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Transcript
- 02:04 About Shannon Drake
- 06:28 Toxic Ingredients in Toothpaste
- 08:31 Toxic Mouthwashes
- 11:57 Tongue Scraper
- 13:47 Other Products
- 15:06 Chemical Toxicity in Mainstream Personal Care Products
- 17:54 Tooth Powders
- 19:03 Other Tips and Tricks from Shannon Drake
- 22:55 Mercury Toxicity Linked to Tooth-Grinding
- 23:28 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today
- 25:46 More About Shannon Drake
Wendy Myers: Hello. Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers and you can find me on myersdetox.com and my new healing and detox program, MineralPower.com.
Wendy Myers: I have a new website coming up, probably mid-February. It will be up and it’s really going to be amazing, a beautiful showcase for my healing program that I’m very, very proud of called Mineral Power. So check that out in mid-February.
Today, we have a guest on, Shannon Drake. I met her at the Bulletproof Conference, the Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof Conference. And she was so nice and she gave me a little taste of her MCT Oil Toothpaste and I was very, very impressed with the product and I really enjoy using it in myself.
It’s a toothpaste that I use. I really like the flavor so much. It’s very, very unique. So I started using it on a regular basis. I’m very, very happy with it and very impressed with the rest of her product line. She has some very interesting parts.
I’m really, as a female, very into personal care products and I love trying all the latest new products. So I really enjoy her stuff. So I wanted to have her on the show to talk about your oral care. I think it’s an area that people need to consider detoxing because a lot of people just want an automatic pilot using their same old, same old toothpaste that they’ve been using for years, not realizing how toxic they are. So we’re going to talk about that today on the show.
Please keep in mind that this podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before doing anything that we suggest today on the show. This show is for informational purposes only.
Wendy Myers: Our guest today, Shannon Drake, she’s a serial entrepreneur and a wellness alchemist and spiritual realm trailblazer. Deemed the cultural revolutionary by Dr. Christopher Ryan, she has created and launched over 30 consumer products in the personal care, nutrition and medical marijuana industries.
When Shannon is not balancing on the bleeding edge of human optimization, she can be found deepening her Kundalini yoga practice and busting out some ecstatic dance moves or inspiring those around her to live to their fullest in her home in Los Angeles, California, right near me.
You can find her at her projects, GiveMetheDirt.com or you can buy her products and tooth-care products in JamboSuperFoods.com. That’s JamboSuperFoods.com.
Shannon, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Shannon Drake: It’s a pleasure to talk to you.
Wendy Myers: I met you at the Bulletproof Conference and it’s nice. You were walking around with your backpack full of all your goodies. And you gave me this MCT oil rose cacao mint toothpaste with MCT oil. I thought, “Wow, that’s really cool.” I love how you said it tastes like a wedding party in your mouth.
Shannon Drake: Yeah, one of our Paleo effects. Two years ago, someone is brushing their teeth in our booth and they were trying it and they’re like, “It’s like a wedding party in your mouth. Could I use that?” I said, “Yes, absolutely.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And it does taste like that. I love it. It has a really nice flavor. It’s really nice packaging. I just really like your products.
Shannon Drake: Thank you very much. I take a lot of pride in not only making products that taste amazing and are natural, but that look sexy. You want to leave them out on your counter so people will see them and think you’re cool.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Why don’t you tell us about your story and your background and how you got so interested in oral health?
Shannon Drake: Yeah. I’ve always been a person who likes to make things ever since I was a little kid. I was always running around the backyard and putting leaves and flowers together and giving it as potpourri to my grandma.
As I got older, I became more health conscious. In high school, I stopped drinking soda and I started learning about organic foods. Right after that, my dad got cancer. So I became extra aware of what you put in your body.
As I got more and more into the health food scene and I got better about what I was eating, I started to notice all the products I was putting in myself. I’m a big label reader. So when I’m in the shower and I’m washing my hair, I’m reading the shampoo bottle while I’m doing it. And one day, I was in there washing my hair, looking at the shampoo and I was like, “What the hell is in my shampoo?” There were all these chemicals, all these weird things.
My first life, I was an artist. So I have a really in-depth knowledge of what goes into industrial materials. And when I recognize a lot of the same materials that were in my oil paint that I have to wear gloves and masks to use were in my shampoo, it completely changed how I thought about topical products.
So I started making my own stuff. I started giving it to friends. And as I became a little more prolific in gifting my items, my friends started to be like, “You should sell these. These are great. I really like it. It tastes good. It works well.” And it took me about three years of convincing to quit my job as a marketing consultant and start The Dirt, which started with the lip balm first. I got into that.
Everything I’ve done has been out of solving my own problems. I got a really bad sun burn on my face when I went camping 10 years ago and none of the lip balms worked. I tried everything. So I made one myself and it worked really well. So then I started making tooth covers because I found out about how industrial glycerin is made. And tooth care products are really, really strange. Most mainstream toothpastes have plastic in the paste, not the tooth. It’s in the paste.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Tell us more about the toxic ingredients in toothpaste. They just don’t think about it. They’ve just been using this mainstream toothpaste their whole life. They like the taste and they’re just on automatic pilot and not thinking about detoxing that particular area of their personal care products.
Shannon Drake: Yeah. There are a lot of very strange things that go into toothpaste. Some of the ones that most people probably have heard of or know about is fluoride. Fluoride is basically a poison. The type of fluoride that goes into toothpaste is not natural fluoride, it’s industrial waste product fluoride and they’re slightly different.
There is SLS sodium lauryl sulfate, which is an irritant and it’s especially irritating for mucus membranes in your mouth. There’s propylene glycol. There are all kinds of crazy things you can’t even pronounce. And that’s the majority of the paste. A very small part of it is the silica and the flavoring.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. They put titanium in it too to make it white, which can be a toxic metal.
Shannon Drake: Yeah. It’s endless. And if you want to see something really scary, go to any big box store and find the preschooler toothpaste that is safe to swallow and look what’s in that. I almost cried when I flipped over this little kids’ toothpaste with Elmo on the front of it and it was just full of chemicals. That’s safe to swallow? That’s not safe to swallow.
So I got really passionate about changing oral care because you ingest it. Even if you spit it out, you’re swallowing it two to three times a day microdosing.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, you have these mucus membranes that are absorbing everything really well into your system.
Shannon Drake: Yeah. You put medicine on your tongue to absorb it. Guess where the toothpaste goes, right on your tongue too. So it’s just a sneaky way that people ingest a lot of funky ingredients they don’t think about.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And then also, let’s talk about mouthwashes and how toxic mouthwashes are. I use Listerine for years and it’s got the FD&C green and FD&C blue and all these food colorings. They do use some essential oils like thyme oil and eucalyptus oil and that’s a little bit redeeming. But it’s very, very irritating and it really hurts your mouth when you use it.
Shannon Drake: Yeah. Mouthwash is pretty much purely a cosmetic thing. It makes your breath super fresh like you’ve mopped out the bathroom floor with bleach, but it kills all of the bacteria in your mouth, not just the harmful bacteria. So much like your intestines and stomach have probiotics in them, so does your mouth. And those little probiotics take care of your gums and your teeth and they help digest different elements of your food and your saliva.
So when you’re using mouthwash, you’re just nuclear-bombing your entire mouth and destroying the natural ecosystem that helps keep your teeth healthy, which proliferates needing special toothpaste, which needs more dental care, which needs this. It’s a vicious cycle of product dependence.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, my favorite mouthwash is Manuka honey. It’s amazing. I used it because I had an H pylori infection a while ago and I was using Manuka honey to kill it. And I found that I woke up with amazingly fresh breath every morning because it was killing all the bacteria in my mouth.
Shannon Drake: Yeah. I do saltwater with some essential oils in it, which it takes a hot second to get used to switching to saltwater. But then after you get used to it, your mouth feels great. And it’s simple. You just use pink salt to make a saline solution, swish.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Shannon Drake: Oil pulling is really fun too. I love oil pulling.
Wendy Myers: With coconut oil?
Shannon Drake: Yeah. Oh, you’re the first to know. We’re launching an oil-pulling oil in about a month.
Wendy Myers: Nice.
Shannon Drake: It’s really good.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, tell us about that. Tell us about that. It’s an ancient Ayurvedic technique to pull bacteria out of the mouth. Correct?
Shannon Drake: Yeah, it’s been done for thousands of years. Traditionally, they use either sesame oil or neem oil, but as Americans, we are obsessed with coconut oil right now. So I started doing it with coconut oil, which is great because coconut oil is naturally antibacterial.
I like to do a little mix of the ancient and the modern, so when I formulated mine, I did a blend of the sesame and the coconut, which makes it a lot easier to swish. I find that coconut oil is foamy. I know there’s a weird texture it, but the [inaudible 00:11:22] oil doesn’t. So we blended those with some beautiful essential oils, turmeric, rose, mint, a little clove to make this just delicious concoction that I use as both oil pulling and mouthwash. So it’s great.
They recommend you do it for 20 minutes. I’m an oral care person and I’ve only made it up to 15 minutes. But it’s one of those things that if you just do it all, it counts. You’re doing something like yoga. You just have to show up and do it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So I saw on your website that you have a copper tongue scraper. I thought that was really unique because all the ones that I’ve seen are plastic. I use one, but with a little caution because I don’t really want to be putting plastic in my mouth, but I thought it was interesting that it’s just copper because copper kills germs in the body.
So why don’t you tell us about your tongue scraper and why it’s important to use one?
Shannon Drake: Yeah. The plastic tongue scraper also, you’re creating more plastic waste, which we know is horrible for the environment and they break. A copper tongue scraper is not going to break unless you run it over.
And as you mentioned, they’re antibacterial. It’s also traditionally what was used. So they’re also Ayurvedic tradition from scraping your tongue and they use copper. So I stuck to the books with that one. And part of benefits of scraping your tongue is I’m sure everyone has had the experience where they wake up in the morning and it feels like they have a white really sweater on their tongue. All that bacteria and residue just live there. So when you scrape your tongue, you’re basically just evicting all of those free litters off your tongue and starting fresh.
It helps improve your breath. It helps improve your oral care. And it’s more effective than brushing your tongue because the bristles on a toothbrush are very soft. So they just rub, whereas the tongue scraper actually scrapes that layer off. If you do it every morning, you’ll see a much fresher breath within two weeks.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I noticed a huge difference in my breath when I do tongue scraping because if you brush, you’re just moving it around your tongue.
Shannon Drake: It looks like after you mow a lawn and there are lines in the lawn.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Shannon Drake: It worked.
Wendy Myers: So tell us about some of your other products. You have some face oils. You have a couple of other different products. Why don’t you tell us about that?
Shannon Drake: Yeah. We have skin serums, shaving oils. We’re launching a beard oil and fragrances. And I’m a big fan of fragrance, but not a big fan of chemicals. So when I launched our skin care line, I wanted to make products that work really well and the base of them were beautiful natural plant oils. That also smelled really good, something a grown person would want to smell like, not anything chemically, not some hippie stuff. It’s something really good.
So we formulated three scents that all smell good and the essential oils I use are beneficial to your skin. So you get the dual purpose there. And they come in matching scents. So you can get a skin serum, a fragrance and shaving oil. Or if you’re a man, you can get a beard oil. They all smell the same, so you get that nice long lasting scent that’s not overpowering. And you get the benefits of all the natural oils without any funky preservatives in them.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I don’t think people realize how toxic traditional fragrances are, the synthetic petroleum based fragrances. They’re very estrogenic. They contain phthalates that are present at 1000 times more than other chemicals in our body and they promote estrogen dominance or estrogen-dependent cancers.
And people are just slaughtering themselves every single day in these toxic chemicals in their cleaners, in their face products and spraying it on themselves. It’s just amazing when people aren’t really paying attention to the products that they’re using, how many chemicals can build up. Women use an average of 126 products a day on their body. They can get so many different chemicals from those.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Shannon Drake: Yeah. When I talk to a lot of people and they’re asking me, “Why should I use natural products?” I’m like, “There are so many chemicals in that.” “Oh, but I just use a little bit.” And people don’t realize the accumulation over a day, over a week, over a month, over your entire lifetime of all these little doses of chemicals.
And a lot of products have the same chemicals in them. So it’s not the trace amounts in your lipstick. It’s the trace amount in your lipstick, in your shampoo, in your eyeliner, in your mouthwash. And there’s not a good way to study the effects. So when everyone’s like, “There’s no scientific research,” just know this, if you understand how the scientific method works, it’s not set up to measure such a delicate and complicated situation as a human life with 120 products. They just can’t do it.
So while these products are in micro-doses, we know that they’re carcinogens. We just don’t know at what level the effect is in a daily life. So why not just avoid them? There are so many options of great products that are natural and don’t have these things in the first place. So play it safe. You have one body your whole life. Take care of it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And the CDC did a study. They do a report about every five years that shows that on average, people have 500 chemicals in their body. These are underlying root cause of disease and health symptoms and fatigue and brain fog, et cetera. And so you really have to control every little thing that you can in your environment including your oral healthcare and personal healthcare products as much as we can.
Shannon Drake: It’s true. We live in a world full of toxins and the least thing we can do is control our own personal environment. We have a little domain over that.
Wendy Myers: So let’s go back to the toothpaste and the tooth care products that you have like the MCT oil here that I have. It’s really cute and perfect travel size. And you also have tooth powders as well. Can you talk about those?
Shannon Drake: Yeah. So tooth powders are old school. Tooth powders were around before toothpaste. They’re basically just a dry toothpaste.
Ours is a blend of clays, herbs and essential oils with a little baking soda. The way we use them is you just wet your toothbrush, tap it in there. You got to tap off the excess because you don’t need a lot and then you just brush like normal.
What I love about the tooth powders is a little bit goes a really long way. So we have a little two inch jar. It will last you six months. Six months. There are no liquids, so we can fly with it. We can take them backpacking. They’re really amazing. I really like them. They’re very simple.
And if you’re a person who has a lot of sensitivities to things, tooth powders are great because they’re as basic as they can get and as effective as they can get.
Wendy Myers: Are there any tips you can give the listeners, some quick tips that they can use to improve their oral healthcare?
Shannon Drake: Definitely. So your dentist always tells you to floss. That’s always number one. Just floss. Just do it just once a day.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Shannon Drake: Just three minutes.
Wendy Myers: And a lot of people don’t want to do that. I just don’t know with some people that never floss.
Shannon Drake: I know.
Wendy Myers: And it’s so disgusting because if I say, for whatever reason, I go five days without flossing and I floss, I’m like, “Oh, that’s really disgusting” because stuff is on the floss. And anybody, if you do it every day consistently, your mouth is far more clean.
Shannon Drake: Yeah, so the way I get people to floss, it’s a little gross, I tell them, “Floss and then smell it.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Shannon Drake: And I guarantee, the person will floss because that’s where everyone else is smelling your breath as. For vanity’s purposes only, floss your teeth. [inaudible 00:20:02].
Wendy Myers: Yeah. If you have someone at work and they have really bad breath and you know who they are, they’re not flossing and they’re not getting their tooth cleaned and not using good products.
Shannon Drake: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: So it’s really important to do that every day because you break up the bacteria colonies. That’s what you’re doing, you’re breaking the bacteria colonies, so that they don’t flourish as much and you just do that on a consistent basis and you have better breath.
Shannon Drake: Yeah. So flossing is always good. Scraping your tongue is great, super simple way to really improve your breath and your health.
Exercising, people don’t realize that fitness is connected to everything about your body. And your teeth have very, very tiny little blood channels that go into them and feed nutrition into your dentine. And just like your hands get cold if you have bad circulation, those tiny little arteries in your teeth don’t get good circulation either. So you are not feeding your teeth from the inside. So you need to do some sort of exercise. At least stretch.
Wendy Myers: To boost that circulation.
Shannon Drake: Yeah, get your circulation up.
Wendy Myers: Circulation in your teeth.
Shannon Drake: It’s true. Some other fun things that people don’t realize, massage your face. You would be surprised how much tension you get in your face every day and that tightness and clenching puts pressure on your teeth and your enamel and it causes micro-cracks in your teeth, which on their own aren’t really dangerous, but they just contribute to the structural degradation of your teeth.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Shannon Drake: Those are two of my fun little ninja tricks people never think of.
Use oil pulling if you have a gum recession or pockets in your gums. You can get oral irrigators, which are these little syringes filling up with saline and you can irrigate out those pockets to keep food from accumulating there. That’s really important if you’re older or you’ve had a history of gum problems.
And then eat well, you want to make sure you get all the nutrients that your teeth needs. So you need to get calcium. You need to get phosphorous, vitamin K, B12, all the really hard ones to get if you don’t have a good diet. They’re all the rich foods, so all those traditional foods like liver and dark leafy greens, organ meats. Wild milks are really great.
You want to stay away from greens and beans. They’re not so good for your teeth. And if you do eat them, you want to soak them or ferment them.
And then I just recommend people look up the Weston A. Price Foundation. They’re an awesome resource for ancestral oral care. I really like them.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I had a lot of information about teeth on their website.
Shannon Drake: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: The [inaudible 00:22:49] that leads to a healthy teeth.
Shannon Drake: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: Because Weston A. Price was a dentist.
Shannon Drake: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: And I have an interesting fact for the listeners, for any of you people that grind your teeth. I used to have a problem with tooth-grinding and grinds on your teeth. That can be caused by mercury toxicity. So with me, detoxing my mercury, that is completely stopped.
And I thought it was just an emotional thing or I was stressed or something of that nature. But it was really just due to my mercury toxicity from my sushi addiction that I have since now detoxed. I’m still on a detoxing process.
Wendy Myers: So Shannon, I have a question I like to ask to all of my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Shannon Drake: Oh, health issue. I really think that obesity is a big problem. It causes a lot of health issues and I think more importantly it causes self-esteem issues. And when you don’t feel good about yourself, it’s hard to care about other people and the environment around you when you feel uncomfortable in your own body.
It’s hard to take care of the outside world when you have a hard time caring of your inside world. So for me, that’s something I’m really passionate about. I’ve seen a lot of my family get really unhealthy in their older age and get a lot of really chronic diseases that are preventable.
So I think just being intentional about what we’re putting in our body and what our cells are then created out of because your cells are made out of food you eat every day. It’s not like your cells are just existing and they’re creating cells. What you eat powers your entire body. So you are what you eat is a passionate thing for me.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, me too. Like you mentioned, your father was diagnosed with cancer. And so is my father as well and he was obese his entire life. And he was addicted to food and was obese from a child. In his childhood photos, he was overweight as well as how I remember him as an adult.
Unfortunately, he passed away from cancer, but he had all of the diseases, preventable diseases as a result of his obesity, the metabolic syndrome with the high blood pressure and heart disease and high blood sugar, high cholesterol, et cetera, the trifecta. And then that high blood sugar consistently leads to cancer and whatnot. So it’s a huge, huge problem.
And that’s the feat of all the little children today that we see. They are overweight. That’s their fate in the future as well. And it is completely preventable. So that’s why we do what we’re doing.
Shannon Drake: Exactly. Exactly.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners more about you and where they can find you and your products?
Shannon Drake: Yeah. You can find all of my products at GiveMeTheDirt.com. We are in a couple of boutiques around the country, mostly online right now, but we’re getting into a couple of bigger grocery chains.
And then about me, you find me on my websites and Instagram, doing all the social media stuff and we’re actually moving to a new location where we’re going to have a yoga studio. So once that’s up, we’ll be advertising all of our yoga and health classes. So keep an eye on GiveMeTheDirt.com.
Wendy Myers: Where is your location or where is it going to be?
Shannon Drake: One of two places, so we’re just locking in our lease right now. It’s either going to be in West Hollywood, California or in Oakland, California.
Wendy Myers: Okay, those are pretty far away from each other.
Shannon Drake: They are. They are. It depends on who has the more perfect location.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Well, congratulations on that. That sounds like a really interesting project.
Shannon Drake: Thank you.
Wendy Myers: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Shannon Drake: Yes, it was great talking with you.
Wendy Myers: Thank you. And listeners, if you want to learn more about me, you can go to myersdetox.com and my healing and detox program. You can learn more about that at MineralPower.com.
Thank you so much for listening to the Live To 110 Podcast.
