Semidey Dental Podcast
Welcome to "Semidey Dental," the podcast that delves deep into the fascinating world of oral health and its profound impact on your healthspan. Join us on an enlightening journey as we explore the intricate web of connections between your oral health and the health of your entire body.
In each episode, we'll unravel the latest research, expert insights, and personal stories to shed light on the link between your mouth and your body. You'll discover how your smile can lead to a healthier, fuller life.
Your hosts, Dr. Alex Semidey and Jeremy Wolf, will sit down with leading dental professionals, healthcare experts, and individuals who have experienced firsthand the transformative power of optimal oral care. Together, we'll bridge the gap between dentistry and holistic health, unveiling the role that your teeth and gums play in maintaining total body wellness.
For more information, visit: www.semideydental.com or call (954) 581-0120
Semidey Dental Podcast
EP #6: How Sugar Wrecks Your Gums, Blood Sugar, and Brain: One Bite at a Time
Sugar is the socially acceptable poison we willingly consume without fully understanding its devastating impact on our bodies. From those innocent childhood candy store visits to late-night sugar binges as adults, we've developed complex relationships with this substance that may be silently destroying our health.
In this eye-opening discussion, Dr. Alex Semidey and Jeremy Wolf explore the alarming connections between sugar consumption and chronic inflammation throughout the body. They reveal how those mysterious morning aches, persistent brain fog, and unexplained skin rashes might actually trace back to the sugary treats consumed the night before. The conversation delves into the science of metabolic syndrome and how repeated blood sugar spikes lead to insulin resistance, causing cellular breakdown that affects everything from wound healing to cognitive function.
Perhaps most striking is the examination of Alzheimer's disease as "Type 3 diabetes" – a powerful reminder that what we eat today shapes our brain health tomorrow. For parents, the discussion offers crucial insights into how sugar affects children's behavior, energy levels, and conditions like ADHD, while exposing the deceptive marketing that disguises sugar-laden products as "healthy" options.
Beyond well-known dental concerns, Dr. Semidey explains how sugar transforms your oral microbiome, creating a cascade of inflammation that extends far beyond cavities. "Your fork matters as much as your toothbrush," he emphasizes, highlighting the interconnection between dietary choices and overall health.
Ready to break free from sugar's grip? Discover practical strategies for reducing sugar intake without sacrificing joy, from smart grocery shopping techniques to effective food swaps that satisfy cravings without the harmful effects. The goal isn't perfection but progress – small changes now that yield significant health benefits for years to come. Listen now and take the first step toward reclaiming your health from sugar's sweet deception.
Welcome to the Semide Dental Podcast. We're here to provide you expert insights on how dentistry can improve your quality of life and extend your health span. I'm Alex Semide and I'm a practicing dentist, and I'll be your host, along with Jeremy Wolf. Enjoy the show, welcome. Welcome, tooth Tribe, to the newest episode of the Semide Dental Podcast. Tooth Tribe to the newest episode of the Seminary Dental Podcast. Hello, mr Wolf.
Speaker 2:How are you doing today?
Speaker 1:Oh, fantastic, as per the usual arrangement, yourself, I'm doing amazing, amazing, ready to talk about a topic that's very near and dear to my heart.
Speaker 2:Skittles. I'm talking about Skittles today, skittles and sugar today. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you know it's funny For me. Obviously, sugar plays a huge role in your childhood, but it's become somewhat of a love-hate relationship as I've gotten older. What does sugar mean to you, alex? Sugar mean to you, alex.
Speaker 1:I mean, what does sugar mean to a lot of us, right, like I don't know. For me, growing up, sugar was almost like an expression of love, like most of my positive experiences as a kid involved you know sugar like birthday parties or any sort of celebration Everything's like sugar laden. I write this anecdote in the blog that one of my like the deepest childhood memories is walking it like my mom giving me the equivalent of like five bucks and just setting me loose in a candy store and just walking out with like a huge bag of pure sugar, right Like ready to mainline, like a pound worth of candy. And I feel like that's the relationship that a lot of us have with sugar, right, and it's definitely an area of medicine and research that's really growing fast and just how much of an impact on our overall health, our diet, and sugar specifically, has.
Speaker 2:So for me, like I've known for a while now that sugar has negative repercussions, however, it's one of those things that you don't necessarily notice. It happens gradually, like, for instance, I had myself a little case of the munchies last night and I consumed quite a bit of sugar. And I woke up this morning and I was walking the dogs and I was just. I was not feeling well, I had brain fog and I was feeling kind of funky and I asked myself I was like, why am I feeling like this right now? And then I was reading the blog that you wrote on this and it kind of set in. It was like wait a minute, there's this huge link between what I'm putting in my body, especially late at night, and how I feel in the morning. For you, was there a point throughout your career uh, either in training or in practice where this really really clicked for you?
Speaker 1:You know, I think one of the one of the the biggest travesties in how we educate doctors is how little emphasis we put on nutrition in general. My wife is a is a physician and like her, nutrition training and all of med school was like half a semester, right Like you get a couple of classes.
Speaker 1:It's crazy it really is it is absolutely insane and for us it's the same thing and it's almost even like more limited. All right, sugar, sugar bad, give cavities right, like that's basically the extent of the training that we get. So for me, the sugar thing because you always kind of know, okay, like you don't want to overdo it with sugar and it's not good for you and you can get diabetes right, but like that all seems so far off and honestly it's been as I've gotten older, right, and I had those terrible sugar habits all my life, sugar habits all my life. And now I mean not to say anything, right, but how many of us remember drinking too much, right, as like in our early 20s, and kind of bouncing right back the next day and being okay, right, maybe you go get the good old Gatorade and you're good to go and now you drink a little too much and you pay the price for like three days afterwards, right?
Speaker 1:Well, I was having the same sort of experience with sugar. Right, I would. I was a late night sugar binger, as many of us are, because it magically just tastes better after 11 o'clock and I was waking up feeling stiff and achy and just off Like I felt bad and I was like okay, well, what's?
Speaker 1:going on. What can I change? Like maybe not gorging in sugar right before bed could be a good idea and, holy smokes, start cutting down on it and start feeling better. So that, as as crazy as it sounds to like, say it out loud, like that's actually what made it click for me that this is very real and has a very real implication with what's going on in our bodies. Right, and we're not, we're not immune to it and we're not like invincible right towards sugar. Like we all know, tobacco is bad. Too much alcohol is bad. Sugar's right there it is a poison.
Speaker 1:It is a poison 100%, 100% and it's everywhere and it's like a celebrated poison. We have a reason to cheer. Let's poison ourselves. That's really when it started. Clicking for me is like making those lifestyle changes for myself becoming a parent, being more concerned about what we are feeding our kids than what we are feeding ourselves. Right, because that's oftentimes the gateway for our own personal lifestyle changes is realizing what we're doing to our kids lifestyle changes is realizing what we're doing to our kids 100% man.
Speaker 2:And it can be challenging in this day and age to really source the food that you're getting. I know, when I go to Publix, maybe I shouldn't go to Publix, maybe I should be at Whole Foods, but when I go, if I start looking at the boxes and trying to assess what the ingredients are, well, I'll be there for like five hours and it's just overwhelming. And then you read the list of ingredients. You don't know I'm getting there and like putting ingredients on chat GPT to try to figure out what it is Like. Like what are some of the things? Some obvious things, right, that that where sugar is hiding in plain sight, where you wouldn't think there was sugar in there, but it turns out that it's loaded with sugar and it's terrible for you.
Speaker 1:Oh man, that is a really, really long list. It's like everything. Yeah, it's seriously in everything. My first piece of advice to myself, my mantra if I go to Publix, is don't go into the middle lanes. Anything that comes in a bag, bottle or box avoid, because most likely it's going to have added sugar in it. And they're sneaky too right, all these marketing companies. They will rename sugar something else and you're like, oh, that sounds okay. And lo and behold, you're consuming a ton of sugar.
Speaker 2:Not just the name either. The packaging right, it's a science. They make it just scream at you like it's healthy, and then you actually look at what's in it. You're like what the hell is this?
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely Absolutely, and you think you're doing all right. Right, but you might as well be eating. You know, a crunch bar.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they should have. They have rainbows and butterflies on the packaging and sunlight and forests and trees. What they should have is a skull and crossbones.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly that's. Yeah, we should, we should, we should propose that. Let's see how far it goes. Yeah, Right.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that was interesting to me was how there's this link between sugar and inflammation. So we've all heard about inflammation, but when I think about it, if you were to ask me, jeremy, what is inflammation, I'd be hard pressed to really explain what that is. Can you just talk a little bit about, like, what inflammation is and then how sugar fuels inflammation?
Speaker 1:so sugar is serves as like a trigger for the for the immune system, right, it's. It's like the immune system is in charge of fighting off offenders in the body. Okay, and sub inflammation is a good thing. Like acute inflammation is a good thing. It is your body's natural process of healing. So, for instance, you cut yourself right and it gets a little red and a little puffy for a few days and then it heals and it goes away. Right, the process of inflammation is your body rushing blood flow to an area to bring in nutrients, remove debris and help the area heal. Right, that's acute inflammation. That's a good thing.
Speaker 1:What sugar in our diets do and a lot of our lifestyle things do is they trigger chronic inflammation.
Speaker 1:So your body constantly feels like it's under assault from something and just kicking like it's it's immune system into gear, right, and this affects it, can have effects everywhere in our body. Like we see things like autoimmune diseases that are skyrocketing right as our diets have evolved and become more, more, more refined, more processed, with more sugars in it and all sorts of different like systemic diseases that we see. That, when you like, superimpose the the line graphs of how our diets have evolved and how these metabolic and autoimmune diseases have developed and and grown. They just like, mirror each other perfectly. So it is tricking our body into thinking that it is under assault and it's just launching this all out response. And for some people it can affect their skin more, things like eczema and rashes. My wife says I'm rashy right, I get. I break out in rashes if I overdo it with sugar. And for some people it's skin, for some people it's their gut health, for some people it's cognitive decline, like it can affect all the different systems in our body.
Speaker 2:And it can be very subtle, whereas you don't know how bad it is until it gets really bad. And that could be very difficult to unwind, especially if you've gotten to a point where I know my wife was was eating a lot of sugar as of late and she did a huge detox and she went through it for for a period of time, but she feels so much better right now, like infinitely better. Yeah. What about metabolic health? What's the link between sugar and metabolic health?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that kind of goes hand in hand with what we were just discussing here that sugar creates this systemic explosion of your immune system. Now we hear a lot about metabolic syndrome, right, and it's tied in with diabetes. Everyone knows, right, too much sugar, you get diabetes. But really, what is that? What's? What's going on? Um, so what we know is that when we repeatedly spike blood sugar levels, right, we create what's called a resistance to insulin.
Speaker 1:Insulin is this hormone that is intended in our body to regulate the blood sugar and keep things working well.
Speaker 1:If we overdo it with those spikes and with the sugar in our blood, we develop almost like an immunity to our insulin, and when that happens, we start seeing things like cell breakdown, like, literally, cells in our body start malfunctioning, right, because they don't have this hormone that's helping them control what they need to do. And this happens. I mean, we know about diabetics with, like, poor wound healing, right, like if you're a diabetic and you cut yourself, like your body just doesn't work well enough to heal something that it should normally heal well, right, like if a diabetic cuts themselves, that cut is going to take much, much longer to heal than someone who isn't a diabetic and that cut is going to take much, much longer to heal than someone who isn't a diabetic, and that's an indication of how well the the normal functions of the body are working we were running several months ago and we had a conversation about this and alzheimer's came up and you and you mentioned alz Alzheimer's as being referred to as type three diabetes.
Speaker 2:What do you mean by that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this is one of the things that personally interests me the most when it comes to the metabolic syndrome debate. If there's one thing that I'm terrified of is is cognitive decline. You know, alzheimer's, dementia, um, and we're learning a lot about how these repeated spikes in blood sugar and insulin resistance leads to cell damage in the brain too. Right, like, the brain is a part of the body and this cell damage seems to be part of what leads to the tangles and the proteins the tau proteins and tangles that lead to the neurons in the brain not communicating effectively. Right, and that breakdown in communication of the nerves is what leads to the dementia. Right Is, what is the dementia? It's what prevents our brains from working well.
Speaker 1:The same way, your skin won't heal when you're a diabetic. It won't heal well. Your brain starts to not function well. And let me make this caveat, because it's not, as you know, causational that you eat sugar. You're going to get dementia. Right, like that's. That's not realistic. There are several other factors. There are genetic predispositions to Alzheimer's and dementia, a host of other things, right, trauma, many other factors. But that sugar and metabolic syndrome is directly linked with cognitive decline today is irrefutable.
Speaker 2:Yes, you mentioned inflammation triggering the immune system. Can sugar play a role in autoimmunity?
Speaker 1:body into thinking that it's under constant assault. So your immune system is like your body's army right, and your body can either keep the army you know in place, right, like stay in your base, right or it can deploy the army into action right, and go, go, go fight. We're under assault, like let's, let's fight back. That's what sugar ends up doing, right? It trips your body into thinking it's under assault, it launches that immune response and it's basically just attacking itself.
Speaker 2:So it's safe to say that if you have I'm just thinking of a friend of mine who had some significant autoimmune disorders and had all these issues I'd imagine that the diet is a huge driving factor behind a lot of these conditions, is it not?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I mean you see all sorts of like from a personal standpoint. Right, I eliminated sugar from my diet for several months and it's I'll be the first to admit it's crept back a little bit, not nearly to the extent where it was. And after this podcast I'll probably, you know, admit it's crept back a little bit, not nearly to the extent where it was. And after this podcast I'll probably, you know, eat some of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what's that you get into some of those skittles that you pulled?
Speaker 1:out? Yeah, exactly, but I've seen it myself. Right, cut down on the amount of sugar. Direct correlation feel better, less joint pain, less aches in the morning, less fatigue, less rashes, right, like, all of these things are just completely like, gone, and there is tons of anecdotal evidence everywhere.
Speaker 1:The people that have suffered from chronic autoimmune diseases, the people that have suffered from chronic autoimmune diseases Crohn's eczemas, asthmas that change their diet completely Specifically, a lot of people that do the carnivore diet, where they completely eliminate any sort of processed sugars, carbohydrates, refined carbs, and they have not an improvement but a complete reversal. Right, like, it is totally gone. They feel they get their lives back by changing their diet. Like. I cannot overstate how important it is to really take into account what it is that we're eating and what we're putting in our bodies. Right, because our diets, the diets that we have available to us today, are, you know, 50 years old and we're dealing with hardware that is a lot older than that, right? So our bodies just aren't built for the kinds of diets that modern society has put at our disposal.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about our future, our children and how sugar is affecting our kids. So what do parents need to know? Right, speak to parents out there, because I myself, like everybody else that has kids, you know, 10 and 13 years old I fall something like sugary sweet snack there and then a bag of grapes. We all know what the right choice is Take the grapes, but something inside is like, well, I don't want that right now. I want to get that, but I just continue to do it. I'm at Publix. I see the buy one, get one free. I'm like, oh, the kids will enjoy. What do I need to do to course correct here and make sure that my kids are growing up healthy?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it goes back to that that establishing those connections, right Like I was talking about earlier, with my mom handing me the five bucks to go into the candy store, like that was an expression of love. Right, and sugar becomes this let's do something fun, let's do something good, let's have some poison together. Right, it's sanctioned poison and it's unfortunate, right, and I'm not above it. Right, and I'm not saying that we need to absolutely remove sugar 100% from our diets, that it is the most evil thing in the world If we overdo it. Yes, it leads to serious, right Like, overall health risks.
Speaker 1:Is there a place to have some sugar with your kids? Sure, right, like, have a slice of cake during their birthday. Right, like, have a cookie every once in a while, like, that's okay, in moderation, it's not going to do a ton of harm. But the problem is that it's super addictive. It's really hard to have just one or to moderate yourself into how much sugar you're consuming. Step number one if you want to cut down on sugars when you go to Publix, don't buy it. Right Like, see the BOGO, pass the BOGO, right.
Speaker 2:Just keep walking right.
Speaker 1:If it's not there, it's not going to tempt you right, and the grapes are going to look a lot better at that point.
Speaker 2:And they're so good, though when you actually eat the grapes, you're going to say to myself all the time. If the fruit is really good, I mean, there's sugar in there, right, let's be honest.
Speaker 1:But it's it's natural, right, as long as you don't eat too much of that as well and it's a totally different and let me make this, this caveat here, just to press pause real quick. It's a totally different, uh, metabolically and biologically very, very different for the body, right? Because you're not only getting the natural sugar from the grape, you're getting all the fiber that that grape comes with. That helps your body process that sugar and do a lot less harm. All right, so it is a totally different thing. If you eat five grams worth of grape sugar versus five grams worth of Skittles sugar, like to your body. The grape sugar that brings nutrients, that brings certain chemicals and things that are good for the body. The Skittle is just pure poison.
Speaker 2:Hold on. You just gave me an idea for a hack here. Shoot, eat your Skittles with some Metamucil I will have to conduct a randomized control study to see how that, how that plays out.
Speaker 1:Oh boy, but going back to that, going back to the kids, real quick, um, like I've said before, my wife is a is a pediatrician. She sees a lot of obviously her, her population is a pediatrician. She sees a lot of obviously her, her population, her patient population are children, and one of the things that we see is, like this, skyrocketing in ADHD diagnoses, right, her first stop when they are considering putting that label on a child is what's the diet like and how well are they sleeping? Right, because those two factors play intimately into how this kid's behaving. Right, like, what is their mood? Like what is their energy spikes and crashes.
Speaker 1:Like, what behavioral issues are they manifesting? Right, and so much of it comes from the diet. And the insidious part is that you'll ask the parent what's their diet like? Oh, it's healthy, right, because they're buying bags and boxes that look healthy on the outside, right, and it says low fat or you know, no added sugars, right, but they're sort of rebranding that sugar into something else and it's still this, you know, bad chemical that's in the food that we're giving our kids. So we need to be really, really aware of that.
Speaker 2:I want to pull this back to the teeth, to dentistry. We all know that sugar causes cavities. It's almost cliche at this point, right, but there's a deeper connection here. I know we've talked a lot about the mouth being the gateway to everything else and there's connection with oral inflammation. Talk a little bit about what sugar does to the teeth and the mouth beyond just cavities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. So everyone knows that connection right. More sugar equals more to the teeth and the mouth, beyond just cavities. Yeah for sure. So everyone knows that connection right. More sugar equals more cavities At least hopefully everyone knows that connection. But more sugar, like you said, has ramifications way beyond the cavities, right, the cavities is actually the easy part to manage and deal with.
Speaker 1:The sugar actually changes and affects the it's called the microbiome or the type of bacteria that you have in your mouth. It drives things like not only the decay but gum disease, right, and it puts you on this cycle of inflammation in the mouth right, like we've talked about with overall body inflammation. Well, the same process happens in the mouth. The sugar is directly in the mouth, right, and it's fueling all of this bacterial activity that leads to the decay and the gum disease. Now let's go down the gum disease route so that bacteria starts building up, starts leading to inflammation.
Speaker 1:Your gums get a little puffy, you start developing pockets. Now the type of bacteria that you have in your mouth start to evolve and become more virulent, more dangerous right To your oral health. It leads to periodontal disease. Now you have an outright infection of the gums right, and now that infection increases your risk for heart disease, things like stroke and heart attacks, things like dementia, right? So now you have a double whammy from the sugar and the bacteria in the mouth that can lead to cognitive decline, right? So, like we tell patients in the practice all the time, your fork matters as much as your toothbrush. Ok, what we are putting in our bodies, what we are eating, matters just as much as how well we're controlling the bacteria in the mouth. So being very, very mindful of those things, getting a checkup as regularly to spot signs of inflammation as early as possible in the mouth, really, really goes a long way to catching these things early.
Speaker 2:So I got a question for you. I'm curious when I eat sugar, often I get this feeling specifically in the back of my mouth, the teeth in the back portion of my mouth, where it almost feels like the sugar is rotting away the tooth. I feel it on the nerve almost. It's like this weird feeling, almost like when you eat like Pop Rocks, the candy and it, it sizzles and it feels like something's going on back there. What am I feeling there? Like what's actually going on when I have that feeling? Is that a feeling of the tooth being rotted away? Is it a feeling of the nerve being stimulated by the sugar? Like what's actually going on there?
Speaker 2:And this happens to you every time you eat sugar going on there and this happens to you every time you eat sugar. I mean, it feels like it gets caked. I tend to chew it in the back of my mouth and it tends to get caked on that and I wonder if that's a function of the fact that I have a lot of dental work back there and I have these crowns and it's just sensitive to it, but it literally I get this feeling in my head like it feels like it's eating it away.
Speaker 1:It's very strange that's not normal not for everyone, you know that could be something as simple as the fact that it's you do have like the said dental work and the sugar, right? So let's think about the things that that are sugar laden, right? Candies, sweets, things that tend to be very sticky and mushy and find their way into like nooks and crannies, right? So it's possible that you're just physically like mashing a lot of this food product in there and it's giving you that sensation. Sugar.
Speaker 1:When we do have cavities that are brewing, sugar can be one of the things that triggers some sensitivity, just like drinking cold water can sometimes let you know, oh, there's something going on back there. Sugar can be one of the things that triggers some sensitivity. Uh, just like drinking cold water can sometimes let you know there's, there's something going on back there. Sugar can be one of those triggers as well. So it's, it's possible that maybe there's something like that going on, but most likely, you know it's it's hard to feel the sugar kind of doing its thing and causing the breakdown. But you, mr wolf, just might be so in tune with your bodily process.
Speaker 2:I'm so hyper aware yeah, so hyper aware that you feel it happening. What is an awareness? I can feel the sugar rotting away in my teeth. It's a good deterrent, though, because I feel it Like that's gross.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:I want to cut that out. That's when I grab a bag of grapes and I go off. Another thing I read in the blog which I found interesting was you were talking about TMJ, which, if I'm not mistaken, it's lockjaw right.
Speaker 1:So lockjaw is one of the things that falls under TMJ right. Tmj is kind of a catch-all term and TMJ stands for temporomandibular joint right. It's the fancy name for your jaw joint.
Speaker 2:Is that like clicking when you're clicking, so clicking is.
Speaker 1:Tmj is what we kind of call. Everything it's a catch all term, right. The proper term is TMJ dysfunction, and then that's the umbrella term for anything that is not quite right with the jaw right and that manifests different for different people. It can be clicking or popping of the jaw, it can be jaw pain, right. It can be as extreme as headaches and migraines or things like broken, cracked, worn teeth right. So the jaw joint is a very sophisticated joint in the body. It has a lot of different movements and a lot of things that, can you know, unfortunately go wrong with it and we all kind of different movements and a lot of things that can you know, unfortunately go wrong with it and we all kind of have our own point of failure, so to speak. Right. For some people it's the jaw joint itself and they will develop things like arthritis and joint breakdown.
Speaker 2:All right, so let's talk solutions here. If I read you correctly, you're not saying no sugar, just smarter sugar, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Smarter sugar, less sugar, right, Less Skittles, Less Skittles, more grapes. So you know practical tactical tips, right? Like I said earlier, when you go shopping, when you go grocery shopping, shop the perimeter right, Like I said earlier, when you go shopping, when you go grocery shopping, shop the perimeter right, Stay away from those middle aisles where the bags, the boxes, the bottles are. One of my biggest hacks is avoiding sugary drinks, right?
Speaker 1:Like, if you really want to mainline sugar juices, sodas, things like that. Gatorade right Like, drink Gatorade if you're actually running, you know a 10K and you need that sugar and you need those electrolytes, Otherwise it's just poison water right, Think of it that way You'll cut down on how much you want to drink it. Energy drinks right, Lots of sugar in those. So cutting down on those things is generally a great idea. Some practical, like food swaps right Like. I'm a big fan of flavored sparkling waters. Publix actually has an amazing orange one highly recommend. My kids love it. Like. They don't take that over a Coke any day, Right, and it's zero sugar, it's. There's no additives, no sodium, so it is. It is a really good replacement for when you would have a Coke.
Speaker 2:Um no, I was going to say. The thing is, when we just I just made that switch recently I started drinking um less and less soda and I bought some sparkling water, perrier type stuff, and over time you get used to it to the point where when you go back and you actually have a Coke, it's like overwhelmingly sweet and like just off-putting.
Speaker 1:At that point, so, yeah, it's almost like the person who quits smoking and then is around smokers and can't stand the smoke.
Speaker 2:That should tell you how powerful and toxic sugar can be, because we think we talk about addiction and it doesn't seem like you wouldn't equate that necessarily to sugar. Sugar is addictive, I mean whatever, just sugar. You reserve addiction to cigarettes and things like that. Yeah, but it really is a sneaky, sneaky killer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it really is. And you know, like baseline things, like you know, stay hydrated, right, like eat balanced meals so that you don't get those intense cravings. And, speaking from personal experience, when you cut down on the sugar, it's going to be tough for the first two, three days. And then days four, five and six for me were almost harder than days one, two and three, because day one, two and three you've got that gusto and that impetus to really going to make this lifestyle change. And then day four, five and six you're like but damn, do I really want to make this lifestyle change? And then you day four, five and six you're like but damn, do I really?
Speaker 1:want to make this lifestyle change. I can sure use a cookie right about now. And then you kind of break through that, that point, and you start forgetting about sugar, right. Like you start losing those cravings and it takes a week or two to like like bleed out of your system, but once it does, man, like I'll tell you, like it doesn't even. It's not even a point of contention. Like you want to go have a snack Cashews became my replacement for Skittles, so late at night if I'm up watching a game or something and I want a snack, cashews, right, and you make. You make substitutions for things that are a lot better for you for things that are a lot better for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, good choices, my friend, good choices. So how do you integrate these conversations without sounding cliche, right, when you have a patient like, don't take, you know, watch your sugar intake because you're going to get a lot of cavities, how do you integrate that into your practice and really have meaningful conversations with patients that you see relatively infrequently? Right, you're going to come in every six months for a checkup, a cleaning. How do you really have these conversations in a way that resonates? And I like what you said about your fork matters as much as your toothbrush, so that's a cool way to put it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and little things like that, right, that just kind of put things in perspective for folks. You know, we at the practice we really focus on on education on all fronts, not just dental but overall health. So just having the conversations with people, right, like the more we hear these things from different sources, like the more, the more weight we put on it, the more research we start doing ourselves. Right, and I'm not, I'm not anticipating or planning or even hoping to have anyone make a hundred 80 degree drastic lifestyle change by having a five minute conversation with me about their diet, but I just I hope to open their eyes a little bit more. Right, and the next time maybe we have another conversation, or they have a conversation with a buddy of theirs who had a conversation with one of their doctors or heard something on the Internet. Right, and the awareness just starts evolving and growing. Right, it is. It's not, it's not flipping a switch. Right, it's a gradual improvement in our lifestyle. We're really not looking for perfection, we're just we're aiming for progress.
Speaker 2:And people don't want to be told not to do a thing right. There's a big difference between coming and saying like you need to not have any more sugar because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, as opposed to just having conversations around these types of subjects and raising awareness so that people can come to the conclusion in their own mind that they need to stop doing it, and not be told.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think it's really important for us, as providers in general, to not come at things from a holier than thou point of view. Right, because we all have our hangups. Right, we all have our vices. For some of us it's it's sugar, for others it's smoking, like we all know it's perfect, right? So no one's preaching from an ivory tower.
Speaker 2:Speak for yourself, brother. I'm a fine specimen, my doctor the other day.
Speaker 1:My vast imperfections. So I I think it's really important that we had just just honest, human conversations with people. It's like, hey, this is bad for us, right, and these are the different ways that it's bad for us. And making little subtle changes can sometimes have a really big impact on not only your your current health, but your health span right. Like this these are decisions that we want to make now, that sort of affect us right now but really affect us 20 years from now. So little course corrections frequently get us to a much more desirable destination.
Speaker 2:So I will. I will leave you at this. I went in for a physical the other day and my doctor did tell me and these, these were her words. She said what have you been doing? You're perfect, mic drop. I walked out, I'm good to go.
Speaker 1:There you go. You are perfect, Mr Wolf.
Speaker 2:Perfect specimen. All right, thank you everybody for tuning in. This was really, really fun. If you're out there listening, if you enjoyed this content, please don't forget to like subscribe all that fun stuff. You know the drill we always like to hear your feedback. If you've had any personal experiences with these topics, let us know about it in the comments. We love to get outside perspectives and if we missed anything, let us know and we will dig into it on future episodes. Everyone, take care, have a wonderful day and stay healthy. We only got this one life to live.
Speaker 2:Let's live it to the fullest.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Seminary Dental Podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and follow us on social media for the latest episodes. You can find us at Semide Dental. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. We're always happy to help. Until then, keep smiling and stay curious.