“weird” things I do to stay healthy…

If you followed me around for a week, you’d see a few health habits that make perfect sense: exercise, flossing, taking my vitamins…

But you’d also see quite a few more that might make you pause.

Below I’m sharing the “weird,” less obvious health habits, in no particular order, that help keep me healthy at age 67…

1) I eat between 5 and 10 different vegetables a day.
More important than eating your veggies is variety of those veggies. I first learned this concept from Terry Wahls, MD.

The microbes on your tongue that convert dietary nitrate into nitric oxide don’t all feed on the same thing. The commensals competing with cavity-causing bacteria on your enamel are a different community from the ones living near your tonsils.

A green smoothie with two ingredients feeds a handful of them; a salad with eight ingredients feeds a whole neighborhood, which is the part the “eat your greens” message left out!

Yesterday I had spinach, arugula, radishes, beets, carrots, fennel, parsley, and celery (eight before lunch).

2) I babysit my grandchildren on a regular basis.
People with a strong sense of life purpose live longer and show lower rates of cognitive decline. A 2019 study in JAMA Network Open followed nearly 7,000 American adults over 50 and found that those scoring highest on life-purpose measures had a significantly lower risk of all-cause mortality, with the strongest signal showing up in cardiovascular death.

In plain English: feeling needed, on a regular basis, is doing measurable work inside your body, even if my Oura ring isn’t going to pick it up.

What this looks like is picking up my grandkids from school, or taking them for the weekend. We try to be “every day” grandparents rather than “special occasion” grandparents, as much as we can be, living two hours away.

3) My wife and I go to bed at the same time every night.
Couples who sleep on the same schedule have measurably better sleep quality and lower morning cortisol than couples who don’t. The other half of the habit is the first thing we say to each other when we wake up: how did you sleep? “I got a 92 last night.” We’re constantly titrating the temperature of the bedroom, humidity, light, air quality, what we ate the night before.

Sleep is the project we share, and we have Oura ring data to discuss over coffee.

4) I keep fresh flowers in our home.
OK, OK…so there is no fresh-flowers longevity study. But the reason fresh flowers are on this list is that they make me happy when I see them in the morning, and being a person who is happy in his own home strikes me as a real, if immeasurable, health intervention.

Creating beauty in the spaces we live in might seem frivolous, but as someone who got his bachelor’s degree in art history, this one has more importance than I think we even realize…

5) I replace my toothbrush head every four weeks.
The standard recommendation is every three months, and almost nobody manages even that. The problem is that worn bristles become too sharp for enamel. After a few weeks of normal use, the soft, polished tips you started with are gone, and what’s left is a brush that wears away enamel and causes gum recession. A fresh brush head every four weeks is one of the cheapest insurance policies in dentistry against the damage a worn one will quietly do to your teeth and gums.

6) I spend real time outside, and I take a walk after dinner.
Morning light hitting your eyes within an hour of waking sets your circadian rhythm – and I can see the difference in my Oura ring sleep scores if I don’t get it.

A short walk after dinner substantially blunts the post-meal glucose response and helps your nervous system shift into the parasympathetic mode that makes evenings feel like evenings.

7) I sleep with a mandibular advancement device.
For me, the difference is obvious: I don’t snore, my sleep is more continuous, and my tracker shows longer stretches of deep sleep. My nighttime resting heart rate is lower now than it was in my forties and fifties, though of course no single habit gets all the credit.

The connection between airway and aging is the most under-discussed thing in adult medicine, and I’m not exaggerating. Disrupted breathing during sleep (even mild, even subclinical) drives systemic inflammation, suppresses growth hormone, and accelerates both cardiovascular disease and cognitive decline. If you snore, or someone who has slept next to you has ever told you that you do, this matters more than almost any other longevity move I could recommend. It’s so important I wrote a book about it. You can find an airway-trained dentist near you using my Functional Dentist Directory.

8) I swish with a CoQ10 MCT oil in the morning, and I never use mouthwash
Both conventional and natural mouthwash kill bacteria indiscriminately, which means every time you swish, you’re taking out the commensals your mouth depends on to produce nitric oxide, buffer your saliva pH, and stay in communication with your gut. There’s a reason mouthwash use is associated with higher blood pressure in the scientific literature.

The “natural” mouthwashes are no better. Peppermint, clove, tea tree, eucalyptus, oregano – at the concentrations used in oral care, these are broad-spectrum antimicrobials doing the same indiscriminate work. A small bottle of clove oil is the concentrated extract of pounds of clove buds, and nobody is eating pounds of clove buds with dinner. Concentrate any plant enough and it stops behaving like a plant and starts behaving like a drug.

What I do instead is swish with a CoQ10 and MCT oil blend, then brush. If you’ve been drying out your mouth with mouthwash, you’ll love how hydrating this oil feels.

9) I scrape my tongue every day.
A stainless steel tongue scraper costs about eight dollars and lasts forever, and the act of using it takes fifteen seconds. It lifts the overnight biofilm off the dorsal surface of your tongue in one or two passes. You can smell the difference in the bathroom after the first pass and taste the difference in your morning coffee. If you aren’t already doing this, it’s the highest-leverage thing on the entire list relative to what it costs you.

10) I drink green tea every single day, and I travel with it, too.
Green tea is one of the most consistently studied beverages in the cardiovascular and oral health literature. The EGCG in it interferes with the glucosyltransferase enzymes that Streptococcus mutans (the main bacterium responsible for tooth decay) uses to build the sticky biofilm that anchors it to your enamel, which means a regular green tea habit denies that organism the foothold it needs to start a cavity.

I’m extremely picky about my tea. Most green tea served in American restaurants is the lowest grade of the lowest grade (old, oxidized, badly brewed) so I travel with my own. There’s a Ziploc in my carry-on with single-serve sachets of the high-quality stuff. If you knew how much of my forties I spent trying to source decent green tea in a hotel lobby in some city I’d flown into for a lecture, the packets would make more sense.

What’s on your list of weird things you do to stay healthy?

-Dr. B