Transcription
What were you just teaching me about mouth breathing and how it changes the shape of the face?
Now, I arrived carrying a copy of the book *Jaws: A Hidden Epidemic*. This is not *Jaws* the shark. This book was written by my colleagues at Stanford, Sandre Khan and Paul Erick, and it has an introduction by Jared Diamond, who won a Pulitzer for *Guns, Germs, and Steel*, and a foreword by the great Robert Sapolsky, also a colleague of mine at Stanford.
So, four heavy hitters on this book, just to credential it first. This book centers around a couple of core concepts, but the first being that people, and in particular children, who overuse mouth breathing as opposed to nasal breathing have changes in the structure of the face that, well, to be quite direct, makes them far more unattractive than if they were to nasal breathe.
It also discusses the chewing of food as essential to mouth and face development. Sandre Khan is an expert in craniofacial function and structure. The fact is that if your parents did things right, you should be able to place your entire tongue on the roof of your mouth with your mouth closed.
Now, I can't do that. Okay, so when you have your teeth closed and your tongue in the roof of your mouth, I can, but I still feel the back of my teeth a bit.
So, yeah, okay. But that's the second point: chewing hard foods is essential to tooth, mouth, and face development. These days, many children slurp their food; many adults slurp their food. Many adults are eating like babies.
Of course, babies, before they develop their mature teeth, and even when they have all their teeth, need to obviously breastfeed and eat pudding-like foods.
So, that's the second point: nasal breathing is good, mouth breathing is bad for craniofacial development. Chewing hard foods, chewing a lot on both sides of the mouth, is great for craniofacial development, oral development, tooth development, and tooth health, which, by the way, are correlated with a number of other things like cardiovascular health and metabolic health. Very interesting links there.
Then the third point is that the book argues that the entire field of orthodontia—things like braces, things like headgear, things like retainers—are the byproduct of poor breathing and, let's just say, overconsumption of soft foods in place of hard foods.
There's this guy from your side of the pond, Mew, the Mew method of restoring normal craniofacial development. The book is chock-a-block full of impressive photos of before and afters. Impressive because in some cases, you'll see kids that were mouth breathing or were eating a lot of soft foods, and then they recovered their behavior, so to speak, and became nose breathers.
Of course, we have to mouth breathe when we're exercising really hard or when we're eating or speaking. We're going to mouth breathe, but at rest, we should nasal breathe, is the argument.
That greatly improves craniofacial aesthetics. The good news is this stuff is modifiable across the lifespan.
And so, the book isn't arguing for anyone to purchase anything. You don't need a Jawserciser. I'm saying that explicitly because they took clips of me talking about this and productized it, and I had nothing to do with that.
So hopefully, you'll keep this in the episode. They even admitted they were breaking the law, and he said, "We don't care; we're going to continue to do it." So, sales to salesmen.
But now, to the credit of products for exercising the jaw, sure, there are muscles of the jaw that can change the aesthetic, but using food to do that—eating tough food—is, if you don't have a sufficiently tough diet, I guess you could replace.
But explain to me the mechanics of how the difference in whether you breathe through your nose or breathe through your mouth changes the shape of your face and head.
Yeah, well, and it goes beyond that. If you breathe through your mouth as opposed to your nose, first of all, you bring in less oxygen than you would, so you're limiting—you're effectively putting yourself into a state of apnea, right? Which is bad during sleep, and guess what? It's bad during waking states also.
You're getting less oxygen to your brain—bad. The sinuses, you know, we hear, "My sinuses are clogged," or "My sinuses..." I wish I had brought a skull with me because one of the most impressive things about a human skull, being no exception, is that the sinuses are literally these little tubes or channels through which fluid and air can move.
The sinuses, even though they are essentially created by the fissures between different bones—like there are two or three different bones that are interdigitated and create these tunnels—are actually fairly plastic in the sense that they can be modified in terms of their shape.
So, people will say, "Well, I have a deviated septum." Guess what? You should try and emphasize breathing through both nostrils in order to undeviate your septum.
Now, if someone has a broken nose or something that's really structurally abnormal, they may need corrective surgery. But purely through deliberate nasal breathing—so it could be mouth taping at night, but also just deliberately nasal breathing during most of your cardiovascular training—unless you need to really hit the gas, in which case mouth breathing is going to help dilate the sinuses and lead to better airflow, which makes nasal breathing easier.
The other thing is that nasal breathing, we know—well, first of all, there's a nasal microbiome. There's also an oral microbiome, but the nasal microbiome is particularly well-suited to scrub or capture and destroy viruses, bacteria, and even some fungal infections.
So, in other words, when you're breathing in through your mouth, you're more susceptible to infections. This is important heading into winter as well.
So, there are a number of—I mean, we could talk about this for hours—but the point is nasal breathe when you can, especially kids, but adults as well. Chewing foods that require some chewing and really working at it is important.
They have some impressive images in this book of kids that were twins raised separately—one by a group that eats a lot of, let's just say, tougher foods that require chewing versus one that's slurping their food.
I mean, one kid is literally incredibly attractive, perfect dentition with no orthodonture or regular dentistry, while the other kid's teeth are like—SN—they have the horsey smile, even though they've got the same genetic predisposition.
Right? It's not a perfect experiment because there are other factors as well, and you know, none of this is— for better or worse—none of this is really amenable to kind of in-laboratory type stuff.
So, these are naturally occurring experiments, as we say. There are also some very impressive images in the book, or we could say depressing, of kids that were pretty attractive as kids.
Then there's an example of a kid who got a pet hamster. He was allergic to the hamster, and as a consequence, he becomes a mouth breather.
The characteristic change in the face when one overdoes mouth breathing is that the chin starts to move back, recesses toward the neck, and the rest of the face goes out. But also, the eyes become droopy.
But as you say, why would the eyes be affected? It's not just musculature. What's happening is there's less use of literally the sinuses in the upper mandible and up towards the eyes.
Because if you've ever had a sinus infection, it's painful up here in your forehead and around the eyes.
So again, it's pretty straightforward: no products required. Chew your food well. Chew on both sides of your mouth, especially if you're a young person, but even if you're not.
Be a nasal breather. Really chew your food. Try and—this probably also has benefits in terms of limiting unessential or low nutrient density calories.
You know, slurping your food all the time—I mean, I love—don't drink your calories, man. I love a good Greek yogurt, you know? But drinking an excess of calories is probably not good.
And eat like an adult, I would say. You know, one of the things is, I don't know, like to me growing up, snack food was something that kids indulged in. You know, once you hit 18 or so, you eat like an adult.
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