The Wellness Brew - Issue 29

I spent last weekend at the Runningman Festival representing Front Pack Sports and hosting the Learning Lab. We held sessions with experts across a range of health and wellness fields, and the one that stuck with me most was the topic I knew least about going in. Oral health isn't something I'd ever spent much time on. After a conversation with a functional dentist and looking into the research, I think it's one of the more underrated areas in health right now.

But first, we filtered the noise — here's what's worth knowing this week.

Researchers took recreational runners through a running protocol twice, once rested and once after a night of total sleep deprivation, measuring biomechanics, metabolic cost, and time to exhaustion. Time to exhaustion at threshold pace dropped 13.2% after the sleepless night. The odd part is what happened to efficiency. Sleep-deprived runners actually used less energy at a given speed, which on paper looks like improved running economy. Their movement had changed to produce it: more time in contact with the ground, work shifted from the ankles up to the knees, and reduced leg stiffness. Their bodies found a cheaper way to run and they still ran out of gas sooner. The practical read is that efficiency and durability aren't the same thing, and a tired body borrows from one to pay for the other. If you're racing or doing a key session, the night before matters more than the training metrics will show you. — Journal of Sports Sciences, 2026.

Researchers at the University of Oulu analyzed 2,264 Finnish adults, all aged 46, from a long-running birth cohort. People who drank more coffee had less total body fat, less visceral fat, and more skeletal muscle, despite having similar BMIs to lighter coffee drinkers. Both sexes showed lower levels of branched-chain amino acids, which are linked to insulin resistance when chronically elevated. In men, higher intake tracked with a better glucose-insulin profile and higher total testosterone. Here's the part most coverage skipped: it also tracked with higher sex hormone-binding globulin and lower free testosterone, which is the fraction actually available to your tissues. So the hormonal picture is mixed rather than a straightforward win. Worth noting this is cross-sectional, measured at a single point, so it can't establish cause, and leaner people may simply drink more coffee. It's also Finland, where per-capita coffee consumption leads the world and only 70 of 2,264 participants drank none at all. — Verroest et al., European Journal of Nutrition, 2026.

Researchers reviewed nearly 4,000 studies covering more than 10 million people to assess what's formally called nature-based interventions, which is an academic way of saying time spent outside. Walking in a park, gardening, or sitting somewhere green. People who did these things consistently reported lower anxiety, stress, and depression. The finding worth noting is that it didn't just subtract bad feelings, it added good ones, improving positive mood rather than only reducing the negative. Nothing here is surprising, and that's sort of the point. This is one of the largest evidence bases for any wellbeing intervention, it costs nothing, requires no equipment, and has no downside. The rough benchmark from earlier research is about two hours a week in nature, which works out to twenty minutes a day. Good timing for it, too. The next few weeks are the best of the year to be outside in most of the country. — Nature Human Behaviour, 2026.

I sat down with Dr. Staci Whitman, a board-certified dentist who practices what's called functional dentistry, which means she looks at the mouth as connected to the rest of the body rather than as a separate system that happens to be located in your head.

As someone who loves learning about new health topics, I was very excited about this session and came away thinking it is one of the more underrated areas in health right now. The connection between what's happening in your mouth and what's happening everywhere else in your body turns out to be far better documented than most of us realize.

Your mouth hosts more than 700 microbial species, the second most diverse community in your body after your gut. [1]

For most of the history of dentistry, we knew those microbes caused cavities and gum disease, and that was the extent of it. But that framing has been falling apart for a while, and the pace has picked up considerably over recent years.

A systematic review published in March screened 1,128 studies and included 104 of them, examining how oral bacteria influence health beyond the mouth. [2] The National Institutes of Health (NIH) convened a dedicated workshop on the topic in 2024, which produced a commentary arguing that the wall between dentistry and medicine needs to come down. [1]

The link is simple. Inflamed gums create a continuously broken surface, and that gives oral bacteria and their byproducts direct access to your bloodstream. From there they travel. 

The evidence for where they end up is more concrete than you might expect. DNA from periodontal pathogens including Porphyromonas gingivalis and Tannerella forsythia has been found inside the arterial plaques surgically removed from people with cardiovascular disease. [2] Not in a lab model. In human arteries.

There's a second pathway too. Chronically inflamed gums act as a persistent source of inflammatory signaling, which raises C-reactive protein, one of the better-validated predictors of future cardiovascular events. [2]

It’s worth noting that most of this remains associative rather than proven. The reviews are careful about that distinction. But the direction of the evidence has been consistent for long enough that the mouth-body connection is no longer a fringe position. It's an active NIH research priority.

Here's where it gets even more interesting.

Researchers have started identifying specific oral bacteria associated with the later development of specific diseases. Not general markers of poor health. Named organisms, tied to named conditions, measured years in advance.

The most rigorous example was published last year in JAMA Oncology. Researchers took saliva samples from more than 120,000 healthy people enrolled in two large cohort studies, then followed them for a median of nearly nine years to see who developed pancreatic cancer. They found 445 who did, matched each against someone who didn't, and went back to look at what had been in their mouths before any of them got sick. [3]

Twenty-seven bacteria and fungi were associated with pancreatic cancer risk. Thirteen species were associated with higher risk and eight with lower risk. Three periodontal pathogens stood out: P. gingivalis, Eubacterium nodatum, and Parvimonas micra, each raising the odds by roughly 27% to 42%. [3]

The samples were collected before anyone was diagnosed. That's what makes this different from finding bacteria in a tumor and wondering which came first.

It isn't a one-off. An earlier prospective study found that people carrying P. gingivalis had 59% higher pancreatic cancer risk over roughly a decade of follow-up. [4] And Fusobacterium nucleatum, another mouth bacterium, has been repeatedly found inside colorectal tumors and is associated with worse survival and greater resistance to chemotherapy. [5]

The researchers on the JAMA Oncology study built what they called a microbial risk score from the species they identified, and suggested oral bacteria could eventually work as noninvasive biomarkers for identifying people who should be screened earlier. [3]

Two things to call out here. These are risk associations, not diagnoses. Carrying P. gingivalis doesn't mean you have anything, in the same way a family history of a disease doesn't mean you'll get it. And pancreatic cancer is rare enough that a 27% increase applies to a small baseline.

But it's a real finding, from a serious study, and it points at a future where a saliva sample tells you something useful about risks that have nothing to do with your teeth.

As with most health-related topics, the best things for you are usually pretty simple and boring.

Diet does more than anything else.

Dr. Staci's position, and it holds up against the research, is that what you eat matters more for your mouth than anything else.

The specifics are worth understanding because they're more nuanced than most people assume. It isn't total sugar that drives cavities so much as how long sugar sits on your teeth. Acid-producing bacteria feed on fermentable carbohydrates and lower the pH in your mouth, and your teeth begin losing minerals below a certain threshold. What matters is the length of time you spend below it.

That means a sticky granola bar eaten slowly at your desk does more damage than a dessert eaten in ten minutes, even if the dessert has more sugar. Crackers, chips, dried fruit, and anything that lodges in the grooves of your molars are worse than their sugar content suggests, because they're still there an hour later.

Frequency matters for the same reason. Six small snacks means six acid cycles. One meal means one.

This is also where oral health and the rest of this newsletter converge. The dietary pattern that's bad for your teeth, frequent exposure to processed and refined carbohydrates, is the same pattern we've covered in the context of metabolic health, inflammation, and colorectal cancer risk. It's one problem showing up in different places.

Breathing through your nose.

I’ve been using mouth tape at night for a while now, but even I didn’t appreciate the true benefits. I viewed it more as a sleep aid. 

The reality is that saliva is vastly underappreciated and does more work than it gets credit for. It buffers acid, delivers calcium and phosphate back to your enamel, and carries antimicrobial compounds that keep the microbial balance in check. Mouth breathing, particularly overnight, dries all of that out.

The result is a mouth that stays acidic longer, remineralizes less, and shifts toward the bacterial populations that thrive in those conditions. If you wake up with a dry mouth, morning breath that seems disproportionate, or you've been told you snore, that's worth taking seriously as an oral health issue and not just a sleep one.

It connects to the airway work Dr. Staci does with kids, where the shape of the face and jaw develops partly in response to how a child breathes. But it matters in adults too, and it's the kind of thing that never comes up at a standard cleaning.

The basics, which still work.

Brushing twice, flossing, and seeing a dentist regularly are not glamorous and they remain the most effective things you can do. Gum health in particular is where the systemic connection lives, since bleeding gums are the broken surface that lets bacteria into circulation. If your gums bleed when you floss, that's not normal, and it's not a reason to stop flossing. 

There's real interest right now in testing the oral microbiome directly, and you can see why. If specific organisms carry specific risks, knowing which ones you have seems like it should be useful.

The science is moving quickly in that direction. The JAMA Oncology researchers explicitly framed their findings as pointing toward biomarker development, and that's a reasonable read of where things are going.

It's also fair to say the field is ahead of the tools right now. There's no established definition of what a healthy oral microbiome looks like, which means there's no reference range to measure yourself against in the way you'd compare bloodwork. [6] The species-level findings are compelling, but translating a result into a specific action is still an open question that researchers are actively working on.

One reason this topic stuck with me is that it fits a pattern I keep running into. Avoiding processed foods and looking at your body as a system where everything is working in harmony. 

Your mouth is the most accessible tissue in your body. You can see it in a mirror. You visit a dentist who examines it twice a year. For most of modern dentistry's history, everything found there was treated as unrelated to the rest of you.

That's changing, and the research suggests it should change faster. Gum disease is not a dental problem that happens to be inconvenient. It's a chronic inflammatory condition with a direct line into your bloodstream, and the evidence connecting it to cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, and several cancers keeps accumulating.

Thanks to Dr. Staci Whitman for the conversation that sent me down this road.

Four things you can do this week:

1. Watch how often you eat, not just what.
Every time you eat something with fermentable carbohydrate, your mouth goes acidic and your teeth lose minerals until it recovers. Six snacks means six of those cycles. The sticky stuff matters most — crackers, dried fruit, granola bars, anything that lodges in your molars and is still there an hour later. If you're grazing through the workday, that's likely doing more damage than dessert.

2. Take bleeding gums seriously.
This is the one with the systemic connection behind it. Bleeding gums are an inflamed, broken surface with a direct line into your bloodstream, and it's where the cardiovascular and cancer associations trace back to. It isn't normal, it isn't a reason to floss less, and it's worth raising with your dentist rather than waiting for them to notice.

3. Pay attention to how you breathe at night.
Dry mouth on waking, disproportionate morning breath, snoring — all point to mouth breathing, which shuts down the saliva that buffers acid and remineralizes your enamel overnight. It’s worth considering using mouth tape at night if you experience any of the above.

4. Tell your doctor about your dentist.
Your dentist sees inflammation twice a year that never reaches your medical chart, and your physician tracks risk factors your dentist never hears about. If you have it, mention gum disease at your physical so your doctor has a full picture of your health. The research says these are one system. 

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Wellness, filtered.

The Wellness Brew

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Disclaimer: The Wellness Brew is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. The content published here is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or health condition. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making any changes to your diet, supplement routine, or lifestyle.