We discuss in this podcast:

• The role of P-Gingivalis
• Oral DNA tests
• Anti-CCP and other tests
• How Robert found immediate pain relief with the Paddison Program
• How he came to know the link between oral hygiene and RA
• How after an oral hygiene intervention his pain levels significantly dropped down
• Different RA histories call for different remedies
• Studies in support of this link
• Water pick and other tools for oral hygiene

Clint – Welcome to the podcast today, and boy do we have an interesting story. Throughout the years, I’ve been sharing transformational stories for people who’ve changed their diet to exercise, their supplementation and stress levels. And for people who have used medications to bring inflammation under control. And we have heard so many different ways in which we can reduce inflammation. But today, I’ve got a guest who’s going to introduce us to a whole new way of addressing rheumatoid arthritis. And it’s an untapped area of information that rarely, if ever, gets discussed. And that is around dental or oral hygiene. So my guest, Robert, joins us from California today. He is a very high profile photographer who flies around the world and does some, you know, photo shoots at a very high level. And I take no credit for the direction from which it went from there, because he found some studies around oral hygiene. And the way in which the certain bacteria that can exist in our mouth can influence the peptides or the small style proteins in our body, and it can aggravate or even cause rheumatoid arthritis. And he’s going to share with us today the way in which he went about improving dramatically the health of his gums and the way in which that incredibly resolved the symptoms of his rheumatoid arthritis. And so, Robert, thanks for joining us today.

Robert – Thank you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate everything you do, and happy to share the story and hope it helps some people.

Clint – I think it will. You know, I think it will dramatically open up people’s minds to a new possible path that they can explore. And whilst people might not get the same life changing results that you got, they may see improvements if they go about improving their oral hygiene.

Clint – So before we get into the science behind the connection with the bacteria in the mouth and rheumatoid arthritis. And before we get into how you actually went about resolving your bad oral health.
Let’s whine back and talk about the situation you were in prior to going through these procedures and so forth. Tell us about your diagnosis and the sort of medication path that you were looking at going on.

Robert – Well, I had been on the road, actually, when I discovered these symptoms. I was in Asia and I was eating a very high protein diet. Some convoluted keto diet. You know, it obviously wasn’t right for me. And
I started noticing these funny feelings in my fingers and toes. And it was odd because this finger, which feels funny and then the corresponding toe my other foot would feel funny the same way. And like just achy and weird. And I’m not usually one to let these things go because I think some of my friends would call me a hypochondriac. And so I went online and tried to figure out what this could possibly be because it just kind of kept getting a little bit worse every few days or so.I kept looking and every time that I would describe the symptoms to the Internet, the Internet would tell me it’s rheumatoid arthritis. And every time I would see that I would hope that it wasn’t, because the more that I read about it, the more that it was the last thing that I would want to be diagnosed with. The online, the prognosis is very grim, and as you know, I mean, it’s all out there. So I wasn’t entirely happy with that, and when I got back home, things progressively kept getting worse. And about fifteen or twenty years ago, I started running my own blood tests before I actually go see doctors just so that I would at least have some kind of a handle on what might possibly be wrong with me. And so I found out that there were these tests that you could take for rheumatoid arthritis. And the most definitive one that I found was the anti-CCP test, which was by all accounts, it had very low false-positive rates. I thought maybe I should take this. And so I took it and I
figured it would probably come back negative, and I was all wrong. Unfortunately, it came back very positive. In fact, it was in the hundreds. So it was quite high. And then I kept on studying the test and I started looking online to see if there was anything that I was doing that might have caused a false positive on the test or anything like that, and nothing. So I figured it’s a very high likelihood that I might have this RA.

Robert – And where I was living at the time, there were no rheumatologists. And we were recommended to me just by reputation or by patient reviews or anything. So I founded rheumatologists in Santa Monica, California, who is highly recommended. And I went and saw him and he did a whole battery of other tests. And he saw the anti-CPP tests. And it came back just as high as the other one. And he said, I’m going to say that you have RA. Even though we did scans on your fingers and your hands and didn’t find any damage or anything, which is good. But I asked him, was there anything I can do? And he said, no, there’s
nothing you can do. And I said, is there anything you can do? He said, No, there’s nothing I can do either. And it just doesn’t ring very well with me when people tell me things like this where they say things like there’s nothing you can do. So I was very dejected and all he wanted to do was basically put me on the drugs when things got worse. I studied the drugs and there is a drug company, I think, give you the sense that there’s some kind of curative aspect to them. Where are they think if you don’t take this, you’re gonna get worse faster. Like there’s some kind of delay process or is this in your experience to?

Clint – Yeah. Yes, certainly. You know, they allowed to use marketing techniques that are successful. So if we think that thinking about the future is one of the most powerful ways to influence a buyer who especially with someone with an autoimmune condition, if you say you’re going to be worse in the future and where will you be in one year or five years from now? We do tend to go towards the worst case and that’s very frightening. And then we will tend to take action. And to be on the flip side of that. I think that it’s fairly well known that the studies show that these drugs do tend to provide better outcomes than uncontrolled disease, where people don’t know anything about what they’re doing and they’re not exercising and they’re eating poorly. You know, you’re gonna do better. But yes, that’s right. There is there’s definitely.

Robert – It seems like it’s a scare tactic too.

Clint – Well yeah. For sure.

Robert – So I thought that was something that was a rather that I did not want to go unless I really got desperate and had to. And that’s when I found your program. I adopted your program probably in about January, late January or early February of last year, and the first thing I did was I think one of your recommendations was basically just fast for two or three days. And I tried that and I felt better probably I would say. You know, right out of the box, I probably felt maybe 50 percent better. You know, just everything sort of seemed to quiet down. And I stayed on your program for a month, month and a half, two months. But while I was doing it, I was studying more and more about this whole idea that there’s no cure for this. I didn’t know where I was going with it, I was literally listening to a podcast that was forty-five
minutes long after hundreds of other podcasts. And I was falling asleep listening to this podcast, like nodding off.

Clint – Can I just interrupt and say it isn’t one of mine?

Robert – No. And the guy that had that was doing it should not take offense, because ultimately what he said woke me up immediately because he said something like, you know, it’s been known that or it’s known now or something, that this pathogen in your oral mucosa called (inaudible) causes this process of the (inaudible) of these enzymes in your mouth, that eventually leads to molecular mimicry in your
joints and causes rheumatoid arthritis. He said it right there on the podcast. People make a lot of claims, but. I’m going to latch on to this and I don’t know why that’d be. It rang true with me because I have horrible at that time oral hygiene. It just never stuck with me, and when I go to the dentist, they have all markers at my mouth and, you know or their next job.

Clint – Why don’t I jump in at this part of the story and tell folks what podcast that was in case they’d like to listen to it? And what I’ve done is I’ve actually gone to the liberty of having the portion that you’re quoting here or referencing transcribed. And I’ve paraphrased it just a little bit and I’m going to read that out. So we sort of save people having to go often and check out this video, because also, as he said, it’s very long. And the portion that we’re talking about here is towards, you know, the 40-minute mark or something.

Clint – But this topic, as you said, it’s about the concept. When we go to get our blood tested for diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, we have our rheumatoid factor measured and we have our anti-CCP markers done, just as you mentioned before, that yours were highly elevated. So with that in mind, here’s what Dr. David Brady said on the Microbiota and Auto Disease episode on the Rational Wellness Podcast, episode
number 41, which can be found on YouTube. He said If you have bad oral hygiene and you have an overgrowth of P-Gingivalis, which is the most common organism to cause gum disease or periodontal disease. We know that P Gingivalis produces an enzyme that actually will citrullinate peptide. Now let me stop there because it’s gotten technical at the end, that’s probably over the head of most of us. And I had to research this myself, which is why I feel that probably is the case. So citrullinate turns out to basically mean chop or change or amend or adjust and host peptides host means us. So where the host of these peptides and a peptide is just a small cluster of amino acids. So if we remember that amino acids make up proteins and all proteins have these building blocks of amino acids. But a peptide is like a mini protein, it only has between two or three. I forget what my notes here, between 2 and 50 amino acids in a chain. Once we have more than 50 amino acids in a chain, we’re no longer a peptide and we become a protein. So that’s what’s going on there. So he says we know that P Gingivalis again one of the most common organisms to cause gum disease produces an enzyme which will actually citrullinate host peptides or break down the structure of our small style proteins called peptides. So it modifies (inaudible). I’ve never said that out loud. I’ve only read it. It’s one of the when you buy it, it’s L-Arginine their name. Do you know how to pronounce it better than me?

Robert – I don’t know. I think it’s Arginine. But Argentine, it’s another nine and.

Clint – It does. Let’s go Arginine.

Robert – It’s (Inaudible) all along anyways.

Clint – Arginine. So you normally come in a supplement, that’s L-Arginine. Okay, so it modifies that particular amino acid on host proteins and stimulates them and makes them no longer your own structure. And then they look foreign to the immune system and the proteins that they cytrel and
they are things like collagen, vimentin, fibrinogen and all the things that make up the semantic structures of joints. So you’re really susceptible to developing autoimmune arthritis like rheumatoid arthritis. And that’s why diagnostically the blood test includes rheumatoid factor, but also the anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide test or anti-CCP test. And he says, well, what’s creating the citrullination of these peptides that has been understood for a while. We’re now finding it out to be the organism this P Gingivalis growing in the mouth, creating this enzyme, and that is facilitating the protein modification.

Robert – I’m glad you figured that out.

Clint – And when I heard this?

Robert – When I heard It rang through because of my dental health. And it sounded like something that actually, you know if I use my kind of junk science, mind it in logic, you figure, well, if you get rid of that,
does that get rid of the disease? And I’ve never seen that written anywhere. And I took it and I ended up scouring the Internet for studies that were done on anything related to that. And I did find them, but they were very small studies that were done on like ten or twelve people. Maybe back in the 90s. And they were people that had rheumatoid arthritis. And the studies claimed that a lot of people that have RA, especially at my age, which is 62, have concurrently for oral hygiene or periodontal health. And so they found these
people that had both and they did this very invasive procedure on them called route planning and scaling, which is where they actually go under your gums because p gingivalis is very hard to get rid of.
There is another thing that I found out. It’s not something you just take a drug for antibiotics or unfortunately, it’s very resistant to antibiotics. And as you know, antibiotics are not a good thing to be
taking when you have an autoimmune disease anyway.

Robert – And so I was trying to figure out how people get rid of it. First of all. So that procedure is one of the ways that they do it. And they did it on those people and the test results were very promising. But the
studies were not, they were not continued or they said that they needed to be continued to come up with a bigger sampling of people to actually make a statement and make that connection between that one
thing and the other thing, which is that the p gingivalis and then and then reducing it in the oral mucosa to the point where it actually had a positive effect on the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. And also I couldn’t find any studies that were done after that time period. And I will go back and try to find those studies again so that your readers or your viewers can reference them. They’re not easy to find, though. But from that, I ended up just saying to myself, how do I find out if I have this p gingivalis.

Clint – And what you’re about to go into is the most interesting part yet. But you did send me a study from 2014, which we will. Let’s go over that after we hear your experience now with how you got rid of your gum
disease. And I will read it just portions of it out because it matches exactly your experience that you’re about to describe.

Robert – Yeah. I took an oral DNA test. And from what I can tell, it hasn’t been out for more than one or two years. And it tests for 11 different pathogens in your mouth. And it’s a 30-second test that you take. You have to go to a dentist to take it. And it’s two hundred dollars and you can order yourself and have a dentist administer it. And when you get the results back, it’s six pages of data and advice and taking these pathogens in and assigning them different disease states such as heart disease. And there’s a whole can of worms besides rheumatoid arthritis about this that I won’t go into. But there are other levels of inflammation that are being found out that are coming from your mouth as well. Anyway, out of the eleven pathogens, I was above the therapeutic threshold and nine of them and p gingivalis were off the charts so high, I don’t even know if it was measurable. And on the test itself, it says this is how you try to control p gingivalis because it’s not easy to get rid of. It’s what they call a biofilm and it really does literally stick to your gums. And also on the test, they take these different pathogens and they assign different diseases to them. And it says right on the test, p gingivalis causes rheumatoid arthritis and that’s what it said.

Clint – I know you showed me the results and it’s a very interesting results page that provided. You’ll give us the link to this particular website that you use to go and get this test done in a moment and we’ll post it on the show notes so people can go to the Rheumatoid Solutions.com post for this episode and get all of the information we’re sharing here and links and everything.

Robert – Right.

Robert – So the thing that they recommended the most was this mechanical thing that I mentioned before, which is this root planning and scaling, which is a very invasive procedure for each quadrant of your mouth. It’s two and a half hours in a chair. And as you can imagine, it’s a false one.

Clint – And yet you went ahead and did this?

Robert – Well, I went to a dentist that my wife had gone to, and I didn’t go to a holistic dentist. I went to a regular dentist because this dentist, according to my wife, was the most kind of thorough dentist that
she’s ever been to. And when she saw me she said, (Inaudible). Because she said, you don’t just have that problem you have other problems. But we know the inflammation Believe it or not, we made the connection too. And we’ve been talking to doctors about this for years. And there’s not a whole lot of response from the other side. Don’t ask me why. But she said this will take care of that problem as
well. And I said, well, the first thing I want to do is this replanning and you survive. If you want to do that, that’s fine. And I really don’t want to do it but, I will.

Clint – Tell us about the experience. Tell us how they go about it, how you medicated prior to the treatment and why it takes so long?

Robert – Yeah. Once see a dentist and then they, the person that actually does this is a hygienist. And this girl that I saw was and she’s very young. And I thought if I tell her about this inflammation, she probably
just say. She actually knew all about it, too. And she knew more about it. I think that maybe my dentist that she knew at least as much. And that was very encouraging because she said, I’ve seen people come not just with your issues, but with other issues. And they’ve actually come out of the chair. You know, it come back to us feeling better. And I thought, ok, that’s interesting. So I went ahead and did the first quadrant thing, which is, two and a half hours and they give you like three or four injections of this numbing stuff. And you are in the chair for a long time. And then it’s not really painful. It’s extremely uncomfortable and just being there that long anyway. And they literally go under your gums and they say they’re using these braiding tools to get rid of this pathogen. You know, not just p gingivalis, but other things that, you know, that are a result of poor dental health. And some people, I guess, have a lot of pain afterward, I didn’t have a lot of pain afterward when the numbing stuff wore off. But after about three days. I wasn’t thinking
about anything, but I just thought to myself, do I feel better? Like do I feel less symptomatic in terms of the RA? And I thought I did, but I thought I’m probably just to see myself that it is better. And it was very subtle, whatever it was. So I was supposed to be scheduled to do another quadrant thing. And low and behold, like a patient had canceled and gleefully my dentist office called me and said, you can come in and do all three quatrains at once. And I thought, well, what could be more fun than that? And so I went in and
I did I went for the whole nine yards and they did nine injections. And some of my stuff didn’t actually wear off until the next day, which I know I thought it was not going to wear off.

Robert – And it was horrible for six hours or whatever it was. you know, I can’t say if it was great. But, you know, no pain, no gain. And again, I waited another few days and for almost not overnight, but probably within a day or two. My symptoms had gone down 80 percent, I would say, at least. Like it was almost I felt nothing. And believe me, I was pretty encouraged by that. So that was probably around April no, May I think was May in June of last year. And that held pretty much that way with the advent of my also taking much more care of my teeth and getting a water pit, getting floss and stuff, getting there’s a specific brand of rinse called CLOSYS that is especially good for this problem. And also they make toothpaste. And also I’ve been doing these five different things every day, you know, at least twice a day. Since that time and that 80 percent symptomatic held true until December of just this December, and then I went to see the dentist because she wanted to do all this other work and she wanted to start in on it. And the first thing she did was replace these crowns. And she said, you know, under these crowns, you can also harbor this inflammation. And it’s not just, you know, because we can’t get to it. Once you have a crown put over something, there’s all kinds of stuff that happens underneath it and you can’t even get to it yourself. And so she replaced these crowns and starting probably around the 20th of December or so, I was 100 percent symptom-free. And I’ve been that way since to this day. And I still have more work to do. But in the interim, I also asked her to do another oral DNA test. And I just got that back about two weeks ago, and the p gingivalis was a third of what it was before some of the pathogens were undetectable. Where they had been completely like 10 copies for whatever they used for DNA testing. So obviously these levels have gone down considerably. But I also ran another anti-CCP tests, and it’s now twelve where it was one hundred and forty-one the last time I took the test.

Clint – Yeah, exactly, I was going to use the word speechless because if ever there was a situation where people should sit up and pay attention it’s this. Now before we start I know that you talked about some particular products and I’d like it to just go through those a little bit more detail, I’m sure people who are listening to this say, well, you know, this is fascinating. I really now want to get to the dentist. I really want to run it. An oral DNA test to find out whether I’m not have got all these bad bacteria in my mouth.

Robert – I have a couple small caveat theories and (Inaudible) theories and that. I don’t know if this is your experience, but from what I all of the things that I’ve read and I’ve spent many hundreds of hours online
and I don’t know if I’m reading the right things or not, but from what I can tell. RA starts for different reasons with different people. Do you think that’s the case?

Clint – Where I was going to go with that is not everyone is going to even if they went through the same experience you did with the gum cleaning, going to have the same kind of resolution. And therefore, I completely agree. Will everyone have a contribution to their inflammation from p gingivalis? No one knows. But should we try and have the best possible oral hygiene that we can? Based on what we have seen from your experience being an extreme case? Absolutely.

Robert – Well, according to what David Brady said, everybody has p gingivalis in their mouth. It’s just that people have different levels of it. And obviously I had extreme levels of it. But my theory kind of coincides
with my age and also my dental health history. My age being 62 and the fact that people of advancing age have worse dental hygiene in general and not my hygiene per se, but their oral health declines
because with everything else. Your bone structure and things like that, they just start to deteriorate. And so I don’t know how much of that is related because that one study that I found on that one guy that I can I don’t know.

Clint – I have it in front of me.

Robert – He’s exactly my age as well. And so I don’t know if it’s age-related, because when I started feeling these symptoms of R.A., they sounded different for me than they sounded maybe for you. I thought yours was more acute. Did it happen?

Clint – Absolutely, mine was acute, very aggressive and very quick development.

Robert And 20’s or 30’s? or.

Clint – 31.

Robert – And mine was more slow and insidious. And that’s what they call from what I can tell. That’s what they call late-onset, meaning that it’s something that starts later in life. And it has a different kind of step off It starts from manifesting itself. So I don’t know how much of that applies.

Clint – I can tell you that everyone who is learning about this right now is going to be more interested in what’s going on in their mouth, there’s no doubt about it. When you were telling me this stuff on email and just said, Hey, Clint, by the way, and it was so casual as I oh, by the way, this is what I did, and now I have no detectable symptoms. I can’t feel any inflammation in my joints. And this is what I did. Like, my eyes were popping out of my computer because I followed the links, I went and watched that interview that you talked about on the one with Dr. David Brady. I know I read the study that I’m just about to reference it right now. And I thought this is fascinating stuff. And it’s taken me a while to get you on the podcast, but I’m glad I was persistent because it’s so valuable. And whether or not people can get dramatic or mild results by being more but by paying more attention to their oral health, every little bit helps. And so this
is a wonderful discussion to have. So let’s look at, …

Robert – I think casual about it, because I didn’t want to come off like it was some sensational thing. Like it was something that was that I was inflating or that I was trying to make money on or anything like that. I have no vested interest in any of this. As far as you know, the future in curing people of anything. But I do want this information to get out there because I want other people to realize the benefit when they can.

Clint – And so do I, I said just before we hit record on this. And I think your audience can tell. I’m just so excited. Because I think this is absolutely the most awesome stuff to share. So a study that gives a report of an almost identical scenario as Roberts is published in the Journal of Medicine. And Robert found and shared this with me, and it’s December 2014, volume 93, issue 27 page 195. But the title of the article is, “Could early rheumatoid arthritis resolve after periodontist treatment only?” And the author is Salemi and
others.

Clint – And let’s have a look at just the sentence that I’ve highlighted out of the abstract. After its treatment, arthritis remission has been observed in the absence of specific RA therapy. Once again, arthritis remission. So this person, who’s a 61-year-old male patient presented with Migrant arthritis associated with antibodies. So he’s got anti-CCP elevation and then has gone through the same treatment. And it said this could be explained by the enzymatic action of p gingivalis, probably leading to break tolerance to collagen. So meaning the body tolerates its own collagen, but then it breaks out
or becomes rebellious against it as a result of the enzymatic action of this central anation process that we talked about earlier. And that’s been published, that was 2014. So your situation could have been published also. And it. could have been almost this exact case.

Robert – So, yeah, it wasn’t monitored by anybody with a degree.

Clint – But I think hopefully, this will reach more people than this study did because as I say, like this stuff’s just not talked about very much. This is a new area of discussion for the rheumatoid arthritis
community. And hopefully it becomes a regular discussion from this point on. So I do feel wall still humility levels that are remarkable. You’ve done something that’s very valuable, and whilst I know that you don’t seek for any kind of recognition or know anything further from it, just sharing this has been fabulous. And I
appreciate that very much.

Robert – I think just having that work on yourself, first of all, is a reward in itself and seeing how it was and then another case as well. And some other there are some other more recent articles in 2014 that just talk in general about oral health and not just RA, but other forms of inflammation and other bad stuff like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. They’re drawing all these parallels now that they were not before. And so it’s a fairly recent revelation.

Clint – You mentioned Closys that’s a brand name of a particular mouthwash product that I went and bought after you told me that that was one of the recommendations for anti-p gingivalis. So it’s mouthwash as you said, the Closys brand also has a toothpaste. That that. I also have still some here after we were in contact with. The pick I don’t know what that is, I know they use them at dentists. What is this pick that you have?

Robert – Well, a water pick is it’s basically just a. It can be a rubber nozzle or it can be a hard nozzle, but it’s a very fine nozzle that you use around your gums to basically blow out food particles and plaque and
other things. And it uses a fair amount of pressure and it’s not painful, but they highly recommend it. When they talk about, you know, especially people with deep pockets, which is where they measure their pockets in your gums in my pockets were when I first went to the dentist, they were in the sixes and sevens and now they’re in threes and fours, which is a marked improvement. It still could be better, but it’s considerably better than it was before. And I also had a portable water pick that I travel with. It’s just a
small a portable toothbrush, except it has a reservoir for water and it just charges and you use it. It holds 30 seconds of worth of water. And it does exactly the same thing as the one that you might have at home. And these are not real expensive devices I think you can buy one for about fifty dollars or something.

Robert – I think that, the flossing and the other mouth stuff. There are other things that they mention on the oral DNA tests like there’s a thing that used to be an ingredient and mouthwash, which no longer is for
some reason called chlorhexidine. And my dentist does not advocate that for some reason, and I can’t remember why she also does not advocate using antibiotics. However. Right on the test, it says, here’s another thing you can do, which is take a probiotic and open the capsule and swish it around in the mouth. And apparently this has some kind of effect on these pathogens. And I was not only told that
by that test, but a person that I had been talking to about R.A. who has R.A. and has had it for many, many years, told me about this as well. And I don’t know exactly what part of the conversation she mentioned that, but it didn’t click with me anything about oral health. It was just. If you had a probiotic, you should try to put it in your mouth and swish it around. OK (inaudible) just swallow it. Well, it didn’t click with me that you’re actually putting this right on your mouth.

Clint – So I first heard about this after I’d already intuitively had this concept on someone else’s podcast. I was on the Ben Greenfield fitness blog and one of his podcasts that he does a morning routine, an oral
routine where he does a oil pulling. You may have heard of oil pulling in the past. Popular with late-stage cancer patients to try and elongate life is where it’s the circles that I’ve heard about it in the past. And then he would empty, as you said, like a probiotic capsule into his mouth. And my first thoughts about this is that the bacteria in our mouth typically aren’t a carbon copy of the sort of bacteria we have in our digestive tract. And so I researched the sort of bacteria that’s meant to proliferate in our mouth and they aren’t different sorts of strains of bacteria. And I ordered and have run out of a probiotic that I was using in my mouth with specific Salla virus strains, similar sounding to saliva. And yeah, I think you can also explore this path as well and put probiotics in your mouth. The current probiotics that I use is one of the classics, bifido bacteria lactobacillus kind of mixture of strains. And whilst I was happily swishing with that for some time it always did cross my mind that I don’t know if these strains necessarily should be in my mouth and
whether or not this is something that’s directly beneficial or we’re just really missing the point.

Clint – So, yeah, I mean, do we need to know? Well, we’d love to know the sort of. Well, let me go on to say that when you try and buy oral bacteria for probiotics, they don’t come in a really broad spectrum the way that the ones we take for our gut, you don’t get 8-16 strains, It’s like one or two strains. And also that doesn’t sit well with me either because it’s just so unnatural to have a huge ecosystem of microbes and then only supplement one in an enormous quantity. It just doesn’t also sit well with me. But what I like to
do above all, is to make sure that I finish my meal with a big mouthful of leafy greens. And so the last thing that’s all over my teeth as I kind of play the mock-up game with the tongue in the saliva for the next half an hour is something that is going to be at least not sugary because I think that if anything can be certainly agreed upon as counterproductive as leaving a lot of sugar on the teeth.

Robert –  (inaudible) actually. I start with the big salad then go from there, so maybe I should switch it off.

Clint – Oh no, it’s all good as long as well, at least in my opinion, as long as the last couple of bites that you have, if possible, some leafy greens. I think that’s also a great place to leave off your meal just in terms of the food that you’re leaving, the microbes at the end of the meal that’s sitting around the most.

Robert – Did you do an oral DNA test?

Clint – I did. And you’ve piqued my interest to go and get it done again. I didn’t have a dentist here in Florida at the time when you and I spoke. Now I have a dentist, I went and had a clean and she had to look in my mouth and she saw no evidence of periodontal or gum disease. And so I’m like, oh, that’s cool. But of course, I would like to know more and I’d like to know what my levels of p gingivalis are. And we will definitely share that link to the test company that you used on them on the show notes of this episode. And yeah I’m only just the click of a button away from actually doing it. And I think I might. You know, I think I’d like to know.

Robert – Yeah. You know, even if they can’t find anything physically wrong, there’s a possibility that.

Clint – Is it still could be there? Yeah. And then and then I love how you married up the connection between your levels of that bacteria in the DNA test to the anti-CCP levels. And I think that that is just fascinating. And yeah, I love that.

Robert – Yeah. It’s from all of the stuff that I started listening to or paying attention to when this all started where everybody said once you take the anti-CCP test, it’ll always be the same number, it will never go
down, the rheumatologist told me that. And I thought something just doesn’t sit right here.

Clint I actually have that in writing from a lab, from a rheumatologist. Who’s written the notes on a female’s lab report, then says do not need to measure this test ever again. This marker will always be elevated. And I have that written by a rheumatologist on a lab report of a female who only sent me her labs last week. Who’s a new member of our rheumatoid support group. And I actually saw that name like that’s wrong. I mean, it’s not.

Robert – I actually know there was a podcast that you had a woman on. She was a young woman from California. Like around Riverside or Moreno Valley or somewhere around there. And she had done your diet and her CCP levels went way down.

Clint – Normalized, back into the normal range.

Robert – Yeah, but like almost in the normal range or back in the normal range.

Clint – Yeah. Her as if we’re told about the same person went into the normal range and I’ve absolutely seen some people get their anti-CCP test from elevation into the normal range.

Robert – She has a taste for Mexican food that her diet was sort of skewed with a lot of avocado and tomatoes. It sounded really good. So yeah that’s why. She said that and she said that it was the last thing she showed her Rheumatologist’s on her visit when she took the test again. And I can’t remember what the reaction was from the doctor, but I think it was some somewhat baffled.

Clint – Yeah, baffled. I do want to add that it’s not common. It’s very uncommon even with folks who get their C-reactive protein normal, feel great and asymptomatic. It’s still uncommon, very uncommon for it to go anti-CCP back to normal. And maybe, it’s because of the things that we’ve covered or some of the things we’ve covered today. And maybe a factor is this p gingivalis, which is extremely hard to get rid of
completely from the mouth. And if p gingivalis is a contributing factor towards the autoimmunity activity, then maybe that’s why.

Robert – Right. Is the leaky gut thing or, you know, I’m not saying you’re right, maybe, but that that whole side of things is that somehow unrelated to this and it’s a completely different mechanism to start this
disease state. Now, is it something else entirely or is it somehow related?

Clint – I think that every comment at the end of every published publication says this needs to be investigated further. I’m going to run with that disclaimer on that question. It’s obviously complicated, but my initial thoughts on this, which may change over the years, is that these may actually be two different contributing factors. And we may have p gingivalis doing its thing, being housed in the mouth and we may have this other activity that’s occurring on a localized level inside the joints and the attack of the immune system to eliminate these polysaccharides, these bacteria proteins themselves in the joints, therefore causing free radicals to be released at the that the joint and cellular level. Therefore, in turn, creates some oxidative stress and deterioration of the surrounding tissue. I think could be a different issue than the one we’ve described or heard from you today. But the bacteria, it’s a translocation of the bacteria. Bacteria in the mouth can end up anywhere in the body.

Robert – Yeah, right. So I think that’s the point they were trying to make is that this is fairly profound. And it’s something, again, that’s not been talked about a lot. But it’s certainly not something. I think that a doctor is going (inaudible). When I came back to my home in California to see some local doctors about this, none of them had anything good to say about what was going to happen with me. You know all were like, you’re gonna be on these drugs. And there’s not much else we can say, you know. So they didn’t have it. They certainly weren’t going to say something about let’s check out your oral hygiene.

Clint – Well, I’m glad you did that’s for sure.

Robert – I am, too. I’m glad I was still awake for that, a bit of that.

Clint – Well, I think we’ve come to the end of our discussion. Thank you very much for coming on today. Was there anything that we missed or you feel like would be really a crucial first add before we wrap it up?

Robert – Now that I thank you for putting it in my head that this is not only going to go one way and sometimes you just need that little bit of hope. And I think that kept me going and told me that there’s there might be something out there.

Clint – There’s always another rock to turn over. There’s always another rock to look under.

Robert – Thank you!

Clint – You’re very welcome. Thanks so much for sharing today, Robert. It’s been absolutely so enjoyable to cover this material because it’s new. And you can imagine a lot of the stuff that I talk about with other
guests is similar variations of what other people have achieved or accomplished. But what you’ve done, this is fresh. It’s new, at least for me and for my audience. And for that, we’re very grateful. And if I ever need some extremely high-quality professional photos done, I’ll be in touch, too. Great. So are you, do you do any private stuff or is it all company corporate work?

Robert – I got into this as a college student a long, long time ago, kind of out of desperation because I was changing my major a few times and I ended up having to take a class photography. They were actually forcing me to take it because I was a journalism major at the time. And so I got into it, sort of just completely without any interest in it at all. And the professor that happened to be teaching the class took the first photograph that I did for him and sent it into a competition of forty thousand students that I came in eighth place or something. And he said this is something you might want to pursue. I think you can do this. And I thought, well, I have nothing else I can do. And honestly, it was not like this thing that I’ve always had this lifelong hobby, passion for. As a kid or anything like that, it was basically I’m going to latch onto this because somebody said I might be able to do it. And I got into it for that reason. Now, that’s not
why the reward that I get out of it now, but it’s I got into it from a commercial standpoint, from an advertising standpoint. And so all of this stuff that I’ve done for work has been very much commercial
stuff. But I do have an interest in fine art and work that’s done for not for commercial reasons. But it’s not something that I should other people really. Yeah. Yeah.

Clint – Well, I’m glad now that with your much-improved health, you’ll be able to continue to enjoy a lot more.

Robert – Yeah, I really I’m glad about that too. So it’s a very physical thin actually, it could have been compromised debates.

Clint – Absolutely. All right. Well, thanks so much, Robert.

Robert – Thank you!