02/01/2026
(If you prefer to listen to the story, I uploaded a book reading version to YouTube: https://youtu.be/rIZDxVvCLVM Duration: 24 min.)
Teeth: Rest Assured
Hello, my name is Janey. I am a video game developer serving in technical art capacity. My background is in electronics engineering but today I am onto teeth. I am going to marry what I learned about oral health with various beats of my life since that’s what I experienced—life flashing before my eyes—when I put myself through a dental bootcamp with Dr. Ellie Phillips’s teaching.
Let’s begin with my origin. I was born premature at 3.3 pounds or 1.5 kg. Preterm babies are underdeveloped and prone to have poor health so I was sick often. I am the second child out of four. My grandmother raised me from age 1 to 6 in the countryside of Taiwan before my parents took me back to live with them. At dental visits, doctor would spend longer time on my teeth than my siblings’ and afterwards, crown me as the outlier needing more frequent cleaning due to excessive plaque buildup. My father asked why I was like that—it made me feel inferior, like there’s something wrong with me. And that’s what the dentist said, I was born that way.
But the reason why I was special was not because of my DNA but because I grew up with my grandmother.
Our mouth can host over 800 kinds of oral bacteria. Healthy biofilm is a protective layer comprised of a community of microorganisms covering the surfaces of our mouth, teeth, and gums. Some microbes swim around in our saliva, or colonize and multiply on the teeth surfaces. Amongst the colonizers lies one sugar-loving evil named Streptococcus mutans or Strep. mutans. It sticks to the teeth and calls its friends to form armies of mass destruction. They turn sugars into acids that erode the enamel making them more porous. Plaques are slabs of Strep. mutans or infected biofilm, and it will stay with the child and continue into adulthood if nothing was done to stop the infection.
My grandmother had dentures, not a sweet tooth. Many foods break down into sugars in our mouth and travel with saliva, nourishing oral biofilm before the body. The odds are that the good colonizers were outnumbered by the bad ones in her mouth. She wasn’t aware of an ally that can pull off a major upset.
Xylitol belongs to a class of polyols or sugar alcohols and can be found in hardwood trees, fruits, and vegetables. Our body also makes it. It is diabetic friendly but toxic to dogs and Strep. mutans. This low-glycemic sweetener outranks its peers in its potency to render the bad troops nonfunctional so they cannot adhere to our teeth or produce acids.
Whenever we speak, kiss, or part our lips, the invisible cloud of armies spray out of our mouth, and they can transfer from teeth to teeth, mother to child, and person to person. Xylitol can alter the bacterial population and transmission by cleaning our saliva, thereby warding off plaque and caries. If, after meals, my grandmother had consumed small amounts of xylitol and dissolved it in water to clean my baby teeth, I wouldn’t have been so special.
One gram of this sugar substitute after lunch and before sleeping at night have shown to reduce pregnant mothers’ chance of delivering a preterm baby. My health could have been better if my mother had taken xylitol for prenatal care. Instead, I had frequent intakes of antibiotics growing up, which caused permanent intrinsic teeth staining.
So, plaques, cavities, silver fillings here and there were my unsurprising trajectory. When I was in junior high, my family immigrated to Canada. In university, quite a few of my classmates had their wisdom teeth extracted. I prayed that mine would never come out since I didn’t have dental insurance to cover the ransom. We had to do three internships as part of my engineering school program, and I did my last internship in Melbourne Australia. That’s when two of my wisdom teeth erupted one after another. I visited a dentist. He numbed the spot each time and took care of business. I remember feeling lucky and grateful because it was cheap.
I learned from Dr. Ellie that we can actually keep the wisdom teeth. Our jaws will grow to accommodate them. Well, it’s probably good mine came out because I already have a big head—I don’t need it to grow any bigger.
In any case, it would be wise to keep our teeth intact.
Our tooth enamel is tougher than steel. It’s a clear casing outside the dentin, which has a yellowish hue. The Moh’s scale ranks the hardness of minerals from 1 to 10, 10 being the hardest. Enamel is at 5 and steel 4.5. Our bites can produce a force equal to 224 pounds or 102 kg of pressure on the tooth surface. Healthy, strong enamel will not succumb to the intermittent pressure or our brushing too hard. Enamel is packed with minerals with layers of liquid between the crystals. It’s a dynamic structure like a well-designed building that can absorb shocks and withstand earthquakes.
Drilling and filling will weaken the construction. Instead of dissipating the biting forces evenly throughout, the force will spread sideways at the base of the filling and cause a crack in the widest part of the tooth. Cariogenic bacteria can get in there. The next drill-and-fill will be bigger and more costly.
As with automobiles, original parts always outperform imitations.
Fast forward to my work in video gaming, with dental insurance in tow, I replaced my silver amalgams with white ones. Even if I had been advised then the glue is highly acidic and the white plastic composites are plaque magnets, attracting the bad boys to their edges, vanity might still trump logic. Though I would likely delay the procedure if I knew fillings last on average 13.3 years, and after two rounds, a tooth might die because it had enough traumas.
In December 2006, I relocated to Los Angeles and was looking for a dentist near the office. At that time, I had two wisdom teeth taken out, 1 was never there, and 1 dormant under the gums. I went for regular exam and cleaning, and the provider billed my insurance for scaling and root planing, which is a deep intensive cleaning procedure that requires the use of local anesthesia. The invoice also included 3 wisdom teeth removal. Wow. I filed a grievance with insurance. I had another dentist charge me copay when I didn’t need to pay copay and told me I needed a filling for a cavity. The second opinion was, it’s not a cavity—his smallest drill is bigger than the pit.
Good dentists are difficult to find. Even though the good doctor didn’t drill me, he didn’t educate me about reversing small cavities with sound oral health.
Around 2010, my sinus became quite troublesome. Over-the-counter medicine did little to help my breathing. I started studying food science and eventually fixed my health problem. I thought I had it all figured out with how to eat and what to eat to stay healthy, prevent cancer, combat stress, and not gain weight. In 2016, out of left field came my cousin’s stage-4 breast cancer diagnosis. That motivated me to do a presentation on food in front of my colleagues. I shared the talk on YouTube and my website JaneyPlay.com. The title is, Food: The Balance Act, if you want to check it out.
I work with cutting-edge technology and fun and creative people. My role as a technical artist is to bridge the gap between art and engineering and problem-solve to unblock content creators from technical issues so they can work. One day I was troubleshooting with a coworker.
He said, “Why is it so painful?”
I replied, “No pain, no game.”
In short, there is a lot of pain. And stress. The physical and mental load accumulated in the years following my food talk. The perfect storm hit and my whole health took a dive in 2021. From then on, it didn’t matter how much I tried with everything I knew about body and nutrition, I couldn’t seem to get my energy level back to the baseline. I just felt tired. On my last project, Battlefield 6, my hands flared up from overuse. I had to take leave of absence as the game wrapped up. The break helped loads but I was even more fatigued after the treatment sessions. That’s a good sign, my doctor said. It means my body is working hard on healing. So… my body’s constantly healing? Is it being constantly injured? How? The mystery began to unravel with my discovery of Dr. Ellie Phillips on January 1st this year.
I have friends with frequent dental woes or no insurance. I have minor gum recession, which I had long accepted as irreversible. One of Dr. Ellie’s fixes-at-home YouTube recordings caught my attention. She explained gum massage can stimulate our blood vessels and stem cells in regrowing gums and lymph in removal of toxins produced by certain microbes. What hooked me in and kicked off my binge watching her videos and devouring her book, Kiss Your Dentist Goodbye (second edition,) was when she said our teeth demineralize in an acidic environment. A light bulb went off. I know when we consume too much protein, our body will excrete calcium from our bones to balance the pH in our system since protein is acidic. But I never connected the similarities between our bones and teeth.
I also didn’t think of our gums like our skin. Rubbing a string on a wound would promote irritation, not healing. Flossing could push bad bacteria further into the gums or bloodstream for people with gum diseases. Flossing cannot modulate our oral microbiome. Mouth rinses would serve us better in combating the evil forces. The other solution we have at our disposal is saliva.
Like motor oil to car engine, healthy saliva lubricates our biofilm, transports particles, prevents tooth wear and gum infections. When motor lubricant deteriorates, vehicle performance suffers. When saliva dries up, biofilm shrinks, exposing our teeth and gums to damage.
Like the liquid metal that makes up the body of T-1000 in the movie Terminator 2, our saliva can shapeshift in its composition, thickness, and pH level. Factors such as diet, sleep, medication, stress, smoking, hormonal fluctuations, or sinus issues influence the make of our saliva and its effects.
We already chip away at our teeth with each chew. Acidic saliva encourages harmful microbes to thrive, adding insult to injury. Ending grub with tooth-protective foods can shift the role of saliva. Calculating nutritional benefits per amount per item is not my jam. I want something that I can pop into my mouth and reap what I sow.
Xylitol fits my bill as it can induce saliva at the right alkaline pH level that is super saturated with minerals to neutralize acids and facilitate remineralization.
For the repairing process to take effect, we need to mouth rest for an hour after a meal. Try to not drink during this time, not even water, because the liquid will thin the saliva or affect the pH. If possible, stretch the time to 90 minutes or 2 hours to allow nutrition from the sustenance we digested to circulate back up to our mouth to trigger another biochemical reaction with a group of denitrifying bacteria. The new compounds on our tongue will travel south to meet with stomach acid to form a gas called nitric oxide. This gas gets absorbed into nearby organs and helps with our lungs, heart, brain, sleep-wake cycle, and hormone health.
No eating for 2 hours is a scary sight for my colleagues who had seen me hangry. But I desire a plaque-free mouth with strong gums and teeth structure to support my white amalgams for life, enabling me to eat and drink without discomfort or pain.
I was using toothpaste for sensitive teeth with extra whitening. I had assumed the desensitizing paste was made with a gentler formula, as opposed to regular cheaper ones for people with more superior DNA. I think of it like our middle class taxation—I have to pay more in tax because I am not rich. But the more expensive paste works by numbing the nerve as with a painkiller, masking the underlying issue—weak teeth. And what adds to the weakness? Teeth whitening.
My intrinsic staining is set for life, but surely I could do something about the extrinsic staining from tea, coffee, or food. I didn’t know the stains were from the Strep. mutans taking on colors of sustenance. Baking soda, peroxide, and whitening products increase porosities and sensitivities of teeth. When our natural protective shield is worn or stripped away, cavity bacteria invasion and our brushing—doesn’t even have to be rough—would send us on a downward spiral.
We can whiten our teeth naturally. When sunlight bounces off any car on the street, regardless of its color, the reflection is so bright, the shine is beaming white. The stronger the enamel, the smoother the surface, the more it reflects. Our teeth will look white to our eyes when the enamel is sturdy and healthy.
What else could weaken our teeth and gums? Smile enhancement design. There are periodontal ligament fibers connecting the gums to teeth. When we bite, those tiny fibers send signals to our brain, improving our cognition. Moving teeth changes our bite. No bite, no signal, no gum retention but recession. If no gums, no support for teeth. The pearly whites would eventually drop out. So, be careful of what you wish for. Should vanity trump logic, seek expert care.
At this point, many could’ve, should’ve, and would’ve crossed my mind. I cannot turn back time, but I can still change the trajectory of my oral health. My first stop, flossing. Instead of driving the string up and down my teeth and into my gums nightly, I save the strip for trapped food. Meanwhile, a sense of apprehension loomed over me as I waited for the delivery of my new security blanket.
On the market, there are different brands of gum and mints made with 100% xylitol or another sugar alcohol or a blend of polyols. Zellie’s was born more than 20 years ago out of Dr. Ellie’s retirement savings and her love for us and our teeth. Her passion for xylitol is shared by the dental associations of countries like Denmark, Germany, Finland, and Sweden. Danish population have the healthiest teeth with less than a quarter of a tooth showing any decay in babies or adults. In the U.S., currently 2% of the adult population have no teeth, and 96% have fillings, cavities, and chronic gum disease by retirement age. It’s clear, we must move to Denmark! Kidding. We can even the score at home by adopting the regimen Dr. Ellie recommended.
You can see the over-the-counter products in Dr. Ellie’s Complete Mouth Care System on her website DrEllie.com. She also has a video explaining the synergy between the specific mouth rinses, toothbrush, and toothpaste in the order they are meant to be deployed. I followed verbatim. Almost verbatim. I use my electric toothbrush in the morning and the suggested manual toothbrush at night because the repetitive motion of vigorous gum massage and toothbrushing make my hands sore.
My treating physician had instructed me on day 1 to take it easy for the sake of my hands. Of course I breached his guidelines in the name of my teeth and oral skin. Now he wants to write in my file that patient should not brush teeth at home. My going rogue paid off. After 2 weeks on the system accompanied by Zellie’s mints following meals, snacks, and before bedtime, I saw my gums grow and improve.
Even before I tested the system, I had expected the improvement—Dr. Ellie had me at demineralization. What surprised me was the difference in my energy level. The tiredness I felt for the last few years seemed to have been lifted after about 3 days on the new routine. What is going on here? Then it dawned on me. The mouth rest.
The firefighting nature of my job often puts me in fight-or-flight mode, affecting my heart rate and breathing. With great stress comes great addiction. To snacking. When my health took a hit, my habit worsened. My mouth was too busy fending off the acid attacks and loss of minerals. The denitrifying bacteria didn’t get the time of day to do their part before I sipped on another cup of tea or coffee. No nitric oxide to relax the walls of my breathing tubes and blood vessels. Every bite sends signals to my brain. The constant grind was both physical and mental, impacting my hormones. I was fatigued and stuck in that state.
Short periods of fasting throughout the day gave my whole body a breather, allowing it to regulate itself properly. The speed of my healing rests on good nutrition and fitness. Since I check both boxes, I notice the change in the way I feel within a few days.
My results and feelings are not unique to me. Others have tests to show the reduction in their body inflammation. That’s why in 2010 Dr. Ellie helped found the American Academy for Oral Systemic Health (AAOSH) with the goal to bridge the dental and medical hemispheres.
I believe I can be plaque free and have zero gum pocketing way sooner than the 6-month average estimate. My biofilm will be populated by only good microbes. It would be a huge relief for me if I could see my dentist for checkups minus the cleaning. My reason has less to do with keeping the microbiome but more to do with my hearing. Pulsed electromagnetic field therapy was one of the treatments I was doing for my hands. The beats intensified my ear sensitivity to sound. On my most recent dental visit, the noise from the cleaning instrument made me jump out of the chair. So, the problem is me, not my dentist.
He safeguards my teeth and wallet with his heart. Good physicians are difficult to find. They may love us and our teeth as much as Dr. Ellie but many are taught to disinfect, floss, drill and fill for protection, unaware of other kinder, more budget-friendly and effective methods to dismantle the evil forces at play with prevention.
I want to share my learning and joy with my dentist, you, and anyone who wishes to pay less tax. You now know when you give your mouth a break, rest assured, your physical and mental wellbeing will be taxed at a far lower rate than without.
On my job, it is my passion to unblock people so they can work. This occupational hazard leads to my breaching my doctor’s instruction once again in hopes of unblocking you from achieving whole health. If you enjoyed the fruits of my labor, share it. Spread love and joy. Let us heal together.
Next time life flashes before my eyes, I desire to see your beaming smiles.
Now, I rest my hands. Thank you and take care.
Let’s begin with my origin. I was born premature at 3.3 pounds or 1.5 kg. Preterm babies are underdeveloped and prone to have poor health so I was sick often. I am the second child out of four. My grandmother raised me from age 1 to 6 in the countryside of Taiwan before my parents took me back to live with them. At dental visits, doctor would spend longer time on my teeth than my siblings’ and afterwards, crown me as the outlier needing more frequent cleaning due to excessive plaque buildup. My father asked why I was like that—it made me feel inferior, like there’s something wrong with me. And that’s what the dentist said, I was born that way.
But the reason why I was special was not because of my DNA but because I grew up with my grandmother.
Our mouth can host over 800 kinds of oral bacteria. Healthy biofilm is a protective layer comprised of a community of microorganisms covering the surfaces of our mouth, teeth, and gums. Some microbes swim around in our saliva, or colonize and multiply on the teeth surfaces. Amongst the colonizers lies one sugar-loving evil named Streptococcus mutans or Strep. mutans. It sticks to the teeth and calls its friends to form armies of mass destruction. They turn sugars into acids that erode the enamel making them more porous. Plaques are slabs of Strep. mutans or infected biofilm, and it will stay with the child and continue into adulthood if nothing was done to stop the infection.
My grandmother had dentures, not a sweet tooth. Many foods break down into sugars in our mouth and travel with saliva, nourishing oral biofilm before the body. The odds are that the good colonizers were outnumbered by the bad ones in her mouth. She wasn’t aware of an ally that can pull off a major upset.
Xylitol belongs to a class of polyols or sugar alcohols and can be found in hardwood trees, fruits, and vegetables. Our body also makes it. It is diabetic friendly but toxic to dogs and Strep. mutans. This low-glycemic sweetener outranks its peers in its potency to render the bad troops nonfunctional so they cannot adhere to our teeth or produce acids.
Whenever we speak, kiss, or part our lips, the invisible cloud of armies spray out of our mouth, and they can transfer from teeth to teeth, mother to child, and person to person. Xylitol can alter the bacterial population and transmission by cleaning our saliva, thereby warding off plaque and caries. If, after meals, my grandmother had consumed small amounts of xylitol and dissolved it in water to clean my baby teeth, I wouldn’t have been so special.
One gram of this sugar substitute after lunch and before sleeping at night have shown to reduce pregnant mothers’ chance of delivering a preterm baby. My health could have been better if my mother had taken xylitol for prenatal care. Instead, I had frequent intakes of antibiotics growing up, which caused permanent intrinsic teeth staining.
So, plaques, cavities, silver fillings here and there were my unsurprising trajectory. When I was in junior high, my family immigrated to Canada. In university, quite a few of my classmates had their wisdom teeth extracted. I prayed that mine would never come out since I didn’t have dental insurance to cover the ransom. We had to do three internships as part of my engineering school program, and I did my last internship in Melbourne Australia. That’s when two of my wisdom teeth erupted one after another. I visited a dentist. He numbed the spot each time and took care of business. I remember feeling lucky and grateful because it was cheap.
I learned from Dr. Ellie that we can actually keep the wisdom teeth. Our jaws will grow to accommodate them. Well, it’s probably good mine came out because I already have a big head—I don’t need it to grow any bigger.
In any case, it would be wise to keep our teeth intact.
Our tooth enamel is tougher than steel. It’s a clear casing outside the dentin, which has a yellowish hue. The Moh’s scale ranks the hardness of minerals from 1 to 10, 10 being the hardest. Enamel is at 5 and steel 4.5. Our bites can produce a force equal to 224 pounds or 102 kg of pressure on the tooth surface. Healthy, strong enamel will not succumb to the intermittent pressure or our brushing too hard. Enamel is packed with minerals with layers of liquid between the crystals. It’s a dynamic structure like a well-designed building that can absorb shocks and withstand earthquakes.
Drilling and filling will weaken the construction. Instead of dissipating the biting forces evenly throughout, the force will spread sideways at the base of the filling and cause a crack in the widest part of the tooth. Cariogenic bacteria can get in there. The next drill-and-fill will be bigger and more costly.
As with automobiles, original parts always outperform imitations.
Fast forward to my work in video gaming, with dental insurance in tow, I replaced my silver amalgams with white ones. Even if I had been advised then the glue is highly acidic and the white plastic composites are plaque magnets, attracting the bad boys to their edges, vanity might still trump logic. Though I would likely delay the procedure if I knew fillings last on average 13.3 years, and after two rounds, a tooth might die because it had enough traumas.
In December 2006, I relocated to Los Angeles and was looking for a dentist near the office. At that time, I had two wisdom teeth taken out, 1 was never there, and 1 dormant under the gums. I went for regular exam and cleaning, and the provider billed my insurance for scaling and root planing, which is a deep intensive cleaning procedure that requires the use of local anesthesia. The invoice also included 3 wisdom teeth removal. Wow. I filed a grievance with insurance. I had another dentist charge me copay when I didn’t need to pay copay and told me I needed a filling for a cavity. The second opinion was, it’s not a cavity—his smallest drill is bigger than the pit.
Good dentists are difficult to find. Even though the good doctor didn’t drill me, he didn’t educate me about reversing small cavities with sound oral health.
Around 2010, my sinus became quite troublesome. Over-the-counter medicine did little to help my breathing. I started studying food science and eventually fixed my health problem. I thought I had it all figured out with how to eat and what to eat to stay healthy, prevent cancer, combat stress, and not gain weight. In 2016, out of left field came my cousin’s stage-4 breast cancer diagnosis. That motivated me to do a presentation on food in front of my colleagues. I shared the talk on YouTube and my website JaneyPlay.com. The title is, Food: The Balance Act, if you want to check it out.
I work with cutting-edge technology and fun and creative people. My role as a technical artist is to bridge the gap between art and engineering and problem-solve to unblock content creators from technical issues so they can work. One day I was troubleshooting with a coworker.
He said, “Why is it so painful?”
I replied, “No pain, no game.”
In short, there is a lot of pain. And stress. The physical and mental load accumulated in the years following my food talk. The perfect storm hit and my whole health took a dive in 2021. From then on, it didn’t matter how much I tried with everything I knew about body and nutrition, I couldn’t seem to get my energy level back to the baseline. I just felt tired. On my last project, Battlefield 6, my hands flared up from overuse. I had to take leave of absence as the game wrapped up. The break helped loads but I was even more fatigued after the treatment sessions. That’s a good sign, my doctor said. It means my body is working hard on healing. So… my body’s constantly healing? Is it being constantly injured? How? The mystery began to unravel with my discovery of Dr. Ellie Phillips on January 1st this year.
I have friends with frequent dental woes or no insurance. I have minor gum recession, which I had long accepted as irreversible. One of Dr. Ellie’s fixes-at-home YouTube recordings caught my attention. She explained gum massage can stimulate our blood vessels and stem cells in regrowing gums and lymph in removal of toxins produced by certain microbes. What hooked me in and kicked off my binge watching her videos and devouring her book, Kiss Your Dentist Goodbye (second edition,) was when she said our teeth demineralize in an acidic environment. A light bulb went off. I know when we consume too much protein, our body will excrete calcium from our bones to balance the pH in our system since protein is acidic. But I never connected the similarities between our bones and teeth.
I also didn’t think of our gums like our skin. Rubbing a string on a wound would promote irritation, not healing. Flossing could push bad bacteria further into the gums or bloodstream for people with gum diseases. Flossing cannot modulate our oral microbiome. Mouth rinses would serve us better in combating the evil forces. The other solution we have at our disposal is saliva.
Like motor oil to car engine, healthy saliva lubricates our biofilm, transports particles, prevents tooth wear and gum infections. When motor lubricant deteriorates, vehicle performance suffers. When saliva dries up, biofilm shrinks, exposing our teeth and gums to damage.
Like the liquid metal that makes up the body of T-1000 in the movie Terminator 2, our saliva can shapeshift in its composition, thickness, and pH level. Factors such as diet, sleep, medication, stress, smoking, hormonal fluctuations, or sinus issues influence the make of our saliva and its effects.
We already chip away at our teeth with each chew. Acidic saliva encourages harmful microbes to thrive, adding insult to injury. Ending grub with tooth-protective foods can shift the role of saliva. Calculating nutritional benefits per amount per item is not my jam. I want something that I can pop into my mouth and reap what I sow.
Xylitol fits my bill as it can induce saliva at the right alkaline pH level that is super saturated with minerals to neutralize acids and facilitate remineralization.
For the repairing process to take effect, we need to mouth rest for an hour after a meal. Try to not drink during this time, not even water, because the liquid will thin the saliva or affect the pH. If possible, stretch the time to 90 minutes or 2 hours to allow nutrition from the sustenance we digested to circulate back up to our mouth to trigger another biochemical reaction with a group of denitrifying bacteria. The new compounds on our tongue will travel south to meet with stomach acid to form a gas called nitric oxide. This gas gets absorbed into nearby organs and helps with our lungs, heart, brain, sleep-wake cycle, and hormone health.
No eating for 2 hours is a scary sight for my colleagues who had seen me hangry. But I desire a plaque-free mouth with strong gums and teeth structure to support my white amalgams for life, enabling me to eat and drink without discomfort or pain.
I was using toothpaste for sensitive teeth with extra whitening. I had assumed the desensitizing paste was made with a gentler formula, as opposed to regular cheaper ones for people with more superior DNA. I think of it like our middle class taxation—I have to pay more in tax because I am not rich. But the more expensive paste works by numbing the nerve as with a painkiller, masking the underlying issue—weak teeth. And what adds to the weakness? Teeth whitening.
My intrinsic staining is set for life, but surely I could do something about the extrinsic staining from tea, coffee, or food. I didn’t know the stains were from the Strep. mutans taking on colors of sustenance. Baking soda, peroxide, and whitening products increase porosities and sensitivities of teeth. When our natural protective shield is worn or stripped away, cavity bacteria invasion and our brushing—doesn’t even have to be rough—would send us on a downward spiral.
We can whiten our teeth naturally. When sunlight bounces off any car on the street, regardless of its color, the reflection is so bright, the shine is beaming white. The stronger the enamel, the smoother the surface, the more it reflects. Our teeth will look white to our eyes when the enamel is sturdy and healthy.
What else could weaken our teeth and gums? Smile enhancement design. There are periodontal ligament fibers connecting the gums to teeth. When we bite, those tiny fibers send signals to our brain, improving our cognition. Moving teeth changes our bite. No bite, no signal, no gum retention but recession. If no gums, no support for teeth. The pearly whites would eventually drop out. So, be careful of what you wish for. Should vanity trump logic, seek expert care.
At this point, many could’ve, should’ve, and would’ve crossed my mind. I cannot turn back time, but I can still change the trajectory of my oral health. My first stop, flossing. Instead of driving the string up and down my teeth and into my gums nightly, I save the strip for trapped food. Meanwhile, a sense of apprehension loomed over me as I waited for the delivery of my new security blanket.
On the market, there are different brands of gum and mints made with 100% xylitol or another sugar alcohol or a blend of polyols. Zellie’s was born more than 20 years ago out of Dr. Ellie’s retirement savings and her love for us and our teeth. Her passion for xylitol is shared by the dental associations of countries like Denmark, Germany, Finland, and Sweden. Danish population have the healthiest teeth with less than a quarter of a tooth showing any decay in babies or adults. In the U.S., currently 2% of the adult population have no teeth, and 96% have fillings, cavities, and chronic gum disease by retirement age. It’s clear, we must move to Denmark! Kidding. We can even the score at home by adopting the regimen Dr. Ellie recommended.
You can see the over-the-counter products in Dr. Ellie’s Complete Mouth Care System on her website DrEllie.com. She also has a video explaining the synergy between the specific mouth rinses, toothbrush, and toothpaste in the order they are meant to be deployed. I followed verbatim. Almost verbatim. I use my electric toothbrush in the morning and the suggested manual toothbrush at night because the repetitive motion of vigorous gum massage and toothbrushing make my hands sore.
My treating physician had instructed me on day 1 to take it easy for the sake of my hands. Of course I breached his guidelines in the name of my teeth and oral skin. Now he wants to write in my file that patient should not brush teeth at home. My going rogue paid off. After 2 weeks on the system accompanied by Zellie’s mints following meals, snacks, and before bedtime, I saw my gums grow and improve.
Even before I tested the system, I had expected the improvement—Dr. Ellie had me at demineralization. What surprised me was the difference in my energy level. The tiredness I felt for the last few years seemed to have been lifted after about 3 days on the new routine. What is going on here? Then it dawned on me. The mouth rest.
The firefighting nature of my job often puts me in fight-or-flight mode, affecting my heart rate and breathing. With great stress comes great addiction. To snacking. When my health took a hit, my habit worsened. My mouth was too busy fending off the acid attacks and loss of minerals. The denitrifying bacteria didn’t get the time of day to do their part before I sipped on another cup of tea or coffee. No nitric oxide to relax the walls of my breathing tubes and blood vessels. Every bite sends signals to my brain. The constant grind was both physical and mental, impacting my hormones. I was fatigued and stuck in that state.
Short periods of fasting throughout the day gave my whole body a breather, allowing it to regulate itself properly. The speed of my healing rests on good nutrition and fitness. Since I check both boxes, I notice the change in the way I feel within a few days.
My results and feelings are not unique to me. Others have tests to show the reduction in their body inflammation. That’s why in 2010 Dr. Ellie helped found the American Academy for Oral Systemic Health (AAOSH) with the goal to bridge the dental and medical hemispheres.
I believe I can be plaque free and have zero gum pocketing way sooner than the 6-month average estimate. My biofilm will be populated by only good microbes. It would be a huge relief for me if I could see my dentist for checkups minus the cleaning. My reason has less to do with keeping the microbiome but more to do with my hearing. Pulsed electromagnetic field therapy was one of the treatments I was doing for my hands. The beats intensified my ear sensitivity to sound. On my most recent dental visit, the noise from the cleaning instrument made me jump out of the chair. So, the problem is me, not my dentist.
He safeguards my teeth and wallet with his heart. Good physicians are difficult to find. They may love us and our teeth as much as Dr. Ellie but many are taught to disinfect, floss, drill and fill for protection, unaware of other kinder, more budget-friendly and effective methods to dismantle the evil forces at play with prevention.
I want to share my learning and joy with my dentist, you, and anyone who wishes to pay less tax. You now know when you give your mouth a break, rest assured, your physical and mental wellbeing will be taxed at a far lower rate than without.
On my job, it is my passion to unblock people so they can work. This occupational hazard leads to my breaching my doctor’s instruction once again in hopes of unblocking you from achieving whole health. If you enjoyed the fruits of my labor, share it. Spread love and joy. Let us heal together.
Next time life flashes before my eyes, I desire to see your beaming smiles.
Now, I rest my hands. Thank you and take care.
My New Routine
I don't brush teeth right after a meal because enamel at weakest.
Massage gums and brush teeth morning and night with Dr. Ellie’s system. (Immature plaque bacteria become fully grown in 12 hours.)
Two toothbrushes: one for morning, one at night, allowing each to dry for 24 hours to kill the bacteria on the bristles. Moisture also softens the bristles. Dryness helps the bristles to stay resilient longer.
Xylitol after meals/snacks, and before bedtime
Use cheap/temporary toothbrushes when traveling because bacteria thrives in low oxygen environment, e.g. in a bag or compartment.
- E.g. eat breakfast, take xylitol mints or gum and wait 1-2 hours, then brush teeth.
Massage gums and brush teeth morning and night with Dr. Ellie’s system. (Immature plaque bacteria become fully grown in 12 hours.)
Two toothbrushes: one for morning, one at night, allowing each to dry for 24 hours to kill the bacteria on the bristles. Moisture also softens the bristles. Dryness helps the bristles to stay resilient longer.
Xylitol after meals/snacks, and before bedtime
- Whenever possible, drink or rinse mouth with water first before taking xylitol
- 6-10 g of xylitol total per day: under 3 g has no dental benefits, over 10 g effects plateau (wasting money)
- Mints: if 0.5 g of xylitol per count, 3 mints (1.5g) after meals and before bedtime. E.g. 4 times a day will give me 6g, 6 times 9 g.
- Gum: if 1 g of xylitol per count, 2 pieces after meals and before bedtime. Chew for 2-5 minutes (I do 3,) then spit it out because after 10 minutes of chewing, your mouth will produce digestive enzymes, changing the pH in your saliva—undesired effects.
- I reduce the number of mints or gum depending on size of snack to not exceed 10 g of xylitol total for the day.
- Mouth most vulnerable during sleep because low saliva production—taking xylitol before bedtime helps.
Use cheap/temporary toothbrushes when traveling because bacteria thrives in low oxygen environment, e.g. in a bag or compartment.
Dr. Ellie Phillips Complete Mouth Care System (CMCS)
3 mouth rinses + toothbrushes + toothpaste. Can see the products on DrEllie.com and buy them there or from elsewhere online or in stores. Don’t need to use too much mouthwash—quality over quantity. Dr. Ellie's CMCS step-by-step video: https://youtu.be/tXZbmz6kBUU (demonstration of gum massage starting at 27:30.)
Do NOT rinse with water in each step.
Notes:
Do NOT rinse with water in each step.
- CloSYS Ultra Sensitive Unflavored Alcohol-Free Mouthwash: Rinse 60 seconds
- Dr. Plotkas flossing toothbrush + Crest Cavity Protection Regular toothpaste (0.243% Sodium Fluoride): Brush teeth and massage inside and outside gums with vigor.
- Listerine Original or Cool Mint Antiseptic Mouthwash: Rinse 60 seconds. Original more powerful. I use Cool Mint Antiseptic.
- ACT Anticavity Zero Alcohol Fluoride Mouthwash 18oz: Rinse 60 seconds.
Notes:
- CloSYS is called Ultradex in the U.K.
- If no access to CloSYS - in Dr. Ellie's video on oil pulling, she tested replacing the CloSYS pre-rinse with sesame oil, followed by other steps, and loved the result the same. (Different oils have different effects.)
- Try to match the time for the last two rinses. Can do shorter time if can’t hold 60 seconds. Longer than 1 minute is not better.
- ACT - Only use the Mint, Cinnamon or Bubblegum flavors. We want 0.05% Sodium fluoride; don’t get bigger size b/c diluted.
- Listerine is acidic as with many other mouthwashes. ACT works well with the acidity to speed up remineralization.
- Use a little bit of the Listerine to clean toothbrush then rinse it off with water.
- If teeth stains become darker, that's because the Strep. mutans that were stuck on teeth died. Dab or sprinkle a bit of xylitol on toothpaste and keep brushing. A hygienist or dentist could also clean it off.
Cleaning Baby Teeth
Granular xylitol can be purchased in stores or online. P143 in Dr. Ellie's book: ... dissolve a quarter of a teaspoon of xylitol in an ounce of warm water, use this solution 3-4 times during the day, starting after the first feeding. Apply it softly with a baby toothbrush or a soft clean cloth or glove or a finger toothbrush.
My Improvement
Growing up, this is the last thing I dreamed of doing—to show my teeth and gums up close onscreen. The first couple of days, I bled a little bit from the vigorous gum massage—part of healing process. The bleeding stopped after that.
