When it comes to managing autoimmune conditions, the journey can often feel overwhelming. However, thanks to a burgeoning supplement market, quality, clinically proven formulas like Berkeley Life, led by Dr. Nicole Beurkens, are providing drug-free tools for patients seeking solutions. Dr. Nicole Beurkens is a licensed clinical psychologist and board-certified nutrition specialist with over 25 years of experience – all of which she is putting to work to bring the life-changing power of nitric oxide to the forefront of health and wellenss. As the CEO of Berkeley Life, Dr. Beurkens is leading the charge in bringing the life-changing power of nitric oxide to the forefront of health and wellness.
The Miracle Molecule: Nitric Oxide
Nitric oxide is often referred to as the “miracle molecule” for its critical role in our body’s functions. This gas, produced naturally by the body, is essential for vasodilation – the widening of blood vessels. This process ensures that oxygen and nutrients are efficiently delivered to every organ, tissue, and cell. For those with autoimmune conditions, optimizing blood flow is vital for cellular health and overall function. Also plays an important role in detoxification and ensuring that diet and lifestyle choices are maximized.
*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
Dual Pathways to Nitric Oxide Production
Our bodies have two pathways to produce nitric oxide: the L-arginine pathway and the nitrate pathway. The former relies on the amino acid L-arginine, commonly found in proteins. However, as we age, this pathway becomes less efficient. By the time we reach our 40s, our ability to produce nitric oxide through this route diminishes by about 50%.
The nitrate pathway, on the other hand, remains effective throughout our lives. Nitrates, found abundantly in dark leafy greens and vegetables like spinach, arugula, beets, and celery, are converted to nitric oxide through a fascinating process involving our oral microbiome.
The Role of Oral Health
Our oral microbiome plays a pivotal role in this conversion. Healthy bacteria in our mouths transform dietary nitrates into nitrites, which are then converted to nitric oxide in our stomachs. This underscores the importance of good oral hygiene and a diet rich in nitrate-containing vegetables.
Innovative Solutions from Berkeley Life
Berkeley Life offers simple yet powerful tools to help monitor and boost nitric oxide levels. Their saliva test strips provide immediate feedback on your nitric oxide status, guiding you towards necessary dietary adjustments or the use of their prebiotic nitrate chewing gum. This gum helps maintain a healthy oral microbiome, ensuring efficient nitrate conversion.
Empower Your Health
With Berkeley Life’s products and Dr. Beurkens’ expertise, you can take control of your health journey. Regularly testing your nitric oxide levels and making dietary and oral hygiene adjustments can lead to significant improvements in your overall well-being.
The products can be used together (try one of their new kits!) to give patients everything they need to optimize Nitric Oxide creation.
Read the transcript here:
Dr. Terry Wahls: Okay, welcome Dr. Nicole Beurkens, who is a licensed psychologist, board-certified nutrition specialist with over 25 years of experience treating children and adults with neurologic and mental health conditions. She’s very tuned into what’s going on with our brains. Now, beyond the award-winning clinical work, she’s partnered with companies and brands to reach people around the globe with the innovative research strategies and products to get to the root of their challenges, particularly with their brain issues and help people function and thrive once again.
Now, she’s proud to be leading the team at Berkeley Life as their CEO to bring this life-changing power of nitric oxide, we’re going to talk a lot about nitric oxide, into the forefront of how we can help our brains do better if you have a neurologic or a mental health issue. Before we get going, I want to remind everyone that Berkeley Life is a Wahls Protocol® sponsor, which really helps us get this message of all that we can be doing to better protect our brains for ourselves and our family. Welcome Dr. Beurkens.
Dr. Nicole Beurkens: Thank you.
Dr. Terry Wahls: Did I miss anything on your introduction?
Dr. Nicole Beurkens: Oh, no. I mean, I’ve had such a winding path with things, but I think that basically covers it. I mean, really, I’ve spent my whole career working with kids and adults around keeping our brains healthy and functioning well, and that’s taken a lot of different directions and now focused on nitric oxide, so I’m excited to talk about that today.
Dr. Terry Wahls: A lot of our listeners may not be aware that nitric oxide is such an important molecule in how our cells function. Do you want to tell us a little bit about nitric oxide and why it matters so much?
Dr. Nicole Beurkens: Yeah, absolutely. I think if people have heard of nitric oxide, they’ve heard it maybe in the fitness and exercise realm. Just to be clear, nitric oxide, not to be confused with nitrous oxide, which you maybe have gotten at the dentist. A lot of people get those two confused. It’s a really important difference. Nitric oxide is called the miracle molecule, and it’s literally called that because it’s such an important signaling molecule throughout the body. Nitric oxide is a gas that the body produces, and it is critically important for something called vasodilation, which means the expanding of our blood vessels throughout our body. Now, our blood vessels aren’t something that we tend to think about that often. In fact, you don’t even hear, you’ve done a lot of courses or webinars or even in the medical field, if we go to lectures and things on different aspects of health, unless you’re focused on cardiology, we don’t really think about blood vessels that much.
This is super important because our blood vessels properly expanding and allowing blood to flow through them properly is what gets oxygen and nutrients to every organ tissue and cell in our body. Of course, we know, fundamentally, the way that our body feels and functions best is when our cells are getting the nutrients and the oxygenation that they need, particularly when we have some kind of chronic health condition. It becomes critically important for blood flow to be working properly so that those cells are getting everything that they need. Nitric oxide is the molecule that allows that to happen. When you think nitric oxide, you can think blood flow and just flow in general. Yes to blood flow, but also you all have probably heard of lymph, lymph flows through the body that’s important for detoxification. The vasodilation or the expanding of the vessels of the channels that lymph is flowing through as well are regulated by nitric oxide.
We’ve got this flow idea. When things are flowing properly in our body, we’re able to have good health and function. When things get stagnant or slowed down and stuck, we have more chronic issues. Optimizing this flow is critical, so nitric oxide is responsible for that. It also plays a host of other functions in the body, everything from acting as a hormone and a neurotransmitter, which is super important obviously for every aspect of our brain and body function. It just is important for regulating a lot of things, so we want to be paying attention to our nitric oxide levels.
Dr. Terry Wahls: Okay, so nitric oxide, super important. Recently, we’ve really discovered that because I didn’t get taught that stuff in medical school, so, how do we make it? Can we just make it spontaneously or are there ingredients that we need? What’s the deal here?
Dr. Nicole Beurkens: Yeah, this is important to understand because the body is so amazing in how it functions and how we have backup systems in the body for things that are super important, nitric oxide being one of them. We have not one but two pathways actually the body uses to make nitric oxide. That’s how critical it is. The first path is using something called L-arginine, which is an amino acid that we get through proteins. For example, you could eat animal protein has L-arginine in it, and through a complex series of reactions in the endothelial cells that lie in our blood vessels, there’s an enzyme called endothelial nitric oxide synthase that when we take in arginine through our diet, it gets converted in those endothelial cells with that enzyme into nitric oxide. It’s a complex process that requires multiple steps and co-factors and things, and that pathway works well when we’re younger.
The problem is that that pathway begins to break down as we get older. In fact, by the time we reach age 40 in our forties, we’ve lost about 50% of our body’s capacity to produce nitric oxide through that L-arginine pathway. This is why we tend to have a lot more energy, a lot more ability to engage in vigorous exercise, just more of that vitality when we’re younger and we start to talk about, “Well, we lose that as we get older.” One of the reasons that happens is because that pathway is not able to produce as much nitric oxide and nitric oxide is critical for allowing us to have those more youthful energy levels, good oxygenation, good nutrient flow, all of that. The good news is that we have a second pathway that we can use to make nitric oxide, and that’s through something called the nitrate pathway.
Now, nitrates are found in foods that we eat primarily vegetables, dark leafy greens, things like spinach, bok choy, arugula, beets, celery, those kinds of things. Those of you who are familiar with Wahls Protocol® and are eating that diet, you might be thinking, “Wow, I am eating a nitrate-rich diet.” Yes, you are. Dr. Wahls and I have had several conversations about just our hypotheses about part of why the Wahls Protocol® diet is so critically valuable is because it is so nitrate-rich.
We take in those nitrates through those kinds of foods and those nitrates when we’re chewing them in our mouth, we have, if our oral microbiome, that community of microorganisms in our mouth is healthy, we’ve got these good bacteria in there that convert the nitrates from our produce into something called nitrite. Those little bugs go to work and they convert that nitrate to nitrite. We swallow that nitrite into our stomach, and then in the acidity of our stomach, that nitrite is converted to nitric oxide gas. That’s the other pathway that the body has. The good news here is that nitrate pathway stays functional throughout the lifespan. That does not degrade over time. Whether you’re a kid or you’re a much older adult, you can count on that nitrate to nitrite to nitric oxide pathway to keep your nitric oxide levels up, but a lot of people don’t realize that.
Dr. Terry Wahls: I’m going to stop you for a moment here. Everyone listening, I think the big simple message is, yep, protein’s super important for the L-arginine. That’s one pathway, but also vitally important is eating your greens and beets because that will supply the dietary nitrates that we can then use if we have the right microbes in our mouth to make the nitric oxide. How do I know if I’ve got the right microbes?
Dr. Nicole Beurkens: Yeah, this is a big thing. We talk a lot about the gut microbiome, but what we don’t talk as much about and need to be paying more attention to is this oral microbiome. What’s going on there? Because that’s actually the start of our gut microbiome. The easiest, quickest way, and this is what I think is so exciting about what we have at Berkeley Life, is to use a saliva test strip, testing for nitrite. We’ve got these simple test strips, and what you do is it just takes 10 seconds. You stick it on your tongue and it’s going to give you a color indication of where your nitric oxide level is. Is it really depleted? Is it at the threshold? Is it at the target level we want it to be? Here’s where this becomes so key for understanding your oral microbiome. That test strip is actually measuring the amount of nitrite in your mouth.
It’s measuring how well those microbes are taking in those nitrates and converting them. If you know that you’re eating a really good nitrate-rich diet and you use a test strip, then it’s showing low, one of two things is going on. Either the produce and the things that you’re eating aren’t as nitrate-rich as you thought, which can happen because of soil depletion, because of how things are grown, but also that’s telling you you probably have an imbalance in your oral microbiome. Those microbes are not where they need to be in order to convert the nitrate to the nitrate. That test strip becomes a very, very beneficial immediate indicator for us to be able to take control over our health and go, “Okay, my levels are not where they need to be. That’s telling me something important about the level of this in my body. Now, I can take action on it.” A few of the ways that we can take action on that is, first of all, with our oral care and oral hygiene, many people are using antibacterial or antimicrobial mouth washes, toothpastes with chemicals and things in them, all of that stuff.
Dr. Terry Wahls: Foaming toothpaste, right?
Dr. Nicole Beurkens: Yeah, foaming toothpaste for sure, or with colorants and artificial flavors in them. We know that all of those things disrupt that oral microbiome. For sure, anything antimicrobial. A lot of mouth washes. It’s like if it says kills 99% of bacteria, well, guess what? That is also knocking out all of …
Dr. Terry Wahls: The good ones.
Dr. Nicole Beurkens: … The good microbes in there. Certainly, if you’re smoking or vaping, if you’re eating a lot of processed foods-
Dr. Terry Wahls: How about alcohol?
Dr. Nicole Beurkens: Yeah, alcohol for sure. Processed foods, foods that are high in artificial ingredients and sugars. That is all we talk about how that disrupts the gut microbiome, but guess what? That completely disrupts the oral microbiome as well. We want to shift away from those kinds of things, especially shifting away from the problematic oral care products because there are so many better options available in the marketplace now that usually when people become aware that they go, “Okay, I can just shift and use a different toothpaste or I’ll stop using the mouthwash,” so that’s the first part of it.
The second part is we need to rebalance then those microbes in the mouth. Certainly, eating a diet rich in leafy greens, produce, nitrates. Those are potent prebiotics that help feed those good bacteria, and we can see the oral microbiome shift and become healthier as a result of eating those kinds of foods. We also recently created a prebiotic nitrate chewing gum, and this is really a game-changer for this oral microbiome piece of things because you’re chewing this gum for five to 10 minutes and you’re literally bathing that microbiome of your mouth in the foods that they need to grow and populate. Those prebiotic nitrates, you’re bathing the mouth in that, and we can see over the course of four to five days the microbes that are needed to convert nitrate into nitric oxide, that those start to increase and balance that oral microbiome.
Something as simple as making some shifts to your oral care routine, chewing this prebiotic nitrate gum can do wonders for rebalancing that, and then you know that you’re getting the benefit of those nitrates that you’re consuming and being able to produce more of the nitric oxide, which is really what we’re after.
Dr. Terry Wahls: What I think I’m hearing is you want to fix your diet, try chewing the gum, test again in a couple of weeks after fixing all that, and now I’m going to get whatever information I’m going to get that I need to do a better job or chew more gum. Would you generally expect that someone’s going to be chewing this gum forever for the rest of their life, or is this something that you could maybe do for a couple weeks or a couple months? I’ve now gotten my scores, looking good. Does that mean I probably don’t need the gum anymore, or generally taking the gum intermittently the rest of my life might be a good thing?
Dr. Nicole Beurkens: Yeah, so really, I mean, the answer is it depends, but I’ll give a couple quick scenarios. First of all, the easiest way to assess what your levels are is to get the test strips, to test your level and see where it’s at. Many people are very surprised if, Terry, you and I even had this experience initially of like, “Hey, we eat a really nitrate-rich diet,” and testing and going, “Oh, wow, we are lower than we thought that we would be.”
Dr. Terry Wahls: Yeah, I was surprised. Like, “Oh, hmm.”
Dr. Nicole Beurkens: In fact, just for people listening, don’t be surprised, and those people will say to me, “My test strip is broken because it’s white.” It’s not broken. That’s how depleted you are in nitric oxide where it’s not even registering. You take that and that gives you some information about we can be eating what we think is the nitrate-rich diet, but the reality is because of how things are grown and soils and all of those things, we might not have as much nitrate in our food as we think. You test where you’re at, and then you take two of our foundation capsules, which is basically your guaranteed level of nitrates that you need on a daily basis in a capsule form. It’s dietary nitrates. You take two of those every day, and that keeps your levels up. You do your initial test, you see where you are, you take two capsules about 90 minutes to two hours later, test again, it should pink up nicely.
You should go, “Okay, my body’s responding to this. My body’s able to handle these nitrates and convert it.” If it’s still low, that means you need to have the gum, you need to be managing that oral microbiome, and then you take your foundation capsules every day. Two capsules is the standard dose that we recommend, but obviously for people with ongoing chronic disease kinds of issues, I myself went through a terrible bout with autoimmune hepatitis several years ago. There are times when you need more and benefit from more, but two capsules is the standard dose, and then you chew your gum. I recommend our standard recommendation is chew the gum for two weeks straight every day to make sure that your oral microbiome is as well-balanced as it can be, and then you can use it intermittently. For example, if you’ve been traveling and maybe exposed to things, if you have been having more stress, if maybe your diet hasn’t been as great as it normally is, you can use that periodically to help just make sure that that oral microbiome is staying balanced.
You also have the test strips that you can test periodically. I personally don’t test every day. Some people do, but I test periodically once a week, once every other week, and that helps me keep tabs on that too. “Oh, where am I at? Do I need to get back to chewing the gum for a few days?” This trio of things is very simple to use, and it allows us very quickly to stay in touch with what’s going on with nitrates and nitric oxide in our body, and then so simple to take those action steps to just keep that level where we want it to be. That has such a positive impact then on everything else that’s going on with our health, particularly people with neural immune kinds of issues, anybody with chronic health, inflammation kinds of issues, having a strong foundation of nitric oxide levels is just critically important. We wanted to be monitoring and staying on top of this.
Dr. Terry Wahls: What I want to remind everyone is that we have a complex relationship with all of the microbes in our body that have co-evolved with us, and we are, in the scientific community, are just now really getting into investigating our oral microbiome. We’re doing that in my current clinical trial. We’re monitoring the oral microbiome at every study visit, and we’ll see how the contents of the oral microbiome are associated with our health status.
We co-evolved with our microbes. They are a vital part of who we are in optimal physiology. What I love about Berkeley Life is that they’re helping us understand our oral microbiome, that it is in a good place. It’s helping us do the physiology we need for great brain health, great heart health, great overall health and vitality. They let us know that our microbiome is happy, contributing well to the nitric oxide miracle, or that it’s not as optimal as it was. Then it gives us tools to address that, to improve our nitric oxide and to prove our microbiome. Then we can check. We’re in a good place or not say like, “Okay, we’re in a good place. I don’t need the gum now. I’ll just practically check, and when I get a signal that I need the gum, I’ll go back on the gum.” This is a wonderful combination. There are other products that boost your nitric oxide, but no other company that I’m aware of gives you the tools to see where you’re at and like, “Okay, I’m not where I’d like to be.” Then gives you the tools to improve your oral microbiome, so I am very, very pleased with this.
Dr. Nicole Beurkens: Thank you. I mean, we’re thrilled to be partnering with you, and I think it’s true. There’s almost nothing in medicine or nutrition that we can have this 10-second test tool that is research validated. We know from the clinical research we’ve done that our saliva measurements correlate with blood measurements of nitrates and nitrites. You can rest assured that you’re getting a valid reading there, and it’s so empowering as just a human being who’s invested in your health and wellness. It’s so empowering to be able to do something in your own home for 10 seconds, get valuable information about the status of what’s going on with something critical in your body, and then have the tools to be able to action it.
Dr. Terry Wahls: Okay, this is marvelous, marvelous tools for all of you. Now, what I invite all of you to do is to please tell us what were the key things that you learned from this. One or two things that you’ll learn, what actions you’ll take, and then by all means, come back and leave another comment like, okay, you did all this stuff and what was the impact? Nicole, this was a wonderful conversation. I so appreciate you and I look forward to seeing you at the next scientific meeting.
Dr. Nicole Beurkens: Thank you.
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