Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic

Product Information

J. I. Silverberg and P. Greenland. 2015. Eczema and cardiovascular risk factors in 2 US adult population studies. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 135: 721–728. e726.

I have certainly never spent more time thinking about my breathing and the position of my jaws and tongue while reading than I did while reading this book.

The specialty of orthodontics has the potential to lead the way out of this epidemic of chronic disease (including malocclusion). We need only read and understand this book first."

Indeed, in their early lives, children often transition from pablum to a fast food diet that is becoming increasingly soft and liquid-like. Few kids get to gnaw on a tough buffalo haunch, instead feasting on hamburgers, cakes and candies that melt in their mouth, sugary soft drinks, and the like. People have some power to protect their children from this serious and cryptic environmental problem. Jaws lays out both causes and cures." Author: Gretchen C. Daily, Bing Professor of Environmental Science Source: Stanford University In a new co-authored book, biologist Paul Ehrlich describes the connection between underdeveloped jaws, modern life and myriad health and quality-of-life issues. (Image credit: L.A. Cicero) It’s also fantastic if you are well aware of the effect tongue ties have on the body as a whole, because you get answers as to the why, as well as an answer to the question: what do I do next? This manuscript looks beyond the flashy smile that so many of us pay our orthodontists for and asks the hard question: Why is it we are almost all born with the faces of angels, yet so few maintain that face value of our innate and inborn beauty? The answer revealed is intriguing, thought provoking and a much needed call to action to fight for the fullest physical potential for all our children. A must read!"

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The central premise is an idea that has been popular with anthropologists and some fringe orthodontists: crooked teeth are a function of undersized jaws due to changes in diet and lifestyle. Kahn and Ehrlich marshal their supportive evidence, but for anyone who wants to read about this, I would instead recommend Nestor's book "Breath." This book seems to have more of a how-to emphasis on how to encourage jaw growth in children, but they rarely include children's ages, which make the advice hard to follow. They recommend `hard' food and a 'pre-industrial diet,' but they don't say what this is, or what age these foods can be given. They only give lip service to women who cannot breast feed; I think that this would be a difficult read for women who had had a low supply, or required a medicine that interfered with lactation. Paul Ehrlich is the world's best-known and most distinguished ecologist, and one of the best known figures in any field of science. Now, teaming up with Sandra Kahn, he offers us his most personal and practical book to date. You'll discover the widespread consequences of how you carry out such seemingly mundane, automatic, and repetitive acts as breathing, smiling, and sleeping—and how your ways of doing those things affect peoples' perceptions of you. Read, enjoy, learn, and prepare to be astonished!" I found the book largely anecdotal, based on the author's experience as a practitioner and a parent, with little data to support her or Dr. Mew's opinions. While I understand that the book was written with a lay audience in mind, if you are going to propose a complete upheaval in culture and healthcare, then it needs to be supported with data. There is a serious hidden epidemic that the public health community is just discovering. Its most obvious symptom is the growing frequency of children with crooked teeth wearing braces. But it also includes snoring, jaws hanging open, frequent stuffy noses, attention and behavioral problems, unrecognized disturbed sleeping (sleep apnea), and a general decline of physical appearance. The first 3 chapters cover the origins of malocclusion (crooked teeth) from a evolutionary perspective. In particular, they go into great detail about George Catlin’s book, Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life. Catlin was a civil war era naturalist and painter, who had an interest in painting native Americans in their natural habitats. He noticed that those who kept their mouths closed had broader faces and were much healthier, whereas these who kept their mouths open hand more narrow and long faces, and were much more prone to illnesses. You can see many of his paintings at the Smithsonian museum. They also note that many paleontologists have demonstrated that ancient skulls usually have very good teeth and essentially no dental crowding. No book talking about shrinking faces and smaller airways is complete without mentioning Dr. Weston Price’s classic book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Price was a dentist who traveled the world in the early 1900s, showing that across the board, cultures that ate naturally without modern Western influences had broad dental arches with a full set of teeth, beautiful smiles, and essentially no cavities.

Dr. Mew and his insights were portrayed with some fondness. I was especially moved by the included photograph of his lone petition for policy change outside the BDA. The qualitative case studies and research cited could have been valuable, had they not been diluted with pedestrian accounts. I feel the urgency, but it was difficult to gain depth through the repetitive, almost nagging tone of the book. Dentists should encourage “forwardontics,” a program focused on keeping the airway open, through sets of exercises designed to correct jaw “posture.” We have learned that how one’s jaws and tongue are held when not eating or talking is key to healthy jaw development. Wanting to convince others to the benefits of nose breath, Caitlin wrote a short book, The Breath of Life (1861), which later retitled as Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life. In this he “condemned the mouth breathing and assigned an array of ills to it, including ‘derangement’ of the teeth. George Caitlin and his book have been forgotten, but, as later research show he was onto something.

Notes

Perhaps the cheeriest news on the jaws front, particularly for orthodontists, comes from the clinical front. Keeping all the things in mind, the authors do state that much of these theories and relations that are mentioned are not proven scientifically and it's their theory that they are leaning on. Much of it might be true, much of it might be not but It helps you to be cautious of yourself, your oral health and possible consequences if you are not conscious about it. In the end, for parents of young kids, no need to panic, as the authors themselves convey in the book, There is some history for the minority view we present, especially in the work of pioneering orthodontist John Mew, to whom Sandra took her son after hearing his lecture in 2012. Mew successfully treats patients by returning distorted oral-facial growth to its normal course through “orthotropics,” a program that encourages normal jaw growth and development. Orthotropics is a very important discipline with a lousy name. It is too easily confused with standard “orthodontics,” from which it has major differences. As a result Sandra renamed “orthotropics,” calling it “forwardontics,” to avoid the confusion. The two names are synonymous. Forwardontics is the term we will use from now on, except when we refer to Mew’s work or to literature that employs the designation orthotropics. Forwardontics is more descriptive for the general public and includes all treatments that focus on forward development of teeth and jaws in both children and adults. Despite the massive evidence that these problems are primarily environmental in origin, we discovered that many dentists still believe that jaw shrinkage is somehow genetic, even citing family resemblance and twin studies in support of that view. It is not necessary to revisit the massive literature on “heritability” demonstrating the fallacies of that approach.

E. Josefsson, K. Bjerklin, and R. Lindsten. 2007. Malocclusion frequency in Swedish and immigrant adolescents—influence of origin on orthodontic treatment need. The European Journal of Orthodontics 29: 79–87.The major claim of the book is that you and Sandra Kahn have unearthed a hidden epidemic in which people’s lifestyles are affecting how their jaws develop, with many downstream health consequences. What do you feel is the most convincing evidence of that?