From ANH International
THE TOPLINE
- The past 4 years has done untold damage to our relationship with microbes. The messaging to sanitize, sanitize, sanitize has been turned up several notches, but with scant regard to the essentiality of the raft of microbes on which our health and wellbeing relies — complex, intelligent microbial communities that interact with each other and with their human support systems that create unique microbiomes for each and every one of us.
- One of the most neglected and dysfunctional microbiomes is the one in our mouths – the oralome or oral microbiome. The community of microbes that live in our mouths, when dysregulated, can cause poor dental health, impact and travel to other parts of our body, contributing to the development of a multitude of disease states from Alzheimer’s and heart disease to cancer and beyond.
- A vibrant and thriving oralome creates multiple health benefits, including a great set of healthy teeth to last you long into your senior years.
- We’re heavily sold on fluoride-laden, alcohol-based, and antibacterial dental products, but these products are toxic and contribute to the destruction of our highly complex, intelligent oralome.
- Catch our top tips to create a healthy and vibrant oralome, which in turn will support your overall health and wellbeing and reduce your risk of creating dysfunction and developing debilitating disease states.
Have you nuked those nasty decay-causing bacteria in your mouth in the last 24 hours with fluoride toothpaste and alcohol-based mouthwash?
We hope not. Read on…
The last 4 years has probably done more to damage our relationship with microbes than at any other time since the inception of proper sanitation in the modern world. From masks to the now ubiquitous hand sanitisers, our focus has been diligently and expertly drawn repeatedly to the danger of pathogens, whilst pressing our survival buttons again and again, lest we not make a sufficiently strong and real association between survival fear and pathogens. An association that we already have programmed into our genetic blueprints as a hangover from times long past, which makes us humans vulnerable to re- and pre- survival programming.
But not all microbes are bad pathogens out to get us. In fact, such is our deeply symbiotic, and evolutionary, relationship with them, we are only around 1% human DNA – the rest is microbial DNA contained within our vast microbiome. Did you know that your body is home to a diverse and functionally important accumulation of symbiotic microbes that are found within and across different sites like the gut, respiratory tract, skin, vagina and oral cavity? Just the bacterial element of our microbiomes are thought now to be almost a 1:1 ratio — a typical 70kg person has around 3 trillion human cells and around 3.8 trillion bacterial cells, not counting all the rest of the microbes making up the microbiome. More than that, our microbiomes are hugely individual and are unique to each and every one of us. Yet how often do you spare a thought for your hard-working microbial partners and gear your food and lifestyle choices to their needs?
There is still so much that we don’t know about the microbiome, but we do know that human health depends on it being diverse, highly functional and robustly healthy. This article is dedicated, in particular, to the oral microbiome — the oralome — given its extreme importance to our general health and, still too widespread, disregard by conventional dentistry and healthcare.
