Dr. Ben: On today's episode of The Modern Vital Podcast, our topic is holistic dentistry and today's special guest is Dr. Karaneh Jahan, Doctor of Medicine in Dentistry. Dr. Jahan received her baccalaureate in public health at Portland State University and then she attended Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), where she obtained the Doctor of Dental Medicine. Dr. Jahan is also a certified health and lifestyle coach, and she's the founder of Remineralizing Pulling Oil underneath her name as a brand. Dr. Jahan believes oral health is inherently important to all patients' well-being and happiness, and she is highly recognized for providing gentle, high-quality care to help as many people as possible achieve healthier life, greater comfort, and a brighter smile. Welcome to the show, Dr. Jahan.
Dr. Jahan: Thank you so much, Dr. Reebs. It's a pleasure to be here.
Dr. Ben: Yeah, it's great to have you. I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey. I mean, how did you find your way to holistic dentistry?
Dr. Jahan: Well, you know, it's a long journey, but I will try to keep it as short and sweet as possible. When I was in undergrad, I wanted to go down a career path where I can help people in a very direct way. And after trying out political science and international relations and Spanish, my father one day advised, hey you're really good with your hands, you're artistic and you want to help people, why don't you go into dentistry? And I never thought that anything in the medical or science would be for me, but I went and shadowed a dentist for a couple weeks and immediately fell in love with it.
Dr. Ben: You know, can you just define what is holistic dentistry to you? Like, what makes your practice stand out and how would you define that?
Dr. Jahan: Holistic dentistry to me, because there are other holistic dentists out there and we all have our own philosophy, but for me, my job as a holistic dentist is to introduce alternatives, more natural alternatives to my patients in regards to how dentistry is traditionally done, and just educate them, hey, there is an alternative to this ingredient, or this substance, etc, etc, that will do the same thing for you, but in a less more natural way. And so that is just the basic of how I do holistic dentistry. But if you want to get into the nitty gritty, we are a metal-free clinic. Our implants are metal-free, all our restorations are metal-free. We incorporate different tools, different methods of curing or treating different conditions, such as ozone therapy. Now we have red light therapy in our practice, et cetera, et cetera. So we utilize all sorts of resources to bring health to our patients, not just in their oral health, but their whole body health, because ultimately that reflects back their oral health.
Dr. Ben: Can you talk a little bit more about these dental or these metal-free implants? I know you and I touched on a little bit, and they're pretty new, and even some of the older, more natural versions I know had some metal in them, but what exactly does it entail?
Dr. Jahan: Yeah, so a metal-free implant is basically zirconia, kind of like the diamond zirconia, but of course with ceramics to make it, you know, give it a more whitish color. But metal-free implants are amazing because your body isn't a huge fan of metal. When placing a titanium implant, it tends to give off little shards of metal that create a lot of inflammation of the gum tissues. And with zirconia implants, you're good. They tend to repel bacteria and plaque. And your bone just integrates so well with zirconia. So that is kind of the new route of dentistry is towards metal-free rector agents.
Dr. Ben: That's amazing. Yeah, being kind of an environmental medicine clinic over here, we do see quite a bit of elevated titanium, you know, in the blood or on a hair mineral analysis and it appears to usually be due to dental work, just from my assessments.
Dr. Jahan: Yes, yes, yeah, I can see that.
Dr. Ben: Well, can you speak a little bit more about pulling oil? I mean, I know you have this remineralizing pulling oil, like tell us more about that. What exactly is oil pulling and what does your product do?
Dr. Jahan: Yeah, I'm a huge nerd about oil pulling, of course. But basically what oil pulling is, is to swish and rinse your mouth with some kind of oil. The most effective oil is coconut oil because coconut oil is naturally antibacterial, it's anti-inflammatory. So with pulling oil, the oil is able to bond with like that lipid membrane of pathological bacteria and because there's a bond there is able to pull it out from underneath your gums whereas a you know a water-based solution wouldn't be able to do that so that's why it's called pulling oil. But we took it up to the next level where we actually added hydroxyapatite which is a natural fluoride alternative to help remineralize your teeth at the same time. We pH balance it, so it's slightly basic, actually, to help neutralize the acid in your mouth. And also, we added just a tad bit of sesame oil, which is also anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory. So that's what our pulling oil is all about.
Dr. Ben: That's amazing. I mean, I'm a huge fan of Weston A. Price, who sort of founded Modern Nutrition, and obviously, he was a dentist in the early 1900s traveling the world and observing how chronic disease began in the mouth, especially with the advent of processed food and mass-produced food. And now, flash forward 100 and some odd years later, and we have all this research on the microbiome, and anyway, I'm curious how oil pulling might affect the biofilm in the mouth, or even the microbiome, that layer where different bacteria can reside, you know, and be pathogenic.
Dr. Jahan: Mm-hmm. Well, the beauty of oil pulling is that, well, let me just say this, your mouth is meant to be dirty. It's a dirty place in there, full of bacteria, that's how it likes it, right? But what establishes a healthy oral microbiome is a little bit of good bacteria balancing out the bad bacteria. So the beauty of pulling oil is that it doesn't just kill, kill, kill, sterilize, disinfect, but more reestablish a healthy balance of both.
Dr. Ben: So how do we balance our microbiome, like from a holistic dentistry perspective? I mean, do you just kind of jump to the typical kind of functional medicine and naturopathic approaches of take a good probiotic and eat a nutrient-dense diet or do you actually have some little pearls that you drop to your clients in your office?
Dr. Jahan: I do have little pearls and one is actually oral probiotics which I take almost daily. My favorite, shout out to Super Teeth, they're my favorite brand of oral probiotics because they seed your mouth with the good bacteria which offsets the bad bacteria. And I take one about once or twice a day after every meal. And so patients who may come into our practice with periodontal disease, rampant decay, things like that, I often tend to recommend oral probiotics for those particular patients.
Dr. Ben: And did you say the name of the brand you recommend?
Dr. Jahan: Super Teeth.
Dr. Ben: Oh awesome, I missed that. Okay, thank you. That's amazing. I'm also curious to hear from you, what are kind of your go-to natural ways for whitening teeth, you know, for coffee drinkers and people who are using the red and blue LED whitening devices that they buy off of the internet, you know, for a couple hundred dollars. Like what do you say to that?
Dr. Jahan: So with whitening there are a lot of products out there, some effective, some not. I will say which ones to most definitely stay away from are the kind of whitening products that whiten your teeth through more like an abrading away or abrasive factors. So toothpaste or any whitening material that uses charcoal, I'm not a huge fan of. Charcoal's very abrasive. Charcoal products or a lot of patients tend to brush their teeth with baking soda, which can, well, it is a mild abrasive. So not a huge fan of anything of that sort. But with professional whitening, you'll see a lot of peroxide. Peroxide has been used for a very long time and it is a natural disinfectant. However, with that, you want to make sure that you are not rinsing or irrigating your mouth with peroxide because then again you're sterilizing, killing, killing, you don't want to do that. So how the whitening gel with peroxide works is it stays localized on your teeth and doesn't disrupt that microbiome in your mouth. So I'm a huge fan of that. One more little ingredient that you might find in some toothpaste nowadays or Dr. Jahan’s pulling oil is hydroxyapatite, which helps re-mineralize your teeth. So because you're densifying your enamel, your teeth actually start to appear more glossy and whiter after a certain period of time of use.
Dr. Ben: So then, I should probably get rid of my charcoal toothbrush that I use occasionally. I also occasionally use the Smoker's toothpaste. I'm not a smoker, but you know, but it's got a little bit of sodium lauryl sulfate in it, which obviously I'm not a fan of. Yeah, I'm curious about to hear a little bit more from you about ozone as well. I am trained in ozone and I do ozone infusions as well as injections as a naturopathic doctor, but I'd love to hear how you apply it, you know, orally for your patients.
Dr. Jahan: Yeah, so we use ozonated water predominantly. We have an ozonating machine and we use it predominantly with our periodontal patients with periodontal conditions. Those deep pockets that are hard to irrigate and keep clean, we make a little bit of ozonated water, use a syringe and irrigate those really deep pockets, great for that. Or if, let's say we take out a tooth that's been abscessed, there's an infection there, we irrigate those sockets with ozonated water. During COVID, we had patients do like a pre-rinse with ozonated water versus a lot of other practices we're using like chlorhexidine or strong disinfectants, and we opted to use ozonated water, because ozonated water, the beauty is that once it interacts with the bacteria, the byproduct is just oxygen and water, so it's very safe to use.
Dr. Ben: So you're not actually injecting it into gums. I know some dentists do that, but you're not injecting it.
Dr. Jahan: Not into the gum tissue itself, but into the pockets.
Dr. Ben: Oh awesome, awesome. Got it.
Dr. Jahan: We're very excited. We've just recently finished with our red light therapy and bright light therapy in a massage chair room. It's been about two weeks that we're now allowing patients to utilize it and it's amazing because red light therapy is so great for skin health, TMJ pain, hair loss or hair thinning, wound healing, even dementia and Parkinson's research studies have been showing great results for that. So we're a huge fan. We also have a very strong medical grade bright light therapy lamp which helps to optimize D3 or vitamin D3 a bit, helps with the mood, more energy, and really good sleep as well. And this is all done in a really awesome massage chair.
Dr. Ben: Sounds great. Well, where can people find you online so they can learn more?
Dr. Jahan: You can find us in a lot of different places, but one place that a lot of our patients tend to follow is on Instagram. We are very active on Instagram. We post a lot about holistic dentistry and my username would be joojoo, which means little birdie, everybody asks me, joojoo_DMD or you can find us on our website www.BrioSmiles.com.
Dr. Ben: Awesome Dr. Jahan, we'll make sure to link to all of those places in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day to join us.
Dr. Jahan: Thank you Dr. Reebs, of course it was my pleasure.
Dr. Ben: Well, that concludes this episode of The Modern Vital Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. We value your feedback, and if you have any questions or suggestions, please reach out to me at ben@modernvital.com. Also, please leave us a review if you enjoyed this episode on Apple or Spotify, and we look forward to having you join us next week for another exciting episode of the Modern Vital Podcast. us next week for another exciting episode of The Modern Vital Podcast.