“Commit to feeling good. Take it day by day. Do what you can in each moment.”

Nadine Artemis is the founder of Living Libations, a natural skin, oral, and body care line based on the purest of botanicals. She’s a revolutionary and incredibly versed in the realm of holistic women’s health and holistic dental care. Nadine’s incredible products are the results of her passion for botanicals and a vision for natural health, wholeness and beauty. She offers incredible wisdom on the correlation between your oral and overall health. This is often an area that is an after thought but turns out should be one of the first places we should clean up if we’re on a healing path. She shares her favorite botanicals for breast health and offers some great advice on maintaining a healthy liver and paying attention to the quality of our water.

What impact does a woman’s emotional and mental wellbeing have on her breast health?

I think emotional and mental health could affect any area, it just depends what our achilles heel is. Regardless of the area of the body where things can manifest we always want to care for our emotional and mental health.

Oral health affects every area of the body.

What’s the impact of oral health on breast health?

I think oral health has a significant impact on breast health and probably more than we even know to this day. What we do know is that oral health affects every area of the body. And again what’s your achilles heel? Where will an imbalance in your mouth show up in the rest of your body? For someone it could be arterial plaque shows up and causes a heart imbalance. For another, issues with the mouth microbiome could lead to infertility or an early birth, not a full term pregnancy. For some it could lead to breast imbalances or thyroid imbalances that could then trigger breast imbalances. It can go on and on like that.

One thing that we do know is that 90% of women with a root canal have a tumor in the breast on the same side as the root canal. It doesn’t mean that a root canal will cause a tumor but all women that have a root canal have it on the same side as the tumor. Through testing with thermography, which looks at inflammation heat patterns in the body, we can see a direct correlation with the signature heat lines showing inflammation leading from the mouth right down to the breast where the root canal is. That shows a correlation. There’s also Dr. Joseph Issel’s, who practiced in Europe for decades, working with people who had cancer and he made sure everyone cleared up their root canal before they began their healing journey.

Why should women consider getting their mercury amalgams removed?

It’s one of the most toxic metals. The thing with metals like mercury, nickel, cadmium, and aluminum is they’re very toxic and are metalloestrogens. We need them removed because they mimic estrogen. It’s hard to get ahead of the game if you have a constant supply of mercury vapours shedding into your body 24/7. No matter how old the mercury filling that’s what it does, 24 hours a day. It releases toxins and what that does is fills up breast receptor sites that want estrogen with metalloestrogens. Hal Huggins, who was a master at educating us about the hazards of mercury since 1963 and onwards, spoke about the marriage of metals and microbes. Mercury loves fungus and yeast and eats it for breakfast.

When my mother was dying, it was about six months process, I had to prepare for a lecture and I thought, I know what I want to do. I’m going to do it on breast health, even though it was too late for my mom. When I write and work and research and meditate, it all starts combining. When I was working on the lecture I was really deep in the research. I understood the xenoestrogens, which I feel all of us are probably aware of at this point in time. They are foreign, xeno being foreign, estrogens from synthetic compounds like plastic, BPA in general . We have had so much of that from our food supply. Plastic is everywhere, it’s in our oceans and it’s in our products. There’s endocrine disruptors not only in the plastic bottle but also in the ingredients of the shampoo and some of those could be xenoestrogen types. So we’re getting it from all places.

All these metals like cadmium, aluminium, and mercury mimic estrogen. So once again our receptors that are looking for estrogen can accept metalloestrogens and xenoestrogens thinking it is estrogen. And not only are they from metals like the nickel in braces, the mercury fillings, and the aluminium in deodorants. It’s also in pesticides like atrazine, pesticides that can evolve a male frog into a gender neutral frog. I did some more research and there are mycoestrogens which are fungal estrogens, myco being fungal. These come from the food supply where you have the sillage, which is all that waste on the floor from harvesting wheat and corn and it’s all moldy. There’s even synthetic mycoestrogens which are pharmaceuticals that are added to our livestock food supply. There’s also aflatoxins which is the mold that you may be aware of from peanuts.

We live in a estrogen dominant world, what are some things women can do to reduce their exposure?

We really have to assess our lives and see where these estrogen mimickers are coming from, where it’s from in our food supply, beauty supply or environment. I was really aware of my mom’s health and her health history so I was able to see the patterns that led to her breast cancer diagnosis. I could see that, of course, she would have been a candidate. She was on the early forms of birth control, she’d had a hysterectomy at 35 due to endometriosis and so she was on hormone replacement therapy for 35 years. That alone increases your chances just by being on it for a few years. She had a few root canals on her two front teeth which came out when she was nine years old from a leap frog game. She also had mercury fillings for a long time. There weren’t any alternatives then. Our mothers’ and grandmothers’ generation were the first of the 19th century where there were more synthetics were being invented and female bodies were so experimented on with so many devastating things, it’s really sad.

These ultra birth control pills we have right now, we don’t know the future. The birth control pill is really asking your body to be in menopause. You’re ceasing ovulation. You’re playing with that internal body lunar rhythm.

For women that are battling breast cancer or are in remission, what would you recommend they incorporate into their self care routine and/or diet?

It’s hard to say on one level because everyone is individual. I think there are some key things. Everyone needs the sunshine. We need to go beyond the bottle of vitamin D. We need real engagement with the sun. Sufficient vitamin D levels reduce risk of breast cancer by 50%, which is huge. I think magnesium is key because you need medicine that’s working on a mitochondrial level and most people are deficient in magnesium. It’s an essential mineral and the other essential mineral is iodine.

So many women are diagnosed with uterine, ovarian fibroids and breast fibroadenomas. What are your favorite botanicals for shrinking theses growths?

I feel like it’s going to be everyone’s own individual journey but based on the research, iodine and working with essential oils. They’re a rich source of monoterpenes which detoxify our tissues of cancer causing chemicals including our own excess estrogen.

Iodine: great for fibrocystic breasts, cysts, fibroadenomas, fibroids and cell apoptosis (death).

Orange oil, frankincense and laurel have high levels of monoterpenes which are anti inflammatory, help to stimulate estrogen detoxification and stimulate the lymphatic system.

An easy way to use them is first of all get rid of any toxic beauty products you have. Buy a bottle of jojoba, some frankincense and moisturize your body that way. You’ve got to take care of your body, you’re going to lubricate your skin after the shower so why not be proactive for your body and actually help it turn things around rather than support the unhealth.

If a woman carries the BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 gene, is she destined to get breast cancer?

In my opinion no, and my opinion comes from reading research, papers and it seems like there’s only a very small percentage, about less 5%. If you have the BRCA 1 or BRCA 2 gene you actually need a secondary mutation to occur before cancer will develop. But there are a lot of things in our environment and practices that we think are normal and that we do that could create a secondary mutation. It also goes back to where is your achille’s heal is going to manifest. Mercury filling are something that could create a secondary mutation. You want to stack the odds in your favor. I feel like with the environment we all live in we all really have to participate in cleaning up all the things that would create secondary mutations.

If you are getting your mercury removed or doing any dental work, you really have to go to the right dentist. A not great dentist can set you back. You have to go to the right person and if you’re having a root canal or tooth removed you have to go to a biological holistic dentist that will ask some questions. We have some questions in our book and on our site to ask prospective dentists. You have to make sure they’re removing the periodontal ligament along with the root canal tooth. With standard protocol they’ll leave it in but that is what we now know the gum grows over this ligament and causes jaw cavities, also known as jaw cavitation and that is harbouring a necrotic nightmare that you wouldn’t know about until decades later. You might not never know about it meanwhile your jaw is eroding and crumbling and it’s not showing up on an x-ray. That’s really an infection in your jaw and that’s going to spread to your body, like your breast or your hip and you have no idea that it was buried underneath your gum from that tooth you removed.

How does does the liver impact breast health?

The liver is an important filter for the body. It processes blood and toxins constantly. This is even a reason why some women get PMS. That time of the month women have more hormones cycling through, the liver can’t filter it as well as it can so hormones and toxins get backlogged. The breasts start swelling from a toxic load. If the liver is functioning properly you won’t have that same kind of PMS buildup. The symptoms may vary from cramps to really intense breast tenderness but once you get that liver freed up than it can process things and that load can be the reason for cramping or your breast tenderness. You need to have the liver flowing so your breasts don’t hold on to all the xenoestrogens and estrogen dominance. To really heal estrogen dominance the liver is going to be doing a lot of that work for you.

Dandelion and milk thistle are very gentle but very effective. They’re great as a daily tonic rather than doing a big cleanse. Keep the liver toned every day.

Why is the quality of the water we drink and bath in important?

There’s so much water in our bodies and we have to fuel it and replace it with real water. There’s so much research. The average municipal water has over 200 chemicals which includes antidepressants, sex hormones, birth control pill, veterinary medicine, chlorine and fluoride. They disrupt our microbiome which we know is essential to our health. The Harvard research study shows that fluoride decreases our IQ. You definitely need real water.

Is there a link between thyroid and breast health?

There’s a huge connection. A malfunctioning thyroid is a precursor to many female disorders. Iodine, together with the thyroid hormone acts as a surveillance team against abnormal cells by inducing apoptosis (natural cell death). There are some practitioners in the integrative medicine field that refer to the thyroid as the third ovary. Every cell and organ needs iodine but the thyroid needs the most and even has an iodine symporter pump to help the organ process iodine and also has iodine receptor sites. The breasts also have that pump and they also have iodine receptor sites. There’s a huge correlation between the two and many more mysteries we will discover but when the thyroid’s out of whack, the ovaries and breasts can also be out of whack. And in this day and age there’s a lot of out of whack thyroids in women in the North American culture.

Commit to feeling good. Create the life that sets you up for that.

And just know that it’s allowed to feel good and you can prioritize feeling good.

What would you say to women who have doctors/healthcare practitioners that they don’t align with and want to walk away from but are hesitant to?

There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s your body. Simply don’t go back. You owe nothing to your doctor.

What advice would you give to women who might be struggling with their health?

Take it day by day. Do what you can in each moment. The main thing is to take stock internally of your thoughts, your feelings and have as your main focus finding the next best thought that you can. Keep doing that in your mind. That’s your home base and you want to keep in good tune. You’re coming to your decisions, your research and your appointments with a better mindset.