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Perfect Your Oral Health Routine with Dr. Jonathan Levine - E59
27 Plays1 month ago
We’ve all heard that sugar, alcohol, and a sedentary lifestyle are sabotaging our health, but it may come as a surprise that the damage often starts in our mouths. While most of us obsess over fitness routines and diet plans, oral health quietly determines the fate of your heart, brain, and even your healthspan. Ignoring it means risking chronic inflammation, compromised immunity, and an uphill battle against age-related disease, all from habits and routines that seem harmless.
This episode looks into why true longevity and vitality begin with redefining your approach to oral care. We break down the exact tools, strategies, and daily rituals you need to protect not just your smile, but your whole body.
Dr. Jonathan Levine is a leading prosthodontist (a dental specialist who focuses on restoration and replacement of teeth) known for integrating oral health with overall well-being. He’s practiced for over three decades and founded multiple dental businesses, with training from Boston University and NYU. Dr. Levine's work has been featured by multiple mainstream media outlets, including CNN, ABC News and USA Today. He is also an inventor and educator, developing diagnostic protocols and products to optimize both oral and systemic health for a diverse client roster in New York City and beyond.
“Dentistry could be a tip of the spear for diagnostics, for overall health, because people go to the dentist more than they go to their primary care physician.” - Dr. Jonathan Levine
In this episode you will learn:
- Why oral health is considered a foundational pillar of overall health and how habits in the mouth impact longevity and chronic disease risk.
- The history and evolution of dentistry’s separation from medicine, and the modern movement towards integrated, holistic care.
- The relationship between periodontal disease, the oral microbiome, and systemic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cognitive decline.
- Dr. Levine’s recommendations for daily oral hygiene routines, including toothbrush selection, flossing, tongue scraping, and mouth rinses.
- The importance of early intervention in jaw and facial development for children, and how breathing habits relate to long-term health.
- Why high-performance dental teams and regular professional care are crucial for maximizing healthspan and preventing disease.
Resources
- Connect with Dr. Levine on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drjonlevine
- Learn more about Dr. Levine’s work and philanthropy: https://www.drjonathanlevine.com/
This podcast was produced by the team at Zapods Podcast Agency:
https://www.zapods.com
Find the products, practices, and routines discussed on the Alively website:
https://alively.com/
Recommended
Transcript
The Importance of Oral Health
00:00:00
Speaker
sugar is the enemy Alcohol's an enemy. The ability to be sedentary is the enemy. The ability not to get into deep reparative sleep. All these things that we think about truly starts in the mouth. And that's why we love to say that oral health, the health of the mouth, will lead to overall health.
Introduction to the Podcast with Dr. Levine
00:00:22
Speaker
This is the Home of Health Spam podcast, where we profile health and wellness role models, sharing their stories and the tools, practices, and routines they use to live a lively life.
00:00:35
Speaker
Dr. Levine, it is a pleasure to have you on the show, and I am excited to dive into your work and everything you've done in the past and are currently doing. But before I do so, how would you describe yourself?
00:00:47
Speaker
I would describe myself as ah ah troublemaker who's a change agent in my industry. Okay, troublemaker who's a change agent and change for good. That's what I hope. yeah Yeah. So i was we were talking just before you jumped in. I was actually at the dentist yesterday for myself and for my daughter.
00:01:07
Speaker
we We went together. And so let's let's get into
Dr. Levine's Journey into Dentistry
00:01:11
Speaker
kind of your journey. How did you get into oral health, oral care, and what you're doing now? For me, it it was interesting enough that it was a process of elimination. i was Cornell. i yeah was a lacrosse player, immunology, microbiology major.
00:01:26
Speaker
You know, I had ah not a great experience in hospitals with grandparents who unfortunately passed away. And I like working with my hands. I was doing some sculpture and some art also at Cornell. And so I looked at the kind of the opportunities in front of me. And what's interesting is I didn't think I liked business either because I grew up around a dinner table.
00:01:49
Speaker
My dad was in one of the oldest industries in the country called the fur business. And that was a crazy, you know, kind of business. industry, not organized. Everybody had, you know, what they owed each other was like on a handshake. Nothing was really, there was no organizational type of approach to it. And so I'll business and I'd hear about conflict around the dinner table. but I said, that's not for me.
00:02:14
Speaker
And I gravitated more towards the science. i don't know how many people can empathize with that, but I think as a growing up person around that dinner table, we learn a lot. And so I ended up saying, well, I think dentistry could be interesting. And I literally,
00:02:27
Speaker
jumped into it with with that kind of background.
Teamwork and Organizational Theory in Dentistry
00:02:31
Speaker
i had such a great college experience also with athletics because we ended up with a great coach winning a national championship, Division I lacrosse.
00:02:39
Speaker
Amazing. But it set me from a standpoint of my perspective that you'd want to do anything, you got to do it as a team. And when you set a big vision and you go after it. And so dentistry was very solo, very fragmented.
00:02:54
Speaker
And so Since the day I got into it, which is at this point, three and a half decades, I've been trying to improve it and change it. And that's why I think of myself as a big troublemaker. OK. Yeah. So, I mean, can you give some examples when you've been trying to improve it and change it?
00:03:09
Speaker
Like what is maybe where did that start? Yeah. what What was the first thing you saw and you say, hey, this is broken. This needs to change. Yeah. So I got out of... ah Boston University Goldman School. That's where I did my pre-doctoral. And then I did my post-grad work at NYU as a specialist. what's known as a prosthodontist that studies aesthetics, but also structure, function, biology. And when I started my practice, I started building a team around myself.
00:03:37
Speaker
And then I started learning about organizational theory. And a bunch of us as specialists worked with a guy who brought those concepts. I started reading all these great books about discipline of market leaders and every business, a growth business, Ram Sharan, Noel Taishi, and all these great authors. And I started saying, wow, i love business because it's just like being on a team and a team sport. And it's the same analogy of performance and high performance team and building culture and all this great stuff. So I said, well, let's go build teams. And the first foray into business was we put our practices together under umbrella, raised money.
00:04:20
Speaker
And I started learning very quickly at a very young age, um that whole dance about raising money from a private equity standpoint, having a board, having accountability, having multiple locations. And then you know From there, i went on for two more companies, but you know i'm at the same time, I always practice because I love practicing. I love what I do with aesthetics and reconstructive dentistry. It was always, for me, the tug of trying to do both and trying to do them well.
00:04:50
Speaker
and The only way I would ever have any chance of doing it well was for me was building high-performance
Oral Health and Its Impact on Overall Health
00:04:55
Speaker
teams. so I learned that. yeah That makes a lot of sense. I'd love to dig more into...
00:05:03
Speaker
oral health and how it fits into overall health. So we typically talk about health span of around five pillars, fitness, nutrition, sleep and recovery, stress management, and social connection. And I think a lot of people listening are probably familiar with Andrew Huberman and his podcast.
00:05:17
Speaker
He has six where he adds sunlight. But then maybe a year or so ago, he had an oral hygiene expert on and said, hey, I think we need to add oral health as a seventh pillar here.
00:05:28
Speaker
And so that's why I was so excited to speak with you. had a friend who was a journalist. And years and years ago, she said she was speaking with Dr. Oz and said, hey, for people aging, what are what are the most important things? And you said three things.
00:05:43
Speaker
One, to keep stretching so you stay mobile. Two, to have fresh plants in your home, so you're getting fresh air. And three, to take care of your mouth. Because it's when you start losing your teeth, you eat softer food, your nutrition goes down, and it's just this cascade and you lose lean mass.
00:05:59
Speaker
And so it ties to nutrition. It ties to fitness and movement. It ties to your stress management. It ties. impacts all these things because imagine the the microbiome in your mouth right can lead to mental health issues.
00:06:12
Speaker
So what what do you see in this space kind of it's evolved on how important people recognize it to be? Yeah, I love what you just said. you know i I did the oral health segments with Mehmet. I know him very well. And i'm I'm so psyched that he said that. And of course, I'm a tremendous fan of Huberman.
00:06:31
Speaker
I add that pillar to longevity, with my mind thinking. And it's really about the oral health and the microbiome. So not only is there a functional problem as we age, because as we age, our ability to fight infection, our immune response goes down.
00:06:47
Speaker
Well, 60, 70% of the American public has some form of periodontal disease, chronic inflammation in the mouth. So you take that fact and now understand that there's 54 systemic inflammatory diseases that are connected to inflammation in the mouth.
00:07:03
Speaker
Just name any of them. So the big one, cardiovascular disease, number one killer in America, diabetes, cognitive function disease, pancreatic cancer, low birth overweight babies, leaky gut, and interstitial cell leakage. So when you realize that and you know, hey, what is this bacteria called P. gingivalis, which is one of the number one seven pathogens in the mouth. There's seven of them that are the bad bacteria, right? It's just like the gut. The same rules apply to the mouth. The gut is the largest a microbiome of the body, seven, eight trillion.
00:07:35
Speaker
The mouth is the second largest, seven, eight billion, 600 species. So what they find when this balancing act is off and the environment in the mouth that we can talk about, what is that environment that causes a dysbiosis, right? That symbiosis gets out of whack and all of a sudden you have a overgrowth from the diversified microbiome, which was healthy to one where you're outnumbered by the pathogens. These bugs end up 20 years ago, in best studies, Moisey Devereaux out of Columbia in the carotid artery of cardiovascular diseases.
00:08:09
Speaker
Dana Orange, rheumatoid arthritis, I'll bring it up to today, came out a year and a half, two years ago, Rockefeller. She showed a direct relationship, causality between periodontal disease and the autoimmune disease of rheumatoid arthritis.
00:08:22
Speaker
I'm just going from 20 years ago to today. in between, you got the 54. You see these links, whether it's a constellation of risk factors, many factors like cardiovascular, or direct causality that they're seeing in rheumatoid.
00:08:37
Speaker
so it's it's Fascinating. And if you knew why it was separated from 1840, you'd shake your head because it was for political reasons. Because back then, dentistry was a so-called barber profession because you had barbers extracting teeth.
00:08:53
Speaker
But you also had doctors that were also involved with oral health and and oral surgery. So they knocked on the door, these two doctors, Chapin Harris was one of them. And he they knocked on the door of the first medical school
The Historical Divide Between Dentistry and Medicine
00:09:06
Speaker
in Baltimore. And they said, let's create a division, of course, of oral health, just like we have of cardiology and this emerging medicine.
00:09:14
Speaker
They said, no, no, no, you guys are a bunch of barbers. Go open up your own school. It's called the Grand Rebuke. It's a funny story. And they go up to New York, they raise some money, they come back down, they open up the first dental school, the University of Maryland at Baltimore.
00:09:28
Speaker
And that's how come in the United States, it was separated. Just know in Europe, it was always connected up until about 10, 15 years ago. And Harvard is the only dental school that has the dental school part of the medical school.
00:09:42
Speaker
So kudos to harvard but time is changing times are changing and we're starting to get this better connectivity between the disciplines of dentistry and medicine.
00:09:53
Speaker
and Speaking of that connectivity, right you're youre you, before we jumped on, started talking about how you're doing some of that, right bringing the medical side in with the dental to to make it holistic.
Integrating Dental and Medical Practices
00:10:03
Speaker
And I think there's a lot in the medical community going that way with functional medicine of saying, hey, it's not just this one thing and let's give you a pill.
00:10:12
Speaker
It's what's causing it in the whole human. And the whole human, The thing that consumes all the energy that you expend in a day is potentially the start of that. So how do you view these symbiotically and and work today to address the whole human?
00:10:29
Speaker
When we look at um the health of the mouth and the oral microbiome, there's um the environment that we put it under. So you talked about longevity and we talked about nutrition.
00:10:41
Speaker
We talked about sleep. We talked about fitness. We talked about stress management, social. social We talked about all these things. Well, it really can get to easily extrapolated to the environment that we put
Oral Health Habits and Practices
00:10:52
Speaker
our body on. And what I've always find so fascinating is the exact same things that we need for overall health.
00:11:00
Speaker
We need for oral health and vice versa. So think about it this way. sugar is the enemy alcohol's an enemy The ability to be sedentary is the enemy. The ability not to get into deep reparative sleep.
00:11:12
Speaker
All these things that we think about help truly starts in the mouth. And that's why we love to say that oral health, the health of the mouth and that good balancing act and why I think Dr. Oz says this will lead to overall health because the habits, these high performance habits that you build for taking care of the mouth, right? Mechanically removing the plaque every day, doing these habits in a row. And we have a whole deep dive on on this because people need to know, hey, what tool do I use? Because there's there's a lot of you know unfortunate noise out there, right?
00:11:48
Speaker
what What are the experts saying? What's the research in the science backing it up to use you know an electric brush versus a manual brush? What is the Cochrane reports that studied five, 700 articles on this?
00:12:01
Speaker
So what do they say about flossing? Why do you need to get between the teeth? Well, there's very strong evidence exactly why. What's the best tool can I use? And are there options for me if I can't use string floss?
00:12:12
Speaker
Answer is yes. How do I raise pH of the mouth? Because pH is critical. And that's where we have environmental factors. Sodas and even all the different foods we eat that are high protein have a low pH. So in other words, we we start moving away from neutral and we get acid.
00:12:29
Speaker
So proteins, everything with you know fish, meat is a lower pH. So we have alkalinizing foods, which is fruits and vegetables, just like mom always told us.
00:12:41
Speaker
And it's a 60-40 balance. That's about what you want, which will give you that very healthy pH. So in our offices, we pH test everybody. It's a standard of care.
00:12:52
Speaker
We test microbiome. We look at the saliva. We want to know what's that oral microbiome. What are the bugs like? Do you have bacteria that can cause inflammation or demineralization and decay or you know bad breath?
00:13:05
Speaker
And all of those things have direct lead ups to these cardiovascular disease or all these kind of chronic inflammatory diseases of the body. So it's very interesting of that whole balancing act that we have control of, right? Just like longevity concepts that we're all learning.
00:13:23
Speaker
from the functional medicine people and and people like you, Ramin. Well, you know, it's the same thing that we could learn from people who have studied, you know, the importance of oral health. Speaking of that, I mean, it may be really helpful. I know for me, and I imagine for listeners to understand from someone like you,
00:13:40
Speaker
what that, to use a humormen, protocol would be. like What on a daily basis should we be doing versus weekly versus monthly versus annually or you know quarterly?
00:13:50
Speaker
What are the different things? right yeah Because like you said, is it manual versus electric toothbrush and tongue scraping, water picks and hopeful fla all the different things mouthwashes or different ones?
00:14:01
Speaker
I'll go through it. And I also we have a guide that I'm happy to send over to you that please share with your listeners, because we we started a new practice from scratch. So when you take all the new knowledge and the things that I've learned from the uptown practice, which is in New York City, and now we're down in Tribeca,
00:14:20
Speaker
We had a blank slate and we built a lot of interesting things that now impact our practices, but we have an order of events that we do things. So the first thing is, you know, you really want to just generally and get the um right amount of time. Basically, electric brushes are five times more effective than the manual brush.
00:14:38
Speaker
and But it's all dependent on technique. You know, manual brushes, like think of like, I got to hit that backhand, tennis backhand just right. But electric brush does all the work for you. You got to hold it and kind of angle it properly and do it for 30 seconds or quiet.
00:14:51
Speaker
Then you got to get between the teeth. Why do you got get between the teeth? That's where the periodontal disease is, because you can't toothbrush doesn't get between those teeth. So you've got to mechanically remove any food particles, and of course the bacteria that form in our saliva that if you don't remove it, there's a whole, what we call four stages of inflammation. So the body over time, and that's why chronic inflammation is so dangerous in the mouth, the body over time thinks it's a foreign invader.
00:15:18
Speaker
So we know what happens with foreign invaders. All of us live through COVID. We understand that when the immune response ah gets you know overwhelmed, we have our body has a problem, whether it's an autoimmune disease or unfortunately over COVID, if you had periodontal disease, you were five times more likely to end up on a ventilator.
00:15:37
Speaker
And that just brings it home of, oh, my God, that's just like cardiovascular disease and, and you know, and any other organ disease that we had in the body that is inflammatory. So anyway, back to that. So electric brush, then a water flosser or a regular flosser. The beauty of these water flossers is they really remove the plaque and any food particles between your teeth.
00:15:58
Speaker
We love that. We also love the tongue scraper. So the tongue scraper will remove, and that's for your breath, the same bacteria, same type of bacteria that cause gum disease between the teeth.
00:16:09
Speaker
They live without oxygen. So those are called the gram-negative anaerobic bacteria. Anaerobic live without oxygen. That's what causes gum disease between the teeth. That's what causes bad breath that lives in the little recesses of the tongue.
00:16:22
Speaker
Scraper removes it. So tongue scraper is great. And then i love to finish with the mouth rinse. It's called immunity rinse. And I'm completely biased because I've started a product company. My sons did it. It's a product that we invented, but What I want the listener to know is just you want to raise the pH in the mouth in a safe way with no antibiotics.
00:16:44
Speaker
And you want to oxygenate because when you oxygenate the bad bugs, they they will the balance starts getting into a more favorable balance. So we then finish with immunity rinse.
00:16:56
Speaker
And that's it. And that takes about. three minutes. You do it in the morning, you do it at night. you So you just want to bookend your day with this. Could I ask on the the actual toothpaste that you recommend? Because they're different ingredients and how people think about them.
00:17:12
Speaker
That's a whole conversation. okay So let's talk about it. So toothpaste, what's really important is that it's not abrasive. So there's an abrasivity factor that we look at. 70 is very good.
00:17:25
Speaker
And then once you get over 120, 150, 170, it's too abrasive. because you don't want to scratch the enamel so you look at the toothpaste and you find out what is that abrasivity index and it and and should be listed, number one.
00:17:40
Speaker
Number two, we're going to get into a whole fluoride conversation because that's been a big debacle, so I can unpack that one for you. But whether you believe in fluoride or you or not or you do, you need to have an active in your toothpaste.
00:17:55
Speaker
Now, they normally come in two forms. They're either a fluoride or a potassium nitrate, which all which also has a very good effect of getting on root surfaces when you have a little recession, decreases in sensitivity and preventing plaque from sticking to those areas. so Fluoride does that topically.
00:18:14
Speaker
It helps seal roots, helps make the surface in the aminitis and smooth so plaque doesn't stick as well. But it also gets into the tooth, especially when you ingest fluoride in the developing tooth.
00:18:26
Speaker
And that molecule of the tooth, which is ah very hard, the hardest, it's the hardest mineral of the body, the hardest material is enamel.
00:18:37
Speaker
That hydroxyapatite molecule now becomes what's called a fluorapatite molecule. It's like super steel. Now, let's unpack this. Toothpaste has about 1,000 to parts per million.
00:18:50
Speaker
And that is safe. And that's why people say, well, how does the ADA not get on fluoride? Because it's such a problem because we got Kennedy talking about this and that and this. And that was what they're talking about is the extreme, extremely high concentrations. And if you know anything about pharmacology and chemicals, it's all dose response.
00:19:10
Speaker
In other words, how much is it? Fluoride has been tested for decades and decades in this country. So at very safe low levels, it works extremely well. There's also, from all the studies, even today when fluoride is in rinses and fluoride could be in water, there's a 25% decrease in decay rates because of all the things I'm talking about.
00:19:30
Speaker
So I got no problem with fluoride at these low levels. I really do not. But if you have problems with fluoride in your water, you know what? Filter it out. But if I had my young kids, I'd have them. I would for sure have fluoride in the toothpaste. Otherwise, your kids are going to have cavities just the way it is.
00:19:47
Speaker
And unfortunately, people who do not have access to care, you take fluoride out of the water. Those are the people that are going to suffer because they don't have the ability that all of us have with access to care. So that's just another thing to think about the unpack of fluoride.
00:20:01
Speaker
And then in toothpaste, you know, look, you don't want to have some of these ingredients. There's sodium lauryl sulfate that causes apthysulsus. you want SLS free. There's more natural organic ways to kind of get a foaming agent. That's what that is in your in your toothpaste.
00:20:18
Speaker
So there's a number of toothpaste that I do like, but you want to look at these things. I like these natural organic kind of vitamin antioxidants in them, but I do like an active lycafluoride and a potassium nitrate also.
00:20:32
Speaker
That's really helpful. Okay. And so you touched on some, the daily practice. Are there any things that you suggest people do? I mean, twice a year cleaning and seeing your dentist. Of course. um But other than that, are there other things kind of on a weekly or monthly or annual basis you suggest people do? Yeah.
00:20:51
Speaker
So you got to go back to what breaks down the mouth. We call them the mouth breakdowns, right? I'm on ah a third book coming out in the fall that talks about the connection of the mouth and the body. So that's coming
Dr. Levine's Upcoming Book on Oral Health
00:21:02
Speaker
out.
00:21:02
Speaker
It's called oral. And they're there are things that break down the mouth. One is, and it's one of the pillars of longevity, is stress, how we stress. And so we clench, we grind, we wear down the teeth.
00:21:16
Speaker
You need a professional to get involved, make sure you don't have muscular problem, make sure you're, yeah you know, there are people who do great stress release. But there are also things that we do with appliances that calms the joint and the jaws down.
00:21:30
Speaker
There's also lasers that we use now called photobiomodulation that also calms the muscles down. There's a great company called M-Face that has a TMJ protocol that just got FDA approval. So you want to get to a professional office that really has the latest technology with the latest knowledge and research, period, end of story.
00:21:49
Speaker
So c clenching and stress is at one of the mouth breakdowns, force. The other thing is plaque. How well are we removing the plaque? That's just what we're talking about. Then you need the professional, because if you had an implant or a crown or a veneer, ah when you had some type of dentistry, you need to be in the dental office probably at least three times a year.
00:22:09
Speaker
You need that hygienist, that superstar of the dental practice I call the hygienist, communicating with the patients, make sure that their technique is right, make sure they're spending the right amount of time. And when there's a little inflammation, bam, they get to it early before it becomes a chronic inflammation that then becomes a tooth problem, but then a systemic health problem,
Dentistry's Role in Health Diagnostics
00:22:29
Speaker
right?
00:22:29
Speaker
So it's getting to these problems early, just like anything else. And I truly believe, and we talk about this with a group of us who are involved with DMI, dental medical integration in this country, that Dentistry could be a tip of the spear for diagnostics for overall health because people go to the dentist more than they go to their primary care physician.
00:22:49
Speaker
So you think about it. You go to a great dental office. They make sure you don't have ah health issues in your mouth. And what's going to happen is those things that you have to do, that environment you have to create in your mouth of health.
00:23:01
Speaker
will be exactly the same environment you're doing for your body. So look at that. You get both things done just by changing your mindset and being knowledgeable about all these things. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.
00:23:14
Speaker
I'd like to go back a little bit to, you were talking about early days, 1840, pre-1840, and Dennis or the Barbers with extraction.
Orthodontics, Jaw Structure, and Breathing
00:23:23
Speaker
And I'd like to talk a little bit more about that world because it's one, I think a lot of people maybe breath from James Nestor and gotten more familiar or Jaws, the the other book in the subject of we had this idea of crowding and a lot of extraction and shrinking and what it did to our jaw versus now people like Dr. Belfour was doing with the homeoblock and some of these others for expanders.
00:23:48
Speaker
How do you view that space and and what's what's interesting there right now? It's fascinating, it's brilliant, and it's spot on. I'm a tremendous fan of what James Nestor did to raise awareness in this country and beyond.
00:24:01
Speaker
of um all of these things we need to know when you look back archaeologically at 400 years, what Corcini did from the Museum of Natural History, where he references in the book where they didn't have an orthodontic problem, nor did they need their wisdom teeth in because they had these beautiful, gorgeous jaws.
00:24:18
Speaker
and And the relationship and the things you they did to lead up to those gorgeous jaws versus the modern diet, the soft diet, the bottle feeding versus breastfeeding and all these types of things.
00:24:30
Speaker
So Sandra Khan and Paul Ehrlich, also in Jaws that you mentioned, is another great book for the young moms because they have you to put those two books together. That bookends people's knowledge of what you need to know, especially as a young parent.
00:24:46
Speaker
So. mouth breathing versus nasal breathing, the difference in the formation of your jaws. Imagine you're breathing through your mouth. Our mouth was not designed for breathing.
00:24:57
Speaker
So what happens, the palate gets vaulted. It's a narrow jaw. And so all of a sudden, our tongue can't come forward when we're sleeping. And now we have these sleep issues as we get older, which means hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and all these chronic inflammatory diseases. So Look at all these things line up.
00:25:14
Speaker
Not to mention dementia, right? I mean, and then you get in. And dementia and cognitive function. Exactly. So this new science is so emerging and it's so fascinating.
00:25:24
Speaker
And there's so many things that um once if your child has a rhinitis or nasal or a nasal blockage, how important is to get that. to get that healed, to get to that ENT and to get it healed and not to wait. If your child is leaning forward and they're becoming long faced and they're breathing through their mouth, you can see that whole head posture.
00:25:45
Speaker
There are so many things, of course, that can get done now with this interceptive orthodontics, expansion of the maxilla, and also just changing some certain habits early enough. So it's an emerging science in orthodontics in myofunctional therapy.
00:26:00
Speaker
I lead a team of specialists. So we, you know, we're very involved with this. So we have every specialty covered all the way from prosthodontist. There's three extra ones of me between the offices. There's periodontist, orthodontist, and pediatric dentist. So when we all collaborate together, and this is one of the keys that we believe I believe deeply is the future of dentistry is where the specialists really work together in a collaborative environment under one roof, not a referral outside of your office, because you can do that if you have to.
00:26:31
Speaker
But if you have an opportunity to join groups where the specialists and the general dentists are all working together, that collaboration, that team sport is where you can really diagnose and come up with the most comprehensive and smart appropriate treatment plans for both the young patients and and for the adults.
00:26:50
Speaker
So, you know, when we all start looking at things these things together, all of the disciplines start working together. Oh, well, let's expand the arch. Oh, I want to improve my aesthetics. But, you know, let's not create an illusion that a tooth is in that position. What may be someone who does a lot of veneers.
00:27:05
Speaker
Let's move the tooth into position. Now we have aligners for 22 years. clear aligners, which is an amazing, amazing orthodontic breakthrough that it's easy for people to move teeth into proper position. And all that diagnostics is now today driven through software, through facial aesthetics.
00:27:23
Speaker
And so the orthodontics is not just about tooth to tooth relationship. It's about function. It's about airway. It's about breathing. And of course, when all of those things line up problem properly, what do you get?
00:27:35
Speaker
You get enhanced facial aesthetics. So I'm just pointing out how more people who are thinking about, oh, where do I put my take my children? What dentist team do I see?
00:27:46
Speaker
You really need to see that word called the team. You need to have a team approach to what you're doing. So people are are weighing in where it's more like grand rounds in dentistry versus a solo climber business model. And we're moving away from that very traditional solo climber that I talked about.
00:28:04
Speaker
For me, early on in my career, that was something I was raising the red flag in my own mind and said, this has to change. And so it's three and a half decades later, and it's starting to change. Yeah, and I'm really grateful. it had I mean, my own personal story, I was a swimmer.
00:28:18
Speaker
And so we mouth breathe constantly, right? That's the only way you're doing when you're swimming. And would hear people mock, oh, mouth breathers. And I was defaulting to it and would snore a lot and had all these issues.
00:28:30
Speaker
And after reading James Nestor's breath book, I went and Dr. Belfort had trained somebody in Atlanta and and got a homeoblock. And you can see the before and after the bone that got built on the top and did it for my daughter as well. And she went from crowding, I mean, just within six months,
00:28:47
Speaker
It's beautiful. She doesn't even have to wear it anymore. like we got to wear so Fixing it at that age, right a 7, 8-year-old, very, very different than waiting until your 40s to try to have to correct decades of things that went wrong.
00:29:00
Speaker
and so I'm so grateful for you and people like you that are helping us so live better as a result of this.
Early Diagnosis and Improving Health Outcomes
00:29:08
Speaker
Thank you for that. and And getting to these issues as early as possible, just like that in our overall body, the air the faster we diagnose, right?
00:29:16
Speaker
We get upstream. We get away from a sickness model. but not dealing with breathing or hypertension. We fix that early on. And not only are people going to be healthier in this country,
00:29:28
Speaker
But this GDP percentage of health care, which is ridiculously out of whack, 20%, that's going to change as we move away from the sickness model. ED HARRISON Yeah, 20% of GDP, but 1 in 3, every 1 in 3 tax dollars. So all the taxes we pay, 1 in every 3 is going to health care as well. So it's really, really tremendous.
00:29:47
Speaker
HARRISON It's a compelling argument. HARRISON understanding we need to get to that full stack on the kind of daily and ongoing basis, but not everybody is starting at that same point, what's the one place to start for somebody? you say hey If you were going to do one thing starting today to start helping your oral health, and then they could compound and have it stack over time, where would you suggest people start?
00:30:13
Speaker
I think people need to do a little bit of research wherever they're living. Get recommendations to be in a top office if you have access to care, an office that'll work with you.
00:30:25
Speaker
Office that has a team approach. I think that's number one, because once you get there, those people will ensure that your oral hygiene regimen, the order by which you do things, what tools you use, getting to problems when they're small, that's where you want to be.
00:30:44
Speaker
It's a focus on health and caring for the patient. and And I hate to say it, but the it's not about the almighty dollar. It's about helping people. So, you you know, you you need to find that off.
00:30:56
Speaker
but For people, what they need to do at home is to just become knowledgeable. And there's ah enough information out there and, you know, a little bit of common sense that if you take the time to have these habits and it's a ritual, this is what I do in the morning.
00:31:12
Speaker
This is what I do with meditation and breath work for the mind and for stress. This is what I do for nutrition. Now I learned that these are the things, right? This is, I know that, you know, social, kind of all these things you're talking about, you know, when I put these things into place, my mind is set properly.
00:31:30
Speaker
i can engage in my day properly. And I started the day off right. And having, we'll call it an oral health game, right? It's like, I got game. and you get game in the morning and get game at night, and you have it for your children and you have it for family members, you you transfer this data, knowledge is power.
00:31:50
Speaker
That's where you start. So I think being in a good professional office, but also... for the people to really have these high performance habits, to have an oral hygiene game, to know that it's a priority.
00:32:01
Speaker
There is something, i think, psychologically, what you're saying to that ritual, right? If it's, hey, I start each day, it's just like the first make your bed. Hey, first, look, I've taken care of my health. I act feel good. My mouth feels better. And same before you go to bed, it puts you in the mindset of, oh, now I'm shutting down. It's time for sleep.
00:32:16
Speaker
And so it kind of bookends what you're looking to do. That's right. I mean, we know. I mean, you were a swim, was lacrosse player. We know what it took. to get to a competitive edge. We know the dedication, the time, and let's use the right word, the discipline.
00:32:31
Speaker
yeah The discipline to do it because we know when we did it, how we felt after it, right? And the accomplishments and the team and the feeling and all of that. And it's like it's like that with everything in life. It's just a commitment that we make to ourselves and to the people around us to have that level of discipline because we will win at the end, you know, from a standpoint of enjoying a life that's filled with health and then everything can fall into place. I mean, when we think about the most important things,
00:32:59
Speaker
You really got to focus on this engine
Maintaining Discipline in Oral Health and Overall Wellbeing
00:33:01
Speaker
we were given. We only got one of them. And you really got to learn what are those important things. It doesn't mean you're a maniac a maniac about it, but it really means that you're paying attention to these important things in life.
00:33:12
Speaker
Yeah, and it's it's certainly clear, speaking with you and and seeing everything you've done, your discipline is persistent and consistent, and not just as a practitioner, the the lives you touch, but also as an author, as an educator, taking the time to come do this.
00:33:27
Speaker
So thank you so much, Dr. Levine, for for all your work and everything you continue to do. Yeah, I appreciate that. It's an honor, actually, you know, totally to be here speaking to you. And I hope we can help people through so your podcast and people can get curious now and and go deeper in all these areas.
00:33:44
Speaker
Yeah, and i certainly want to get the handout. The oral health guide, yes. want to share that in the show notes so the listeners have access to that and can learn more about you, of course. Yeah, no, absolutely. And people, I'm at Dr. John Levine, J-O-N Levine on Instagram, and we'll get them the guide, which is called, you know, Smile House is what we've built, where we we have all these specialists under one roof, and then we have this dental medical integration. We have all of these standard of care diagnostics, CAT scans.
00:34:17
Speaker
iTero scans, salivary diagnostics, so we test microbiome, all these things we look as a standard of care so that we roll up all this information and we can diagnose with data today that we never had it before.
00:34:30
Speaker
We didn't have it 10 years ago. We didn't have a CAT scan. The CAT scan tells us everything from the top of the nose to the airway. We can diagnose sleep today. We can diagnose sinus problems, small jaws, all these structural issues that really are paramount to proper breathing and airway.
00:34:48
Speaker
And so that's a whole science that's nicely emerging with dentistry and medicine. You have to be deeply connected to help our patients. Yeah, i I think this is a truly nascent area, this integration that you're talking about. and so that's right I'd be excited as it continues to develop to to get you back and things you're learning as it all fits together.
00:35:08
Speaker
Absolutely. I'd love to do that. All right. Thank you so much, Dr. Levine. Thank you, Andrew. All my best. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of the Home of Healthspan podcast. And remember, you can always find the products, practices, and routines mentioned by today's guests, as well as many other Healthspan role models on Alively.com.
00:35:26
Speaker
Enjoy a lively day.