Unlocking Jaw Health: Mewing, Bioesthetic Dentistry, and Tongue Posture for Total Wellness LIFE Network: RAW Podcast #6

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast, welcome to a special raw episode. What does raw mean?

Well, within the Life Network at joinlifenetwork.com, I pop on every once in a while and just release solo-sode conversations with me, myself, and I. Today is one of those raw episodes. This is going to be at joinlifennetwork.com if you want to check it out.

Welcome to The Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

Welcome to the— let's start that over. We're here to talk about awkward, edgy, controversial content. Nothing is off limits, and you're gonna learn a lot. Welcome to the Raw Podcast. Well, howdy howdy ho, as they say. So as you know, if you've listened to the first— well, let's go out on a limb here and say 5 Raw Podcast episodes— this is just me walking on the farm roads back behind my house, talking to you about some things I haven't had a chance to unpack in as great of detail as I'd like, and things that I really want to get into more detail on with you personally. Things that I think are big wins in the health or wellness or longevity departments, uh, new breakthroughs, findings, things that are working for me, uh, controversial thoughts occasionally. And, um, today I'm going to start with a story. I was, uh, at a conference. Oh, I guess this was maybe 2 years ago. It's called Designs for Health. Designs for Health, or DFH as they're known, is a supplements company. Um, you know, they design and formulate a variety of different pretty high-quality nutrition supplements, and they had hired me to come and speak at their event. I don't even remember what I was speaking about, to be honest with you, but I was there speaking. And as happens at many of these events, there are after parties, there are cocktail events, there are dinners. And I was milling about the night after I'd given my talk, and a woman walks up to me and she started asking me about my mouth. She started looking at my teeth, not in a creepy way, but in almost like an investigative Sherlock Holmes type of way. And she started telling me things about my mouth and my teeth. Oh, you wake up and the right side of your jaw is sore sometimes, isn't it? I'm like, yeah. And you tend to grind your teeth at night. 'Even if you're not stressed or anxious.' Yeah. 'And you occasionally get leaky gut issues.' Yeah. And she's going on down this list and basically just like diagnosing my mouth and my teeth. And, you know, we get a little bit into this conversation. I said, 'What do you do? Like, who are you that you know so much about my mouth from afar, having never met me?' So she introduces herself as a gal named Dr. Aniko Loud. Aniko Loud out of Phoenix, which is where this event was. Turns out she actually has a dental office in Phoenix, and she is a bioaesthetician. A bioaesthetician, which is a special, pretty fringe form of dentistry. She proceeded at that cocktail party to tell me all about bioaesthetic dentistry and how it works. Essentially, if you wanted a better bite, or you're having jaw issues or TMJ or even things like sleep apnea, poor chewing mechanics, tight head, neck, jaw complex, et cetera, and you wanted to get some of that work done, a typical dentist, even like a natural holistic biologic dentist who uses all-natural materials, well, they would go in and they would scrape away some teeth, adjust some teeth, maybe you know, you want some aesthetic work, so they're putting in veneers or crowns because I think a beautiful smile is important for confidence and for, uh, you know, as much as some people don't like this, uh, societal status, symmetry, beauty of the mouth, it actually can give you a— can give you an advantage in certain scenarios when it comes to having a beautiful smile. It is something that other human beings take into stock when they are sizing you up. Of course, you know, for me as a Christian, I know that man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart. And yet, the fact that man looks at the outward appearance means you should not look like or smell like a complete slob all the time. And furthermore, you know, the idea of like working out to keep your body in shape, not just for function and strength, but sometimes just to look good, to carry yourself confidently. The same applies to the mouth, the head, the neck, the jaw. Like, this is an area we should care about. This is probably why I spend an extra 5 minutes in the morning in the bathroom cleansing my face or derma rolling or coconut oil pulling or tongue scraping or doing all these things to keep my face from just getting too, you know, too much like the grandma in Something About Mary, I suppose would be a good analogy for those of us who are fans of movies from the '90s. So, anyways, bioaesthetician in contrast to a, shall we say, normal dentist or even a biological holistic dentist, they have a different approach. What they do is they actually look at the actual mechanics of the jaw, the bite, what's moving the wrong way biomechanically, what's grinding, what's moving at incorrect angles, and how do we fix that. Before we go and fix, say, the teeth. Because if you fix the teeth but you don't fix the underlying biomechanics that cause the teeth to become degraded, to damage, crooked, worn down, etc., in the first place, 5, 10 years later, thinking long term here, you're gonna have the same list of problems. You're just going to be, you know, $10,000 poorer from whatever aesthetic work you might have had done in your mouth. So anyways, I'm sitting here listening to her talk about this whole concept of bioesthetic dentistry, which is used again for not just aesthetics but also for fixing pretty serious issues like, you know, uh, temporomandibular jaw syndrome or sleep apnea, or a lot of these issues that really bug us, cause poor sleep, cause poor chewing, cause leaky gut, cause tight jaw, cause jaw pain, cause migraines, other types of headaches, but that we often forget to really think about when it comes to attributing some of that to jaw and teeth and neck, the hygiene and biomechanics. So, long story short is I wind up in her office the next morning because I had like an afternoon flight out of Phoenix. So, I'm like, "I want to go investigate this. I got to see what this is all about." So, I went in there and she did a bunch of cone scans and X-rays. And 3D bite analysis using all these advanced pieces of computer equipment, you know, an advanced computer program and machines and very high tech, almost like you walked onto, you know, like a spaceship. That's where her office kind of felt like. Well, at the same time, using a lot of the biologicalistic dentistry concepts I was already familiar with, right? All, you know, cleaning the rooms with ozone and using all biocompatible materials in the mouth, etc. And, uh, she found a lot of the issues that she suspected she would find in my mouth. And so of course the question for me was, what do we do about this? So I wound up signing up for her program in which she began to make tiny little micro adjustments in my mouth, meaning she sent off to Germany the complete 3D print of my entire jaw and teeth structure And then they printed a special mouthpiece that I was to wear at night to begin to gently align my jaw. She cleaned out a bunch of bacteria from my mouth that were predisposing me to things like Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease because she did a complete salivary biome analysis of the mouth. It's shocking how, how much the bacterial composition of your mouth affects your risk for a host of chronic diseases. As a matter of fact, a little bit of a rabbit hole here. I recently recorded a podcast for the main Ben Greenfield Life show with the folks from Thrive Probiotics, and they even made a pretty compelling case for occasionally breaking open one of your probiotic capsules and swishing it around in your mouth, or even doing that when you're doing, like, your coconut oil pulling in the morning to help to adjust the biome of the mouth, which is interesting. I had already known when I interviewed Dr. Nathan Bryan, an expert in nitric oxide, that if you do something like use a high amount of mouthwash or fluoridated toothpaste, you can nuke the biome in the mouth to the extent to where you're not producing nitric oxide adequately, which affects blood pressure and erectile function and energy and performance. And so you don't want a hyper clean mouth, nor do you want a mouthful of bad disease-causing bacteria. You want a mouthful of good bacteria, good oral microbiome in the same way as you want a good gut microbiome. So, Dr. Loud began working with me on that special toothpaste that has something called hydroxyapatite in it that helps to build up the minerals in the mouth. There are companies, one toothpaste I'm using right now is called Smart Teeth, right? It's made with hydroxyapatite and no fluoride and helps to build mineral in the mouth and reduce, uh, your, your cavity risk. So anyways, uh, she's, she's doing all these measurements, gradually adjusting my mouth, and it culminated after a year and a half of, you know, it was a little annoying because she's based out of Phoenix. I had to fly to Phoenix like 4 times a year, you know, and granted I had other podcasts and work to do when I was down there, but basically she reinvented my entire mouth. And to put the icing on the cake, uh, it culminated with 2 8-hour days in the dental chair actually doing the full aesthetics, literally capping the teeth, making them nice and white, making them all symmetrical, but doing so after I'd spent like 2 years reshaping the mouth. Now, I'm not telling you all this to try and convince you to go sign up for some, you know, $50,000-plus dollar dental aesthetics package in Phoenix. But I'm telling you this because what I've learned during that process and afterwards is something I'm now teaching my sons, teaching my clients, and really wanting to get out to the world. It's this idea of proper posture when it comes to the tongue, the jaw, and the teeth. So, after I went through all the protocols, with Dr. Loud, my jaw was very sore. I didn't feel like I was chewing my food properly. I had to relearn how to chew my food because I was used to tearing with my front teeth and grinding a little bit with the molars, which were kind of worn away, and then like swallowing half-chewed food. And because my bite mechanics began working properly, I was almost like forced to chew food 25 to 40 times after that protocol. Which I knew up to that point I should be doing, but it wasn't until that point that based on the biomechanics of my mouth, I was actually forced to do it because I could no longer rip with my front teeth and swallow, and I instead had to chew very mindfully with my molars. My poop changed, my bowel habits changed, gas and bloating after eating changed because all of a sudden, I was taking 30 minutes to eat a salad I'd normally mow through in like 10 minutes. I would take like 20 minutes to eat a ribeye that I'd normally eat in like 10 minutes because I was adequately masticating my food, allowing the salivary enzymes to work, swallowing a liquid bolus. As a matter of fact, if you really want to take a funky deep dive into this whole category, look up the idea of fletchering or the work of Dr. Fletcher, who was kind of sort of known as a little bit of a kook back in the day, But one thing that he did propose as a leading cause of disease was inadequate chewing and mastication. And he like proposed chewing your food 100 times per bite. He'd take like 30 minutes to eat a little piece of green onion. And I'm not advocating for that, but this idea actually became a complete movement called Fletchering, which is interesting. So there's your, your fun cocktail party fact for the day that you can go research. Anyways though, so began chewing properly and then I had some follow-up appointments with one of the dental hygienists at Dr. Loud's clinic who worked with me via teleconferencing and a few Zoom calls to teach me specific exercises for my tongue and for my jaw. And I learned something very interesting from her and by reading a book that I really think you should read. If you want to better wrap your head around this concept. The book is called "Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic." And, the premise of that book and what Kat, the name of the dental hygienist, taught me is that through the process of forward head posture from phones, computers, screens, and a post-industrial lifestyle, and poor shoulder strength and upper back strength also as a result of less manual labor, through the introduction of ultra-processed and processed foods at an early age that cause a child to not have to chew as well and develop as good of a jaw, through stress and through poor posture during sleep, the onset of mouth breathing, which puts the jaw into a completely different position that causes tooth crowding and a whole bunch of other issues. And then, and you may already know this if you've come across the work of Dr. Weston A. Price, the relative absence of important vitamins for bone and teeth formation like vitamin A, D, E, and K, such as we would find in fermented dairy and other fermented foods or such as we might be able to use even in supplemental form or such as we would find in organ meats that we don't eat as much of these days or bone marrow, liver, heart, kidney, pancreas, et cetera. These ancient foods really aren't a staple of our diet. And that combined with the introduction of processed and ultra-processed foods at an early age, forward head posture, screens, stress, poor sleep posture, et cetera, leads to a host of chronic diseases associated with jaw malalignment, teeth malalignment, improper chewing, and even poor nutrient bioavailability because your food is not adequately masticated. When you chew and swallow it. I may have just saved you the process of reading the entire book Jaws, but if you want a much deeper dive into the research, see some interesting photos, etc., that would be a cool book for you to read, and I'll include it in the show notes to this podcast episode for Raw along with a longer podcast I did with Dr. Loud about bioaesthetics dentistry. So anyways, as I'm learning about the process of mewing, I discovered some things that I never knew before. For example, did you know that your entire tongue, from the base of your tongue way at the back of your throat to the tip of your tongue, is for ideal posture and nasal breathing and airway supposed to be suctioned to the roof of your mouth unless you are talking or chewing? Like typical posture, checking emails, driving, Even working out, unless you're working out at a very high intensity that requires mouth breathing, all of that, you should be breathing through your nose with your tongue pressed— not really pressed, I should say suctioned against the roof of your mouth. And there's an entire movement or process, kind of similar to like the fletchering I talked about earlier, but a little less fringe, called mewing. M-E-W-I-N-G. They talk about it in that book Jaws. There's a guy named Dr. John Mew. There's an entire very helpful YouTube channel called Jaw Hacks where you can see demonstrated a lot of the different tongue exercises, jaw exercises, and even mouth and jaw self-massage both in the mouth and outside of the mouth with your fingers that you can do to begin to get yourself to the point where you're carrying your jaw properly. And actually in the book Jaws, they show some shocking photos of people who began this process of mewing and proper jaw and tongue alignment, and their entire faces changed. They became more symmetrical. Jaws became more square and defined in men. The faces became less kind of like narrow and sharp in women, a little bit more round and beautiful. And so there's, there's something to this idea of face reinvention, jaw reinvention, via the process of mewing. I even found this one company called PosturePro. I'd interviewed the woman who runs that company, Annette Verpilot, before, and they even have like a mouthpiece you can wear during the day. I've been experimenting with it. It's the only mouthpiece they sell on their website. I'll have someone or me find a link to it. It's PosturePro. It's like a mouthpiece, a little blue mouthpiece you put in, and it automatically suctions your tongue to the roof of your mouth. And forces you into slightly lips apart, teeth slightly together, nasal breathing. So, there are implements or tools or apparati you can use to allow yourself to just kind of like subconsciously train these muscles to be in the correct position related to the jaw and the tongue specifically. Of course, the tongue has a muscle. We eat it every Tuesday, Taco Tuesday, Tongue Taco Tuesday at the Greenfield House. It's fantastic. Get a beef tongue, crockpot it all day, fry it up in butter, and cut it into cubes. You got yourself tongue tacos. It's great with some radishes and avocado and sour cream and some of those siete flour wraps and some of the masa tortilla chips. Oh, speaking my language. Getting hungry now. So anyways, the interesting thing is that during this entire process of learning how to mew and proper tongue posture, I came across another guy who's actually flying out to my house in 2 weeks to do a long-form podcast on all this named Dr. Neal Bolchandi. And, Neal Bolchandi specializes in tongue tie in infants and improper tongue posture in adults and cranial and head and neck massage and tongue adjustments and mouth adjustments and jaw adjustments. And so, he was another wealth of knowledge for me throughout this entire process. And, especially if you've had a tongue tie or cleft palate or some of these other issues as an infant, he can fix all that through manual therapy and specific exercises. He has tongue functioning exercises and I've actually already in the past couple weeks promoted this tongue course that he has that I'll also put in the shownotes here. But he's been another fantastic source of information. So between him and, uh, Kath, uh, Dr. Nico Loud's hygienist, and Dr. Loud herself, I have just learned a ton about the value of Mewing, jaw mechanics, bioaesthetics dentistry, and the way that you carry your tongue against the roof of your mouth for proper nasal breathing. This is so important that I wanted to devote a Raw Podcast to it in the same way that I devoted a podcast some time ago to the health of the big toe. I would say two huge breakthroughs for me this year have been understanding the importance of big toe mechanics, flexibility, and mobility, and the importance of the jaw being in proper posture by suctioning the tongue against the roof of the mouth and breathing through the nose, and even looking into some of these other exercises that are done as a part of the mewing process or the idea behind mewing. So, best book for you to read up on this is "Jaws: The Story of the Hidden Epidemic." Best podcast long form I've done on this is my podcast with Dr. Eniko Loud. And then, Kat is the dentist. And actually, I might be able to find her actual page. It is— I'm sorry, I'm just looking at a text from her. The functional activator from PosturePro is called the Breathe Better Activator. And then, her actual page is called honestmyo.com, like honestmyo.com. And, she's really cool because she'll get on a video call with you and teach you a lot of these exercises that I've been doing. Her name is Kat, K-A-T, and she's Dr. Niko Laude's dental hygienist who also specializes in a lot of what's called, I believe the field is called myotherapy, but it's very similar to mewing. So anyways, what can you do? What are the— because I know I've kind of thrown a lot at you here. What can you do? Like I said, you don't have to go sign up for some super expensive 2-year process with a bioesthetic dentist. What I would do if I were you is if you're a reader and a content consumer, read Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic, the book. Listen to my podcast with Dr. Nico Loud and go over to the Honest Myos website, honestmyo.com. Look at some of Cass's videos and tutorials, which are free, and then look at that super inexpensive Breathe Better device from PosturePro. And that way, you've got a device that's kind of helping you to feel what this feels like as well as some information to help you understand more of the science behind this. Now, next level up, of course, is you could call Dr. Loud's office or go to the website for BioAesthetics Dentistry. Which has a directory of bioesthetic dentists that might be present in your area. Dr. Loud is also pretty good about telling you if you call her office if there's someone who does what you can literally call her office and say, okay, I talked to Ben, I can't come to Phoenix like multiple times a year for dental work. Is there somebody in my area? And then tell them your city who does work similar to Dr. Loud, and they should be able to refer out or give you the name of a good person if you actually wanted to get this type of dental work done. It's unique, I'll tell you. There's not a lot of people who practice this, but man, it has been a game changer for me. So, now, I get up in the morning, I do tongue scraping with a copper tongue scraper, I do about 5 to 10 minutes of oil pulling. I use the ozone oil from Simply O3. I have been breaking up a little probiotic capsule in there occasionally. Swishing with that. You just keep one extra bottle of probiotics on your bathroom counter. And then, I have been doing the mewing exercises and using that Breathe Better device when I don't need to be talking and I'm just standing there reading emails or reading a book or even doing a workout, focusing a lot more on suctioning the jaw against the roof of the mouth and doing nasal breathing. And then, I know a lot of people ask this, so I'll address it, mouth taping. And yes, mouth taping, one of the reasons it works so well, and I use stuff called hostage tape, which really sticks to the face, but other people will use this mouth tape that's called Somnifix. But, it can be really good though for causing you to breathe nasally and also putting your tongue in proper posture while you're asleep. So, mouth taping does fit into this scenario. And, one of the reasons it works so well with helping you get better sleep and better oxygenation is it does force you into a little bit better tongue posture and of course nasal breathing during sleep in addition to making you sound like Kenny from South Park if you're trying to have intimate conversations with your spouse at night. So anyways, I know you guys might have some questions. I'm always here around the AMAs and the Q&As to be able to dig into this more. I would love to hear your journey and your experience if you try some of this stuff out and how it might change your digestion. Oh, and that's one thing I forgot to mention. Yes, I'm still chewing my food 25 to 40 times per bite. It's taking me a longer time to eat, but honestly, I think that's okay. I'm more mindful. I chew my food better. I don't have an empty plate, you know, before everybody else is done. I get fuller faster. I'm more satiated. So So anyways, that is the story of what happened after that cocktail party and a 2-year process of learning more than I ever thought I'd know about the mouth. And now, you know, even my sons will be working out and I'll be like, "Breathe through your nose, tongue suction against the roof of your mouth, go!" And so I'm able to help my kids with proper tongue and jaw posture too. So hopefully they have fewer teeth, head, neck, and jaw issues later on in life. And by the way, yes, my wife also went through this entire process and it's been just as transformative for her. So there you have it. Enjoy your mewing. I'll include lots of resources in the show notes. And thanks so much for listening in.

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