Silent & Hidden Dental Infections-How to Protect Your Fertility & Health with Dr. Thomas Levy – #11

0:27 Charlene Lincoln: Welcome to another episode of The Fertility Hour. We have a very special guest today: Dr. Thomas Levy, a board-certified cardiologist and bar-certified attorney. After practicing adult cardiology for 15 years, he began to research the enormous toxicity associated with much dental work, as well as the pronounced ability of properly administered vitamin C to neutralize this toxicity. He has now written 11 books largely addressing important roles of dental toxicity and nutrition in disease and health, along with practical treatment prevention protocols. Recently inducted into the Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame, Dr. Levy is now lecturing on the findings in his latest book Hidden Epidemic: Silent Oral Infections Cause Most Heart Attacks and Breast Cancers. The recent scientific data indicates that the reason for most chronic diseases most of the time remains undiagnosed and unaddressed. Welcome, Dr. Levy.

Dr. Thomas Levy: Thank you, Charlene. Thank you for having me.

1:43 CL: As I was telling you, I emailed you, I’ve been reading your book. Thank you for writing this book. Amazing. I’m kind of beyond words. Luckily, this is not my first introduction into this world because, I don’t know, it’s a little bit shocking. It’s shocking information when you’re exposed to it for the first time. Why did you write this book?

TL: Well, I wrote this book because in January of 2016, I was accompanying a friend to the dentist who was getting some root canals extracted and they did three-dimensional x-ray, a three-dimensional cone beam imaging of her mouth just to outline the anatomy. From across the room looking at the x-ray screen, I could see another tooth that had not been root canaled but had been under no procedure, had a huge abscess on top of it, eroding away the floor of the sinus and filling her sinus with mucus and infection. And I couldn’t believe that a tooth that badly infected didn’t hurt like the dickens and I said, “You know, does that tooth hurt?” “No.” “Does it ever bother you at all when you eat or chew?” “No.” Yet I didn’t even need to do the research that I did to immediately see that a tooth like that would have enormous toxicity. And I told my friend, I said, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to get another tooth taken out along with those other three.”

Then that began the research which showed me because initially I talked about this, I’m a cardiologist but I talked about this with dentist friends and they all felt a tooth like that should hurt as well. Then when I looked at the literature, the endodontic literature and the dental literature, I found out teeth like that are typically silent, typically asymptomatic. They don’t hurt like an acutely infected tooth, but the toxicity is enormous. Then I said, my goodness, there’s a good reason why everybody on the planet gets cancer, heart disease and every other disease under the sun, but just thinks they’re unlucky. And as it turned out and we can talk about when I reviewed the literature, this entity of having an asymptomatic, grossly infected tooth might affect somewhere between 7 and 10 percent of all teeth in the adult population across the world when you do the proper studies and look for it.

So, do we get unlucky? Yeah, we get unlucky. But do we get a disease for no reason at all? No. We get diseases for reasons and the book makes the case that the vast majority of the time that we get a critical disease, it’s because we have an asymptomatic tooth that’s not bothering us that’s grossly infected, but that we need to do a special test to identify. Not just regular x-ray but there’s new technology called 3D x-ray.

4:56 CL: I was shocked when you were talking about how often they’re asymptomatic. That doesn’t even make sense to me if there’s so much of an infection going on. So, who is this book for? Is it for a small percentage of the population who’s having this going on, a very small percentage of the population? Or who is this book for?

TL: Quite the opposite, Charlene. This book is for the planet. I don’t want to sound like a megalomaniac or grandiose, but the nature of the information in the book, not the fact that I wrote the book but the nature of the information is that this type of issue impacts my conservative estimate would be well over 80 and probably over 90 percent of all people with a chronic degenerative disease on the planet. We’re talking about diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, arthritis. All of these diseases are mediated by increased oxidative stress and the greatest stimulation for increased oxidative stress throughout your body is a chronic infection, the worst of which are in your mouth.

6:10 CL: Wow. Your mentor and friend, the late Hal Huggins, I mean that’s how I was introduced to the connection between the mouth and the body. Before that, I was in the belief like a lot of us and a lot of dentists and doctors, that there’s the mouth and the health of the teeth and the gums completely separate from the body. Now I know that that’s absolutely not the case. They’re so integrated and connected.

TL: Everything shares a common blood supply, a common lymphatic system. Gosh, your mouth is inside your head which the last time I checked is attached to the rest of your body. So yes, it’s not only an integral part of health, it’s just that arbitrarily we evolved into a situation and I know a dentist that will call themselves as it evolved into a situation where dentists just became tooth mechanics. We’re just going to deal with the structural problems and make sure everything works well mechanically and physiology be damned. But in fact, and there’s a lot of evidence to show this, far more than we have the time to look at, when you harbor a chronic infection in your body, there’s nothing that will bring your health down to its knees quicker.

7:41 CL: Absolutely. Unfortunately, dentistry as a whole but like you said, mouth mechanics, because once you become educated on this and then you try to have a conversation about this to a dentist, you might get a very blank stare back at you and then, you know, maybe I’ll have a conversation. I mean, you just stop the conversation essentially because it’s not happening when you talk about root canals and all of that. So you were talking about oxidative stress and you’re talking about focal infection to the mouth being kind of the number one reason for oxidative stress. What’s another kind of culprit in oxidative stress that you discussed in the book?

TL: The important thing to understand about oxidative stress is, first, there’s a small amount of oxidative stress that’s normal. As you metabolize, you bring oxygen in and you produce some degree of oxidative stress. Oxidative stress means biomolecules that have been oxidized. When it’s oxidized, they’ve lost electrodes. When you take oxidized biomolecules and you can restore the electrons to them, you take them from an inactive state back to an active state. In fact, it may sound like an oversimplification but I’ve been looking for an exception to this rule for 10 years now and I’ve not found one. Increased oxidative stress is disease. It doesn’t cause disease; it is the disease. The state of having too many biomolecules and too many situations, enzymes, structural proteins, too many molecules in the oxidized state, they lose their function and that is the pathology of disease. When a biomolecule or a group of biomolecules lose their function, that is disease.

So, this brings us then to the point that anything that oxidizes is a toxic molecule. Toxicity is pro-oxidant. The only way that a toxin inflicts toxicity is by directly oxidizing biomolecules or causing biomolecules to be oxidized. And it doesn’t matter that there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of toxins out there. The final common denominator of all toxins is they cause biomolecules to be oxidized. This is why and I was flabbergasted many years ago because I read Dr. Klenner’s work and a bunch of other people that did vitamin C research, and I began to work for myself clinically and saw the same thing happening which was a single molecule, this little tiny molecule called vitamin C when you give large enough doses of it, it will neutralize and negate the toxicity of any toxin exposure, any poisoning, anything of any kind. I mean, vitamin C intravenously should replace the poison control center completely. Okay? But I said, how can one molecule neutralize the toxicity of thousands of different large molecules, small molecules, this tissue, that tissue, and the answer ultimately became apparent: it’s because the toxicity of a toxin is its ability to oxidize. Nothing more.

So then you put all of this together and we take this, if you will, theory of disease a step further, and we then come to the realization that all diseases are caused by toxins. All diseases are caused by molecules that have a pro-oxidant, the ability to oxidize nature. So then that brings us to the ultimate part of therapy, and that being Dr. Huggins told me this many, many years ago when was just having a conversation with him and I was little frustrated and I didn’t understand something, and he said, “Tom, you can’t dry off while you’re still in the shower.” I said, oh my goodness. And that made all the sense in the world. Just about all effective medical protocols involve trying to repair damage. Okay? How much antioxidants can you get to the oxidized biomolecules? Sometimes you can get a very dramatic and positive response. But it makes no sense to do that and not try to find out what are your daily sources of new toxins coming in. You want to not only repair damage, you want to prevent damage from occurring in the first place. So that’s the two-pronged approach to any ultimately positive medical therapy is stop or inhibit or thwart the exposure to new oxidants, new toxins and get optimal levels of antioxidant nutrients. That’s what a nutrient is. A nutrient is an antioxidant at the molecular level and get as much good nutrition and antioxidant to repair the old damage and bring those inactive biomolecules back into play.

Unfortunately, modern medicine, as we know it, does neither. It doesn’t look at new toxins and new oxidative stress, and it doesn’t really attempt to repair old damage. It just throws enough stuff at the wall until it finds a toxic drug that by some crazy mechanism decreases a symptom. On the other hand, alternative or complementary medicine, most of it only does one part of that which is let’s try to repair the damage while still not recognizing the role of infections and new toxins that need to be addressed as well. Truly, there are many diseases now and you’re not supposed to say that horrible four-letter word “cure”. But if you catch what normally should not be a curable disease but you catch it early in its stage and you get rid of the new toxins and you repair the old damage, you can see by all external appearance a complete resolution or cure of these diseases.

So many cancers that seem to respond extremely positive to a protocol, what happens down the road? They come back or a new cancer develops. That’s because you didn’t turn off the shower. Okay? You got to turn off the shower, stop the new toxins and then if you can repair the old damage, the body has an enormous ability to heal? But these toxins go straight to the coronary arteries by the venous system and they go straight to the breast tissue by the lymphatic system. And even though I’m presenting the case that this is very much the etiology of all disease, obviously you want a book to catch attention.

So, I also said and it’s true that these silent infections, asymptomatic infections cause most – by most I mean greater than 90 percent of heart attacks and most breast cancers. Well, if you eliminate heart disease and breast cancer, you’ve saved 65 to 70 percent of the world right there until they finally get disease and die from something else.

15:49 CL: So when Dr. Levy was discussing about the shower, the focal infections in the mouth and for people listening that go, “How do I find out?” So you were talking about the 3D cone beam. Is that kind of the hallmark or the gold standard of diagnostic tools to use?

TL: That is now the new gold standard. The really big point I wanted to make in the book aside from what I just said, making sure people and the readers understand what causes disease and what helps resolve disease, then a very practical question: how do you approach that in the mouth?

There’s no diagnostician or physician on the planet that can have a patient walking to their office and you can look at them and say “Oh wow, you have early diabetes. Your blood sugar is 135.” No, of course not. They have to get a blood test. Okay? Well if you walk into that same office and your mouth feels fine, you’re not complaining of anything, that doctor also is not going to be able to say, “Oh wow, you know, you have three teeth that are chronically infected but they don’t hurt you.” Obviously, the test has to be done because I’m explaining the medical impact which is impact on all disease, the test has to be done routinely in the initial evaluation of a medical patient having any condition at all and consideration should be given to repeating the test, whatever time down the road if that patient destabilizes or gets clinically worse or develops a new problem, because for whatever reason and I’m not trained as a dentist but teeth do well until they don’t. They stay intact until the break down. Just like every other part of our body as we get older, they can fracture, any of a number of things can cause the pulp to be exposed to the cesspool of pathogens that are present in the average mouth. And once that happens and the pulp of the tooth gets infected, that’s it. That tooth is technically necrotic and dead. I mean you’ll still have pain from where the root is but the upper part of the tooth is dead and chronically infected and you have a characteristic picture on x-ray of a large abscess area at the tip.

The studies that are cited in my book show as you would suspect that these infections are enormously toxic. They’re so toxic and this I’m sure would make my wonderful mentor Dr. Huggins flip in his grave to hear me say this, because at the time it was like never consider having a root canal for any reason at all, I would still support never getting a root canal if you want to protect your overall health. But there are some people obviously that are economically strapped, they don’t want to get a tooth extracted that they say feels fine and then they say “Dr. Dennis, you do whatever you need to do to do the best job for me but I am not giving you permission to extract that infected tooth. Under those circumstances and those circumstances alone, we have the studies to show that a well-done – and I emphasize well-done – by an endodontist, not a general dentist, that a well-done root canal, much of the time will substantially decrease the toxicity of that tooth if it just was otherwise going to stay untreated. So under those circumstances when the patient has you in a half nelson, not letting you do what you want to do that’s best for the health, under those circumstances, absolutely a well-done root canal would be appropriate because we have the solid data to show that a well-done root canal disseminates less toxicity statistically speaking that an untreated abscessed tooth.

20:25 CL: So now that you said that, and someone goes to an endodontist and gets a well-done root canal, I guess the question is, how do we know that it was well-done? What are the markers for that?

TL: Excellent question. This is where the patient has to be part of the education process because they need to understand that, “Okay, you don’t want to get the tooth extracted. We’ll do the root canal”, but not all root canals turn out well and if you want to protect yourself from a heart attack or whatever, cancer in the future or an increased chance of it, you have to let us work with you to decide whether your root canal really turned out well or not. That is on this 3D cone beam examination, virtually all root canals show a little sliver of infection or abscess accumulation at the tip of the tooth. That’s pretty much always there. What you want to know from a practical point of view is, is that area growing over time. So if the patient is doing well and feeling well, you repeat the 3D and you see if that abscessed area remains a trace or it started to grow. That’s one point.

The next point are systemic blood indicators of increased inflammation. The most prominent one being a test called C-reactive protein. C-reactive protein skyrockets during acute inflammation and stays elevated to a lesser degree during chronic inflammation. So if you’re not in the throes of any sort of acute cold or any sort of acute illness and your CRP is elevated, that’s a clear indicator that something is clearly disseminating inflammation throughout your body. And the CRP, the higher it is, the shorter you live. Increased CRPs mean increased all-cause mortality. They mean an increased chance of death from every condition imaginable. And as I said, as it turns out, infections are the main stimulus of this so if you have an area in your mouth, the root canal and you have an elevated CRP, you still can’t refuse the patient’s request not to extract the tooth but you do have as an obligation as a physician, as the dentist to say “Look, Mrs. Jones, the data clearly shows you’re at a substantial increased risk of heart attack, a substantial increased chance of breast cancer and a decreased chance of living as long as you could. Now, if that too is that valuable to you, well, continue to follow it and if it gets worse, we’ll tell you when it gets worse, but you need to understand that you’re putting your health at risk.”

I mean, the dentist or the physician, the patient still has to make the decision. Because again, the patient has limited finances, the patient may have a phobia about dentistry. The patient may have anything. And that’s fine. We all die someday. But we should have as much information as much of an informed consent, if you will, as possible going into these situations. We have the data that shows from the journal of the American Dental Association that having one or more root canal treated teeth in your mouth increases your chance of heart disease. Period. But to be fair to that study, they didn’t look at the quality of the root canals. They didn’t go and say it was those that had massive abscesses or those that had minimal or those that had CRPs or those that had low CRPs, it just said if you have a root canal, you have a greater chance of heart attack. And we also know that there are a lot of older people that have had root canals in their mouth for a couple of decades and they’ve done fine. And we also know there’s the 50-year-old guy that goes and gets a root canal and six months later he has a heart attack.

So what the book tries to do is make the case that we need new studies. We need prospective studies looking at different groups of patients that have root canals with large abscess areas, small abscess areas, high CRPs, low CRPs, and see if we can differentiate in the future to be able to tell somebody with a little greater assurance that, well, you fall into the subset where the root canal does not seem to be negatively impacting your general health or you fall into the category where you have a clearly increased chance of heart attack over the next couple of years. I mean, medicine is evolutionary. It has to continue to evolve because we only know little pockets of information. We rarely know the big picture, and this needs to flesh out so that we can better understand this.

Also I’ll mention and we can talk about it more later, that two of the big reasons why these infections kill you or do nothing to you has to do with how well balanced your sex hormone status is and your thyroid hormone stats.

26:17 CL: Oh, definitely talk about that.

TL: When those get out of whack, all hell breaks loose in your body and infections don’t stay put. But when they’re perfectly controlled, it’s incredible how well the body can wall off an infection.

26:35 CL: Is that a chicken and the egg scenario? Because the thyroid is so sensitive, it becomes imbalanced because of a focal infection, but focal infections can become unchecked and out of control because the thyroid sex hormones are out of balance.

TL: One scenario does feed the other. So if let’s say your sex hormone and thyroid hormone is tightly controlled, the infection stays put but if other things develop and the infection gets worse, that can actually play a factor in pushing your sex hormones and your thyroid hormone out of balance which then further propagates it. So yeah, it’s all intimately involved as to the fact that any chronic disease, for example, worsens your systemic inflammatory status. When you worsen your systemic inflammatory status, the deiodinases inside every cell of your body, a greater percentage of them become oxidized. What happens when a biomolecule is oxidized? It no longer functions. So systemic inflammation can actually poison the enzymes inside your cells that convert T4 to the active T3, so they can help promote the hypothyroidism that’s going to make that chronic inflammation even worse.  This is also another reason why when you’re treating thyroid function and you’re tracking T3 and reverse T3, you need to understand that one treatment or one dose of thyroid hormone is not a forever dose because if you have other things going on making your oxidative stress in your body worse, over time you’re going to need more thyroid.

On the other hand, if you’re resolving problems like maybe getting infected teeth extracted or infected tonsils well addressed, dropping the inflammation in the body, then you might find that dose of thyroid hormone that you started six months till a year ago is now making the person hyperthyroid. So you always have to continue to follow your patient because the body’s health is not static. Okay? It gets better, it gets worse and all gradations in between.

29:06 CL: A question comes up about something you said a few minutes ago, about an endodontist having a conversation with a patient and you really have to be willing to work with the patient on whatever level that they’re at. But what percentage of endodontists have these 3D cone beam x-rays in their office? Isn’t that more like someone who’s practicing biological dentistry or is it a common tool in most dental practices?

TL: Actually, the 3D machine technology has been around for roughly 15 years and nearly all periodontists, those are the dentists that put in implants as a specialty have them. And I can’t say this with authority but I think the majority of endodontists have them these days as well because it just gives them the information they need to better map out how well they do their procedure. But even if you don’t, there’s no reason these days to make sure that your patient doesn’t get properly referred for one of these examinations. And again, it can be like a blood test. The dentist or the oral surgeon or whoever doesn’t need to lose control of their patient. They can simply have them go to another facility to have this test done and then get the results. But one very important thing I would emphasize here is the 3D cone beam examination basically looks at just about the whole head in just about every angle possible.

The significance of that is there’s an enormous amount of information on this exam. You can get lost trying to completely analyze every possible piece of pathology and every different cut or every different plane. The point being is, is when the physician or a dentist refers a patient to have this examination, it needs to be crystal clear on the request that you’re looking for apical infection on every tooth. You’re looking for the evidence of an abscess at the tip of each tooth. Otherwise, the information can be lost. For example, as a cardiologist, if somebody orders an echocardiogram and doesn’t tell me what they’re looking for, I’ll give them a thorough interpretation because I go through things systematically. But, I’ll still give them more information if they have on there suspicion of endocarditis, please look for vegetations on the mitral valve. Then I can really hone in and examine something very specifically. And that’s the rule of thumb. You always get more information from an examination being reviewed by the expert if you give them the clinical input and tell them precisely what you’re looking for. So don’t just order a 3D and say “Give me the interpretation” because there’s a million different changes. They can get carried away on inside that huge test but you want to say “I’m looking for evidence of apical infection on every tooth.”

32:35 CL: If you’re listening to this podcast, you really have to read Dr. Levy’s book. Because what happens is if you’re listening and you get a little information and you go, “I want to do this…” I mean, I live in the Bay Area, it’s a pretty progressive area of the country. I went to an endodontist. I said I had a root canal that was extracted that I had some concern about a cavitation, possibly an infection at that site. He was nice but he essentially was like, “You have nothing to worry about. There’s no pain there, right?” He didn’t ask me about any other symptoms I was having because one thing that I think by reading your book and just kind of what I’ve gone through at different times is HPA axis dysregulation or as they know in the integrative medical community, adrenal fatigue, 21st Century syndrome. So many of us suffer from it. Adrenal and then throwing off thyroid hormones, everything else. But he didn’t ask about any of that. He just basically was like, “It’s not going to show anything. You’re fine,” and that was that.

TL: That’s an important point because we’re talking about things that are symptomatic or asymptomatic. As it turns out, especially when you’re dealing with an area that’s closed, not soft loose tissue but very closes surrounded by bony structures. If you have an infection that grows quickly, it puts everything on stretch and stretch is what hurts. So when you have an infected tooth that just blows up in a few days, there’s probably few things that are more painful.

On the other hand, when you have a tooth and at some point in time dies, and then over the period of six months, a year, two years, five years, the infected contents gradually leak into the tip of the tooth and expands slowly, the body compensates. Nothing is put on stretch and there is no pain. The front cover of the book actually shows my friend’s tooth on regular x-ray and on 3D. This one on 3D is grossly abscessed, it’s actually eroded away the bone, the bony floor of the sinus. But that still is not acutely associated with pain.

So one of the important messages of this book is that most physicians and most dentists have been laboring under a long-standing delusion and incorrect assumption that all infections are going to hurt. That’s absolutely not only incorrect but it’s actually the exact opposite that it’s true. When you actually count up and total all the different areas of your body that can be infected including in your mouth the vast majority of the time. Again, 85-90 percent or more are asymptomatic and pain-free. But it has nothing to do with the toxicity.

I mean, it’s kind of funny. Certainly most physicians and dentists that know my name around the world pretty much know I’ve been anti root canal for 20 years following Dr. Huggins and everything else like that. But to any endodontist who still has his or her mind open, I would tell them right now, listen to what I’m saying when I’m talking about these number of teeth on the planet that are chronically infected. Combine with the fact that most people are poor and they can’t afford much dental work. They certainly can’t afford an implant down the road and they don’t want to be missing a tooth. What does all this translate to? All this translates to is an effective huge increase in root canal treatments for the endodontist if they actually read between the lines. Because the world will be better served by chronically infected teeth having an expertly done root canal than have nothing done at all.

37:19 CL: I was surprised when I read that in the book because I knew that you had studied with Hal Huggins. But it made perfect sense when you explained that and I think that’s such important information to have out there. Now, let’s talk about what is the other cause of oxidative stress because you were talking about certain vitamins and minerals that you would never have anyone take. Could you quickly run through those?

TL: Oxidative stress is either caused by toxin excess or antioxidant nutrient deficiency. It’s all a balance of those two things. So quality supplementation, unfortunately, there’s a lot of confusion about that as well. And it’s a whole separate topic but it’s not an irrelevant topic because it all funnels in to what we’re talking about with regard to if you want good long-term health, you need to take all of the factors that are going to cause increased oxidative stress into play.

One of the big ones is iron. Most of us in this country are in a state of advanced iron excess. You only need enough iron to make a normal amount of blood. So if you don’t have an iron-deficiency anemia, you should never, never, never supplement iron. Whether you’re a menstruating female, doesn’t matter. If you don’t have an iron-deficiency anemia, do not supplement iron. Iron is the main up-regulator of oxidative stress throughout your body. A certain amount of iron is necessary for life and an increased amount of iron is one of your most reliable sources for cell death. The sad part about this, and I have some whole different presentations on this and anybody listening to this, I would say go to YouTube, type in “Dr. Levy iron video” and you will see that since the mid-40s, our incredibly dense, stupid, and undeserving public health authorities have decided that the worst thing on the planet is to have an iron-deficiency anemia like so many of the populations that are really starving. So if you’re starving, you’re not going to get enough iron. Well, nobody in the United States is starving and the rest of the modern world. But what do they do? They add iron to everything. Anything that says it’s enriched means it’s not enriched. It’s been poisoned with iron. Furthermore, and this is what the video shows, if you just take a regular box of cereal off the shelf and dissolve it in some water and pass a magnet over it, you’ll pull out a fistful of metallic iron filings.

Even if iron were good for you, which it’s not, this is the worst form of iron to take. You shouldn’t take in metallic iron any more than you should take in metallic chromium. That’s like you can have a chromium supplement. “Well, chromium supplement. Let me grind this chromium bump around my food to go along with the cheese.” This is why plants exist. Plants exist to turn the inorganic into the organic, but you can’t skip the plant step.

Similarly, all copper should be avoided. You should never take a multi-supplement that has iron or copper or any significant amount above maybe 50 milligrams tops of calcium. Okay? Calcium is the other one. I call calcium, iron and copper the toxic nutrients.

41:40 CL: And calcium is probably your most controversial one. You talked about it, right? Because we’ve sort of been indoctrinated that you need calcium.

TL: Yes. I have another book entitled Death by Calcium. I’ll only start by saying the title is not an exaggeration. Calcium, when you actually look at the scientific data and the book is filled with pertinent scientific articles, not rocket science, as I say. Very straightforward studies. You don’t need to be a PhD in science to understand it by any means at all. It’s very clear that above the level that you need calcium which is quite minimal, calcium is a primary carcinogen. Like, how do you for example diagnose breast cancer on a mammogram? Microcalcifications. You have breast cancer because you have a derangement of calcium metabolism fed by toxins that keep your metabolic balance of out shape so that one of the manifestations is metastatic calcium deposition throughout your body. As people get older, they get calcified this, calcified that. Well, let me say it’s never, never, never normal for any part of your body to calcify. That’s not a part of normal aging. That’s a part of aging accompanied by an inappropriate diet and inappropriate supplementation. Then you’ll start to calcify like crazy.

So you need to supplement correctly by not only avoiding supplements like that but also taking proper dosages of other things. Vitamin C for most people that should be dosed in the 5, 10, 15 gram a day or more level (5,000, 10,000, 15,000 milligrams). Some people will take a lot more when you take a specialized form of it like liposome encapsulated. You can take a lot less because proper liposomes get the vitamin C inside your cells. But let me quickly say and people can go to my website so they can see the data on this. Not homemade liposomal preparation. That’s a big fiction and fraud. It’s very complex and very costly and very involved to make liposomes of the right size and to make sure that they’re in the liposomes. The homemade preparations, those are emulsions. Which is not bad in the sense that an emulsion gets better absorption but it doesn’t get delivery inside the cell. That’s what we’re talking about with liposomes. The only damage that’s done, if you will, because a lot of people will take these homemade preparations and feel better, well it’s a form of vitamin C. People have been getting better on vitamin C for years.

But the real tragedy is when you have let’s say a cancer patient who wants to treat their cancer as best they can with antioxidants and they don’t get better on their homemade liposomes and then they say, “Well, liposomes failed me.” No, liposomes didn’t fail you because you never took liposomes. Because liposomes have a unique, therapeutic impact to get inside cells especially with doses of vitamin C and glutathione and other antioxidants. There’s a lot of fraudulent liposome products out there. I’ve been a consultant to a company for 12 years and I would absolutely recommend their products with the highest recommendation. That’s LivOn. Do other liposome products exist? Yes. However, we analyze many of them and they had no liposomes. But it’s too expensive to go out and test everybody’s different product, just so you know. To properly test a product for liposomes with a special laboratory might be $8,000 to test. So that keeps companies very well-insulated from being discovered because nobody is going to go out and spend $8,000 just to prove that X, Y or Z company is not really making liposomes.

So, not so much in Hidden Epidemic but in Death by Calcium I go into the different supplements that are important. The big four are magnesium, vitamin C, vitamin K, and vitamin D. Each one of those substances as a separate supplement will decrease all-cause mortality. So that’s a pretty big thing when you take anything and it decreases your chance of death from everything. The reason those big four do that is because they all work on getting calcium out of the cell. All increased oxidative stress, all diseases and very much so with all cancers have increased oxidative stress inside the cell which is always accompanied by and/or caused by increased intracellular calcium. That’s how significant calcium is as a major player in inflicting and mediating all disease.

47:15 CL: Why was I taught at some point that the only way to effectively take magnesium is if it was coupled with calcium for absorption? I think that’s something that’s being lectured.

TL: Yeah. Well, they even have Cal-Mag supplements, this and the other. All I can say is it’s just another fiction. All of these things have basically been started just by supplement companies. Sometimes supplement companies give you some great information. Sometimes they give you total fantasy. The thing is calcium and magnesium are the yin and the yang in the body. You can’t have elevated levels of both. You can’t have depressed levels of both. When you get the level of one up, it drives the level of the other one down.

Magnesium is what’s known as a natural calcium channel blocker. You have literal channels across the cell membrane that facilitates the uptake of calcium. Magnesium blocks that. So magnesium keeps calcium from getting into the cell while at the same time, the national extrusion mechanisms inside the cell continue to work, bringing the intracellular calcium level down.

And because of this madness out there that you just assume that calcium supplementation is good for you, which is not, it’s the worst that you could possibly do, because of this madness out there, most people are in a state of calcium excess. They feed this fantasy, if you will, by looking at the osteoporotic patient. Well, in the osteoporotic bone, there’s a deficiency of calcium. Also many other things but there is decreased calcium in osteoporotic bone. And so they say that means you’re low in calcium. No, the exact opposite is true. Because the osteoporosis in your bone has been mobilizing calcium for years because 99 percent of your calcium should be in your bones, because they’ve been mobilizing calcium for years, and you’ve been taking calcium supplements, you have a calcium excess everywhere else in your body. Even though the bones are low in calcium, the body is high in calcium. So what do these poor souls do taking all the calcium supplements? They massively increase their chance of cancer and heart attack and they have no effect at all, and this has been well established, on decreasing your chance of fracture. Now ultimately that’s the reason why an osteoporotic patient should take any supplement is to decrease their chances of their bones breaking and this doesn’t do that.

The interesting thing talking about Cal-Mag, there’s another common partnered supplement called calcium and vitamin D. It’s incredible the number of studies out there that look at patients taking calcium with vitamin D and they see a decrease in fracture incidence and they say therefore calcium decreased fracture incidence. No, you were taking two supplements, not one supplement. But they seemed to look upon calcium and vitamin D as a mono supplement which is ridiculous because vitamin D by itself very readily decreases fracture incidence. Calcium supplementation absolutely does not.

50:41 CL: That’s going to take a while for people because for me, maybe 20-30 years ago when I started studying nutrition, we looked at countries with the lowest level of osteoporosis and hip fractures. They were drinking virtually no dairy products and they were not supplementing with calcium. That was the first kind of indicator to me that this whole this is a marketing media. It’s been masterful in basically indoctrinating that thought that we need calcium and if not, we’re going to have hip fractures and osteoporosis and our children’s bones are going to grow weak. That’s the message. Then add a bunch of sexy celebrities drinking milk and it really pretty much gets ingrained into the populace.

Another thing I just thought to mention because in the senior population who are on limited budgets, many times they are told to use Tums as like a cheap alternative to getting calcium supplementations, which that’s wrong on many levels but we don’t have time to get into that. So don’t use Tums with calcium.

TL: Calcium carbonate which is Tums, unfortunately, it knocks out heartburn in a second. So that’s the worst thing about it is the fact that it works very well on the symptom. Taking 1 or 2 Tums is like taking the amount of calcium that’s in a 12-ounce glass of milk which is horrible. For people who are wondering, I mean, they’ll obviously get more details on the book, but you avoid milk as a beverage absolutely. You avoid large amounts of yogurt and cheese. But the flipside is the fatty part of milk is wonderful. So that means you enjoy sour cream, you enjoy heavy cream, you enjoy butter as much as you want, aside from calorie considerations of course because those are actually the healthy part of dairy products.

52:48 CL: And if you don’t have a problem with casein and lactose.

TL: Right, yeah.

52:53 CL: We’re almost at the top of the hour but I wanted to ask your thoughts on… This talk is really for everybody but we are talking to a fertility audience and we’re talking about chronic disease. But let’s talk about focal infections, oxidative stress and its effect on fertility. So how do subclinical infections affect conception rates?

TL: It’s interesting. I did a little research on this before we got on because I knew that was the focus of your group to a great degree. And not surprising to me but it’s all sitting there in the literature because what did I say at the outset? I said that the outset, increased oxidative stress increases, aggravates or causes to one degree or another all diseases, because all diseases have the final common denominator of increased oxidative stress secondary to toxin exposure. In 2017, we have an article in one of the obstetric-gynecology journals that clearly show periodontal health, periodontal being the gums, and I show in the book that anything that correlates with periodontal disease or infection is going to correlate even more with an infected tooth because it’s the same spectrum of pathogens but in a much higher concentration and a much more efficient delivery system when they’re in the tooth. So I mean when you have an infected tooth and you chew on it, what do you do? You express toxins and pathogens directly into the venous system and the lymphatic system better than if you do it IV with a syringe.

So one of the things to remember is, unfortunately, for whatever reason, infected teeth not only have an intense array of pathogens but you also have the optimal reason to get them throughout your body. Point being is anything that says it correlates with periodontal or gum disease is going to be even more strongly correlated with these infected teeth. And we can see that fertility, and also interestingly too it works on both sides of the infection. The periodontal disease or oral infections negatively impact the woman trying to become pregnant and also, the periodontal disease in men affects their fertility sperm-wise. So you really hit it from both sides in both sexes. Because again, it might sound like an oversimplification but I challenge anybody anywhere to show me data of a disease that’s not either primarily caused by or severely promoted by any condition that increases oxidative stress throughout the body. And remember, oxidative stress equals inflammation. Those two words are really the same thing. So any time you hear about something that increases inflammation, that means it’s increasing oxidative stress. Same thing. Synonyms, meaning the same thing.

56:28 CL: There was a study and it linked periodontal disease, it associated it with more IVF failures. And IVF success rates on average are about 26.6 percent. So I would urge anyone who is going to go ahead with that procedure to, one, read the book and then you’re going to go want to go through the diagnostic tools that Dr. Levy recommends because if you have a silent infection, it’s going to make everything more difficult for you as far as conceiving – male factor or female factor.

TL: And there’s a couple of other papers I ran across and I’m sure this is a familiar term to you and your group, is periodontal disease, periodontitis, gum infection has also been directly shown to impact negatively time to conception. So obviously anybody looking to get pregnant wants to do it in 6 months and not 6 years.

57:31 CL: Yeah, absolutely. Periodontal pockets have shown to lead to decreased sperm motility and increased risk of male fertility because sperm is 50% of the equation and we see sperm quality as a whole, it has decreased tremendously over the last 20 years and shockingly so.

TL: Hugely so, but remember, and this is one of the saddest commentaries of all. Forget about for the moment the mouth and understand that the number of toxins that you encounter on a daily basis are astronomically higher now than they were in 1950 or they were in 1930 or they were in 1920. I mean, we are being assaulted. Air, food, water, mouth. It seems like they’re just increasing in number astronomically every day. So unless you can completely live on a sterile planet, maybe Mars or something like that, you got to really protect yourself with antioxidants and stop or limit or thwart the toxins over which you have control. In this case, the mouth, if you diagnose it correctly you do have control. You don’t really have control all the time over what you inhale or if you have to go out in the public there can be toxin exposures you can’t protect yourself against. But you have to protect yourself against the toxins over which you have control.

59:09 CL: Absolutely. And that shows how incredible the human body is that we can live in this environment and we can adapt. I guess “adapt” to the environment. Some of us are not adapting quite as well but that we are able to so we really want to honor our bodies and arm ourselves with this knowledge and not to be fearful about it. When I came across, I felt like I had been kind of misled and lied to when I started really looking at the impact of oral health to the rest of the body. I was like, “Gosh, this is the first time.” And I’ve been practicing medicine for 16 years that I’ve really even come across this information. It’s not common knowledge. And I did get a little bit fearful but it’s not too invoke fear on the population; it’s really to educate you.

TL: This should be welcomed information, what I’m saying. This gives people a chance to do something about so many diseases that modern medicine says nothing can be done for them except symptom alleviation. We’re talking about serious things you can do to change the progression and if they’re not too advanced, reverse many, many different chronic degenerative diseases, especially the heart and especially on a host of different cancers of the head, neck and chest.

60:35 CL: We can’t get into these studies now but I hope that just prompts our audience to read your book and become more educated on this because they have found correlations between periodontal disease and increased risk of miscarriage and premature birth, also preeclampsia, perinatal mortality, low birth rate, growth retardation of the fetus. There are a lot of studies out there. Sometimes people don’t want to dig as deep to look at these, to go to these studies, to go to PubMed or wherever this literature is. But the studies are out there and hopefully they’ll increase the number of studies. I don’t know if it’s profitable to do so. Sometimes that’s what kind of prompts studies or halts them, so I don’t know if there’s money behind really doing them. But read the book and become educated on this as that’s kind of the number one thing that we can really emphasize here.

Let’s go back to the practical steps. Now we talked about the 3D cone beam. Just to throw it out there, I live in the Bay Area in California. I’ve priced off the 3D cone beam x-ray, it’s about $350, the cost of it.

TL: That sounds about right.

61:50 CL: Then we talked about once again getting the thyroid panels done, but not just the TSH. You talk about that in the book, the full panel that needs to really be done and I think our audience is pretty educated on this. They don’t just go and get that one marker.

TL: Also the thyroid antibodies because you need to know if there’s thyroiditis. But other than the thyroid antibodies, most of the traditional thyroid tests are close to worthless except for the T3 and the reverse T3 basically because we’re dealing with the fact that T4 converts to T3, T3 is the active form of thyroid hormone. But the conversion of T4 to T3, greater than 80 percent of that conversion takes place outside of the thyroid gland. So it’s going on in the thyroid gland. Basically you should look at your body as trillions of little thyroid glands because it’s the deiodinases that are inside the cytoplasm of every cell of your body that determines how efficiently the T4 that’s circulating gets activated and converted into the T3. And when you have large amounts of oxidative stress, inflammation in your body, those enzymes become oxidized, they’re less efficient and then you start developing what I call the “blank key”. You start developing more and more reverse T3 which is inactive versus the T3 which is active. So it’s very valuable to look at that T3, reverse T3 ratio, and you really don’t have to pay attention to the thyroid gland per se. You’re looking at what is the bottom line thyroid function inside my cells. It’s like fracture and osteoporosis. Bottom line is, do you fracture or not. Bottom line with thyroid is, do your individual cells have enough thyroid function or not.

63:55 CL: We looked at the sex hormone panel, you said midrange.

TL: The sex hormone, it’s very important for, well, in younger older individuals like the 50 to 70, you can be a little more liberal in your supplementation and the much older, you basically want to shoot for getting sex hormones out of the abnormally low range into the normal range no more than mid-range of normal. But you ultimately have to do this because a lot of people, a lot of docs say, “Well, I don’t want to give this 85-year-old testosterone. He’s going to have a heart attack.” Well, guess what? He has a greater chance of a heart attack if his testosterone level is below normal and you’re not doing anything about it. That’s your biggest way for that individual to get a heart attack. You have to follow the metabolic panel blood work, the glucose, the cholesterol. You need to see at the same time that you’re supplementing, that you’re getting a normalization or no impact and not a worsening of those. Very, very few people are ever going to get a heart attack over a 1-year period during which their metabolic blood work improved. That’s just not going to happen. Usually it’s going to be when that metabolic blood work starts creeping up and getting worse.

Same thing with estrogen. Estrogen decreases your all-cause mortality when it’s balanced. Testosterone, same thing. The whole bugaboo with estrogen and breast cancer, another piece of scientific fraud. What causes breast cancer in all these treatments is the synthetic form of progesterone: progestin. That’s what causes the problems. No form of estrogen by itself has ever been shown to cause or promote breast cancer. But when you combine it with the synthetic form of progestin, again, what did we talk about combined supplements? Cal-Mag, Vitamin D-Calcium. They look at them as mono supplements. They’re not. Pure forms of estrogen, the more bioidentical the better. But in some older patients, even something as crude as Premarin still does a good job or still does an improvement, improves the metabolic situation. But absolutely that has to be addressed.

And when you have the normal sex hormones status, when you have the normal thyroid status, it’s incredible how the infections stay in place. Dr. Broda Barnes in the 1970s had 1600 patients he followed for 20 years. They had root canals, they had diabetes, they had high blood pressure, they smoked. Everything. But he finely tuned their thyroid function in over a 20-year period, out of the whole group only four men had heart attacks. Over a 20-year period. Should have been 75-80 based on the Framingham Study. So, tightly controlling thyroid function is, as I’ve reviewed the data, that is far and away the single most important way to make a focal infection stay put if you’re incapable of removing it or eradicating it.

67:25 CL: That’s really working closely with a functional medicine practitioner because my mind is saying you have a subclinical infection, controlling those thyroid levels or sex hormone levels, you have to stay really on top of it. The

thyroid is so sensitive.

TL: And as I said, thyroid status can switch. As one area gets better, your thyroid hormone can be in excess or if your metabolic inflammatory status is getting worse, then you’re going to need to be rechecked in increasing amount of thyroid. So thyroid is very dynamic. No doc should put you on one dose and not see you again for a year or something like that. You need to periodically and regularly recheck this because some people, when they improve enough, they can legitimately need thyroid hormone at day one and not need any thyroid hormone at all a year or two later. So it always has to be followed up carefully.

68:34 CL: C-reactive proteins.

TL: C-reactive protein is an incredibly important tracker for risk. The range or the control range is like 0 to 3. That’s once again, like so many things, that’s crazy because they say theoretically your iron can go up to 400, your ferritin. No, your ferritin shouldn’t go above 25 and your CRP, if you’re interested in optimal health, should never go above. They clearly show that individuals with a level of 1 or less have a substantially less chance of a heart attack and death than a CRP of 3 or more. But it’s a continuum. So I mean a 1.5 is better than a 2.5, okay? But your optima CRP, 0.3 or less. It does track very well. We’re now starting to see other tests that indicate inflammation in the body but they’re much more expensive, they haven’t been as well studied and we don’t have the mountains of data by which to have confidence in them that we do now in the CRP.

Now, is a CRP of 0.3, for example, a guarantee of living long and healthy? No. But a CRP of 5 is a really good guarantee that you’re not going to live long and healthy. And when you have advanced diseases such as cancers, I mean, you can have CRPs of 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 100. Which also allows those disease when you’re doing something like addressing the mouth and you’re doing other parameters, ozone etc. to address the cancer, it really gives you something you can track very well to see how well you’re systemically impacting that cancer, that chronic degenerative disease. So it’s not only a good test to see where you stand statistically but it’s also a good test to track the effectiveness of your treatment protocol.

70:45 CL: You’re a remarkable human being. You’re a cardiologist. You could have basically just stuck in that role. It’s a very noble role. You could be playing golf in a beautiful resort right now. Instead, you’re stirring the pot and happily pissing off some people in the AMA.

TL: There’s no question. I could be making a heck of a lot more money as a regular cardiologist. No doubt about it. But I appreciate your comments and I’m not trying to build myself up but I’m trying to take my Hippocratic oath seriously, what can I say.

71:22 CL: I thank you for it. When I came across the work of Hal Huggins, I mean there’s just certain doctors out there. I know that they could have just gone the conventional role and had a very good life doing that, and I was like, “You know, these people are my heroes because they stick their neck out and it’s usually not without criticism and all the other things.” I put you right up there with him. I know the exhaustive research you’ve done and you didn’t have to do it. The world could have just one on with all these chronic diseases. But you just couldn’t sit tight and keep quiet. You had to put this information out there and I know it’s going to save lives. I appreciate it so much. How can people find out more about you and about the 10 other books that you have written?

TL: My website Peakenergy.com. It has links for the book, it has a whole bunch of articles I’ve written on related topics that people can feel free to email around because I talk about the iron, I talk about the liposomes, I talk about the craziness of vitamin C complex and all the people that are trying to jump on the vitamin C bandwagon by telling people crazy stuff like ascorbic acid is not vitamin C and all sort of things like that.

72:52 CL: I’m glad that you brought that up because the last few times that I went to the health food store, I did get sold on a food grade which is much more expensive. The dosage is much less which I was told because it’s food grade your body needs much less and you should stay away from the ascorbate. You addressed that in the book and thanks so much for clarifying that because it gets a little confusing when you’re shopping for vitamin C these days.

TL: The more antioxidants you take, the better. So if you want to take a whole host of antioxidants and vitamin C, that’s good. But you don’t need to take anything other than vitamin C to accomplish the literal miracles that have been published in the literature over the past 80 years.

73:35 CL: And I don’t want to dissuade people because they go, “Gosh, it’s so expensive to do so.” It doesn’t have to be.

TL: Well, that’s the other thing too. They think they buy into that, “Well, I got to take this with my vitamin C, and then I don’t end up taking the best amount of vitamin C because it’s too expensive to take it in this whole complex vitamin C form. I mean, you couldn’t afford, many people couldn’t afford to take 15 grams a day of this complex food form of vitamin C, but it’s pennies when you just take the vitamin C.

74:12 CL: And I was relieved in your book, Curing the Incurable, about the vitamin C that you were saying the liposomal, you have found to be almost just as effective as IV vitamin C.

TL: Incredible stuff but you just have to make sure it’s liposome encapsulated because I’ve never seen a fraudulent bandwagon the size of the liposome encapsulation. They are some incredibly fraudulent products out there and that’s why I say, I’ve mentioned the LivOn, I’ve been with them a long time and I only jumped onboard with them after I saw what the products did. Not because I just wanted to be an endorser or something like that.

74:57 CL: I heard that story that you took it for quite a while before you kind of got back to them and started communicating with them. Okay, our time is up. I can’t thank you enough. The last request is, can I invite you for a part 2 of this interview?

TL: Sure, that would be fine.

75:15 CL: Thank you so much, Dr. Levy. Have a wonderful day!

TL: Okay. Thanks for having me.

75:21 CL: Thank you. Bye-bye!

TL: Okay. Bye-bye!