1. We mix natural miswak with bio-based castor oil, which is derived from a plant rather than petroleum. This mixture allows the miswak to remain effective for 3–4 months rather than expiring in 1–2 weeks. It also softens the miswak and helps it attract water easier. This unique combination makes our bristles 76% greener than traditional nylon plastics derived from petroleum. Each bristle is packed with Miswak. It’s hard to give an exact proportion because it’s all mixed together, but our engineers determined it to be roughly 40-45% Miswak.
2. Yes, it’s still highly recommended, because toothpaste offers added benefits. Especially our toothpaste, which includes ingredients like Neem (antifungal), Nano-Hydroxyapatite (strengthens enamel), and Zinc which helps with plaque and calculus build-up. Actually, a few studies show that users reap added benefits when they use a conventional toothbrush and toothpaste, followed by Miswak. Based on these studies, we advise users to do the same. A few of our customers use only our Miswak toothbrush with water and enjoy it just the same, due to the added miswak benefits.
Other questions…..
How is this actually better than my plastic brush?
Your current brush just scrubs. RemoBrush bristles are infused with Miswak – a natural antibacterial used for centuries.
So while you brush, you’re fighting bacteria, soothing gums, and freshening breath. No synthetics, and the bamboo handle breaks down when you’re done with it.
Does Miswak actually work?
Miswak has been studied extensively & contains compounds that are naturally antibacterial and anti-inflammatory. The tradition goes back centuries. The science backs it up.
How do I even use it?
Run water over the bristles for 10 seconds – that activates the Miswak and releases the antibacterials. Then brush as normal. Toothpaste optional.
If you want to do something positive about your oral health, here’s the link.
When the manufacturer of the Blotting Brushes we’d made available for over 10 years stopped production during the long, strange paralysis of COVID, we were left with a problem.
We searched for a replacement manufacturer with the machinery, the patience and the sanity to make them for us.
What we received were offers to sell us their existing brushes, or quotations so extravagant that the brushes would have needed to be dipped in gold to justify the price.
Then, I received a message from Dr Elmar Jung with a link to a UK source of miswak brushes.
Excited, I ordered brushes for us both immediately.
A Memory from the Maasai Mara
I’ve used miswak before, but the sources were haphazard. My first encounter goes back to 1983, when I was in the Maasai Mara in Kenya. Walking with the Maasai tribe, they cut a small branch from a bush they called the toothbrush tree. They handed it to me and explained that I should fray one end until it became a natural little brush (see image below), then use it to clean my teeth and between them.
A Brush with the Ancient World: the original miswak ‘stick’, now in toothbrush form. The man may have a missing tooth, but the rest are healthy and white.
It seemed wonderfully primitive. It also seemed wonderfully sensible.
What the Miswak Actually Is
The miswak, as we explain in our book Gum Disease: The Silent Battle In Your Mouth, comes from the root of the Peelu tree, Salvadora persica, known in the Middle East as the Arak tree. It has been used for centuries across parts of Africa and the Middle East for cleaning teeth and maintaining the gums.
Research has found antibacterial and plaque-fighting properties, and the World Health Organization has recognised its usefulness for oral hygiene. The miswak contains naturally occurring compounds that help clean the teeth, freshen the breath and support the gums. And, rather pleasingly, it doesn’t require toothpaste although this is an optional extra.
An Accidental Demonstration
Perhaps the most memorable demonstration came to me not from a laboratory but from television.
During the football World Cup in South Africa (2010), whenever an African team scored, the camera would pan across the celebrating crowd. Row after row of faces appeared, many displaying spectacularly white teeth.
I remember thinking that this was one of those curious little observations that television accidentally reveals: the evidence wasn’t being presented as evidence, but there it was, grinning back at us.
So perhaps the disappearance of our Blotting Brushes isn’t quite the disaster it first appeared.
Sometimes you spend months looking for a complicated modern solution, only to discover that the answer has been sitting in a tree for several thousand years.
And now, apparently, it’s being delivered from an informative UK website that offers a variety of options, from miswak bristles on bamboo handles to the original miswak sticks.
There is something rather encouraging about that.
PS. If you fancy trying these brushes, here’s the link. And, in the interests of complete honesty, it is an affiliate link, so if you buy it, we make a small commission. It doesn’t cost you a penny more, but it does help keep the lights on, which, in these expensive times, is no small thing.
There are places that simply feel right. You walk through the front door and your shoulders loosen before you’ve even put the kettle on. Others, despite polished kitchens and estate-agent promises, never quite become home.
Advocates of Geopathic Stress believe the difference lies beneath our feet.
The theory is beguilingly simple. Invisible natural energies, created by underground watercourses and geological faults, may subtly influence our wellbeing. Sleep, they suggest, can become deeper, moods lighter, relationships calmer and concentration sharper when we are living or working in harmony with these natural forces.
Supporters point to countless observations gathered over decades. Dowsers speak of homes transformed after nothing more dramatic than moving a bed a metre or two. Animals often seem to know instinctively where these energies lie; dogs may avoid them while cats appear strangely attracted. Trees sometimes twist to escape them, bees abandon affected hives, and even babies, too young to understand, are said to shuffle towards more comfortable sleeping positions.
In parts of Europe, the idea has been taken seriously enough for builders to consult dowsers before construction, aiming to create homes where every room rests on balanced ground. It is an approach that sees a house not merely as bricks and mortar, but as an environment that should nurture the people within it.
Science has yet to provide a universally accepted explanation for geopathic stress, but its supporters argue that absence of proof is not proof of absence. They see it as another reminder that nature is infinitely more complex than our current understanding allows.
Whether one views geopathic stress as emerging science, ancient wisdom or simply an invitation to observe the world more carefully, it encourages us to think differently about the places we choose to live. After all, home should be more than a roof over our heads – it should be a place where body, mind and earth exist in quiet harmony.
Linda was twelve when she developed leukaemia.
There followed the modern catalogue of medical misery: a bone-marrow transplant, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and a month spent in isolation, away from the ordinary world of childhood. Eventually she began to recover and went home. She slept in her mother’s bed.
And something rather curious happened.
Week by week, Linda got better.
Then she was well enough to return to her own bedroom, to her own bed. And the leukaemia returned.
Her mother had never heard of geopathic stress. She had no particular theory about it and, understandably, was prepared to try almost anything that might help her daughter.
A dowsing investigation was carried out. Two geopathic-stress lines were identified running beneath Linda’s bed — one described as strong, the other very strong.
So they moved the bed.
Within a month, Linda’s hospital decided that no further treatment was required.
She recovered.
Now, whether you regard that as coincidence, curious circumstance or evidence of something we don’t yet properly understand is, of course, up to you. But it is an intriguing story, and perhaps that is enough reason to ask questions.
Linda’s bed position showing geopathic stress lines: (S = strong and VS = very strong)
Then there was Simone. Shewas only nine when she developed a cancerous tumour and underwent six sessions of chemotherapy. Then came the high temperatures, the loss of her hair, a bone-marrow transplant, swollen cheeks and feeding through a tube into her stomach.
Eventually, her family were told that the cancer had gone.
It hadn’t.
The cancer returned, followed by pneumonia. Simone died in 2001. Unfortunately SImone’s parents had not been told about GS and they had a hard time getting over their daughter’s death.
Two children. Two very different endings. And between them sits a question that conventional medicine doesn’t necessarily ask: could the environment in which we sleep, live and recover have an influence on us?
Geopathic stress is the name given to the idea that natural underground features, geological formations and certain environmental fields can create areas of disturbance – particularly where we spend many hours in one place.
It can affect sleep, wellbeing and health. Claims have been made linking it to everything from restless babies and bed-wetting to learning difficulties, epilepsy and unexplained health problems.
Some practitioners even suggest that babies instinctively move towards the least-stressed part of a cot.
These are still considered to be controversial claims, but curiosity should never be forbidden simply because the answer isn’t yet convenient.
The bedroom is a particularly interesting place to begin.
We spend roughly a third of our lives there. We don’t move while we’re asleep. We don’t choose where our bodies are positioned during those hours. The bed becomes, quite literally, our most sustained relationship with a particular piece of ground.
So perhaps there is a simple principle worth adopting:
If you’re moving house/flat, why not look at the environment before you sign anything?
Consider the geology. Consider external sources of radiation and electromagnetic exposure. Consider where you sleep. And, if geopathic stress concerns you, have the property assessed by someone experienced and sensible rather than someone determined to frighten you.
You don’t have to become a believer. Just a detective.
Because sometimes the most useful question isn’t “Do I believe this?”
It’s: “What happens if I look?”
And that, ultimately, is what being your own detective means.
Geopathic Stress can impact so many activities both inside and outside the house. It is even estimated that 25% of people diagnosed as epileptic are wrongly diagnosed and the main cause of the symptoms is Geopathic Stress.
Pregnancy, Sudden Infant Syndrome (Cot Death), excess bed wetting, learning difficulties, seemingly unrelated health challenges, even car accidents can be affected by the incidence of Geopathic Stress
Before you relocate to a new home it is essential to have your new place checked out for GS lines as well as the impact of radiation from external sources by someone who knows what they’re doing. If you need help with this, please contact me.
Become Your Own Detective
You can buy a copy of Rolf Gordon’s book “Are You Sleeping In A Safe Place?” from Dulwich Health or your local Amazon.
There is something wonderfully humble about the sardine. It arrives without fanfare, costs a fraction of fashionable seafood, and yet quietly delivers more nutrition than many foods commanding many times the price.
Long before “superfoods” became a marketing buzzword, sardines had already earned their place on dinner tables across Europe, the Mediterranean, Asia and the Americas.
Long before nutritionists discovered hashtags, sardines had already been sustaining fishermen, labourers and families from Lisbon to Tokyo. They didn’t require branding. They simply worked.
The name itself is thought to come from the island of Sardinia, where the fish once gathered in shimmering shoals so vast they seemed less like wildlife than weather. For millennia they have fed coastal communities, preserved in salt, smoke or oil against leaner seasons.
They were the original convenience food, except they contained actual food.
Unlike the marine aristocracy – tuna, swordfish and their swaggering predatory cousins – the sardine lives a refreshingly uncomplicated life. It matures quickly, breeds enthusiastically and spends its days nibbling plankton rather than swallowing everything smaller than itself.
Consequently it accumulates very little mercury or other environmental nasties, making it one of the cleanest fish on the menu and one of the most sustainable. Nature, it seems, knows exactly what she’s doing.
Travel the world and the sardine wears many disguises. In Portugal it crackles over charcoal fires, sending fragrant smoke drifting through narrow streets. In Britain it finds sanctuary atop buttered toast. Around the Mediterranean it slips effortlessly into salads alongside tomatoes, olives and capers, while elsewhere it disappears into pasta sauces, lending them the sort of deep savoury richness chefs prefer to call umami because “delicious” somehow no longer sounds sophisticated enough.
Its reputation for being aggressively fishy is one of gastronomy’s great libels. A fresh sardine is delicate, almost sweet, its flesh firm but tender beneath skin that crisps beautifully over a flame. Canned sardines, meanwhile, mellow into something altogether richer. Packed in olive oil, tomato sauce, spring water or mustard, they develop a depth of flavour that belies their modest price tag.
Then there are the bones.
Most diners approach them with unnecessary suspicion. Yet these softened little skeletons, rendered almost creamy by the canning process, are nutritional gold dust. They disappear almost unnoticed while delivering calcium in quantities that many expensive supplements can only dream about.
Few foods naturally unite calcium and vitamin D in quite the same convenient package. Because the bones are eaten whole, a single serving contributes meaningfully to maintaining skeletal strength, something one tends to appreciate rather more once birthdays begin arriving faster than expected.
Indeed, sardines possess an almost embarrassing concentration of goodness. Within one modest serving lurks complete protein, generous quantities of omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, vitamin B12, calcium, selenium, phosphorus, iodine, iron and magnesium. If nutrition were measured by cubic centimetre, sardines would be difficult to beat without resorting to laboratory equipment.
Their greatest celebrity, of course, remains omega-3. These remarkable oils help maintain healthy blood vessels, support normal heart rhythm, moderate inflammation and contribute to lower triglyceride levels. Unlike the synthetic concoctions that occupy entire shelves in health food shops, sardines deliver these fats exactly as nature intended, complete with the supporting cast of minerals and protein.
The brain also thrives on omega-3 fats, particularly DHA. Together with the generous helping of vitamin B12 found in sardines, they contribute to healthy nerve function, memory and cognitive performance. They are not magic bullets against dementia or Alzheimer’s, but they supply many of the nutritional bricks from which a resilient brain is built.
There is another virtue rarely celebrated: value. At a time when supermarket receipts increasingly resemble mortgage applications, a humble tin of sardines remains astonishingly inexpensive. For less than the price of many nutritionally bankrupt snacks, you acquire a complete meal rich in protein, healthy fats and essential minerals, with a shelf life that makes it a dependable ally in any cupboard.
Perhaps that is the sardine’s greatest triumph. It has steadfastly refused to become fashionable. Fashion would only spoil it. It has remained exactly what it has always been: honest, nourishing and quietly magnificent.
Sometimes we spend our lives chasing culinary peacocks while overlooking the sparrow sitting contentedly on the garden fence. The sardine asks for no applause. It simply turns up, feeds us superbly, asks almost nothing of the oceans in return, and slips away without ceremony.
The sea, it seems, has always known that its greatest treasures need not be the largest. Sometimes they arrive in silver jackets, packed neatly in a tin, carrying enough goodness to make foods costing ten times as much look faintly ridiculous.
Bon appétit
Graeme Dinnen
ResourcesForLife.net
A Simple and Healthy Sardine Meal:
This Sardine spread isn’t just delicious, it’s loaded with omega-3s, protein and calcium for strong bones, sharp focus and glowing skin. ✨
Made with simple ingredients – sardines, egg, butter and lemon juice, it is the perfect nutrient-dense snack for busy days or post-workout fuel.
It arrived in dented tins with labels that looked as though they’d been designed during a long lunch. It smelt of hot afternoons, dusty groves and stone farmhouses where recipes were inherited rather than invented. It asked for nothing more than a crust of bread, a tomato and perhaps the company of a sensible bottle of wine.
Today, it has become liquid gold.
And history teaches us that wherever gold accumulates, rogues soon follow with shiny shoes and grubby intentions.
Across Europe, soaring prices, relentless droughts and disappointing harvests have transformed extra virgin olive oil into one of the world’s most desirable foods – and one of its most profitable targets for fraud.
Criminals have been caught diluting it with anonymous seed oils, dressing ordinary olive oil in aristocratic labels, inventing noble family trees and persuading perfectly mediocre liquids that they were born beneath Tuscan sunsets.
Greek poet Homer called it “liquid gold” more than two thousand years ago. He could scarcely have imagined that one day the phrase would sound less like poetry and more like a police briefing.
From Spain to Italy, investigators have uncovered warehouses holding hundreds of thousands of litres of counterfeit oil. Europol now spends almost as much time following the olive trail as it does organised crime, while inspectors descend upon bottling plants with the enthusiasm once reserved for illicit whisky stills.
Yet the greatest casualty isn’t the shopper who unknowingly pours counterfeit virtue over a bowl of salad.
It’s the honest grower.
The family whose gnarled trees have survived wars, droughts and generations of hard hands. People who spend an entire year nurturing fruit from ancient branches, only to see their reputation diluted by someone with a stainless-steel tank and a vivid imagination.
Ancient Olive Tree, Ibiza
The answer, however, isn’t to abandon olive oil. Nobody swears off Burgundy because somebody once bottled vinegar with a French château on the label.
The answer is simply to buy wisely.
Choose producers whose names mean something. Be suspicious of miraculous bargains. Look for harvest dates rather than clever marketing phraseology. Real olive oil carries the quiet confidence of authenticity. It doesn’t need to shout.
The recent headlines about Europe’s olive oil racket have reminded us just how valuable trust has become. In today’s food world, that’s almost rarer than finding a politician who can blush.
Food fraud has become the supermarket’s invisible aisle. Honey that’s enjoyed an intimate relationship with corn syrup. Herbs bulked out with whatever happened to be lying around. “Extra virgin” oils that have clearly lived colourful, complicated lives before arriving on your kitchen shelf.
Don’t be a victimto the Mafia’s most profitable crime
It’s a magnificent masquerade where, all too often, the label is the only ingredient that’s entirely genuine.
Fortunately, there is another way.
Support the growers who still treat olive oil as a craft rather than a commodity. Celebrate the producers whose pride lives inside every bottle. Every purchase helps preserve centuries of knowledge, family traditions and landscapes that deserve to outlive the counterfeiters.
After all, every meal is an investment in tomorrow. Your body quietly rebuilds itself from the food you choose today. Give it honest materials, and it has every chance of returning the favour.
Need I say more?
If you’re in the UK, we’d love to help you discover olive oil the way it ought to taste. Here’s an offer to take £5 off your first order– not as a gimmick, but as a small celebration of good taste, honest farming and food you can trust.
We joined their free Olive Oil Club and arranged a monthly delivery. One less thing to think about, and one more thing to look forward to.
Salute.
Graeme Dinnen
ResourcesForLife.net
“Liquid Gold” – Homer, describing virgin olive oil in ancient times.
For most of human history, we have made the same blunder with plants: we have mistaken silence for simplicity.
A tree stands in one place for centuries, apparently doing very little. It does not chase, argue, complain, or announce its intentions on social media. It simply remains there, which to the human imagination is suspiciously close to being boring.
We like movement. We like noise. We like things that look as though they are having an interesting time.
But beneath that apparent stillness is a world of astonishing activity.
A plant is not a decoration that happens to be alive. It is a sophisticated survivor, quietly running a chemical empire beneath our feet. Its roots explore the soil like a slow-motion underground expedition, searching for water and nutrients.
Its leaves monitor the sun with extraordinary precision. When attacked by insects, it can release chemical warnings, sending messages into the surrounding environment that other plants can respond to.
It is tempting, naturally, to turn this into a little woodland fairy tale. We imagine trees whispering secrets, flowers exchanging gossip, and forests having ancient conversations while humans rush past without noticing.
The truth is both less magical and, in some ways, more impressive.
Plants do communicate, but not because they have opinions. They do not send warnings because they are frightened in the way an animal is frightened. They do not sit quietly in the garden contemplating existence. They are not miniature philosophers wearing leaves instead of trousers.
They are simply very, very good at being plants.
Some experiments suggest that plants can adjust their behaviour based on previous experiences. The sensitive plant, for example, can become less reactive after repeated harmless disturbances. It appears to “remember” in some sense.
But this is not memory as we understand it. There is no evidence of a private inner world, no little plant mind sitting behind the leaves making plans for tomorrow.
And this is where humans often get carried away.
We see intelligence and immediately assume there must be a brain behind it. We see a response and imagine a feeling. We see complexity and expect consciousness. But nature has produced countless ways of solving problems without producing thoughts.
A thermostat regulates temperature without understanding heat. An immune system fights disease without knowing what illness is. A plant can defend itself without experiencing fear.
The mistake is not in admiring plants. They deserve admiration. The mistake is believing they must become more like us before they become interesting.
Plants have spent hundreds of millions of years perfecting a different way of existing. They have no need to run, hunt, or think. They survive through patience, chemistry, and an extraordinary ability to adapt.
The forest is not a gathering of silent minds. It is something stranger: a living network of organisms responding to the world in ways that do not require thoughts, feelings, or awareness.
Plants do not have minds like ours.
But perhaps that is exactly why they are worth paying attention to.
“When I die, she said, I’m coming back as a tree with deep roots & I’ll wave my leaves at the children every morning on their way to school & whisper tree songs…”. Brian Andreas, StoryPeople
A Danish study found that people who live near green spaces and forests are healthier and live longer.
Research shows that spending five days and four nights in a forest environment can enhance the activity of natural killer (NK) cells in the body. These cells play a crucial role in fighting cancer and infections. The immune boost from being in nature can last for up to seven days after the trip.
This effect is part of a concept called “forest bathing” or “Shinrin-yoku,” which has been shown to improve overall well-being. Studies have found that time spent in forests positively impacts the immune system. The results highlight the therapeutic benefits of nature on human health.
Find an Air B&B in a pine forest because:
“Pine trees have an irreplaceable value to human lives….their true value is invisible except on very hot days where a blue haze hangsover the trees and we can see their most precious offering. The trees emit a chemical known as pinene; for the trees it emits a haze that protects them from the heat of the sun; for us it has an equally protective effect. Scientists have found that when we inhale pinene, it chemically interacts with our bodies, lowering the levels of the stress hormone, cortisol and enhancing the activity of our anti-cancer killer cells.”
Once upon a time, a man decided that living a longer life was simply an engineering challenge.
He set about this task in a way he believed was best for him.
Most people, when confronted with the mortality question, buy a gym membership, cut back on the biscuits and promise themselves they’ll get more sleep.
But our man, US entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, did what only a Silicon Valley millionaire could do: he declared war.
Every morning begins with a roll call.
Not of children, or employees, or even thoughts worth having. Numbers.
Heart rate. Blood sugar. Sleep score. Body fat. Inflammation markers. Biological age. Somewhere, a dashboard flickers into life and informs him whether yesterday was a triumph or a mild disappointment.
Then come the pills.
Not one or two. Not the sort your grandmother keeps in a little plastic day-of-the-week organiser. Dozens of the things, swallowed with the determination of a man trying to win a loyalty scheme at the chemist.
Breakfast isn’t a comfortable, laid-back breakfast. It’s an industrial process.
Even sunshine, one of life’s few pleasures, has become an enemy. When the sun makes an appearance, most people welcome it for the VItamin D benefits. But Bryan reaches for an umbrella as though daylight were a personal insult.
A stroll becomes an evasive manoeuvre, darting from shade to shade with the urgency of someone avoiding a debt collector rather than a pleasant July afternoon.
And all day, every day, one question hums away in the background like a faulty fridge.
How can I live longer?
It’s an expensive hobby.
The curious thing is that the joys of life have quietly slipped out through the back door while he’s been measuring it. Every conversation is interrupted by a protocol. Every meal is an experiment. Every walk is a calculation.
There is something oddly tragic about devoting every waking hour to extending a life that increasingly resembles an administrative exercise.
Imagine arriving at the age of ninety-nine, after decades of flawless optimisation, only to realise you’ve spent most of the journey staring at graphs instead of sunsets.
The body, meanwhile, remains magnificently indifferent. It doesn’t care how many spreadsheets you’ve colour-coded or how many capsules you’ve swallowed before nine o’clock. It has been making and unmaking human beings for rather longer than Silicon Valley has been making apps.
Perhaps the point was never to squeeze another grey decade out of life.
Perhaps it was to notice the one you’re already in – preferably without carrying an umbrella on a perfectly pleasant day.
Health has become another luxury product, sold with the promise that enough money and enough discipline can exempt us from the human condition.
But the body has a wicked sense of humour. It ignores status, laughs at protocols and eventually reminds every one of us that we’re not machines waiting for an upgrade.
The goal was for Bryan Johnston to live for a long time. Yet at forty-eight, he has been diagnosed as having an Incurable Autoimmune Disease. That’s put a spanner in his longevity mission.
It would be a shame to discover, somewhere around the age of ninety-nine, that you’d never enjoyed a bacon sandwich, a few too many Margaritas watching the sun set in Bali or stepped outside your established, possibly misguided, parameters.
Few subjects empty a room faster than dentistry. Mention gums at a dinner party and you’ll find yourself talking to the cheese board before you’ve finished the sentence.
Which is curious, because we spend an extraordinary amount of time worrying about what goes into our mouths, while paying remarkably little attention to the thing doing the receiving.
Most people have no idea how much damage can quietly accumulate beneath an apparently respectable smile. Teeth are polished, breath is disguised with minty chemical warfare, and the gums are left to wage their own losing battle. It’s only when something begins to wobble, bleed or ache that we suddenly discover an urgent interest in oral health.
Not you, of course. You’re still reading.
A few years ago I stumbled across an online seminar called Functional Oral Health Summit: Say Ahh! It’s not a title that sets the pulse racing. Nobody ever cancelled Wimbledon to stay home for something called Say Ahh!.
Yet behind the dreary branding is some remarkably compelling information about what happens when periodontal (gum) disease is allowed to settle in for the long haul.
Gum disease is one of the commonest chronic health conditions on the planet, largely because it is both slow and polite. It doesn’t announce itself with fireworks. It simply gets on with dismantling things while we congratulate ourselves on brushing twice a day.
The full presentation lasts 58 minutes. That’s a serious commitment in an age when people complain if a video exceeds ninety seconds. If time is tight, start with operating room nurse Jeanne Dockins between 29:20 and 32:05.
In those few minutes you’ll also hear Dr David Verity explain why elective surgery should never be undertaken while periodontal disease is active.
It’s an uncomfortable thought, considering that in the United States up to half of surgical patients are believed to have periodontal disease before entering hospital.
Watch the whole presentation when you can. Not because it promises miracle cures or fashionable wellness jargon, but because it forces you to reconsider the mouth as something rather more significant than a convenient holder for teeth.
The discussion also explores possible links between periodontal disease, sleep apnoea and certain cancers – areas that continue to be actively researched and debated.
Your mouth is less a pristine showroom than a densely populated city. Around 700 species of bacteria live there, alongside fungi, viruses and the occasional unwelcome parasite.
Some residents are industrious citizens; others are little more than organised criminals waiting for an opportunity. Health depends not on sterility but on maintaining order. Once the balance shifts, trouble rarely confines itself to the mouth.
The old idea that dentists deal only with fillings while doctors deal with everything else has always been an artificial division. The mouth is the front door to the body, and it leaves clues everywhere.
What Doctors Don’t Tell You once described several striking cases from the records of a British holistic dentist. In one, a patient presented with severe toothache, only to be told the problem wou,d be resolved after a colonic irrigation. In another, treatment involving the alignment of a tooth appeared to coincide with relief from a persistent hamstring injury.
Whether or not you accept every conclusion drawn from such cases, they illustrate a broader principle that medicine has increasingly recognised: the body is a connected system, and symptoms do not always originate where they announce themselves.
Inside your mouth are teeth, gums, tongue, cheeks, tonsils, salivary glands, muscles, bone and that curious little uvula hanging like an afterthought. Sharing the space are billions of microscopic organisms engaged in a perpetual negotiation for territory.
Good health isn’t achieved by declaring war on every bacterium. It’s achieved by keeping the ecosystem in balance.
Ignore it, and your mouth won’t be the only thing complaining.
So next time you clean your teeth, keep at it for longer than you spend in the shower.
Dental sayings:
• You don’t have to clean all your teeth – only the ones you want to keep.
• The toothbrush doesn’t remove six months of tartar 30 minutes before your dental appointment!
• Dentistry is not expensive, neglect is.
Graeme Dinnen
ResourcesForLife.net
PS You’ll find this and many other important aspects of dental health explained in a clear and accessible way throughout the book.
People often imagine science as a straight path: each discovery bringing us steadily closer to the truth.
Alzheimer’s disease has never followed that path. Instead, its history looks more like a long debate, one that has gone on for decades without clear agreement.
This story begins in 1901 with a German doctor, Alois Alzheimer, who examined the brain of a woman named Auguste Deter after her death. She was the first person to walk down memory loss lane as we know it today.
He wanted to understand what had caused her severe confusion.
By 1905, the disease had been named after him. Researchers noticed unusual clumps of protein in the brain, later called amyloid plaques.
These plaques became the centre of Alzheimer’s research. Scientists developed the “amyloid hypothesis”: the idea that amyloid plaques are the main cause of the disease.
The theory seemed logical and attracted enormous funding. Governments, including the National Institutes of Health, invested billions of dollars in treatments designed to remove amyloid from the brain.
Despite this investment, Alzheimer’s remained difficult to treat.
Some newer drugs, including monoclonal antibodies that target amyloid, can reduce plaque levels in the brain. However, their effects on memory and daily functioning have been, at best, modest, and some can cause serious side effects such as brain swelling and small brain bleeds.
In 2003, French neuroscientist Sylvain Lesné declared that his research pinpointed amyloid plaque as the cause of Alzheimers. In 2022, they found his highly influential research to be fraudulent – investigators reported image irregularities in his published papers. But he got away with it for years and diverted genuine research in the wrong direction.
Meanwhile the National Institutes of Health hd been duped into spending $300 million dollars a year to attack amyloid plaque. Today, pharma continues to produce medicines that they know don’t provide any real benefit but are happy to accept healthy annual subsidies.
The Alzheimer’s story is beginning to look less like a triumphal march of science and more like one of those expensive expeditions that discovers, several billion pounds later, that it may have been reading the map upside down.
The unsettling possibility is not fraud or conspiracy, but that an entire orthodoxy grew fat on evidence that was partial, shaky and simply too eagerly embraced.
Science, gloriously, is built to correct itself. Less gloriously, it often does so at the speed of continental drift, particularly when careers, reputations and fortunes have been invested in the prevailing wisdom.
Researchers are now asking a more awkward question: why does amyloid accumulate at all? A growing number suspect it may not be the villain of the piece, but part of the brain’s emergency services – a biochemical paramedic rushing to sites of injury, inflammation or even infection.
Amyloid, in this telling, may be less the arsonist than the fire brigade.
Meanwhile, the unglamorous business of living well still matters. Sleep appears to help the brain clear away its metabolic rubbish, while exercise is associated with sharper cognition and may even encourage the growth of new brain cells.
Alzheimer’s resists simple explanations. The real failing may have been intellectual overconfidence: a field so enamoured of a single theory that it stopped looking over its shoulder.
Natural health author and researcher Patrick Holford (BSc in experimental psychology), attended a conference on mental health at which he presented papers evidencing the causes outside the theatre of amyloid plaque. His research was ignored, his question to the panel went unanswered and he wasn’t invited back the following year.
Cognitive Reserve
As for reducing dementia risk, one important concept is cognitive reserve. This refers to the brain’s ability to cope with damage by using alternative neural pathways.
But the brain is fundamentally lazy. Once it masters a task, it puts it on autopilot to save energy. ⠀ You can do a crossword or Sudoku puzzle every single morning for 10 years. But after a while, your brain isn’t actually working hard anymore. It’s just driving down a well-paved road.
The real secret to a bulletproof brain? Cognitive friction. It’s the habit of consistently doing things you are absolutely terrible at. ⠀
When you force yourself to learn a new language, pick up the piano at 50, or even just navigate a new city without GPS, our brain gets uncomfortable. It has to burn energy to build entirely new neural pathways. Even handwriting, an almost forgotten art, engages cognitive friction.
Our culture tells us that getting older means finally getting to be comfortable. But neurological comfort is a trap.
If your daily routine is perfectly predictable, your brain is slowly going to sleep. If you want to keep your mind alive until the very end, you have to drop the ego.
Embrace the frustration of being a beginner again. Every single day, give your brain a reason to wake up.
Blood Quality Means Everything
Your brain is the most energy-hungry organ in your body.
Although it represents just 2% of your body weight, it consumes an extraordinary 20–25% of all the energy you produce. Every thought, memory, decision and moment of focus depends on one thing above all else: an uninterrupted supply of blood-delivered oxygen and glucose.
Healthy blood flow is not simply important. It is fundamental to vitality, cognitive performance and healthy ageing.
Blood is your body’s crimson river of life. It nourishes every cell, removes toxins, repairs damage and defends against infection. Without efficient circulation, the brain cannot perform at its best.
Blood reaches the brain from the base upwards, and then travels from back to front. The last area to receive this supply is the prefrontal cortex, the command centre responsible for concentration, planning, judgement and decision-making.
When blood flow is less than optimal, this critical region may be among the first to feel the effects. Brain fog, poor concentration, mental fatigue and declining cognitive performance can gradually become part of everyday life.
Many people simply accept these changes as an inevitable consequence of ageing.
They are not.
Modern life places enormous demands on the brain. Stress, inflammation, poor sleep, environmental toxins and the ageing process itself can all compromise circulation and cellular energy production.
The good news is that there is something you can do.
Vielight’s technology offers a simple, non-invasive way to support healthy circulation, cellular energy production and brain function – all from the comfort of your own home.
Shining therapeutic light through the nasal passages may sound unconventional, yet the science is compelling. The nasal cavity contains an exceptionally rich network of blood vessels, providing an ideal gateway for delivering light energy to circulating blood and supporting whole-body health.
The MIP is available without prescription or referral. But compare that investment with the true cost of cognitive decline: lost independence, diminished quality of life, and the heartbreak experienced by families watching a loved one slowly fade.
The choices you make today will influence how clearly you think, how independently you live and how fully you enjoy the years ahead.
