Why I Started Using Fluoride After 28 Years
On letting go of rigid beliefs and listening to your body.
It took me a while to write this one.
I’ve been sitting on it for quite some time. Every time I carved out space to write, something else seemed to demand my attention. But this is a topic with a lot of nuance, and I wanted to give it the time and thought it deserved.
My hope is that by the end of this, you’ll better understand why I made the decision I did and have answers to most of the questions that might come up along the way.
So, let’s dive in.
I was standing in a bathroom in another country, holding a magnified mirror to my face, when I saw it.
My front tooth had gone almost translucent. There was visible decay where there had never been decay before. For a few seconds I just stared, my brain refusing to process what I was looking at. I’m a holistic health practitioner. I’ve spent almost 30 years building my life around the cleanest possible version of well-being. I had not had fluoride toothpaste in 28 years. I oil pulled. I tongue scraped. I took minerals. I had a biological & integrative dentist. I did everything right.
And there I was, postpartum, breastfeeding, exhausted, looking at my own face and seeing my teeth fall apart in real time.
That was the moment I realized something I’d been resisting for years: one part of the natural health world I’d been holding so tightly to wasn’t serving me anymore. And the harder I held on to my identity around it, the more damage I was doing to my body.
This is the story of how I changed my mind. And why, if you’ve been quietly struggling with your teeth in the natural health world, I want you to feel permission to do the same.
A few things to know before we go in
I’ve changed my mind about a few things in my life. Some big, some small. This one is probably the biggest shift I’ve made since stopping veganism, which, if you’ve ever gone through it, you know can become so tied to your identity that you stay in it long after you’ve realized it isn’t working for you.
As I get older and experience more, I’m learning to be more fluid. More open. Never say never.
There seems to be a common path many OG health influencers travel, and we all seem to go through similar, inevitable cycles: veganism, pro-metabolic, ancestral.
I predict that more and more people will come forward about their teeth and oral health journeys.
More on that later.
For years, people have come to me for health advice. Partly because I’ve dealt with very public health issues, and partly because I am a holistic health practitioner. I’ve always leaned toward natural approaches first, and only after exhausting those do I consider more conventional options. I believe there is a place for both.
What I would love to see shift is the all-or-nothing mindset that social media thrives on. You’re either this or that. If you’re a mom, a health influencer, a clean beauty founder, you must believe one thing and reject another, and once you make a choice, that’s it. You have to stick with it. But that isn’t real life. Each of us is different. Our bodies, our histories, our needs. The idea that everyone should follow the same path is not only unrealistic, it can actually prevent people from getting the support they need.
Nothing is black and white. As you know better, you can do better. And you’re allowed to share your truth along the way and change your mind about it later. Just another reason not to take every influencer’s word as bible.
Do not let your identity stop you from getting the support you need.
How I got here. Let me go back.
I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at 29, although looking back, I believe it started much earlier. RA is systemic, which means it affects the entire body, including your teeth, which most people don’t realize. It can cause dry mouth, which increases the risk of decay because saliva plays such a critical protective role.
I grew up in Chicago drinking fluoridated tap water right out of the sink. Later, we found out it wasn’t just fluoride, it was a mix of toxins in that water that affected many people in that area, contributing to autoimmune conditions and other health issues. I also grew up eating a lot of candy and didn’t have strong oral hygiene habits early on. Foundational years matter.
In my late teens, when I found holistic health, everything shifted. I stopped drinking fluoridated tap water. I stopped using fluoride toothpaste. I started oil pulling, tongue scraping, flossing more religiously. But even then, I seemed to be in the dental chair more than most in my twenties. I trusted the system and followed what I was told. I ended up with three root canals, one of which I had removed in 2019 hoping it would help my RA. It didn’t have much instant effect, but I still hope to address the other two at some point. After a cone beam scan, only one was visually infected, but I believe they all put a burden on the body.
I shared all of that on Instagram (you can see that HERE) at the time, because nobody was really talking about it yet. Root Cause — the documentary about root canals and systemic health came out in 2019 and I saw it the moment it dropped. I’ve been on the opposite side of the pendulum I’m about to swing for most of my life. I’ve been seeing a biological dentist for almost ten years.
I had my first baby at 25. Diagnosed with RA at 29. And from there I did everything I could to support my health and teeth naturally.
And when I say everything, I mean everything. Ozone. Minerals. Hydroxyapatite. Homeopathy. Remineralizing pastes. Specific probiotic strains & lozenges. Red & Blue light trays. Diet. Internal supplementation. If it existed, I tried it.
For a long time, it worked. Until it didn’t.
The last five years broke the system
The turning point was the last five years of my life. Years of hormonal stress. Pregnancy. Miscarriage. IVF. Postpartum. And then breastfeeding, which I’m still doing now, with my two-year-old. For about five years straight, my body has been in a constant state of building, losing, or sustaining life.
Hormones impact your teeth far more than most people realize. I was vaguely aware, but I thought I was doing all the right things and didn’t think too much about it.
RA added another layer with dry mouth. And over time, I became depleted.
Even though I followed a deeply nourishing, nutrient-dense way of eating — Weston A. Price-inspired, which, by the way, who happened to be a dentist — I couldn’t keep up. (More on him in a minute.)
Which brings me back to that bathroom. Magnified mirror. Translucent tooth. Signs of decay on multiple teeth. The first time I had really looked at myself in the mirror in awhile.
I was exhausted, postpartum, living abroad for my husband’s work, running my company, and completely neglecting myself. I called my biological dentist, Dr. Leedia, immediately who, over the years, has become a friend. We were actually pregnant together and supported each other through it all. She told me she sees this all the time after pregnancy and shares a wealth of knowledge on her Instagram, regarding the connection of hormones and oral health in women especially. She reassured me that I was going to be ok and gave me a few tips over the phone — nutrition, mineral balance, MI Paste, chewing xylitol gum between meals, and we made a plan to see her as soon as I got back to the States.
But it would be some time before I could get home. So out of desperation, I went back into research mode. I bought every natural tooth healing product I could find. I joined a facebook group called Tooth Remineralizing & Natural Healing. I searched every post. Went down tons of rabbit holes.
And what surprised me most was realizing I wasn’t alone.
There were so many people in the holistic, crunchy granola space who had avoided fluoride for years and were now struggling with their teeth. Some had the perfect storm I had — hormones, autoimmune, depletion. Others didn’t. They had just done what we were all told to do, and the math wasn’t adding up for them either.
There was strange comfort in knowing I wasn’t the only one. And in that comfort, something shifted in me. I decided I wasn’t going to stand on a belief that was no longer serving me. My mom, who was staying with us, and who has great teeth especially for being 78, had some fluoride toothpaste with her. I started stealing some of hers about once a week. It had been so voodoo for me for so long that I half-expected to instantly have some negative reaction. It’s nuts how deeply we hold onto these things.
Why your teeth are never just about your teeth
Before I tell you what the lab test found, I want to back up and talk about why my dentist would even run a test like that in the first place, and why your teeth, no matter how isolated they seem inside your mouth, are connected to almost every system in your body.
This isn’t new information. It’s some of the oldest information in medicine, something I learned when I removed my first root canal back in 2019.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is over three thousand years old — every tooth in your mouth lies along an energetic meridian that connects to specific organs, glands, and tissues elsewhere in the body. The meridians are sometimes called energy highways: pathways of vital force, or qi, that flow through the body and link seemingly unrelated parts together. Each tooth corresponds to one of these pathways.
(graphic above is from my dentist, Dr. Leedia)
In the 20th century, a German physician named Dr. Reinhold Voll built on this framework and helped popularize what biological dentistry now calls the meridian tooth chart — a map showing the relationship between each individual tooth and the organs, glands, joints, and systems it shares an energetic pathway with.
Here’s the general framework, simplified — knowing that there are nuances and individual variation within each pairing:
• Front teeth (incisors) are connected to the kidney and bladder meridian, and to the reproductive organs
• Canines (eye teeth) are connected to the liver and gallbladder meridian — the body’s primary detoxification organs
• Premolars (bicuspids) are connected to the lung and large intestine meridian — your systems of respiration and elimination
• Molars are connected to the stomach, spleen, and pancreas meridian — your systems of digestion, blood sugar regulation, and immune function
• Wisdom teeth are connected to the heart and small intestine meridian
When a tooth becomes infected, decayed, holds a root canal, or is affected by toxic dental materials, the theory is that the disruption travels along the meridian — potentially showing up as dysfunction in the corresponding organ, joint, or gland. And in the opposite direction, weakness or dysfunction in an organ can sometimes manifest as a problem in the corresponding tooth.
This is one of the reasons biological dentists take such a different approach than conventional dentistry. A conventional dentist treats a tooth as a structural unit — fill the cavity, pull the tooth, crown the stump, and we’re done. A biological dentist treats each tooth as part of a living system with energetic, immunological, and physiological implications that extend far beyond the jaw. The cavity isn’t just a cavity. It’s information.
For me, this conversation isn’t theoretical. This is the reason I had one of my root canals removed in 2019. I wasn’t just trying to clear out an infection, I was trying to release the burden that root canal had been placing on the meridian it was sitting on, and the system that meridian connected to. I hoped it would help my rheumatoid arthritis. It didn’t move the needle as much as I had wanted, but I still believe the work matters, and I plan to address the remaining two when the time is right.
The Western scientific community is mixed on the meridian tooth chart. There aren’t large randomized clinical trials proving that Tooth #14 reliably affects the stomach. The chart has more clinical observation and energetic medicine behind it than mechanistic Western science but it makes absolute sense to me.
Something else I want to mention here, because it comes up every time I share my root canal story: there’s a longstanding theory in the biological dentistry world that root canal–treated teeth can harbor anaerobic bacteria, and that the lymphatic drainage from the jaw, which flows extensively to the breasts may contribute to chronic inflammation in nearby tissue. The most-quoted version of this claim, which you’ll see repeated everywhere from documentaries to wellness influencers, is that “97% of breast cancer patients had a root canal on the same side as their cancer.” I looked it up and that specific statistic does not come from a peer-reviewed study. It’s been repeated for decades without a clear source, but was actually one of the driving forces for me to want to remove my root canals.
What is true is that the biological plausibility of an oral-systemic connection, including the lymphatic pathways between the jaw and the breast is increasingly being taken seriously by researchers, and that the bacterial profiles in chronically infected root canal teeth do show patterns of inflammatory burden. The 2025 MyPerioPath (the lab test my dentist ran) literature explicitly links several common oral pathogens to cancer risk, including breast, pancreatic, and colorectal.
This is why I plan to address the remaining two root canals. I trust the lymphatic connection. I trust that bacteria in dead tissue creates burden. And I trust that addressing it with a biological dentist is part of the work of supporting long-term health.
But here’s what I keep coming back to. The thing I notice about traditional medicine, across cultures, across continents, across thousands of years is that the connections it identifies tend to be eventually validated by modern science, just with a different language. The gut-brain axis was “folk wisdom” until neuroscience caught up. The vagus nerve was an obscure anatomical pathway until Stephen Porges. The microbiome was dismissed as fringe until 2010. Eastern medicine has been describing the meridian network for three thousand years. Modern research is now mapping out the bacterial pathways, inflammatory cascades, and immunological connections that link the mouth to the rest of the body in ways that look remarkably similar to what the ancient charts described.
And this is exactly where the lab test I’m about to share with you comes in.
Because what TCM has been saying for millennia about the mouth-body connection, modern science is finally able to measure.
Getting to the root cause
Once I got back to the States, I went to see Dr. Leedia and her brother Dr. Rashad Riman at their dental group, ELEV8 Biological Dentistry. They evaluated everything, and yes, they saw rapid decay since they’d last seen me when I was pregnant. Real cavities. Demineralization. Gum issues. The kind of changes that are devastating. Dr. Rashad confirmed what I had already begun to notice: he sees a lot of patients in the natural health world struggling with oral health issues.
Part of getting to the root cause was running a test called MyPerioPath — a molecular analysis of periodontal and systemic pathogens that does so much more than tell you what bacteria are in your mouth. It connects oral health to broader risks like rheumatoid arthritis, heart disease, stroke, pregnancy complications, diabetes, and even Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Because everything is connected.
My results showed.
Bear with me. I also share my entire oral health protocol below, along with the mind-blowing tooth-brushing lesson my dentist gave me.
