Attractive Face or Not? It depends on Tongue Posture

Is the structure of your

face

determined 100% by your genes? Or can the bone structure of a person's

face

be changed without surgery? Here we have a 10 year old boy with a strong jaw and an overall

attractive

face... who developed flat cheeks, a sunken chin, a weak jaw, and a slight hook on his nose at the age of 17. He was the work of genes, why would they work hard to have a pretty face until they were ten years old and then give up? Well, around the age of 10, the boy acquired a pet gerbil and kept it in his room.

He was allergic to the animal and his nose became congested and clogged, forcing him to part his lips, lower his

tongue

and open his mouth, otherwise he could not breathe. Next, take a look at these two brothers: Ben has a slightly flatter and longer face, while Quentin's face appears to have grown more forward than vertically. I think most would agree that Quentin's face is a little more

attractive

. So did Quentin just get lucky and get the best genes? Probably not, because the striking thing about these brothers is that they are identical twins, the only difference is that one received traditional orthodontic treatment and the other was treated by Dr.

John Mew with what is called Orthotropic treatment. Orthotropics and their principles are discussed extensively by Drs Mike and John Mew on the Orthotropics YouTube channel. In short, it is a method to achieve correct facial development. Developed in 1966, the general goal of orthotropes is to guide the upper and lower jaw to grow forward. Here is another example of orthotropic treatment in a girl where Dr. Kevin Boyd advanced the jaw: he got the midface bone to advance, without surgery. Here is another example from Mike Mew where he advanced his jaw, again without surgery. I think most would agree that both girls have gotten a more attractive 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 at the top of the mouth, is connected to the skull and face by several sutures. And the interesting thing is that these sutures are not fused. New bone can still form in the sutures, even in adults. In fact, certain sutures do not begin to fuse until the age of 68-72, so the position of the bones of the skull can be useful information in forensic medicine and archaeology.

As Dr. Felix Liao, author of Six-Foot Tiger, Three-Foot Cage, explains, "...the potential for maxillary-facial redevelopment is alive even in late adult life." There are clear examples of structural changes in the facial skeletons of an adult: when the nerves of the face have been damaged, the lack of muscle tone can transform the facial bones. Here is Mike Mew showing the change in the facial bones of a woman affected by a muscle disease. It is not a disease of the bones, but an affliction of the muscles that has so transformed her facial skeleton. A more famous example is Stephen Hawking, who suffered from motor neurone disease, but his facial bones also appear to have changed dramatically over the years.

So what happens to adults who improve their facial skeleton? Here is an example from the Orthotropics youtube channel. Here's another one from Dr. John Mew's website. And, in this research article by Professor G. Dave Singh, what they call "facial enhancement" was achieved in 19 and 26 year olds by applying orthotropic principles for just 1 year. The 26-year-old's eyeliner is giving her a bit of an edge in the second photo, so let's hide that. If you look closely, you'll see that the 26-year-old has a more pronounced jawline and her face has shortened and moved forward a bit, making the middle of her face look fuller. .

In fact, 12 adults participated in the study and various facial angles were measured to track the objective change in the face. They found significant changes in the labiomental and thyromandibular angles... and concluded that their approach "can improve facial appearance non-surgically in adults." Well, let's get down to it: how can we move the bones in our face to have a better-functioning and better-looking face? Well, a simple way is to follow what John Mew calls the tropic premise: “Rest the

tongue

on the roof of the mouth with the lips sealed and the teeth in light contact for four to eight hours a day.” This may not seem like a big deal, but the tongue is a relatively large muscle and can exert a lot of force on the jaw.

It is possible that having this large muscle pressing up and forward on your jaw for 8 hours a day, and hopefully while you sleep, for a few years, could produce noticeable changes in the structure of your face. But wait a minute: these improvements I just showed you were made using devices that fit in the mouth and exert the necessary forces on the skull necessary for the facial change. It has been difficult to find people who have made improvements simply by maintaining good oral

posture

over the years. But I have unearthed three examples. Each person seems to have started at a relatively young age, and I don't have many details worth looking at: here's a forum post from someone who was apparently 15 in the first photo and 21 in the second.

The angles are quite different, but if it's the same person... it's a drastic change even after 5 years. This is from the meaganxrose youtube channel; the only information I have is that this photo on the left was taken 3 years before the one on the right. She may have lost some weight too, but here she is in a recent video. Her cheekbones and jawline appear much more pronounced. One more example is the YouTuber AstroSky. He apparently started working on back and tongue

posture

when he was 16 years old. Here are two photos when he was around 16 or 17 and here he is at 18.

Here he is now at 22. Not surprisingly the face changed from 16 to 22. old, but this is a particularly drastic change. This would suggest that his jaw has come forward. These three examples are not the strongest evidence either, but at least they show that the face can change to some extent without braces or surgery. 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. Although I think most would assume that straight or crooked teeth are genetic. So if it's not genetic, what causes crooked teeth?

In this article by Dr. Kevin Boyd, he states that “dental cavities (as in cavities) and malocclusion (meaning misaligned or crooked teeth), while now highly prevalent public health diseases, are surprisingly rare within the preindustrial skeletal and preindustrial era. -Historical fossil records, and also rarely seen in many non-Westernized cultures today.” This is very surprising considering that, according to Proffit's 1994 Contemporary Orthodontics study, 2/3 of the American population has some degree of malocclusion (misalignment of teeth). However, malocclusion with a known cause is listed as only 5% 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.” The most interesting thing are the images in the book. -Here we have girls from isolated valleys in Switzerland and boys from modernized districts in Switzerland. -Here we have the Inuit natives of Alaska, also called Eskimos, and on the right we have the first generation of children born after their 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 first generation Native Americans with a modern lifestyle. -Here we have people from islands in the southeast Pacific... before and after adopting a modern lifestyle. -Then we have the Samoans, a tribe from the Belgian Congo, the Australian aborigines and the 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 uses native food.

There are several more examples in the book of people living on their native diets and with excellent teeth, and then of people with similar genes living on modern diets and with crooked, unhealthy teeth. Paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman reports in his book “Evolution of the Human Head” that “…jaws and faces do not grow to the same size as before…”. And if we go back to these images, we notice that these people have relatively wide faces with wide dental arches. If you compare a prehistoric skull to a modern skull, you will find that we used to have much wider dental arches.

Weston Price's book highlights the importance of fat-soluble vitamins in the diet for proper growth and development, but in this video we will see how a different characteristic of the diet can affect skull growth. Biological anthropologist Clark Spencer Larson says agriculture instigated a fundamental change in human craniofacial growth and development. He highlights the use of cooking vessels as a striking innovation because they allowed humans to prepare very soft, bland foods that required little chewing. He says that such culinary adaptations resulted in fundamental changes in craniofacial growth and development, resulting in decreased robustness, increased malocclusion, and increased crowding of the teeth.

So, while people were biting into very fibrous, low-calorie plant foods as well as raw and cooked meat, perhaps having to chew skin, cartilage and tendons and using their teeth as tools, they could now make porridge and perhaps some stews that provided a lot. More calories for less chewing effort. Evidence of the importance of chewing more and harder is the fact that skulls that have good occlusion, with straight teeth, have a lot of wear on the teeth. As Rose and Roblee explain in this article, "A comprehensive analysis of dental data from the Armana Project has shown that Egyptian and older teeth have extensive dental wear even in the youngest individuals.

Malocclusion is rare in Amarna but very common in the United States; tooth wear is widespread in Amarna but 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 facial muscles involved in chewing. Spending most of the day chewing on things with enough force to wear down the teeth to that point could exert enough direct and indirect force to transform the facial skeleton and dental arch. But there is an unexpected effect of consuming soft foods at a young age.

The idea is that when a baby is weaning off breast milk, if she switches to eating hard foods, she will have to develop a different swallowing pattern. If she has a straw or bottle nearby, you can try it yourself to see what I mean. Her swallowing pattern when she aspirates liquid is different when she chews something hard and then swallows it. So if you wean the baby on soft, suckable foods, the baby does not fully develop a proper swallowing pattern. The swallowing pattern she wants to develop is where her tongue pushes hard against the roof of her mouth to move food into the esophagus;

What you don't want is to swallow with your tongue sucking your teeth. It is estimated that humans swallow about 600 times a day with approximately 2 pounds of force against the roof of the mouth; This frequent force exerted on the palate, as well as the posture of the tongue at rest, can affect the dental arch. Simply put, if the tongue does not exert force on the roof of the mouth and push the teeth outward, they can sink. The upper arch should be formed like this, thanks to the fact that the tongue presses against the teeth, preventing the pressure of the cheeks by pushing them inward.

But if the tongue does not hold the teeth in place, the teeth can crowd inward: further evidence of this idea is Dr. Egil Harvold's work on rhesus monkeys. Rhesus monkeys, when left to their own devices, breathe through their noses with their lips touching and tongue resting on the soft palate, and have straight, properly functioning teeth. A 1981 article describes how Dr. Harvald blocked the nasal passages of monkeys with silicone nose plugs, causing them to develop an open-mouth posture with their tongues lowered from the roof of their mouths. So what effect did this have? The article reports that "the common finding was a narrowing of the mandibular dental arch and a decrease in the length of the maxillary arch, resulting in an incisor crossbite." Simply put: By pulling the tongue down and breathing through the mouth, monkeysThey developed smaller dental arches and crooked teeth.