EP #2: The Unseen Connection: Shrinking Jaws and Your Health

What if the secret to better health was hidden right under our noses, or more specifically, in our jaws? Prepare to be amazed as Dr. Alex Semidey and I, Jeremy Wolf, unravel the shocking connections between our shrinking jaws and overall health. We explore how modern lifestyle changes and dietary shifts contribute to weaker jaw muscles, leading to a host of dental issues ranging from crowded teeth to impacted wisdom teeth. We also shed light on the far-reaching consequences for children's development, including problems with breathing and tongue placement. Chewing gum, surprising as it may seem, could provide a simple yet effective solution.

But that's not all. We delve deeper to expose the grim health risks associated with mouth breathing. Could this overlooked habit actually trigger a vicious cycle of sickness, allergies, and even sleep apnea? We affirm the vital importance of nasal breathing, nature's built-in bacteria filter, and dissect the implications of mouth breathing on facial development in children. Early formation of proper habits could be the key to preventing these issues. With a call for more collaboration between dental and sleep professionals, we hope to address these interconnected problems head-on. Finally, we touch on the curious case of the 'shrinking jaw bone epidemic' and shed light on myofunctional therapy's role in combatting sleep disorders. So, ready to make every breath count and improve your overall well-being? Tune into this enlightening episode of Word of Mouth.

Transcript

Jeremy: 0:00

Welcome to Word of Mouth, where we explore the fascinating connection between your oral health and your overall well-being. Here's your host, dr Alex Semide. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode number two. Episode number two right number of dose of Word of Mouth. I'm your co-host, jeremy Wolf, and I'm joined by your host, dr Alex Semide, and, as we alluded to on the first episode, we are going to get into a. I like to think it's a pretty fascinating topic, something that to say it wasn't on my radar would be an understatement. It's something that I'd never even conceived of, and it's this idea of shrinking jaw, the shrinking jaw in human beings. That is it, and I'm curious like and how actually that relates to your overall health, right, and so I'm trying to like what is it? What was the impetus that led researchers in the first place to start investigating this relationship between the shrinking human jaw and how that relates to your overall health? Because that's kind of counterintuitive. Let's start there.

Dr. Alex: 1:18

So let me ask you this out of 100 people that you know how many of them have, like naturally, perfectly straight teeth?

Jeremy: 1:34

That's a great question. I'm trying to think of everybody that I encounter. But you mean naturally straight teeth, but you don't know for most of them, because they may have had orthodontics. Are you talking about now or Right?

Dr. Alex: 1:45

So no, they're like in their lifetime, like people who just never had braces, never had Invisalign yeah my wife, perfectly naturally straight, perfect teeth.

Dr. Alex: 1:54

That's awesome, right, yeah, he is in the minority. Okay, like crowding and what we call occlusal issues or malocclusion Occlusion is the term for how your teeth fit together top to bottom, and issues with that distribution of the bite, right, things like under bites, over bites, crowding, are really, really common. Like, most people are affected by malocclusion to some extent, and what's super interesting is that 150 years ago, no one had crowded teeth. Interesting, 150 years ago, no one had impacted wisdom teeth and now, basically, that's all you see is people that have to have their wisdom teeth taken out because they don't have enough room in their jaw bone for them. So, man, like, evolutionarily, that doesn't even make sense, right, like, why do we grow these things that we don't really have enough room for? So the issue is that the jaw bone has been shrinking over time and it's been shrinking pretty fast. It started about 150 years ago.

Jeremy: 3:05

That is a really rapid progression, very, very fast as your jaw size. You would think that would take thousands of years to start shifting.

Dr. Alex: 3:13

You would think so. Right, like generations and generations and evolution, right, and all of that. But it is a relatively recent phenomenon and it tells us, like we know a couple of things, right, like everyone always wonders okay, is it a genetic thing? Right, are we evolving to reduce our jaw sizes? Right, you know, like, let's kind of fast forward on that track. You ever seen everybody knows the alien head, right? Big old brain, big eyes and tiny little like lower half of the face. Like, is that what we're evolving to? I hope not. Yeah, me too. But we see that the jaw bone has been shrinking and it is not a genetic thing. Right, there aren't like genetics you can't do anything about.

Jeremy: 4:08

This would be more akin to gum disease or things like that, not the actual shifting of the jaw per se right, more about like 100%.

Dr. Alex: 4:19

Okay, yeah, so what is causing this shrinking of the jaw bone is, in large part, our diet. We used to use our teeth and our jaw muscles a lot more earlier on in life than we do now After the period of industrialization, where our food supplies changed a lot in general our foods got much softer and in getting softer, we stopped developing the lower half of the face the way we used to 150 years ago.

Dr. Alex: 4:56

So think about this right Like because we're not using the muscles and forcing them to work at a really early age, as we're weaning kids off of being breastfed, we're stunting the development of the face and it's leading to all of these issues where the jawbones are literally shrinking, crowding our teeth out, leading to other issues with the mouth that contribute to more and more issues with the development of the face.

Jeremy: 5:27

So wait, you're not sitting here today advocating for increased gum chewing amongst youth. Are you Because that seems like that would give you a good workout? It is Maybe some sugar-free gum.

Dr. Alex: 5:38

It is actually one of the treatments that are recommended. Having kids starting to chew gum?

Jeremy: 5:44

Yeah, I was just telling my daughter to stop chewing so much gum. She's getting complaints in the school from teachers that she's chewing too much gum.

Dr. Alex: 5:51

Well, I'll wait, yeah, it's yes. Like anything that forces us to use these structures that we have for tens and hundreds of thousands of years been using in a certain way and has helped our physiology develop properly, we're stunting that growth, right, and like anything else that goes unused, it atrophies and we're now starting to open our eyes because the impact that this has on our development as kids Right, like kids, so we don't wean them off of the breast milk into hard foods Right, they continue to chew soft foods that really don't require those muscles to work at all and things don't develop well. So they start being. They start having those issues with how the teeth come in.

Dr. Alex: 6:49

Right, the jaw bones don't develop, things are crowded. They don't have enough space for their tongue in the mouth because the jaw is crowded. Right, they end up not being able to breathe through their nose because, as the palate doesn't expand, your nasal passages are also constricted. So now you can't breathe in through your nose so you leave your jaw you know slack jaw so you can breathe in through your mouth. Right, interesting, the tongue is. Everyone's kind of heard of a palatal expander, right, anyone who needed back in our generation when you needed headgear, right for your braces and stuff like that. A lot of people had this palatal expander where they turn a key to like literally expand the upper jaw bone. The tongue is the natural palatal expander.

Jeremy: 7:43

Okay.

Dr. Alex: 7:44

Your tongue. When we're asleep, when we are not speaking or chewing, our mouths should be closed and our tongue should be resting up against the palate. And the tongue, believe it or not, is the strongest muscle in your body and that strong, gentle, constant pressure is actually forcing your palate to expand. The tongue is the strongest muscle in your body.

Jeremy: 8:07

Right, right, yeah, really yeah. I guess pound for pound, right.

Dr. Alex: 8:13

Yeah, yeah, it's like the Walter Wray Champ.

Jeremy: 8:18

That's the way. Hey, eating is important, so you've got to have strong, strong operation up here, right, you know?

Dr. Alex: 8:23

and it just the strength of the tongue and the proper positioning of the tongue is essential to let the skeleton right, the jaw bone, develop properly. So we get into this vicious cycle of mouth breathing right because our nasal passages are too small. So because you mouth breathe, you get sick more often, you get more allergies, you get more congestion, which means you mouth breathe even more right. A lot of people don't know this, but when you breathe through your nose, your nose is actually killing bacteria that would otherwise get into your system. When you breathe in through your mouth, that bacteria gets into your system and can make you sick. So your nose is like a natural HEPA filter for your body.

Jeremy: 9:11

The nose the nose Natural HEPA filter.

Dr. Alex: 9:14

Yeah.

Jeremy: 9:15

And all of this stuff ultimately leads to things like sleep apnea, right? Yes, exactly.

Dr. Alex: 9:21

So you can see how all of this sort of like spirals out of control, right? No, kids mouth breathing, their palate doesn't develop, they have a restricted airway. Now they're getting older they're snoring, sleep apnea and not to mention the other issues that come from like systemic issues that come from improper sleep, that come from sleep apnea. It's linked to all sorts of chronic comorbidities the diabetes, cardiovascular disease, general inflammation. It is a fascinating relationship and something that, if we educate more providers to look for these things early, we can intercept them when we can still be extremely effective at changing their course for life Like this can have an incredibly profound impact on so many people's lives.

Dr. Alex: 10:21

Just diagnosing the fact that this kid can't breathe. Well, my wife's a pediatrician and, as this whole jaw shrinking, early childhood facial development, sleep thing came onto my radar, which was pretty recent, because it's not something that is discussed much in dentistry or medicine at large, right, it's one of these like nascent fields that there's a lot of research going on, but it hasn't tripled down to the mainstream, right. So you said it earlier, it wasn't on your radar. It's not on a lot of doctors' radars either right, yeah, I'm just.

Jeremy: 11:08

I'm sitting here wishing we did this podcast six, seven years ago and maybe my daughter wouldn't be having the issue she's having right now with crowding in her mouth and teeth not coming out right. And here I thought this was all. Oh, it's just genetics, it's just you know. But all this stuff I think, like with anything else, right, it goes back to forming proper habits from a very early age through proper education, forming routines and getting into the daily habits of doing these things, so that it doesn't become such a difficult chore later on, because forming new habits is more difficult the older you get. So if you can go back as a parent when your kids are very, very young and instill these you know values into them, right? You know they're gonna, like you said, right, a lot of people will avoid having the need for orthodontics and things like that later on when they reach those teen years.

Dr. Alex: 12:01

You know, a good example that I think a lot of people, a lot of parents, will relate to is the pacifier use.

Jeremy: 12:11

Yeah. So what's up with that? Is that horrible? Is that not horrible? Cause I've heard that it's really really bad to use it all the time because it will help shape the the mouth incorrectly. 100%, it makes sense, and so would you advocate not using that at all, or just on a limited basis? I mean, what's so advocating for?

Dr. Alex: 12:33

not using it at all would make me an extreme hippo Streamist, cause my daughter, isabel, who is 18 months old, is still using her pacifier and we're meeting her off of it, all right and. But I saw it with my son too, right, like it started to change the shape of their teeth and the shape of their palate. Right, and just think about what's happening. Right, if you have a pacifier in your mouth, you're kind of like sucking on that nipple in your mouth. Your cheeks are pressing inward right, your tongue is kind of like pressing forward and you're you're sucking on this thing and it starts creating like this V shaped palette and and crowding and, you know, rotations of teeth in the front.

Dr. Alex: 13:19

As soon as we started removing the pacifier with Jordy, with my son, who's now five, all of that started going back in place right, and their, their upper jaw, his upper jaw kind of rounded out all of those rotations and, kind of buck teeth settled back in, because now the upper lip is just gonna be pressing back on those teeth and we're not gonna be pressing in anymore with the cheeks and the tongue again, like we were talking about. It'll just start to expand the palette and put everything in its proper place. So for some kids they have, you know, some, some malformation, a tongue tie, weak tongue muscles, things like that. There are all sorts of exercises, very simple exercises that we can teach kids and adults to teach the tongue where to go, teach the tongue where it should be, to help execute some of this developmental stuff that we need to see happen very, very interesting stuff.

Jeremy: 14:25

It is really, really fascinating. I'm curious, from, like, a dental health standpoint, right, how should individuals and other healthcare professionals approach these types of concerns and collaborate together, cause, like you said earlier, that there's not a lot of cross-disciplinary working on these issues? Right, you know, you do what you do from the dental side, like, how do we get more dentists, together with people that deal with sleep apnea, to have more conversations around this kind of stuff to help bridge the gap between these different disciplines that are, by nature, heavily interconnected?

Dr. Alex: 15:07

Yeah, no for sure. You know it's tough with. I think this is a good. These conversations are important to have. These conversations are important to have in public. You know there's a lot of.

Dr. Alex: 15:26

You know, sometimes there's this idealistic notion of how medicine works. You know, from people that are outside of the industry, right, where everyone is just rallying together around the big round table and figuring out the best way to go about things, it doesn't exactly work that way. You know there's a lot of tribalism and everyone thinks they know best. And you know, as a dentist, as a dentist, physicians are sometimes like oh, dentist, what do you know? You know about the human body and health? So there's a little bit of that too, right. So we need to kind of break down some of those barriers and really just have conversations.

Dr. Alex: 16:06

I think, the more pediatricians I was saying earlier, my wife's a pediatrician and she's been kind of good reference point for these things for me with her perspective and what she sees in practice. And you know, in talking to her about all of this, she shared with me the connection between sleep disorders with kids and things like ADHD. You know, when kids are being worked up for ADHD, one of the first things they start looking at is how are these kids sleeping? Sleeping patterns, yeah, yeah, because it's so important for the way that we, our brains and our bodies develop in life. So, going back to how we can increase awareness, I think these conversations are important. I think the more dentists and pediatricians are aware of these things and are screening and are bringing these sorts of things into the general awareness of people, I think that's how more and more conversations start to be had and people start educating themselves more on these things and that's how, sometimes, fringe science becomes mainstream science.

Jeremy: 17:28

Yeah, maybe one day we can get your wife to join us on an episode to talk a little bit about what she does on the pediatric side, and, obviously, other guests in different disciplines to talk more about these issues, because it is incredibly important to have collaboration. Interdiscipline, interdiscipline say the word for me. Interdiscipline, disciplinary Discipline yeah, cat got my tongue.

Dr. Alex: 17:52

I really think about it too, that one activates my speech impediment.

Jeremy: 17:58

So I wanted to also ask there's a term that I came across and doing a little research on this that I wasn't entirely clear on. I thought maybe you could elaborate on it. It's this idea of myofunctional therapy. Yeah, so what is I mean? Can you provide maybe a brief summary of what myofunctional therapy entails and kind of how it addresses the issues that we've been talking about?

Dr. Alex: 18:22

Yeah, so myofunctional therapy are basically tongue exercises, right it's a workout for your tongue and you end up doing a lot of funny looking things right. So this is not the sort of thing.

Jeremy: 18:34

Care to give us an example? Yeah, or maybe later.

Dr. Alex: 18:40

So you're really just sort of holding your tongue in extreme positions for 10 to 15 seconds at a time, right Like you were crying. A touch the tip of your tongue to the tip of your nose.

Jeremy: 18:52

I never, even thought about doing anything like that. I wonder if you can incorporate some of that in breath.

Dr. Alex: 18:58

Work deep breathing exercises because that's obviously.

Jeremy: 19:03

That's a whole nother topic for a whole nother day. Yeah, maybe, as we're training for another 10K. We will do myofunctional breath work exercises.

Dr. Alex: 19:13

Reach out, man, just reach out.

Dr. Alex: 19:16

Yeah, so the idea for the myofunctional therapy is to strengthen the tongue, kind of train it to be where it should be and help. And it's great for kids and it's great for adults with sleep apnea, right, like that is one of those fundamental aspects of any sleep disturbance treatment, right, and it's a lot like I see that sort of thing as. Like, if you have a bad back, you incorporate stretching into your diet, right. You incorporate doing crunches and strengthening your abdominal muscles into your routine, right. It's not just about taking a pill that kills the pain, it's about actually working to fix the underlying issues that are causing the problem. So it is an extremely useful and functional aspect of treating all of this and, again, something that's kind of like under discussed and really under, dare I say, appreciated in medicine and in dentistry, but I definitely think it provides a very, very valuable service.

Jeremy: 20:34

Yeah for sure. So before we wrap up here, I want you to pull out your crystal ball. Let's look into the future, right. Obviously there's cutting edge science, there's things on the horizon and obviously a lot of this goes back to on the preventative side. But for folks that are already past that stage and are dealing with these problems, what lies beyond the treatments for these shrinking draw issues? Orthodontics I know they have an Invisalign came heavy on the scene. Are there any future research projects, any future AI technology that's coming out that's helping to correct some of this? Like what do we have in store for us in the future? My friend.

Dr. Alex: 21:16

So really, as far as the amazing shrinking jaw bone epidemic goes, a lot of this is really what we're talking about, right, like identifying, knowing that it's a thing. Let's start weaning our kids off of the soft foods. Let's start having our kids chew and use those chewing muscles and incorporate the myofunctional therapies so that we can help the younger generation start developing better From a take a pill to fix it approach.

Jeremy: 21:46

That was gonna be my next question, right? When are we gonna have that magical pill that fixes everything? Hey, I got news for you. The magic pill does not exist. Everything requires hard work. Yeah, forming the right habit, but I'm pretty sure.

Dr. Alex: 21:58

I read something that Pfizer is close, yeah, but in any case, like there's actually there's some really cool stuff happening, I'm actually gonna be taking some CE coming up and something that just very recently came on my radar of using some targeted heat treatments to prevent the development of wisdom teeth in the first place, targeting heat treatments to prevent the development of.

Dr. Alex: 22:25

Yeah, yeah, so like your, teeth grow as like little little flower buds in your jaw bone, right, and they develop like you see your wisdom teeth starting to develop in little kids, right, but they're just like these tiny little seedlings that grow into a tree and grows roots and then pops up in your jaw bone, right? So the idea is that as soon as those buds are starting to develop, we target them and basically like, stunt their growth so they never come in. So it's okay, human with tiny, shrinking jaw bone. We're going to avoid the problem that might happen in 10, 15, 20 years from now of having an impacted wisdom tooth by killing the seedling now.

Jeremy: 23:10

So just for some context, wisdom teeth exist because in the past folks had larger jaws and needed the additional teeth and they came in when the jaw got bigger and now that's shrinking jaw bone.

Dr. Alex: 23:21

We were chewing raw meat off the bone, right Like we needed some power to chew that, and that's why you were feeding your baby too. Right Now, my pantry's full of like puffs.

Jeremy: 23:34

No, good, no, I want to start a campaign. We're going to bring wisdom teeth back, brother. Let's go Chewing gum. We're all wisdom gone Chewing gum 12 to 18 hours a day, raw red meat off the bone. Let's get the wisdom teeth back in play, brother.

Dr. Alex: 23:51

It'll need some tweaking, but I think where you might be honest something.

Jeremy: 23:56

Anything else you want to share before we wrap up.

Dr. Alex: 24:01

No, I think absolutely. One aspect of this podcast is we always welcome questions. So if there are questions related to the podcast or any other topics that folks find interesting always happy to get those we will read them, we will address them Absolutely.

Jeremy: 24:22

We will, of course, link in the description below to all of your contact information and obviously post your comments, leave a like, subscribe, get involved. Let's spread the good word, my friend. Let's spread the gospel.

Dr. Alex: 24:36

Let's do it.

Jeremy: 24:37

All right, dr Semide, alex Semide. Always a pleasure, mr Wolfe, I'm looking forward to our upcoming 10K. It's going to be magical.

Dr. Alex: 24:49

I'm going to beat you All right brother, All right man.

Jeremy: 24:53

Take care, have a great day If we don't speak before the holidays. Have a wonderful holiday with you and your family and everybody listening. Take care, have a wonderful day and we will catch you on the next episode.

Dr. Alex: 25:03

Happy holidays, keep smiling.

Jeremy: 25:05

Keep smiling. Bye, Thank you for joining us on Word of Mouth. Remember a healthy smile is a reflection of your well-being. Until next time, keep smiling and caring for your dental health. We'll be back soon with more dental.