Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA, IFMCPPresident at Five Journeys, Functional Medicine & Wellness Provider, Best Selling Author, Passionate Champion for Health

Why Jaw Growth Is Essential for Healthy Breathing

29 May 2026 · 1 min

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1:14

In this educational dialogue, the speakers explain the two‑way relationship between breathing and jaw development. They argue that optimal jaw growth is achieved by recruiting the oral muscles—tongue, lips, and cheeks—that naturally stimulate the jaw when they rest and function correctly. Dysfunctional oral musculature leads to under‑developed jaws, which in turn cause crowded permanent teeth. An early, observable sign for parents is a set of baby teeth that are tightly packed with no gaps; this predicts future crowding and signals that the jaw has not grown sufficiently. The discussion emphasizes that correcting muscle function can promote proper jaw growth, which then improves breathing, creating a positive feedback loop.

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Essentially, if you fix the breathing, does the jaw start to develop differently?
So you can work both ways. It's a little easier if you get the jaws growing better, then that fixes the breathing. How do you do that? Grow the jaws. And we want to grow the jaws by recruiting the muscles that are supposed to be growing them. So our jaw growth and development is dependent upon the tongue, lips, and cheeks and how they're basically functioning and resting. So when our jaw muscles, tongue, lips, and cheeks are resting and functioning properly, that produces really nice jaw growth through all those years. But when they're not resting and functioning properly, we'll lose the word dysfunctional. When our tongue, lips, or cheeks are dysfunctional, our jaws don't grow the same. And then of course, when the jaws are smaller, in the end we'll see crowded teeth. Like most parents are like, oh my God, my kid's teeth are all over. I know we're gonna need braces. But one step before that that a parent might see is those cute little baby teeth are perfectly together. There's no space. So that's another item on the list of an observation a parent might notice. Their 3 to 5-year-old who has all these beautiful baby teeth, but there's no gaps between them. They're together. Baby teeth that are together equals permanent teeth that are really crowded, and it's a sign of the jaws are underdeveloped. So the teeth are the symptom, the jaws are underdeveloped.