The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode - #360 - Dr. Michelle Jorgensen

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
I believe if the American Dental Association were to ban these fillings and were to say okay research is now showing that we shouldn't be doing this, every dentist that has ever placed or removed a mercury filling in the United States would be under class action lawsuit because that's how our country works.

I really feel like lack of sleep or poor sleep is an epidemic in the world today and a significant amount of the chronic disease that people are suffering from actually ties all the way back to poor sleep quality. We've been called kind of the most overfed, undernourished society in history. Welcome to the American Dental Association.

Melanie Avalon
to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast, where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more. Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind, we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics lying herein.

So friends, are you ready to join me? Let's do this. Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. Oh my goodness, friends, I so enjoyed today's conversation with Dr. Michelle Jorgensen. For her book, Living Well with Dr. Michelle, Dr. Michelle is a dentist with a very holistic approach to dentistry. And her book is all about how to support cellular energy all throughout your body to live your truly best life. We touch on so many things in today's episode on the dental health side of things, we talk about things like the truth about fluoride, all about the fluoride alternative hydroxyapatite and what it can do for your teeth, what to do if you have mercury fillings, how to get them out, and when you maybe shouldn't get them out, whether or not you should engage in cosmetic dentistry, how to deal with TMJ pain, beyond the mouth, we talk about how you can live seasonally in the spirit of ancient wisdom meets modern medicine, how the different organs align with the seasons, and so much more. The show notes for today's episode will be at melanieavalon.com slash living well. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about, so definitely check that out. I can't wait to hear what you guys think. Definitely let me know in my Facebook group, I have biohackers, intermittent fasting plus real foods plus life, comment something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love, and then check out my Instagram, find the Friday announcement post, and again, comments there to enter to win something that I love. All right, I think that's all the things. Without further ado, please enjoy this fabulous conversation with Dr. Michelle Jorgensen. Hi friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I am about to have today. It is a long time coming. So the backstory on today's conversation, when I first saw the pitch about this incredible guest, Dr. Michelle Jorgensen, I was an immediate yes for so many reasons. So she is a holistic dentist, and I personally just think this is so important because I feel like a lot of people, when it comes to dentistry, I feel like a lot of people medically are very much aware about the importance of a functional medical approach or a more holistic approach, and yet we might just like go to a conventional dentist and not think twice about all the things, and also not necessarily connect our dental health to our whole body health. Like for some reason, I feel like there's some sort of segregation there in the world of medicine.

Melanie Avalon
So just the idea of it, I was very excited by. And at the time, the book that was coming out was called Living Well with Dr. Michelle, a comprehensive handbook for optimal health and unlimited energy. So it looked really promising.

I definitely wanted to read it, have her on the show. And then friends, I read the book, and I was mentioning this to Michelle right before, but it was not what I anticipated in that going in, I was like, oh, this is gonna be a book about holistic dentistry. Yes, Dr. Dorgensen's story is in there. She talks about her history with mercury poisoning and toxicity, which I actually had as well, so we can talk about that. And the epiphanies that she had from that and how she came to realize the importance of cellular energy in our bodies and supporting that. And what I really, really liked about this approach was I feel like we talk about cellular energy on the show all the time. Normally, we talk about it in the context of the mitochondria and how can you best support it with different lifestyle interventions and diet and exercise and cold exposure and all the things. This book goes deep, deep, deep into an aspect of it, which I'm thinking about it now, is not really touched on in most of the books that I read, and that is the actual flow of electrons, so the role of electrons in creating energy in our bodies. And in particular, she has a cell well model, and she has a really interesting correlation between kind of like a traditional medicine approach to things where we're looking at the seasons and living seasonally, and how does that line up with your cells, and even throughout the day, how can you live according to the different elements and the seasons? And she talks all about genetics and epigenetics and how food is actually turned into energy. What is the role of electrons there? What is the role of the earth, the soil, the air, the water? It was a really, really fascinating read.

I have so many notes, so many questions, so many things to talk about. So Dr. Michelle, thank you so much for all that you do, and thank you so much for being here. Well, I am.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
I'm just excited to talk with you. This has been a fun thing to find out more about you and about your journey and your expertise. And I can't wait.

Melanie Avalon
I know I from like I said from the very beginning of the book when you shared your story about mercury toxicity I was there to it with mine was so bad my my blood mercury levels were like thirty i think which is shockingly high and i also went through kelation and everything like that okay i have so many questions so your personal story so did you always want to be a dentist so what led you down that route and what happened with your mercury toxicity and your epiphanies that you had there surrounding the practice of dentistry and you know the broader picture that it led you to

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Yeah, I grew up as a dentist daughter, so my dad's a dentist, and I knew I wanted to do something with medicine or dentistry. So I'll always remember senior year in high school, we actually had a challenge to find out something about ourselves. And the teacher asked us all to go and investigate something. So I said, well, let's go figure out if I want to do medicine or dentistry. So I went and talked to every dentist I knew and asked them, which would you recommend I do? And I talked to every doctor and asked them, which would you recommend I do? And this was back in the 80s, and they all said, every doctor said, if you're a woman and you actually want to have a family, go be a dentist. Your dad has a lot better life than I do. And so I said, all right. And every dentist said, go be a dentist. Our lives are great. As a woman, if you want a family, this is going to be a great way to go. And so everybody across the board unanimously said, go be a dentist. So that's what I did.

And I just dove headfirst into it. I actually graduated from dental school at the age of 23, which now I think back to that. I think, what in the world was I so in a rush to do? Why did I want to be grown up and responsible for that long? I started in dentistry, and really, my dad was my mentor. He was exactly what I wanted to do. He was such a great just educator. He himself was very educated in all things. He was always up to date, and I thought I would practice forever just like he has. He's in his 70s, and he's still practicing. And that's not how it went for me. I started having health issues at about a decade into practice. And you know, when you have health issues, you just start talking to friends and neighbors about what they do. And you go visit a doctor or two maybe, and at first it was just gut issues. And so we changed all of our food and our diet, and it was a great education process for me to learn some of those things. And it helped a little, but it didn't help a lot. The bigger issues were that my memory was slipping so badly. I couldn't finish sentences. I couldn't even remember patients' names from room to room. So it was drastically different from the way my mind has always operated. But the big one was my hands. I just had painful pins and needles, just fire, numbness all the way down my arms and hands. I couldn't sleep at night. I would set up half the night shaking my hands trying to get them to wake up. I couldn't blow dry my hair or brush my teeth or hold a pen, and I got to the point that I couldn't hold an instrument. So at that point, doctors had no answers. I'd been everywhere, had seen everyone, and no one could tell me anything. So I put my practice for sale. But this was devastating for us. I had four young children. My husband also worked for the practice. This was our livelihood, our entire livelihood. We still had debt. It was really devastating, and I didn't know what I was going to do. So I looked into being a nutritionist, working in a dental practice, doing that.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
And finally, one dentist said, your symptoms sound so much like mine. Have you looked into mercury poisoning as a possibility? And that was the first time I'd ever heard it, that it even was a possibility. We'd been taught in school that silver fillings are 50% mercury. Still are today. We were taught that that mercury is completely stable and inert, completely safe. And if we told anyone that mercury could affect their health, we would lose our license. So that was the only education I had about mercury.

And here I am being told perhaps my symptoms are because of that. So the doctor finally said, isn't it worth just a test? So it was. I'd done every other test, got tested, and that's what it was.

Mercury levels off the charts. So at first I was relieved, of course. Finally an answer. I finally have a path I can try to go down and find a way to get out of this mess that I'm in.

But I was also a little furious. You know why in the world? Why is no one talking about this? Why was no one telling people that mercury, this wasn't because I had fillings.

This is because I was drilling out fillings. I have no fillings. I was drilling out patients fillings. I was a cosmetic dentist. People didn't like the way they looked. So they wanted me to take out their old silver, you know, black fillings. As you do that, it vaporizes the mercury in the filling and mercury vapor rises. Well, where's the dentist's head? Right above the patient's head. So literally it's filling our heads with mercury.

I have had a lifelong journey with infertility. Well, mercury definitely influences infertility. I mean, so many issues that all of a sudden made sense. So I was mad.

Why is no one talking about this? What else in dentistry is no one talking about? And that's really what set me on my journey to change, first of all, my own needs. I had to change the way I was doing dentistry so that I couldn't, I didn't keep breathing it in so I could keep actually practicing.

But also what else is there? And patients started asking me questions. I thought that they would all run away screaming. Like I was the crazy woman on the block, you know, like, what in the world is she doing? Why do we have these giant vacuums in the room when we're removing fillings? And I thought they would all just think I was just crazy. But instead they all said, oh, I've been looking for somebody that does things like this. Can I send my friends? Can I tell my doctor about you? People started asking me questions I didn't know the answers to. Things like, well, our root canal is really safe. Should we be having them? And what about fluoride? You dentists talk about fluoride all the time, but is there any, you know, side effect or issues with fluoride? I've heard, you know, rumblings about that and I didn't know how to answer them. I didn't know the answers to any of these things. And that's where my journey really took off. I said, all right, there's too many things that I don't know.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
And that's not OK. I need to find out what the real story is behind all of this.

And I need to find out, is there a way that our bodies can keep ourselves well? What does dentistry have to do with all of this? And how can I contribute? And that's really where my career and my journey started is at that place of I don't know enough and I need to learn more.

Melanie Avalon
Wow, okay, I what an incredible story. I have so many questions just from that.

I'm really curious today still so going back to the beginning what you're saying and your decision about and you were polling everybody. Is that still the case today where they would recommend being a dentist if you want to have a family as a woman or do you think it's different now?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
it's absolutely the case. Because if you think about it, medicine is a difficult career oftentimes. There are nights and weekends and on call hours and even just going through the schooling, there are those demands the dentistry doesn't have. You know, people joke the dentistry is like the perfect career. None of us work Fridays. We get off at 4pm and we can take spring break with our kids and it really is a great career.

And I particularly love it because of what we'll probably continue talking about just the influence that I can have on health now. You know, it wasn't that when I started it was that wasn't my focus, but that certainly is now.

Melanie Avalon
The mercury poisoning that you had, I find it interesting. Like, do you think you are genetically more susceptible to it?

Like, why do you think more dentists were not, or were they maybe getting this experience as well?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Absolutely. I think I was more genetically susceptible. So I'm sure you've learned and talked about the gene variation called MTHFR. And this gene variation, the way I like to describe it to patients simply is the body has like a coding system where when something comes in the body, the body's able to tag it, the liver particularly is able to kind of put a UPC code on it and say, okay, this one's trouble. Get rid of it. This one's good. Keep it. You know, and it just, it's the sorting system in the body. Well, when you have this genetic variant, your body isn't as good at sorting. It's not as good at tagging things. So I held onto the mercury where my father got rid of it. And we've actually done genetic testing to find that I did get one of these genes from him, one from my mom, so he only had one, but I had two. So my body simply did not have a great process for sorting things. Now a lot of people will find that they, they have similar symptoms. These are the people who, when they come to the dental office, they say, I can never get numb. Like you're going to give me 10 shots and I can't get numb. Well, it's because your body doesn't know what to do with anesthetic or if you've gone to the doctor before and had similar experiences, not just the dentist or ibuprofen or, you know, drugs, medicine, just don't work on me. I can't take, you know, medicine. It doesn't, it doesn't do much or it works the exact opposite way. Like I take a Benadryl, you know, for an allergy or something and I'm wired, whereas it's supposed to put me to sleep. So they find that their body actually reacts opposite or in a different way than it's expected. Well, that's a tagging issue. That's an MTHFR variant.

And interestingly enough, we're finding that about a third of the population has this variant. So that means about a third of the population can't deal with mercury and that includes dentists. And the sad thing that this one actually, like I've teared up on podcasts talking about this before. Two things. Number one, the infertility that I talked about. There's so much infertility and a lot of it inside of dentistry. And if you think about it, this isn't just dentists. Think about a dental office. How many of those dental team members are women? 90% even if the man, even if the dentist themselves is a man, well, the high dentists are women, the assistants are women, the receptionists, everybody working in the office is still exposed to mercury through the entire HVAC system. And there's so much infertility. We often blame it on nitrous oxide on the laughing gas, but I think it's mercury related. And this one's the saddest one to me. Dentists are notoriously high in suicide rates. And I always would scratch my head and say, well, why are we, why are more dentists committing suicide? I've had, I'm thinking five or six colleagues alone that I know that have committed suicide that are dentists. This is not right. And people will say, Oh, well dentistry is just such a stressful job. I can think of other stressful jobs that are a little bit worse than dentistry, you know, like that doesn't, that doesn't make sense.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
That doesn't add up to me. But if you talk about mercury and literally decades of filling the body full of a toxin that just fries your entire nervous system, well, now that may make sense for higher suicide rates. So it's just devastating to me.

The dentists don't know about this. How many dentists, how many dental professionals are struggling with mental issues, nervous system problems, infertility, gut issues, and they have no idea that this is mercury.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. Yeah. It's funny. I was thinking about my practice that I go to and it's a male dentist and all female assistants. Okay. This is very random and specific.

I'm just curious because my mercury toxicity was actually from eating fish. It wasn't from... I never had fillings. But one of the symptoms I had, which it's funny, it's so interesting how when you're in a dark place with something health-wise and you have some sort of symptom and you think it will never go away and then it's just so interesting when you don't have it anymore and you don't even think about it. So I'm like, I'm thinking about it now and I'm having gratitude that I don't have this symptom. And it doesn't sound that bad, but it was so uncomfortable and so intense that it was kind of shocking to me and it was the excessive saliva. I'm curious if you had that, especially since you were a dentist and aware of male

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
stuff. Very interesting.

I didn't have excess saliva, which is, I'm glad of, since I had to wear a mask every day all day. That might be problematic, but I didn't have that. But there are two different types of mercury. So the mercury that you get from fish is a different kind. It's called methylmercury, whereas the kind of mercury that is in dental fillings is called elemental mercury. So it may be that they're just two different types too.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, wow. Okay. So that that's really interesting. Once they're in the body, is the toxicity potential the same or do you know if it's different?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
They're stored in different places and they're eliminated in different ways. So they do, they are handled a little differently in the body.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, that makes sense. I'm guessing what I had, excessive saliva. Yeah, not to be TMI. Like it was so, I don't even wanna say it's so embarrassing.

It was so bad that I had to carry around, like I would carry around those like paper cups with me so that I could spit into them because there was just so much saliva in my mouth all the time. It was, yeah. And then I did chelation, which I know you said you did as well. Did you do pharmaceutical chelation?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
I was going to do that. And the doctor I was working with said, you're going to need 97 IV treatments and each one takes about two and a half hours. I said, there's no way. There's absolutely literally no way. I have four young kids. I'm running this busy practice. My life is in the toilet. How am I supposed to do that?

And so I took a very slow road to detoxing. I used things like chlorella and cilantro and some of the herbal things. But I actually, because I've had other periods of detoxing that I've said, okay, I think there's probably still mercury in here. I'm going to do more of an intense chelation. I have felt absolutely horrid. So I am really glad that I did it the slow way because I think I wouldn't have been able to continue functioning if I had done it with a stronger chelator. Chelation means pulling out. I just don't think I can pull out very quickly.

Melanie Avalon
So how long did that take you to do it the slow way?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
I felt like my brain was back after about eight years, very slow.

Melanie Avalon
I was going to say that probably, and it's so, I feel really passionate about this subject because I, I mean when I realized, you used the phrase off the charts and I get hit with a memory because I remember seeing my results and it was literally off the charts and I was like, oh, that's why they say off the charts because like it goes past where the chart goes. I'm like an extremist and I was like, I got to get this out now.

And so I, I did, I did so much back-to-back pharmaceutical chelation probably for like six months straight. I was going in multiple days doing like DMPS pushes, EDTA, IVs, things like that. And the reason I feel really passionate about it now is I got the mercury out. I also, I think it pulled out a lot of nutrients and I don't think it was smart that I went that fast. And I really caution people if they are, you know, in this situation to, you know, maybe not go as fast and take a very measured approach and be aware of, you know, replacing with nutrition because I know I pulled out a lot in addition to the mercury when I was doing that.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Yeah, and it overwhelms your elimination organs. Your elimination organs are the liver that has to, again, like I said, tag it and sort it, the kidneys that have to get rid of it, methyl mercury, which is going through, coming from fish, is largely excreted actually in feces. So it's going through the digestive tract so that it stresses the digestive tract out. But it really takes about 70 days to even get like half of it.

That's the half-life of methyl mercury, about 70 days. So you're looking at at least double that, so six months at minimum, and that's doing it pretty quickly. And I think that slowing it down even a little more and giving your kidneys and liver some extra support during that process as well as extra nutrients is a wise approach.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, and art, so now you would, I don't know, you just would think there would have been more awareness about this, especially historically knowing about like mad hatters and, you know, mercury poisoning with that. But now, is there a better understanding of everything?

No.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
No, not at all. And I have my theories. This isn't proven, but I have my theories about this. No, inside of dentistry in particular, there is a big backlash.

I have a lot of arrows that I get in my back. And thankfully, I'll always remember a time I was at the end of a very long continuum. So I've always been a very big believer in continuing education. You know, I go and I get educated on the latest and greatest and everything we're supposed to be doing. So I had gone to nine different courses in this continuum of courses. Each one was three days, cost $6,000. I had to fly to Seattle to do it. I mean, you can add up the dollars and the time that I had to have done to get to the end of this course. So I was at the end, the last ninth course at lunch on the last day. And we were sitting around with all the dentists who had committed this much and had put in this much to their education. So these are the cream of the crop here at this table. And one of them started telling a story about a dentist in his office building that wore a crazy hazmat suit to remove mercury fillings. And they all started laughing. So again, these are highly educated practitioners, all started laughing. And I sat there and I thought, do I say something or do I not? But I always say something. So of course I had to say something, but what I said I think is really important. I just said, can I share my story with you? And I shared my story. And of course they were embarrassed and apologetic. And I said, I didn't share for an apology or any of that. That's not why I shared. The reason I shared is because I don't want any of you to have the exact same story as I did. And the problem I find though is that really what we're taught and taught about mercury in school and in the profession at large is that anybody who's delving into any of these topics is just crazy. And this is all just woo woo. I'm thinking how woo woo is it if you get a test that shows you have high mercury levels? I'm pretty sure that's as far from woo woo as it can get. But here's my theory. If the American Dental Association were to come out and ban mercury fillings, they're not. They've said that you should not have them for children under the age of six or pregnant women, which always makes me say then why anyone? But at least they have made that step forward. That's just been in the last couple of years. But they're still allowed. Nothing's banned. And actually this is frequently done in children because, especially lower demographic children, because it's less expensive treatment. And it's easier to do on a wiggling, you know, saliva-filled mouth that children often are. So it's easier to do it. But I believe if the American Dental Association were to ban these fillings and were to say, okay, research is now showing that we shouldn't be doing this. Every dentist that has ever placed or removed a mercury filling in the United States would be under class action lawsuit, because that's how our country works.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
So they can't, they can't, and they never will. Because the American Dental Association, their job, people don't understand this. Who pays the American Dental Association? Dentists. We all pay.

I pay about $700 a year dues to the American Dental Association. So their job is to keep us safe, to keep us safe, legally, every other way. So they simply cannot say that this is problematic because we would all be under lawsuits and they won't do it. So right or wrong, that's why I just have to keep beating my drum and help people understand what this is about because dentistry itself will not change on its own. My philosophy is basically if we create enough demand and enough education, then we will ask enough dentists to change their mind and to do things differently, then it will slowly change but it's not going to happen from the inside.

Melanie Avalon
If a person has mercury fillings, and they have, I mean, ideally they would take them out with a holistic dentist in a safe way, but if they're thinking of taking them out conventionally, is it better to just leave them in rather than take them out and expose themselves, or would it depend on their genetics? Just leave.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
them in. You found, you hit it exactly right. Yep. It is safer to leave them in.

There is research showing that that mercury is released from the fillings 24 seven. You can go online and PubMed right now and find these articles. So I can say this now without losing my license. It is released from those fillings, especially during temperature changes. So you eat something hot, drink something cold. You, anytime you chew, it releases it. It is released, but the most mercury that's going to be released is during that removal appointment. So if it's not done with, and it's called smart removal, I found an organization that had protocol for this. So the organization is called the I A O M T dot org. And they have something called smart removal protocols. You can find dentists on their website that will follow these protocols. Don't do it unless you are doing it this way.

Melanie Avalon
OK. Wow, okay, so I've, okay, I find it, I hinted at this a little bit. It is really interesting to me that the world of dentistry does feel very, to me, siloed from the medical community when it's addressing a part of the body. Like every other part of the body that has a specialized medical approach to it, I don't know, we kind of put it under the medical umbrella. But like you said, you were doing your poll and it's like dentist or doctor, dentist or doctor, even though you're dealing with like a part of the body.

So how do you feel about that segregation or silo there?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
It's such an interesting thing because, and people will say it all the time, they'll say things like, well, you're not really a doctor. All right. I don't really care what that designation means, but thank you so much. Appreciate that.

It's such a funny thing, isn't it? That we dissociate the mouth from the rest of us and think, oh, it really doesn't have anything to do with anything. Well, it's exactly the same. The mouth is the starting point of the digestive tract. So if you have infection in your gums, you have infection in your gut. If you have infection in your gut, you have infection in your gums. It's all one tube from the top to the bottom, and the mouth is the top. So guts-related teeth are actually made of the same exact minerals that bones are. So if your body is deficient in minerals and you have something called osteoporosis, that's also why you're getting tooth decay, why you're getting cavities. Your body is pulling minerals from both bones and teeth to do that. I can look in your mouth and I can determine, are you nutrient deficient? Are you mineral deficient? Are you having issues with airway and breathing? Do you have diabetes? I can see this in your mouth. I can tell if you have heart problems. I can see so many things inside of the mouth that have to do with the rest of the body, and yet we still think it's this own little entity that's not connected, and it's just not true.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah. It's really, really interesting to me. So my current dentist that I go to, I do really like him. The reason he's not though, he would not identify as like a holistic dentist or anything like that. But the reason I found him was he was at the time here in Atlanta, he was the only dentist like in my area that had a cone beam scan. And I was convinced I went through this period where I was just convinced that I was plagued by hidden infections and things. So I was like, I must get a cone beam scan and find the hidden infections in my mouth. I'm convinced they're there. There wasn't anything there, but that's how I found him.

And it's, he, so he does have a little, he feels like a doctor. Like he takes that approach to everything and like the whole body wellness connection and everything that said, it's still like, so for example, I'm not to make this all about like my personal dental issues and things like that, but I struggle with, I know this is not the correct terminology because it's the TMJ joint, but is it TMDD? Whenever I, like that TMJ pain is what I, what I have. And so it's been a long, it's been a long road of trying to figure out like, where is the, where, like, where is that coming from? Is it like a dental issue with my teeth? Is it like breathing? Is it, you know, something else? So I just, I just find it really interesting how we like said, we kind of focus on everything in the mouth and want to keep it there when it could be coming from, you know, much more in the body. So I don't know if you work with a lot of patients, I guess, like would you or like an orthodontist work more with patients with TMJ pain?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Yeah, we have an entire specialty in our practice that's TMJ related because there is such correlation. We also have a chiropractor that works hand in hand with our TMJ doctor because what we often find is muscles and joints are very connected and sometimes the pain is muscle pain, sometimes the pain is joint pain, sometimes it's positional or structural issues that are leading to it and until we correct one thing, we can't correct another and so these are all very interrelated one with another.

Melanie Avalon
Okay. And then actually, one more last personal dental question, and then we can get into your book. But I'm dying to know. And I think the broader question here that applies to listeners beyond myself is I see this a lot in the medical world, and now I'm realizing it's a thing in the dental world as well. And look at me, segregating them again. But in any case, I think there's oftentimes like an inclination or they like to prescribe aggressive procedures. When something's wrong, it's like, well, you need this done and this done and this done, rather than being given maybe alternative options. So my example in the dental world right now is I have developed a overbite. I have my theory about where it came about. So I went and saw a orthodontist and they're like, they gave me the plan. And it was like to put an extender into my mouth, like drill a hole in the top of my mouth and extend my palate. And then that's going to pull apart my teeth. And then I went to Invisalign and push them back together. And I was like, this is a lot.

And I don't know that I want like a piece of metal in the top of my mouth. So I'm curious, things like that when people have like overbites, underbites, issues with their alignment of their teeth, whatever it may be, how drastic do people need to go to address these things? Is that sometimes the only option?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Really, I think the bigger question is, why are these things happening more frequently? What's going on? Because really understanding the root cause and the source of things then dictates treatment. Because until we know that, we aren't really able to competently give you a plan moving forward.

So we talk a lot. In fact, we talk so much about this with children as well, but children and adults both, why are mouths small these days? Why are teeth malaligned? Why does everybody have braces? Why does everybody have crooked teeth? Why do mouths not fit wisdom teeth anymore? When we look at schools 200 years ago, they had all their teeth, including the wisdom teeth in their mouth, functioning, chewing, plenty of room. What's changed?

And when we look at that, the answer actually was, it was answered back in the 1940s by Dr. Weston Price. You've probably heard of him, talked to him. You know, he was a dentist. People often don't realize that. He was very well known in the nutrition circles because he researched all of these societies that hadn't been touched by the modern diet and said, okay, which of them had better overall health but also better mouth health, had room for all the teeth, straight teeth, white teeth, you know, good fertility, good longevity, all of these things he looked at and he equated it to what they ate and found it was a matter of vitamins and minerals, really.

More fat, soluble vitamins was the key that he found. And so when we look at our society today, we are seeing a society that is small mouths everywhere, small mouth, small mouths, over bites, things that are underdeveloped. So here's the fascinating piece about this. And actually I know this through personal experience. We adopted my son when he was two and a half years old and he had been severely malnourished up until that time. He had been born at 25 weeks, extremely premature. He'd been on a G-tube for a year. I mean, just a lot of things. And he just hadn't gotten the nutrition that he needed. And one of the things that his birth mother said when selecting us as the family for him to adopt him is she said, I know that you're a dentist and you're going to be able to fix whatever's happening in his mouth because his mouth, his mouth was so small, his teeth were lined up like airplanes on a runway. They weren't next to each other. They were all front and back, kind of like a shark would be. It was the craziest thing you've ever seen in your life. And she could tell looking at it that things weren't right, you know? And so we from that day forward, it was like he's been through so many. We were at the Mayo Clinic doing therapy to try and expand things and grow his mouth. And but it all came down to nutrients and nutrition. And what I learned is that the top jaw is the first bone affected by malnutrition.

Now, we might not think of our world as maln- as having malnutrition today, but we have been called kind of the most overfed, undernourished society in history.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Why? Because our food doesn't have nutrients anymore. This goes to the book some, you know, the food doesn't have nutrients. It's it's food, it's calories, but it doesn't actually have the building blocks that bodies need to grow properly.

So what do we have? Everybody has a small mouth and crooked teeth and an underbite, which then leads to no room in the mouth for teeth and tongues, which leads to no room for error. So we have an epidemic of children who have ADHD symptoms, bedwetting, these dark circles under their eyes, super restless. They're grinding their teeth. They can't sleep at night because they can't breathe, which then translate into adults who can't go to sleep, can't stay asleep. They are on things like Ambien and even, you know, the light versions like melatonin to try to just get enough sleep at night. They wake up multiple times. They toss and turn. They grind their teeth. They wake up feeling like crap and they don't know why they slept the hours, but they didn't get the quality they needed because there's no room for the air.

So when you put all of these things together, we have to go all the way back to the start to that nutrition piece and say, okay, so what didn't grow? Well, the bones didn't grow. Well, if the bones didn't grow, we need to help direct them. We need to tell them we need to help them do what they didn't do to begin with. So an expander is actually a great idea for you, but just so you know, there's not only one way to do it. You don't have to screw something into the roof of your mouth to make this happen. There's actually other options to make this happen, but really you have to get to that root cause and say, okay, if that's where the jaws are positioned right now, it means they didn't grow properly. At some point in the game, you didn't have the nutrients your body needed to do all you were asking of it.

So it didn't grow as much as it needed to. So now we have to help the body to do what it wasn't doing at that time. So for children, we call it interceptive orthodontics where we're, we're jumping ahead of the train or trying to help them develop and grow in their mouths to grow while we're still capable of directing that growth. Once we're in an adult phase, we have to correct. It's more of a corrective action, right? We're trying to move things out and move things forward, but it's all possible. And there's so much information now that shows that it's possible. And it's so crucial because I really feel like lack of sleep or poor sleep is an epidemic in the world today and a significant amount of the chronic disease that people are suffering from actually ties all the way back to poor sleep quality.

The body actually has the ability to keep itself well, if we give it what it needs. And one of the things that needs is time to recover and reset and rebuild and do construction. And if we are never in deep sleep mode, we never do that. So we're just running on empty nonstop. So for you, long story, let's get back to where you, yes, yes. I think an expander is actually a great idea, but you don't have to screw something into the roof of your mouth to make it happen.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
If you need more space in your mouth, if you need more room for airway and breathing, if we need to be able to bring that bottom jar forward to relieve those joint issues that you have, which is what exactly it sounds like, all of those things actually are going to be beneficial.

Melanie Avalon
I'm having another déjà vu. It's like a déjà vu flashback happening simultaneously, which is, I think you talked about the work of James Nestor in your book. I had him on the show when he released. I always forget if it's breath or breathe. Breathe, yeah. He's awesome. It's great. Okay. He's amazing. And it's funny because when I interviewed him, I was like, I was like, I need to fix my deviated septum. That was the conversation that made me go do that for the breathing.

And then I did actually. And so now I'm having this moment right now where I'm like, okay, I need to go address this this way. Could it also be partly mechanical as well? Like mine developed in the past two years. I feel like it's related to the dental work that I've had done and also the retainer that I'm wearing and the way it's built. I could be completely wrong, but intuitively, that's what it feels like. For sure. Yeah.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
The book is breath, by the way. I said it wrong. It's right behind me. I turned around. I'm like, oh, there it is. It's breath. I can never remember.

Yes. It's interesting because retention, to me, is a complete fallacy, having to have a retainer. If you use a retaining wall in your landscape, you're putting dirt where it doesn't want to be, correct? That's the reason you have the wall because you're putting dirt where it naturally wouldn't just go. Think about it in balance with the muscles on the outside, which are your lips and cheeks and all those things on the outside, and the muscles on the inside, which is your tongue. If we put the teeth in balance with those two things, they don't move. They don't move. They're in the right place. So to have to wear a retainer after orthodontics means we've put them in an unstable position, an unstable spot. They're not in balance with the musculature, with the muscles. So most likely, your teeth have moved because of your retainer because they're not in a stable spot. So that, and there's probably some other issues with that jaw joint, actually, I already am thinking in my mind, if you have more of an overbite, you've probably had some collapse in the top of the jaw joint. I would love to see a cone beam CT scan on you. Because if that collapses, then everything, the bottom jaw goes back. So lots of possibilities there for sure.

Melanie Avalon
Well, it's so interesting. So my retainer is also a night guard. So I primarily wear it because of the TMJ pain. And it's funny, because this is what I've told everybody intuitively, I feel like it is, but I don't know, nobody seems to take me seriously about it.

But my night guard retainer used to be built up more in the back. And then I switched, they switched it to it's built up in the front. So every night when I'm sleeping, my mouth is not closing. So I just feel like it's, I feel like it's been years of my teeth, like being in a situation. Wait, I don't have an overbite. Wait, I have my teeth. When I smile, I can't touch my teeth together. Is that over underbite? It's open bite, open bite.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
I have an open bite. It is due to your jaw and your night guard both. Let's talk. I have actually answered.

Melanie Avalon
for you. Okay.

Well, we'll circle back to that. It's funny though. Like speaking of different, you know, procedures and stuff, they were like, my dentist was like, I think you need to get a tongue where they clip your tongue at the bottom.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Mm-hmm.

Melanie Avalon
So then I went and did like therapy, myofacial therapy, and like I learned like tongue movements and like... You've done all the things. Yeah, I've done all the things. I actually really enjoyed learning those tongue exercises. I was like, everybody should do this at some point because I didn't realize my tongue should be doing certain things during the day.

But in any case, okay, that's a lot of, I mean, it's not really tangents because it's your area of expertise, but hopefully listeners found something helpful there for them. Your book, your most recent book, because you have multiple books, but the most recent ones. So like I said in the intro, you took a very different approach that I had not really read in any other book before, which was this focus on electrons and how they work in the cells. And then also tying it into a more traditional medical approach with like the seasons. And so this whole idea, did it come in a flashlight epiphany insight moment? Or what led you to that particular focus and approach?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Yeah. It's really the continuation of my story is what led me to it because like I said, I was relieved to have an answer. So at least now, you know, oftentimes I find when I'm working with patients, they just need an answer. You know, you just need a path to take a step forward on because it's that place of just not knowing that's so uncomfortable for us. I just don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know what to do. And that is the worst place to be. It's that lack of hope, that lack of direction. So that's where I was for so long. So when I got an answer, I was relieved.

Now I have a direction. But like I said, I was a little furious. What in the world? Why was the medical methodology that I was trained in? Why didn't it not provide the answers I needed? My father is a dentist. My grandfather was an internist. This is my world. I had been trained in modern medicine. And I've always been a very curious, inquisitive mind. So even though dentists supposedly were not even really doctors, I did actually know quite a bit about the body and the way it worked and everything else. And the answers hadn't been there. So I started studying different medical methodologies. And it's interesting because they're often called alternative, right? We hear about this. This is alternative medicine. Well, I heard the most beautiful quote that I will always remember. So I actually went back to school to become a naturopath. And during my naturopath training, I was told this, that there was a meeting of a bunch of medical professionals. And one of the medical professionals was an Ayurvedic practitioner, an old, old, old Ayurvedic tech practitioner. And they introduced him and said, OK, he's now going to talk about alternative medicine. And he got up and he looked at all of the rest of them. And he said, what you do is alternative. What I do is medicine. My kind of medicine has been around for thousands of years. You're the alternative to mine. And I love that so much. So I don't ever like the term alternative medicine. I use traditional medicine, right? Because it's what was used traditionally. So I started studying some of these traditional methodologies. So I started studying Ayurveda. And I learned things like, well, I'm a pitadosha. All right, I'm pitavada. You're pitavada, I'm pitavada as well, typically. But what do we do with that? Unless you do a lot more studying, what do you do with that? Well, I don't really know. So then I studied Chinese traditional medicine. All right, I'm a fire. Well, nobody who knows me is surprised by that one. But then, what do I do with that? That doesn't really give me a path to identify that. So then I started studying German herbalism and Native American medicine and Korean medicine and all of these different methodologies. And they all were beautiful. And they all had so much wisdom inside of them and just centuries of knowledge that had been built up and passed on from medicine man to grandma.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
It was so beautiful. But I realized we don't use it because it's not usable.

You can't make a plan from that unless you really are studied and you have somebody that you can work with that just didn't make any sense. So I said, all right, what do all of these methodologies have in common? And they all have something very similar. They all talk about the seasons of the earth and the elements of the earth, every single one of these methodologies. Talks about spring, summer, winter, fall, water, air, fire, plants, they all talk about it. So I created this enormous database. I studied and studied and studied and studied. All of these methodologies, I thought, well, I'll do the work so that other people don't have to. And I created an enormous database of all of these methodologies, what they referenced when it came to the earth, seasons and elements and how they correlated. And I found out they were all saying pretty much the same thing. They were just using different languages, different terminology, but it was all pretty much the same. So then I put it into this seasons methodology, which is easier to understand. If I say I'm a summer, immediately people can kind of go, or I'm in a summer. They can go, oh, that's hot. It's, you know, you can start to figure out what that might mean just by that term. And what I found is that using words that people know and understand, everybody lives on the earth and experiences seasons and elements. Everybody knows what water is. Everybody knows what air is. This made it universal. Now it didn't matter what country you lived in, what language you spoke, you could understand what this meant. And so this was not just a flashlight moment. This was a, hey, I need to get better. There's a lot of good out here. Okay, this has helped me. Now, how do I actually make it so this is usable for anyone, anywhere?

Melanie Avalon
I love it so much. I've been thinking about it a lot recently because while we're recording this, we're at, I don't know what the weather is like in Utah.

I actually have no idea what the weather's like in Utah. Is it, do you have like four typical seasons there?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Yeah, we're like Colorado, you know, we're like Denver. So we get to know, but it's very warm right now. It's unseasonably warm this spring.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, yes. And so here in Atlanta, it's been so weird. It was cold. Then it got hot. It was 80 degrees. And then this week, it got down to the 20s again one night. So it's going back and forth.

And the reason I've been thinking about... Or what I've been thinking about how it relates to this is I so love the winter. I can't even express. I love the cold. It makes me feel healthy. It makes me feel not inflamed. It makes me feel alive. I do cryotherapy every day. It's my jam. And summer, I dread coming. In Game of Thrones, winter is coming. Summer is coming. But it's so interesting to me that so many people love summer. They just can't wait for it. And it's their thing. And so I really reflect on this probably longer than I should. How can a certain season make me so happy? And how can I loathe another season and somebody else be the complete opposite? It makes me think, in theory, I could like everything. But I guess... And it probably also relates to my constitution. And then that said, though, growing up, I love the summer. It was like, I would just go outside, lay out... I mean, I just loved it. So it's interesting that... So okay, a person's just general perspective of liking or disliking a season. How much does that speak about their actual health and their constitution and how they should be living?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
So everybody does have a natural constitution, and I think that we can figure it out pretty simply. Like, if you just say, okay, I love this season, or I don't love this season, or whatever, you can kind of figure out, okay, I'm more inclined to be that way. And it's interesting. The seasons concept can be applied numerous different ways. The first way I applied it is by changing, you know, the color typing that you can do, where you can say, are you a red, or a blue, or a white, or a yellow, or there's all sorts of personality typings that you can do, like the disc personality, DISC, you know, there's all sorts of different ones. And so the first way I utilized the seasons was exactly that way. I said, all right, what season are you naturally? And I tested as a spring. So I came up with an assessment for this, I tested as a spring. And my daughter and daughter-in-law both tested as a harvest season. And it was so true. The foods we like to eat, the things that we're drawn to, the ways that we kind of navigate our lives in the world were so spot on.

It was just really cool. And again, I got this all from these old Ayurvedic and, you know, different traditional methodologies. But what I realized is even though that's our kind of our constitution, the way we're made, that doesn't actually reflect what our needs are from moment to moment. Because just because I'm a spring naturally, that's the way my body works, my, you know, that's the thing that I need to focus on, those organs and those systems, my body is going to cycle through every single season, meaning every single organ system is going to need a little extra tension or a little extra thought or a little extra, I should eat a little differently. And we all feel it, right? We're eating something and then all of a sudden we go, you know what, I don't even want to touch that anymore. Why do I not want to touch that for a couple of months? Ah, a different organ system needed help. So there's a few different ways you can apply this season's methodology. And the reason I really leaned into talking about the season of now, like which season are you in right now is because it gives everyone that first step on the pathway. You know, we are living in a complete information overload society, right? You can find so much information on every single topic at the touch of a fingertip anymore. And now with AI, who knows if it's even true or not. It's like, all right, that sounded interesting, but I think that was completely made up. So that's even more confusing. Oh my gosh, we are not lacking in information or lacking in clarity. We don't know what the first step should be.

So that's why I really built the season's methodology the way I did. What I wanted this assessment in the book. And there's, so there's an assessment in the book. What I wanted the assessment to be was a, what is my first step answer? I want it to be a translator. So that's what it is. So what you do is you put your symptoms into the assessment and the assessment gives you an answer or a season that you are currently in. What that means is that is what your cells are telling you.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
That is what your symptoms are telling you. This is where you need to put attention right now. So it tells you step one. Now it may be, and it will be that that's going to change. You know, we, so we all cycle through these seasons in our lives, but that is what you need to do right now.

And that, like I said, is what everybody needs to get out of that place of hopelessness and confusion and fear and overwhelm is just what is step one. So that's what this assessment does is tells you what are you needing today? And then the rest of the book tells you what, how do you do that? How do you actually give your body what it's saying it needs?

Melanie Avalon
I have a really random question. The heart, I was like fixating on this because we have our four seasons and also though in your setup and you mentioned it here, there's a harvest and fall.

So that fifth, like that harvest season, how does that correlate to the actual seasons?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Yeah. So it's often called Indian summer. I don't know if we can call it that anymore, but you know, there's, there's, it's often been called that in the seasons.

If you look back into old farmers, almond acts, they actually have a fifth season. It's that harvest time that it's kind of like that late summer, you know, sometimes we'll say, Oh, the summer just keeps hanging on. That's harvest. It's right there. How long is it? You know, ebbs and flows in the, in the world, but typically, you know, about a month, month and a half or so usually in the world, it's really an important season in the body because that harvest season is when we're really taking everything in and re nourishing ourselves. So that's an incredibly important season that the body cycles through.

Melanie Avalon
And you line up the different seasons with primary and secondary organs, when you were doing your research and looking at, you know, Ayurveda and all of these different, you know, TCM, did they also make these correlations and did the correlations agree with like what organs?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Oregon correlated to what? Yes, so these all came from all of those old methodologies.

I didn't make any of this up. Really, all this is, is me compiling. I compiled all of the data and information from all of those different methodologies and just translated it into something that was a little bit more understandable for us today in our modern world.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I'm just so fascinated by all the, you know, how all the different organs relate to the different seasons. If a person is not seemingly experiencing symptoms, does that mean they're just in the flow of the seasons the way they should be?

Like, how intentional do we need to be about this if we are feeling well, not unwell?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Yeah, it's a great question. I really, I think I pushed back a little bit that we're never feeling a symptom because it may even be just simply, I'm feeling impatient today, or I'm feeling a little stuck. You know, I actually, in the assessment, there are just as many mental symptoms as there are physical symptoms because our body doesn't tell ourselves what's going on just through a mental sign. So, you know, we haven't really delved into this, but that's really the premise of the book, is that our cells have the ability to keep ourselves wow. And one of my favorite examples is if you were to cut your finger. So, you cut your finger, you put a Band-Aid on it. Does the Band-Aid do the healing? No, my granddaughter thinks the answer is yes, but the answer is no, you know, it didn't do the healing. The Band-Aid helped, right? It held the two sides together, it kept it clean, you know, whatever. It did some work, but the body itself had to do the healing, the cells. And what's miraculous about it is that the first stage was the body had to say, all right, immune cells, go in there, clean up the mess, clean up all those cut cells, you know, and that's why it gets a little red and swollen. That's your body's own immune system coming and doing the cleanup work when the skin cells, let's come in here, let's rebuild those attachments, let's connect together. And it's so strong that those two cut sides don't separate again. And you didn't have to tell it what to do. You didn't have to tell it any of those steps. It did it all on its own. Isn't that incredible?

I mean, that's just incredible to me. And it happens over and over again, and we don't even think about it. So, if our body is capable of healing a cut, it's capable of doing a lot of good things and keeping ourselves well. Our job is just to give it what it needs. So, cells, the only way that they can tell us what they need is through a symptom. Sometimes it might be a physical symptom, my stomach hurts, my knee is aching, you know, whatever it might be, or I've got a cold, I'm sneezing. Sometimes it may be an emotional symptom. Man, I am really struggling to feel motivated today. Or I am so hungry. Why am I so hungry? You know, it may be that, it may be a mental symptom where I just have brain fog. I cannot even remember what I did yesterday. So, all of these are symptoms. So, when you're using the assessment, you may be living well. Exactly right. You don't have aches and pains and other things that you're really complaining about. But how do you feel? Is your mind working the way it should? Is your emotions, are they on track? Every single day, a beautiful day, you know, hopefully the answer is yes. But usually the answer is there's something going on. And that's just simply your body saying, aha, right now I need a little more attention on my kidneys. This is where, you know, this is where I need a little bit right now. So, will you pay a little bit of attention? I need some warm, maybe some miso soup would be a great idea for dinner tonight. And stay with that caffeine. I can't handle it. So, it's just listening to those tiny little nudges that sometimes laugh.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, it really is mind blowing, you know, the ability of the body to heal and also the ability of, I mean, because you have a really wonderful overview, speaking of what you're saying about making things practical and implementable and understandable. I really appreciated your overview of like, of epigenetics and genetics. And I think for the first time, it's funny, because you talk about the work of Davidson Claire a bit who has also been on the show twice, actually, but he talks a lot about the role of like markers on DNA and how we can potentially reverse aging by, you know, fixing all of this. And you give an overview of like the three types of markers and tags and compare it to like, like methyl groups or sticky notes. And, you know, histone modification is dog-eared pages and non-coding RNA is these handwritten notes. And I was like, oh, this is like the first time I actually, despite reading about this for so long, I'm like, this actually makes sense. So thank you for the analogies and, you know, making it so understandable for people.

Speaking of, this is a very random question, but I asked, I'm always really curious what people, what guests will say. Would you want to live forever?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Hmm. Great question. If I can live well forever, yes.

Melanie Avalon
that's that's what I so many people I because I'm always I've always said yes for that but I guess I say yes with the assumption that I would be feeling well and it's interesting because having a longevity podcast I always thought people would automatically say yes but a large percentage of the guests even with the understanding that they would be feeling well you know don't say yes I find that actually really interesting that isn't as

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Yeah. I always will say our goal should not just be to live long, it should be to live well.

And I think that that's, you know, my mother-in-law just passed away about a month ago. She was 88. My father-in-law wishes he could follow right along with her. They were married for 71 years. I mean, isn't that amazing? They were married for 71 years. So he'll be 90 next month. And I watched them and he's sitting in a care center and he says, I'm just rotting away every day. And so I look at that and I say, that's not living well, you know, that's not how I want to live. If I'm going to live long, I don't want to live like that. I mean, he has beautiful life. He has beautiful children that care for him and everything else, but you know, not if

Melanie Avalon
I live like that. So does she get married when she was like 17? Yep. Junior in high school. Oh my goodness.

So I'm sending much love. I'm so sorry to hear that. She lived a great life. And then let's see. So one other thing, food wise, I did really appreciate your approach to diet because you take on all the controversial topics. So grains, legumes, and lectins, raw versus cooked. Out of all of the controversial things, what have you found to be most misunderstood or most controversial? Like when you were writing the food section, did you go in with bated breath or did you know pretty much what you wanted to say there?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
You know, it was interesting because there's actually, I start talking the food section. It's the plants section.

So plants is one of the elements of the earth that correlates with the seasons and the body and all of the above. But I talk about the evolution of the food pyramid and the MyPlate. And we just got a new food pyramid, which is actually a little closer to what it should be. So I'm so happy about this.

Melanie Avalon
as wild. I was, I was, I was like, are we living in a simulation? Like, like, I would never thought they would have done that. I'm very happy.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Yeah, so it was great. You know, actually, well, when I was writing some of the controversial pieces in the book, my original manuscript, they were a little harder hitting than they are now. The editor watered them down just a little, not significantly, but some, because he said, I really want to make sure that we give a measured approach to this. And I appreciated that, because the last thing I want to do is somebody to discount what I'm saying, because it's too extreme. That's not what I, you know, I really want to find a place where people can meet, you know, in the middle there and say, oh yeah, this makes sense for my side. This makes sense for my side. So we must be able to agree here. So that was good.

But the one thing that I really felt I wanted to delve more into, and I have now, as I've talked after, is this, the world that we live in today is an interesting one, because we're so focused on this concept of macros, right? Everybody is talking about how much protein they're eating, or how many carbs, or how many grams, and what this does is it takes food down to its constituents, to the actual, and those things, carbohydrates, proteins, fats, they are the three ways that our bodies, or the three types of fuel that our body uses to make energy. So we absolutely need all of those things. But if you remember in the chapter, I talked about this problem of not really thinking about foods as a whole. And I talk about work from Dr. Cullen Campbell and how we compared the benefits of a whole apple versus every single thing that they were able to isolate out of an apple on its own. So they took all of the things on their own, gave a person all of these things, and then they gave them an apple. And the benefits from the apple, they could not replicate. They could not get those benefits out of that. And I think that that's so crucial to understand when it comes to plants and when it comes to food in general, because we're working so hard, and I think a lot of the biohacking world is doing this too, are saying, this thing is so good for us. If we can just concentrate that one thing and just take more of that thing, it's going to be great for us. But in reality, that thing works better when it's combined with the thing it was originally in, in nature. Does that make sense?

Melanie Avalon
Yes, completely. I am, I'm haunted by this as well. And I always, because I even have a supplement line, and I always lead it off by saying, you know, in our ideal world, I think we would definitely get all of our nutrition from Whole Foods. And I think the problem is that, like you were saying, and you talked about in the book, like our soils are so depleted today, like the food is just not as nutritious. So sometimes we do need to like, you know, fill in gaps with places, especially with something like magnesium, or maybe like vitamin D if you're not getting it from the sun.

But that aside, yes, I think there's such a reductionist view to food. And like you said, we put it down to like fats, carbs, protein. And it drives me crazy seeing all of the, like the processed foods on the shelves. And because right now, high protein is like a trend, I think, I think high protein is great. I talk about it all the time, especially on my other podcasts, I'm very team, getting adequate, moderate, high protein. And yet, there's all these processed foods where it's like, like a cereal bar, and it'll be like high protein or like macaroni and cheese, high protein version, you know, like in a package. And I'm like, no, this is not, this is not, I think it's very misleading for, for people. Yeah.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Yeah. And things like they'll put a gluten-free label on a package of grapes. We've forgotten this concept of food in its entirety.

I have a supplement line as well, so I'm right there with you, but it's things exactly like what you're talking about. It's vitamin D and K, that we're just not able to get from our foods anymore. I really feel like if we just went back to eating a grape instead of resferritol out of the grape all on its own, that we'd find that our bodies are really good at figuring out what to do with food that nature created. They're really amazing at it, and they make more sense of it that way.

Melanie Avalon
I know. So, I have a berberine, for example, and what I appreciate about that is I like that it's been used in traditional medicine, and I know Ayurveda and TCM for so long, but we had this whole debate where we were like, do we do normal, normal, like berberine the way it typically comes from like the whole herb, or do we do this isolated, you know, dihydroberberine? And I didn't know. I was like reading the studies, but I was just thinking about it from the paradigm that we're talking about right now, which is that I would rather err on the side, even though this is like a supplement, but err on the side of like the wholeness form, like the closest form of wholeness possible rather than getting super reductionist and trying to pull out this one piece of it.

So yeah, it's interesting, especially like you said in the biohacking world today. Okay. So, we have talked about a lot. I do not come a little bit full circle back to the dentistry stuff because I realized there might be some questions I bet people really, really want to know the answer to. So you do talk about, I'm trying to remember which section it is, probably the water section that you talk about fluoride. Yeah, so where do you land on fluoride today?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
That's a great question. So as a daughter of a dentist, I was bathed in fluoride growing up, you know, not, well, probably literally, but I remember a little pink fluoride tablets on the table in the morning that we all took before school. I remember Swish, it was so disgusting, anybody of my era will remember, we had these little cups full of pink and green. You got to pick either the green kind or the pink kind and you'd swish it around. They did this at school once a month, you'd have little swish cups that you'd go and swish with at school.

And when I first graduated dental school, I created fluoridation tables for all of the areas where I live and gave them all out to pediatricians in the area, showing them specifically what they should be prescribing based on where people lived, where children lived. And I mean, I was just really, really told the fluoride is the thing. It is the thing. It is the way that we're going to save teeth. So when someone first said, well, what are your thoughts really about fluoride? I mean, I had all the answers until I didn't have all the answers and I realized maybe I have not actually looked at the research. Maybe I actually haven't followed along. I've just been parroting back everything that I've been told forever. So when I started looking, there were two things that really stood out to me. First of all, the reason that we started using fluoride was good. I always assume positive intent. I don't get into these conspiracy theories that everybody's trying to kill us off. I just think, you know what? No, there were some people who saw there was a purpose for this. And originally they found that there were some societies that had higher levels of fluoride in the water naturally. This was because they were drinking well water. They had higher fluoride. It was naturally in the earth and naturally in the water. And they found that these people had harder teeth. They weren't getting cavities as often. They also were a little ugly. They had kind of these white and brown splotches on them, but they didn't get cavities on their skin, on their teeth, on their teeth. They had, okay. Yeah. Yeah. And that's called fluoridosis. It's terrible looking actually. And high levels fluoride creates horrible looking teeth, kind of the brown and white splotches all over the teeth. And so they said, all right, so fluoride does make teeth harder. If we can just moderate the dosage, then we can prevent tooth decay entirely. This is a fabulous idea. And it was. So that was in the 1940s. So my first question is, did it work? Has anyone had a cavity since 1940?

Melanie Avalon
intensely does cavity relate to strength of the teeth versus diet? Like could you have strong teeth but be eating a lot of sugar and have cavities?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
So yes, you can. Really, the way it cavity forms is twofold. It is all related to acid. and nutrients. So if you put acid on your teeth, so if I drink three cans of coke a day and I'd sip it all day long, I just sip a little bit of every single, you know, every few minutes I sip a little bit of coke, I'm going to be completely bathing my teeth in acid all day long and my teeth will literally dissolve because minerals dissolve in acid. So this is why if you drink a lot of soda, you have poor teeth, your teeth just dissolve.

And what is pulled out is the mineral itself. The mineral itself is called hydroxyapatite. Actually, we need to talk about this in relation to fluoride. This is good. So the mineral the teeth are made of is called hydroxyapatite. That's the mineral complex itself in teeth. It's also in bones. So that same complex exists in bones. When you get acid on the tooth, that mineral complex gets pulled out of the tooth and gets put into the liquid in your mouth. Like it just dissolves into the liquid in your mouth and then goes down the hatch, right? So the more acid that goes on the tooth, the more minerals are dissolved. Then a hole is left behind. It's kind of like a sponge. You know, you get kind of really holy and porous bacteria crawl into the holes. And then here's the other way that acid can get on your tooth. When bacteria eat sugar, they excrete acid. So it's not the sugar that creates the cavity, it's the bacteria eat the sugar and then create acid. Then that acid does the same thing it does. It dissolves the minerals, the bacteria crawl in further, and this is what a cavity is. It's simply tooth structure that's infected with bacteria. So those bacteria have been able to crawl deep into the tooth because of the holes left behind when minerals were pulled out. So that's the number one way. Number one way is acid. Acid either from bacteria eating sugar or acid that you put there. Number two reason is if the body needs minerals elsewhere. So there's a huge demand for minerals in the body. To run our brains, to run our hearts, you have to have minerals. And those minerals, if there's not enough of them to go around, do you haven't been eating enough of them? Or I see this so frequently, you don't have the vitamin D3, K2 to direct minerals where to go properly, or your gut isn't working properly. So you actually aren't absorbing them. So for one of those three reasons, you just aren't getting enough minerals. Your body will triage and prioritize. And it'll say, you know what? My heart and my brain are more important than my teeth and my bones. So I'm going to go find the minerals that I need in my teeth and my bones to run the rest of me because I don't have enough to go around here. So this is why we end up with osteoporosis and tooth decay because the body literally minds them from your teeth.

This is another reason why people get a lot of cavities when they're pregnant or nursing or teenage years because think about the mineral demands during those times. You're literally growing a human.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
So there's so many demands and there's just not enough to go around. So the body pulls it from the teeth to make up for what it's missing. So those are the two reasons we get cavities is we either don't have enough minerals or we have too much acid.

So then back to your question, could you actually have cavity resistant teeth? This is what Dr. Weston Price was trying to find out. Could you actually make your nutrition so good that it didn't matter what you ate? You could eat sugar all day long and it wouldn't matter. Well, I had a very personal test of this. My brother got braces in about, I don't know, maybe 14. And my dad, again, being a dentist, did the braces for him. This was the first iteration of like clear braces. Well, they were terrible because everything he ate, the clear braces just turned that color. So he had spaghetti. They were now red braces. He ate, you know, like whatever. It was terrible. But I'm pretty sure he didn't brush for like two years. It was the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life. But he got his braces off and he didn't have a cavity, not one.

What? Why? Because his teeth were literally cavity resistant. So yes, if you get enough minerals, you can have cavity resistant teeth. You can eat more sugar. It won't matter because there's enough minerals to go around. But so let's actually go back. Let's go back to that fluoride just a little bit. So what does fluoride do? Fluoride changes the outside of this tooth. It changes tooth structure. It actually kicks calcium out of the hydroxyapatite crystal and turns it into fluorapatite. Well, fluorapatite is less able to dissolve an acid. So it's more acid resistant. It just can't dissolve as easily. So you can get more acid, more more acid either from the diet or from bacteria eating sugar. And it won't create a cavity as easily. It just doesn't dissolve as easily. So it works. It absolutely works. It makes teeth stronger. Now it doesn't work entirely right because obviously there have been a cavity since 1940, but it has helped. Research shows it's definitive. There have been less cavities since we've implemented fluoride.

That all is great. And that's what we were trained as a dentist. And I believe it. And it's true research research has proven. It's not just a belief. It's true. But here's the problem. Anything we put in our body doesn't just affect one single cell or cell type. We know this. We call this side effects. It's on the commercials, on the TV. You know, when they say, okay, it's going to do this for you. Your life is going to be so good except for it could create death and blah, blah, blah. You know, all those words they say really fast at the end of the disclaimer because it's going to affect every single cell in your body. Everything we put in, every food we put in, every medicine we put in, every anything is going to affect every cell. So it makes teeth stronger. Great. It also changes the structure of bones because remember, bones are made of hydroxyapatite also.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
So now it's turning hydroxyapatite and bones to fluorapatite. It is stronger, more resistant to acid attack, but it's also more brittle. Is this a problem with a bone? Perhaps.

So it's changing bone density and the brittleness of bones. So that's strike number one in my mind. Strike number two is that fluoride is very similar to iodine and structure. If you look on the periodic table, they're all called halides. So fluoride, iodine, bromine, chlorine, they're all cousins. Very, very structurally similar to one another. Iodine is necessary to activate every cell that secretes something. So that's our gut cells. That's our hormone, like our adrenals. That is our thyroid. Hugely iodine is hugely needed to activate thyroid hormone. Well, when fluoride is in the system, it actually is the bigger bully cousin of iodine and it will push iodine out and will bind in the place of iodine on hormones, on receptor sites. So just like in our tooth, it pushes calcium out and binds instead. On our thyroid hormone, it pushes iodine out and binds instead. So now you get a blood test. You say, man, I am feeling so sluggish and tired and I just, my thyroid must be off. You get a thyroid test, a blood test, and they say, no, you have plenty of thyroid hormone. You do, but it's activated by fluoride. So it's not usable by your body. So you have all of these symptoms of low thyroid activity because your body can't use the hormone. So interestingly enough, fluoride was used in the 1970s to treat people who had hyperthyroidism. It's been known for decades that it reduces thyroid function. How many people today struggle with thyroid function? Many, many, and this very well may be due to fluoride. Fluoride getting in the way of iodine binding. So that's strike number two, thyroid function.

Strike number three, there was a brand new study just in January of 2025 that showed a direct correlation between higher fluoride levels and lower IQ levels in children, especially male children. Strike three for me. So if fluoride had completely eliminated cavities, if there was never a cavity again, maybe we could say, you know what, it's worth it. It's worth these side effects, but it didn't. We're still getting cavities. So is it worth it?

In my mind, absolutely not, especially because we talked about what a cavity is. A cavity is not a deficiency of fluoride. Fluoride wasn't there to begin with. The cavity is a deficiency of minerals. Minerals are pulled out, dissolved, a hole is formed, bugs crawl in. So instead of putting something in that was never there to begin with, why don't we just put in what was lost? Hydroxyapatite. Let's just put the minerals back in. Let's just fill the hole back up again. How about that for a concept? So now we have the ability to do that. We can just replace what was lost and thankfully studies are showing hydroxyapatite is just as or even more effective than fluoride at reducing tooth decay. So here's the beautiful thing. We've not introduced anything that wasn't already there or that could have a side effect in the body because hydroxyapatite is already there. It's already what makes up tooth structure.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
It's already what builds bones. And here's the really cool thing. When you use it in a tooth care product, so toothpaste, tooth powder, mouthwash, I have all these things in a product line. When you use it in a product like this, the way you're gonna get that hydroxyapatite into the body is through the gut. We did some independent studies showing that you swallow about 3% of it, no matter what. You're gonna swallow some of it.

Well, remember what dissolves a tooth? Coke, acid, right? Minerals dissolve an acid. What's in your stomach? Acid, HDL. So you swallow hydroxyapatite and guess what happens to it as soon as it hits that stomach acid? It dissolves. It breaks apart into calcium, phosphate, hydrogen, just all the things that are clumped together into that crystal. So it's no longer hydroxyapatite once it leaves your stomach. It is calcium, phosphate, hydrogen, all things your body knows what to do with and can use. So there are no side effects. And this is all over social media right now. People are saying it's worse than fluoride. I'm like, do you understand what this even is? You would not say that if you did. It's simply minerals that your teeth are made of and as soon as it hits stomach acid, it's just minerals.

Melanie Avalon
That's it. Why are they saying it's worse than fluoride? Because they're just saying it's toxic or something?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Yeah, they're saying, oh, it calcifies your brain, it calcifies your arteries. I'm saying there's no way because it can't make it past the stomach as anything but just calcium and phosphorus and hydrogen.

It can't do anything like that. So yeah, when you actually get down to the science of how cavities are formed, how teeth are made, and how this works in a body, it just makes.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I remember when I first came across it, because how long has it been a marketed option in toothpaste?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Oh, it's not been long. I would say maybe seven, eight years, you know, somewhere in there.

Melanie Avalon
I remember when I first came across it, I was actually a little bit angry because I was like, what? There was this alternative here this whole time. I was like, what? So I do, I use that.

I use a toothpaste with that every night. So you have a toothpaste. I'm very excited about this. You have a toothpaste. Do you have a mouthwash? He said. Is it minty? Is it like strong?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
have minty and we also have a delicious citrus flavor that tastes like an orange creamsicle.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, nice. Nice, nice.

I mean, I have gone through, like, the mouthwash obsession train and tried, like, ordered all the mouthwashes, trying to find, you know, like, a clean one that's effective. And so I will definitely be ordering that.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
My gum health mouthwash is literally, it is to die for, and we've done independent lab tests on it that have showed that it literally stops cavities and stops gum disease. It's incredible. Yeah, anyway, and it tastes great too.

Melanie Avalon
one other question about dentistry. And okay, I think about this question a lot, which is kind of relates to like the dream world, the whole foods, we would eat the whole foods. I think also in the dream world, we would, you know, have the nutrient nourish teeth and no cavities and perfect teeth as well, non-stainable teeth.

So I, my diet basically consists of at night, like red wine, turmeric, blueberries, very pigmented things. I also was less than happy with my teeth from a aesthetic perspective. So I have veneers and I love them.

They make me so happy because I actually, this is like a little fun fact. I was going to just get them done, like normally have them make them. And then they were like, Oh, you know, we can like model them after a celebrity. And I was like, what? They're like, yeah, just show us who you want, like who you want to be. And this was like during the Barbie movie era. So I was like, I want Margot Robbie's teeth. So like,

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
They meet them like that. I've given somebody Matthew McConaughey's smile before. Somebody asked for that? Yep.

Somebody asked for Matthew McConaughey's smile. Unfortunately, he didn't look a thing like Matthew McConaughey, but his teeth do now.

Melanie Avalon
It's so funny. I know, I went and saw Weathering Heights recently that she's in and my friend that I've said, I was like, guess what? I have her teeth. It's my question here.

And this is a very genuine question for me. Like, is that bad? Like, is it bad to... Because you are shaving down your teeth, you're putting, you know, something on top of it. It's not your natural teeth shape, per se, although it clearly fits your mouth, so it can't be cosmetic dentistry. What are your thoughts on it?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
So I was a cosmetic dentist for about 10 years before I got really, really sick and now we do what we call health-based cosmetic dentistry. So often, this is actually a really interesting thing and it goes a little bit back to what we talked about with retainers and all of that, that when teeth are in the right place, they look beautiful. So some of this is developmental and if you can't breathe and you end up holding your mouth open, it ends up creating a real long face, often an overbite and it's not functional and it doesn't, people don't love the way it looks. So we work really hard to get things where they belong functionally and it sounds like you've done a lot of that.

But sometimes the teeth themselves, they're small or they're darker than you would like and there's different ways, you know, there's different things that you want changed. Thankfully, nowadays, first of all, if you already have veneers, you're doing everything you can and the things that you need to do to make sure that they stay well is this is my mantra for everyone, minerals on the outside, minerals on the inside. So you just have to make sure that there's plenty of minerals on the outside that are refilling any holes, any anything in these teeth and keeping them well. That's hydroxyapatite and minerals on the inside, which means your body has to have enough that it's not going to start stealing from your teeth to go take care of something else. So that's vitamin D3 and K2 and a mineral supplement that has specific minerals that teeth are made of. So minerals on the outside, minerals on the inside. If you're doing that, you're going to be just fine. And thankfully, hydroxyapatite is not going to be damaging to veneers. If you have veneers, I do recommend a paste version, like our paste version versus our tooth powder version, but there it's, it's going to be

Melanie Avalon
Oh, a toothpaste. Sorry. I've never seen the veneers are a paste version.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Yeah, we have a toothpaste and we have a tooth powder. The tooth powder is slightly more abrasive. So usually if somebody has veneers, I say stick with a paste. Stick with a paste version, that's going to be better and a mouthwash because it's going to get into all the nooks and crannies, all the places that those little edges are sitting where the porcelain meets the tooth, it's going to get into those and make them and make sure that they stay strong and healthy too.

But there are newer techniques with cosmetic dentistry too that are just getting me so excited. For years I've done something called a minimal prep or no preparation veneer where we don't actually have to take away any tooth at all to do this. These are like contact lens thin veneers of porcelain. So they can go on the front of the tooth, you can change shape, size, color and we don't actually have to take any tooth away or minimal tooth away. We can also do this with direct filling material now. It's called composite or bonding where we can just add bonding to the teeth without taking anything away either. So that's what's so great about cosmetic dentistry now is that you don't have to sacrifice the way it looks for health. You don't have to choose one or the other. You can choose both. We can say, nope, absolutely. We can get your smile looking exactly the way you want it and we can keep it healthy for life also either by doing minimal procedures or by having the right techniques and products and things to keep it well after you've had the work done. So you don't have to choose because a smile, I mean, that was literally, that was my career for a decade and I had so many people whose lives were changed because their confidence increased. They felt so much better about themselves because of their smile. I saw it happen day in, day out and I know the power of that. So I never want to be somebody who says, oh, if you want to stay healthy, you would never do that because that's not true. That's part of health as well and there's ways.

Melanie Avalon
to do it well. Okay. I love hearing that.

And yeah, I have the minimal prep ones on the front at the very least, but I have like crowns in the back. I went through a period, it's funny. So when I was doing a low carb diet, I do intermittent fasting and I was doing intermittent fasting and low carb for quite a while and I never had a single cavity. And then I switched to eating like a really high fruit, still high protein, but like a really high fruit diet every night and just ate lots of fruit for like four hours every night and then was not using fluoride, was brushing with like activated charcoal, which I don't know if that's good or bad, but I got cavities and I have done some work in the back. And it was such an interesting moment, like getting a crown the first time and thinking, if you're speaking to like the experience of your body and everything, it's like, okay, I am taking away that tooth to put on a crown and that's not coming back. Like it's kind of like a, it's like part of you dies or something inside a loss. Yeah.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
It's hard to explain. Now it's interesting thinking back, learning what you've just learned. So it was the acid of the fruit, right? Fruit's very acidic. So the acid of the fruit was dissolving the minerals, plus the sugar was feeding the bacteria, which led to more acid. So you're bathing your teeth in acid.

Activated charcoal is a binder. So it's great for stain removal, but it has no minerals itself in it. So you weren't replenishing the minerals that were being lost with that acid. So you were basically leaving your teeth just at stripping your teeth of all minerals. Back to your crawl in further. This is how you end up doing cavities.

And I was doing chelation. You're doing chelation. So now you're pulling even more minerals from your body. So now, when you think about the actual ways, I love to get down to, well, let's just think about, like, in reality, how this worked and why this happened. It wasn't like, oh, I ate a lot of sugar and got all the cavities. Well, no, you ate a lot of fruit, which was acidic, and it fed the bacteria, and you were pulling minerals out, and you weren't replenishing. Oh, no wonder you got cavities. That's what happens.

Melanie Avalon
body has to stay in balance. And I was grinding like horribly.

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
If you were grinding, that means you're not getting enough air. That's what that means, because you grind to tighten, you grind to tighten up muscles and move the jaw so that you can get enough air in the back.

So you were probably also inflamed from that chelation. It was blocking some airway things and you were having to work to get more air at night. All of it has root causes.

Melanie Avalon
all explainable. And it's the loss of it, though. And then it's also the thought where it's like, Okay, I have to at least, I have to at least have enough money comfortably in the future that if these fall out, I can replace them because, you know, if they fall out, then like, then what do you do? And if you can't afford to replace them. So yeah, it's definitely a definitely a journey.

And I've learned so much. And so thank you. Thank you for what you do. I wish you I wish you lived in Atlanta. Actually, wait, one last thing. Have you heard because my again, the dentist that I go to, and the reason I saw him out originally was because he had that combing machine. And so when I went last time, he had this new, he loves getting like the newest stuff on the market and dentistry. And so he had this new thing, he was really excited about it. And he did it on my teeth. And it was like, it like taps each tooth to check like check the integrity and structure. Have you seen this machine? Yeah,

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Yeah, there's different ways to see what the gums and the bone and the foundation and everything is like. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon
It was it was really cool. It was cool to see I got to see like how my teeth were doing and he said he thought it I mean, I'm not this is not a good thing but he said he thought it was gonna look really bad because of all of the Like because of all like all the dental work and all the grinding and like everything we're trying to figure out right now This just seems like a mess But everything actually looked really great.

So like the what what I have left of teeth are holding on so But um, thank you so so much for all that you do So do you take new patients? How can people get your products your book all the things?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Yep. So my practice is located in Utah, just south of Salt Lake. It's called Total Care Dental, and we actually get people flying in from all around the world for things because it's just sometimes hard to find somebody, but I also have a directory. So on my website, livingwellwithdoctormichelle.com, we have a directory of dentists who do what I talk about because we literally get 20,000 people a month asking, where can I find a dentist like you?

So I finally went to the dentists and said, can you please just get on my website somehow here so I can send them to you? So that is a directory of vetted dentists to go check out somebody near you. The products that I've talked about are all on that same site, livingwellwithdoctormichelle.com, and please just go. If any of these topics are interesting to you, just go look on my YouTube. I release a video or two a week all about these kinds of things we do. Cooking videos, talking about how to eat this way, and I show you a gardening theme. Anyway, it's just lifestyle, but incorporating all of these things into a way that they make sense for life. So go check out all my free stuff everywhere. That's just my mission in life, is to help more people live well.

Melanie Avalon
Well, thank you so much. You're definitely doing that. And I just I just so enjoyed this conversation. I'm so grateful for everything that you're doing.

And the last question, speaking of that we ask every single guest on this show, and it is just because I am so obsessed with gratitude. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Dr. Michelle Jorgensen
Right now I'm grateful for the earth. I'm sitting here staring out my window and looking at all of the things coming back to life and it's just absolutely a miracle that the earth supports us and gives us life every single day.

Melanie Avalon
I love that so much. Well, thank you, Dr. Michelle. This has been absolutely amazing. We'd love to have you back on in the future. And yeah, thank you so much for all that you do.

Thank you. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. For more information and resources, you can check out my book, What Win Wine, as well as my supplement line, Avalon X. Please visit melanieavalon.com to learn more about today's guests. And always feel free to contact me at contact at melanieavalon.com. And always remember, you got this.