حالت زبان در دهان بر روی چهره تاثیر می گذارد

Attractive Face or Not? It depends on Tongue Posture

Is the structure of your face 100% determined by your genes? Or, can you change the bone structure of a person’s face without surgery? Here we have a 10 year old boy with a strong jawline and overall good looking face …who went on to develop flat cheeks, a receded chin, a weak jawline and a slight hook in the nose by the age of 17.

If this was the work of genes, why would they work hard to make a good looking face until age ten but slack off after that? Well, right around age 10 the boy got a pet gerbil which he kept in his bedroom.

He was allergic to the animal and his nose became stuffy and obstructed - forcing him to separate his lips, lower his tongue and open his mouth, otherwise he couldn’t breathe. Next, take a look at these two brothers: Ben has a slightly flatter and longer face where Quentin’s face seems to have grown more forwards rather than vertically.

I think most would agree that Quentin’s face is a bit more attractive. So did Quentin just get lucky and get the better genes? Probably not, because what’s striking about these brothers is that they are identical twins, the only difference is one had traditional orthodontic treatment and the other was treated by Dr. John Mew with what’s called an Orthotropic treatment.

Orthotropics and its principles are extensively discussed on the Orthotropics youtube channel by Doctors Mike and John Mew. Simply put, it is a method for achieving proper development of the face. Developed in 1966, the general goal of orthotropics is to guide the the upper and lower jaws to grow forwards.

Here’s another example of Orthotropic treatment on a little girl where Dr. Kevin Boyd advanced the Maxilla - he got the bone of the midface to come forward, without surgery. Here’s another example from Mike Mew where the maxilla was brought forward, again without surgery.

I think most would agree that both girls have achieved a better looking face. What makes this possible? Well, as these examples would suggest, the development of the facial skeleton is not fixed.

The bones of the skull are held together by fibrous joints called sutures. The maxilla, the bone of the upper mouth is connected to the cranium and face by several sutures. And, the interesting part is that these sutures are not fused together. New bone can still be made at the sutures - even in adults.

In fact, certain sutures do not begin to fuse until 68-72 years of age, which is why the positioning of bones of the skull can be useful information in forensics and archeology. As Dr. Felix Liao, author of Six-Foot Tiger, Three-Foot cage explains, “…the potential for maxilla-facial redevelopment is alive even late in adult life.

” There are clear examples of structural change in an adult’s facial skeletons - when the nerves in the face have been damaged, the lack of muscle tone can morph the facial bones. Here is Mike Mew showing the shift in facial bones on a woman who was affected by a disease of the muscles.

Not a disease of the bone, but an affliction to the muscles has morphed her facial skeleton this much. A more famous example is Stephen Hawking, who was afflicted with a motor neuron disease, yet the bones in his face seem to have also changed drastically over the years. So what about adults changing their facial skeleton for the better?

Here’s one example from the Orthotropics youtube channel. Here’s another from Dr. John Mew’s website. And, In this research article by Professor G. Dave Singh what they call “Facial Enhancement” has been achieved in a 19 and 26 year old by applying orthotropic principles for only 1 year.

The 26 year old’s eyeliner is giving her a bit of an advantage in the second photo, so let’s cover that up. If you look closely, you’ll see the 26 year old has a more pronounced jaw and the face has shortened and come forward a bit, which makes the midface appear fuller. .

In fact, 12 adults participated participated in the study, and several facial angles were measured to track objective change in the face. They found significant changes in the labiomental and thyromandibular angles …concluding that their approach “may enhance facial appearance non-surgically in adults.”

OK, let’s cut to the chase - How can we move the bones of the face around to have a better functioning, better looking face? Well, one simple way is to follow what John Mew calls the tropic premise: “Rest the tongue on the palate with the lips sealed and the teeth in light contact for four to eight hours a day.”

This might not sound like a big deal, but the tongue is a relatively big muscle and can exert plenty of force on the maxilla. It’s plausible that having this large muscle press up and forwards on the maxilla for 8 hours a day and hopefully while you’re sleeping, over a few years, this can make noticeable changes in the structure of the face.

But hold on a moment – these improvements I just showed you were made using appliances that fit in the mouth and exert the necessary forces on the skull required for facial change.

Another effect of having the tongue on the roof of the mouth is that - especially when young, it widens the dental arch, which helps to have straight teeth. Though I think most would assume that straight or crooked teeth are genetic. So if it’s not genetic, what causes crooked teeth?

In this paper by Dr. Kevin Boyd, he states that “dental caries (as in cavities) and malocclusion (which means misaligned or crooked teeth) while now highly prevalent public health diseases, are both surprisingly rare within the pre-industrial skeletal and pre-historic fossil records, and also seldom seen in many present-day nonwesternized cultures.”

This is very striking considering according to Proffit’s 1994 Contemporary Orthodontics, 2/3rds of the US population has some degree of malocclusion - misalignment of the teeth. Yet, malocclusion with a known cause is listed as only 5% percent of the population. That leaves 60% of people with malocclusion for unknown reasons.

In 1939 an American dentist named Weston Price traveled around the world examining the oral health of both civilized groups living on modern foods and isolated groups living on native diets.

He published his results in a book titled “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.” What’s most interesting is the pictures in the book. -Here we have girls from isolated valleys of Switzerland and children from modernized districts of Switzerland.

-Here we have native Alaskan Inuit people, also called Eskimos, and on the right we have the first generation of children born after the parents adopted a modern lifestyle. Notice how There is some wear on the teeth, especially on this person, but the teeth are …straight. -Here we have isolated native Americans and the first generation native Americans with a modern lifestyle.

-Here we have people from islands in the southeastern pacific …before and after adopting a modern lifestyle. -Then we have Samoans, a tribe in Belgian Congo, Australian Aborigines and Andean Indians. -Here we have two brothers from the Isle of Harris, the one on the left uses modern food, the one on the right native foods.

There are several more examples in the book of people living on their native diets with excellent teeth, and then people with similar genes living on modern diets with unhealthy and crooked teeth.

Paleoantrhopologist Daniel Lieberman reports in his book “Evolution of the Human Head that “…jaws and faces do not grow to the same size that they used to…”. And if we go back to these pictures, we notice that these people have relatively broad faces with broad dental arches.

If you compare a prehistoric skull to a modern day skull, you’ll find that we used to have far broader dental arches. Weston Price’s book highlights the importance of fat soluble vitamins in the diet for proper growth and development, but for this video we’ll look at how a different characteristic of the diet can affect skull growth.

Biological Anthropologist Clark Spencer Larson says that agriculture instigated a fundamental change in human craniofacial growth and development. He highlights the use of cooking vessels as an impactful innovation because they allowed for humans to make very soft mushy food that required little chewing.

He says such culinary adaptations resulted in fundamental changes in craniofacial growth and development, resulting in reduced robustness, increased malocclusion and increased tooth crowding.

So, where people were gnawing on very fibrous low calorie plant foods as well as raw and cooked meat, maybe having to chomp through skin, cartilage and sinew and using their teeth as tools, they could now make porridges and maybe some stews that provided much more calories for less masticatory effort.

One piece of evidence for the significance of having to chew more and harder is the fact that the skulls found with good occlusion - with straight teeth are found with extensive wear on the teeth.

As Rose and Roblee explain in this paper, “Thorough analysis of dental data from the Armana Project has shown that Egyptian and most ancient teeth have extensive tooth wear on even the youngest individuals. Malocclusion is rare in Amarna but very common in America; tooth wear is extensive in Amarna yet rare in America.”

And, Dental microwear analysis shows that hunter gatherers ate a diet that wore down their teeth more than farmers. This would mean stronger masseter and temporalis muscles - the muscles in the face involved in chewing.

Spending most of your day chewing on things hard enough to wear the teeth down to that extent could exert enough direct and indirect force to morph the facial skeleton and dental arch. But there’s an unexpected effect of having soft foods early in life.

The idea is that when a baby is weaning off breast milk, if they move onto hard foods, they would have to develop a different swallowing pattern - If you have a straw or bottle nearby you can test for yourself to see what I mean.

Your swallowing pattern when you suck up liquid is different when you chew up something hard and then swallow it down. So if you wean the baby onto soft foods that can be suckled down, the baby doesn’t fully develop a proper swallowing pattern.

The swallowing pattern you want to develop is where your tongue pushes tightly up against the palate to pull the food into the esophagus, what you don’t want is to swallow with your tongue sucking on your teeth.

It’s estimated that humans swallow around 600 times per day with about 2 pounds of force against the palate - this frequent force exerted on the palate, as well as your resting tongue posture can affect the dental arch. Quite simply put if the tongue isn’t exerting force on the roof of the mouth, and pushing the teeth outwards, they can come to cave in.

The upper arch should form like this, thanks to the tongue pressing against the teeth, preventing the pressure of the cheeks from pushing them in. But if the tongue isn’t holding the teeth in place, the teeth can get crowded inwards: One more piece of evidence for this idea is the work of Dr. Egil Harvold on rhesus monkeys.

Rhesus monkeys,, when left to their own devices will breathe through their noses with their lips touching and tongue resting on the soft palate, and they have properly functioning, straight teeth.

A 1981 paper describes how Dr. Harvald blocked the nasal passage of monkeys with silicone nose plugs - this causes them to develop an open mouth posture with the tongue pulled down off the roof of the mouth.

So, what effect did this have? The paper reports that “the common finding was a narrowing of the mandibular dental arch and a decrease in maxillary arch length, causing an incisor cross-bite.” Simply put - by pulling the tongue down and breathing through the mouth, the monkeys developed smaller dental arches and crooked teeth.