Snoring Is a Major Red Flag: A Dentist’s Dire Warning About the Signs Women Should Never Ignore for Better Sleep & Longevity with Dr. Leedia Riman

Dhru Purohit (0:00)

Dr. Lydia, welcome to the podcast. So you have a crazy story. All right, so these are important facts that are there. Follow along, everybody. So genetically, you're missing a tooth. We'll get to why that's important in a second. And then you have three kids. After your third pregnancy, you noticed something a little bit weird start to happen, and you're a dentist, a functional and biological dentist. You noticed that you started snoring. And anytime you see a patient, especially a female, that starts snoring all of a sudden, that's kind of like a canary in the coal mine for you. That's a sign. That's a smoke alarm going off that, hey, I don't know where there's fire, but there's definitely something burning.

Take it from there. Like, what the heck happened, and why is this important for the audience that's listening?

Leedia Riman (0:46)

Snoring is a huge red flag anytime you see it. And there's a statistics that over 35% of pregnant women start snoring after pregnancy.

Dhru Purohit (0:57)

After, not just during.

Leedia Riman (0:58)

After, mostly after, because that's when the progesterone drops. Okay? So it was my third pregnancy.

It was actually a twin pregnancy and I lost one of the babies.

Dhru Purohit (1:08)

I'm so sorry, I didn't know that.

Leedia Riman (1:09)

Thank you. It was, God has, God works in mysterious ways, but I had to be on bed rest because my nausea was so severe, I couldn't leave the house. It was a very tough pregnancy. So towards the end of my pregnancy, something happens called Pregnancy Rhinitis as the progesterone rises and women get really congested. It's like very typical Pregnancy Rhinitis. So that's why I tell my woman to always clear their mouth, clear their nose, and just practice as much nasal breathing as possible. Then I started snoring significantly, my husband would tell me and it really bothered me when he told me that. But after I had the baby, my snoring did not go away. It stayed and it actually got worse.

Other than him telling me that, I was waking up feeling like a bus hit me. I was so fatigued and almost debilitating fatigue. It wasn't, and I have a newborn, I have two other kids, I'm nursing on demand, so night and day. So that's why I was tired, but this was a different level of fatigue.

Dhru Purohit (2:10)

You're like, something else is going on. Were you asking people, were they like, hey, it's normal, this is like your third kid?

Leedia Riman (2:15)

Yeah, everybody, it's like, oh, it's normal, you're a mom of three, you're going to be tired. But just because it's common, doesn't mean we should accept. So important. And I am an integrative dentist, and I work with women. I've been working for women for so many years, but it really hit me, this pregnancy. So I was like, I need to dig in. And my thing is, I want to get to the root cause. I don't want like quick fixes. Like, I love mouth tape, I love nasal clearing. I do it, I do all of that. There was one afternoon I was sitting with my husband in our living room, and I was seeing my kids, and I just felt so tired, I couldn't enjoy them. And I was like, if I'm like this, I'm 41 years old, imagine when I'm like 80

Like, I'm seeing the menopausal woman in my office. I'm seeing the perimenopausal. Like, I am seeing the future. It was like kind of like an out-of-body experience. I saw my three little kids as adults with their own children. How do I want to interact with their children? So I needed to make a shift for my health. So right away, I made the decision, I need to look further. And I knew I needed to expand because I was born narrow.

Dhru Purohit (3:20)

You knew that you needed to expand. Let's start there. And then you said that your jaw and your bite is narrow. So break those two things down. What are you talking about?

Leedia Riman (3:30)

I was born congenitally missing an upper anterior tooth. So one of my front teeth is missing. I'm very open about it. Like, I was born that way.

Dhru Purohit (3:37)

Sure.

Leedia Riman (3:38)

And it never really impacted me until I got pregnant. I noticed a change in my airway in my first pregnancy, but I was younger, and I was able to compensate better, and I bounced back a little better. So when you're missing an upper front tooth, a lot of times what doctors want to do when they put braces on or Invisalign, they want to close the space naturally, because it's the quickest fix.