes quickly gaining weight and then gaining some more? Research is coming out now saying that the standard recommendation to lose weight by eating less and exercising more, could actually be damaging to our ability to maintain a healthy weight long term.

Starving Yourself is Not the Answer

It sounds great to quickly achieve the healthy weight you dreamed of, and the drastic weight loss attained by the contestants on controversial reality tv show, The Biggest Loser, is an example of the results that can be achieved through this type of eat less, exercise more diet and exercise regime. However, research published in The New York Times, suggests that the US contestants who lose weight in this way are up against some major metabolic hurdles to maintain their ideal weight. In fact, the question could be posed, does this type of weight loss regime result in permanent injury to your ability to maintain weight?

It has to do with resting metabolism, which determines how many calories a person burns when at rest. When the show began, the contestants, though hugely overweight, had normal metabolisms for their size, meaning they were burning a normal number of calories for people of their weight. When it ended, their metabolisms had slowed radically and their bodies were not burning enough calories to maintain their thinner sizes.

Read more about the experience of The Biggest Loser contestants here: After ‘The Biggest Loser’, Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight – The New York Times

Healing the Metabolic Thermostat for Weight Loss

No doubt you've heard experts talk about the metabolism as being like a thermostat? It strives to become more efficient in the face of scarcity, which in an eat less, exercise more environment, is exactly what your thermostat is sensing. The trouble seems to be that your thermostat resets to maintain your body functions on less food. Approaching weight loss with an eat less, exercise more approach, which is the most common regime followed, resulted in their contestants finishing The Biggest Loser program with a resting metabolism of between 250-800 calories (1,050-3,350 kilojoules) less, than a person of the same size who has not dieted in this way. It's not all about willpower keeping weight off, there are powerful metabolic compensations making regaining weight almost certain to occur.

The answer? The old approach isn't working, let's try something new.

Health at Every Size

Adopting behaviours that support health, regardless of size is in the best interests of everyone. The truth is, people of size are stigmatised for being ‘unhealthy', when weight alone has little to do with health. Health has more to do with:

  1. Regular movement and exercise.
  2. Getting 5 serves of vegies and 2 serves of fruit each day.
  3. Quitting smoking if you smoke.
  4. Drinking alcohol in moderation.

Science doesn't support the commonly held idea that normal weight is the only healthy size to be either. A 2013 Systematic Review and Meta-analysis found

Relative to normal weight [BMI of >18.5-25]… Grade 1 obesity [BMI of >30-35] overall was not associated with higher mortality, and overweight [BMI of >25-30] was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality.

Curated from Association of All-Cause Mortality With Overweight and Obesity Using Standard Body Mass Index Categories

So let's shake the status quo. Stigma about weight harms everyone. People in larger bodies experience discrimination and shame, while people of normal and underweight are afraid of gaining weight, which contributes to the prevalence and harm of eating disorders in people of all sizes. Being comfortable with your weight, regardless of size is important for our overall health.

Greater satisfaction with one’s weight was associated with positive health behaviors and health outcomes in both men and women and across weight status groups.

Curated from Adults with Greater Weight Satisfaction Report More Positive Health Behaviors and Have Better Health Status Regardless of BMI

Seeking good medical care, being active, eating nutritious food, avoiding weight cycling and shielding yourself from weight stigma we now know is what contributes to ideal health. Much more than size.

Why Probiotics Alone Aren’t Enough

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You might have noticed the lovely article I recently shared on my Facebook page highlighting the benefits of probiotics. Probiotics are a tool that are hugely helpful in the world of natural medicine for a multitude of ailments, and the emerging list of benefits of probiotics is in no way limited to the important benefits listed in the article:

  1. Healing your gut
  2. A healthy metabolism
  3. Being able to absorb nutrients from your diet
  4. Brain and mood function
  5. Convenient topping up of good bacteria in therapeutic doses
  6. Reducing the risk of sinus inflammation
  7. Protecting your gums and teeth from disease. Read more about that in my article on Keeping Your Mouth Healthy.
  8. Clearer skin
  9. Fewer sick days
  10. Probiotics are proven to provide these benefits

The gut is lined with hundreds of trillions of microorganisms that make up your intestinal flora. Throughout the course of a day (and certainly a lifetime) those bacteria change, grow, and deplete based on a host of outside factors like diet, lifestyle and environment. The one constant you can provide for your gut? Taking a probiotic.

Read more about the benefits of probiotics in the full article here: 10 Reasons You Need a Probiotic in Your Life

While I do take a probiotic on most days, and in certain cases would take more than one a day, as required, there is an honest imperative to look after this investment. If you planted a seed and didn't water it, give it some plant food and avoid putting poisons on it, would you expect it to grow? Well, the same can be said for probiotics. These little bacteria will do all the wonderful things described above if they are nurtured and encouraged to thrive in our digestive system.

How do you make sure your probiotics thrive?

I don't know about you, but leaving your healthy earth worm farm with a person who lives on chips and maccas, is a sure fire way to return to find all your worms starving to death! No, vegie scraps in that household! Well, in this scenario, your gut is the healthy earth worm farm, you just have to decide what sort of caretaker you are. The best, most caring thing you can do for your probiotics once you have taken them is to:

Get to know your prebiotic and colonic foods

These feed your good bacteria and ensure they multiply and live a good life. Your probiotics like variety, so feel free to eat your way through the list! Some to get to know include:

  1. Garlic, onions, Jerusalem artichokes and chicory root. Care should be taken here if you are fructose intolerant, as these are also high in fructose.
  2. Oats
  3. Legumes
  4. Beetroot
  5. Slippery elm
  6. Guar gum
  7. Pectin
  8. Psyllium husk

Protect your investment, eat your vegies and feed them well and you are one step closer to all the benefits above, and more bestowed by a healthy digestive ecology.

Sweet beetroot, pumpkin and red lentil soup

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Pumpkin and Beetroot SoupThis soup is so tasty it doesn't need much extra seasoning. Ever tried cooing with beetroot? Try spicing it up! This soup is beautifully flavoured with ginger, cumin, coriander, cinnamon & paprika. Sweet beetroot, pumpkin, and red lentil soup – inspired by the culinary talents of my friend, yoga teacher, Madeline Ford!

Immune boosting with food!

Getting through the winter months, with a little extra care to including immune-boosting foods in your meals, can make all the difference to your health and happiness this time of year. Red and orange vegetables are particularly high in vitamin A, so look for new ways to include them in your recipes over winter.

Beetroot

Beetroot is a great source of vitamins A and C, and these brightly coloured vegetables are also full of antioxidants and are a source of iron. Iron stores are another factor that can affect the functioning of our immune system. Not getting enough iron in our diet can reduce our energy, stamina and general health and wellbeing.

Pumpkin

Pumpkin is another brightly coloured vegetable that is a great source of vitamin A and beta-carotene, those handy immune-boosting nutrients. Did you know, dried pumpkin seeds (also known as pepitas) are a very rich source of zinc? Immune function and healing, not to mention almost every function in our body require zinc as a co-factor to get the job done.

Another batch of this wonderful soup is perfuming my kitchen today 🙂 If you have a few spare beetroot give it a go! Perhaps you could top it off with a few toasted pumpkin seeds to serve? For an extra crunch and a little boost of zinc.

Recipe and instructions

Take, 1 brown onion, finely diced, saute, add 2 teaspoons each of ground cumin, coriander, cinnamon, paprika and 4 tsp freshly grated ginger. Heat until you smell the aroma of the spices (the best part!). You might like more or fewer spices, so don't be afraid to experiment for yourself. Add about 1kg of diced pumpkin and 2 large beetroots, also diced. Coat vegetables in the spices. Add 1L vegetable stock & simmer 10 minutes. Add 1 cup of red lentils and 1 cup of your choice of quinoa (rinsed).  Top up with another 1L of water. Simmer until lentils are cooked. Season as desired. Enjoy!

Can you change a bad habit?

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Can People Really Change?

All of us come into contact with people whose lives and families have been torn apart by bad habits: people addicted to cigarettes, alcohol, and illegal drugs; over-spenders, overeaters, and chronic worriers; negative thinkers, procrastinators, and people who won’t forgive themselves for something that happened long ago.

Bad habits can keep ordinary people from living happier and healthier lives. Everywhere you look, people want to know why they are unhappy. And they want to know what they can do about it. My personal addiction is sugar. I consider myself a recovering sugar junkie.

The talk shows offer a constant menu of miracle cures for every type of bad habit imaginable—everything from quick weight-loss programs to 20-minute lessons in positive thinking that promise to cure depression. We are constantly bombarded by programs that promise effortless and immediate results: Lose weight fast, while eating as much as you want! Guaranteed to work! Sure.

We are overwhelmed with solutions today. And the more solutions there are, the harder it is to find one that works. Many people have failed so many times that they’ve almost given up the battle. Others gave up a long time ago.

Establishing new priorities

Is it possible to free yourself from bad habits? Can people really change in any meaningful and lost-lasting way? Can I change myself? The answer to each of these questions is “yes.” But you can’t change in 24 hours, as some programs and self-help books promise. My own experience and common sense, tell me that anyone can change, but you need a compelling reason to change.

Alice:                             Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cheshire Cat:       That depends a good deal on where you want to go.

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Learning how to free yourself from bad habits starts with the realization that the situation can't stay the same and that you have the power to make a major difference in your life. The moment I grasp that simple fact, I’m ready to step into the process of self-change that will lead to freedom from the habits that keep me from living a more satisfying life. And when I’m free from my bad habits, the people around me will be free from the person I used to be.

All people can bring about superficial changes in themselves. But freeing yourself from a self-destructive habit like smoking or overeating requires a deep, long-lasting change. A bad habit is like an iceberg. You can’t beat the habit if you approach it as if it were only as large as what you can see on the surface.

Franz Kafka said, “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Any book or program that aims to help people break bad habits must reveal the whole iceberg that lies below the surface. Realising the effect sugar had on my anxiety levels, my energy and my ability to eat a balanced healthy diet, to keep myself well, revealed the iceberg of denial I had been living with.

You can’t eliminate the whole thing in one day, but if you take a step-by-step approach, you can eliminate the bad habit sooner than you thought possible. It is going to take effort on your part. You can’t eat whatever you want and lose weight, no matter how many times you hear it on the talk shows. But you can lose weight, and you can learn to enjoy healthy foods more than the unhealthy foods you’re eating now. Whatever your addiction, finding something worthwhile to replace it with, is a good first step to crowd your habit out of your life. In the case of sugar addiction, I found new, healthier treats to enjoy before refined sugar was banished from my taste buds.

Overeaters, smokers, and chronic procrastinators have a lot in common. We all go to great lengths to hide the truth from ourselves about the destructive nature of our bad habits; too often, lives and families are destroyed before we become aware of the verbal cages that keep us trapped in self-destructive behavior.

Does professional therapy work? Can it help people break bad habits before the habit destroys their lives? The dropout rate is astonishing: 45% of clients who seek a professional therapist drop out of therapy after two or three sessions. Committing to the process is essential to success.

Do programs help? Millions of smokers have quit forever without following a treatment program. On the other hand, many people who try a smoking-cessation program are not able to quit, no matter how many different programs they try.

Some research suggests that for every person who quits smoking by following a treatment program, there are almost twenty people who quit on their own.

What conclusion should we draw from all of this? It’s pretty clear, I think. You have a better chance of freeing yourself from a bad habit by becoming your own coach, by taking responsibility for your own program. Millions of people have succeeded in breaking a bad habit, and so can you.

Keeping Your Mouth Healthy

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Smiling is definitely one of the best beauty remedies. If you have a good sense of humor and a good approach to life, that's beautiful.
Rashida Jones

A healthy smile is an instant makeover and in good health, your mouth has a positive effect on your overall wellness. The mouth is the beginning of the gastrointestinal tract and anything that happens here is going to affect everything downstream – both good and bad.

Like the rest of your digestive tract, it is home to a wide variety of microbes, in fact, some 700 species of microbes inhabit your mouth including bacteria, fungi and viruses. The health of the bacteria in the mouth and the rest of the body begins at birth with the most diverse ecosystem being associated with the greatest health. Interestingly, the diversity of bacteria existing in babies that are born via cesarian is reduced and this can mean the good bacteria of non-vaginally birthed babies can need a little health. Oral bacteria have a big influence on the gut bacteria and there is a 45% overlap of bacteria in the mouth and the colon.

Saliva delivers nutrients to the mouth, immune protecting immunoglobulins like secretory IgA, is integral in determining the pH in your mouth and it also washes bacteria out of the mouth and into the high acid environment of the stomach. So having a dry mouth can cause problems for your oral cavity and further downstream in your digestive tract. Certain medications, autoimmune conditions and stress can all be sources of problems with saliva.

When you think about it, you are swallowing one trillion bacteria each day, seeding your gastrointestinal tract with the microbes from your mouth. So why wouldn't the health of your oral bacteria also affect the health of your gut?

What happens when the bacteria in your mouth are out of whack?

Dysbiosis is the word we use to describe an imbalance of positive and harmful bacteria in the body. When this occurs in the mouth this results in:

  • Cavities – high sugar diets select for bacteria that like acidity which sets up for a perfect storm of dysbiosis leading to cavities as the acid-producing bacteria traps acid and demineralises the tooth enamel.
  • Gingivitis – gum disease
  • Periodontal disease – destruction of gum tissue, bone

At the intersection of your teeth and your gums, there is essentially a weak point in the barrier protecting the blood stream from the bacteria in the mouth, so the immune system must be strong to protect your periodontal tissues and prevent infiltration into the bloodstream. Bacteria cover every aspect of your oral cavities, from the mucosal surfaces of your gums, inside of your cheek and your tongue to the hard surfaces of your teeth. Plaque is a type of biofilm. Directly after a clean, certain bugs start to attach to your teeth, creating a film that can be harmful if good oral hygiene is not practiced.

Are there good biofilms as well as bad biofilms?

Yes, biofilms can also protect the good bacteria in the mouth. When dealing with really chronic and stubborn infections it may be necessary to remove or treat the biofilm. But we do want good bacteria in the mouth, so things like antibacterial mouthwash are possibly an example of too much dental hygiene.

The link between dysbiosis and periodontal disease

Your gums are particularly porous – even more so than the gut, so absorption of substances is very high through the gums into the blood. This can be an issue if there are high levels of problematic bacteria causing harmful by-products, which are then constantly being released into the system. Bacteria in the gums trigger the immune response to defend against this bacterial overgrowth but when the immune system is overwhelmed, you get an invasion of the tissues, inflammation of gums, bone and bloodstream and periodontal disease occurs. This is when teeth become loose and you are at risk of losing teeth due to damage to the gums and bone.

Oral inflammation and the link to other inflammatory diseases

The lymphoid tissue in the tonsils analyse the content of the mouth and is the first line of defence for our bodies. A constant flow of inflammatory bacteria can cause the immune system to be consistently on alert. In fact, this causes inflammatory defences to be mobilised in the body and there seems to be a relationship between inflammatory diseases of the bowel and periodontal disease in the oral cavity. Both have inflammatory origins and need treatment that is both local in the mouth and bowel and systemically to support the immune system.

H pylori infection

Interestingly, people who have a history of H pylori infection causing ulceration and pain in the stomach were less likely to be reinfected if they had regular dental cleans. This is thought to be because the H pylori bacteria can hide in the biofilm on tooth enamel. Conversely, people with chronic gastrointestinal dysbiosis and infections have had limited success in treatment without also making sure the mouth is healthy. This makes sense as how can you combat inflammation in the gut when the mouth has bacterial overload causing raging inflammatory by-products to enter the blood stream? Anything that happens in the mouth, due to the permeability of the mucosa, gets into the bloodstream.

Cardiovascular disease

People who have a history of cardiovascular disease have been found to have a reduced risk of future cardiovascular events if they consistently practice simple dental hygiene. Why this happens is still unknown but it is a really simple thing that people with heart disease can do to help prevent further complications. Conversely, using mouthwash to kill the bacteria in your mouth has been suggested in studies to increase blood pressure. This is due to the relationship between nitric oxide and the good bacteria in the mouth. Nitric oxide helps expand blood vessels and reduce blood pressure. Wiping out the good bacteria in your mouth, reduces the production of nitric oxide. In a way this is like using antibiotics and wiping out all the bacteria in your gut – it's not the healthiest environment for your oral cavity or your heart it seems.

Rheumatoid arthritis and other immune diseases

Similarly, systemic diseases like rheumatoid arthritis are more severe when patients also have periodontal disease. There is also a greater risk of cancers and autoimmune diseases in people who have poor dental hygiene or periodontal disease.

How can we reduce the risks of oral dysbiosis?

Some of these things are not going to be new to you, but hopefully, with the understanding of how important good oral hygiene is, you won't feel as inclined to miss your daily floss!

  • Oral hygiene practices: brush, floss, regular dental cleanings
  • Plant-based diet
  • Low sugar
  • Healthy salivary flow
  • If you have chronic, recurrent gastrointestinal dysbiosis, make sure your dental check ups are up to date and pay your dentist a visit to make sure.

What about supplements?

  • Chewable probiotics – the most common chewable ones in Australia are aimed at the children's market
  • Probiotic toothpaste – Designs for Health has one on the market in Fennel and Spearmint flavours
  • Chewable coenzyme Q10 – this is very nourishing to gums and oral mucosa
  • Bacteria eat polyphenols: consider swishing with green drinks to nourish the good bacteria
  • Green tea is also naturally high in polyphenols

Healing the environment of the oral cavity

If there are symptoms of inflammation, gum disease or cavities in your mouth, healing the oral mucosa can be helped through adopting some of these strategies:

  • Deglycrryhized licorice is anti-inflammatory and nourishing to the mucosa.
  • Make sure you have enough zinc in your diet and consider a zinc supplement, like zinc carnosine.
  • Soothing, slippery foods like aloe and okra are great for soothing inflamed gums.
  • Glutamine is the preferred fuel of the cells of the mouth and digestive system. Try swishing a diluted solution around your mouth for topical application to your gums. You could also consider adding the solution to a tooth bleaching tray or a mouth guard overnight.
  • Systemic natural anti-inflammatories include aloe and turmeric, which can be added to foods or taken as supplements.
  • Remove gluten – this is being found to increase the epithelial cell permeability of all people, not only in the cells of people who have Coeliac Disease.
  • Treat chronic stress. High-stress levels can cause dry mouth and reduce the healthy cleansing effects of saliva, as also happens with some medications and in some autoimmune conditions, so might be worth checking out if it is a new symptom for you.

Oil pulling

While there is not much research supporting the practice of oil pulling, it is likely to cause changes the microbiome in the mouth and has been part of the Ayurvedic medicine for many years. In fact, Coconut oil has antimicrobial properties, while Sesame oil was the preferred oil used in Ayurveda.

Brushing and flossing

Flossing lowers the incidence of other diseases. All floss contains plastics but brushing after flossing and rinsing will help dissolve and expel the plastic residue and the benefits are considerable.