The dentist you choose is shaping your destiny. Here are Parts 1 and 2 if you’d like to read them. This is Part 3 of 8 — today, we talk about your blood sugar.
Back to our two people. Same age, same genes, same diet, but one sees a dentist focused on the whole-body and a root cause approach, while the other picked a perfectly nice conventional drill-and-fill dentist.
In people with diabetes and gum disease, getting their gum disease under control was shown to improve their HbA1c by a meaningful amount. Researchers pooled 35 trials for a 2022 Cochrane review, examining more than 3,000 people with diabetes. Treating their gum disease lowered HbA1c by about 0.4 of a point.
That’s the kind of drop you’d expect from a prescription—simply from getting their gums healthy again.
This connection runs in the opposite direction too…
Gum disease makes blood sugar harder to control. The inflammation from infected gums worsens insulin resistance. So the two get into a loop, each one dragging the other down. Most people sadly only ever get treated for half of it.
And it’s not just your gums, it’s the bacteria on your tongue that are involved in blood sugar, too…
There are “good guy” bacteria on your tongue that help keep your blood sugar down by turning the nitrate in leafy greens that you eat → into nitric oxide, the same molecule from the heart issue, which opens your blood flow and helps your muscles pull sugar out of your blood. People who have more of these “good guy” bacteria have lower insulin resistance, yet how many folks with gum disease are being sent home with an alcohol-based mouthwash designed to kill those exact bacteria we need to get out of this mess?
98 million American adults have prediabetes, and more than 80% of them have no idea they’re prediabetic because their blood sugar isn’t high enough for a diagnosis. But it IS high enough to do some damage to their gums.
This is why your dentist should be connecting your gum health to your blood sugar levels, and your doctor should be taking an interest in your gums and oral microbiome health.
Here’s where our two people part ways. The one with a whole-body dentist still gets booked for the deep cleanings. But that dentist also asks about their blood sugar, sends them for an A1C, and picks up the phone to their doctor. Someone finally connects the two. The gums get treated, and so does the reason they keep bleeding.
The person seeing the conventional dentist, on the other hand, will stay on a treadmill that keeps getting harder. Their dentist keeps scaling the same gums, their doctor keeps treating the blood sugar with medications, and no one connects the two. Both problems keep feeding each other, and both keep getting worse.
So, what can you do?
1) Tell your dentist if your blood sugar runs high (prediabetic, diabetic, or just creeping up), so your gums get watched more closely. This is information that your dentist needs to know.
2) Ask your doctor to check your blood sugar if your gums bleed and won’t settle. Your dentist and your doctor are working the same problem from opposite ends, so they should be talking to each other.
3) Track your metabolic markers annually. Personally, I aim for a fasting insulin under 5 μIU/mL (ideally under 3), fasting glucose under 100 mg/dL, and A1C under 5.7%.
4) Take berberine to help steady your blood sugar, especially the spikes after meals that a fasting test never sees. It works mostly in your gut, where it feeds your good bacteria and cools the inflammation that drives both insulin resistance and gum disease. It can interact with diabetes medication, so talk to your doctor first.
5) Take CoQ10 because it helps both problems at once. Your cells use it to make energy, which is exactly what your gum tissue needs to heal, and in trials it also lowered HbA1c and fasting glucose. Statins drain your CoQ10, so if you take one, you’re likely running low.
Next week, we’ll get into Part 4. See you there.
Take care,
Dr. B
P.S. A few things I use to keep my mouth clean and oral microbiome balanced:
- this toothpaste
- this oil-pulling blend instead of mouthwash
- this green tea
- these enzymes with meals
- this magnesium 1-2 hours before bed
Why do runners get more cavities?