Your Mouth Could Be Aging You Faster: Linked to Dementia, Heart Disease & Tooth Loss | Brynn Maclennan | EP#174

**Brynn Maclennan** (0:00)
Your toothbrush only cleans 60% of your mouth. Would you ever shower and not clean your armpits or other cracks and crevices? Of course not.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:07)
I am joined today by Brynn Maclennan, who is gonna teach us a different way. I was at a conference where I learned so many things, and I learned all about a new way to care for our oral health.

**Brynn Maclennan** (0:18)
Two reasons you get bad breath is either from the tongue or from the gums. If it's not from your tongue, it's because you have bacteria in the pockets of your gums. That's what we're trying to do, is disrupt all that bacteria that's been sitting in your gums. Black turns into tartar in less than 48 hours. If you don't floss every day or every other day, it becomes hard on your tooth.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:38)
If you're not motivated by biofilm, or you're not motivated by black, or the deadly diseases that come when we ignore our dental health, maybe you're motivated by halitosis, which literally translates as like foot mouth or toe mouth.

**Brynn Maclennan** (0:54)
People are caring about eating right, and exercising, and weight lifting, and they've completely forgotten about their mouth. That mouth is part of the whole system.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:03)
It's the entryway to the whole system. If we get to choose, we floss, brush, and tongue.

**Brynn Maclennan** (1:09)
Most dentists would say.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:13)
I am so thrilled that you're here, and I want to thank you as my audience for being smart, and curious, and generous, and sharing The Dr Vonda Podcast with all your friends. You know, this podcast has been around for a long time, but you have pushed it into consistently being in the top five, six, seven, in all medicine podcasts across the world, and in the top 100 of all health and wellness podcasts. That is a huge deal because you are helping not only yourself, but other men and women around the globe understand their health. So I'm thankful. I want you to keep sharing. I want you to subscribe. The more you subscribe and support this podcast, the better we will be able to bring you the information that's transforming your lives. So I just want to thank you. Hey, everybody. You know, a month or so ago, I had my own dentist on The Dr Vonda Show, and we talked all about the relationship between our teeth and our perimenopause and our sleeping, but that is not the end of the story.
It's more than just our teeth and perimenopause. It's how we care for them. And I think that we haven't spent enough time connecting our oral health to our whole health. And so I had the privilege of learning more about this and finding out that there was a better way to floss our gums than these really... These are like instruments of destruction looking things. Like they're not even attractive. But, and yet whether it's just string or whether it's this kind of hooky thing, this is what we have until now.
And I am joined today by Brynn Maclennan, who is gonna teach us a different way. You know, I was at a conference and where I learned so many things, not only when I speak, but when I meet the other presenters.
And I learned all about a new way to care for our oral health. Can you hear this device, Brynn? Isn't that funny?

**Brynn Maclennan** (3:25)
Unfortunately, it's not that loud, so...

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (3:27)
It is, you can't hear it, but it's just this little buzzy funness. So we are here to talk about the continuation of how mouth health affects whole health and how we don't have to be subject to technology, a string that's been around for probably hundreds of years. I'm sure you're going to tell us. So you are the co-founder and CEO of Slate. It's a new solution for dental health. You know, it's an innovation that, I don't know why we didn't think of it earlier, but thank God you thought of it. And it brought it out here because it changes, frankly, the relationship between how we take care of our gums, the interdental enamel, which we don't get with brushing.
But before we start, I want you to take us down the road of why this is so important.

**Brynn Maclennan** (4:23)
I am so passionate about this.
I worked at the dental office, and I was at a continuing education course, and I heard all about how it affects our body. And I left that course thinking about pH. I was thinking about the bacteria that goes from your gums to your brain and to your heart and to your gut. And I was like, whoa, as a normal patient at a dental office, I didn't understand the connection to flossing and whole body health. I love to exercise. I love to take care of myself. But I had never put flossing as a huge priority until I've learned these things and I was like, we have to tell everyone and the hygienists are like, oh, we kind of tell our patients. We do, we try to tell them, but they're not connecting the dots. And I was like, if people knew that, like so 50 percent of Americans have gum disease, like you don't, and then when you're 60, it's 70 percent. And so people who are active and healthy and smart and educated, those were our patient base and they still had gum disease.