How Your Mouth Relates to Your Overall Health | Dr. Ron Ehrlich

Darin: You are listening to the Darin Olien Show. I’m Darin. I spent the last 15 years exploring the planet looking for healthy foods, superfoods, environmental solutions, and I’ve had my mind blown along the way by the people, the far off places I have been, and the life-altering events that have changed my life forever. My goal is to help you dive deep into some of the issues of our modern-day life, society’s fatal conveniences. The things that we do that we’re indoctrinated into thinking we have to, even though those things are negatively affecting us, and in some cases, slowly destroying us and even killing us. Every week, I have honest conversations with people that inspire me. My hope is through their knowledge and unique perspectives they’ll inspire you too. Together, we’ll explore how you can make small tweaks in your life that amount to big changes for you, the people around you and the planet, so let’s do this. This is my show, the Darin Olien Show.

Darin:  I’m really excited to have this conversation because there are so many things that I’m interested in and what you’re talking about and you did a lot of study obviously. You went into holistic dentistry. So yeah, so I and I’m sure the listeners want to understand like number one, what was the interest of starting down this path? And then what occurred to start cracking you open to these concepts that we’re going to get into?

Dr. Ron: Do you want me to stop? Do you want me to go into that now?

Darin: Get into it.

Dr. Ron: Get into it. Wow. Well, you know, I’ve been in clinical practice for 40 years, Darin. And about six months, yeah, I know, I started really young.

Darin: When you’re 5.

Dr. Ron: A very loyal patient following that didn’t mind being treated by a 10-year-old. Yeah, I got in very early in my dental career. I found myself rather unexpectedly treating chronic pain, and not toothaches, chronic musculoskeletal pain like headaches and neck aches. And that is a big problem, and I wasn’t expecting that dentistry had anything to contribute to it, let alone solver. And I got very excited about that because I had some really exciting results, but it takes you down a tunnel. I mean, if you want to be specialized, a mouth is about almost as specialized as you can get, and you can forget that you’re looking at a whole person. And then as I was doing many, many courses both in the States, in Australia, or in Europe, I stumbled upon a program which introduced me very early on to this model of stress because most people said, oh, I’ve just got a stress-related headache, my headaches related to stress. And I always thought, yeah, but there’s more going on there than that. And this model is the model that I have used for the last 35, almost 40 years of my career. And I believe it’s a great model for asking all the right questions. And that’s important because if you’re going to solve a problem, you need to know what the problem is that helps. And this model of stress said that stress is a function of five stressors: emotional, environmental, postural, nutritional, and dental. And that kind of put me into the perspective that yes, the dental, and I can explain why dental stress is an important stressor for anybody with a mouth who is interested in their health, but has never fully connected the two. But it also gave me a broader perspective on exploring nutritional, postural environmental in the early ’80s, in 1981 or 1982. I mean, I know Rachel Carson had written a book in 1960, but that didn’t mean Environmental Medicine was very prominent in the early ’80s. So I didn’t really got my head around that. And in my mid 20s, as I was at the time, being involved with emotional stress was not where I felt comfortable, both professionally and personally. So I started my journey of exploring nutritional medicine and postural issues. And because I got into nutritional medicine, I invariably got into the Environmental Medicine part of things. And as I’ve gone on, that’s the model that I’ve worked with. So, to me, a stress is anything that compromises your immune system or promote chronic inflammation. And so that journey over the last 40 years has just led me into all these different areas. And it’s, I’m sure you know this, Darin, the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know, and that’s exciting.

Darin: It constantly puts you on the curiosity and learning line, which then just eliminates retirement altogether because it’s a beautiful thing. So I want to unpack a little bit just because your core entry into this through dentistry, and it is still so foreign to realize that these teeth have anything to do with my toe and the energy, meridians, and etc, etc. So, yeah, so unpack that a little bit. And then maybe just start describing how your protocols or what you discovered along the way has facilitated health and healing for people.

Dr. Ron: The reaction I always get when I list out those five stressors is people are nodding for the first four, and then I get to the dental stress, they go, whoa, hang on, hang on, where did that come from? And I include dental stress for two reasons. One, I’ve been a holistic dentist for 40 years, so I feel reasonably well qualified to discuss it. And secondly, as I said, I include it for anybody with the mouth who’s interested in their health, but as never fully connected the two and there are many connections. For example, the two most common infections in men, woman or child are tooth decay and gum disease, and that affects up to 90% of the population to some degree. And pain is very, very rarely associated with it. I mean, toothaches are what brings people to the dentist, but there’s so much more going on there that people are just not aware of. So there’s that. Literally, the shape and size of your mouth determines the shape and size of your upper airway. And so if you think breathing is important and I think we can all agree it is and there is a difference between just breathing and breathing well, then the shape and size of your mouth is important because that also includes sleeping well because sleep is all about not just quantity, but quality. So the shape and size of your mouth, and it’s rather sobering to learn that we’ve evolved to have 32 teeth in our mouth, just like we’ve evolved to have five fingers on each hand. And yet 95% of the population in the Western world do not have enough room for all 32 of their teeth.

Darin: That’s strange, isn’t it?

Dr. Ron: And we’ve come to accept that. I mean, if we didn’t have enough room for all five fingers on our hands, and I said to you, “Darin, you had your fourth finger removed when you’re 18, didn’t you? Everybody does.” And you go, “Yeah, of course I did. I had my fourth finger removed, what do you mean, you have five fingers? What’s that?” We would not have accepted it. And yet we accept this because we don’t understand the potential connection there, to the impact it has on our respiratory system. So that’s another aspect of it. It’s the gateway to the digestive tract. So if you think chewing your food and breaking it down for good digestion and absorption is important, this is important as well. There’s the whole cosmetic and how you’re perceived by the outside world. And we could argue about how important how we perceive this, but the reality is, it’s important, and it’s the most sensitive part of the body. I mean, literally, it is so sensitive that you can pick up 10 microns. For example, you go to a hairdresser, and you get a head caught somewhere in your mouth, you immediately know where that is because there are so many nerves in your mouth to tell you that. And if there are imbalances, then that has a profound impact on your body balance and on chronic musculoskeletal pain, which is what got me into this in the first place. And then there’s a whole story about oral cancer being very– it’s one of the top 10 cancers. So you know, there’s a lot going on in the mouth here. The mouth affects the way we breathe, the way we sleep, the way we eat, the way we perceived the chronic pain and a whole lot more. So there’s a lot going on there.

Darin: Wow. I mean, what you just illuminated already blew my mind because you think about that from a nervous system standpoint and a sensitivity standpoint, I think everyone who just heard that when you get that hair in your mouth, so much attention, it’s so uncomfortable, you got to get it out. You stop everything you’re doing to do that. So then I think about like if 90% of the people have some sort of infection in their mouth and that’s just ongoing, and it’s not like it’s causing an acute shutdown, and they can’t function, but yet it’s ongoing for a lifetime, and there’s so much happening in the mouth, then what are those things as an undercurrent of degeneration? What is that ceding in terms of the rest of the body and the compromise that it’s putting the body in? So can you talk a little bit about that because that’s a startling statistic.

Dr. Ron: When I say 90%, for example, a bit inflamed gums. If your gums bleed when you brush or floss, you know, that’s an indication of some inflammation. Now, if every time I washed my hands, the cuticles in my nails bled, again, I wouldn’t kind of go, oh, gee, I better stop washing my hands for a few days, it’ll get better. And yet people do that all the time. They brush or they floss and something bleeds and they go, oh, a better just leave that alone. It’s actually an indicator that there’s some inflammation there. But then if it’s allowed to go deeper, then it starts to affect the bone supporting the teeth and 50% of the population suffer from that deeper inflammation or infection called periodontitis. And after the age of 65, that number goes up to 70% or 75%. The connection between heart disease, cancer, diabetes, fertility, I even looked at a study this week on fertility, endometriosis, erectile dysfunction, that normally gets men’s attention, but there’s even studies to show that. And it’s not surprising because the common denominator that runs through every chronic disease is chronic inflammation. And the big breakthrough here, Darin, the body is connected. People didn’t know that up to about 20 or 30 years ago. But the body is actually connected to the mouth. The mouth is connected to the whole body, vice versa. And so if you’ve got inflammation or an infection somewhere in the body, it will affect other parts of the body. And so that is a product basically of our diet. There’s no question about that. The diet is the number one contributor to that. And just as we have the hardest part of our body, teeth decay because of what we eat. Just imagine what happens to the rest of our body. Well, we don’t have to imagine. Heart disease is still the number one killer. Cancer number two. There are over 100 autoimmune conditions. Diabetes is through the roof. We talked about daily deaths. We become very conscious of that during this COVID time. It’s rather sobering to learn that there are 52,000 deaths a day. 52,000 deaths a day globally from cardiovascular disease. There are 27,000 deaths a day from cancer. There are 11,000 deaths a day from diabetes. So we’re talking about a day here, right? And nevermind the. 27 million people die of cancer. 52 million die– I mean, the numbers are crazy, and they’re preventable. So what’s going on in the mouth is a reflection of what’s going on in the whole body. And when there is nothing going on in the mouth in terms of its healthy and well formed, then you generally have a healthy individual.

Darin: So for years, maybe most of my life, people have been asking me, “What kind of foods do you eat? What kind of exercises do you do? What kind of water should I drink?” All of these things and so much more we put into a 21-day program so that can take you through a theme every day of knowledge, action, and then eating these delicious meals, working out, getting support, anchoring in these new habits so you can do what? So that you can kick ass. So you have the energy, the vitality to live the kind of life that you really want. That’s what it’s all about. So all in this app, we have grocery lists, we have education about real hydration and what greater oxygenation and the balance of alkalinization. All of these things we are diving into as you’re heading down this hero’s journey of implementation into a new life to give you the kind of life that you actually want. So join my Tribe. All you have to do is go 121tribe.com. Sign up, and you get three free days. Join me on this hero’s journey. Join the Tribe.

Darin: You know, everyone’s caught into habits, right? They’re caught into these habits, and you just illuminated some really good ones. So just making that distinction between, hey, my gums are bleeding, my gums are bleeding. If my hands were bleeding, you do something about it. So if people are already compromised and they’re sitting in this situation, and they’re like, and I’m sure people are nodding their heads going, my gums are bleeding almost every time. What are some easy steps that people can do just to start cleaning up that part of their world so they can implement some new habits?

Dr. Ron: Well, I think the first thing is to take stock of where you are, and that means to have a comprehensive checkup. And I use the word comprehensive because going in for a checkup with a dentist who looks in your mouth and goes, yeah, you’re okay. Do you have any pain? No? Good. X-rays, you’re out of here in 5 or 10 minutes. I mean, a new patient exam in my practice takes an hour and a lot of that is history of getting a picture of a person’s general health. How is their digestive system working? How are they chronically tired? How are they sleeping, etc, etc. So getting a good comprehensive history and picture of your health is important. And x-rays are an important part of that because there’s so much in this area that we simply cannot see. So that’s the first thing and taking stock of where you are. And don’t use pain as a barometer of health. Can you imagine going to see a cardiologist and he goes to you, “Darin, how are you?” And you go, “Fine.” And he says, “Have you had any pain?” And you go, “No.” And he goes, “Okay, well, come back when you’re in pain.” And you would think wow, that’s not a very comprehensive cardiologist, and similarly pain’s a really poor barometer of health. So a comprehensive exam is important to know where you are at. And that word comprehensive is important. Secondly, looking at your tire, and that is not only what you’re eating, what you’re drinking, how you’re breathing, are you a mouth breather, are you a nasal breather? Having a dry mouth predisposes you to a lot of problems of which dental– oral disease is just one of them. I mean, upper respiratory problems is another and poor sleep is another. And we often look at quality of sleep because the quality of sleep, if you’re not getting a consistently good night’s sleep, your immune system is compromised. No question about it. So there is another factor. So we need to focus on what we eat, how we breathe, how we sleep, and then how we look after our own teeth. I mean, if you were on a stone age diet where you had no carbohydrates to speak of, no refined carbohydrates, no sugar, and you were just drinking water, whether you brushed or floss your teeth, I know, this is a terrible thing for a dentist to say, it probably wouldn’t be that significant, but we live in a real world. And even if 90% of our diet is good, it’s that 10% that requires attention, and so regular hygiene on your own part is very important unless you’re on a stone age diet. And there’s been some interesting studies to look at that.

Darin: Yeah. And another question just for me personally, too, because I and maybe other people because I’ve had a root canal and it’s the one thing I want to change because I landed on my face. See that front tooth right there? I landed on my face when I was riding BMX one day, and we never even wore helmets in 1976 or whatever it was. And obviously, when you do a root canal, you’re leaving a dead tooth, you’re drilling it out, and there’s potential for a lot of infection in there, and then that’s affecting a lot of things. What’s your stance on root canals?

Dr. Ron: It’s a very contentious issue. And in our practice, we do some in and often we remove some. So the answer is, it depends. And it depends on a few things. Not all root canals are the same, number one. The way a tooth, let me just explain for your listener so very quick, root canal 101. Inside a tooth, there is a nerve and blood vessels. So when you traumatize a tooth as you did, that nerve in the tooth dies, and you end up with gangrenous tissue inside the tooth, which if it’s left there, will spread to the surrounding jaw bone and start to eat away a little bit of the jaw bone. And in an x-ray, that will show up as a shadow at the tip of a root. And that’s what requires either a root canal or extraction because you can’t leave chronic infection and gangrene in the mouth. So then you clean it out, you identify the canals, you measure them, you clean them out, you try to clean them as much as you can, and then fill. And then 12 months later, if the root canal has been well done, and I should say that root canal therapy is one of the most technically challenging parts of a very technically challenging profession. Dentistry is a very technically challenging profession. And all of that profession, root canal treatment is, I believe, the most technically challenge to do well. Anybody can do a crappy root canal treatment. A monkey could do a root canal treatment. But to do it well is a different story. And how do you define well? Well, if you go back 12 months later, and where there was infection and a hole in your jaw bone, healthy bone has regenerated, I think what we could say is that something positive has gone on there. When bone regenerates, you’d have to say something positive has gone on. And is it perfect? No, it’s not. Is it completely sterile? No, it’s not. How important is that? It depends. It depends on your immune function. And your immune function may change from today to 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 years time. So this requires an ongoing conversation and an ongoing monitoring. So we have taken out, there are some times when you are just better off taking out a root canal treatment that has been done technically well but still has infection there, as is determined by a 3d x-ray. That has been a total revelation to me after 40 years of practice, very sobering. You know, we’ve been using root 3d x-rays for the last 10 years, and it has been very, very sobering. Things that I thought were okay, I’m not. And things that I thought might not be okay, are actually not bad, and so it depends. The answer is it depends. It depends on how well it’s done. It depends on your immune system and it depends on how your immune system progresses over a lifetime.

Darin: That’s a professional answer, I think, you know what I mean? Because it’s easy to stand up and say all root canals are bad, take them all out and all of that stuff and I think with your experience and stuff it makes sense.

Dr. Ron: You know, Darin, I often say to my patients, I wish I could be more dogmatic because it makes life so much more easy, it’s so much easier. See, I could say to you, all root canals must come out, and that rolls off my tongue very easily. And it has all sorts of implications because when you have that tooth out, Darin, you’re going to need to have it replaced. You can’t walk around without a front tooth. And to put an implant in there is a lot of dentistry and a lot of expense. And also, it’s titanium or zirconium. And that it has its own issues, or you’re going to have a bridge, which puts a crown on either side and the fourth tooth in the middle. And what if one of those teeth has a nerve problem? What do you do then, go for a bigger bridge? A lot of dentistry, it’s a good economic model, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the best health model. And I think the answer to that is to be open minded to all things. I must say, even on patients where it looks okay on an x-ray. So the bone has healed up, but the patient says to me, “You know, I know it looks alright on the x-ray, and I know you say to me, it’s alright, but there’s something wrong with this tooth,” then you can never dismiss the likelihood of there being a tiny crack in there somewhere that you cannot see with an x-ray and that tooth still needs to come out. So we need to listen to our patients as well as be professional about it.

Darin: How many people listening right now are saying, I gotta go to my dentist, I got to get my checkup, I gotta go after this thing. So yeah, so shifting gears a little bit then. You’re kind of that first line of seeing the effect of food coming in, and this first ecosystem that we have, not only protecting us a bit but also starting the digest the process, you know, the balance of acids and alkalines, and there’s so much going on. So described to me, I mean, we can certainly say standard American diet is gonna throw you off, but I guess from your seat, what do you actually see from people eating poorly and what are they eating and then vice versa? What are you seeing and how quickly are you seeing changes when people are actually eating whole healthy foods? And then maybe describe what you perceive as a good diet to move into.

Dr. Ron: You know, it’s interesting because one of the stressors that I use in my model is nutritional stress. And whenever we’re talking about nutritional stress, we always hold up the hamburgers and the chips and the crap fries, you call them, and the pizzas and all that. But I would argue that probably the biggest nutritional stress that we’ve endured is the food pyramid, which morphed into the food plate, which is basically a construct of the US Department of Agriculture, and was designed to sell more grains. And it put at the base of the food pyramid 6 to 11 servings of grains a day, and it also demonized fats. And when we look through our evolutionary history, our journey over the last couple of 100,000 years, if not millions of years, fats have been an important part of that process. And so I think the key is really– so I would say, a lot of the things that we have been advised to eat have contributed to our problems. And I’ve often said that the way our healthcare system works is literally fed by the chemical and the food industry and then managed by the pharmaceutical and the medical industry, including the dental industry, and that is a beautiful economic model. It generates literally billions of dollars of profits for all of the above, but it’s just not a very good health model. So the question is, what should we eat and what should be the basic principles of what we should be thinking about? And there are so many different diets out there. There’s vegetarian, there’s vegan, there’s carnivore, there’s paleo, there’s keto, there’s this, there’s low fat, there’s high fat, there’s avoid grains, avoid gluten, avoid dairy, so many things. So to me, there are basic principles. And the basic principle is you should have a nutrient dense diet. And the way I define a nutrient dense diet is we require about 60 elements. You know, there are 120 odd elements in the periodic table. The human body needs about 60 of them. We know what 25 of those elements do. We don’t know what some of the others do, but let’s say 60 elements the periodic table. We also need some essential amino acids. There are 20 amino acids, but there are eight or nine that we can make ourselves, so we need to incorporate that. And we need essential fatty acids. And we need to have a balance between omega three and omega six, which are pro inflammatory, anti inflammatory. So broad principle is that, and that means we need food that is grown in healthy soils. And that is a whole other story about why agriculture is an issue for every single one of us. And while you know, you guys have just voted in your election, and you might wonder about how effective one vote is every four years, but we get to vote every single day with how we spend our money, and that drives what is on the supermarket shelf, it drives what is planted in the soil, it drives how land is managed. We have an impact on that. So I think what we need is to take a step back, have some broad principles, don’t get confused by all the chatter by the avalanche of information that comes our way, just have some basic principles. And those are those, that we need nutrient dense diet. And we need to incorporate healthy fats in that because without healthy fats, and that is the fat soluble vitamins like A, D, E and K, we’re not going to absorb our water soluble vitamins and minerals that we need to be healthy. So this whole demonization of fats and the promotion of a high carbohydrate diet is really not good. The other thing I would say is, through our evolutionary journey of millions of years, the idea of eating three meals a day and two snacks, again, is a great economic model, but it’s not the way we’ve evolved. And I think we need to embrace hunger, and I think not eat as much as we do.

Darin: Well, that’s that’s one thing that unfortunately, we people adopted from our way over here in the West. And that’s something that we we are starting to change. Dr. Zach Bush is doing a lot of great work with Farmers Footprint. He’s doing a lot of great things. But you you mentioned something that I stress as well, and everyone on here, it’s like, literally, the dollars and the voting with the dollars is it’s pleomorphic. So there are many reasons for that. Number one is, you’re choosing food that’s better for you. So it’s a, in a good way, a good selfish thing to do and your family, but it’s also taking profits out of these companies that don’t have your interest. And then several other layers, it’s not going to put money that you’ll have to pay for pharmaceutical drugs down the line because you’re building up a strong body with every bite you take. And so this is that power that we need to realize as people and take ownership of that and I think collaboration and population is more powerful than a leader, a government, and all of that stuff because ultimately the numbers will win.

Dr. Ron: Well, I’ve got very involved in holistic land management, which is about regenerative agriculture. And I incidentally, in my own podcast, this week’s episode came out with David Leon, who is the CEO of Farmers Footprint.

Darin: That’s great.

Dr. Ron: And I’m looking forward to getting Zach Bush on my show as well. The similarities between holistic land management and holistic health care are really profound. And it can be summarized in one sentence, and that is we need to enable nature rather than dominate it. And that’s what regenerative agriculture is all about, enabling rather than dominating. We have had a very adversarial effect to microbes in our health journey through the last 50 or 100 years. And we are now suffering for it and coming to realize that we need a very healthy relationship with microbes and fungi. And so this enabling nature rather than dominating it is one of our most powerful tools. And regenerative is so interesting like soil is our best resource. We need to preserve that. And it takes nature 500 years to grow one inch of soil. Now on a regenerative farm that is well managed, you can grow one inch soil in three to five years. So you know, soil is one of America’s biggest exports, and it’s going out, it’s not coming back. We all are degrading our soil at a rate that is unsustainable. So regenerative agriculture is a really important movement.

Darin: Many of you who follow me know I’ve spent most of my life searching for the healthiest foods on the planet from the Amazon jungle to the Andes of Peru, to the Himalayas and Bhutan, to the deserts of Africa, and everything in between discovering hundreds of plants and herbs and superfoods like this is my passion. Things like sacha inch, an Incan treasure, wild [unintelligible 00:31:41] mushrooms, things like Maya nuts, another Aztec superfood, wild cocoa moringa, many adaptogenic herbs and on and on and on. If you look hard enough, there are a few unknown extraordinary foods around the world that people still don’t know about. And a few years ago, I came across my favorite superfood discovery of all time, barukas nuts. Why is that my favorite? Well, when I first tasted them, my eyes lit up. I was blown away. They’re so delicious with notes of popcorn and cocoa and chocolate with peanut butter, and with this amazing crunch, so the taste alone just absolutely blew me away. But after sending them to the lab, which I do, and getting all the tests, I realized they’re the healthiest nuts on the planet. No other nut even compares. They have an unusually high amount of fiber, which is critical for healthy digestion. We’re all getting way too low of fiber in our diet and it’s good for the healthy bacteria and microbiome. And they’re off the charts in super high antioxidants, and have few calories than any other nut. It’s jam-packed with micronutrients. And what they don’t have is just as important as what they do have because they’re found in the forest in the savanna what’s called the Cerrado biome of Brazil, not grown on a plantation or a farm. They’re untouched by industrial pesticides, larvicides, fertilizers. They’re truly a wild food. But they’re not just good for you, they’re really good for the planet. Most other nuts require millions of gallons of irrigated water, not to mention, using bees and shipping them across the United States and just horrible sustainable practices just to grow certain nuts annually, but Baruka trees require no artificial irrigation. At one time, the Cerrado’s forest were made up of millions of these trees. These trees are incredible. They’re nitrogen fixers. They give back to the other plants in the forest. Their grandfather of sacred trees, but most of them were chopped down to make way for cattle, soy, and corn production. When you’re down in Brazil, it can be absolutely shocking. And actually, I’ve cried several times with miles and miles of deforested land filled with soy farms. This beautiful Savanna filled with soy farms and cattle grazing. Our mission is to reverse that. And the long term goal is to plant 20 million new baruzeiro trees throughout the Cerrado. And if that wasn’t enough, we are also providing highly beneficial and fair jobs for thousands of indigenous people so they can stay on their land and they can thrive with this consistent income every year forging and working with Barukas. Barukas are truly good for you, good for the planet, and good for the world community. It’s a win all the way around. I really think you’ll love them, so I’m giving all of my listeners 15% off by going to barukas.com/darin. That’s B-A-R-U-K-A-S dot com backslash Darin, D-A-R-I-N and using the code “Darin” at the checkout. I know you will enjoy.

Darin: So a little bit more about stress. What are some things that, and I love that too, I agree the nutritional stress is a major thing. You change that from eating all of this stuff that has chemicals and glyphosate and stressors. There’s like this twofold, you’re not getting the nutrient complexity that you need and the elements that we require. And not only you’re not getting that, you’re getting exposed to this toxic soup that we’ve created in our modern-day world. So it’s it’s exponentially bad when you’re choosing to eat Dorito chips over a salad. So that’s a big, big one. And so yeah, so break down stress a little more, and what you see are positive stressors, and some things that people can do right now to shift from negative stress into some positive stress actions.

Dr. Ron: Well, as you allude to, Darin, not all stress is bad. In fact, intentional stress is good. We call it exercise. That’s an intentional stress. Fasting, you know, that’s been going on in traditional cultures and religions for thousands of years. That’s actually an intentional stress that is actually quite healthy. It gives the body a chance to mop up disease or dying cells. So fasting is a stress that is good. Saunas, another good, heat or cold. You know, the work of Wim Hof. I’m sure you’ve followed that. This is about putting our bodies under intentional stress. One could even argue that meditation is an intentional stress that is very positive because they’re trying to quiet the mind down. It is a big stress for a lot of people, but it’s very positive. So there are some positive stressors, but I would define a stress that compromises our immune system and promotes chronic inflammation as one we should try to identify and minimize. And to that effect, for example, emotional. Emotional stress is what most people think of. When we talk about stress, people always think about emotional stress. And there are certain things you can change in the world. There are certain things you can’t. And one of my podcasts where we’re talking to a regenerative agriculture expert who said change what you can change, you know, focus on what you can change. And that was a really interesting thing to hear because while we can’t change events and people, we can change our attitude to that. And that’s how most powerful tool. Now that is easier said than done. And in order to change your attitude to it, you need to build resilience, physical, mental and emotional into it. So that’s why looking at the other stressors are important. For example, environmental stressors, there are literally tens of thousands, if not 120,000 different chemicals in the world. And as we’ve walked through the supermarket shelf, we might be excused for thinking they’ve all been tested, but they haven’t. Only a very small percentage, maybe 5% or 10% at the most are being tested. But when you hear how they tested, you realize we’re in a big experiment because the way a chemical is tested is one at a time, usually on a healthy university student or volunteer for a period of a month or two or three and that’s it, but that’s not the way we’re exposed to them. We’re exposed to combinations of chemicals for years on in. For example, if you gave lead a toxic value of 1 and you gave mercury a toxic value of 1, and you’re exposed to both those, you might assume that 1 + 1 = 2, but it doesn’t. 1 + 1 could equal 10. It’s an exponential effect. So this synergistic effect of chemicals that has never been tested over the length of period that we’re exposed to them, which we’re part of that experiment, and if the evidence is anything to go by and you mentioned glyphosate, and you can a look at a graph of glyphosate use from 1970s to now and you can track that against the increase in almost every disease. And you might say, “Well, glyphosate causes all of those diseases.” Well, it certainly contributed to it along with 1,000 of other chemicals. So that chemical soup which we’re exposed to in our personal care products, in our homes, in our clothes, in our food, and that can be really overwhelming but the beautiful thing about that and depressing, I might add, but the nice thing about that is by making informed choices, you can reduce your chemical load by 80% or 90%. So that’s important. I think there’s another environmental stressor that we need to be aware of, and that is our relationship with radiation, wifi radiation, and technology. A guy by name of Einstein said something really important and he said, “Every atom in the university is both energy and matter.” Which means every atom means our body. And if you think, and here I am sitting with this by my side, but anyway, you’ve been– but hang on, I’ve also got one of these which is electro radiation detector.

Darin: I got one too.

Dr. Ron: So if you think that this kind of radiation, the holding to our rear, we’re putting in our laps, we’re surrounding our houses with, doesn’t have any biological effect that is naive at the very best, and probably negligent at the very worst. So I think we need to have a healthy respect for that, the World Health Organization has. It classified wifi radiation as a class 2B carcinogen, which means it’s a possible carcinogen. And so, I think that’s another one. And then within our house, as we try to hermetically seal our houses and make them more energy-efficient, we’ve created other issues around dampness, mold, and molds and mycotoxins are a significant thing. So building myology is another environment of stressor. So that’s environmental medicine. Postural stress, well, you know, we’re sitting. We do that a lot. But the one big postural stress is our head. Millions of years ago, we stood up on two legs, and that was a big challenge because suddenly, we were balancing this 10-pound ball on a spine that was relatively unstable. But as I tilt my head down, down, down, by the time I get to this level, that 10-pound ball is now 27 pounds. And that puts a strain on my neck and shoulder and whole back. How many people walk around like that? That’s number one. We spend a lot of time sitting, sleep positions and other postural stress. The way we sit on the toilet is another postural stress. I go into it in quite a deal of details. And we talked about dental stress. So there’s a few of the stressors.

Darin: I meanit’s so great because it’s such a beautiful title to a Life Less Stress, and I encourage everyone, I got through a bunch of it and I just resonated with every topic that you’re bringing up here because it’s foundational and so necessary and powerful. Because of this kind of modern-day world that in one hand it’s so convenient, there’s all these other– I have a term called ‘fatal conveniences.’ So sticking the phone up to the head, I can call anywhere in the world, and yet now I’m radiating my brain affecting RNA-DNA signalling, etc. protein connections, blah blah blah. And it’s something that I’m glad you brought that up because it’s something that we have to minimize. And it’s the unseen world that’s very challenging. I know even a decade ago, there was a study out that every child born today in the modern world, there are 200 carcinogenic compounds in the umbilical cord. So it’s not that we’re okay, I’m cool, I’m out in the country. No, by the act of you being here, we have done so much harm chemically that teflon’s proliferated throughout almost every corner of the globe. Glyphosate, obviously, water soluble raining down everywhere. Now wifi signals, the insanity of trying to kind of the agenda of making the globe kind of a permanent wifi signal from satellites. It’s a dangerous, dangerous thing that we’re playing. But like you said, there are solutions to that and there are so much we can do to liberate ourselves from those things and take our biological power back so that we don’t have to kind of drag around this life. And we can stay curious and moving forward, like you and I, and never retire. And just continue to push forward. So last question. You know, kind of taking everything that we just discussed from COVID to our life right now, and I know you’re very much into thought patterns and everything else, what would you say to people right now that are listening that are definitely psychologically stressed now they’re aware that they have stress in their mouth more than they thought, now they’re aware that there is a lot of chemicals, now they’re aware that there’s EMFs hitting them? What would you say to them now that is something that they can do or maybe something that they can perceive moving forward?

Dr. Ron: Well, I think this is an incredible– we started this conversation, Darin, by agreeing both that this was an incredible opportunity because we’re in a period of global reflection on health like never before. And I think the message overwhelmingly is that your health is just too important to leave to anybody else. You got to take control of it yourself, number one. Number two, as we live in a more complicated– our world is definitely very complex. The solutions are actually remarkably simple. I mean, what could be simpler than focusing on building resilience by prioritizing sleep. It doesn’t cost anything. There are so many other aspects to this model. One the one hand reducing stress, on the other hand build resilience. So while the world is very much more complicated, the solutions are remarkably simple, and it’s really important. With information comes power and that power is all about empowering yourself to take control and be the best you can be and don’t get stressed about it.

Darin: That’s it, man. Doc, this has been such a great conversation. I am excited that you’ve taken on the angle that you have with opening up and talking about the holeism that we all need to come from, and also illuminating the importance of this mouth ecosystem and this dental ecosystem that we, myself included, have blown off. And so thank you so much for your time, for your passion, for your curiosity, and everyone needs to checkout his book because it’s fantastic.

Dr. Ron: Thank you so much, Darin.

Darin: Thanks, brother.

Darin: That was a fantastic episode. What was the one thing that you got out of today’s conversation? If today’s episode struck a chord with you, and you want to dive a little deeper on a variety of topics, check out my live deep dives on darinolien.com/deepdive. More episodes are available on darinolien.com as well. Keep diving my friends, keep diving.

Darin: This episode is produced by my team at Must Amplify, an audio marketing company that specializes in giving a voice to a brand and making sure the right people hear it. If you would like or are thinking about doing a podcast or even would like a strategy session to add your voice to your brand in a powerful way, go to www.mustamplify.com/darin. That’s www.mustamplify.com/darin.