Breath

Exactly a year to the week after I began wearing Belfor’s retainer, I visited a private radiology clinic in downtown San Francisco and had my airways, sinuses, and mouth rescanned. Belfor sent the results to AnalyzeDirect at the Mayo Clinic to study what had happened to my face and airways.

Today, the official website of the U.S. National Institutes of Health attributes the causes of crooked teeth and other deformations of the airway “most often to heredity.” Other causes include thumb-sucking, injury, or “tumors of the mouth and jaw.”
There is no mention of chewing; no mention of food at all.

The exercise, which Mike’s hordes of social media fans call “mewing,” has been popularly adopted as “a new health craze.” After a few months, mewers have claimed their mouths expanded, jaws became more defined, sleep apnea symptoms lessened, and breathing became easier. Mike’s own instructional video on mewing has been viewed a million times.

shape—perfectly straight until it reaches the small of the back, where it naturally curves outward. While maintaining this posture, we should always breathe slowly through the nose into the abdomen.

It just meant holding the lips together, teeth lightly touching, with your tongue on the roof of the mouth. Hold the head up perpendicular to the body and don’t kink the neck. When sitting or standing, the spine should form a J-

you go to a mirror, open your mouth, and look at the back of the throat, you’ll see a fleshy tassel that hangs bat-like from the soft tissues. That’s the uvula. In mouths least susceptible to airway obstruction, the uvula will appear high and clearly visible from top to bottom. The deeper the uvula appears to hang in the throat, the higher the risk of airway obstruction. In mouths that are most susceptible, the uvula may not be visible at all. This measurement system is called the Friedman tongue position scale, and it’s used to quickly estimate breathing ability.
Next is the tongue. If the tongue overlaps the molars, or has “scalloping” teeth indentations on its sides, it’s too large and will be more apt to clog the throat when you lie down to sleep.

If these simpler approaches fail, the drills come out. About three-quarters of modern humans have a deviated septum clearly visible to the naked eye, which means the bone and cartilage that separate the right and left airways of the nose are off center. Along with that, 50 percent of us have chronically inflamed turbinates; the erectile tissue lining our sinuses is too puffed up for us to breathe comfortably through our noses.

Breathing slow, less, and exhaling deeply, I realized, none of it would really matter unless we were able to get those breaths through our noses, down our throats, and into the lungs. But our caved-in faces and too-small mouths had become obstacles to that clear path.

It was the constant stress of chewing that was lacking from our diets—not vitamin A, B, C, or D. Ninety-five percent of the modern, processed diet was soft. Even what’s considered healthy food today—smoothies, nut butters, oatmeal, avocados, whole wheat bread, vegetable soups. It’s all soft.

They discovered that the optimum amount of air we should take in at rest per minute is 5.5 liters. The optimum breathing rate is about 5.5 breaths per minute. That’s 5.5-second inhales and 5.5-second exhales. This is the perfect breath.