I’ve seen this making the rounds recently. Like the title suggests, it talks about how mouthwash cancels out the BP lowering impacts of exercise due to its removal of beneficial oral bacteria.
For those of you that are more scientifically-inclined than I am, what are your thoughts on this?
Single study. Definitely weird. But there is probably something there.
There are other glucose swish studies that show reductions in RPE and increased performance, so it would make sense that there could be negative effects from certain compounds.
Your mouth has a ton of nerve endings. Hope someone can replicate the study.
There is other work that has shown mouth bacteria convert nitrates into nitrates, which are then absorbed and further metabolized into nitric-oxide, which is a potent vasodilator – aka blood-pressure-lowerer. I suspect the exercise-angle here is just a distraction. The real takeaway is oral biome disruption messes with nitrate metabolism which messes with blood pressure. I’d imagine you would see similar impact from toothpastes with triclosan, drink a bunch of high-strength spirits, or taking antibiotics. There are other nitric-oxide generation pathways, so it’s not as if this completely disables you, but obviously the effect is significant enough to measure. I’m not sure if it’s proven, but the whole beet-juice thing may actually just be an exploitation of this very same phenomenon.