It is now well established that heart attacks (as well as other circulatory diseases like strokes and high blood pressure) are almost entirely lifestyle based. That even if you have the “heart attack gene”, with a properly informed lifestyle you can turn it off (that is the science of epigenetics). The reason most people give up on lifestyle and the reason most physicians barely give it lip service is that we almost always treat it like a pill – take this pill, make this change, and then expect everything to magically get better. But here’s the reality – very, very rarely is there just one single silver bullet, one issue, one lifestyle tweak that will get you all the way there. So we try this, and that doesn’t work. Then we try that, and it doesn’t work. We jump from one diet to another, one exercise routine to another, one supplement to another, one celebrity health guru to another. Till finally we just give up and take the pills!

This is precisely why I developed and promote the wholistic Cross of Health. Because without a comprehensive total lifestyle plan, one that addresses each arm of that Cross, you are bound to miss your goals. It really doesn’t matter what we are talking about – heart health, brain health, kidney health, bone health… the list goes on, including dental health – without a common-sense balanced lifestyle that honestly “follows the science” (emphasis on HONESTLY, which you all know is rarely the politically correct version!) a lifetime of health and vitality will continue to elude.

So, can flossing prevent heat attacks? In and of itself? No, not without support from each of the other arms of the Cross (BTW – flossing falls under the Hygiene arm:). But in as much as flossing helps to control pathologic oral bacteria that cross into the blood stream traveling to the heart and literally causing &/or contributing to 40% of all heart attacks, it and anything else we can do to control those bugs is definitely essential to heart attack prevention.

But how much is enough? Once a week? Once a day? Two or three times a day? Well that all depends, doesn’t it? It depends on what you’ve been eating, the quality of your tooth-to-tooth contacts, and of course how good you are at it! The bottom line is how well those pesky bugs are controlled and fortunately we have a really good way of knowing.

If you really want to know how well you are doing at controlling those heart attack causing bacteria, all we have to do is have you spit in a test tube and in about 1 week we’ll get a lab report back that tells us. No bad bugs? Great, keep up the good work! Too many? Well maybe you need to floss more, or maybe you need to pick up the slack of one of the other arms of the Cross of Health. Breathing though you mouth at night can dry up your saliva and create a perfect environment for those pathogens to flourish. An anti-biotic diet (the opposite of prebiotic, not to be confused with antibiotic medications) can cause an overgrowth of toxic bacteria and crowed out the good essential ones. The same is true for chronic subliminal stress, not to mention any conscious stress!

What we are talking about here is periodontal health, health of the tissues and bone that surround our teeth. Not only is it the number one cause of tooth loss, but as we’ve been talking about, a major cause of poor systemic health as well. Too often though standard usual-and-customary periodontal treatment is limited to the mechanical removal of bacteria (brushing, flossing, dental cleaning, root cleaning…) and fails to address other critical systemic issues such as the ones we’ve just mentioned.

So next time you’re in the office, don’t be surprised if we recommend that you spit in a test tube. It just might be the next step in saving your life! To your health –