 On this episode of the Dr. Gundry podcast, I am speaking with now LA-based chef, author, restaurateur, and wellness advocate, Seamus Mullen. More than a decade ago, Seamus was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that causes pain and swelling in your joints, among other things that we're going to talk about. But through diet, exercise, and other lifestyle changes, he was able to turn things around. And now, he's using his experience to help others. Seamus, welcome to the program. It's good to see you. Good to see you as well. Thanks for having me. Thank you. You know, I was on your GoopFellows podcast, and we had a great conversation, and a good time, and thank you. So you've opened multiple successful restaurants, and have been featured on shows like The Next Iron Chef, CHOP, The Today Show, and like I mentioned, co-host of the GoopFellows podcast. So you've made a name for yourself in the culinary world. So how did you get into that in the first place? You know, I was really lucky to grow up on a small farm in Vermont. So I was around good food from a very, very early age, and my grandmother was an exceptional cook, and she was my primary caregiver. My parents were working. So I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with her when I was little. And it's funny. When people ask me when I learned to cook, I actually can't ever remember not cooking. Cooking was just one of the chores that my brother and I had to do when we were growing up. There was one night a week when we had to cook, starting from a very young age. And the more I realized when I made food that made people happy, the more I realized this is something I actually really like doing. Being able to bring a meal to the table and then see the reaction and have my parents be proud of me, or if they had guests that came over to be impressed by the fact that there was a kid that was involved in the kitchen. I just loved it. And of course, I loved to eat as well. So it was sort of a natural beginning. I never thought of it as a career, though. It was just something that I loved doing. It was more of a hobby as I got older, and then when I got out of college, I realized that this actually could become a career. So you didn't go to college specifically to go to Cornell and do the restaurant thing or the hotel management? No. I studied Spanish literature of all things. And yeah, I was very interested in Spain. I lived in Spain for a number of years, and in fact, after graduating from university, I went back to Spain and worked in Spain in kitchens there. So that's kind of where I got my foundation, officially in cooking. Spanish literature, a lot of great business opportunities. Oh yeah. I mean, it's great. It's a perfect way to get into the restaurant industry. Yeah. So you lived in Spain and worked in Spain. So a great culture of cooking and cuisine. Interesting. Yeah. All right. So you got into that, and then what happened? Well, I was really healthy when I was younger, for the most part. Actually, I should backtrack and say I wasn't really healthy when I was younger. I struggled with a lot of health issues, but despite that, I was able to still be healthy, which I think is pretty common for a lot of folks. Like I had a lot of, early on I had a lot of digestive issues when I was a child. And then that kind of led to a variety of a lot of sinus infections, strep throat, things like that. You still have your tonsils? I still have my tonsils, yeah, fortunately. I don't think that my family, I mean, nobody was really, my doctors, my family, nobody made a connection between the fact that I would be bloated after every meal, and I had a lot of issues that sort of spiraled and went on and on, that I was able to kind of deal with as a teenager and a young adult. But once I started to get into the kitchen and really into a stressful environment where I was working really hard, my health started to break down. And it took a long time. It wasn't until I went through a complete transformation and overhaul of my health that I realized that the roots of my illness of rheumatoid arthritis and my autoimmune dysfunction went all the way back to early childhood. Yeah, and that's very typical of all the patients I see. 70% of my practice is now autoimmune diseases. And you're right. When you look at people and ask them about their childhood, it starts from a very early age, almost universally. Now, there are adult circumstances where you can get an autoimmune disease kind of out of the blue and they will get into that. So in 2007, you were actually diagnosed. Yeah, I was diagnosed, but I had been sick for a long time before that, for many, many years. I started having RA flare-ups when I was probably in 18 or 19. And I wasn't diagnosed for another 15 years. So when you say flare-ups, what does that mean for everybody listening? For me, the initial flare-ups were excruciating pain in the shoulder. I would have it maybe three times in a row on my left shoulder and then months later, I'd get a flare-up on my right shoulder. And it literally felt like somebody was stabbing me in the shoulder. Incredible pain. I couldn't move my arm. It would usually last a day or two, sometimes three days. And then it would go away. And I thought for the longest time that I had slept wrong on my arm and I was pinching a nerve. I'd ask, you know, my mom said, you probably have bursitis. It runs in our family. You've got bursitis. And I didn't know what that meant, but just that there was some inflammation called bursitis in my shoulder. And when I go to the doctor, generally what happened by the time I would get to a doctor, the flare-up had already passed. So there was nothing really to examine. And when it was happening, you know, I usually was like, well, this will go away pretty soon. It's not a big deal. But it was debilitatingly painful for a short period of time. What ended up happening is that it went from those kind of periodic, acute attacks in my shoulder to eventually, as my health really started to deteriorate, to getting them in my hands and in other joints. And that's when it was really clear that there was something pretty severe going on. So this wasn't growing up as a kid. You went out and started throwing the baseball or the football around for the first time after six months. And, you know, your shoulder was sore. But that's not it. This is just boom. No, and then the thing was is I actually thought that could have been the case. Because initially what would happen to my right shoulder, I thought it was because I had thrown the baseball too hard when I was younger playing Little League, that I might have some sort of labrum tear. But the pain is really, really specific and incredibly. I mean, unless you've actually experienced RA pain in a joint, it's very hard to describe what it's like. I mean, when I get it in my, even in my pinky right here, it felt like somebody was taking a hammer and smashing my finger with a hammer. I mean, it was really, really painful. Good. So can you catch rheumatoid arthritis? Can you catch it? Well, not from someone else. Oh, okay, good. Yeah, I know. Well, actually that's not entirely true. I suppose that if you think of, I mean, because we got, we very frequently think that, oh, you're genetically predisposed to this. I'm a firm believer in both nature and nurture. And I think that a lot of what ends up happening, particularly when people say, oh, high cholesterol runs in my family. It might run in your family, probably because the people in your family have the same sort of lifestyle that you have. So in that sense, I suppose you could catch an autoimmune dysfunction like RA if there are other folks in your family that have the same kind of environmental set of circumstances and lifestyle as you do. Yeah, and it's true. I think there is a small genetic component to most autoimmune diseases or the susceptibility to develop it. And I used to do family trees of all my patients with autoimmune disease. And you can kind of spot these in siblings, aunts, uncles, great-grandmothers or great-grandfathers. Interestingly enough, a lot of these families have histories of lymphomas or leukemias, which is actually, maybe we'll talk about that, but Ann. All right, so, but you were also a competitive cyclist, right? Yeah, so in my late teens and early 20s, I was very fit, I was very athletic. And it's funny, and I think back, I ride a lot now, and I'm really into cycling, gotten back into it. And I think back to what I know now about nutrition. And if I had known then what I know now, at the time, there was zero emphasis put on nutrition and diet in competitive cycling, well, in most competitive sports in general. And now we understand this notion of marginal gains and that every little aspect of, look at somebody like LeBron, for instance, who's controlling his sleep and controlling his nutrition and his recovery and using every minimal advantage point he can, every lever to be the best possible athlete he can be. And I look back at what we would do, and I was literally eat a jar of peanut butter, eat a big bowl of pasta the night before, all of the classic, what we were told, just load on carbs, you'll be fine, that's what you need to do. There was no emphasis put on recovery, on sustainable nutrition. But despite that, it's remarkable what, when you're 18, 19, 20 years old, you can pretty much deal with anything. And I was really fighting at a deficit because I was ill, but the real genesis of my illness didn't present itself until 10 years later. But in many ways, I think that period of time when I was really competing very seriously on the bicycle, it's so stressful and taxing on the body that if you are dealing with something like an autoimmune dysfunction, eventually systems within the body are gonna start to deteriorate. So would you, I mean, looking back, would you have ever put together that maybe that pasta load the night before would have a negative content? No, not at all, no, it's funny. I even, for many years, even up until my early 30s, I'd eat food that would make me feel like crap, and I'd still eat it. I'd still like, oh yeah, well, I love spicy Thai food, but it's not gonna make me feel good, but I love it anyway. And I continued to do it. And it took a really long time for me to really be able to thread the needle and say, okay, if I eat this, this is how I feel. And eventually start to change my, and even to this day, I still make mistakes. And I think that that's part of the challenge with being human is that the temptations of things like sugar and salty, crunchy carbohydrates are desirable to all of us. It's sort of, we're pre-wired to love these things or to want these things. Even when we know they may not make us feel so well. No, you're absolutely right. I used to have a collection of, I don't know, a hundred hot sauces and my brother in line would have actually competitions of who could eat the hottest stuff. And of course, it would tear up my insides. And I thought it was kind of normal that you spent the next day in the bathroom. And the old joke was, it should hurt more coming out than it did going in. And it's true. The infamous ring of fire. Yeah, the ring of fire. So yeah, and back in those days, I didn't ever make the connection. It's like, oh, that's normal. No, it's not. It's not. So did the rheumatoid arthritis, so as a chef and you're busy in the kitchen and you're, so you must have noticed it then? Yeah, I was having major problems. I mean, I would have, when I was briefly when the flare-ups became more and more frequent, I wouldn't be able to reach to grab a pan or to get something from overhead, even to pick anything up. I mean, when I was running service, you'd have to grab the dupes that are printing out of it, out of the printer to say what to make. And I remember, I have one very specific memory of seeing these dupes print up where it was a busy, busy service and I couldn't lift my arm to get them. And we were going, we call it in the kitchen, going in the weeds, you're in the weeds, you're getting weeded because there was just no way that I could actually read the tickets to run service. So something as simple as lifting my arm up to grab a ticket. And that's, that was when things really started to go downhill for me. So did you know at that point, I mean that you had rheumatoid arthritis or this was just a pain in the neck, a pain in their arm? It was just pain. I mean, it was pain. And unfortunately the world of the kitchen is a very 19th century world where you don't complain. You put your head down. There's a lot of pride in who's worked the longest and the hardest and gone the most number of days without a day off and there's a lot of- It's like a surgical resident. I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's a lot of machismo. It's very, very militaristic in many ways. And also it didn't help that, you know, when I would go to my doctor, I didn't really have any answers. And I found that this is a very common situation with folks when they're going through a diagnosis of autoimmune dysfunction. It's changed a lot now because there's so much awareness about it. But when I was diagnosed, it was nobody really, I mean, I had never heard of rheumatoid arthritis. I knew very little about autoimmune dysfunction. There wasn't, you know, if you went to your doctor, the first thing that the doctor would give you and give you some NSAIDs and maybe a cortisone shot in whatever joint was bothering you and zen you on your way. And it wasn't as though there was any understanding of the underlying cause of these symptoms, what was driving it. So it was, in many ways, you kind of had to be your own advocate. And I just didn't have the time, the resources, or in a way, I actually didn't even have really the desire to be my own advocate. I think that there's an emotional component that when you're, for many people, and I know this is certainly the case for me, being sick was somewhat comfortable. There was an element of being a victim that kind of excused me from the responsibility of trying to take care of my own well-being. Well, you know, it's interesting. A lot of my patients, particularly women who do get more autoimmune diseases than men, do fall into this, this is my life, this is my cross to bear, if you will, and just kind of, I need to suck this up. I need to be strong. Yeah. Yeah. So that's interesting for you to say that. Yeah, it's unfortunate. But, and I'd certainly, once I was diagnosed, and then I kind of settled into this routine of, I mean, I was diagnosed with RA, which was, to a degree, there was a relief that came along with that because I had a diagnosis to hang my hat on. There was an explanation that, okay, there is in fact something wrong, it's not just in your head, which was also kind of my fear for a long time, having gone to the hospital over and over again and been sent away with NSAIDs, I did begin to think that I was being a hypochondriac or maybe I was overreacting, but once I was diagnosed, then there was confirmation that there was something wrong and there was this treatment path, if you will, but the treatment path was really, you're gonna be on biologic drugs for the rest of your life. And that to me was kind of a jagged little pill to swallow. I did, initially I kind of, as I said, I settled into it, I became very much of like a woe is me, I'm a victim, there's nothing I can do about this. And that, you can only go one of two directions with that and I realized pretty quickly that if I didn't change, I wasn't gonna be around for very long. So let's go down that, so they, okay, so they make the diagnosis and congratulations, there's these wonderful biologic drugs and you're gonna be on them the rest of your life. And if this one doesn't work, there's another one. That's right, we've got 10 of them now or 12 of them now. And like I tell my patients, look, you don't have a heart transplant, a lung transplant or a kidney transplant, what the heck are you doing on these drugs that I use for this? Okay, so, and you said, did you take them for a while? Yeah, I did for years. And what I noticed, what happened in going on, going down the conventional path for treatment for AI disease was I stopped having the acute attacks. So the acute flare-ups where my joints were so painful that I couldn't actually move my, like say, I couldn't move my arm or my leg, that went away. And it was replaced by this sluggish, malaise, depression, weight gain, susceptibility to illness and infection. And I was in and out of the hospital over and over again with these secondary problems that were a result of the meds that I was on. And in fact, at one point I was prescribed a neurologic drug for neuropathy, for fibromyalgia, another like, you know, garbage bail diagnosis, that in conjunction with the litany of pain medications that I was taking and biologics caused severe grand mal seizure. And then later I got an infection that spread to my brain and that nearly killed me. And that's when I was really clear that I had to take a completely different approach to caring for my health. That would probably get your attention. Yeah, well, you'd think. It doesn't necessarily, though. I mean, it still took a little bit, but yeah, that was definitely, that was a wake up in aha moment where I was like, you know, listen, I really have to change. So how did you take back your health? Well, I mean, the first thing was to really understand that there is not any one cause to autoimmune dysfunction. I think that we often like to look at causality and we think in allopathic medicine if this is what is the problem, fix that and everything else is gonna be okay. But the human body, as you know, is a really complex system. And when we expose ourselves to myriad paper cuts throughout the course of our lives, eventually the systems are gonna start to break down. And for me, it really started with, ironically, everyone likes to focus on what are the super foods that you need to eat or what do I need to eat to cure my disease? And unfortunately, it has much more to do with what should you not be eating. Because it's easier to say what should you not eat because those things are pretty much broad strokes versus what should you eat, that has much more to do with the individual. I know what I ended up doing that worked really well for me, but even that changed over time. There were times when things that I couldn't eat before that now I'm more tolerant of. But the big, I mean, the big strokes are not that surprising, it was taking out sugar and taking out any processed food, which is a bit of a, it's, I don't like to term process food because all food is processed unless you're literally pulling it out of the ground. But taking out foods that have been processed, say in a factory or that have additives and really trying to eat, I mean, I took out all dairy, all sugar, all grains. Most lectins at the time, people weren't really talking much about lectins. Later, I started taking out more of the nightshades and lectins or modifying how I was preparing them. And that was the main thing, and focusing on a balance of healthy meat and fat and vegetables and using as many cruciferous vegetables as I could. And initially I did a lot of raw vegetables and then I learned over time that I actually did much better with vegetables that were cooked. As much as I love a lot of raw vegetables, I try to keep a mix of both raw and cooked vegetables. So that was like, I mean, that was the beginning and then of course, there was a lot of supplements, acupuncture, meditation, yoga, believing that I could get better. Mindset was incredibly important. I often say that the moment I stopped thinking of myself as a sick person was the last moment I was actually sick. And that was really important. If you can't visualize and you don't actually believe that you can get better, you won't know about a science or lifestyle change will actually affect that. You really have to believe that you can get better. No, that's very true. And I like what you said that the first principle of the plant paradox is it's not what I tell you to eat, it's important, it's what I tell you not to eat. Not to eat, yeah. And you're right, it's so much easier to remove certain foods than it is, oh, eat these super foods and you'll be fine. Yeah, we still do it, yeah, exactly. So, being a chef and being in restaurants is dangerous for your health. I mean, you see it, I see it, I have multiple friends and who are restaurant tours or chefs, what do you tell your colleagues about the health threats of being a chef? Well, I think that we have a unique position as chefs in that we have a bit of a bully pulpit. You have people that are coming into your restaurant on a daily basis and you can make decisions about what you choose to provide them to eat. You can decide whether you're gonna fry food and if you are, what are the fats you're gonna fry that food in. If you're using cooking oils, what kind of cooking oils they are and what temperature, where you're sourcing your product from, there's lots of choices that we make. And in the past 20 years with the rise of interest in cooking in the United States and chefs becoming, sort of coming out of the kitchen becoming public figures and spokespeople, we have, I feel like we have a bit of a responsibility to be advocates for eating well and also for demonstrating that eating for your health is synonymous with eating delicious food. It shouldn't be about this idea of like an indulgence or cheat day. And if it does, if that does happen that you feel as though like you need to indulge in something by all means you should do it and do it wholeheartedly. And just be cognizant of how you feel after doing it and might affect your decision next time. And if it doesn't, be glad that it didn't but it doesn't mean it's not carte blanche to repeat it every day and all the time. So I think that as chefs, we have a real responsibility and I've been really happy to see that as I've gone through my own journey and my own transformation, so many of my colleagues have done the same. So many folks that I know that came up with me in the kitchen that I've known since my early 20s that we're now in our mid 40s. And it's really clear that you can't continue the lifestyle that we sort of started out with. And the folks that I know that haven't made changes. I mean, I have lots of colleagues who've died in their early 40s from heart attacks, from side effects from medication they've been prescribed, from strokes. I mean, it's incredible. The amount of stress and it comes along with that lifestyle. But I have lots of other friends who have gone from being alcoholics to being sober and becoming athletes to changing their diets to even changing their concepts. And that's really, that's inspiring to me. And I see them then becoming advocates and inspiring so many other people, which is really great. I do believe this idea that health is as contagious as illness. Yeah, absolutely. Stay around healthy people and you'll catch some of it. You'll catch it. Yeah, you'll catch it. So now that you're back to health, you've written books, hero food and real food heels. And you started actually offering better options in your restaurant that you ran, right? Yeah, and initially it was like very subtle changes. For instance, the choice to, rather than bringing bread to the table, just not offering it, and if somebody asked for it, then we would bring them a sensible portion of bread made from the best quality ingredients we could find. Even though I personally didn't eat bread, I understood that I couldn't impart upon everyone else, my own style of eating. Although, looking forward now, this is many years later, it's not uncommon to find restaurants that don't offer things like bread. Right. But yeah, making changes like that. Or make a surcharge for the bread. Or make a surcharge for the bread, exactly, since so much of it actually ends up in the trash anyway, which is totally wasteful. So that was a very simple one. Removing all the refined sugar from our desserts. I mean, that was a more complex move to make, but one that was not met with any resistance, and really surprising to see that people, it's amazing that oftentimes when you provide something that's really, really good, people don't think about what they're not getting. They don't understand that there's something that's missing. And I love when I cook meals for folks, particularly for people that don't necessarily follow the same style of eating as I do. And after the end of the meal, I'll say, did you notice something missing? And they'll say, no, that was amazing. That was an incredible meal. And I said, well, the bread was missing, the dairy was missing, the refined sugar was missing, the refined carbohydrates were missing. They weren't there. But you don't miss it when you have bright, vibrant, flavorful food. Yeah, you know, my favorite expression is, I want to give you food you love that loves you back. Love you back, exactly. Yeah, I say the same thing. Yeah, and it is possible. Yeah, and I think more people like yourself and others are beginning to realize that this is possible. Oh yeah, it's give you food that loves you back versus giving you comfort food that makes you uncomfortable. Yeah, that's exactly right. Because that's really, you know, that's the shift, that's a mindset shift for us to understand that there are so many wonderful foods that actually make us feel really, really good. But it's about dialing it in and understanding what works for you. Now you mentioned lectin containing foods and they've kind of left your diet for the most part or you've learned how to handle them with peeling and de-seeding or pressure cooking. Have you seen other people benefit by getting rid of or taming lectins in their diet? Yeah, I mean, it's surprising. I think a lot of people that I know didn't realize that things like beans, for instance, caused them so much trouble. Or something as innocuous as the eggplant could have a tremendous effect on how they felt. And I think a big part of that is not really, when you're, I like to say like when you're looking at life through dirty lenses in your glasses, it's really hard to pick up the details but once you clean your lenses and suddenly you're looking at things with a new set of eyes and crisp HD vision, you're able to pick out the things that start to become offensive to you and they can cause problems. And I've definitely seen, my feeling on lectins like so many other things is that everything in moderation and certainly depends a lot more to what's going on the rest of your life. One of the most common questions I get is folks that say, oh, well, I was in Italy and I had this pasta and I felt great or I had this buffalo ricotta and it was amazing. But if I eat it here, I feel terrible and it's really easy to jump to, well, in Europe they do things so much better than we do. There's elements of that that are true but there's a lot of that that's not true. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that if you're in Italy and you're on vacation and you're not thinking about the rest of your busy stressful life and you're in a beautiful environment and you're excited to be there and celebratory, those are all things that are like if you think about your resources, your resource tank is drained down when you're in your busy life every day and your ability to deal with inflammation, your ability to deal with some of these offenders is marginalized but then when you go to Italy and suddenly you're on vacation and you're feeling great, you have a greater capacity to handle things that may be a little bit more difficult for you to handle here in the States. So I'm glad you brought that up. What do you think about the presence of roundup and glyphosate in our food versus say in Italy or in France? Yeah, well I think one of the major problems that we have here in the States is not only the presence of glyphosate in our food but in our water source. Right, yeah, everywhere, in our wine. In our wine, exactly. So I mean in Europe, glyphosate exists in Europe. It does, it rarely does. But it's not, it doesn't exist to the degree in which it does here. Our water table is infected with antibiotics and so as I said earlier with that idea of paper cuts, that's like part of the paper cuts. You know, we're getting these paper cuts, we're exposed to them environmentally throughout the course of our daily life and I think you're less likely and because we don't have GMO labeling laws in the US like we have in the European Union, we don't, there's not nearly, I mean it's not nearly as regulated. So the chances of consuming as much glyphosate in your food in Europe is lower than it is in the United States and I think that's a factor. So what's next for you? You've moved to LA, you currently don't have a restaurant? No, I don't have a restaurant right now. I'm taking a break from operating restaurants and the reality is, the sad reality is that it's very difficult and as much as I've tried to strike the balance, it's still very difficult to work as a chef on a daily basis and to be healthy. The two things are, it's not that they're in Congress but it's very, very difficult and the industry is changing and it needs to continue to change so that that can be a reality for the people that work within the industry. But if you think about it just from a, just from a logistic standpoint, you have, we work in an environment in the kitchen where most people are resting when we're working. So the idea that you're gonna eat a healthy meal when the optimal hour is to be eating a meal, you don't have access to eat because you're cooking and preparing food, it's very difficult. So I may do a restaurant here in LA but I'm not sure yet, I'm thinking about it. In the interim, I work with a lot of different clients consulting on how to make their brands healthier. I do as much as I can to raise awareness around the importance of food and the food choices we make and how that impacts our well-being because if you look at, as a nation, we're facing a healthcare crisis unlike anything we've ever experienced before and at the core of that is that we've really lost the connection with food, we've lost this relationship with food. Is there one tip for going to a restaurant to eat healthy? Sure, I mean one tip, I think that this is something that people are often scared to ask to modify a dish and I think everyone should know that as chefs, we go into this business because we love caring for other people, we love making other people happy and if making you happy means taking the almonds or taking the peanuts out of this dish or making something without fresh cheese or using olive oil instead of using canola oil, we'll be happy to do that. So I think- Really? Yes, yeah, yeah. And I think it's really important, I think most people are like, oh, they're gonna spit in my food if I tell them that I want the spinach sauteed in olive oil and the reality is no, we're not. I mean, in the kitchen, we're happy to make those changes. Now, within reason, if you're gonna redesign the whole dish to become something else or if it's not possible and the way that I always suggest doing is to be as gracious as possible and say, I hate to be a bother but is there any way that we might be able to make this without that? And if it's doable, 99% of the time, the answer will be yes. Yeah, I wrote in my first book, a good friend of mine, Tom Guy, used to say, Steve, the menu just tells you what the chef's got in the back. And if they won't do that for you, it's a fairly simple regret. You don't go back. Exactly, there's plenty of other places to go. Yeah, okay, great, great advice. How can people find you, learn about you? Where are the books? Yeah, so the books you can get on anywhere that find books are sold. I won't say amazon.com, but that's what you just did, but that's what I just did. And you can find more information about me at my website, which is shamosmullen.com. You can find out about the podcast if you go to goop.com slash goopfellas and you can follow me on Instagram at at shamosmullen. It's very simple to find me there. Very good. Well, keep up the good work. Thanks so much. We'll stay in touch and yeah, very good. Thanks so much. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you. All right, it's time for the audience question. Brian McGahn of YouTube asks, does brushing your teeth with hydrogen peroxide and baking soda kill off good bacteria? Hey, that's actually a really good question and it's actually been studied. And I've mentioned this before. First of all, you really, really want a nice oral flora that's teeming with good bacteria and there's increasing evidence that certain bad bacteria in your mouth is a major cause of coronary artery disease and my good friend, Dr. Dale Bradison, who I just spoke with this week again, is convinced that much of dementia is powered by oral bacteria getting into your brain. If you think about it, your nose and your mouth is a direct shot into your brain and we have to be cognizant that oral health is probably paramount to good brain health and good heart health. Having said that, you also need bacteria to generate nitric oxide which is an amazing compound that dilates your blood vessels and without the right bacteria in your mouth, you will not generate the appropriate amount of nitric oxide and people who use mouth washes that kill off 99% of germs in their mouth actually have raised blood pressure compared to people who don't use those mouth washes in a placebo controlled trial in human beings. So, hydrogen peroxide and baking soda is not going to decimate your bacteria as much as that swig of a healthy mouthwash. So please do not use mouth washes as they are currently configured. Great question. Your mouth microbiome is every bit maybe more so important than your gut microbiome. So, feed those bugs what they want to eat too. Okay, review of the week. In response to our podcast on lectins, Michael Chow on YouTube wrote, is there a button for loving this video? I don't know, is there? We should have a button for loving this video. Thank you for educating us about how lectins shouldn't be in our plates. My girlfriend and I truly love to binge on your podcasts and videos. Oh, I thought you were gonna say binge on lectins. We appreciate you very much. Well, thank you very much. I mean, that's why we do these podcasts. We bring you, you know, fantastic information like Seamus Mullen here today. And thank you for liking us and you know, love us whenever you can. And you're loving me by sending me your response. So please keep them coming in. So that's it and we'll see you next week on the Dr. Gendry podcast. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts because I'm Dr. Gendry and I'm always looking out for you.