by Dave Asprey
The first generation of neurological dentists figured out how to use laser therapy to turn down the fight-or-flight signal sent from the trigeminal nerve to the autonomic nervous system and worked with patients to correct the underlying problem: a misaligned bite. In that hotel room, the trainer melted soft plastic tabs and went around the room to affix them to everyone’s rear molars to properly align their bites.
When it was my turn, I could feel my lower jaw relax for perhaps the first time in my life. Until then I had spent my entire life clenching my jaw without knowing it in order to chew. Sure, I experienced occasional tension and pain in my jaw when I would grind my teeth at night. But I couldn’t believe that something as simple as a plastic tab that allowed my lower jaw to relax could make such a big difference. And beyond the changes I could feel, the corrected bite took the pressure off my trigeminal nerve, shifting me out of a constant state of fight or flight.
For the next year and a half, I wore those tabs on my back teeth whenever I wasn’t eating. In addition to having a more relaxed and better-functioning jaw, I noticed a marked decrease in my overall levels of musculoskeletal pain. If you had told me a few years before that simply relaxing my jaw would help decrease the levels of pain throughout my body, I would not have believed you, and I wouldn’t have said it that nicely. But now I am walking proof that proper jaw alignment can help your entire body feel better and become younger. Since the height of your rear molars typically goes down with age, it’s a fantastic anti-aging idea to sleep with a bite guard if you clench or grind your teeth.
My hope is that awareness of neurological dentistry will continue to grow until the demand for these services reaches a level that motivates dental schools to begin integrating the necessary training into the classroom.
P IS FOR PAIN
The trigeminal nerve serves as a direct route to the nervous system, and as such it is highly sensitive, with 100 percent more dense pain fibers than any other nerve in your body. Even the slightest dysfunction that puts pressure on the trigeminal nerve leads to elevated levels of a neurotransmitter called substance P, which sends pain signals to the brain. Any time you experience a psychological or physiological stressor, sensory nerves release substance P, which travels directly to the brain, telling it you are in pain. Substance P is a primordial pain-signaling molecule, and a rise in substance P always causes inflammation.
This is an important survival mechanism. In order to live, you have to know when you are in pain! Otherwise, what’s to stop you from sticking your hand into a fire or hanging around to see what happens next when you are being attacked by a bear? But like all survival mechanisms, it is a double-edged sword. You experience stress all the time when you are not in immediate danger. For example, when you bite down and your top teeth on one side of your mouth touch down first, this stimulates the release of substance P, which tells your brain that you are under threat and triggers the release of inflammatory cytokines.7
It turns out that substance P plays an important role in many health issues we associate with normal aging but are really inflammatory conditions. Patients with asthma are often hypersensitive to substance P, meaning their bodies produce excess inflammatory cytokines when substance P is released. People with eczema and psoriasis also have high levels of substance P.8 Elevated levels of substance P are found in the colons of patients with inflammatory bowel disease.9 And studies have shown that cancerous tumors overexpress substance P.10
In addition to causing inflammation and playing a role in these diseases, substance P opens up cell membranes, making them less efficient and more vulnerable to toxins that can enter the cell and cause direct damage. You can’t detox effectively when your substance P levels are too high. And perhaps most frightening, substance P plays a role in activating stem cells in the body.11 This means if your substance P levels are out of whack, you cannot efficiently replace cells that die, and the tissues throughout your body will begin to waste away. Yes, like an old person.
Obviously, you must get your substance P levels under control if you want to live a long time without suffering with pain and disease. And the best way to do it is by taking pressure off the trigeminal nerve, which means fixing your bite.
ALIGN YOUR JAW WITH YOUR LIFE
Several years after I attended the laser training session where I learned to use plastic tabs to align my bite, I invited a neurological dentist named Dr. Dwight Jennings to speak at SVHI about aging and jaw alignment. After I heard his presentation, I made an appointment to see him right away.
After he examined me, Dr. Jennings explained that I had a small upper palate and a jacked-up (again, that’s the technical term) lower jaw. He built a custom appliance to align my bite that gave me a chin and a square jaw (neither of which I had before), without surgery. Dr. Jennings’s work took about two years to complete. First, he made a metal appliance that crossed my teeth in the back and basically pushed out my upper jaw. I wore this appliance whenever I wasn’t eating. It affected my speech a little bit in the beginning, but I got used to it quickly, and it wasn’t visible. It spread out my lower jaw, making space so it could rest in its natural position. To align my bite once this was complete, we had to widen my upper jaw to accommodate for the wider part of my lower jaw, which was now farther forward. Finally, Dr. Jennings made me denture-like clip-ins that I wore all day long, even when I was eating. At night I wore a bite guard, which I still use to this day to make sure my jaw stays aligned when I sleep. This alone has helped improve my sleep quality and the overall alignment of my body.
Bringing the jaw forward moves the tongue forward as well, opening up your airway. When your airway is restricted, you can snore or suffer from sleep apnea, a sleep disorder in which breathing repeatedly starts and stops. As you read earlier, this common condition can take years off your life. I can feel myself breathing better now that my jaw is aligned, and I know for a fact that I sleep better because I track my sleep!
Beyond sleep apnea, the trigeminal nerve is involved with the brain’s reticular activating system, the part of your brain stem that keeps you awake. When there is too much trigeminal disturbance, the brain won’t shut down. In this state, you are physically incapable of falling sleep. This is why many people with bite alignment issues suffer from sleep disturbances. But this can—and should—be fixed.
You already know how important sleep is for your longevity, and pressure on the trigeminal nerve can wreck your sleep. Generally our teeth touch for less than five minutes a day when we are eating. But when your bite is misaligned, your jaw is always on guard, trying to keep you from banging your teeth into one another. This puts pressure on the trigeminal nerve and keeps substance P flowing and inflammation building. And because the trigeminal nerve plays such a large role in motor function, it can even cause movement disorders such as torticollis, a condition in which the neck muscles contract, causing the head to twist to one side, and scoliosis, abnormal curvature of the spine.
I hope in the future we will see more dentists studying neurology and fixing jaw alignment to impact spinal health. Imagine if a simple bite guard could help straighten the spine of a child with scoliosis! Before my bite was aligned, you could see the dysfunction in the way I stood and walked, because the trigeminal nerve controls movement throughout the body.
Too many conventional dentists lack this insight. They focus on making the teeth look good rather than bite alignment. I’ve found that most dentists have no problem throwing off your bite by even a tenth of a millimeter when they fill your teeth because they simply are not aware of how this can impact the trigeminal nerve and therefore substance P levels. Even a tiny misalignment like this can set off a (now sadly shortened) lifetime of inflammation.
Too many dentists also don’t realize what proper bite alignment should look like. The standard of care is for the front teeth to hit a bit in front of the bottom teeth instead of end on end. But this is technically incorrect. Dr. Jennings explains that when you bite down, your teeth should a
ll touch at the exact same time—even your front teeth. This is proper bite alignment, and it is all too rare.
According to Dr. Jennings, the vast majority of humans these days are moderately compromised when it comes to their alignment, and that’s why we have such frequent headaches and other neurological and musculoskeletal problems. He claims that even the high incidence of ear infections in infants can be explained in part by orthopedic jaw defects. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid chronic headaches, spinal issues, or other pain conditions, jaw dysfunction can still lead to an inflammatory propensity in the body.
One of the most common and well-known conditions to stem from improper jaw alignment is temporomandibular joint (TMJ) dysfunction, which causes pain in the jaw joint. Most dentists think it’s okay for the temporomandibular joints to move back and forth. But according to Dr. Jennings, just because this is the only joint that can move back and forth, that doesn’t mean it should.
For example, when you have an overbite, you subconsciously have to slide your lower jaw forward to bite things off and to control your airflow and speaking. As a result, you create a sense of hypermobility in this joint, which in return impacts the trigeminal system and leads to elevated levels of substance P. And worse, TMJ dysfunction is often correlated with pain in other joints, likely stemming from the inflammation caused by excess substance P. Dr. Jennings estimates that 30 percent of patients with TMJ dysfunction also have significant knee pain like I did. This is no coincidence.
And there’s more. The trigeminal nerve also plays a role in modulating blood flow to the brain. In particular, it controls how much blood flows to the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that manages the most complex thinking and decision-making. Again, this goes back to survival. When you are facing a threat to your very existence, you want to shut down the prefrontal cortex so you can act without putting too much thought into it. But it’s problematic, to put it mildly, if you can’t activate your prefrontal cortex because you’re constantly shifting into a state of fight or fight as a result of poor jaw alignment.
When I learned about the role of jaw alignment in brain health, I felt like I’d found another cause of my own cognitive dysfunction. As you read earlier, when I had brain imaging done using the SPECT scan, the result showed virtually no activity in the prefrontal cortex, even when I really tried to think. Could a lack of blood flow, mediated by the trigeminal nerve, have played a role in my diminished cognition? I can’t tell you for sure, but it’s clear to me that my jaw issues were one cause of my premature aging, and that creating proper jaw alignment is perhaps the most overlooked intervention when it comes to longevity.
DENTAL HEALTH HACKS
The good news is that there are several simple ways to correct bite issues, and many are not expensive. Even a store-bought non-custom bite guard will help somewhat to take the pressure off the trigeminal nerve. Of course, if it’s in your budget, a custom bite guard will likely work better and more quickly. There are also several at-home hacks you can try to reduce the amount of substance P in your body. Many of these don’t even involve going to the dentist. Here are some of my favorites.
CAYENNE PEPPER
The chemical capsaicin that gives hot peppers their spiciness also reduces levels of substance P in the body.12 This is one reason people use capsaicin to treat pain. Patches with an 8 percent concentration of capsaicin effectively treat pain for up to twelve weeks,13 and they do this just by reducing levels of substance P. Capsaicin cream for arthritis works by depleting substance P around a joint.
Hearing this, some people go out and eat a lot of hot peppers or cover their meals in cayenne pepper to reduce their pain levels. You can try simply cooking with more cayenne pepper or taking cayenne tablets. The downside of this is that peppers belong to the family of nightshade vegetables. Many people (about 20 percent) are sensitive to nightshades. For these people eating nightshades causes inflammation, which does not help reduce levels of substance P. If you are one of those people, use pure vanilla bean instead! Both capsaicin and vanilla work by interacting with your vanilloid receptors. Pay attention to your body, and if you start experiencing joint pain after eating nightshades, switch to pure vanilla.
OIL PULLING
In the three-thousand-year-old Ayurvedic practice known as oil pulling, on an empty stomach you swish a tablespoon of coconut, sesame, or sunflower oil in your mouth for up to twenty minutes a day. This ancient practice is known to detoxify and clean the mouth and gums, reduce inflammation and halitosis, and make the teeth themselves whiter. While I haven’t seen any studies connecting oil pulling to substance P, it makes sense that anything you do to improve your oral health will also reduce your levels of inflammation throughout the body. You read earlier that some dentists use ozone gas to kill harmful bacteria in the mouth that can otherwise set off widespread inflammation. Oil pulling can also help you avoid this inflammation by getting rid of nasty bacteria hiding in your gums.
The idea behind oil pulling is that the oil literally pulls harmful viruses, bacteria, parasites, fungi, and all of their toxic waste products from the mouth, preventing them from seeping into your bloodstream, where they can cause inflammation and suppress immune and overall health.14 There have been several promising small-scale clinical human studies on oil pulling. Subjects who used oil pulling reported less gum disease and plaque accumulation than those who simply brushed and flossed their teeth.15
This happens because during the swishing process, the oil mixes with your saliva, creating a thin liquid that travels between your teeth and gums to places where bacteria hide. There the oil binds to the biofilm, or plaque, on the teeth and reduces the number of bacteria in the mouth. Many of these harmful microorganisms are coated with fat—a lipid bilayer that is attracted to other fats, including the fat of the pulling oils. Bacteria are absorbed into the pulling oil during swishing and removed when you expel the oil from your mouth. Spitting the oil out instead of swallowing it is an important last step to the oil pulling process, as you don’t want to reabsorb these toxins.
When it comes to choosing your swishing oil, coconut oil is preferable to other oils like sesame or sunflower because it works as a natural antibacterial, killing disease-causing bacteria, fungi, viruses, and protozoa. The medium-chain fats found in coconut oil are effective in attacking Streptococcus mutans bacteria, which causes cavities.16 Coconut oil is also naturally anti-inflammatory.17
Sure, regular oil pulling has worked fine for thousands of years, but as a professional biohacker I set out to make this technique even more effective. The first step was to switch from coconut oil to XCT Oil, which I created. You absorb oils through your mucosa, so if you’re going to go through the trouble of sitting with a mouthful of oil for twenty minutes, you might as well use one that is triple distilled for purity and converts to energy more quickly after it’s absorbed through your mucosa. (Like coconut oil, it also has powerful antimicrobial properties.) XCT Oil is made with zero solvents ever, and it is triple distilled in a non-oxygen atmosphere so it is completely free of one type of MCT, C6, which irritates mucosal membranes. Considering how porous your mouth is, a daily oil pulling routine with the cleanest and most effective ingredients makes sense.18
Next I add a drop of essential oil of oregano to my XCT Oil before oil pulling. Oregano oil is a well-known and powerful antifungal and antimicrobial, and there’s even a study of the combined effects of oregano oil and the most rare form of MCT oil (caprylic acid, which is 70 percent of XCT). The combination was proved to reduce bacteria in meat stored over time better than either caprylic acid or oregano oil alone.19 I’m willing to bet this means it helps reduce harmful bacteria in our bodies, too.
Whether or not you decide to give oil pulling a try with XCT or just plain coconut oil, both Western and functional biodentists agree that an anti-inflammatory diet low in sugar improves your oral health. If you are following the advice in chapter 3, you are already avoiding the majority of foods that are most likely to
cause cavities, infections, and unhealthy gums and therefore trigger an increase in substance P and inflammation.
Having healthy teeth is about more than just looking young or even keeping your teeth until you’re a hundred and eighty instead of ending up with dentures, though of course you want to do that, too! Your dental health and jaw alignment will greatly determine how fast you will age and how long you will live. That trainer was right: The quality years I gained from fixing my dental issues are worth much more to me than a Lexus—or for that matter, any car in the world.
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Bottom Line
Want to age backward? Do these things right now:
•Test your jaw alignment by opening your mouth, relaxing your muscles, and slowly biting down. What hit first? You want your molars on both sides to hit evenly at the same time and for your front teeth to hit very lightly right after the molars. If anything else happened, look into buying a bite guard. You can get a basic one at the drugstore or a custom job from a dentist if you’re able to make a bigger investment.
•Clean up your diet and your mouth. Eliminate sugar, try oil pulling, and brush occasionally with activated charcoal to sop up toxins.
•Find a dentist who will help you try transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) or a cold laser if you suffer from TMJ dysfunction or jaw pain for any reason. This will reduce your substance P levels and take pressure off the trigeminal nerve, literally extending your life.
