Here are three things I wish someone had told me sooner about herbal oral care.

This first one generally shocked me.

So most of us were taught to think about our mouths as kind of separate, right?

You go to the dentist for your teeth and gums and you go to the doctor for everything else.

Nobody's really connecting the dots there.

But the research is telling a different story. A 2024 narrative review found that bacteria from periodontal disease has actually been found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease.

So that's telling us that these bacteria appear capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier and triggering inflammation linked to neurodegeneration.

And the links don't just stop there. We have a major consensus report from 2020,

which found significant correlations between severe periodontitis and cardiovascular disease,

including heart attack and stroke. And we're talking about a real link

here right this is not loose correlations so what's happening in your mouth is

absolutely not staying in your mouth and this really changes everything about

how we should be thinking about oral health both in how we treat challenges as

well as prioritizing prevention all All right, point number two.

So the second thing I wish I'd learned sooner.

I wish everybody learned this sooner, actually, and it's a shift in thinking.

It's stop trying to treat disease and start looking at the tissues.

And this is actually the foundation of herbal energetics, which, many of you may know is kind of my whole thing. So what does

that mean? It's instead of asking like what herb do I take for gum disease, you

start asking what are my tissues actually doing right now, right? Are they hot and

inflamed? Are they dry and lacking moisture? Are they lax and lacking tone?

And when you ask these questions, the herbs make so much more sense. And honestly, this is why I'm excited about what my friend and fellow herbalist Kyle Denton is teaching about right now.

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