The Silenced Scientist: The Cure For Alzheimer's Already Exists?! Doctors Are Trapped In A Broken System! The Link Between Oral Infection & Cancer!

What if the cure for Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and erectile dysfunction already exists? Dr. Nathan Bryan breaks the silence on the missing molecule that could reverse disease. Dr. Nathan Bryan is a renowned nitric oxide biochemist, entrepreneur, and bestselling author. Over the past 18 years, he has made groundbreaking discoveries that have transformed our understanding of nitric oxide’s critical role in human health. He is also the author of books such as ‘The Secret of Nitric Oxide - Bringing The Science To Life’. He explains: Why nitric oxide deficiency is the hidden cause behind major chronic diseases How oral infections can trigger cancer and heart disease Why blood pressure medications often fail and what truly works How nitric oxide therapy can make you biologically 15 years younger Why the healthcare system keeps life-saving treatments hidden 00:00 Intro 02:33 Nathan's Mission 04:38 Decline in Nitric Oxide (NO) Production 05:40 Symptoms of Low NO Levels 06:55 Diseases Linked to NO 08:21 What Prompted Nathan's Interest in NO? 10:35 Your Experience With Your Dad Setting You on This Path 12:07 Who Are You & Your Experience 13:14 Nitric Oxide Breakdown 14:24 Is Everything You See Just Aging? 16:07 How to Measure Vascular Age 17:50 Chronic Diseases Associated With NO Deficiency 21:54 The Medical Industry Is Broken 27:40 Doctors Are Trapped in the Broken System 29:18 The Molecule of Longevity 33:00 What Do You Think of Bryan Johnson? 34:38 Can NO Be Overdosed? 36:33 NO’s Role in Increasing Telomere Length 38:33 Relationship Between NO and Oral Microbiome 40:54 Nathan's View on Antibacterial Products 44:04 Negative Impacts of Using Mouthwash 46:08 Oral Microbiome and Blood Pressure Connection 48:25 Link Between Oral Health and Cancer 54:10 Ads 56:19 How to Improve Our Oral Microbiome 58:21 Are Tongue Scrapers Beneficial for Oral Microbiome? 59:26 Relationship Between NO and Hormones 1:00:14 Should We Be Seeing Dental Hygienists? 1:00:45 Mouthwash Eliminates Benefits of Exercise 1:01:05 Foods to Boost Nitric Oxide Production 1:03:54 Wound-Healing Properties of NO 1:05:02 Foods for NO Production 1:05:36 *Beet the Odds*: Why Nathan Wrote a Book About Beetroots 1:09:06 Growth of Interest in Antacid Medication 1:12:22 Link Between NO Levels and Nasal Breathing 1:15:05 Humming Increases NO Levels 1:16:23 Things to Stimulate NO 1:17:45 The Future of Medicine Relies on This 1:20:01 Are You Happily or Unhappily Mated? Follow Dr. Nathan: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/bRZbIr6ZtSb YouTube - https://g2ul0.app.link/urFHgP9ZtSb Website - https://g2ul0.app.link/AJpc3jc0tSb You can purchase Dr Nathan’s book, ‘The Secret of Nitric Oxide-Bringing The Science To Life’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/uHJ9hcf0tSb The 1% Diary is back – limited time only: https://bit.ly/1-Diary-Megaphone-ad-r… The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Get email updates: https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt Think like a CEO – join the 100 CEOs newsletter: https://bit.ly/100-ceos-newsletter Follow Steven: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Independent research - https://nathanbryan.tiiny.co Sponsors: Perfect Ted - https://www.perfectted.com with code DIARY40 for 40% off Vivobarefoot - https://vivobarefoot.com/DOAC with code DOAC20 for 20% off Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm absolutely convinced this will eradicate and cure Alzheimer's.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 0:03Speaker 00

  The data don't lie, and I'm a data guy, and the future of medicine and healthcare around the globe is going to be dependent upon this.

• 0:10Steven Bartlett?

  Dr. Nathan Bryan is the biochemist whose cutting-edge research suggests-

• 0:13Speaker 02

  How one crucial molecule can impact our health, brain function, and longevity.

• 0:17Steven Bartlett?

  That molecule is nitric oxide.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Nitric oxide is a signaling molecule in the human body, which regulates things like blood flow and oxygen delivery, and the loss of nitric oxide production is the earliest event in the onset progression of age-related chronic disease. So things like erectile dysfunction, diabetes, Alzheimer's, high blood pressure, which is the number one driver of cardiovascular disease, which is the number one killer of men and women worldwide. And 50% of the patients that are treated with prescription medication don't respond with better blood pressure because they aren't targeted toward nitric oxide. But most people have never heard of this. They don't know that if you can't walk up a flight of steps or exercise moderately for 15, 20 minutes, then you're nitric oxide deficient. They don't know that most toothpaste and mouthwash is killing the oral microbiome that's partly responsible for production of nitric oxide, but no one is interested in curing human disease because medicine is a business.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  And the epiphany for me came because my dad had a car accident, and he developed these non-healing wounds, and I saw the failure of the standard of care to treat dad's wounds. And so I just thought that there had to be a better way. And simply by giving nitric oxide, I've healed this wound within six months.

• 1:20Steven Bartlett?

  That's crazy. So how do I improve my nitric oxide levels?

• 1:24Speaker 00

  It's what you shouldn't be doing, and we'll cover those step by step. Number one, you have to avoid-

• 1:29Steven Bartlett?

  Quick one before we get back to this episode, just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us, and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you. Thank you so much. Back to the episode.

• 2:16Steven Bartlett?

  Dr. Nathan Bryan, you have committed much of your life to writing about and educating people on a subject that I know absolutely nothing about. But from doing the research for today, I'm pretty shocked that I don't know more about this subject. So for those people who have just clicked to listen to this conversation, can you tell them the mission you're on and why it's so important?

• 2:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, thanks so much for having this conversation with me. I think that illustrates the problem, right? Someone as informed as you don't know anything. I've never heard of nitric oxide. So

• 2:46Steven Bartlett?

  It's important for us to just make a distinction between like nitric gas that people inhale and that if you played like some of those racing car games, you press a button and the car goes really fast.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  Well, that's nitrous.

• 3:00Steven Bartlett?

  Nitrous, yeah. These are two separate things.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, very good point. So this is not nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide is, I mean, a medicine, it's a dental anesthetic, right? It's a gas. It's called laughing gas. That's N2O. It's the chemical formula. What we're talking about is nitric oxide or NO, one nitrogen, one oxygen. But yeah, they sound very similar, but they're completely different. This molecule is foundational for human health and longevity. So nitric oxide is a gas. It's a naturally produced molecule. It's a signaling molecule in the human body. And so it regulates things like blood flow and oxygen delivery, and it mobilizes our own stem cells to help us recover and repair and replace dysfunctional cells. It improves energy production inside

• 3:44Speaker 00

  the cell. And it regulates blood flow. You know, when we begin to exercise, if we want to recall memory, that's dependent upon adequate blood flow to the organs. If we're, you know, it's intimately involved in sexual activity and dilation of the sex organs for sexual function. So what we're finding is that the older we get, the less nitric oxide we naturally produced. And now today, that's recognized as the earliest event in the onset and progression of age-related chronic disease. So my mission is to inform and educate the global population.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  On how important, number one, what nitric oxide is, how it's produced in the human body, what goes wrong in people that can't make it, and then perhaps most importantly, how do we prevent that age-related decline in nitric oxide production? So, everybody can be empowered to take control of their own health and prevent age-related disease. And that's what the science tells us, but as you illustrated, most people have never heard of this.

• 4:39Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, this graph, which I'll put on the screen for anyone watching, kind of illustrates what you're talking about, and quite notably, this decline seems to start when you're 30 years old, which is how old I am right now.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Well, you know, that's, if you look at population-based studies at different age groups, we see about a 10 to 12% decline in what we call endothelial function per decade. So that means, so nitric oxide is a gas, it's produced in the endothelium. So the endothelium is the single layer of cells that line every blood vessel throughout the body. So the function of these endothelial cells is to regulate vascular tone and to regulate, you know, solute exchange and extravasation or transport of molecules across that endothelial layer. And so when your endothelial cells can no longer make nitric oxide gas, they no longer dilate, so the blood vessels become constricted, you start to get inflammation, you get stiff

• 5:34Speaker 00

  arteries, plaque deposition, and that's what starts cardiovascular disease or atherosclerosis.

• 5:39Steven Bartlett?

  So, someone that's struggling with their nitric oxide levels at the moment, what kind of symptoms would they experience?

• 5:48Speaker 00

  Well, we know there's a hierarchy, right? So, the first sign and symptom of nitric oxide deficiency is usually erectile dysfunction. And when you think about this, when we're stimulated or we're about to have intimacy with our partner, we have to dilate the blood vessels. So, when erections in both men and women are dependent upon dilation of the blood vessels to get engorgement, to get increase in blood flow, and that's what an erection is. But if those blood vessels can't make nitric oxide, the blood vessels don't dilate, so there's no increase in blood flow, there's no engorgement, and that's by definition what we call erectile dysfunction. And it's the same in men and women, right? Whether it's the penis or the clitoris or the labia, you have to have an increase in blood flow. And without nitric oxide, there's no increase in blood flow.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  So that's number one, and we call that the canary in the coal mine. Because for years, people thought it was a lifestyle disorder. Right?

• 6:40Steven Bartlett?

  What erectile dysfunction?

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. But now it's recognized that it's a symptom of loss of nitric oxide. And really, an accelerated form of cardiovascular disease. So we have to focus on the vascular component of erectile dysfunction.

• 6:54Steven Bartlett?

  What other diseases are linked to nitric oxide?

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Deficiency. So if you don't correct the ED, then what you start to see is an increase in blood pressure. And when you think about this mechanistically, so we have, you know, a finite volume of blood that's pumping throughout our body every day, every second. And if you can make nitric oxide, the blood vessels are more dilated. So now we're pumping that volume through, you know, more dilated blood vessels. But if we lose the ability to produce nitric oxide, now you don't get the dilation. Now you have smaller blood vessels. You're pumping that same volume of blood through smaller pipes. And simple physics tells us that blood pressure goes up.

• 7:31Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so you're going to have cardiovascular challenges.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  Well, you're going to have high blood pressure or hypertension. And at least in the US, and I think these these statistics probably are worldwide, but two out of three Americans have an unsafe elevation in blood pressure. And 50% of the people that are given prescription medications to treat their blood pressure do not respond with better blood pressure. It's because most of the drugs out there, whether they're ACE inhibitors, what's called angiotensin receptor blockers, calcium channel antagonists. The main classes of drugs that treat high blood pressure aren't targeted toward restoration of nitric oxide. So that's why we call that resistant hypertension. They're resistant to traditional therapies. And the reason they're resistant is because it's a nitric oxide problem.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  And those drugs aren't designed to affect nitric oxide production or improve it.

• 8:20Steven Bartlett?

  Was there a an aha moment in your career where you became particularly interested in this subject? Because you could have committed your life to studying any facet of health or or science. But for some reason, you chose nitric oxide as the thing that you chose to focus on. What was that eureka moment?

• 8:39Speaker 00

  You know, for me, it was I was a student at LSU School of Medicine. So it was the late 90s, maybe early 2000s. But a Nobel Prize had just been awarded for the discovery of nitric oxide. And the three US scientists that were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1998. And I was very fortunate at the time, I was a young student, probably a first year student, and Lou Ignarro, who had just won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of nitric oxide, came and spoke and gave a lecture before the student body. And I had a chance to have a conversation with him afterwards, and I was fortunate to be invited to have dinner with him that night. And he made a very poignant statement to me. He goes, "If the scientific community can figure out how to restore the production of nitric oxide, it will change the world. And it will change the landscape of medicine."

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Because even then, was that 25, 26 years ago? That it was recognized that a loss of nitric oxide production is leading to the onset and development of many poorly managed age-related chronic diseases. So I go, "That's a very profound statement from a guy who just won the Nobel Prize." But that was the first kind of eureka moment for me that stimulated the interest. But then my dad, and I talk about it in the book, his dad is 76 years old. In 1984, he had a car accident that left him paralyzed from the mid-back down. So the majority of my life, even as a kid, I was treating dad's wounds, the cubitus ulcers, pressure ulcers on his feet, on his butt. And he developed these non-healing wounds.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  He was diabetic, he was paraplegic, poor blood flow, hypertension, and he developed a non-healing wound, and no wound care doc that I took him to could heal this wound. So I started making a topical nitric oxide, and I've healed this wound within, it appears that four years of non-healing, I healed it within six months. Simply by giving nitric oxide and getting blood flow to that wound, killing the infection in the wound. And this was in a 60-something-year-old, paraplegic, diabetic, sedentary old man.

• 10:34Steven Bartlett?

  What you went through as a young man, to me, appears to be such an important sort of through line with all the work that you do and chose to do. There is this overarching question, which is even like, why did you go into medicine? Why did you want to help people? Where did that come from in you? And I feel like there's clues in that to some degree, based on what I read about your family, your early upbringing, the divorce of your parents, and then ultimately your dad getting in a car accident and being paralyzed. Is that an accurate suspicion?

• 11:06Speaker 00

  You know, I certainly directed kind of my, my life because I witnessed the failure of the standard of care to treat dad with what I thought should be pretty simple. I mean, we have, again, the most advanced technology, medical technology, best medical schools in the world, and yet we can't treat a wound, we can't address the hypertension, we can't address the diabetes medically. And so I just thought that there had to be a better way.

• 11:35Steven Bartlett?

  It's still with you now, isn't it?

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I, you know, I see, um, you know, dad, when I think I'm having a bad day, I just think, look, I'm not in a wheelchair, I got my health. So no matter how bad I think I got it, I go, it could always be worse. So I just wake up every day with a grateful heart and, you know, some days are good, some days are bad, but I always realize it could always be better, but it could be a hell of a lot worse. So I don't complain.

• 12:06Steven Bartlett?

  And who are you? What are all the reference points? What's the experience you've had in your career that have filled up your sort of buckets of knowledge that you bring forth today? Like, what have you studied? Where have you been?

• 12:20Speaker 00

  I was in molecular and cellular physiology, got a PhD in molecular and cellular physiology. And that was, I was recruited by Fred Mirad, one of the other guys who shared the Nobel Prize, to join the faculty at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, which is the world's largest medical center, but is part of the University of Texas system. So I was recruited as a professor of molecular medicine, published probably, well, over a hundred peer-reviewed scientific publications. I've edited several medical textbooks on the subject. I taught in medical school. And then I resigned from academia, I guess, several years ago during COVID to focus on the next phase of my career, is taking this 25 years of science and research and discovery.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  And now bringing that to the fore for safe and effective product technology, drug therapies to eradicate a lot of these poorly managed chronic diseases that you know, we're faced with today.

• 13:14Steven Bartlett?

  So let me get this straight. I'll repeat back to you what I think I understand about nitric oxide and you tell me if it's accurate. So this nitric oxide is a chemical that is in all the blood cells of my body and it allows my blood cells to basically expand, open up so blood can flow through there.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  So if I Well, it dilates, it dilates the smooth muscle. It's not affecting the cells per se, but it's dilating the smooth muscle that surrounds the blood vessels and that leads to relaxation and dilation.

• 13:44Steven Bartlett?

  Fine. So my blood cells would then expand.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  Your blood vessels.

• 13:46Steven Bartlett?

  And more blood would go through there. But if I'm deficient, that mechanism doesn't work and my blood cells wouldn't expand, ultimately expand through the relaxation of the muscles.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 13:57Steven Bartlett?

  And therefore I would have higher blood pressure, which can lead to a series of downstream diseases and consequences. And so when we look at the graph that I showed a second ago, where we're seeing, for anyone that can't see this graph because you're listening on audio, we're seeing nitric oxide levels in young people up to the age of roughly around 20 are optimal. And then from about 30 to 70, there's this tremendous sort of 80, 90% drop. When I look at that graph, though, my question becomes, is that not just aging? Is that not just normal? Is that not just inevitable?

• 14:33Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, there are a lot of things that occur with aging, right? We lose growth hormone with age. We lose, you know, many hormones. Nitric oxide is a hormone that we, we first discovered nitric oxide as a hormone back in 2007. But to understand aging, you have to understand what leads to aging. So aging, from my perspective, is the inability to repair and replace dysfunctional cells, right? Every day we wear ourselves out and we just gotta, and if we can repair and replace dysfunctional cells, then we combat, or at least prolong the aging process. So what the science tells us in nitric oxide is this, that loss of nitric oxide production is the earliest event in the onset progression of age-related chronic disease.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  So as that graph implies, it is part of the aging process, but it doesn't have to be. Right? Because today, we know we can shift that curve to the left or to the right. So we can accelerate it. And you see this today with 18, 20-year-old kids that are, have high blood pressure. They have diabetes. They have erectile dysfunction. They have learning and cognitive impairment. And those are all symptoms of nitric oxide deficiency. And to the contrary, we, if we see 50, 60, 70-year-old patients, they would fit on a 30 or 40-year-old scale on that graph. So this, this doesn't have to be the case. We know how to prevent this age-related decline in nitric oxide production. You know, I'm, I'm the best example.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  I'm 51 years old, but I've got the vascular age of a 36-year-old. Cause I employ these principles to prevent this age-related decline in nitric oxide production.

• 16:08Steven Bartlett?

  And when you say you've got the vascular age of a 36-year-old, how, how does one measure that? You look at the sort of vascular health of your...

• 16:14Speaker 00

  You can, so there's, there's several objective measures of, of biological age. Obviously, we can affect our chronological age. Right? But we can certainly affect our biological age. So what you can do, there's databases now that we call cradid intima media thickness. So they take an ultrasound and look at your cradid arteries. And they can look at what's called smooth muscle hyperplasia, or the thickness of the intima. And compare it to a database of age-matched, kind of, really, it's, you're comparing against your colleagues. So that's one way. Another way is looking at what's called flow mediated dilatation, or endothelial function. And again, through database of hundreds of thousands or of millions of patients, you can figure out where you fall on that spectrum on endothelial function.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  And then there's, you know, other markers, looking at histone modification of the DNA, methylation profiles. There's a company or a technology called Glycan Age that looks at certain markers that can then define a biological age for each individual.

• 17:16Steven Bartlett?

  So by age forty, we have lost about fifty percent of our ability to produce nitric oxide in our blood vessels. And we lose ten to twelve percent of nitric oxide production per decade. This is all according to your book.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:29Steven Bartlett?

  And by age seventy to eighty, nitric oxide levels in blood vessels can be seventy five percent lower than in young adults. A Japanese study found a seventy five percent reduction in nitric oxide production in people aged seventy to eighty compared to twenty year olds. Interesting. So in terms of chronic disease, that is downstream from me losing nitric oxide level. Can you give me a bit of a menu of chronic disease that is associated with this nitric oxide deficiency?

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Yep. And we've touched on them. So erectile dysfunction.

• 18:06Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  Fifty percent of the men over the age of forty self-report erectile dysfunction. That's in the US. So think about that. Fifty percent self-report. I think the numbers are higher because most forty year olds that I know are never going to admit that they have erectile dysfunction. So I think the numbers are even worse. So that's one. High blood pressure. Again, fifty percent of the patients that are treated with prescription medication don't respond with better blood pressure. That's a huge problem because high blood pressure is the number one driver of cardiovascular disease, which is the number one killer of men and women worldwide. Number three, metabolic disease and diabetes. We published in two thousand and eleven that nitric oxide production is necessary for insulin signaling. If the cell can't make nitric oxide, you develop insulin resistance.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  So diabetes, a global pandemic. Nine out of ten Americans are metabolically unfit. The other thing is exercise intolerance. If you if you try to start an exercise regimen and you can't walk up a flight of steps or exercise moderately for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, then you're nitric oxide deficient. And then the other one is obviously Alzheimer's. Because Alzheimer's is a vascular disease. It's reduced blood flow to the to the brain, what we call focal ischemia. There's insulin resistance. You know, Alzheimer's has been called diabetes type three. So you can't get glucose into the cell. And that's the primary energy source or substrate of the brain. Oxidative stress and immune dysfunction. And then you get misfolded proteins. And that shows up as the tau tangles and the amyloid plaque that we see in Alzheimer's patients.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  So if we can restore, and nitric oxide corrects every single thing we know about Alzheimer's. It improves blood flow to the brain. It improves glucose uptake. So it overcomes the metabolic aspect of Alzheimer's. It reduces inflammation. In fact, the number of my patents are on a method of reducing inflammation. It inhibits the oxidative stress we see in Alzheimer's neurological disease, and it prevents the immune dysfunction. And when you do that, when you restore blood flow and you get nutrients and oxygen in and you take out the metabolic waste products, there's no misfolding of protein. So you don't get the amyloid plaque, you don't get the tautangles. So this simple molecule, nitric oxide gas, I'm absolutely convinced will eradicate and cure Alzheimer's.

• 20:19Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Because it addresses every physiological root cause of Alzheimer's.

• 20:24Steven Bartlett?

  If you can get it administered therapeutically to patients early enough?

• 20:29Speaker 00

  No, I think that's a very key because the success or failure of any clinical trial, any drug in any clinical trial is dependent upon the design of the clinical trial and what patients, at what stage of disease that you enroll these patients. So what are the inclusion criteria and what are the exclusion criteria? And there's a stage in every disease, whether it's heart disease, kidney disease, Alzheimer's, where you've reached a point of no return. There's really no medical therapy that's going to reverse that disease because it's progressed to a state that's irreversible. So I think what we try to do is take, take patients early in the process, what we call vascular dementia, mild cognitive impairment, early Alzheimer's.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  Because what I want to be able to demonstrate is two things. Number one, can we stop the progression of disease? Once it started, can we stop the progression? And then number two is, we want to enroll patients far enough along to where we can show regression. So can you move, can you move the needle back? And so that's a very kind of a specific and finite patient population. When you design a clinical study, number one, at the, at the absolute worst, we want to stop progression. At the absolute best, we want to show that we can regress disease. And that's the goal of therapy, is that you understand the mechanism of disease to the extent that you can treat it, you can prevent it, you can reverse it, and you can cure it.

• 21:55Steven Bartlett?

  Is there something you believe that the traditional world of medicine and maybe the traditional media don't believe?

• 22:05Speaker 00

  I believe in the truth and I come from a very objective scientific background. So everything that we do is based on objective data.

• 22:14Steven Bartlett?

  I say this because I was listening to your interview before and there were several moments in the interview where you'd reference that you'd say things like they don't, they don't want you to know this, or they don't, they won't tell you this.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  No, absolutely, because you know, the, we talk about epiphanies and eureka moments in science, but for me, one of the kind of complete change in paradigm in the way that I think was changed in, when I was in academia and teaching in medical school and doing research in an academic institution. And you start to think, what we, in the scientific community, we under, we've cured every disease, every disease known to man, we've cured it in rats and mice. So then the question is, why hasn't this translated into patient care? Why can't we do this in humans? Number one, in, in animal experiments, we control their environment, we can true their food, we control their light cycle, we control everything about them. You can't do that.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  Everybody has a different diet, everybody has different drug therapy that they're on or hygienic practices. But then what I realized was, because when I was in academia, we wanted to create this consortium, a center of excellence for diseases, because my thought process was, you know, Western medicine is siloed, right? If you have a heart problem, you go to a cardiologist. You've got a GI problem, you go to a gastroenterologist. If you've got a neurological problem, you go to a neurologist or psychiatrist. But none of these disciplines talk to one another. So if you go to, that neurologist is going to treat that condition much different than the cardiologist would, much different than the GI doc would. But what if we're looking at the exact same root cause?

• 23:56Speaker 00

  And so my philosophy, well, let's create a center of excellence and let's bring everybody in the room. Let's bring the GI docs, the neurologist, the cardiologist, the geneticist, the pulmonary docs, the kidney docs, the renal docs. And let's, let's understand this kind of wheel and cog because everything occurs at the mitochondria, subcellular level, and energy production. And then basically, everything can, can manifest from that. But what I quickly realized, when you, when you go to, for instance, MD Anderson and trying to treat cancer, no one is interested in curing cancer. No one is interested in curing human disease. Because the epiphany for me came because medicine is a business. It's a for-profit business.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  In fact, it's the largest business and economic model in the world, trillion-dollar annualized market. And most of these drug companies who influence and pay and support scientific journals, JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, the major publications, the major journals, and they're influencing regulation and policy and FDA. And so when you figure out that there's undue influence for these for-profit companies, because the number one rule of business, as you know, as an entrepreneur and a business guy, is acquire a customer and keep that customer as long as you can. Call it lifetime value of that customer. And that's what medicine is. They get you, they acquire you as a customer, they put you on a drug, that drug has side

• 25:25Speaker 00

  effects, they have to put you on another drug to mitigate the side effects of that drug. Now you get side effects from that polypharmacy, they have to put you on another drug to mitigate those side effects. And now you look up and people who are 50 to 60 years old and older are on 10, 12, 18 different medications. That's the best financial model in the world. So it's a great financial model, but it's at the expense of our health and the health of everybody living in the world. And in the US, you know, we have the sickest population in the world. Now, for the first time in the history of Western medicine, have discussions between physician and patient, how do we wean you off this drug? That conversation has never had before, because it's always, if this doesn't work,

• 26:08Speaker 00

  come back and I'll prescribe you more drugs. Let's do the opposite. You come back and let's understand the root of cause of disease. Let's say, okay, well, if we are addressing this, you don't need this medication. And if you don't need this medication, you don't need this medication. And now, for the first time, you start weaning patients off of drugs. And what happens? You're now impeding upon the market share of these multi-billion dollar drug companies who make their living buying influence, regulating policy, influencing policy. And the FDA is a stepping stone to a board seat of Big Pharma. Every former FDA official in the US for the past 20 or 30 years goes on to become multimillion dollar salaried employee from Big Pharma. It has to stop.

• 26:53Steven Bartlett?

  Despite spending nearly 20% of the United States GDP on healthcare, the US ranks last overall on health outcomes among high income countries, including having the highest infant mortality rates and lowest life expectancy. It's like unbelievable.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  No, I mean, that's depressing. I mean, but those are the facts. And you have to understand, those are indisputable data, right? And so when people hear that, they go, they, when you look at kind of the system, and I don't blame doctors, because doctors are getting into this field, you know, I was on the admissions committee to UT Medical School for a number of years. So we interviewed a lot of these young kids, figure out what their motivation was. Will they have a successful career in medicine? And almost everyone, I mean, there's always the exception, but everyone gets into medicine because they want to make a difference. They're driven by curiosity. And most of them want to leave a lasting legacy and help people. That's what drives entry into healthcare.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  But when you look at the system in which they're trained in, it prevents them, it basically handcuffs them. Because when you figure out the pay, the economic model of medicine, once you make a diagnosis, now you've got a diagnosable disease to which you have a finite number of responses. Right? If you make this diagnosis, that's called an ICD-10 code, which is reimbursable. And that's how you get paid. So, once you make a diagnosis, you only have a finite list of things you can do. You can't ask that question and go, "Well, what's really causing this?" And spend, you know, 90 minutes with that patient. Because most physicians have to see 60, 70, 80 patients a day to pay the bills, to cover their overhead. So, it's a factory.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  You come in, you look at, you've got a transcriber, you make a diagnosis, "Okay, I'm gonna prescribe this medication, come back in two weeks or six months and we'll see where you are." And then it's just, it's a churn, it's a mill. But as you meant, the data don't lie. Right? sickest population, highest infant mortality in the most industrialized nation in the world.

• 29:00Steven Bartlett?

  And according to the data, Americans are spending about 13 years of their life living with disease. And that is significantly higher than many other high-income Western countries. So although life expectancy, you know, might be 70, 80 years old, you're gonna spend almost 15 years of that time living with disease. So your health span is really probably the more important thing to be focusing on, not your lifespan. And so when we talk about nitric oxide, I've heard you describe it as the molecule of longevity.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 29:30Steven Bartlett?

  Why'd you say that? Why'd you say that?

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Well, again, longevity is this emerging field that's driven by how do we live longer? How do we increase our health span and longevity? Right? Because I think we can all agree that nobody wants to live to be 100 years old if we spend the last 25 of that year incapacitated, in a diaper, unable to get out of bed. Right? That's not living. So when I look at longevity, I look at kind of what are the hallmarks of longevity? What defines longevity? Right? How do we live a longer, healthier life, free of disease? And really, there's three objective measures. There is a stem cells. You know, this whole field of regenerative medicine is based on mobilizing our own stem cells. We're deploying stem cells throughout the body to repair and replace dysfunctional cells.

• 30:16Steven Bartlett?

  So these stem cells are cells that can basically act as like Band-Aids repairs for any part of our body?

• 30:22Speaker 00

  Well, we call them pluripotent stem cells. So mean that, and some of these are bone marrow derived. Some of these are what we call stromal vascular fraction that you get from the adipose tissue or the fat.

• 30:31Steven Bartlett?

  Pluripotent would mean

• 30:32Speaker 00

  Pluripotent, it means that that stem cell can go and become a neuron. That stem cell can go to the heart and become a functional myocyte. It can go and become a macrophage or an immune cell, white blood cell. So pluripotent means it can become many things, whatever it needs to be. In some cases, the amount of stem cells present in our bone marrow get smaller with age, the number of cells decrease with age. But fortunately or unfortunately, the older we get, the more fat we deposit. And so we have a number of stem cells in our fat. So we've increased the number of stem cells in our fat. So the problem with aging and longevity is when we lose the ability to mobilize our own stem cells. We can't repair and replace dysfunctional cells.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  So we have what we call zombie cells or senescent cells. They're there, but they can't do their job. They're dysfunctional. And that's what leads to age. Number two, it's telomeres. And telomeres are the ends of the chromosomes of our DNA.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  And so they're the very end. So it's like the

• 31:37Speaker 00

  the tips of the shoestrings, right? That prevent the shoestring from fraying.

• 31:41Steven Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  And those are like the telomeres. So as long as you have a functional telomere and it prevents it from getting shorter, then shorter telomeres, shorter lifespan. Longer telomeres, longer lifespan. So when telomeres get shorter, it decreases our lifespan and longevity. And then the third one is mitochondrial function. Every age-related chronic disease, you have a lower number of mitochondria per cell. And the mitochondria that are present aren't functional. So you get what's called an uncoupling of the electron transport chain inside the inner mitochondrial membrane. And you can no longer effectively produce cellular energy or ATP. So nitric oxide is the foundational longevity molecule because nitric oxide is

• 32:22Speaker 00

  the signal in the body that tells our stem cells to mobilize and differentiate. Without nitric oxide, you have less number of circulating stem cells. Nitric oxide activates the enzyme telomerase, which prevents telomere shortening. Without nitric oxide, you don't get activation of telomerase, telomeres shorten. And then nitric oxide is the signal in the cell that tells the cell, I need more mitochondria, and I need these mitochondria to be more efficient, generate more cellular energy with less oxygen. So when you restore nitric oxide, you address all three aspects of longevity, and there's no other molecule in the body that does that.

• 33:02Steven Bartlett?

  You know Brian Johnson, don't you?

• 33:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 33:05Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think of Brian Johnson?

• 33:06Speaker 00

  You know, I would never replicate or try to do what he does. I don't think it's the proper approach. You know, and I don't, I don't mean to criticize people because this whole field of biohacking. You know, you get people who have no science background, no medical background, no biochemical background, and yet they're out there influencing millions of people that follow them. And many times, they're giving really bad advice, not intentionally, it's because of ignorance. They just don't know. They don't know the science, they don't know the medicine behind it. So before you go and follow any influencer or biohacker, number one, look at their credentials. And if they don't have any science background, if they're, you know, formal technologist

• 33:50Speaker 00

  or, you know, come from anything besides science and medicine, you really need to do a little bit of deep dive and make sure that what they're giving you is scientifically valid or recommending.

• 34:00Steven Bartlett?

  He seems to be a fan of the role of nitric oxide as it relates to longevity, though. He seems to have said positive things about nitric oxide and its impact on improving your cardiovascular health.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think as we advance the science and we do more to communicate the complex science into, you know, layman's terms where the non-scientists, non-medical professionals can understand it and appreciate it, I think more people are going to pick up to that. But there's also some well-known biohackers with influences of, you know, millions of people that still say that nitric oxide is a toxin that inhibits mitochondrial respiration and it should be avoided.

• 34:37Steven Bartlett?

  Is there such thing as having too much nitric oxide though? Because if people hear this conversation today and they rush out and they, I don't know, overdo their nitric oxide by doing a bunch of therapies, is that a risk?

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Absolutely. You know, we know water is essential, right? But we can drink too much water and kill ourselves. You see it on the news, you know, a couple of times a year called hypotonic lysis. So yeah, dose dictates poison. And so what we have to do is make sure, maintain the integrity of the field to make sure that if there are nitric oxide products out there, that number one, you don't overdo it and lead to, you know, health issues or kill a consumer, kill a patient, because that could kill the entire field. But we also understand that there's only two signs of toxicity for nitric oxide. So it's really pretty straightforward. Number one, if you take too much nitric oxide, you're going to get an unsafe drop in blood pressure. Just think about this, if you take nitric oxide or you're enhancing nitric oxide products

• 35:36Speaker 00

  through whatever means, it's going to lead to systemic vasodilation. Now you've got that same volume of blood pumping through much larger pipes and you're going to have a drop in blood pressure. And if you lose perfusion pressure, you're not going to be able to perfuse the brain because you've got to pump against gravity and you're going to get lightheaded and you'll pass out. And if that's prolonged, it leads to ischemic end organ damage and organ failure and it can be deadly. So that's number one. And then number two is a condition called methemoglobinemia. And that's a big word, meaning that you're, it oxidizes the iron of hemoglobin and reduces your oxygen carrying capacity. So you'll become cyanotic, you'll get blue around the lips, your extremities will turn, you know, white from lack of perfusion or lack of oxygen.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  But you never see that. I mean, you really never see clinical methemoglobinemia. Fortunately, your blood pressure will drop to an unsafe level long before you get any accumulation of methemoglobinemia.

• 36:33Steven Bartlett?

  So on this point of longevity, then, one of the points you mentioned there was telomere length, and I've heard about telomere length because I've heard about studies they've done in rats and I think other rodents around telomere length. So it was discovered that individuals with shorter telomeres had a death rate nearly twice of those with longer telomeres. And you're telling me that there has been research done that shows how nitric oxide can increase telomere length?

• 36:58Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So we understand at the DNA level, at the nuclear level, that nitric oxide is what's called a co-localizes with estrogen receptor to allow for the turning the cell to turn on transcription and translation of the telomerase enzyme. So it's not only affecting the genetic transcription of that protein, but it's also regulating the function of the enzyme. So without nitric oxide, you have less telomere telomerase enzyme and that telomerase enzyme isn't functional.

• 37:32Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so nitric oxide has an impact on the telomerase?

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Telomerase enzyme, that's right.

• 37:37Steven Bartlett?

  Telomerase enzyme.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  So what happens with each cellular division, those telomeres can get shorter.

• 37:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Right. But as long as that telomerase enzyme is active, it prevents the shortening of the very ends of the chromosome.

• 37:49Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. And just for people that don't understand, the with every replication, as we age, we're continually replicating ourselves to restore and repair them. But in that replication process, harm is occurred sometimes.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, and different cell types have different replication rates, right? So the epithelium of the gut is highly regenerative, right? It's replicatable. We're replacing these cells all the time because it's the outside environment that you're having to continue to replace those cells. Neurons, to the exact opposite, aren't regenerative by nature. So we don't typically make, I mean, we can, it was once thought that you can't regenerate neurons, but today we know we can. But yeah, so it affects different organ systems differently. But the data are clear, shorter telomeres, shorter lifespan.

• 38:34Steven Bartlett?

  The other thing that I wanted to talk to you about before we really get into the heart of how do I improve my nitric oxide levels or keep them at a healthy range while I age, is nitric oxide's relationship with the oral microbiome.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:47Steven Bartlett?

  I had a conversation on this podcast not too long ago about the oral microbiome. Again, another subject I hadn't thought much about. But is there a relationship there?

• 38:54Speaker 00

  No doubt. I mean, this is, this is probably 20 year old science.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  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, you can culture the, 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, what we call the symbiosis. We're providing benefit to the

• 39:41Speaker 00

  bacteria and the bacteria providing benefit to the human host. And so if you use antibiotics or antiseptics to kill the bacteria that live in and on our body, you get human disease.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  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?

• 40:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  You agree with that?

• 40:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  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. Right? So the, 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

• 40:51Speaker 00

  microbiome, then it leads to systemic disease.

• 40:54Steven Bartlett?

  We live in a culture where we're constantly trying to kill bacteria, right? We're like, especially post pandemic, we're using all kinds of hand washes and antiseptics and obviously the, the big, I guess, chemicals that we all typically use are things like mouthwash is.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:09Steven Bartlett?

  With, which are again, trying to just clean out all the bacteria from our mouths.

• 41:14Steven Bartlett?

  Well, how would you caution someone on using these things? And even the like the antibacterial.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's bad news.

• 41:20Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 41:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:21Steven Bartlett?

  We give it to our children because we want our kids to be clean and not to have.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Kids need to be dirty.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  If I, and again, you look at epidemiological data, kids who grow up in the, in a rural area, they're out in the environment, they're rolling in dirt, they're, they're get dirt on them and they have, you know, 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, what, why are we doing this? Why are we using fluoride rinses in dental offices? Why is there fluoride in our toothpaste?

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Why is there fluoride in the municipal water of 72% of municipalities in the US? 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.

• 42:25Speaker 00

  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 biopsy 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 got bleeding gums, there's open blood vessels for those bacteria to get into our blood supply.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  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 in systemic circulation and we can prevent heart attack or stroke.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  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 four?" And they go, "Well, it's been used for 100 years." And I go, "Well, 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.

• 44:14Speaker 00

  We published on this probably in, like, 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 do, if we take normal tints of 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

• 44:59Speaker 00

  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 stop for four days. We say, "Okay, don't take mouthwash for four days, then come back, let's re-measure 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.

• 45:31Steven Bartlett?

  So if you use mouthwash, within seven days, your blood pressure goes up?

• 45:36Speaker 00

  I think it occurs earlier, but what we 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.

• 45:50Steven Bartlett?

  Which is, put that in context for me.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  It'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.

• 46:08Steven Bartlett?

  And explain to me in layman's terms, the mechanism now, what's going on?

• 46:14Speaker 00

  Well, we're still trying to understand mechanism. Again, we're at the observational level that's really indisputable. Because these bacteria, there's what we call nitrate reducing bacteria, and humans do not have this enzyme. So nitrate is what's found in green leafy vegetables, right? These plants assimilate nitrogen in the soil in the form of nitrate. We consume these vegetables, the nitrate is taken up in the gut, it's concentrated in our salivary glands, and the bacteria perform this metabolism of nitrate into nitride and nitric oxide. And humans do not have the functional enzyme to do this. We're 100% dependent upon the bacteria.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  So then now, because nitrate is inert in humans, we rely on the bacteria to metabolize this molecule into a usable form where we can make nitric oxide. So when you're killing the bacterium, now the nitrate is just being recirculated, but you're you're urinating because it's filtered across the kidneys. You poop it out and you sweat it out. So it's completely unchanged unless you have the right bacteria. And what we're finding is that that oral production of nitride and nitric oxide being produced in the acid environment of the stomach is somehow regulating resistance arteries in dilation to normalize systemic blood pressure.

• 47:36Steven Bartlett?

  So if I don't have a healthy oral microbiome, then

• 47:39Speaker 00

  You have an elevation in blood pressure.

• 47:41Steven Bartlett?

  And much of the things you're talking to me about today in terms of dietary

• 47:46Steven Bartlett?

  changes won't have any effect anyway, because I need the bacteria to convert it into nitric oxide.

• 47:53Speaker 00

  As it relates, there are many benefits of many nutrients in foods, particular plants, that confer some health benefits. But when we focus specifically on the benefits of nitric oxide from your diet, if you don't have the right oral bacteria, you get zero nitric oxide benefits from your diet. Now, you're gonna get, you know, obviously, hopefully, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D from foods, fiber, other phytonutrients. But in terms of the blood pressure lowering effects of, for instance, a plant-based diet, if you don't have the right bacteria, you get zero benefits of that.

• 48:26Steven Bartlett?

  Have you seen a link between oral health and cancer?

• 48:31Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely.

• 48:33Steven Bartlett?

  What have you seen?

• 48:34Speaker 00

  People that have dental infections, root canals, cavitations from previous extraction sites, have typically cancer. It sets the stage for cancer cell growth and proliferation.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  So, and I've, you know, I made a controversial statement on a previous podcast where I say, number one, I'm not an oncologist, but people who have terminal metastatic disease, who aren't ready to die, who are sent home to die on hospice, somehow find me and go, can you help me with this cancer? So the first thing I always send them to is a dentist. To see, do you have any active oral infections? That may have led to the development of the primary tumor in the first place, but obviously, it's metastatic, meaning that it's now everywhere. It's migrated outside that primary tumor. But almost always, without fail, they have an active oral infection. And it may be a symptomatic infection to where they know it and they have a toothache, or it may be an asymptomatic infection where they don't even know they got a dental infection.

• 49:31Steven Bartlett?

  What percentage of cancer patients that you see, that you then refer to a dentist, have an oral infection?

• 49:36Speaker 00

  People with primary tumors, solid tumors. So we categorize these in bloodborne cancers, something like lymphoma, leukemia, multiple myeloma, which is a bloodborne cancer, and those that have a solid tumor.

• 49:48Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  A primary tumor that starts in the breast, the colon, the prostate, the lungs, or liver. Without fail, 100% of them have dental infections.

• 49:58Steven Bartlett?

  But cause and effect is not possible to establish here, right?

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Cause and effect, no, I don't think we're there yet. I think probably as the science advances and people start to look at this. Because you may imagine if you have cancer and you've been to the best cancer doctors in the world, and you've done surgery, you've done chemo, you've done radiation, you've gone through the standard of care, and the cancer comes back, it's terminal, it's metastatic. And you tell, when I tell people, well, you need to go see a dentist. I mean, many people laugh and they go, have you, what, what in the hell did you just say? I've got cancer, I don't have a dental problem. And I go, no, well, perhaps you do. Because again, if you go back and I always look at back, what's, what's held true throughout ages?

• 50:45Speaker 00

  And if you look at Ayurvedic medicine, if you look at traditional Chinese medicine, if you look at acupuncture, and if you go back and you look, if you don't know what to look for, you're never going to find it. If you know what to look for, it's out there, it's in the published literature. But every tooth in the body is connected to an organ system, right? And so these are, these are the meridians, the acupuncture meridians. You know, the analogy is they're circuit breakers. So if you, if you trip a breaker in your home, there's no electricity going through that circuit. So your oven doesn't work, your refrigerator doesn't work, your lights go out. Well, the body is electric, right? And how do we diagnose death? No electrical activity, right? Either through an EKG or an EEG. So the body is electric and we're, we're batteries.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  And so if we get, if that red light comes on on our phone, it says we have a low battery. Everybody panics and goes and plugs it in and charges, right? And the human body is the exact same. We lose voltage over time. And if you've got a trip breaker from an infected tooth, there's no voltage, there's no circuitry going to that meridian that feeds individual organs. So the, the best example is if you've got a root canal and 100% of root canal teeth are infected. And when you think, and people go, well, that's not true. Well, think about what a root canal is. You had a toothache at some point because of an infection. So you go to the dentist and they pull the nerve root out of that tooth. So you don't feel the pain anymore because there's no nerve root there. And they pull the blood supply out of that tooth.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  Now you have no blood supply to that tooth and a tooth is a crystalline structure. It's a living organ. With no blood supply and no nerve root, that's a dead tissue. So if you were to go in and would disconnect your gallbladder, for example, and just cut the blood supply to it, the nerve supply to it. Within seven or 10 days, you'd be dead from sepsis. Nobody leaves dead tissue in the body.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  And so then what happens is when you leave the dentist, what do they do? They put you on an oral antibiotic. But they must have forgotten they took out the blood supply to that infected site. So an oral antibiotic isn't going to reach the site of infection.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  I mean, to me, when you think, when you sit back and think about this and go, who the hell does this and why do they do it? Well, it's because what we've always done. So then what happens is these anaerobic bacteria, they don't need oxygen. They're sitting there in an anaerobic, low oxygen environment and they're just eating away at your jawline. They're just like us do. They metabolize, they take stuff in, they poop waste out. Those waste products accumulate, it shuts down voltage. And they eat away at your jawline. So then you've got osteonecrosis, osteomyelitis, and you don't even know it. And an X-ray will not show it. And most dentists unfortunately still use X-rays instead of a higher resolution CT.

• 53:29Steven Bartlett?

  It's really interesting. I was doing some research in preparation for this conversation around the subject of oral microbiome and cancer and the link there. And one particular study that was done and published in the New York Post, but done by a team of researchers found that. And this was done at New York University as well. So it was published by the New York Post and done at New York University. They analyzed saliva samples over 160,000 participants over 15 years. Are you familiar with this study? And they identified over a dozen bacteria species linked to a high risk of head and neck cancers with certain bacteria increasing the risk by 50%

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:01Steven Bartlett?

  of getting a cancer, which is pretty shocking. Literally, I feel like texting my assistant and asking us to book a. Oral hygienist and to change my mouthwash. No matter where I am in the world, it seems like everyone is drinking matcha. And there's a good chance that that matcha you're drinking is made by a company that I've invested more than seven figures in, who are a sponsor of this podcast called Perfect Ted. Because they're the brand used globally by cafes like Blank Street Coffee and Joe in the Juice and many, many more. Not only can you get Perfect Ted matcha in cafes, but you can now also make it at home, much cheaper, in seconds, using our flavoured matcha powders that I have here in front of me. Perfect Ted matcha is ceremonial grade and sourced from Japan. It is smooth, it

• 54:43Steven Bartlett?

  is naturally sweet, not like those bitter grassy matches that I tried before Perfect Ted. And if you are one of those people that have told yourself you don't like matcha, it's probably because you haven't tried our Perfect Ted matcha. And you can find Perfect Ted matcha in the UK in Tesco, Sainsbury's, Holland and Barrett and in Waitrose, or Albert Heine if you're in the Netherlands, and on Amazon in the USA. Or get the full range online at perfectted.com. You can get 40% off your first order using code DIARI40.

• 55:13Steven Bartlett?

  This one change has transformed how my team and I move, train and think about our bodies. When Dr Daniel Lieberman came on The Diary of a CEO, he explained how modern shoes with their cushioning and support are making our feet weaker and less capable of doing what nature intended them to do. We've lost the natural strength and mobility in our feet, and this is leading to issues like back pain and knee pain. I'd already purchased a pair of Vivo Barefoot shoes, so I showed them to Daniel Lieberman, and he told me that they were exactly the type of shoe that would help me restore natural foot movement and rebuild my strength. But I think it was plantar fasciitis that I had, where suddenly my feet started hurting all the time. And after that, I decided to start strengthening my own foot by using the Vivo Barefoot. And research from Liverpool University has backed this up. They've shown that wearing Vivo

• 55:57Steven Bartlett?

  Barefoot shoes for six months can increase foot strength by up to 60%. Visit vivobarefoot.com/DOAC and use code DOAC20 for 20% off. That's vivobarefoot.com/DOAC. Use code DOAC20. A strong body starts with strong feet. If I've just listened to everything you've just said there, and I want to improve my oral microbiome, what should I be doing?

• 56:25Speaker 00

  Well, I think the most important thing we've learned is what you shouldn't be doing.

• 56:28Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  So it's not what should we do, it's what we shouldn't be doing. Number one, we have to get rid of fluoride. You know, just this past weekend, I was speaking at a dental conference in Salt Lake City. And there were there people there from the National Toxicology Program. Which in the US is the organization tasked with, if there's any kind of risk of exposure of a environmental toxicant, they're charged with doing the toxicology studies to see if there's an increased risk. What is the risk? And is there a safe level that is without risk? And what they report is that fluoride, there's no benefit of fluoride. And it's all risk. It lowers IQ in kids by as much as seven points.

• 57:08Speaker 00

  And it shuts down your thyroid function. And it's a neurotoxin. And as I mentioned before, most toothpaste has fluoride in it. And if you read the back of your toothpaste, it will tell you, at least in the US, I don't know about in other countries, but it says, if you swallow this, call poison control.

• 57:27Speaker 00

  Because it's a poison. They're putting poison in toothpaste. And then if you also pay attention, it says, only put a pea-size amount of toothpaste on your toothbrush. A pea-size. But everybody that I know fills the entire bristle of the toothpaste with, toothbrush with toothpaste. So that's about 10 or 15, sometimes 20 pea-size amounts of toothpaste. And a pea-size amount of toothpaste contains about half a milligram of fluoride. Now, if you're using 10, 20 times more than that pea-size, now you're exposed to 5mg, 10mg of fluoride. And you don't even have to swallow it. This is a very small molecule, molecular weight of 19.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  So it's absorbed directly across the buccal mucosa, the oral cavity, and it becomes systemic.

• 58:13Steven Bartlett?

  I'm not going to use it anymore.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  No, you shouldn't.

• 58:16Steven Bartlett?

  What should I use instead?

• 58:17Speaker 00

  You have to use a non-florinated toothpaste.

• 58:19Steven Bartlett?

  And what about things like tongue scrapers?

• 58:22Speaker 00

  Now, tongue scrapers, the data, again, that's time-tested. That's an ancient practice. And even in our study, we found that people who do tongue scraping... Have a more diverse oral microbiome and they seem to have better oral health.

• 58:35Steven Bartlett?

  Why is this? My girlfriend's been banging on to me. She's always bloody right. My girlfriend's been banging on to me about tongue scraping for the last two years. And I've kind of just ignored her. I've just kind of, yeah, babe, sure. And when she's not in the bathroom, I'm not using her tongue scraper. Cause it just looks strange. And for me, based on what I knew about the oral microbiome and the microbiome generally, I'm like, should I be scraping off all my bacteria?

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Well, if you're going to plant a garden, do you plant a garden on untilled soil?

• 59:04Steven Bartlett?

  Listen, I know nothing about gardening. You're asking the wrong guy. So maybe, yes.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  I grow my own food. So you have to till the soil, right? You gotta break up the soil so the seeds actually can be aerated. And you break up that biofilm. Yeah, you take the back of the dorsal tongue, I mean, almost to the point of the gag reflex, and you just pull that ideally copper tongue scraper forward. And you're going to see this goop.

• 59:29Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 59:29Speaker 00

  Coming in there, but it's like, it's kind of like tilling the soil and it's increasing the diversity of the dorsal part of the tongue, the microbiome.

• 59:36Steven Bartlett?

  So my girlfriend was right?

• 59:38Speaker 00

  In that regard, yes. But what we found was in that one kid, we saw the greatest increase in blood pressure. If you tongue scrape and use antiseptic mouthwash, that's the absolute worst scenario.

• 59:51Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. So if you.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  Because think about this, you're tongue scraping, you're opening up the pores. And now you're using mouthwash, it's better to easily penetrate deep in the crevice of the tongue and more effectively kill the bacteria.

• 1:00:03Steven Bartlett?

  So you want to tongue scrape and then use a toothbrush without fluoride toothpaste?

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And no mouth, no, no antiseptic mouth rinse.

• 1:00:12Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. And what about going to dental hygienists and things like that? Do you think that's an advisable idea? Cause once every quarter or so, I'll go and see a dental hygienist just to get everything sort of cleaned out.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  No, I think that's a good proactive practice, but you know, because you need to look at the the health of the gum tissue and the gingival tissue. And a routine clean and scraping the plaque off the teeth and allowing, making sure you have good mineralization of the enamel of the tooth is good. But never let them do a fluoride rinse on you.

• 1:00:45Steven Bartlett?

  Is there anything else on this subject of the oral microbiome and its relationship with nitric oxide that I need to be aware of before we move on?

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's also data showing that if you use mouthwash, you lose the cardio protective benefits of exercise. So think about this, we know that diet and exercise is the best medicine. And many people aspire to do that. They go and they try to eat good. They avoid the temptations of sugars and sweets. They exercise every day to try to increase their longevity and cardiovascular health. If you do that, and you're using mouthwash, you no longer get the benefits from exercise. And we've already established, you don't get the nitric oxide benefits from diet. So two out of three Americans wake up every morning and use mouthwash. And two out of three Americans have an unsafe elevation in blood pressure.

• 1:01:33Steven Bartlett?

  What's the mechanism there?

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  Well, because you're killing the the oral microbiome that's partly responsible for production of nitric oxide. Without nitric oxide, you get constriction of blood vessels, and it leads to high blood pressure.

• 1:01:46Steven Bartlett?

  That's crazy. And is there a link between our hormone levels, things like my testosterone levels, and the nitric oxide?

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is a two way street. So in men, testosterone activates nitric oxide production. In women, estrogen activates and stimulates nitric oxide production. So as long as we have optimal sex hormones, and as long as the enzyme in the lining of the blood vessel can functionally produce nitric oxide, that explains the cardio protective benefits of hormone replacement therapy.

• 1:02:16Steven Bartlett?

  Got you. So taking testosterone or estrogen therapies helps to increase my nitric oxide levels?

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  As long as the enzyme is functional and coupled, which means that we have to we have to understand the enzymology and the biochemistry of that reaction to where when it's exposed to testosterone, the cell can actually make nitric oxide in response.

• 1:02:38Steven Bartlett?

  And there's a two way relationship as well with exercise then, because I've read in your book that exercise activates and stimulates nitric oxide production. But you also just told me that if you want to get the great benefits of exercise, you need nitric oxide in the first place, because else your blood cells are going to be very narrow, less oxygen traveling through you. You're going to do a worse workout as well, presumably.

• 1:03:00Speaker 00

  Well, think about, I mean, there's other agenists too, like vitamin D. I mean, most Americans are deficient in vitamin D. People with low testosterone have erectile dysfunction. And why is that? Because they're not stimulating nitric oxide production, and they're not dilating the blood vessels, so they develop ED. So all of this, no matter what it is, which is related to vitamin D deficiency, which is activated or stimulator of nitric oxide, if it's low hormones, if it's a poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, all of that can be explained by insufficient nitric oxide production.

• 1:03:28Steven Bartlett?

  When I think about the role that food plays in my nitric oxide production, what should I be eating to increase my nitric oxide levels or to keep them at a healthy level?

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  I think the same answer is for that too. It's not so much what we should be eating, it's what we should not be eating.

• 1:03:48Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  So we'll cover those step by step. Number one, you have to avoid sugar and high glycemic index foods. Because sugar is a toxin, it's a poison. And let's think about what sugar is. So when we eat sugar or drink sugar beverages, right? Whether it's sucrose, whether it's fructose, whether it's high fructose corn strip, the end result inside the human is we see an increase in glucose. So elevation in blood sugar or blood glucose is diabetes, right? And now there's continuous glucose monitors that you can get anywhere. And everybody does this. So if you eat something and it causes an increase in your blood sugar, blood glucose, then you should avoid that.

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  Because glucose, as the name applies, is glue, right? It's sticky. And if we, if you have a soda and you spill it on your countertop, you come back the next day, it's sticky, right? That's what happens inside the body. That sugar sticks to everything. It sticks to proteins, it sticks to enzymes. It binds to hemoglobin. And sugar stuck to hemoglobin is what we call hemoglobin A1C. And what is that? It's a, it's a marker of long-term glucose control. If you have hemoglobin A1C of greater than 5.7, you're diabetic. So it's not just hemoglobin it sticks to, it sticks to the enzyme that makes nitric oxide. And in biochemistry and enzymology, enzymes have to be able to undergo conformational changes.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  Right. So it transfers electrons from one donor to an acceptor and that's how biochemistry is done. But if sugar is stuck to that enzyme, it locks it in some conformation and it can't do its job. It can't make nitric oxide. So sugar is an absolute poison and it kills many enzymes and binds to everything.

• 1:05:36Steven Bartlett?

  And it lowers nitric oxide production?

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  Absolutely. That's why diabetics have a 10 time higher incidence of heart attacks, stroke, all cause mortality. That's why they develop neurological or peripheral neuropathy. That's why they have non-healing wounds. There's no nitric oxide. That's why they're developing diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, pancreatitis. I mean, all of that can be traced back to a lack of nitric oxide production because the sugar is stuck to the enzyme. The sugar destroys the oral microbiome and completely changes the ecology of the bacteria. It completely shuts down nitric oxide production.

• 1:06:15Steven Bartlett?

  Just a bit of a tangent there. You mentioned that's why they have open wounds that don't heal.

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, diabetic ulcers.

• 1:06:21Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so nitric oxide is playing a role, a healing role in wounds and scars?

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:06:26Steven Bartlett?

  So I've got this scar on my head. I was playing football the other day. Someone ran into the back of my head and they, they like, they passed out and got taken away by an ambulance. But I was just left with this big like scar on the back of my head, which I've had like glue stitched. So I'm wondering, I'm like, if I...

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  Apply the nitric oxide serum. It'll stimulate blood flow to that. It'll improve cellular turnover and heal that wound and basically remediate the scar.

• 1:06:50Steven Bartlett?

  And how do I do that? Is it?

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you take one pump from each side.

• 1:06:54Steven Bartlett?

  So one pump from this side.

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  And we turn it around, one pump from the other.

• 1:06:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  And now if you apply that and mix it together, as soon as you mix it together, it starts to generate nitric oxide gas. So then that gas will diffuse into that tissue. It's going to increase blood flow. And it's going to mobilize stem cells and it's going to improve cellular turnover and completely remodel that and heal that. And if it were an infection in there, it would kill the infectious bacteria.

• 1:07:20Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, well, we shall.

• 1:07:22Speaker 00

  Second one.

• 1:07:22Steven Bartlett?

  We shall see if that works. So back on this point of food then, so sugar's bad.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  Sugar's bad, yeah, you gotta eliminate sugar. And I think the benefits of it, like a straight ketogenic diet or a straight, you know, vegan vegetarian diet is just the elimination of sugar and carbs.

• 1:07:36Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  Right? But I think, to answer your question, what should we be eating? I think you've got to eat a balanced diet in moderation. You know, Americans are overfed. All you gotta do is walk around and see the epidemic of obesity. Good, high-quality protein, good-quality fats, and little or no carbs. And it's really that simple.

• 1:07:58Steven Bartlett?

  And why did you write a book about beetroot?

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  Beets, yeah, the beets hit the, uh, really the airwaves back in 2012 in the London Olympic Games. There was a lot of data coming out at the time of the benefits of beetroot juice on enhancing athletic performance. And there was a benefit of the nitric oxide being produced that could explain the improvement in athletic performance. The problem is, these athletes were drinking liters and liters of beetroot juice and causing a lot of gastric discomfort, causing diarrhea. Their urine and their feces would turn red, and a lot of people interpreted, misinterpreted that as gastric bleeds or urinary bleeds. And then when I started looking at the products on the market, most of the beet products, the desiccated beet powders, provided zero nitric oxide benefit.

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

  They didn't contain any nitrate, no nitrite, they were just, we called them dead beets. They're, they're dead beet products. And so I thought, if people, if consumers are out there looking for beets because they've been shown to enhance their performance, but that enhancement in performance was dependent upon the beet's ability to improve nitric oxide production in the body, then the non-scientist out there wouldn't know what to look for. Right? They're buying products that aren't providing any benefit to them. And so years ago, we would do randomized placebo-controlled clinical trials, and we would take some of these commercial beet products that you can go to your local nutrition store or pharmacy, buy off the shelf, and we would use those as placebos

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  in our clinical trials because it's the perfect placebo. So what I tried to do in that book is educate, okay, what is it about beets that are so important? What's the mechanism and what is necessary in those beets that can improve nitric oxide production? So again, everything I do is intended to educate and inform the consumer so that they know how to make informed, educated choices on the products they're taking or the foods they're eating or their oral hygienic practices.

• 1:09:58Steven Bartlett?

  I'm trying to find the page in your book, but there was a page in your book where you describe beetroot as the most underappreciated food in the history of eating.

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, that may be in the beat the odds.

• 1:10:16Steven Bartlett?

  I thought it was in this book.

• 1:10:17Speaker 00

  But if you go back to historical times and you look at the hieroglyphics on caves of the ancient cavemen, you know, people thought they were drinking wine because they would have these red stuff in this before battle. But what these ancient Egyptians were doing was they were drinking beet juice to improve their performance before they went into battle so that they were ready, they were energized, they improved their circulation. So that's the historical study on beets. And obviously, these were beets grown at a time when there were no herbicides, pesticides, and the soil was probably fertile. So these beets were full of nutrients, probably full of nitrate that provided the benefits of that.

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  But unfortunately, today, the beets that are grown, at least in America, really are nutrient depleted, just like most of the food.

• 1:11:05Steven Bartlett?

  So would you recommend people eat beetroot?

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  No, because as would, again, through our survey that we published in 2015, we realized that you really can't eat enough beets to get enough nitrate to improve your performance. And the other caveat is that if you're using mouthwash, you've got fluoride in your toothpaste or fluoride in your drinking water that you're mixing the beet powder in, you're not going to get a nitric oxide benefit from it.

• 1:11:26Steven Bartlett?

  There's a graph in front of me here, which I printed off, which shows the rise in antacid medications.

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, from 2004 to 20, so a 20-year period, we're seeing, what is that? Almost a quadrupling of the use of antacids. And this is globally, or is this in the US? That's worldwide, I believe. Yeah, worldwide. Now, this is a problem. I mean, these, these antacids. What is an antacid? So it's a medication that's given orally to suppress stomach acid production. Yeah. And as a biochemist and physiologist, I can't think of nothing more damaging than to inhibit stomach acid production. Because stomach acid is required to break down proteins into amino acids, whether it's you're eating animal protein or, or plant-based protein. It's required for nutrient absorption.

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  You need stomach acid to absorb B vitamins. You need stomach acid to absorb selenium, chromium, iodine, magnesium, iron. I mean, most nutrients, micronutrients are absorbed in the lumen of the stomach. And if the stomach can, is not making stomach acid, then these nutrients are not absorbed. And most Americans, 75% of Americans are deficient in magnesium. 95% of Americans are deficient in iodine. I mean, it's a huge problem. These are the brands like Gaviscon. No, these are like the, the Prilosec, the Prevacids, the Nexium, the prescription medications, or Omeprazole, Pantoprazole. These, today, in the US, I think it's probably worldwide, you don't even need a prescription

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  for these from your physician. You can go to your local drugstore and you can buy these, what we call proton pump inhibitors, or PPIs. What about Tums? Over the counter. So there's a difference in, so Tums and things like baking soda are a buffer, right? Sodium bicarb or calcium carbonate. And it's a buffer, right? So if you, if you have an acute bout of hyper secretion of acid, you can take a Tums or some buffer, some base, alkaline substance, to neutralize the acid. Neutralizing acid is completely different than inhibiting its natural production in the paloric cells of the stomach. So what is the difference between, have you heard of Gaviscon before? Yes.

• 1:13:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. What's the difference between like a Gaviscon?

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  Well, there's, there's certain classes of antacids. There's what we call H2 blockers. There's proton pump inhibitors, and then there's the natural buffers that are just kind of neutralizing the acid environment in the stomach. Gaviscon, I'm trying to think what class that falls under. I don't think it's widely used here in the US. I mean, the main drugs used here are Probostec, Nexium, Prevacid. Those are the over the counter. And then the main prescription medications are the Omeprazole and the Pentoprazole.

• 1:14:16Steven Bartlett?

  Gaviscon is a commonly used antacid brand, and the active ingredients are aluminium hydroxide and magnesium carbonate?

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  Oh, so Gaviscon. So number one, it's got aluminium in it, which you should, should absolutely be avoided. But yeah, that just, it looks like a buffer. It's got an hydroxide, aluminium hydroxide, which is a strong base. So it's neutralizing the stomach acid production. But it's, it's a neutralizing agent, but anything that contains aluminium, you should absolutely avoid.

• 1:14:44Steven Bartlett?

  And my, I said, I've mentioned her a few times today, but my girlfriend's a breath practitioner. She runs a business called barleybreathwork.com, hashtag ad. And one of the things she's talked to me a lot about is mouth breathing. And I know there's a relationship between nitric oxide and how we choose to breathe, whether it's through our nose or through our mouths. Can you explain to me that, that link?

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  You know, when we talk about the enzyme that's found in the lining of the blood vessels, when we started this segment, that same enzyme is found in our epithelial cells, in our upper airways, in our sinuses. So just like exercise can activate nitric oxide production in the lining of the blood vessels, deep breathing, nasal breathing activates that enzyme in the epithelial cells of our sinuses. And so when we do nasal breathing, it's activating the enzyme to make nitric oxide. And now we're delivering that nitric oxide gas into the, the bronchioles, the lower airway. It's dilating those bronchioles. Moreover, it's dilating the pulmonary arteries. So now we're improving oxygen uptake, oxygen delivery, and that's why nasal breathing and deep breathing has been shown to lower blood pressure.

• 1:15:50Steven Bartlett?

  This is a pretty crazy graph I took from Google as well, which shows just how interested people are now getting in the subject of mouth breathing.

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Again, going over the past 20 years.

• 1:16:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of people, I mean, obviously, your girlfriend, there's a Patrick McEwen in the UK.

• 1:16:08Steven Bartlett?

  Came into Dragon's Den, I did a, made him an offer in Dragon's Den.

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:13Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Speaker 00

  No, I think that the benefits of that are pretty well, and mechanistically, we understand the benefits of it. So the mouth breathers are not only bypassing this natural nitric oxide production pathway, but when you mouth breathe, it completely changes the microbiome.

• 1:16:30Speaker 00

  And so you're not only bypassing the nitric oxide producing in the upper airway, but you're inhibiting nitric oxide production in the mouth from the microbiome. Because you're fully oxygenating the mouth, it's changing the pH of the saliva, and completely changes the microbiome, and completely shuts down nitric oxide production.

• 1:16:48Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. Interesting.

• 1:16:51Speaker 00

  So you have to, I mean, I'm a big fan of mouth taping. But for me, I know, and I watch my kids, but sometimes there's anatomical issues where there's obstructive airways, and airway obstruction that has to be corrected by dental appliances or some, sometimes surgery. But the worst thing you can do is tape your mouth and your airway be constricted and, you know, suffocate. So before you do mouth taping, you need to get, you know, some imaging done from your dentist to make sure that your airway is open to where if you're forced to breathe through your nose, you can actually have oxygen exchange.

• 1:17:27Steven Bartlett?

  And is there anything else that I could and should be doing to increase and improve my nitric oxide levels that we haven't talked about yet?

• 1:17:33Speaker 00

  Humming, you know, there are certain frequencies. We've done this in looking at nitric oxide coming out of the exhaled breath when you're humming. So certain frequencies can activate this enzyme, and it's dependent upon the volume of the nasal sinuses. So there's not one frequency that would work in every single person. Because the volume of your airways and oral cavity and sinuses was probably much different than mine.

• 1:17:56Steven Bartlett?

  Give me an example, show me.

• 1:17:58Speaker 00

  Well, if you just, you know, like, ohms, like you do in meditation or just simple humming, you could actually, so if I had my ozone or gas phase analyzer here, I could hum,

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  and I could detect nitric oxide coming out of my exhaled breath.

• 1:18:14Steven Bartlett?

  Because of the frequency of the...

• 1:18:15Speaker 00

  Because of the frequency and activating the nitric oxide synthase enzyme. But if you take older patients, and we've demonstrated this, it's published years ago, and other groups have demonstrated this, older patients, that their enzyme isn't making nitric oxide, whether they do nasal breathing or whether they do humming, there's no nitric oxide coming out. So again, this is an activator and a stimulator, but it's dependent upon the function of the enzyme that makes nitric oxide. If your enzyme is broken, humming, nasal breathing, exercise, isn't going to produce any nitric oxide.

• 1:18:46Steven Bartlett?

  Is there anything else that I should be aware of if I'm trying to improve my nitric oxide levels?

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  I think it's doing the things that disrupt it. Get rid of fluoride, get rid of mouthwash, stop using N-acids, stop eating sugar, anything that leads to an elevation in blood sugar, a balanced diet in moderation, moderate physical exercise, 20, 30 minutes of sunlight a day.

• 1:19:06Steven Bartlett?

  Sunlight?

• 1:19:07Speaker 00

  Sunlight. There are certain, at both ends of the visible spectrum, both the UV spectrum and the full spectrum infrared. So those frequencies and vibrations, again, stimulate nitric oxide release. So the UV has enough energy to where it'll knock nitric oxide bound to a cystin thiol and protein, and then the UV spectrum will release nitric oxide bound to metals.

• 1:19:33Steven Bartlett?

  So you mean, go out in the sunshine, but also those red light beds and stuff?

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have a red light bed, I have an infrared sauna that uses red lights in it, and I use it every day.

• 1:19:44Steven Bartlett?

  For nitric oxide production?

• 1:19:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. And there's other benefits of light. You know, it can stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis, it improves energy production, it can lower blood pressure. But yeah, lots of benefits of light therapy. And yet, we're programmed to not go outside. If we go outside, put on SPF 60 and intoxicate ourselves with these cancer-causing chemicals and sunscreen. I mean, it makes no sense.

• 1:20:08Steven Bartlett?

  What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about today, Dr. Nathan?

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  You know, I think the future of, well, I don't think, I'm, I know, you know, there's three levels of conviction. You think, you believe, and you know. I'm at the point of knowing now that the future of medicine and healthcare around the globe is going to be dependent upon nitric oxide product technology. Because I think we can inform and instruct people to stop doing things or start doing things, but the most difficult thing to do is to change people's habits and to get people out of their comfort zone and stop drinking sugar soda waters, eliminate sugar to the best extent possible, get 20, 30 minutes of exercise a day, and completely change your diet. Compliance is an issue.

• 1:20:54Speaker 00

  People don't do that. They were programmed to want to take a pill to overcome everything. There's that pill, nitric oxide is very important, but it's not a silver bullet. It's not going to overcome all your bad habits, but what it is going to do, it's going to correct a lot of the things that your bad habits are leading to a deficiency of.

• 1:21:12Steven Bartlett?

  Well, it's a good thing we have a lot of people that are devoted to finding new solutions to old problems, and you're certainly one of those people. And it's super fascinating because as you say, as I said at the start of this conversation, I had no idea about any of this stuff beforehand. I had no idea. I'd not really even heard the word nitric oxide. And maybe I'd heard it in passing, but maybe I was confusing it with that NOS gas that people talk about and that some people inhale. And maybe because I hadn't added context and story and understanding to it, maybe I'd heard it in passing but didn't know what it was or meant. So it's really wonderful that you're leading the charge in educating the world on nitric oxide, because it's clearly a really, really important molecule in the broader picture of our health. And the more we understand it, the more we

• 1:21:54Steven Bartlett?

  ask questions about it and have curiosity about it, the higher the probability that we're going to be able to build some of these therapies that prevent us from ending up in a state, as we've seen in some of these graphs, where we're deficient in nitric oxide, and then have to deal with the downstream consequences of that. So thank you for all the work that you're doing. It's really, really important. I'm going to ask you one final question, which is the question left by our previous guest.

• 1:22:16Speaker 00

  Kim.

• 1:22:16Steven Bartlett?

  They don't know who they're leaving it for, and they write it into this diary. So the question that's been left for you is...

• 1:22:24Steven Bartlett?

  Are you happily or unhappily mated and why?

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  Happily or unhappily mated? You know, one of my biggest challenges in life is maintaining balance, right? Because I've been so focused on, you know, discovery and research and leaving a lasting legacy and making innovations and doing, doing things in the scientific and medical community that many people said couldn't be done. And so my problem is, is there's always a deficiency. You know, I've got young kids, I spend a lot of, a lot of time away. And, you know, that's, you know, I'm happily mated, but there's deficiencies, right? Because again, my challenge is always maintaining balance. Work, home life, kind of maintaining, you know, my spiritual, my, my, you know, it's,

• 1:23:16Speaker 00

  it's, it's mental, it's physical and it's spiritual health. I'm trying to do better at that now, but you know, you can't, there's always sacrifice, right? And we just have to pick, pick our sacrifices and, you know, so I've got to, I've got to choose to do better.

• 1:23:32Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Everything has a trade off. That's what my guests have told me. Thank you so much for the work that you do. Where do people, if people want to find out more about you, if they want to read more, they should certainly get this book, which you've just released called The Secret of Nitric Oxide.

• 1:23:47Steven Bartlett?

  I'll link it below for anyone that wants to have a read of this book. I highly recommend you do because it gives an even more comprehensive understanding of everything we've talked about today. And it's incredibly accessible, which is always critically important to me. But if they want to find out more, if they want to understand the products that you, you sell and anything else, where do they go?

• 1:24:02Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, obviously I'm here to educate and inform on nitric oxide. You know, this latest book, The Secret of Nitric Oxide, Bringing the Science to Life, really chronicles both my kind of journey through science and medicine, as you revealed, kind of my early years and kind of what motivated me to go in this space. But I think more importantly, it tells the story of nitric oxide. What it is, what led to a Nobel Prize for its discovery? What you can do to prevent the loss of this molecule? So you can go to nathansbook.com. Or you can get it anywhere books are sold, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. I've got a YouTube channel, Dr. Nathan S. Bryan Nitric Oxide, where we provide education, information, latest scientific information on nitric oxide.

• 1:24:46Speaker 00

  You can find me on social media, Instagram, Dr. Nathan S. Bryan. And then for those who want to follow our product journey and, you know, bringing forth safe and effective product technology, that's N101.com. So it's the letter N, the number one, letter O, number one dot com. But, you know, we make products that release nitric oxide.

• 1:25:05Steven Bartlett?

  Dr. Nathan Bryan, thank you so much for your time today, being incredibly generous. But thank you so much for educating the world in such an articulate and accessible way on a subject that few of us knew very little about. It's incredibly important work and it's gonna, it's inspired me to think again about my diet and about the decisions I make, the habits I have about exercise, about sunlight exposure, about my oral microbiome, all of these things. So thank you so much for that. It's a real gift and I appreciate you taking the time today.

• 1:25:29Speaker 00

  Thank you so much. Pleasure being with you.

• 1:25:31Steven Bartlett?

  This has always blown my mind a little bit. Fifty-three percent of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.