Your Mouthwash Is Hurting Your Heart (Here’s the Fix) | EP 424.A

Marcy (0:04)

Hello, my name is Marcy, and I am from Middleburg, Florida. I am 54 years old, and I have been blind for the last 15 years of my life. Most of my adult life, I have struggled with being overweight and having various health issues. Dr. Gundry's program has helped me to lose 93 pounds, and I feel the best that I have ever felt in my life. Thank you, Dr. Gundry. God bless you.

Steven Gundry (0:37)

Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. Let's talk about the ancient tongue trick that lowers blood pressure.

Now, here it comes. There is a one-minute habit you could do every single morning that might actually lower your blood pressure. No new pill, no diet overall. So stick around, because before this is over, I'm going to show you exactly what it is.

SPEAKER_3 (1:07)

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Steven Gundry (2:08)

But first, you need to understand what's really pulling the strings on your blood pressure and it's not what you think. It comes down to one molecule your body makes or doesn't make enough of depending on where you're at. So what is this molecule? It's called nitric oxide or officially ENOS. Now there's an enzyme, ENOS, that converts dietary nitrate into nitric oxide. Now this enzyme unfortunately weakens with age. Now we now know, and Nobel prizes have been awarded for this, that low nitric oxide is a major driver of high blood pressure. But this isn't about a pill. It's about bacteria. Our oral microbiome can do the conversion job of taking dietary nitrates and converting it into nitric oxide.

So wait a minute. If you're using an antibacterial mouthwash, it kills those exact same bacteria. Sorry, multiple studies confirm it. So when you're watching TV or reading an ad and it says kills 99% of bacteria or 99% of odor causing bacteria, you're actually doing something horribly bad for you thinking you're being healthy. So if mouthwash is the problem, what's the fix? And it's not just blood pressure. What's happening in your mouth is tied to your heart in a way that most people have never heard.

So we now know that leaky gut is a real thing. It can be measured. We can quantify it. We can watch it heal with my protocols. But we also now know that you can have leaky mouth. After all, your mouth is part of your gut. It's the start, and the other guys are at the other end of the tube.

Here's the bad news. There are certain bad actors of bacteria that can live in your mouth, just like there are bad actors that can live in your gut microbiome.

When you have issues with your gums, we call it gingivitis, we know that these oral bacteria can actually get directly into your bloodstream. And the sad thing is, they can actually directly attach to your heart valves and in your arterial walls. In fact, as a heart surgeon, I can't tell you the number of times, sadly, I had to do emergency operations on people who had a bacterial infection in one or more of their heart valves, and we had to do emergency surgery to take out those infected valves and put in artificial valves.

Almost invariably, these people developed these infections from their dentist office where, believe it or not, tooth cleaning can actually put 2 billion bacteria into your bloodstream. Now, before you jump to conclusions, oral hygiene, tooth cleaning is incredibly important, and do not skip your tooth cleaning. The point is, in some of us, these bad bacteria are the bad actors that can cause damage to valves and even to your blood vessels.

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