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The Diary of a CEO

Most Replayed Moment: Mouthwash REVERSES The Benefits Of Exercise! Dr Nathan Bryan

24 min episode · 2 min read
·
Nathan Bryan

Episode

24 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Productivity, Health & Wellness, Fundraising & VC

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Mouthwash and exercise: Antiseptic mouthwash eliminates the cardioprotective benefits of physical exercise by killing oral bacteria responsible for nitric oxide synthesis. Since nitric oxide dilates blood vessels and regulates blood pressure, two out of three Americans who use mouthwash daily are negating their workouts entirely, regardless of frequency or intensity.
  • Fluoride toxicity threshold: Standard toothpaste contains roughly 0.5mg of fluoride per pea-sized amount, but most people apply 10–20 times that quantity per brushing. The molecule is small enough (molecular weight 19) to absorb directly through oral tissue without swallowing, suppressing thyroid function and lowering children's IQ by up to seven points.
  • Tongue scraping and mouthwash combination: Tongue scraping increases oral microbiome diversity and improves nitric oxide production, but combining it with antiseptic mouthwash produces the worst possible outcome. Scraping opens tongue pores, allowing mouthwash to penetrate deeper into tissue and kill bacteria more effectively — eliminating the benefit and accelerating microbiome destruction.
  • Sugar and nitric oxide enzyme damage: Dietary sugar physically binds to nitric oxide synthase, the enzyme lining blood vessels, locking it in a fixed conformation and preventing nitric oxide production. This mechanism explains why diabetics face a tenfold higher incidence of heart attack, stroke, peripheral neuropathy, and non-healing wounds compared to non-diabetics.
  • Nitric oxide activation stack: Nasal breathing, 20–30 minutes of daily sunlight, humming at resonant frequencies, and red light or infrared therapy all stimulate nitric oxide synthase in sinus epithelial cells and blood vessel linings. Testosterone and estrogen also activate the enzyme, explaining why hormone replacement therapy carries measurable cardiovascular protective effects in both men and women.

What It Covers

Dr. Nathan Bryan explains how common oral hygiene habits — specifically antiseptic mouthwash and fluoride toothpaste — destroy the oral microbiome responsible for nitric oxide production, eliminating cardiovascular benefits of exercise and contributing to elevated blood pressure in two-thirds of Americans.

Key Questions Answered

  • Mouthwash and exercise: Antiseptic mouthwash eliminates the cardioprotective benefits of physical exercise by killing oral bacteria responsible for nitric oxide synthesis. Since nitric oxide dilates blood vessels and regulates blood pressure, two out of three Americans who use mouthwash daily are negating their workouts entirely, regardless of frequency or intensity.
  • Fluoride toxicity threshold: Standard toothpaste contains roughly 0.5mg of fluoride per pea-sized amount, but most people apply 10–20 times that quantity per brushing. The molecule is small enough (molecular weight 19) to absorb directly through oral tissue without swallowing, suppressing thyroid function and lowering children's IQ by up to seven points.
  • Tongue scraping and mouthwash combination: Tongue scraping increases oral microbiome diversity and improves nitric oxide production, but combining it with antiseptic mouthwash produces the worst possible outcome. Scraping opens tongue pores, allowing mouthwash to penetrate deeper into tissue and kill bacteria more effectively — eliminating the benefit and accelerating microbiome destruction.
  • Sugar and nitric oxide enzyme damage: Dietary sugar physically binds to nitric oxide synthase, the enzyme lining blood vessels, locking it in a fixed conformation and preventing nitric oxide production. This mechanism explains why diabetics face a tenfold higher incidence of heart attack, stroke, peripheral neuropathy, and non-healing wounds compared to non-diabetics.
  • Nitric oxide activation stack: Nasal breathing, 20–30 minutes of daily sunlight, humming at resonant frequencies, and red light or infrared therapy all stimulate nitric oxide synthase in sinus epithelial cells and blood vessel linings. Testosterone and estrogen also activate the enzyme, explaining why hormone replacement therapy carries measurable cardiovascular protective effects in both men and women.

Notable Moment

Dr. Bryan reveals that proton pump inhibitors — sold over the counter as Prilosec and Nexium — block stomach acid production, preventing absorption of magnesium, iodine, selenium, and B vitamins. He connects this directly to the statistic that 75% of Americans are magnesium deficient and 95% are iodine deficient.

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Episode Transcript

Taxes was feeling so stuck. Sitting in traffic, squeezing into a parking spot, all to squeeze in getting tax help during your lunch break. Nowtaxes is a TurboTax expert who does your taxes for you while you go about your day getting real time notifications about their progress and the most money back guaranteed. Now this is taxes. Intuit TurboTax. Don't miss the deadline. File by 04:15. See guarantee details at turbotax.com/guarantees. Only available with TurboTax experts. If I've just listened to everything you've just said there and I wanna improve my oral microbiome, what should I be doing? Well, I think the most important thing we've learned is what you shouldn't be doing. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So it's not what should we do, it's what we shouldn't be doing. Number one, we have to get rid of fluoride. You know, just this past weekend, I was speaking at a dental conference in Salt Lake City, and there were there people there from the National Toxicology Program, which in The US is the organization tasked with, if there's any kind of risk of exposure of environmental toxicant, they're charged with doing the toxicology studies to see if there's an increased risk. What is the risk? And is there a safe level that is without risk? And what they report is that fluoride, there's no benefit of fluoride, and it's all risk. It lowers IQ in kids by as much as seven points, and it shuts down your thyroid function, and it's a neurotoxin. And as I mentioned before, most toothpaste has fluoride in it. And if you read the back of your toothpaste, it will tell you, at least in The US, I don't know about in other countries, but it says if you swallow this, call poison control because it's a poison. They're putting poison in toothpaste. And then if you also pay attention, it says only put a pea size amount of toothpaste on your toothbrush. A pea size. But everybody that I know fills the entire bristle of the toothpaste with toothbrush with toothpaste. So that's about 10 or 15, sometimes 20 pea size amounts of toothpaste. And a pea size amount of toothpaste contains about half a milligram of fluoride. Now if you're using ten, twenty times more than that pea size, now you're exposed to five milligrams, 10 of fluoride. And you don't even have to swallow it. This is a very small molecule, a molecular weight of 19. So it's absorbed directly across the buccal mucosa, the oral cavity, and it becomes systemic. I'm not gonna use it anymore. No. You shouldn't. I'm just gonna What what should I use instead? You have to use a non fluorinated toothpaste. And what about things like tongue scrapers? Now tongue scrapers, the data again, that's time tested. That's an ancient practice. And even in our study, we found that people who do tongue scraping have a more diverse oral microbiome, and they seem to have better …

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  • Dr. Bryan reveals that proton pump inhibitors — sold over the counter as Prilosec and Nexium — block stomach acid production, preventing absorption of magnesium, iodine, selenium, and B vitamins.
  • Dr. Bryan reveals that proton pump inhibitors — sold over the counter as Prilosec and Nexium — block stomach acid production, preventing absorption of magnesium, iodine, selenium, and B vitamins.

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