Jodi: Hi, I’m Jodi Cohen and I’m so excited to be joined by my friend Trina Felber. She’s the founder and CEO of Primal Life Organics as a registered nurse with a master’s degree in anesthesia. Trina disrupted the beauty industry and exposed the hyper-toxic personal care products poisoning us with big cosmetics.
She started her natural dental and skincare company in 2008 and puts her nurse care into every product she makes. She is a multi-million dollar entrepreneur and bestselling author of Beauty’s Dirty Secrets. She has made the Inc. 5,000 list five years in a row.
Trina: Hey Jodi. I can’t wait to mouth off with you cuz we’ve done it before. Not on camera, really.
Jodi: I heard you speak at Paleo FX a couple of years ago and you did this amazing talk about the mouth microbiome and just spoke about it in a way that I’d never heard before. I’d love for you to share some of the health benefits of the mouth microbiome.
Trina: I remember either my mom or the dentist saying, “Hey, brush your teeth. Good health starts inside your mouth.” And I never really thought about what that meant. We just heard that saying, but nobody actually ingested it and was like, what does that mean? Good health starts inside your mouth. What I’ve come to realize in my recent search is that if you don’t have good health inside your mouth, that is exactly where good health stops for you because your mouth is directly linked to every other organ and aspect of your health inside. If you have the wrong bacteria inside your mouth, it’s creating acids, it’s creating plaque.
Plaque is really a biofilm and it’s creating these acids that wear away at your enamel, so your enamel becomes really thin. Your teeth start to become really thin, and it also wears away and destroys your gum tissue. When your gum tissue starts to get worn away, you start to get these weak junctions between the cells. Just like in your gut, you start to get these weak junctions where proteins and toxins can enter your system and cause inflammation internally. And the interesting thing about your mouth and your gum tissue as opposed to when you drink or eat something, when you eat or drink something, your body has a protective mechanism called the liver where toxins and things that aren’t supposed to be in your body will go to your liver.
Your liver will detox, it’ll convert it to something that’s water soluble, so you can excrete it. But in your mouth, when you absorb toxins that you’re exposed to all day long, whether it’s food, drink, or the air that we’re breathing, those toxins can get into your gum tissue. Once in your gum tissue, which has a lot of blood vessels in it, those toxins can enter your bloodstream and when they enter your bloodstream, they enter it at a point that it travels throughout your body, so this inflammation then can travel throughout your body, to your heart, to your brain, to your kidneys, to everywhere, and cause problems.
That’s why your mouth isn’t just linked to heart disease. It’s not just linked to early Alzheimer’s. Your mouth is linked to infertility. It’s linked to erectile dysfunction for men and women, diabetes, thyroid disease, all sorts of things.
Jodi: People talk about metal amalgams and other toxins in the mouth, but they don’t really talk about your mouth having the wrong flora. Can you talk a little bit about the do’s and don’ts, like what they can do?
Trina: How do you know if you have the wrong bacteria inside? Because most people don’t know. But I can tell you that if you wake up with bad breath or you suffer from bad breath at all, even once throughout the day, you have the wrong bacteria inside your mouth. We’ve been wearing masks. A lot of people have still been wearing face masks, right? Face masks will increase the bad bacterial count inside your mouth. So even if you’re healthy and you’re eating well because of the environment, it’s all about the environment inside your mouth and what you’re using.
The problem with products that are being sold on the market is that they are acidic. And they are causing more bacteria, the wrong bacterial growth inside our mouth. So you think that they should be good, we’re being told that they’re cleaning our teeth, they’re killing all of our bacteria. What they’re really doing is they’re causing cavities and gum disease because of the way they’re formulated, they’re acidic by nature. Whenever there are acids inside your mouth, whether it’s from what you’re brushing your teeth with, mouthwash, or what you’re eating, anytime your mouth is acidic, those minerals are inside your enamel.
I have a little thing here, my little prop, those minerals that are inside your enamel come out, so you lose minerals with acid exposure, the wrong bacteria inside your mouth, those bacteria create acid. That’s how they survive. That’s how they live and procreate. Just like cancer cells, they love an acidic environment so they create an acidic environment so that they can keep procreating and destroy your good cells. So that’s the same thing that’s happening inside your mouth. Bacteria that is bad causes bad breath. So, anyone that suffers from bad breath, we were brainwashed into believing bad breath is okay…
“Use mouthwash that has alcohol in it and it will be fine.” And the opposite is true. Bad breath is not okay. It’s a signal to you that there’s an imbalance between the good guys in your mouth and the bad guys and the bad guys are winning. And if you don’t do something to stop that, you are gonna be losing minerals, denaturing your teeth, and you’re gonna be wearing away your gum tissue. And it’s super easy to stop the process.
We just have to stop using the wrong products. Mouthwashes don’t work because they’re killing your good bacteria and the harsh ingredients in most toothpaste don’t work. Even natural products, while they’re better, they’re not doing what you really need them to do to create this help. What you wanna create is this environment inside your mouth, think of a garden that’s really flourishing as opposed to the garden that has fungus and it has like bugs. You want the garden that’s like got fruit galore, so what we need to do is get the good bacteria growing.
Let me go into my story a little bit cuz this tells you a little bit about how I figured this all out because as a nurse, I got none of this in nursing school, doctors and nurses don’t get taught. I’m even gonna go as far as to say most dentists don’t get taught what I’m gonna teach you. Most dentists have no idea what I’m gonna tell you and how it really works to heal teeth. When my daughter was two years old, she had a molar that came in that looked like a cavity, and so my husband and I took her to the dentist, and the dentist told us that when that tooth was being developed, it must have had some sort of infection or viral infection or stress or something where when that tooth was being developed, it had a natural defect, which was a natural cavity.
I had no idea that could happen, but he said that the defect was pretty significant. He said most likely the tooth was gonna have to be pulled within one year, but his resolution was, let’s put a temporary filling in it. The temporary filling will be a bandaid. It’ll fall out every two to three months, and every time it falls out, we’ll just decide if we put in another temporary filling or if we pull the tooth. So as I was leaving the dental office, I’ll never forget, he says, don’t worry, Mom. He knew I was upset. I know that every tooth with a meridian is connected to an organ, and as soon as you pull the tooth, that connection is severed. And I didn’t want that to happen. So I was upset. And he said, don’t worry, Mom, we put a temporary filling in it.
Now we just hope for the best. And I thought, there is no way that this mom is gonna hope for the best. So I went home. Started researching and that’s when I found Dr. Wena Price and all of his research, and I came away with three takeaways from him. For a healthy mouth, you have to have an alkaline environment inside the mouth. You have to brush with things that are alkaline to neutralize the acids and put minerals back in the teeth. Remember, when you’re eating something that’s acidic, or the bacteria is creating acids, it’s wearing away at your enamel and it’s causing damage to your gum tissue. But during an alkaline environment, your good bacteria thrive, alkaline kills the bad bacteria, breaks down plaque. It can actually destroy that hard coating of the plaque and it’s gonna put the minerals, if minerals are present, minerals will go back in into your teeth.
So it must be alkaline. How to know if what you’re using is alkaline. Baking soda is the best indicator. It’s food, you know, it’s food grade. We use it in baking. Baking soda is the best indicator that what you’re brushing with is alkaline.
The second thing that Dr. Wesley Price, when I did his research, I walked away saying, has to have minerals, has to be alkaline, has to have minerals, because if I don’t have minerals in what I’m brushing with when it’s alkaline, those minerals, if it’s not alkaline and there’s minerals, you’re gonna spit them out or you’re gonna ingest them, and they’re gonna go all the way through your body and then you’re gonna dispose of them. But if it’s alkaline, it has the right minerals, you’ll be brushing those minerals right back into your enamel. So it has to have the right minerals. Your teeth are made up of calcium and phosphate primarily, but they also have manganese and silica and magnesium and many other minerals in them.
They’re primarily calcium and phosphate, but it’s a lock-in key. So if you lose a manganese mineral in a certain spot, you can’t replace it with calcium. You can’t replace it with fluoride. Technically so that it’s strong, you can only replace it with the mineral that was lost. When I was reading his research, clay is what I found that has minerals in the ion form and a plethora of minerals, not just calcium and phos. But it has a lot of other minerals that are needed by your teeth to keep them strong. So, I use a blend of three different clays. The three clays then have all the minerals. So while you’re brushing, you’ve got three clays, a blend of baking soda, and I now added hydroxyapatite.
That’s a new ingredient that is the same composition as your enamel. So it is calcium and phos and brushing with that along with three clays and baking soda is an environment that’s gonna allow your good bacteria to take over, kill off the bad stuff, and then put the minerals back in your teeth. And I make it either peppermint, or spearmint, or we flavor ours with essential oils. And the essential oils help support good bacteria and kill off bad bacteria.
They help whiten as well. All of this will help whiten your teeth, rebuild your enamel, and then when you have a healthy microbiome inside your mouth, you don’t wake up with bad breath, you get that balance back so that you don’t have to worry about gargling with alcohol or using breath mints, which do the opposite of what they’re supposed to, and gum and things like that.
Jodi: I don’t have any cavities, but my gums are like a horror movie to the point where my dentist wanted to refer me out to a periodontist. And so I wish I had thought of you. I had heard this company has this binder biotoxin, which is clay. And someone said, just swish it around your mouth once a day and see if it works. My dentist couldn’t believe it, she was blown away. She’s like, I don’t know what you’ve done.
Trina: So your gum tissue is loaded with toxins. Like when we think about what our mouth is exposed to, we’re exposed to everything and heavy metals and especially tap water, if we are exposed to any tap water at all. Tap water has a lot of heavy metals. It has a lot of drug waste in it. But the environment that we’re breathing, we’re exposed to so much, it can get into your gum tissue. Clay binds to those toxins and can pull them out so that your tissue can actually be clean and then the healing can begin. Like when you think about mucked up, anything that’s mucky, you can’t heal very well. You can’t heal. It’s gotta be cleansed, it’s gotta be clean. And then you can get more blood flow and then detoxification can happen. They can get rid of the waste and more oxygen can be delivered.
When we’re talking about gum tissue, the third part of that is the clay, but the other important aspect of your gums is making sure that you’re giving them the nutrients that they need.
Your gum tissue is epithelial cells, so it’s just like the skin on your hand or your body. But the difference is that the environment that your gums are in is alcohol or is gonna be acidic most of the time cuz the foods that we drink, your saliva is supposed to keep your mouth more neutral and it’s supposed to protect, which is really our basic protective mechanism. Our immune system starts with our saliva.
Jodi: Isn’t that interesting? When you’re sympathetic dominant, you have less saliva.
Trina: The pathway of making nitric oxide, your saliva, good bacteria in the mouth, and good bacteria in the gut. If those three things are not there, your nitric oxide production is almost non-existent. Your nitric oxide vasodilates, increases blood flow, and increases oxygen. So you think about your heart health. Erectile dysfunction, infertility, brain fog, all of these things, your immune system, all of these things are dependent on nitric oxide. Everyone walking around with a mask on and bad breath is not producing adequate amounts of nitric oxide.
You’re gonna start to see the fallout of that, not just inside your mouth, but your immune system’s gonna become depleted and then you’re gonna end up with inflammatory problems that can make their head as anything. It could be diabetes or thyroid disease or cancer or anything. The bacteria inside your mouth are extremely important. I do have this teeth whitening system and it does more than whiten teeth because of the lights. It has 16 blue LED lights. It’s laser therapy for your mouth. And then you can do both. You can kinda see both red and blue.
You put this in your mouth and I’m gonna talk you through what each one does. Let me start with the red because you’re talking about receding gums. So anyone with gums that are receding. When you go to the dentist, they say your gums, you’ve got the score or bleeding gums. Bleeding gums are a sign that you’re having issues, bacteria inside your gums.
Red light therapy does the same thing for your gum tissue as red light therapy does for your skin. It’s set at the wavelength, or the nanometers, appropriate for gum tissue. Let me turn it back on. Red light increases blood flow, so it’s gonna increase the diameter, which brings more nutrients in oxygen, and waste products can be delivered or removed. It increases blood flow, reduces inflammation inside the gums. And also increases collagen production, which is also gonna be what is probably lacking as your gums are receding. Your gums and your bone tissue, your jaw, both need collagen in order to be healthy. I tell people to use red light if they have issues with their gums.
The blue light is really cool for inside the mouth, so the bacteria that are harmful, that causes bad breath and gum disease and cavities has this little piece to it. Harvard did a study, they found that the bad bacteria inside the mouth has this little red part to it. I call it the heme part, that when exposed to blue light, this, this part explodes. And when it explodes, the bacteria die. What’s really cool is putting this inside your mouth light doesn’t just hit the surface, but it can penetrate. How cool is that, that it could penetrate between your teeth and into the pockets of your gum, where the bacteria like to hide and you could zap the bacteria and kill them with blue light. So that’s what the blue light does. So if people have problems with plaque buildup or bacterial problems inside their mouths.
Bad breath. I tell them to start with just the blue light. If you are someone that, everything seems pretty good. Your teeth aren’t sensitive, you don’t have problems with plaque, you don’t have gum issues, then I tell them to do the treatment that has both the red and the blue. So you’ll get 16 blue, 16 red at the same time. But the gel that comes with it that I created is peroxide 3. Cuz peroxide’s not a good thing for your mouth, especially if you have amalgam fillings, the silver fillings.
There’s a video on YouTube and it shows what peroxide does to silver fillings and it vaporizes. So then you breathe that in, and now you’re loading yourself with mercury. Our gel is made with an olive oil base, soothing to your gum tissue, soothing to your teeth, not gonna hurt at all, even if your teeth are sensitive. And then it has two clays in it. The olive oil is gonna help with the cleansing of the gum tissue and the cleaning of the teeth. The clays are gonna help with remineralizing your teeth. Your enamel is the thickest part of your tooth. What happens as we get older is we lose so many minerals from the surface that we start to see the dentin. So your teeth become transparent and you start to see the dentin underneath, which is off-color. It’s usually grayish or bluish.
The way peroxide works is that it pulls the fluid, the moisture out of the dentin, because if it does that, it can make it more opaque and your tooth will look white. But what you’ve just done is destroyed the infrastructure, so now you have weakened the tooth inside here, and you are more prone to cavities and fractures of your tooth. So the best way to whiten your tooth is to remineralize the hard enamel part. The thicker your enamel, the whiter your tooth.
So it has two clays in it and hydroxyapatite.
This isn’t an overnight thing. We’ll remove surface stains very quickly, but rebuilding the enamel takes a little bit of time. So, with the kit, you get the teeth whitener device and then you get 10 gels that come with it and a charger and each gel has two treatments, so you get 20 treatments. We recommend doing five treatments a week. The light goes off after 15 or 16 minutes, 15-minute treatments, five times a week for four weeks.
And then after that, we have the gels that you can purchase and do two treatments a week for life to keep your teeth in your gums healthy, and you can choose red light only, blue light only, or a combination just depending on what your needs are at that moment. How much is the kit? I’m gonna give you a special offer on the website. The kit is $550, way less than what you would pay in a dental office for peroxide. I’ll give Jody a link and be sure to click through her link cuz you’ll get 60% off!
Jodi: That is a deal. I really wanna land on what you were saying is that a lot of these cosmetic processes make you look better, but you’re actually deteriorating your health.
Trina: You look better for a little bit of time, but then you know your teeth might look white, but you’re starting to get sick from the ramifications of it.
And then ultimately, things that are leeching minerals, your teeth are gonna eventually start to break or chip, or you’re gonna end up with cavities and root canals and all sorts of issues like that.
Jodi: It just goes downhill from there. I’m curious. I’m happy to be a Guinea pig for this because I know how close I am to the edge of my gums bleeding…
I’m happy to try this and see if it helps restore, I would be thrilled if I could rebuild gum tissue.
Trina: I’ll send you my LED so then you can tell everybody how you do. I always got asked, where do I start? What do I use? So I put together an entire kit that has everything you need for 60 days. I always tell people, please don’t use anything that’s not in this box unless it’s the LED. If you use another brand, even if it’s a natural product, a natural brand, many brands don’t formulate their products the way that I formulate mine.
One of the big no-no ingredients is glycerin. Glycerin is in so many toothpastes. It’s in regular toothpaste, but it’s also in natural toothpaste. What it does is it puts a saran wrap coating on your tooth, so you can’t get minerals in them. It desensitizes the two, so you don’t know that you’re losing minerals. Odine uses something else, but it’s similar. It’s an ingredient that is not gonna hurt you. You could probably swallow glycerin and you’ll be fine. It’s not toxic, but it’s detrimental to your tooth. That’s why natural companies will put it in there. It makes your teeth feel smooth and it makes your teeth feel not sensitive. But the problem is you’re not gonna get minerals in here. You’re not gonna be helping your tooth at all for the long term.
So what happens when you start using a product like mine? If you were using a product that has glycerin, it will erase the glycerin. And if you have areas that are mineral depleted, Your sensitivity might go up slightly. So what I tell people to do is just take a little bit, this is the larger size of it, but take a little bit of the powder, dip it on your finger, and then just place it anywhere where you might have a sensitive tooth.
Jodi: Talk about tongue scraping. I do that. I love it. But I’m just curious, like, tell people the benefits.
Trina: Tongue scraping is amazing. If you’re not doing it, then you’re just leaving a flower bed of bacteria. Think of your tongue as a flower bed. If you don’t get rid of the stuff that’s growing on top of it, then your taste buds will never be able to function properly. That white coating on your tongue is the bacteria. It’s gonna create acid. So even if you’re brushing and you’re doing everything right, you’re brushing and flossing and putting good oil on your gum tissue and doing an LED. If you’re not scraping your tongue and you have a white coating that is creating acid, so you’re still gonna have that acid mouth.
This is the reason that masks over your mouth all the long creates problems is that it creates that coating on your tongue and then that branches out into gum tissue. So scraping it takes between five and 10 seconds.
Jodi: I always do it when I wake up. How often do you recommend doing it a day?
Trina: If I can get you to do it once a day, I’m happy. Twice a day is better. So I just tell people like, I’m not trying to overwhelm anybody, so if you just do it once a day, you are better than not doing it. If you do it twice a day, it’s literally three swipes on your tongue. I have a whole protocol, I’ll give you the links for this as well. That way they can get a discount on the detox kit if anyone is interested in getting the LED, you don’t have to do both. You will get the opportunity to purchase this as well when you order the LED. It’s a copper tongue scraper, and as long as you wipe it dry and not sit it in water it will last you a lifetime.
You’ll never have to replace that. It’s really cool. And then you’ll get biodegradable floss picks as well. They’re made with cornstarch. I’m very in tune with Mother Earth. She gives me what I need to put in my products, so I always try and give a little back to her. So this is biodegradable, bamboo toothbrushes biodegradable as well with activated charcoal in the bristles to detox and cleanse a little bit more.
And then the gum serum, which we kind of touched on, it’s an olive oil. It’s an olive oil base with 11 essential oils, you use this instead of mouthwash, and all you do is drop one, two, or three drops right on your finger. And I like to put it right on my gums. And then I’ll get a little bit more and put it all over the tissues of my mouth. And even on my tongue.
Jodi: The one oil we might wanna recommend, something for the lymph, like our lymph oil or even castor oil.
Trina: And you’re mobilizing all those toxins. I love your lymph and the adrenal. Those are my two favorites. I’m like hooked on the adrenal.
Jodi: I’ve noticed if I smell it before the balance exercises, it’s so much easier to feel centered and grounded. Thank you so much for that amazing education on the mouth and what we should be doing.
Please tell people how they can find out more about you.
Trina: Primal Life Organics. I should come up. Primal LifeOrganics.com is the website.
My support team, if anybody has any questions, you can reach out. It’s su*****@pr****************.com and we’re on Instagram, we’re on Facebook, we’re on most of the platforms. We’re here for you. I just wanna help people understand if you’re taking care of the inside of your body, but you’re not taking care of your mouth, you’re never really going to be able to heal properly.
Jodi: Back to your original story about the dentist, let’s just hope there’s a lot you can do. My dentist was like, I think we need to send you to the periodontist. I’m like, what are they gonna do? Are they really even gonna fix it? No, they’re just gonna use sharper knives. That does not sound fun. I have a better plan.
Trina: Did I tell you the end of that story? I forget the punchline. So the tooth that was supposed to be pulled within a year. My goal when I started making my tooth powder, cuz the whole reason I made my toothpowder was for my daughter. So the whole goal was if I can get that tooth to one year and one day I win, I only wanna get it past one year. That tooth fell out naturally at the age of 12 and that original filling that was supposed to last two months, lasted 10 years and was in that tooth, and her tooth had remineralized over that temporary filling to support it and prevent any bacteria from getting inside. So that tooth lasted the life of the tooth with the original filling still in place.
Jodi: I have two baby teeth in my mouth. I’m 53. I have not let them pull ’em, and I only have one wisdom tooth that they wanted to pull and I’m like, let’s just see it. It’s totally fine. It grew in naturally.
Trina: You have options and as long as you have knowledge, you can make the best decision.
And that’s what my goal is, is just let people understand, go home, look at what you’re using if you’re not at home, or pull out your toothpaste right now. And if it doesn’t have baking soda, it doesn’t have clay, hydroxyapatite, then you’re missing those three components. It’s so easy when I talk about the mouth detox kit, people will tell me that their teeth are super sensitive. They’ve had sensitive teeth for years.
They’ll use it for three days and their sensitivity’s gone and they can’t believe it. They’re like, I’ve suffered with this for years. It happens very quickly because the way it’s formulated, it’s formulated so that those minerals can get in.
Jodi: Thank you so much for your time and for your wisdom.
Trina: It was so good to see you and chat with you again, Jodi. I miss chatting with you.
