Video Transcript:
Dr. Hisham : As a dentist, a lot of people always keep asking me, I’m brushing, flossing, I’m using mouth rinse, I’m doing whatever I can, and I still keep getting cavities, or I still have gum disease, or I still have bad breath, or all of the above. Very common.
Or: my kids, I’m doing my best for them. I’m using this, I’m using that, we’re doing everything possible, we’re doing everything we’re told, actually, and we still have problems. What is going on? What is the cause of all these problems?
Biofilm. More specifically, bad biofilm. Biofilm is a bug city.
The majority of biofilm that lives in the human body is either on the skin or in the mouth or in the lower gut. The mouth, the lower gut, and the skin were never meant to be sterile. They’re not sterile.
The problems start to happen when the good bacteria die out, and the bad bacteria start to take over. When you’ve got an imbalance in the biofilm, too many weeds versus too little grass, that’s when you have disease.
Having biofilm is normal and natural. Having a bad biofilm is a problem.
First of all, let’s have a look at what biofilm inside the mouth actually looks like. What we’re looking at here are little clusters of bacteria left behind on real teeth inside the mouth that will continue to grow in size as the bacteria multiply and they bud off to join with other clusters, and the whole thing starts to grow into this very well-organized bug city.
From you cleaning your teeth or cleaning your mouth to a fully matured layer of biofilm again, it only takes about 8 hours. Inside the mouth, the most common three problems that are caused by bad biofilm are tooth decay, gum disease, and bad breath.
What it is is an excess of bad bacteria that are fed sugar that makes them sticky as well as producing acid. They ferment the sugar to produce acid, and acid does what? It dissolves teeth.
And the other biofilm disease is gum disease. Certain bacteria help protect us and protect our gums and protect our bones and protect our teeth, and certain bacteria attack us. They cause inflammation. The body doesn’t like them, so we start to react to them.
When these bugs start to get stuck below the gum line, around the teeth and below the gum line, that causes the human body to react. You get this inflammatory reaction that breaks down the bone, dissolves the gums.
In the mean time, the gum is bleeding and inflamed, and of course all these toxins and these same bacteria as they are travel through that inflammatory blood reaction into the rest of the body and cause us other diseases in other parts of the human body.
That’s what bad breath is: too many bad bugs, rotting away food, dead cells, and debris, that shouldn’t be there.
The question becomes what is growing inside of that bug city? What is coming back more? The bad guys or the good guys? Is it balanced or imbalanced?
What grows back within that bug city is only determined by the environment that we allow that biofilm to grow in. So if that environment is more productive and beneficial for the good bacteria to grow, meaning that it has a lot of oxygen, it is nice and slippery, it is alkaline or neutral, then we get the good bugs growing back.
If that environment inside the mouth is kept bad, that is dry, desiccated, acidic, and devoid of oxygen, then guess what? The bad guys will grow over. And the good guys can’t survive in that environment.
So the more that environment is shifted towards being good, the more the biofilm shifts towards being good. Bad environment = bad biofilm.
Brushing, flossing, or using any other forms of cleaning is very, very important because you’re reducing the total amount of dirt. Bad biofilm, dead cells, you’re reducing that amount.
That’s very, very important—It’s critical actually, because you can’t spray the bad bugs within a heap of rotten food and say “I’m ok.” You’re not ok.
You’ve gotta still clean that out. However, that’s only fifty percent of the equation because you clean out all that stuff that you can get to, you’re still left with many bacteria left in there which, within the next eight hours, will form that complete sticky biofilm again. So the more the environment is shifted towards being good, the more that biofilm shifts towards being good.
Make sure that you stay hydrated, and make sure that saliva gets produced more often and more enhanced. Our saliva is what really protects us.
We have a lot of minerals in our saliva. We have bicarbonate to neutralize acids, and as we’ve explained already, acids are very bad for our teeth, and they promote the growth of bad bacteria.
We have calcium and phosphate to remineralize the teeth from any acid attack that happened to them already. We have antibodies that help kill those bacteria that are left behind and keep reducing the numbers.
When people don’t have enough saliva because they’re dehydrated, too much caffeine, too much alcohol, too much smoking, many factors that combine together to cause that, they will always have a problem.
Our job is to stimulate that saliva and to mimic that saliva and to make that saliva more enhanced and stronger with what it should normally contain and do.
Things you can do to do that would include sodium bicarbonate, baking soda, basically, as a little mouth rinse, chewing a piece of cheese, chewing on vegetables, chewing on nuts, or using things like the Ozospa system, which was specifically designed to do this. To mimic and enhance and stimulate natural saliva in every way, shape, or form.
To naturally keep you protected and keep that balance going. You establish the balance, and then you have to keep it because it doesn’t stay there; it always keeps changing.
It’s always shifting, we work on where is it shifting to. More towards the good, or more towards the bad?
Dr. Hisham Abdalla