 Thank you for that generous introduction. This is showing normal blood pressure for whom? Americans. And as you can see with age and with the differences between genders, and I'm sorry you can't see female and male. But anyway, this is something that we consider normal. So I have sort of a new definition for what a wellness continuum is. It's usually predicated on diet nutrition and exercise and physical activity. We now propose a triangle with sleep and airway hygiene. And I was so glad to hear the talk this morning about ancestral sleep. It's something I'm very much interested in helping develop. Sorry to interrupt you, you don't need to hold the microphone. Oh, I don't need this. Yeah, I've got. I just like holding a microphone. So and stress level figures into this continuum somewhere. And I don't quite know where. I think it modulates all of them. Diet nutrition is bi-directional. I mean comfort food, right? We can alleviate stress with it. And we can cause stress and inflammation by over nutrition, wrong nutrition, non-paleo nutrition. Same thing with exercise. Some people do it to relax. But if it's not done correctly, it can put stresses in the system. Sleep and airway hygiene. Hygiene does not mean clean. Hygiene means health. So dental hygiene, they clean teeth. Well, that's one component of hygiene. Sleep and airway hygiene is something that we are now teaching dental hygienists to, in addition to cleaning teeth, we want you to assess airway health. So anyway, normal does not equal healthy. Normal means average. And I'm preaching to the choir, obviously, you know this. But this is going to be on the internet. And we're hoping our dental and medical colleagues will be learning from this as well. So some of the stuff I don't want you to think, oh, he doesn't know we don't know that we know that. Well, anyway, how about this? How about an ancestral norm? Now, I'm just using blood pressure. But it depends on the environment that you're subjected to. That determines what is normal and normal equal healthy. Well, 120 over 80 probably is healthy, but it probably should be lower. Genomically, we have the potential to have lower blood pressure. But we're an industrialized society. So that's as good as it's going to get for now. But maybe when we have our impact on society, which we will and we are, maybe these 10 years from now, they might revise these. Well, the same thing exists in orthodontics. The norms that have been established were in the 1950s by two white guys who took a couple of kids that they thought were good looking. And they were powerful. And these are the norms. They're mainly by a guy named Steiner and Downs. And these are really the foundation of the norms that are used by most orthodontists to look at your kids. And they're misdiagnosing. I'm not indicting the orthodontic profession. In fact, you will hear later from Scott that Western dentistry is a wonderful thing. It does the best that it can. We want to push it in a direction that can help it be all that it can be by having it be more ancestrally focused. Well, orthodontic norms are leading to kids being treated too late and being treated inappropriately. If orthodontics was only about cosmetics, this really wouldn't be that big a deal. I got beautifully straight teeth. But I had teeth pulled. I wore headgear. And I need jaw surgery. I'm not overweight. And I snore like a train. And that can be damaging to end organ damage. So what we're saying is, what is a new norm that we can use for little kids? That's a 500-year-old pallet of one of our museum specimens. And what I want you to pay attention to is this. This is the back nose, the posterior nares. This is your nasal septum coming all the way from the front. This is where air enters into your throat, the pharynx. It correlates with the width and the depth and the length of the pallet. And anyone who wants to reference on anything, I'm not putting them up here. But I have references on everything I say. You can Google anything I say. I am not lying about or exaggerating about anything. It's all scientifically and medically defensible. So anyway, we're proposing a new norm for orthodontics. And this is pretty much something that we go back, and a lot of this was covered in other lectures today, but about 2 and 1 half million years ago, that's genus Homo when it came into being. 40,000 years, that's Europeans, chromagnans. And then we say 10,000. It's probably 15,000 when agriculture and domestication of plants started in different places, but we use that 10,000 to 12,000 thing. But it's changing all the time. But that's when we start to see appreciable increases in tooth decay. Now, when I first heard this, I thought it was a lie because I would have learned about it in dental school, huh? Right. That's like Paul Simon when I think back on all the crap I learned in high school. Well, some of the things I didn't learn in dental school was this, because I didn't have to take any anthropology or evolutionary biology as basic science to get into school. None of us did. The physicians don't. Nobody in health care does. It's not required. It should be. It is like, according to Randy Nessie, it's as if an engineer could call themselves an engineer without having to take a course in physics. That's how bad it is. Anyway, this is my Academy of Pediatric Dentistry. And you can see this is our policy statements and practice guidelines. Everything, and they have this little thing here, and it all has to do with early gum disease, early childhood tooth decay, early gum disease and tooth decay tartar. And that's something that Al is going to talk about later. We think of plaque as being intrinsically bad. He's going to talk about good plaque, OK? We find 50,000-year-old plaque fossilized. It's called calculus. And there's no gum disease or bone loss or anything associated with it. So I'm really looking forward to what he has to say. Nothing about malocclusion. We do, in our statement now, we have a practice guideline for sleep apnea, which is good. And we have all kinds of things about orthodontics, but really nothing connecting the two. And that's what I am trying to do with my research and by talking to groups like you. If we can end childhood obesity, why is it that we can't end tooth decay? And you really just don't hear it. Well, because childhood obesity is a nutritionally modulated condition, it can be prevented. Michelle Obama, he said, we can end it in a generation. I think she's technically right. It's practically not too realistic, but it could be done hypothetically. Well, so too can tooth decay because it involves bacteria, but it is a diet-modulated disease. So we could end it because at one time, we used to not really appreciably have it. There's always been tooth decay. So it didn't start with agriculture. Now you can go hundreds of thousands of years and find tooth decay, but it wasn't appreciable. There wasn't much. Honey can cause tooth decay, and we know our ancestors hate honey. But what will dentists do when there's no tooth decay? I have a very busy practice in Chicago, and less than 10% of what I do, generating income, providing services, has anything to do with tooth decay. I'm sort of known as a sugar scoundrel. I tell parents politely, look, if you're kid, if you're not going to keep this stuff out of the house, this might not be the practice for you. I've lost patience before, but not for that. Most parents love it, that we're strict. And it's not just me, it's my partner and my team, my staff. So nutrition counseling, again, the next two speakers are going to talk a little bit about that. They're very proactive with it. I have a nutrition dietetics degree, and I don't do near the degree of counseling that these guys do. And they've got some amazing forms. This is, people have been exploring this. This was in the Journal of Science in 2012. It was a focus group, a nescent focus group at Duke University. And I was on a panel with eight anthropologists and eight dentists, and we came up with this. And there's been some articles that look at malocclusion from an evolutionary perspective. So other people are curious about this. One of the things that happens, I don't know why the whole, is there something? I don't know if the AV guy can do it, because everything is skewed over. Well anyway, what happens is 200,000, 250,000 to 300,000 years as hunter-gatherers, right? Our jaws were wider, more forward, and more less vertical. What's happened with agriculture and industry is that the jaws have gotten narrower, more retrusive, and vertical. They've fallen down. This is a universal phenotypes of a modernization. If you take an extant hunter-gatherer and move them to the big city, in one generation, you will see crowding. That can't be genetic. This is an epigenetic phenomenon. So this is what happens. Now, it has implications for apnea, the airway. And does everyone know that ADD, ADHD, when you clear up the sleep and improve the breathing, usually the symptoms go away from ADD, ADHD. And you can, many kids we've taken off of Ritalin, just by improving their sleep, by changing the shape of their jaw, some as young as two years old. And I'm doing orthodontics on two-year-olds. And most of them are referred from pulmonary specialists, ENTs, pediatricians. Let's let Boyd try. Nothing else has worked. We took the tonsils out, and the adenoids grew back, and the kids' apnea is bad or worse. This is something that is taught in orthodontic programs and orthodontic textbooks that a retronaphic chin is a normal trait. And you can see it in utero. And here it is in the textbook. But that says not true. It's not true. There's not a shred of evidence for it. And what we have found in our samples at the Penn Museum is that fetal cadaver skulls before the Industrial Revolution are all bimaxillary protrusive. That implies that they come into the world with the potential of morphology for a healthy airway. The front of the airway is the face. The back of the face is the airway. We don't see craniofacial anymore. We see cranio-respiratory. What happens in the face, the palo-facial sutural complex, you have fontanelles, soft spots, all over the place in your cranio-respiratory complex. So this is the difference. And we just superimposed a couple. It's not terribly scientific. And this width, I told you, correlates with the ability to get air through the perinazel sinus complex into the pharynx, which to the lungs, to the brain. So there you go. You've got a narrow jaw. You've got a narrow posterior nares. A wider jaw, wider airway, less resistance. Treatment of apnea. And yes, little kids get apnea, lots of them. And little kids, right now, the treatment of choice is tonsil and adenoid removal. Or you cut a hole in the throat. And I've got mainly syndromic kids that come in with tracheostomies. Or maxillomandibular advancement. Look at that. What in medicine do you know has a greater than 90% success rate? Every patient, by virtue of the name of the procedure that will fix it, maxillomandibular advancement, that means presurgically they are maxillomandibular retrusive. And it starts probably in utero, certainly, while they're in their baby teeth. This is one of my patients. This is her when she was like five. And here she was two and a half months ago in intensive care for three days. Her dad is a dentist and did not know how to do for her when she was this age. So that's what had to be done. He did know what to do for her, the little sister. And she didn't need jaw surgery. And they now look like, well, their airways look remarkable. This is her where the adenoids are. That's very narrow. It should be really wide. And it's not. So she got her tonsils out. Look how wide it is. But look how narrow it is here. And on three-dimensional cone beam, you can see it's really nice up here. But it should be all the way down like this. There she is now after her surgery. Cured, TMJ, anxiety, depression, apnea, just really. She was tired all the time. She had a degenerative jaw joint, TMJ. And it's all fixed. There she is today. Now, I know this kid really well. That's my daughter. And when we drove to St. Louis to get the surgery, you would thought she was going to get a manicure. She was so excited. She didn't care about the intensive care and being on the table for 10 hours. Here's another patient that my partner Janet Panarale does all the adults. So she and I don't treat my own kids. So she did all the ortho-nathics setup for this. But we have people flying in from all over the country to get this done. We also, this is a last resort. This is a rescue. But look at that. That's what happens. Now, hypothetically, if I would have known her when she was three, maybe I could have prevented this. Maybe I could have prevented my own daughter having gone through that. So there's non-surgical options. One is weight loss, CPAP. Look at that. Little baby's on CPAP. You think of it for an old person's disease. One-way nasal valves, mandibular advancement devices. This one, they just bring the jaw forward so you can breathe better. This is what I do. This is called orthotropics. And this is what happens. I can create a maxillary mandibular advancement. I like to get them under the age of six. We call kids with LTS. Sounds like a syndrome with less than six. Number of permanent teeth, number of years of age. That's when I ideally like to get them. I can fix a 10-year-old. It's a lot harder. 12, it's almost impossible to create this. So anyway, that's what it looks like. Again, kids as young as two years old were fixing. They're very tiny little retainers that go in. I do different kinds now that are basically most of them are glued in. But you can see what happens. This kid didn't even get the tonsils out. And this is in North Adonis, Florida, who discovered this independently. And we've gotten to be friends now. But it's amazing how good it looks and how well and healthy these kids are. This is a kid who had her tonsils out twice, or her adenoids out twice. And then we did this, and that's how we fixed her. This is how it works. Real quickly, we're doing, we're good. It pulls it forward. We do it non-surgically, but that's how it works surgically too. The Hippocratic Oath, do no retraction. Most orthodontics or lack of orthodontics will keep a retrusive face back or make it even worse. We say treat early and treat protrusively. So there we go, I'm done. So our next panelist will be up there. Thank you. Good job. Thanks, thanks. Thanks, Kevin. Next I'd like to introduce Alvin Danenberg. Alvin has been a periodontist for 43 years and he faced some serious personal health challenges in middle age, which he was able to address using an ancestral diet and lifestyle. And that was part of his inspiration for incorporating ancestral nutrition and lifestyle advice into his practice. I also wanted to mention that he just released a book called Crazy Good Living and he'll be doing a meet and greet for that book right after this panel if you're interested in that. So Alvin, take it away. Super. So I'm going to be a little more practical. I'm going to talk about dental plaque. And Kevin started this subject matter and that is dental plaque is healthy until it's unhealthy. So most people think that they need to remove dental plaque. As a matter of fact, if you go to your dentist and your hygienist, they're going to make every effort to remove dental plaque and show you how to remove all the dental plaque, give you antimicrobial mouth washes to kill every bacteria and microbe in your mouth. And that's theoretically healthy, but it's not. So dental plaque has a purpose. It is a biological film, biofilm. It is made up of hundreds of microbes. Some are good, some are bad, but they are in a state of homeostasis or balance. And what that means is they serve a purpose. If you took out any of the good bacteria in dental plaque, the pathogenic bacteria would overgrow. If you took out the pathogenic bacteria in dental plaque, the good bacteria could change into pathogenic bacteria or allow other pathogenic bacteria that wouldn't even be involved to come in. So dental plaque that is healthy dental plaque actually maintains a balanced pH under the gum tissue and around the tooth, which is more neutral rather than acid. It helps to kill off other pathogenic bacteria that wants to come into the area because it makes its own hydrogen peroxide. And in addition, it helps remineralize the teeth. So your tooth actually is going through a state of remineralization 24-7 because of the nutrients in the saliva that eventually get into the dental plaque and eventually do what they need to do on the surface of the tooth. So if you remove the dental plaque, you don't have this protection. And this is what dental plaque is designed to do. So there are some products on the market that are effective in removing dental plaque all the time. So if you use xylitol in your mouth enough that you need to do this all the time, you will not allow the pellicle, which is the earliest form of dental plaque, to form on the root of the tooth and you would not have the benefit of healthy dental plaque. So what is gonna happen when healthy dental plaque becomes unhealthy dental plaque? Now I wanna give you an example. There were two studies, phenomenal studies. 2009, a guy named Baumgartner and his research people looked at 10 individuals in Switzerland. So they were living in Switzerland in a remote area and they had to live on land, they had to hunt and gather their food and they were the only food that were available were the foods that were available in the area about 5,700 years ago. So the researchers started off by culturing the bacteria on their tongue, the dental plaque, and then they used different techniques to evaluate the infection of the gum tissue, bleeding in the gum tissue, as well as the spaces between the gum, the depth of the spaces. So these 10 people had to find their foods, they were all unprocessed, healthy foods obviously. No refined processed carbohydrates, no refined sugars, no refined flowers. And the test or the study lasted for four weeks, but they could not brush or floss for four weeks. So the researchers were experimenting to see just how much unhealthy plaque would develop. That was the goal of the paper. Turns out that they had gobs and gobs of dental plaque, you might imagine. And when they cultured the dental plaque from their tongue and from their, from the back here from the tongue and the dental plaque, again, it had gobs and gobs of bacteria, but they weren't virulent. And when they tested the bleeding points and the pocket depths around the gum tissue, they were statistically, significantly healthier. Very interesting. There's another gentleman, a periodontist in Germany, Johann Wolber. He is a periodontist and a researcher in the University of Freiberg. And he present, he and his staff did a randomized control trial, which is kind of the gold standard in research, with 15 people. These 15 people had gum disease, the requirement was they had to have gum disease and they had to be eating a standard American diet and you know what that means. So here's what he did. For the first two weeks, he had two groups. Five were the control group, 10 were the experimental group. The five of the control group and the 10 of the experimental group had to brush their teeth the same as they normally did, but they couldn't floss or use little brushes between the teeth. So they couldn't clean between the teeth. The five control group ate their normal standard American diet. The 10 experimental group had to eat a low carb, nutrient dense, anti-inflammatory diet, basically a paleo slash Mediterranean diet. They did this for two weeks just to get acclimated and then at the start of the test, the researchers evaluated inflammation in the gum tissue, bleeding on probing or pressing on the gum tissue and the depths of the periodontal pockets. Four weeks went by, as you might imagine. There was a tremendous amount of plaque between the teeth, around the teeth but quite a bit of plaque between the teeth. The experimental group that had a healthy diet that could not clean between the teeth but could brush had 50% less bleeding, less inflammation and less pocket death. The five individuals who were part of the control group that ate their crappy food that did not floss between the teeth but they still brushed had significantly more inflammation, lots of plaque, deeper pockets and more bleeding on probing. So basically, diet is significantly related to the difference between healthy plaque and unhealthy plaque. So how do you get unhealthy plaque? Well, the food that you're eating, if it is a standard American diet, is having an effect in a variety of ways. So if you're eating grains, you're getting phytic acid that is pulling out minerals in the mouth. If you're eating other foods like grains and sugars and they're affecting the gut dysbiosis, they're creating a leaky gut and they're creating chronic inflammation that eventually goes to the mouth. Studies have shown that if you have a leaky gut and chronic inflammation from dysbiosis in the gut, you will get dysbiosis in the mouth, you will change healthy plaque into unhealthy plaque. And what's even more important is when you do have dysbiosis in the gut and you're developing unhealthy plaque, just brushing and flossing is not necessarily gonna take care of the problem and that unhealthy plaque becomes very pathogenic and it goes from the early stages of gum infection called gingivitis to a much more advanced stage of the disease called periodontitis. Different bacteria start to proliferate that are resistant to the immune system's efforts to kill the bacteria. So now under the gum tissue, because you have this advanced stage of periodontal disease, you're developing chronic inflammation because the immune system is constantly trying to fight off this bacteria that is very virulent and very resistant. So you're getting leakage from the periodontal pocket into the blood system, just like you get leakage from the gut into the blood system. And now you have two nitices of infection that create chronic disease, cardiovascular disease, MS, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, you can name a bunch of them. And if you only treat the gut dysbiosis with functional medicine does very well, but they don't understand the disease in the mouth, you won't treat the mouth by treating the dysbiosis in the gut because now you have a new nitice of infection in the mouth. That's deep. So you have to treat the gut and you have to treat the mouth. Treat the gut in the mouth, get to a healthy diet again, nutrient dense, anti-inflammatory diet. You need to have good exercise, you have to have good sleep, you have to have good stress control, the four pillars of health. That's what my book is all about. That was a plug, by the way. Then once you treat these two problems, then you can maintain a healthy environment. I believe that if you take care of the dysbiosis in the gut and you're eating a nutrient dense diet, you can treat chronic disease. End of story, am I timer just went off? Thank God, awesome. Thank you, Alvin. So next I'd like to introduce Scott Solomons. Scott got his degree in dentistry at Columbia and he's been practicing for 28 years as a general dentist in Connecticut. He has a background in anthropology from Bigamton University and he's experienced substantial benefits from incorporating evolutionary principles into his diet and lifestyle. He currently incorporates an ancestral perspective in his practice, including diet and lifestyle advice. Let's welcome Scott. Thank you. Thanks for that intro. If you ask my patients, they would say, he drills any news things. That's what he does. For all you Game of Fans thrones out there. So I'm gonna just give you a little background. General dentists basically do all the things that these guys don't do. Sort of a catch-all. And so I wanna talk about how we can incorporate this ancestral idea into dentistry as a whole. From my perspective, I do all clinical stuff so that thing about I drill and know things is true. I try not to drill but I spend most of my time in the clinic treating patients and I just study like a nerd. So I'm gonna just look at my cheat sheet here. So I generally don't lecture so normally it's a one-on-one kind of a discussion and so I can't ask you guys, so what brings you in today? But I'm gonna just ask a few questions. Just kinda see where we're all at. So I want you guys to raise your hands if you go to the dentist regularly and it's above average, I think 50% is the national average. It's a little higher actually where I am. How many people have ever had a cavity, a filling or anything like that? Most, okay and I think it's 91% of the population so it's pervasive. Okay, bleeding gums, gums disease, anything like that going on out there? Wow, I would say less than average. What do you think? Well, the statistics would say, do I need to do this? The statistics would say that 91% of the US adult population has what's called gingivitis which means the gum tissue bleeds. It doesn't have to bleed when you poke it, it just bleeds. You know, can I give you one minute of this? So if you were looking in a mirror, you're a woman and you're putting on your makeup or you're a guy and shaving and you were doing this really closely and there was blood dripping out of your ear, would you be concerned? Well, the gum tissue is as firm as the cuticle around your nail. It is as protective or more protective than the cuticle around your nail and it shouldn't bleed. And 91%, so I'm assuming a few of you didn't wanna raise your hand but 91% has bleeding gums. Now, it's not something to be upset about but you need to recognize it and the reason you have gum disease, number one is because of diet. There's some other factors but generally diet. I think we have a cut above here so I believe you guys. Okay, anybody crooked teeth, told your bites off, anything like that? Okay, quite a few. Has anybody ever broken a tooth? Accident or otherwise? Okay, so that happens and that's not any, probably much you could have done about that one. Any temperature sensitivity? Okay, quite a few and sensitivity to biting hard things, pressure, okay. And then has anybody had their wisdom teeth taken out or been told about everybody? Okay, so this is normal. And one of the things that I would love to have done was talk to your parents and I think Kevin would, gotta travel through time a little bit for that one. Okay, so it's universal. So I do lots of normal dentistry, I just wanna let you know that. Sometimes, I've been coming to these things since the second one and some of the lecturers get up there and they make it seem like this Western medicine approach is terrible. Well, it's not. It's quite lovely at most of the time. It's just they don't use this filter that we use here. So hopefully this is gonna go out on YouTube and some of our colleagues can hear this and with an open mind and because I just wanna let you know by the way, this is an historic day in dentistry. You don't realize this, but this is the first time that three dentists with an evolutionary perspective have ever been on a podium together. The problem is, we're the monolith. Not so good, not so good. So with a little luck maybe there'll be six of us here next year, but we're hoping for more. So we'll get that video out there and you guys do your job and spread the word please. Just look at my little cheat sheet here. The cake. Yeah, well, we're getting to cake. Oh, I love the cake. We're gonna eat our cake tonight. Okay, so my approach also because I'm talking to people and they don't wanna be there and they're miserable. And I obviously try to do everything I can to make them feel at home and comfortable, but I really have to boil things down to the simplest possible explanation that I can. I can't be sitting there citing studies like these guys do. They're the brains in the room. We're, yeah. Yeah. So I sort of take like the Rob Wolf approach though when it comes to all this and that if we don't do something in medicine and dentistry, there's not gonna be enough money in the world to fix all of this. It's just, it's too expensive. So we need to empower you guys, and I know I'm preaching to the choir, I'll say you guys on the video to take care of yourselves. But having said that, there's a continuum of different types of patients. There's gonna be that patient and there's lots of them. They generally skew the older crowd where they just wanna pill and something quick and they don't wanna change. And that's okay. That's okay. And then there are, all you guys, you'll do probably whatever it might take to be healthy and you're gonna embrace change. And so this is the challenge I guess that we have. Most of us, we sort of have cultivated a following where a lot of people come and expect this, but I still see a lot of folks who have no idea what they're getting themselves into. So they can quickly glaze over when I start having this conversation about nutrition and sleep and all that stuff. What the heck's my dentist talking about sleep for? I gotta get out of here. And I have to tell you that I make some of my colleagues that I work with, I have many partners. I have a multi-specialty practice. They get a little nervous. They think I've overstepped my bounds, but I beg to differ because I feel it's my moral, ethical and legal duty to tell you guys, all of the options that there are out there. The fact of the matter is there are 8,760 hours in a year, if you're a good patient, you're gonna come in for two hours a year, it's not up to me to stop you guys from having your dental problems. Don't let anybody ever fool you that they stopped your problems, it's gonna be up to you. But having said that, when you go to the dentist or the doctor, you're their boss. You pay them, okay? So they work for you and they better well respect whatever you do, okay? I just want you guys to know this, you shouldn't have a sit there with a finger-waving lecture from your healthcare practitioner. They need to take you as you are and understand who you are and what you're willing to do. Okay, a couple more things and I'll be done. You need to say something now? Okay, the Q and A. Okay, I'll wrap it up. So let me just do my little cake analogy that kind of seemed to like so much. So one of the things that I tell my patients is that the recipe for a happy, healthy, vibrant human being is pretty simple. It's sort of like a cake and don't ask me exactly what's in a cake, I really don't know. But butter, flour, sugar, leavening, something else. But a few things. So if you put too much flour in that cake, it's not gonna really be such a good cake, is it? So for a happy, healthy, vibrant person, you need sleep and stress really to be under control. There's a certain level of nutrition we need, movement, sunshine, nice relationships and friends. And if you have too little of any of those things, you're gonna be in trouble. Too much of any of those things sometimes can also get you into trouble. And I think I've run over, so I'll turn it back over to Stefan. Thanks. Thank you very much, Kevin, Alvin and Scott. So now we're gonna transition into the question and answer portion of the panel. We're gonna take questions from the audience and I'm gonna ask you to please use this microphone when you're asking your questions. We're also gonna have some questions that people left on Facebook, as well as I'm gonna invoke my moderator's privilege and throw in a couple of my own. So let's take a question from the audience first. I'm gonna go over here because I can see that you've been standing there for a while. This was a great discussion and I cannot wait till this goes on YouTube because the first person I'm gonna send the link to is my dentist. I mean, guys, you've really liberated me. So just a small story here. I mean, up until 25-8, a crappy diet and I have the fillings for that. And then I, from 30 on, I've eaten pretty much low-carb paleo. So when I go into my dentist, she's great. She cleans my teeth. She says, wow, no bleeding, your gums are healthy, but you aren't flossing. I'm like, you know, I brush, but I don't see the need to floss. And I don't have a problem. She goes, you need to floss. So you just gave me some great ammunition. Thank you very much. You're welcome. I don't need to floss, right? Say it again. No, I will not say you do not need to floss. So let me tell you why I would not say you do not need to floss because you do not know if you have healthy dental plaque or unhealthy dental plaque. And you do not know if your stress level is under control or your sleep pattern is good or you have efficient exercise or is your diet as good as you think it is? So I would be more proactive and floss, but I know in the back of my mind and other areas, I know that it's not so critical. Okay, if you have a healthy gums, no caries at all since HG5. I hear what you're saying. Okay. If I were to say you should not floss, guess what's gonna happen? So I'm telling you, you should floss, but do you really need to floss? That is the question. I have a similar answer, Todd. Can I just add a little bit to that? So again, we have patients on a continuum. So if I do a little graph and down in this corner here is the recalcitrant patient who does everything wrong and is never gonna listen and all that stuff. I mean, they're inviting trouble, aren't they? So I would obviously encourage that person to floss. Then you have you guys on the total opposite end of the spectrum who are doing everything right. It would be somewhat less critical, but as my daughter when she was 12 would have said ooh-wah. And I would make one more addition. You didn't ask me if I brush or floss. I'm not sure why you didn't, but yeah, yes, I do brush and floss, but I will tell you the best thing to clean between the teeth is a little soft, the brand name is called a soft pick by a company called Gum, G-U-M. Little tiny brush that you can clean between the teeth. He owns a company. Extremely effective. You remain stockholder in that company. And I am not a stockholder in Gum. All right, so at this point, I'm gonna ask a question from Facebook here. We had a few questions that were related to the same topic that I also think is a really interesting topic. And that is, what are the best current recommendations for optimizing a child's jaw and face development, both prenatally and postnatally? And what if the child doesn't want to eat tough or crunchy foods? We know that mechanical forces are one of the things that help proper development of the jaw. So what if that child does not want to eat those types of foods? Just starve them, and then they get hungry and I felt no. The first thing a mom can do, and really, this probably starts preconception, it's always moms. I mean, the guy's gotta take care of his sperm too, because you wanna pass on good genes. But sleep gestational apnea. We've heard of gestational hypertension, you know, preclamps in gestational diabetes, but there's something called gestational apnea. A mom who doesn't, who might have apnea or breathe through her mouth while she's pregnant, may be putting her, maybe at risk for intrauterine growth restriction, which also shrinks the jaw. So that's number one. But certainly, breastfeeding, yet another reason to breastfeed is developing of the palo-facial sutural complex. It's the same way the brain grows the cranium, the tongue and the breast and the nipple and the sucking and the vacuuming. It starts to develop that. That's why all of our ancestors wouldn't have become ancestors, they wouldn't have survived childhood unless they ancestrally nursed and weaned, baby-led weaning. Look it up if you don't know it, but that's the first thing. In terms of, you just don't start out with Gerber. Let them start eating, I mean, they can eat a pork chop bone. They can gnaw on it as long as they can sit up. They can start gnawing on things. They won't choke. Baby-led weaning, Google it, it's amazing. And then, you know, press your pee. Every child should see the dentist by age one. Press your dentist. How, what's the shape of the jaw like? Is there anything that can be done about it? Most dentists who see children, this is starting to just come into the lexicon and we're, you know, people are learning about it. So you may have to push them. Like I heard, you know, you can expand them too and it could be, you know, prevent apnea and ADD. You may be the person to teach your dentist this. Yeah, that's all I... Both Al and I took Chris Cressor's Adapt Functional Medicine course. We were, I think, in the first class, weren't we? We were. More history. I would encourage all of you to go to Chris Cressor's Healthy Baby Code. It's awesome. I mean, there's a fee for it, but well worth it. And there was a cool part on there. It's been a while since we've had babies, but, you know, went to introduce certain foods and, you know, just to name the first two, egg yolks and liver. And when you do this, the kids love it. I mean, I don't know if you guys have seen Chris or Rob Wolf talk about their paleo kids. I mean, I think it was a Chris's child, maybe, who couldn't get enough kimchi. What one year old, you know, is addicted to kimchi. So, you know, they'll eat what you give them. Hi, out of all the changes to the jaw, gums, and teeth that are caused by a poor diet, which ones do you think are the most reversible through an ancestral diet? I didn't hear it. I'm sorry. Out of all the changes to the jaw, gums, and teeth from a poor, modern diet, which ones do you think are the most reversible from an ancestral diet? Reversible in terms of shape and morphology, I'm just real quick, because you guys probably have more to say than I do, but this has to be done in infancy. I mean, certainly before the age of six, you have got to get in there. Either, you know, one of my residents who is a pediatric dentist in San Diego now, Tom Keller, he calls it expansile foods, and they're really just trying to introduce, you know, every kid in the tribe, pre-industrally, was eating everything that every adult was eating by the age of 11 to 12 months. That had to have happened. So I'm just introducing solid foods, and then introducing expansion orthodontically, if indicated, at the earliest possible age. That's all I have to say. And about the rest of it, I mean, gum disease, recession, tooth wear, tooth loss, it's amazing what we can do. The thing about, you know, the mouth is, and again, the analogy to your Western medicine, when body parts fail, Western medicine rules. And we're pretty good at it. You know, so again, talking about that continuum, it's better if it didn't happen. If I need to replace a broken part of a tooth or a decayed part of a tooth, I'm using a man-made material. I'd rather not have to get to that point because there would be issues. But, you know, if I'm walking across the street and I shatter my femur, you know, I get hit by a car, go into the emergency room, and they get put as much titanium in there as they want. I'll deal with all the other issues that might come with having titanium in me. So, you know, if you broke off your front tooth or a decayed or something like that, you know, everybody sees that and they might pass judgment. Maybe you don't care, maybe you do. So, the way you would want to treat that would vary. Some people wouldn't care, pull it. I don't want anything foreign in my mouth. And then if you want to save it, there are other things we can do. We can get into root canals and all that stuff. So, again, it is a continuum, but, you know, when you're looking at gum disease, gingivitis can be reversed very, very quickly, decay. These things are, you can, we can restore these problems. We can restore a hard tooth structure back to health. We can replace receded gums or move the gums back up into place. And then maintenance would be just, of course, an ancestral type diet. And I would just add that dental diseases, including gum disease and tooth decay, are diseases of improper diet and chronic inflammation. So if your question is how to prevent them, diet and elimination of chronic inflammation, and chronic inflammation is not necessarily the source, the source of chronic inflammation is not the mouth. It's the gut. So, the gut needs to be treated, the diet needs to be right, and that would be nutrient-dense anti-inflammatory foods and obviously toxic substances. There was some discussion about glyphosate before. Glyphosate kills or destroys gut bacteria, it puts holes in the gut lining, it destroys DNA, and mitochondria. We're eating so much glyphosate in our conventionally raised vegetables and fruits. Sadly, you know, the toxic load becomes the problem. A little bit may not be such a problem. Intermittent may not be such a problem, but if you're eating a wheat product six times a day because you eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack, and snack, and snack, you're going to have dental diseases. Even if you're brushing and flossing, and even if you're seeing a dentist three times or every three months for a cleaning, you're gonna have dental diseases. You're welcome. I'm gonna invoke my moderator's privilege now. So my question is, how do you guys feel about paleo cookies? Ha ha ha. I feel the same way about a paleo cookie as if, you know, you were smoking unfiltered cigarettes and somebody said, here, this filtered cigarette will be better for you. It's a good analogy. Good. I would agree with that. Me too, full agreement. Besides, the cookies and the paleo breads and all of these other substitutes for the foods that are obviously unhealthy are very heavy in carbohydrates. They may not be wheat products or gluten products, but they have a lot of carbohydrates. And they're probably using some kind of sugar. All right, so I'm gonna get back to a question from Facebook here. We had several questions about root canals and about whether they're problematic, whether they can contribute to health problems. So do you want me to take that or do you want me to take that? You got a week and a half, I can. So, yeah, again, it's a continuum, I suppose. I lay out all options for patients. It would actually be my practice if I didn't. And the standard of care is a root canal, which, for those of you who don't know what that is, the nerve inside the roots of the tooth or any of the soft tissue in general, it's not just nerve, can get infected or exposed and it's trouble. So the idea is that that is cleaned out and a filling material is put inside the root so that germs can't kind of hide inside the tooth away from your immune system. When you have a healthy, it's called the pulp, there's a circulation in and out of the tooth and the immune system can function and so if germs get in there, the idea is that your immune system can take care of it. Having said that, when you look at the majority of the tooth is made of dentin and it's got a whole bunch of tubules in it, if you look at it under an electron microscope, it's very spongy looking and that can harbor some bacteria and in an otherwise healthy person, maybe you deal with it and there's no problem and it checks out, okay, there's no pain, there's no swelling, there's no inflammation, the x-ray looks good and all's right with the world. But sometimes you can get some nasty bugs in there, especially the anaerobes, which is probably what you'd get anyway and they have a tendency to kick off these lipopolysaccharide endotoxins, which can be pretty nasty and Al keeps talking about that level of inflammation so you can get a low grade level of inflammation that you may not be aware of, you may not have any local symptoms around that tooth. So for my patients, we always monitor their overall health but if they come in fairly well compromised, we might say, yes, a root canal can be done but there are other options and the options are nothing, which is generally not a great idea. Having the tooth taken out and then the question is, should it be replaced and how can we replace it? That's another discussion. So in my opinion, we've only got a minute left. Oh, okay. So we'll let her ask her question. Okay, interesting, a full disclosure here, I don't go to Dennis anymore, I stopped going years ago because I can't get one that will let me not do the X-rays so it's in their standard of care now and they will not, and I've moved around, I don't live 3,000 miles away where I grew up so I can't get them, my sister died of a really aggressive cancer last year and I don't want to do X-rays, never had a cavity, never had braces but enough about me, I want to ask you guys what you think about dental X-rays, do you have a toothpaste recommendation? And also, what about teeth whitening did our ancestors have nice white pearly teeth or were they slightly yellow because of that biofilm? Okay, so let me jump in with the toothpaste because first of all, you do not need toothpaste to brush your teeth, okay? So if you want to brush your teeth and floss your teeth and I don't think you brush and floss, by the way, but water is fine, it would be ideal if it is obviously non-fluoridated water, we can talk about that if you want later on in some other way and filtered water but yeah, you don't need toothpaste. Now, if you want to use toothpaste, my opinion also, it helps with whitening, take your toothbrush, dip it in some coconut oil, you all know about coconut oil and then dip it in some baking soda, not baking powder, baking soda, and then brush. Now, baking soda is slightly abrasive but it is the least abrasive ingredient in any commercial toothpaste. It does help neutralize the acidity in the mouth and it is actually a decent, not great, but a decent whitener. So if you really wanted to try to whiten your teeth, baking soda, salty, by the way, you could take and make a paste of baking soda, put it on your teeth, and really scrub it. Now, you could scrub it too hard. We're done. And we're done! Thanks everybody. Did I answer some of it? Yes. All right, let's give a round of applause to our panelists. I can answer your x-ray question up here if you want. Thank you all for coming.