What if you could take steps to ensure that your child was protected against cavities, mouth or tooth infections, mouth sores, gut dysbiosis, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s disease? You can! Friendly mouth bacteria can do all of that for your child. Build your child’s healthy oral microbiome before, during, and after pregnancy. Breastmilk gives a child a foundation of healthy bacteria that will colonize the gut, the mouth, the skin, and the rest of the body. Nature has designed a magnificent system whereby a mother passes on her microbiome to her child through vaginal childbirth and breastfeeding. Antibiotics, C-section births, and infant formula interfere with the process of transferring mother’s microbiome to her child. Watch the video for tips to promote a healthy oral microbiome if vaginal birth and/or breastfeeding are not possible for you and your baby. Even if your child is older, you can still change your child’s oral microbiome for the better with diet, probiotics, and by avoiding unnecessary antibiotics.
Video Transcript
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The oral microbiome is the good bacteria in our mouth.
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Hey, guys. Cass Nelson Dooley here, author of Heal Your Oral Microbiome and integrative and functional medicine consultant. And we’re talking today about how to get our kids healthier, how to give them a healthy oral microbiome. And this all comes down to mom, actually, for better or for worse. Mom, something else on your plate. Okay, now oral microbiome.
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But actually we can thank our moms for our oral microbiomes, the good bacteria that live in our mouths.
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Mom is critical because 85% of babies at six months have a very similar oral microbiome to their mothers. It doesn’t stop there because by 18 years old, their oral microbiome is
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still more similar to their mom’s than to their dad’s. So getting moms set up for a healthy oral microbiome is so important even before conception/ if possible.
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And if mom has oral infections going on when she’s pregnant, it can create real risks. Kind of scary risks for the
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growing baby in her womb and also children down the road, because it affects not just oral health, but systemic health, heart, lungs, gut appendix. There are various
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different things that
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impact the body when the oral microbiome is out of balance.
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So we also, you know, for many, many years we thought that the womb was sterile and that babies were completely sterile when they were born. Is it true? Not at all. Turns out that babies are floating around in amniotic fluid during pregnancy.
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What are the bacteria in that
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fluid? It is oral bacteria from the mom.
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Wow. It’s so incredible. So how mom’s health
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is in the mouth really impacts the baby.
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The things that we think are so important for setting up your child for a healthy oral microbiome diet; whole foods diet, low in sugar, low in refined carbs, low in packaged foods, lots of plants,
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colorful fruits and vegetables. And that goes for mom before giving birth,
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babies that are starting to eat and children that are growing and developing. We also want to encourage vaginal birth that keeps an oral microbiome very healthy and gut microbiome and introduces all kinds of good bacteria to the baby.
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Of course, breastfeeding is critically important. It provides good bacteria and the food that they need and immune factors. This is great for setting a child up for a good oral microbiome and for overall great health later in life.
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Avoid unnecessary antibiotics. This, you know, can be devastating to the microbiome. I know it’s required. Sometimes we don’t want to do it
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but we have to. But it’s very important to keep them to the bare minimum. We want to keep antibiotics to the bare minimum only when they are 100% indicated. And if the child is having recurrent antibiotics or the mom, then there is a deeper infection going on.
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There’s a deeper imbalance that really needs to be addressed with an integrative and functional medicine practitioner.
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If your child is mouth breathing or potentially has tongue tie, you know, keep an eye out for those things because they can affect the oral microbiome, too. So you can check out more tips on my blog, Your Child’s Oral Microbiome, A Key to Lifelong Health.
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There’s so much there. Even if you can’t breastfeed or you can’t have a vaginal birth, I have
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some other options for you. And I want to thank Super Chief for sponsoring this live blog and this video. They have a dental probioticthat is wonderful. It tastes great. My kid loves it, but it contains Streptococcus salivarius BLIS M18, which is a beneficial probiotic for the mouth, actually one that colonizes the mouth of babies really early.
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And it decreases cavities, it decreases bad breath and it decreases tooth stains. So it’s yummy, it’s healthy, it’s safe, and it’s something that can encourage your child’s
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oral microbiome. So check out more tips on my blog. And good luck with this.
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It’s
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a great investment for your child, for their oral health now and for their long-term good health.
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Thanks.
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Good bacteria helps you defeat the bad bacteria. And, if you eat healthy food, it’ll make the good bacteria stronger. And if you eat non-healthy food like candy, it will make the bad by the skin stronger
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I know it tastes good, but you don’t want to eat a lot of it.
Cass Nelson-Dooley, MS, is a researcher, author, educator, and laboratory consultant. She studied medicinal plants in the rain forests of Panama as a Fulbright Scholar and then launched a career in science and natural medicine. Early on, she studied ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, and drug discovery at the University of Georgia and AptoTec, Inc. She joined innovators at Metametrix Clinical Laboratory as a medical education consultant helping clinicians use integrative and functional laboratory results in clinical practice. She owns Health First Consulting, LLC, a medical communications company with the mission to improve human health using the written word. Ms. Nelson-Dooley is an oral microbiome expert and author of Heal Your Oral Microbiome. She was a contributing author in Laboratory Evaluations for Integrative and Functional Medicine and Case Studies in Integrative and Functional Medicine. She has published case studies, book chapters, and journal articles about the oral microbiome, natural medicine, nutrition, laboratory testing, obesity, and osteoporosis.
