Listen
Listen to this podcast or watch the video. CLICK HERE
Transcript
- 07:55 The problem with root canals
- 18:35 Your Options Besides Root Canals
- 20:20 Are mercury amalgam fillings toxic?
- 35:19 Using ozone and other ways to prevent tooth decay
- 43:22 Benefits of using ozone
- 47:25 Ozonated oil
- 49:06 Myofunctional aspects of dental health
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers and I’m a health and nutrition coach.
Let me to introduce you to my fellow co-host, Cate Beehan who is also a nutrition coach.
Cate Beehan: Hi! How are you Wendy?
Wendy Myers: Hi! How are you?
And we are broadcasting live, worldwide from Malibu, California.
Today, I will be interviewing Carol Vander Steop, author of Mouth Matters. A fantastic book about how our oral health profoundly affects our overall health. It can’t be stressed enough.
And you can find her on Mouthmattersbook.com. Today, we’re going to be talking about all kinds of hot topics and biological dentistry including mercury amalgam fillings, the dangers of root canals and the myofascial aspects of dental health that may surprise a lot of people and how that relates to sleep apnea and breathing difficulties, etc.
Hello Cate! How are you doing?
Cate Beehan: I’m good. I’m good. Wendy and I were talking before about my theme ride for SoulCycle, my spinning class, and how is neck get sore from head banging and my hip bones are bruised from doing the worm.
Wendy Myers: Really? You were head banging in SoulCycle class?
Cate Beehan: Yeah, that’s right.
Wendy Myers: Or you’re teaching it rather.
Cate Beehan: No, head banging and teaching simultaneously.
Wendy Myers: That sounds fun. I probably would have died in that class, it sounds like.
Cate Beehan: It was an hour. It’s an hour class. A little longer than usual.
Wendy Myers: Well, this is probably TMI, but I have a hard time doing cycling classes or spinning classes because my vajayjay always gets bruised.
Cate Beehan: Yeah. The good thing about SoulCycle is that they have gel seats to put on. I recommend every woman, for their first time to use one of those. I used it for quite some time in the beginning until I got used to it. I didn’t need to use it anymore.
Wendy Myers: So, you’re saying you’ve got callouses developed on your vajayjay?
Cate Beehan: No, I don’t.
Wendy Myers: Well, you just toughened up down there.
Cate Beehan: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: You had to adapt.
Cate Beehan: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: So Cate, why don’t you do our super annoying disclaimer?
Cate Beehan: Okay.
Please keep in mind that the Live to 110 podcast is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any disease or health condition. This podcast is solely informational in nature.Please consult your healthcare practitioner before attempting in any treatment you hear on the show.
Wendy Myers: Thank you. Thank you very much.
So, when was the last time you went to a dentist, since we’re on the topic of the dentistry?
Cate Beehan: I think I went almost six months ago so I’m probably due again. I go twice a year. I think that’s how many you’re supposed to go, right?
Wendy Myers: Yeah. That’s pretty good. My dentist is always trying to get me to go every four months to get my teeth cleaned.
Cate Beehan: I mean, I would go every four months, but my insurance doesn’t cover every four months.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s a problem, but I have—my sister-in-law is a dentist so it makes it kind of easy to go and see her. She’s a really good dentist. She’s amazing.
Cate Beehan: Yeah. I always do that thing where I’m not really religious about flossing. I’ve gotten way better about it. But it’s when you make that dentist appointment, it’s like a week before the dentist and then all of a sudden you start flossing every day.
You want to just tell the dentist when he says, “Do you floss? You want to just be able to tell him, “Yeah, I do like for the last week.” and play that part out.
Wendy Myers: Oh, we have a guest on the show. My daughter, Wynter. She’s decided to come on the show today. Hi Wynter! How are you doing?
Sorry, my nanny couldn’t make it today. Like last minute we’re trying to get the last recording done and of course, we can’t.
Cate Beehan: Do you use a regular toothbrush for her?
Wendy Myers: No, I actually use a Sonicare.
Cate Beehan: For Wynter, you do?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I do. You know it’s hard to…
Cate Beehan: How old is she again?
Wendy Myers: She’s 3 1/2
Cate Beehan: Okay.
Wendy Myers: But you know for little kids, it’s hard to get them to sit still to brush their teeth and use a Sonicare. It’s kind of like double time. It cleans their teeth a lot faster so it gets the job done better.
Well, why don’t we get on today with the show since my daughter is anxious for my attention?
Cate Beehan: Okay.
Wendy Myers: Our guest, Carol Vander Steop, is a registered dental hygienist and orofacial myofunctional therapist in Austin, Texas and she has more than 3 decades of clinical experience as a dental hygienist.
During that time, she came to realize dentistry’s marginal position in preventive medicine which she thinks needs to be at the forefront. Hence, the birth of her book, Mouth Matters. And you can find that on Mouthmattersbook.com.
Hello Carol! Thank you for being on the show.
Carol Vander Steop: I am so glad that you have chosen to speak with me today because as we were talking earlier, all the areas of dentistry that I talked about really have the potential to affect people’s health. The very fact that we’re having this conversation means that people are waking up to that idea. It’s delightful to be here. Thank you.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Well, thank you for coming on. I think this is really important because I’ve been telling people for years that they need to go get their teeth cleaned and do preventive dentistry. And that there’s a reason health insurance companies pay to get your teeth cleaned because it is actually an important thing you have to do for your health. Because bacteria in your mouth can cause infections all over your body and heart disease and it just has profound systemic effects.
So, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and why you decided to write Mouth Matters?
Carol Vander Steop: I would say that I got tired of the old paradigm that we all derived from. I think all medicine is pretty much treating the symptoms of disease and not really getting to the root cause.When I started writing the book, I’d have to say that I started from that paradigm.
As you said, true, plaques from the mouth do enter the bloodstream and affect everything, all the inflammatory diseases. It’s just one of the web—one of the diseases that’s part of the web of information of heart disease, stroke risk, diabetes, osteoporosis, you name it.
And so, I did write down the book into chapters so people could really see how does leaving plaque in your mouth affects heart disease. I broke it down into all those different diseases and so on. But as I moved forward, I realized that it’s not just about that and I think just about, I don’t care what discipline medical doctors who are thinking are coming from. They’re coming to the same conclusion. It’s about what we eat. And I know you know that, but still that’s equally important.Our lifestyles really make a big difference in oral health. And so, I also go into that great a deal.
Wendy Myers: One of my pressing questions that—I’ve read a lot about biological dentistry and that you shouldn’t get root canals. Can you explain a little bit about why you shouldn’t be getting root canals?
Carol Vander Steop: Root canals are very hot topic right now and you’ll even find within the biological dental community. There are varying opinions on it.
The problem with root canals are—Okay, What is a tooth that needs a root canal?
Basically, what’s happened is either the decay has gotten so deep that it has gotten to the center portion of the tooth that carries the blood vessels and nerves and all of the lymph flow that helps to keep the tooth alive and full of the nutrients that it needs to stay alive and it dies. It becomes infected with bacteria and it can’t survive so that tooth itself dies or you can have gum disease so bad like that it’s blown away enough bone around the outside of the tooth that the germs enter from underneath the tooth. Either way, the pulp is dead.
So the old way of looking at it was to remove the pulp that’s dead and basically embalm the tooth. Where in dentistry, about the only profession I can think of that tries to keep something dead within the body just so it can continue functioning on some level.
I personally think that’s a bad decision because first of all, the pulp that brings the nutrients is never as straight and simple as what the drawings look like. Quite often, they have braided or ancillary canals and so on. On top of that, there are miles and miles of these micro tubules.
Going back to an alive tooth again, you know the length and the blood vessels and everything come up through the base of the tooth through this huge pulp and then out through these miles and miles tubules to keep the tooth flushed and clean and with the nutrients it needs. So, what they want to do is to go ahead—or what most dentists do to root canals. They’ll come in through the top of the tooth, they’ll get the pulp out, and then they all have various ways to tie and clean out the canal the best they can and then they seal it up.
Probably the oldest way to fill it was with the silver point. That might have been the best thing of all because we all know that silver is antibacterial, but it doesn’t. I don’t know whether it works on fungi and yeast and things. But again, it’s such a straight point that it doesn’t really fill the canal all that well. And then, you have got to part which strengths and expanse and that isn’t a very acceptable material either.
And the very fact of the matter is that they’ll seal the top of the tooth and they conceal the bottom of the tooth, but what happens to all those miles of tubules that end out at the surface of the tooth? And by the way, a front tooth has 3 miles of tubules. Probably a back tooth has double that. That’s a lot of space. And you have to realize that the bacteria that were part of the tooth dying in the first, place migrate into these tubules and there’s no way to kill that.
Until, the advent of ozone. Ozone therapy would be the most successful way to make a root canal tooth work I suppose, because it can diffuse through those tubules and kill the germs but you can’t seal all those tubules. And so, you still have the remaining question as to whether that tooth is going to stay sterile overtime. My experience is that it doesn’t.
And it’s kind of interesting also, once you have something dead in the body. I think more and more people are starting to understand energy medicine. Energetically, its dead. It blocks meridians and so you have that problem too. Most biological dentists that I know would probably go ahead and extract the tooth.
Wendy Myers: Okay. So, can you extract the tooth and do ozone to kill all the bacteria?
Carol Vander Steop: There again. That’s an excellent question.
On my website is, if you punch in ‘root canal roulette’, you’ll come up with pictures that help describe what I’m talking about, but yes, if you don’t extract the tooth correctly.I don’t care if it’s a live tooth extracted for—I don’t know—orthodontic reasons, or something because it’s necrotic, you have to take care of the infection there or you’ll get a cavitation. That’s another hotly contested subject within dentistry.Most dentists would say, there’s no such thing as a cavitation.
A cavitation is where there’s an area of dead bone that healed over with healthy bone but you have all this bad bacteria trapped and so on. And the same thing as a root canal. These things can filter in through your blood supply and tank the rest of your body.
Anyway, when you pull this out, Hal Huggins has an amazing DNA test that you can do. People want to know if some of the bugs that were in the root canal or cavitation are leading to some of the, or associated with some of the other medical problems that they’re having. And so, they’ll ask for a DNA test from Dr. Huggins’ lab. He tests – I don’t know, 128, 165, I don’t remember – different bacteria.
I have a good friend who has a very, very healthy lifestyle, very clean. And he had a root canal, a failed root canal tooth removed and we did that and you just wouldn’t believe what came back. He was in New York during 9/11 and I think they even found anthrax in there and they found gonorrhea, they found all kinds of crazy little bugs. I mean, 2 columns tightly spaced of germs that are in there.
So, I don’t think that you have a choice but to really clean out the old necrotic bone, take about a millimetre of bone out from the socket and then hit it with ozone in attempt to really get that clean.
Wendy Myers: And so, then you have to, I guess put an implant in? Is that your other option to extract the tooth?
Carol Vander Steop: That is one option.
And again, biological dentistry, you have a lot of different theories involved in that. Energetically again, it’s kind of a root canal tooth you know, an embalmed tooth. It doesn’t really blocks meridians. And then, there are 2 kinds of implants: There are titanium implants and then there are zirconia implants.
Titanium implants have much the same problem as joint replacements in other parts of the body. I think it’s beginning to be recognized that metal on metal you know, for instance, you break off little flex and the body has to deal with the titanium. You still have that with the titanium implant so there’s that issue. And then of course titanium isn’t as harmless as a lot of people would say. The titanium implants tend to depress T cells which are one of the immune system’s ways of helping us take care of infection.
So a lot of people who have implants, let’s just say that they have suppressed immune systems. A lot of them get some autoimmune disorders. Cancer is a possibility once you—cancer is an interesting one.If your immune system is really good – I mean, everybody is forming cancer cells all the time and we’re hoping that our lifestyle is good enough to take care of these cells that want to proliferate. If you start putting in things like mercury and titanium and things like that, then you’re just suppressing your immune system and not allowing it to function in an optimal way so then somebody’s bad cells get away from us and start turning into cancers and so on.
Wendy Myers: Yeah I know.
I had a root canal myself, when I was 12. I ate it on the pavement and half my tooth came off and so it eventually died. And, when I was about 20, the tooth died. And so basically you know they had to clean it out and I had to have it redone a couple of times since then.And every time they take off the tooth, you can just smell the bacteria. It’s frightening.
Carol Vander Steop: Yes.
You’ve just brought up the most difficult of all because I’m pretty sure it would be a front tooth. You have a lovely smile but what do you do for a front tooth? I can’t say for sure what I would do, but I’m leaning more and more towards extracting. I can’t imagine what’s in there and…
Wendy Myers: You can do a bridge also right?
Carol Vander Steop: Yes, you can do a bridge. There are problems with bridges too.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Carol Vander Steop: Here’s the thing. Once you start having the problem, then you have to start making hard choices because nothing is good as the original. So you have to get your priorities in line and take it from there.
As a good example, I’m wearing braces right now. I never thought I would go into them. And I don’t like braces because there’s a lot of nickel in them and then of course the metal is crossing the mid line which again, messes with your meridians. But my choice was to do them anyway because the alternative was worst.I have a small airway and I needed to expand my mouth in order to have more room for my tongue so that I will have more of a chance of not having apnea when I get older.
So, I have to make that choice and I was willing to go into braces for a year to do that. That’s not nearly as hard a decision as whether to have a root canal or an implant in my body but yeah, we have to start making those decisions even to whether we’re going to have a crown.
If you listen to my Mercola interview, I talked about how I really hate how that is so invasive. It has to take off 60% of the tooth for the most part to put what is essentially a cap over the tooth. And then all of a sudden, it is not putting the compressive forces that teeth have to put up with. It is unable to transmit them to the root as well as the original tooth. So, the tooth has a lot of breakage. And a lot of times, they’d just break off at the gum line or something like that. A lot of people grit their teeth.
Wendy Myers: I do, I love doing that.
Carol Vander Steop: You do? Yeah.
You’re less likely to be clenching on the front teeth and certainly not as hard as on the back teeth. We see the breaking off more often on the back teeth because you have to put up with so many hundreds more pounds per square inch when you do that. But when we clench, the tooth flexes a bit and you’ll start seeing this little V shape notches right at the edge of the crown or even in a regular tooth, you’ll see that too. And it’s just worst than having your regular tooth if you have a crown on it because then all the forces have to be passed around the outside of the tooth and concentrated right there at the gum line.
Wendy Myers: Well, let’s talk a little bit about mercury fillings.
This is like a huge, huge debate in the dental world. I can’t even tell you how many dentists I’ve had tell me that mercury is totally safe. It’s completely fine and I’m thinking, “Are you kidding me?”
Do you think that mercury amalgam fillings are toxic and should people have them removed?
Carol Vander Steop: Well, the stand at the American Dental Association is becoming less and less credible all the time.At some point, they need to go, Okay, we just can’t make up any more stuff that sounds reasonable. It’s not a belief system.
Back in 1980, I believe the Germans showed that unequivocally, mercury vapor is embedded from these fillings. So, the idea is that well yeah, but it’s not much. It’s not enough to do any damage.
Mercury is actually one of those heavy metals where there is a tolerance level. We’re already picking it up from fish and coal burning plants and so on. Having it right in your mouth being emitted is, it seems to be an untenable attitude but, let me just say, this is a very, very difficult subject.
When I started writing my book, of course I was on firm ground talking about all the inflammatory diseases and how they were connected. But you know sooner or later I have to look at mercury and fluoride which I haven’t done before. And it was the hardest thing I did in my life because I had parroted what I’ve heard in dental school and so on even though I kind of knew that that was not right.
And now with the internet, there’s just no excuse for not understanding it. And in fact, I kept wondering for the past 7 years maybe when somebody would be brave enough to get on the television with the Jerome mercury analyzer because that’s just what they use in industry to see what kind of vapor that workers are exposed to.
And to his credit, Dr. Oz was the first person to do it and perhaps many of your listeners have seen that. It’s really kind of a beautiful piece. And it’s also especially nice because I remember getting his book, YOU: Staying Young years ago.
I thought he was beating me to punch on the book on oral systemic health. He did have a whole chapter on oral systemic medicine and interestingly, he talked a little bit about fluoride toxicity in a very light manner. He just said, it’s possible we’re getting too much in a side bar. But then on another side bar it says, mercury is completely safe. So, I’m really, really proud of him for studying that and bring it to the fore. And if you haven’t seen that, probably you should or just search for ‘smoking tooth’ to see how much mercury is emitted.
I of course talked about it a lot in my book. But what was interesting was of course, in the ADA have to come back and have some sort of a statement. Well first of all, they separately all had ties with him. I’m not sure how serious the ties were on the first place but they made a big deal with separating those ties; But also, they made a point that whatever mercury does come out of the fillings, whatever vapor does is—I don’t know—inactivated by the protein in the saliva or something. And I thought that was such an odd thing to say.
And then, I moved on immediately with another statement kind of on another subject. Then I thought, well I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I’m not much of a drooler. You know I try to keep my saliva on my mouth. What do I do with it? I swallow it so. Okay, so it goes into saliva, what then? It’s in your body.
Anyway, then I pulled up the study I think 2 or 3 days ago. This is mercury awareness week so Dr. Mercola has a lot on it and I made a little comment with a link to a study that shows that anyway, 65% does go past the saliva into the vapor, does go into the oral cavity and then, you respire it and so on.
But more interestingly, for a while they were making the argument that the kind of mercury they put in these fillings is elemental mercury. It’s not the bad methyl mercury, but guess what? There are germs in the mouth and in the stomach that immediately methylate it so that argument is moved too.
Anyway, my point with Dr. Mercola even was that mercury fillings, the design that’s required, it breaks teeth apart in the first place. And then, you have these fillings that have a different expansion rate than the tooth itself. So eventually, the tooth is going to break apart.
If you have very many listeners out there with amalgam fillings in them, the silver dark ugly looking things. Almost all people out there that have one of those, if they had them long enough would have experienced the cusp breaking off or part of the tooth breaking away. And they never think it’s the fault of the amalgam they just think it has to do with them.But really it’s the physics of the whole situation. They pretty much guarantee that the tooth will break down. So they may be cheaper to put in, but in the long run you end up spending so much more.
And in fact, that brings up a conversation I had with a Canadian dentist this past weekend. She is working 3 days a week in a practice that is not her—in an area where there is an army base or something, one of the military bases. And of course that’s all they allow being put in because they’re cheap and she’s good at it. She says, “I love putting in these mercury fillings.” or she called it amalgam because they’re easy to carve, they’re fun. She likes it. And then she paused for a minute and she said, “but I know that I have to stop doing it sooner or later. I’m starting to have neurological problems.”
Okay. So, that gave me a great opportunity to say, well you know perhaps you can’t really change that but you can make these little changes. And people will start questioning you know if you put all in negative ion generator in the office to pick up the mercury, if you start wearing a mask such as people wear like a gas mask so that you’re not picking it up. If you start using a heavy vacuum, taking all the precautions that you should when you’re taking out these toxic materials which really generates a lot of vaporized mercury.
You know it’s not a big surprise if your patients will start asking you, “Why are you doing these things?” “What’s going on?” And you can just say, “Well I’m starting to have neurological problems from working with this material.” however you want to say it. Start raising the awareness and I would imagine that a lot of the clients would start saying, “Oh, so what are the options?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting point that your associate started having neurological problems because dentistry, of all professions, has the highest suicide rate. I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
Carol Vander Steop: For many reasons, in most of the biological dentist I know actually got into it from the mercury issue. They know that they’re in it day in and day out. And this whole thing about, all these dentists are just taking out good fillings so that they can make a lot of money by putting in these other ones.
I would say, that would not be a very good argument because when you drill out a filling, you’re really producing an off a lot of mercury and they’re breathing it, they’re right in that place. And by the way, dental assistants have one of the highest miscarriage rates and so on. Of any working professional, we haven’t looked at that. I know several people, hygienist and assistants alike personally throughout the years that have not been able to hold on to their fetuses and one would imagine that that would have a lot to do with it.
Wendy Myers: Well, that’s really sad.
Yeah, it’s interesting as I do hair mineral analysis and every single person has mercury toxicity. My mentor that trained me, Dr. Earl Wilson, he’s given 300,00 hair test and he said, every single person has mercury toxicity.
People does have to realize that no matter what the entry point into your body, be it fillings or in the air from coal burning plants, it is causing toxicity and problems in our bodies.
Carol Vander Steop: Absolutely.
And one of the biggest things that it does is create a lot of oxidation. Our cells can’t work at a very good level and I mean, energy metabolism.
Look at the people with trouble with fatigue and so on. And you finally reach the tipping point you commonly hear, “I don’t see people growing horns.” ‘I don’t see…” you know, all these ridiculous comments. But these are very subtle toxicities that you—you get to a tipping point and then you have disease but it’s so far release from the initial problem that of course you can’t put a direct tie to it but yeah, I’m sure most of this are mercury toxic.
I haven’t even looked at mine. But I work at chelating and taking carbon and chlorella and so on all the time because I’m still facing. I get tired of even people who have all these fillings and they’ll open their mouth and it emits a lot right into my face.
And a long time ago, I quit polishing. But even polishing, you think hygienist would care more because a lot of times they’re set to polishing and making these things look lovely that they’re liberating a lot of mercury and it doesn’t make sense to me.
Wendy Myers: Yeah well, I’m happy to put you on nutritional balancing program to detox, at a cost if you’d like.
Carol Vander Steop: Oh, That would be fun!
Wendy Myers: It’s a very effective program. It completely detoxes your body. It involves infrared saunas and things like that but it’s very effective.
Carol Vander Steop: You said it does involve infrared saunas?
Wendy Myers: Yes, it does. Yes.
Carol Vander Steop: Excellent. Those are amazing, aren’t they?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I love them. I love my home one.
I have another question.
I recently went to the dentists and I have all my mercury fillings removed about you know 20 years ago. But at that time, I had no idea about biological dentistry. I just intuitively knew that the mercury shouldn’t be in my mouth and so I just went to the dentist and said, “Replace all my fillings.” And lo and behold, I went to my sister-in-law who’s a dentist. She’s an amazing dentist. She’s not biological but she’s pretty close. She’s very cutting edge and so she removed a couple of my fillings to redo them. And there was mercury underneath. And so, I guess the guy didn’t remove all of it. I guess he just, was doing it for cosmetic. He thought I was doing it for cosmetic reasons and just remove as much as he needed to, to put in the composite. So, can that cause problems, the mercury that’s sitting on the root?
Carol Vander Steop: Yeah, I think that it should all be removed.
Don’t forget, back to those little tubules, it’s interesting. We have a world that there’s as much sugar as you want eat. And when the person needs sugar, one of the small little downsides of it is the natural flow, the cleansing flow that goes through a tooth that reverse its direction so whatever’s in the tooth goes into the pulp and then into the body. So if you have mercury in there, it was being transmitted to the pulp in and out through your body every time you had sugar for instance. So yeah, you should always have all the amalgam removed.
A lot of times when I think they were leaving it in for is, they didn’t want to drill into yet more tooth structure because it’s true, the more tooth you remove, the worse it is. But what you also almost always find when you take out all the amalgam is that there is some decay underneath it. And I’m not much into drills anyway if you listen to my broadcast with Dr. Mercola. I like just back it up, back it up, back it up, back it up.
For our children, we absolutely should not just be using x-rays and a pick to be diagnosing decay. It just doesn’t work. It’s the guessing method of decay. That’s probably a worthwhile interview to listen to. I also have a little bit on my website about it.
But basically, on these principles, both of my daughters looked absolutely pristine. There was no stain in the little grooves on the top part of their teeth. It wasn’t able to be—nothing was picked up on an x-ray. The little picks showed nothing. But I was looking at my oldest daughter, and based on the information that I get in that Mercola interview, I just said, I don’t believe it. And I went into my doc’s room and picked up an air operation unit and just opened up all the grooves a little bit. It’s not what I wanted to do. It’s not the best way we should use it, a special imaging device but it’s what I had available.
And sure enough, one of the little grooves opened up into a stain and the stain got bigger and bigger and the deeper I went. And, that little prep went almost all the way to the pulp and that’s when it was time to stop looking to see how deep that little whole went and to use some ozone on it. We cut that little prep if you will open for months and I applied ozone to it for several minutes every month and we’ll talk about that in a bit. But, eventually we filled it in, but I even took a picture of that to see how close to the pulp it was and the x-ray showed nothing on there, not even the prep.
I know you’re going to probably ask me about fluoride here in a minute, whether it’s a good idea to re-mineralize and so on. And the thing is, that fluoride has so mineralized the upper layer of teeth that x-rays do not shoot through the tooth the same way and decay has to get significantly into the next layer before we can even pick it up and diagnose it.
In my book, I go into 3 ways that we—actually decay from the inside out anyway, so that re-mineralizing a tooth from the outside just makes less and less sense to me.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s really interesting and I think that’s really why I wanted to have you on the show is, to talk about prevention and what we need to be doing to prevent decay in the first place.
So what can be done like, you talked about ozone in your book, which frankly I’ve never heard about prior to hearing your interview with Dr. Mercola. Can you explain the benefits of using ozone and maybe some other ways how we can prevent tooth decay?
Carol Vander Steop: Yes.
Probably again going back to diet, the best way is to have a really clean diet and most of my patients and probably a lot of your listeners know it. But I will say, the toughest thing for most people to do—I mean they’ll eat, grass fed beef, they’ll eat lots of vegetables. They’ll do all kinds of things. But then, they’ll get that sheepish look inside that I’m still addicted to sugar.
Wendy Myers: That’s me! That’s me. I hate to admit it.
Carol Vander Steop: Sweetie, have you read my book?
Wendy Myers: I’ve read parts of it. Yes.
Carol Vander Steop: You have got to get off the sugars. I just can’t think of anything more devastating to your body in every single way.
For instance, let’s look at what dentistry does to try to fight all of these. Everywhere you look, kills germs, kills germs, kills germs. Well, actually as in many places in our body, there are lots of good germs. We don’t want to kill everything.
You know we have this, probably 80% of our immune system is in our gut and it has to do with the bacteria that are there. Every time we eat sugar, we weaken that a little bit because it kills off the probiotics that are in our gut, the good bacteria. That’s reason enough.
And when I say sugar, I mean wheat too because wheat pretty much turns immediately into sugar. So, we’re constantly abusing the wonderful flora, bacterial flora that we got on the first place by eating sugars and that’s the toughest thing I fight because—it was hard for me because I never was addicted to sugars. And I actually wrote the whole first edition not realizing how bigger than addiction it is for people. But I caught on to it pretty fast.
And highly recommend maybe Dr. Amen’s book “Change Your Brain, Change Your Body”. And I even go to his website and look what happens to your brain. It looks like a shriveled dapple raisin if you’re not doing it right as supposed to a nice fat grape.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah.
Carol Vander Steop: There are 5 different neurochemical ways that we’re addicted to sugars and you wanted to get to identify which way you’re addicted to it. And then, it’s really easy to change. Probably 60% of the people out there are addicted to sugars in the same way that alcoholics are addicted to their alcohol. It’s the very same addiction pathway.
And I happen to know that my daughter for instance, have that particular addiction pathway or at least I guessed it. And so, we fought it. It’s actually the easiest one to fight. All she had to do is take a really high quality whey protein and boy, that’s the trick.
Really high quality grass fed, cool produced, something like ‘One World Whey’. There’s some other ones out there, but 2 scoops every morning before the day started. You have to get protein into your brain anyway and after 2 or 3 weeks, she could have cared less about sugar. And it didn’t taste the same. It’s a little disappointing to realize that it doesn’t taste the same because it’s a comfort food, but it’s also a huge relief because I can’t think of anyone out there who really knows that it’s good for you. Yeah, we all know it’s not good for us.
Wendy Myers: Yes.
Carol Vander Steop: So, I’m just going to mention that for your clients because they have to know that it is an addiction. It’s not something that can usually set their mind to and get over it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I’ve been trying to fight it for a year and I haven’t not been successful. And so, I’m going to try that step. I’ve read Dr. Amen’s book too and I want to get one of his brain scans but they’re like 5 or $6000 so I’ve been waiting on that for a little bit.
Carol Vander Steop: And what would you do with that brain scan anyway?
You need to confirm or denied that you have a problem and you’re going to do the same. Well, you later be comfortable and keep going and doing what you’re doing or you’ll change, which is you know you know you want to change, right?
Wendy Myers: Yes, absolutely.
Carol Vander Steop: I’m guessing so, yeah, that’s a tough one. B
But it just imbalances the chemistry in your mouth. Your whole body is going to run acid being on sugars. And all disease states exist when you’re not having a balance body chemistry. So, that’s really the first line of defense.
That being said, preventive in dentistry. So the little bruise on the top of the teeth are the most difficult and common decay to have because even at irruption time, there can be a little crack in the bottom of that groove and you can’t access it with a toothbrush. So, it’s more than likely going to decay. And you just can’t just tell what’s going on. The only way you can guide that is by having zero sugar or this or that but I’m not even sure then that that would protect that groove. So diagnosis is a paramount importance. You have to go to someone who has some sort of a little air abrasion method of cleaning out the grooves of the teeth and then something like DIAGNOdent.
And actually, I need to have this conversation with a new dentist that I met up in New York. I’m thrilled to death. He does air abrasion, bio-mimetic, ozone dentistry and he does it biologically. That’s and almost never seen combination. So he was mentioned in an e-mail that he’s got a new imaging device that’s coming out that will be better than x-ray so I can’t wait to hear what that is.But anyway, x-rays and a pick don’t do it. You have to have some sort of imaging device.
The other child I took to a dentist in San Antonio about 3 weeks ago and even though her teeth looked pristine, she had 5 little tiny cavities. And they were able to get to them before they got too deep. I mean, that’s the key, the more tooth structure you take out, the more likely it’s going to break down later and you end up with this endless cycle of repair and break down. The less you have to enter that, the better. So that’s a good reason why people ought to be going to the dentist very frequently. A lot of people are afraid to go I think but if you can find a dentist who can do that.
And I have a database on my website. Now, say that all those dentist on my website, I have 3 little categories: air abrasion dentistry; bio-mimetic which means copying the structure of the tooth as closely as you can so it can pass those compressive forces through the tooth to the root and not break down over a lifetime; and then ozone.
But, I kind of left off that biological component because first of all, that’s a very broad subject and everybody interprets it a little bit differently and I didn’t really know how I could quantify that. But a lot of these dentists don’t have the vaguest idea about mercury or fluoride toxicity or any of the biological ideas that I think are important. And that’s what gets down to the bottom of what it’s all about.
Every single person taking responsibility for what it is they want, prioritizing what they want and then asking their dentist for what it is that they want. The more they hear about it from people whether making their bread and butter, the more pressure there is going to be to change. And, that’s where all the power is. We’ve got to vote with our pocket books. I’d be willing to, and I do fly across the country for the kind of dentistry that I want because I value it and I understand it and I know how important it is to do it right.
Wendy Myers: Well, let’s talk a little bit about ozone. You kind of touch on it a little bit. What are…
Carol Vander Steop: Other uses, sorry.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. What are the other uses and the benefits of using ozone and where can you find the dentist that uses ozone?
Carol Vander Steop: Yes, and my database on ozone is incomplete. There are other databases too, and you do have to look for and more and more are coming online all the time.The beauty of it is multifold.
First of all, it does kill all microbes and that is wonderful because we do deal with some rather terrible germs in the mouth. And I know I just said that we don’t want to kill everything, but what it also does is to set up this wonderful environment for the good bacteria to proliferate. It’s a more alkaline environment and aerobic environment.
So, in the presence of oxygen, you have good bacteria populating them out and then they can keep out the bad one. It sets up that wonderful environment. It kills all the bad ones and, so I intonate it a little bit about how it’s use in decay. You don’t even have to remove a lot of the tooth structure. You can remove most of it. You get down to what we call the leathery layer and then you can just hit it with ozone and that ozone will penetrate deep into the tooth at least 2 to 5 millimetres. And remember those tubules I was talking about with root canals. It can kill everything that’s in there and change the chemistry within the tooth. That’s the important thing because our bodies are set to heal themselves.
If you have a nerve that’s alive, then it’s going to be bringing the minerals to the tooth to re-mineralize that just as my daughter had that happen and that decay that I hadn’t removed turned hard over time. That is what happens. So that’s wonderful. That’s one use for it. It halts or reverses decay.
When I use it in gum disease, I’m killing all those nasty germs that deep into the gums and a lot of people don’t know that there are germs under their gums that they have to remove. I would refer them to my Facebook page or my website, www.Mouthmattersbook.com and I have a—just quickly put together but you can get what you need from it—to show them how to get up under the gums to clean because that’s critical. So you can kill all the germs up under the gums.
And then, if you have gum disease where you didn’t know to clean under the gums and those germs have gotten deeper than what you can clean, you need the tissues to reattach to the tooth and it does that. I call it kind of a Velcro like attachment. The little hooks we call, ‘fiberglass’ and it allows them to proliferate like crazy. And they’ll definitely want to look back onto the tooth so it’s going to help reduce pockets.
There are a lot of people who are on—I don’t know—that 700 of the different drugs that cause dry mouth. So they’re particularly prone to yeast infections. A dry mouth is devastating as far as cavities are concerned. They ought to have some ozone trace made so that the ozone can help keep their teeth strong and their gums strong.
If yeast infection gets away from them, they can even use this ozonated oils that you can buy. I’ve got one on my website available but that was mainly just to let people know what they can buy. I like that one because it’s jojoba oil. It doesn’t taste so bad as olive oil that a lot of people will oxygenate or ozonate. But it’s a way for the common person who doesn’t have access to an ozone machine to get ozone into their mouth. It doesn’t have the penetrating power. It can’t halt or reverse cavities but it sure is great for gum disease.
Also, If you have a denture or dry mouth and you think you have a Candida infection, you just put some of these ozonated oil on it. Not very tasty, but you know it’s a very easy way to get rid of that infection.
Wendy Myers: That’s really interesting. I never heard of ozonated oil before.
Is that something that you can use on a daily basis for prevention or is it just for disease?
Carol Vander Steop: Actually, I do in braces because I’m so paranoid. I put it on this little picks that Butler Gum makes (G-U-M) and there are little tiny picks and I’ll pull a little bit out and put it on. I just put it in between my teeth. Again, it’s on the video. You can use a rubber tip if it isn’t going to work in that particular kind of area but that’s nice.
Also, it has a lot of uses. My girls use it on you know blemishes that might come out from time to time on their face. I use it on ant bites and chiggers. And I have a couple of ladies take it to the coast, they got some ‘Portuguese man of war’ stings.
Wendy Myers: Ouch.
Carol Vander Steop: It slows down nerve transduction so it takes away pain. One time I bit my tongue and it was very painful to swallow. So, I finally put that on there and pain went away and you know it healed up right away.
You can also use the ozonated—if you can find a doctor who has an ozone generator and you have a herpetic infection or cold sore. As it’s coming on and they apply that, first of all, it usually go away a lot faster but it has the tendency to make him never come back. 65% of the time, those cold sores never come back so that’s a really nice thing.
Wendy Myers: Well, let’s talk a little bit about—in your book, you talk about myofascial aspects of dental health including airway development, breathing in the facial development. Can you explain this aspect of your work a little bit?
Carol Vander Steop: That is probably the most important thing that I think I talked about and it can’t be emphasized enough.
I want to take it again back to the little kids because that’s where the greatest hope is. Let’s just say that oral posture has the ability to change how your face is developing.
If you think about your braces are, it’s gentle like pressure overtime has the power to move in any direction an orthodontic so chooses the teeth while the tongue and the cheeks and lips, they all have that same ability so when we start with the little as kiss, I can’t emphasize enough that if they have the correct oral posture from birth, they will probably develop with enough tongue space. They will develop horizontally, forward instead of vertically.
Now let me explain that a little bit. We give our children quite often pacifiers, bottles and so on, and these teach a tongue down rest position. The nipple has to go on top of the tongue and somehow they learn that that is what is supposed to happen and they never revert to that tongue being plastered to the root of the mouth as it should be. Babies breast feed exclusively for the most part, learn that correctly. That’s not to say that that’s a hard and fast rule. But, I know that a lot of working mothers and it’s very, very difficult to think that pumping and then giving it to them in a bottle is having a detrimental effect because they’re going to a lot of trouble. But the patterns of lip, cheek and tongue and swallow movements are entirely different from a bottle.So, that’s kind of the ideology of it.
People can do what they can but in earliest years, if you see that your child does not rest their tongue on the roof of the mouth, and where the tip of the tongue—Okay so all your listeners should take just a second and just notice, this is not something anybody thinks about.
Where is your tongue right now? Is it resting on the floor of your mouth? Is it touching your front teeth? Is it the lower front teeth? Is it the upper front teeth or is it on the roof of the mouth. And if it’s on the roof of the mouth, that’s correct. The tip should be about half an inch back from that front teeth. The rest of the tongue should follow and when you swallow, it should stay up there.A lot of people have a reverse swallow which means that the tongue pushes forward on those teeth. And then they should have a lip seal.
The biggest thing to be sure to do for your children is make sure that you’ve taken care of all their allergies so that they’re not clogged up in their noses. The nose is on the face for a reason. If they don’t breath through their nose, then they’re going to probably have an open mouth because they’ll be breathing through their mouth and their tongue will be down because you can’t really draw air in through a tongue that’s up.
And what will happen is the front of their face will grow very, very long and narrow. And the jaw line which is most beautiful if it’s chiselled, right? And it comes horizontally to the floor will start to drop at a sharper and sharper angle. And the more it does that, the less room they’re going to have for their molars, their bicuspids. And they also start contracting, if their tongue is down, they start contracting in the other direction you know from side to side. So, all these children with crowded teeth, it’s usually because they don’t have a lip seal on the proper tongue west position and very likely, they don’t swallow correctly.
Wendy Myers: Well, that’s really really interesting and I definitely heard some concepts from Weston A Price that if the child is growing in utero and they’re not fed grass-fed meats and other things that their skulls are not going to form properly. But I had no idea that it was also from, perhaps lack of breastfeeding and the other issues that you talked about.
Carol Vander Steop: It’s highly related. And it’s all over to wear faces with kind of that, well with the recessive jaw.
Look at all the guys who are growing goatees and beards and stuff. They’re often trying to hide a recessed jaw. And a lot of times they are mouth breathers. And to be honest, most of the problems happen at a young age while they’re still pretty plastic. That jaw will continue to—the conveyance will continue to lengthen and become more receded over time so throughout their life and it’s terrible because it makes for a very, very tiny airway.
I was just in an orthodontic conference last weekend. I knew all the stuff but to actually see x-rays of what can be done to make and keep a large airway compared to doing it incorrectly. It’s crazy. You can have, your airways should be about 20 millimeters that is pretty big. That’s about as big as a garden hose. Minus about 6 millimeters or the size of a soda straw, which is significantly less but it’s still doable.
But thankfully, I didn’t have extraction, retraction, orthodontics. Meaning, they didn’t try to straighten my teeth by pulling teeth and pulling back on everything making less room for the tongue. And it isn’t just tongue space. It’s a lot of how the gums form back there, but seeing the airways—it’s all about the airway— if you don’t have an airway, you don’t have health.
And, You actually have a lot of children with apnea. Most of them, their parents don’t have any idea that they have it and that relates to heart disease. Even snoring just relates to heart disease.
Orofacial myofunctional therapist can help children learn the correct oral posture. These are neuromuscular patterns that are hard to develop,but little children learn in very, very quickly. So, we’re there to help children who haven’t attained those skills. And it’s really actually a lot of fun. Best to do it by ages eight or nine,
but I work on children up to 12 of course, and actually beyond but 12 is when 90% of our facial growth is done.
And for those who think that their children are not developing correctly, I can’t recommend this orthotopic orthodontics anymore highly than I do. They should go to Facefocused.com to see how he does it but they have to be still having a mixed dentation. They can’t have all adult teeth but he is a genius and being able to encourage that forward growth but not only is more beautiful, but much more functional.
People these days really care about aesthetics. I could talk forever about airways and it’s like, :Oh, that’s on down the line.” but high cheek bones, hollowed out cheeks, nice fat full lips. All these things make for an attractive face. It just also happens that they’re also far more functional.
Wendy Myers: Yeah well, that’s really interesting thing.
Thanks for giving us that aspect of dental health and most people have never heard of or wouldn’t even be thinking to address with their dentist. But so you’re not going to be able to address this with every dentist obviously. Do biological dentist address this or it’s just a really specialized niche?
Carol Vander Steop: It is still too small. To be honest, at the end of Dr. Mercola’s interview, he had mentioned something that made me look in his mouth just to check one thing, and he turned out to have a tongue tie. So yeah, most dentists don’t look for that tongue tie. His was so acute that he couldn’t have an upper tongue rest position. So, there was this whole flu of physical difficulties that he was addressing in other ways that were actually tied to that.
So for instance, if you have a lower tongue rest posture and has tiny airway, you’re going to have a forward head posture. And your head will come forward and your head will tilt back so you can even breathe. Look around and see how many people do that.
Wendy Myers: That’s what I do. That’s exactly what I do. My physical therapist was just trying to tell me to put it back but obviously develop that.
Carol Vander Steop: Yeah, you can’t because it makes the airways smaller, but it’s terrible for brain function. It’s terrible on your, you know cervical vertebrae. It’s much deeper than that. And those are the people who are really going to catch onto this because again, it’s all about the airway, but isn’t your whole neck and shoulder girdle just miserable?
Wendy Myers: Absolutely. Yeah.
Carol Vander Steop: And I have,I think a link on my website. A young lady who had her tongue tie released. She is also seeing Dr. Hang in California which is where I fly to from my orthodontics. And she just can’t stop talking about how wonderful, how everything felt so released when she had that tongue released.
If you look and see how complicated all of the neck and shoulder muscles are and how they integrate together, if you’ve got something just folding on it all the time, then yeah. You’re going to be in pain so it’s a very complex subject.
Wendy Myers: What is the dentist that you go to in California?
Carol Vander Steop: The orthodontist that I am working with is Dr. William Hang. He’s amazing. And again, we’re working on my airway, trying to make it bigger. And then I do myofunctional therapy to change the muscles back to that. So, you take somebody with apnea who’s older, 40% of people with mild to moderate sleep apnea don’t need anything anymore once they do myofunctional therapy. If they’ll actually go through. Our muscles get flaccid even the tongue that sits on the floor with the mouth is going to be a lot more flaccid because it’s not working hard enough, it’s not exercising.
So we help this client learn to move and widen this airways the best that they can. And this can be very effective. So yeah, I highly recommend before you do any other kind. As he said—it was rather clever—He said, all orthodontic practitioner should give an airway impact assessment to their clients before they do anything. Wow! that would be something because of the time, what you’re doing is making for a smaller airway and…
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Carol Vander Steop: It’s unfortunate. I mean, I know these people are working really, really hard but it’s so hard to change an industry so you just start with where you can.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I think the sleep apnea thing that you talked about is really important because my own father had really bad sleep apnea. He had a sleep study. He was waking up 70 times during the night and it destroyed his health completely.
Carol Vander Steop: Absolutely, in every way.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. He was falling asleep during the day. Now obviously, your body and your brain can’t recover. You kill millions and millions of brain cells. He was falling asleep at work. He got fired from his job, and it causes heart disease and it just really set him on a spiral toward his early grave. So, this has a profound impact on people’s health and I have no idea that you could correct this with myofascial therapy.
Carol Vander Steop: Well, you know but it’s still very late stage and a lot of times, you do have to do more. I mean, this is honestly a several hour show just to talk about that. But, there are things to be done and that’s why I guess I want to emphasize with the little children because you know working on older people who have already lost their jobs and his health is already failing, that’s just not fishing far upstream enough. You know we can help them but that’s practically every person I point to.
Once I became aware of it, every patient that came in is—I’m still a dental hygienist and I look at their throats, I look at their facial features and it breaks my heart. I couldn’t fix all of them if I tried. And, I don’t want to try. They’re not enough of this out there.
Okay, so let’s just talk for a second about what dentist are doing to help with sleep apnea. A lot of dentists now are noticing when people have clenching issues and they’re breaking their teeth down and we didn’t even get in to bisphosphonates, the drug that kills them to save it so to speak. It’s devastating to the bone and the teeth itself but people clench their teeth to basically keep their jaw from falling back on the airway and bringing their tongue with it.
A lot of the dentist will make just a simple splint, but if they make a simple splint and the person has apnea, then the jaw will fall back on the airway even more easily and obscure it. So then, you have the dentist to make a double splint. It will be one on the top and one on the bottom and it will push in one way or another and bring the lower jaw out and bring the tongue with it. And that’s very workable except overtime maybe a period of 15 years, you eventually do push back hard enough on these upper teeth that you change the relationship of the teeth and the jaws with each other and they still end up with smaller tongue space.
So, while they’re very helpful for people, I mean I have a lady who has on a CPAP who went to one of those machines and she immediately had better results because I don’t think they had titrated her CPAP well enough but she lost 40 pounds you know because her hunger hormones were more regulated and so on. You know if you’re not sleeping well, you tend to gain weight because these hunger hormones were all in that stuff.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Carol Vander Steop: So, what I was looking at, it looks very promising, that does not change the relationship of the teeth with each other is something called the full breath solution. It’s a lower splint that has a little bar with a paddle cross at the back that kind of reaches us back and pulls the tongue away from the airway.
That looks very, very beneficial to me and you know I’ve seen that it does, results that it does have opened the airway and I kind of like that one but you know, you have all kinds of doctors invested in all kinds of different ways that they learned to do. So again, you have to look at it and ask for what you want, what make sense to you.
Wendy Myers: Well, I think I was so much thrilled. That was so enlightening and I just want to thank you so much for being on the show.
And, can you tell the listeners that you know, where they can find you and what you’re up to these days?
Carol Vander Steop: Yes, you can find me at Mouthmattersbook.com and I have as much information as I have time to post up there. Also at Facebook under Mouth Matters or Carol Vander Steop. I have both the business and the personal page. They kind of mixed, so call at either page.
I do a lot of speaking engagements. In fact, I’m going to one of the biomedic conference where I’m going to encourage them to be getting into biological dentistry a little bit more.
My main thing right now though is the book that I have called “”Mouth Matters: How your mouth ages your body and what you can do about it”. Because again, there are so much there that I can’t talk about in 10 radio interviews and what a person can do is just read what most interest them and it will leave them on rabbit trails that they might want to explore in more detail. I like the downloadable version honestly because it’s cheaper and the pictures are in color and it’s searchable. I think that’s very beneficial for people but a lot of people like to have the paperback version and so I have both.
Wendy Myers: Well, I’m really glad that you wrote this book because it’s one that I’ve actually been searching for for years to give any friends that I have with bad breath. Because these friends you have, they have really bad breath and they just going to get their teeth cleaned. They do some ozone therapy or something and so I’m just being a good friend. I want to tell people that you know that they have bad breath but seriously, I’ve been telling people for years that they have to get their teeth clean if they want good breath and good health.
Thank you for writing this valuable resource that’s an often overlooked aspect of health.
Carol Vander Steop: Well thank you for what you do too. It’s an uphill battle in this country to get the health information out there, but it’s still very important. There are sometimes I wonder why I do it, but basically because I can’t help it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, me too. I can’t help it.
Carol Vander Steop: Yeah, it’s just, it’s fascinating, it’s endlessly fascinating so, it was a pleasure. And I thank listeners for listening in.
Wendy Myers: Yeah and definitely I’d love to have you on the show again in some point in a few months talking about just myofascial therapy because it has really peaked my interest. I think the listeners also would love to go a little bit more in depth on that subject with you.
Carol Vander Steop: I think we really should do that because its worth—I know I did a two-hour interview with Patrick Timpone not long ago and it got international attention.
Wendy Myers: Oh, wow.
Carol Vander Steop: Absolutely.
Wendy Myers: Well, thank you so much Carol. I really appreciate it.
Carol Vander Steop: Thank you.
Wendy Myers: And thank you all to the listeners out there for tuning in to Live to 110 podcast. That’s all for today. Talk to you soon.
