Dr. Nathan Bryan
speaker
1,178 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 3 Apr
Dr. Nathan Bryan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
No doubt. I mean, this is probably 20-year-old science where we find that, you know, probably 20 years ago, the microbiome project was complete. And what that means is that the bacteria that live in and on our body were completely mapped out. And these communities were identified in the gut, started in the gut, the gastrointestinal tract. And then, you know, you can culture the skin flora.
There's bacteria that live on our skin. There are bacteria that live in our colon. There are bacteria in women that reside in the vagina. And so all of these different ecologies of bacteria that live in and on the body are there to do things to help the human host. We call this symbiosis. We're providing benefit to the bacteria and the bacteria providing benefit to the human host.
And so if we use antibiotics or antiseptics to kill the bacteria that live in and on our body, you get human disease. I mean, that's clear. And the best example is that there's no physician in the world that would recommend you or I take an antibiotic every day for the rest of our lives. Right? Do you agree with that?
And why is that? Because the antibiotics are killing the good bacteria. They kill the infectious pathogen bacteria, but they also destroy the entire microbiome. And when you disrupt the microbiome, you get systemic disease.
You get vascular disease, you get Alzheimer's, you get leaky gut syndrome, you get autoimmune disease, you get high blood pressure, you get yeast infections, you get overgrowth of candida, you get parasites. So the bacteria are really the police of the human kind of surveillance. So we have 10 times more bacteria cells that make up the human than we have human cells.
So we're 10 times more bacteria than we are human. And so if you destroy that microbiome, then it leads to systemic disease.
And again, you look at epidemiological data, kids who grow up in a rural area, they're out in the environment, they're rolling in dirt, they've got dirt on them, and they're inoculated with a lot of bacteria. Those kids are the healthiest people. And you look later in life, they have lower incidence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, they have better immune dysfunction, less autoimmune disease.
So there's this whole hygienic principle or hygienic hypothesis of disease. And I don't think it's a hypothesis anymore. I think it's proven out. So for me, I go back and I go, why are we doing this? Why are we using fluoride rinses in dental offices? Why is there fluoride in our toothpaste? Why is there fluoride in the municipal water of 72% of municipalities in the U.S.?
When fluoride is a known antiseptic, it's a chemical toxicant, it's a thyroid toxicant, it kills your thyroid, and it's a neurological toxin. And so when you go back and look at the history of dentistry, over 100 years ago it was first identified that oral bacteria can be found in the plaque that killed someone from an acute heart attack, right?
People who died from sudden cardiac death, they'll take the thrombus or the embolus that occluded that coronary artery, and they basically biops it, and they find oral bacteria in that plaque that caused the heart attack or stroke. So that told us there's an oral systemic link. There's bacterial translocation of the pathogens. That's why bleeding gums are a problem.
Because you've got bacteria in the mouth, you've got bleeding gums, there's open blood vessels for those bacteria to get into our blood supply. Now they become systemic, cause inflammation, plaque rupture, and heart attack and stroke. So 100 years ago, with reason, with good reason, they go, well, let's treat with an antiseptic.
We have to kill all the bacteria in the mouth, so if you have bleeding gums, there's no translocation of that into systemic circulation, and we can prevent heart attack or stroke. That was 100 years ago, and we've learned a lot in those 100 years. Number one, it wasn't recognized that we have a microbiome on our body, in our body. So now, when I ask dentists all the time, why do you use fluoride?
And they go, well, it's been used for 100 years. And I go, I don't care what the question is, that's the worst answer you could provide. Just because we're doing it because that's the way we've always done it. Right? So now we have to understand, how do we selectively kill the pathogens while maintaining a healthy microbiome?
And so this field started probably in the, I mean, some of the first papers were published probably in the 90s, showing that there were, if you use mouthwash, it destroyed the microbiome, and we saw an increase in blood pressure. These papers were published in the late 2000s. We published on this probably in 2008, 2009. We created what's called an association.
So people who had the healthiest and most diverse bacteria in their mouth had the best blood pressure. people who had the least diverse oral microbiome, and we could not culture any of these nitric oxide-producing bacteria, appeared to have the highest blood pressure. So that's what we call association. It's not causation, but it's a nice association.
So in 2019, we published a paper showing, okay, now let's see if we take normal intensive patients, young, healthy people with good nitric oxide, good blood pressure, and we just give them mouthwash twice a day for seven days to kill the entire oral microbiome. And then we do tongue scrapings to see if we're killing the bacteria, and we do blood pressure measurements.
And so we do that twice a day for seven days. Seven days, we bring them back in, we measure their blood pressure, And then we stopped for four days. We said, okay, don't take mouthwash for four days. Then come back, let's remeasure your blood pressure, and let's do tongue scrapings and figure out what's happening to these bacterial communities.
And what we found was that if you eradicate the bacteria, within seven days your blood pressure goes up.
I think it occurs earlier. But we looked at seven days. We only looked at day one at baseline, seven days, and then four days after stopping the mouthwash. But in one 21-year-old kid, his blood pressure went up 26 millimeters of mercury.
That's clinically hypertensive. So for every one millimeter increase in blood pressure, that increases your risk of cardiovascular disease by 1%. So within seven days, we increased this kid's risk of cardiovascular disease by 26% simply by giving him mouthwash.
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