To have a healthy mouth for your whole life, you need to understand two things: what makes a mouth healthy, and what makes it unhealthy. We’ll briefly cover that, then give you 5 simple things you can do to keep your mouth healthy and avoid disease.
Traditional advice focuses heavily on mechanical cleaning of your mouth: brushing and flossing. But many people brush and floss religiously and still have uncontrolled dental disease. That’s simply because the issues aren’t mechanical, they are biological.
So our approach comes from a completely different place. We focus on the biology of the mouth – if you get that right, you’ll have a healthy mouth.
A healthy mouth
Saliva is key to a healthy mouth. It is full of minerals to keep teeth strong, and helps cleanse food and debris, and helps prevent bacterial overgrowth. Another important fact is that a healthy mouth has a healthy biofilm, which is a thin layer of micro-organisms. Every mouth has a biofilm on every surface – if you have the right balance of microbes they boost your health, but imbalance or infection will ruin the health of your mouth.
So to keep your mouth healthy, you need to let saliva do its job, and you need to make sure the microbes are in line. Fortunately there are simple, easy ways to do this!
A sick mouth
There are many kinds of dental disease, but they almost always come from the same basic causes. Either the saliva cannot do its job, or the microbial balance has gone wrong, or both. Sometimes, an actual infection has developed in the gums or in a tooth, leading to damage like gum recession, loose teeth, cavities, and toothaches.
The devil is in the details, but the big picture is simple: use medicine to heal infections, use lifestyle and correct oral hygiene to restore a healthy biofilm, and allow the saliva to do it’s natural job.
If you want to dive deeper, we recommend Dr. Ellie Phillips’ Complete Mouthcare System. You can learn the whole system for free on YouTube, and the all the supplies you need are affordable and available over the counter.
5 Ways to Take Care Of Your Mouth
1. Cleaning After Eating
Let your saliva do its job! After eating or drinking, always clean out any food or drink lingering in your mouth. This can be as simple as swishing with some water. If necessary, use a toothpick, floss, or toothbrush to clear away food debris. Food debris or sugary drinks left in you mouth can cause an imbalanced biofilm and lead to infections of the teeth or gums. This will cause gum disease or cavities. Eat and drink, then get the food and water out of your mouth!
Getting debris out of your mouth also allows your saliva access to everywhere in your mouth, so it can keep your teeth strong and prevent an unbalanced biofilm.
2. Rest Your Mouth
Now that saliva has access to your whole mouth… let your mouth rest! Ideally give yourself a break of at least 90 minutes after eating or drinking anything so that your saliva can cleanse and fortify your mouth. All you have to do is nothing: don’t eat, and don’t sip, only for 90 minutes. Our focus right now is the impacts on the mouth, but you should know that mouth resting can positively impact the health of your entire body.
3. Enjoy Xylitol
Xylitol is naturally produced in small quantities by the human body, and by many species of plants. It is used as a low-calorie sweetener, and in small doses it can have various beneficial impacts as a pre-biotic. But for our purposes, it does two main things: reduces the growth of microbes that can cause dental disease, and promotes saliva production. This is almost perfect, because the two key things we are focused on is keeping the biofilm balanced and keeping saliva flowing.
5-10 grams of xylitol a day has been shown to be very effective at reducing dental disease. The easiest way to incorporate this into your lifestyle is to have some mints or gum after eating, and before bed.
4. Daily Mouth Care Routine
Dr. Ellie Phillips has the best daily mouth care routine we are aware of. Her system makes use of a few over the counter mouthwashes, good toothpaste, and some basic techniques for using them correctly. This system helps keep the biofilm balanced, reduces inflammation in the gums, and eliminates the need for most flossing. We really recommend watching her full video lesson here.
Here’s a brief, simplified overview of the routine. Twice a day you should:
- Rinse with Closys mouthwash for one minute. This helps reduce the growth of harmful bacteria in deep pockets or cavities.
- Use Crest Cavity Prevention toothpaste to brush teeth… and brush gums vigorously. This is possibly the most scientifically validated toothpaste as far as preventing cavities. Vigorously brushing the gums helps activate stem cells and promote circulation.
- Rinse briefly with Listerine Original, Listerine Cool Mint, or a mouthwash with the same formulation. The essential oils in Listerine reduce gum inflammation, and attack fresh overgrowth of bacteria.
- Rinse thoroughly with the original ACT Anticavity Fluoride rinse. This buffers the mouth pH, and the fluoride helps strengthen your teeth. After rinsing with ACT, don’t rinse with water, or drink anything for 30 minutes so the fluoride has the best chance to strengthen your teeth.
This system effectively cleanses the space between your teeth – as long as you are doing this twice a day, you do not need to floss except when necessary to remove food debris.
5. Povidone Iodine + Dental Care for problems
If you follow techniques 1 – 4, you should have little or no tooth decay. But if you are experiencing a problem with sensitivity or a cavity, you can self-treat at home to keep the infection in check until you can get solid professional care. For that, you’ll want to send your dentist to our Provider Resources page which has everything they need.
There are a few crucial points here before we explain the treatment. If you are not willing to pay attention to detail you should not do this yourself.
- YOU MUST USE 10% POVIDONE IODONE, not any other form. Other forms of iodine can be dangerous or ineffective. This can be purchased at almost any grocery store or drug store.
- DO NOT OVERDO IT. You only need a few drops of iodine to treat an issue, and you only need to do it once a week or once a month.
- APPLY IODINE TO TEETH. Do not use it as a mouthwash or spread it around your entire mouth.
- THIS IS NOT FOR TOOTHACE. Sensitivity is one thing, but a serious toothache is a much more critical situation and you should seek professional care immediately.
To treat a suspected tooth problem at home (to hold you over until professional care is available):
- Open the mouth. Use paper towel or q-tips to dry the tooth to the degree that you can.
- Use a microbrush or a q-tip to place a drop of iodine on the effected tooth. Make sure you see get it to wick into the space between the teeth, between the tooth and the gum, and into any cavity in the tooth.
- Wait for 1 minute.
- Spit, but do not rinse with water or anything else.