Dr. Nammy Patel introduces the AGES longevity system and explains how the mouth can influence airway health, inflammation, detoxification, energy, and quality of life as patients age. She discusses why biological dentistry looks beyond teeth to whole-body patterns and how targeted oral health care may support long-term wellness.
John Maher: Hi, I’m John Maher and I’m here today with Dr. Nammy Patel, founder of Green Dentistry in San Francisco, California, helping patients recognize the vital connection between dental health and whole body health, and author of the bestselling book’s Age With Style: Guide to a Youthful Smile and Healthy Living and Total Wellness: Understanding the Link Between Your Teeth and Your Health. Today, our topic is Why Your Mouth is the Missing Piece of Longevity Medicine. Welcome, Dr. Nammy.
Dr. Nammy Patel: Thank you for having me, John. I’m so excited to share this information with you.
John: Absolutely.
Nammy: Yeah, it’s been something I’ve been working for the last 20 years and really putting a protocol together, a program together that we can really serve our patients and the world in helping everyone live longer, but using your mouth as longevity medicine. No peptide, no pill, but really your mouth.
The Mouth as a Foundation for Longevity
John: Right. So Dr. Nammy, you wrote a book called Age With Style, and you have now built a system that you call AGES, A-G-E-S. Before we go deep into that, what’s the single biggest thing that most people and even most doctors miss about how the mouth affects our age?
Nammy: One of the biggest things people forget about the mouth is that it’s connected to the rest of the body. It is the source of missing infections, and it is the source of nitric oxide. It is the source where when we can shift one degree, it really adds 10 years, 20 years disease-free to your life. Now, the system is called AGES. I wrote a book called Age With Style: Guide to a Youthful Smile and Healthy Living, because I wanted to know what can we do at each stage of our lives to live longer? We’re all designed to age. We can’t stop that. What we can do is really figure out how can we do it so that is disease-free, and how can we do it so that we enjoy the quality of life? Because as we get into our 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond, we really start getting concerned about heart attacks, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, mobility.
We’re really looking at this. So I started my work with how can we help people live longer? And I designed the AGES protocol. And A stands for airway. G is your gums, your gut and your glymph. E is energy because our mitochondrial energy is really important, and S is sculpting and smile design and making sure we look pretty and we feel pretty. So that’s the third or fourth aspect that we call AGES longevity system.
What Longevity Medicine Means in Dentistry
John: Yeah, you mentioned longevity medicine. What do you mean by that? What does that phrase actually mean in your practice day-to-day?
Nammy: For longevity, what I mean is how can I live long disease-free? That is my quality of longevity so that I’m able to have the quality of life. What I want to do is be able to have functionality because when we want to live, we don’t want to be a vegetable in the hospital because that’s one way of living. So the way I think of longevity system is I want to be 120, still being able to walk everywhere on my own, still have my mental facilities in place, still be enjoying the quality of life. And at that time, I’m probably going to be enjoying spending quality time with my nieces and nephews or cooking something and really be able to have the fulfillment of life that I get today. That is what I think about longevity is living life on your terms without disease, without being bound to a hospital bed, without having amnesia or dementia and forgetting something, without being dependent on a pill.
That’s really what I consider longevity.
The AGES Protocol: Airway, Gums, Energy, and Sculpt
John: So you talked a little bit about your AGES protocol and what that stands for, airway, gums and glymphatic, energy, and sculpt. And why those four and what gets left out if you only do one or two of those?
Nammy: Well, one of the things we have to really start looking at is one thing that really ages all of us is toxins. And what happens with toxins, even your cells on a regular basis, we poop every day, right? That’s toxins getting out of our body, and that’s important. We want to know that our body can detoxify. And so the AGES protocol is designed so that we can detoxify at the source, which is the mouth, and also throughout the entire system. And when we start looking at the functional airway, really making sure we can breathe really well, really get that nitric oxide, we’re really making sure our body is working optimally. We want our bodies working optimally because nitric oxide vasodilates. It helps blood flow and blood is a river that keeps us alive. There is of course the airway, but there’s actually intracellularly, it’s the blood where the oxygen exchange actually occurs.
So we want to make sure that we’re looking at you from the outside in all the way down to the cellular level, to the molecule. We want to make sure each molecule is optimized in your body and working well for you.
Who Benefits From an Oral-Systemic Longevity Evaluation
John: So what type of patient is this system designed for? And can you give us an example maybe of a patient who had some sort of a dental problem and came to you and then that turned out to be something bigger, something more whole body, something that was affecting their life in a larger way than even maybe they thought when they came to you.
Nammy: I have so many patients and so many different examples. One of the one that I’m going to describe to is a common person like you or me. No real diseases, really, really busy working, doing a lot of life. Started a company just working across the ladder of career, really climbing the corporate ladder, really becoming more and more successful. And what happens during that is there is an amazing success, but there’s fatigue, there is moodiness, there’s brain fog, there’s exhaustion. It’s like feeling dead inside. It’s called burnout, and that’s super common. I see it on a daily basis. Now, these patients don’t sometimes even know that the mouth can be really helpful. And so what they do is they come to me for a dental issue. For example, they’re breaking their teeth or they have a lot of gum recession and the teeth are sensitive or they have gum disease.
And as we go down and unpack what’s really at the root of it all, we really discover that, hey, dental problems are the least of their concerns. Dental problems are really just a symptom that’s bringing them in. If we go deeper, we find that they’re actually aging very quickly. They’re not very happy. There are just feeling dead inside is what I say is the burnout, the exhaustion, the fatigue, the inability to focus, the anxiety that goes along with day-to-day living. And that’s almost torturous because that’s not the way we want life, right? We want life on your term. So what we start doing is we really start looking at what’s deeper here, what’s really going on, how can we help you? So we really start looking at the foundation of how the body is working. And the most important I look at is going to be the airway as a dentist because a tongue position is what’s going to determine how you are breathing and that is part of a dentist.
Now, medical doctors screen for sleep apnea from time to time, but they’re not doing it at a level that is really needed to bio-optimize ourselves. And that’s why in my practice, I start looking at the root cause. What is missing? What is that one domino that’s going to shift everything else? When you work with a nutritionist or when you work with a dietician, that’s the first thing we’re looking at is what’s that one change that you can do that’s going to have a massive lasting impact. And that’s what I’m looking at when I look at the AGES protocol. And so a perfect example is going to be my patient, Jane. She came to me, works in AI, super busy, just has meetings all the time, is working on the weekends because she loves her job, but it’s taken a toll on her mental body and her physical body.
She comes to me and we start looking at her airway. We look at her airway, we expand her 3D nasal volume, we literally expand her 3D nasal volume. And now she is actually so happy with her job. She is like, “Dr. Patel, can I tell you, I thought I was only going to last in my job another three months, but here I am three years later, super excited, super happy, has balance in life knowing that she’s doing the job that she wants and living the life that she wants.” She’s not doing her work at the expense of her. What she’s doing is the work and it’s elevating how she’s feeling. So her quality of life has increased. She has more energy. She’s able to focus. She’s able to get the work done in a shorter period of time. Instead of sleeping eight hours, she’s getting five good solid hours of sleep because she’s optimized her sleep.
Now, she has optimized her schedule so that she is able to get the exercise in, be able to work, be able to get the things that she can, and she’s super sharp. So that exhaust … Sometimes it can take a while to get something done because we’re just not feeling it. And she’s like, “I’m so sharp. I get up at 5:00 AM. By 8:00 AM, a lot of my stuff is done and I feel really good. I feel really set.” Because in the past, she couldn’t get started in the morning. She’d have to wait till like 10 o’clock after three cups of coffee to be able to get productive.
John: Now
Nammy: She’s productive as soon as she gets up. And mind you, this is a menopausal woman. So there’s a lot of hormones that are involved that we’re working with as well. And so she is just much happier, better quality of life, more focused, more ability to get things done. She’s faster, efficient, living life and enjoying herself, which is the most important. Her quality of life is amazing. She is bio-optimized to live long. She is bio-optimized to enjoy her now and her future.
Dental Longevity Versus Biohacking Trends
John: That’s a great story. There’s a lot of maybe noise in the longevity space out there right now. We hear a lot about supplements and biohacking. You mentioned peptides earlier. How does one separate the real science here from just the trends that are going to come and go? And where does your form of dentistry kind of quietly fit in?
Nammy: So one of the things I look at, John, is that when I’m looking at long-term effects. So the thing is when I do anything, I want it to last. I’m looking not at a two-year or a five-year timeline. I’m looking at a 20-year timeline. So I’m looking at what am I doing today that’s going to have an effect now, but it’s going to really have the patient have the return on investment in 20 years. If I’m preventing disease, it’s going to be a massive impact. If I’m keeping their marbles in place, remember making sure that they’re not getting Alzheimer’s or dementia, that’s going to be a massive impact that I would have. What happens with peptides, where it happens with just a lot of things that are out there, it’s great, and a lot of it is just not studied long enough. We don’t know a hundred year effect.
We don’t know. And that’s what’s happening with our food system is that we just didn’t know about glycosates. We didn’t know about any of these things that are now becoming a problem. Pesticides, we know that being able to, like leptins are problematic for patients. There are some patients who are allergic to wheat, gluten. We didn’t know that taking niacin out of the bread was a problem. And now it’s because you need 50, 70, 100 years of research in order for us to be able to know that this is completely safe. My attitude is if it’s natural, it’s much safer because it’s been around for millions and trillions of years. Even in the life of human beings, there’s a lot of things that are natural and our bodies can process them because it’s familiar with them. It’s familiar in our DNA. Our ancestors know what this was.
And whether it’s like an adaptogen, like a mushroom, right? Our bodies know how to process them and it doesn’t have additives and they’ve been studied. Now with something like GLP-1 even, or even with all these different peptides that exist, they’re very challenging because we just don’t know what the efficacy is in 20 years, 50 years, a hundred years, because it hasn’t been around for that long. Number one. Number two, our biology is changing. What we’re seeing is that adults, their physiology a hundred years ago is very different in our physiology now. It’s because evolution occurs. So there’s no way to know 100% how everything will be. What we can do instead is maximize certain foundations. If we know that … It’s like the classic example, if you want to lose weight, you got to diet and exercise. There’s just no way around that. You can get lipo done, but it comes back in different areas.
So if there’s just something about foundational work that just needs to be there, like diet and exercise. When I look at patients, I’m looking at what’s naturally there. What can I maximize that’s already naturally there to make it work better? So I’m not adding additions up. I’m more taking away things that are not working so that the body is natural, it’s healing on its own and working really well.
Why Chronically Ill Patients Need Biological Dentistry
John: You see a lot of patients who come to you with medical issues. They might be recovering from cancer. They might have chronic illnesses. They have autoimmune issues. Why can’t those types of people go to a regular dentist? And what is it that you do differently in the way that you work with those types of patients and treat them?
Nammy: One of the things with chronic ill patients or cancer patients is that it happens over time. There’s usually triggers for somebody to be chronically ill. I’m going to use example, simple as arthritis. One, people would think, okay, it’s something that we can put up with. We all have a little bit as we get older. Arthritic conditions are normal and they’re actually not. Arthritis is inflammation. When we talk about a heart attack, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, all of those are chronic inflammatory conditions. Even autoimmune conditions are eczema. We hear that all the time. Thyroid issues are autoimmune conditions. These conditions, our body just doesn’t … I’m born with autoimmune conditions majority of the time. 80% of the population is going to develop these autoimmune conditions over time because what happens is that there are stressors that the body is facing, whether it’s mercury, whether it’s a failed root canal, whether it’s bad bacteria that’s in the mouth, whether it’s mold in the environment, whether it’s lead in the environment, or the quality of food has toxins in it.
What happens is these toxins, our body naturally takes care of them, but what happens over a period of time is that it reaches this threshold. Now, when it reaches its threshold, it’s on a tipping point. Now, that tipping point sometimes can be a lot of stress. It could be death, disease divorce is the three things I always say. A move is something that is very, very, very hard for the body to process and our minds to process and we get really stressed out. When that happens, those toxins that the body was actually taking care of, it’s no longer going to be able to do that because it’s immunocompromised. And so our immune system isn’t as active because there’s so much cortisol or stress built up in the body. So the body ends up with an autoimmune reaction majority of the time. It’s not 100%, but 80% of the population is usually how autoimmune diseases develop.
And usually when the first one happens, there’s a second one that happens a few years later, there’s a third one that happens. Typically, they appear in freeze. And when we look at this, if we start breaking it down and we start looking at like, how can I be helpful to this person? So what I really start looking is, how do I remove the toxins out of this person? And what are the hidden areas of toxicity that people have not looked at? And the number one is the amount. Have you had your wisdom teeth taken out, John?
John: Yeah, I have.
Nammy: Right. 90% of the population gets their wisdom teeth out. What happens with wisdom teeth is sometimes if they’re not taken out properly and the periodontal ligament is not removed, it remains a foci of infection, a low grade infection that lingers in the body for many, many, many years. Not a problem if you’re healthy, no problem. Once you get, let’s say you get in your 50s and you’re really stressed out and there’s so much going on and all of a sudden that reaction that your body was able to contain that healing didn’t heal so well, now starts going to the rest of the body and starts becoming a real problem. People start having different diseases from it. Their energy, their blood levels are like, “I don’t understand why my white blood cells are so high. I don’t understand why things are off on my blood work when there’s really nothing going on that I really see, or why is this chronic fatigue that I’ve had forever, or why is this arthritis all of a sudden developing?” It’s because the infection or the toxic load of the body has reached a threshold, and that threshold is the tipping point when now we see the body attacking itself.
And as a dentist, I’m looking at root canals, failed root canals that are not done properly. Looking at gum disease, there’s bacteria that we need to remove, and if they’re not done properly, it will lead to chronic infections and autoimmune conditions and chronically ill conditions. The third thing we are also looking at is cavitations, looking at the jawbone, has it healed properly. If it hasn’t healed properly, we want to make sure we take out the dead bone that’s not in there, right? We want to remove it so that we can put healing materials inside so your body doesn’t have to unconsciously process and fight that infection all the time. And as we decrease that bacterial load, as we decrease the body’s attack mechanism, patients start getting better. They start feeling better. They start having more energy. Their blood levels are balanced. They’re able to live life again.
They’re able to increase capacity. For arthritis, the swelling goes away. They’re able to function where they weren’t able to without medications. There are patients who memories are much better because we’re getting rid of these infections. For people, even with mercury toxicity, metals in their mouth, once we remove all that metal and we help patients detox that out, what’s happening is their energy starts feeling better, their skin lot starts looking better, their twitches go away, and their nervousness is much better. So we’re really able to help patients naturally taking out the toxins that we find in our environment, but most importantly, in our bodies, they need to be removed so that our bodies can be an ecosystem that functions properly.
How to Start With the AGES Protocol
John: So if somebody’s listening to this now and they’re listening to you speak about this and talk about your AGES system, and they’re seeing themselves here. They’re hearing what you’re talking about and going, “Wow, that sounds like me. I’m having a lot of these same issues that Dr. Nami is talking about. ” What are the main points that you want to get across here in terms of your AGES protocol and what it can do for a person, for a patient? And what should the one thing be that somebody should do to start this process and move forward?
Nammy: That’s a great question. The first thing I would say is let’s review the AGES protocol. A is airway, right? And then we have the G, which is the gums. We have E, which is energy, and then the S is sculpt because we all want to look good too. We not only want to feel good, we want to look good. And we can use regenerative products to be able to do that as well. We call it truly anti-aging, really longevity through the mouth. The mouth is your longevity medicine. Now, the one thing I would say for anybody that’s listening is that come in for an evaluation. Let’s look at it. Let’s score you. Let’s take a look at your airway. Let’s look at your gums. Let’s look at your energy. Let’s look at your smile design. Let’s look at anything else cosmetically. They may not be happy.
Let’s really look at this and let’s come up with a game plan and how we can fix it and how we can really help you optimize yourself, feel better, look good, and feel amazing and live your purpose. That’s what we really want to do is how can we help you live your purpose so that you can have a long, beautiful life.
John: All right, well, that’s really great information, Dr. Nammy. Thanks again for speaking with me today.
Nammy: Absolutely.
John: And for more information about Green Dentistry and the AGES protocol, you can visit the website at sfgreendentist.com or call 415-433-0119.
