Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic

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R. A. Settipane. 1999. Complications of allergic rhinitis. Allergy and Asthma Proceedings: 209–213. Image 7. Improvement of the airway in a boy after orthotropic and postural treatment. This is the impact mentioned in image 6. The clinical evidence largely generated by Simon Wong, BDSc, indicates that using minimally invasive Forwardontics appliances to train children to keep their mouths shut, accompanied by a carefully designed postural exercise regime such as Good Oral Posture Exercises (GOPex), can return children to the trajectory of normal orofacial development. It also could increase the probability that they will live long, healthy, and happy lives. Paul Ehrlich wants you to shut your mouth – for your health. According to Ehrlich’s new book, mouth breathing, among other modern habits, has led to an epidemic of small jaws and many troubling health consequences.

Dr. Mew and his insights were portrayed with some fondness. I was especially moved by the included photograph of his lone petition for policy change outside the BDA. The qualitative case studies and research cited could have been valuable, had they not been diluted with pedestrian accounts. I feel the urgency, but it was difficult to gain depth through the repetitive, almost nagging tone of the book. All that is required is to know that jaws have continued to shrink over that past few centuries (say, 20 generations), and there is no evidence that small-jawed individuals are out-reproducing large-jawed individuals are any rate, let alone the high selection pressure that would be required to produce a discernable change in such an eyeblink of evolutionary time. Indeed, if one were to speculate on selection pressures, we think the best guess would be that, considering sleep apnea and the traumas associated with the removal of wisdom teeth, that biological selection pressures would favor larger jaws. I think the best evidence comes from human ancestors. Richard Klein, Stanford paleontologist and the world’s expert on the human fossil record, said to me, “I’ve never seen a hunter-gatherer skull with crooked teeth.”Paul Ehrlich is the world's best-known and most distinguished ecologist, and one of the best known figures in any field of science. Now, teaming up with Sandra Kahn, he offers us his most personal and practical book to date. You'll discover the widespread consequences of how you carry out such seemingly mundane, automatic, and repetitive acts as breathing, smiling, and sleeping – and how your ways of doing those things affect peoples' perceptions of you. Read, enjoy, learn, and prepare to be astonished!" Author: Jared Diamond Source: Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel Kevin Boyd, DDS (Pediatric Dentist), M.Sc. (Human Nutrition) is an attending clinical instructor and Sleep Medicine consultant at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Assuming that genetics are chiefly responsible for the sudden modern rise of these dental maladies does not make sense, said Ehrlich. “There’s not been enough time for evolution over the span of only several generations to have made our jaws shrink,” said Ehrlich. Nor is there any evidence of selection pressures that would have favored smaller jawed-people producing more offspring – and thus perpetuating the trait – than regular-jawed people. Studies of skulls from just a few hundred years ago compared with today show human jaws are still shrinking. There hasn’t been time for this to be a genetic problem. You can get crowded jaws within a generation. So, it’s primarily a response to environmental changes accompanying a sedentary life and industrialization.

Except for the occasional slight incisor crowding and rotation, observation of the teeth indicated that they were well-aligned with very-good-to excellent occlusion, in general. Thorough analysis of dental data from the Amarna burials has shown that Egyptian and most ancient teeth have extensive tooth wear on occlusal (chewing) surfaces of even the youngest individuals. Malocclusion is rare in Amarna but very common in America; tooth wear is extensive in Amarna yet rare in America. 16 There is a common and serious misapprehension about malocclusion. As one friend said, “We take it for granted that malocclusion is genetic—we’ve always considered my son got his crooked teeth from my wife.” As you will see, virtually all the evidence shows that the oral-facial epidemic can be traced not to our genes but to changes in our culture, particularly to ones in how and what we eat and where we live. These have changed greatly from those of the Stone Age, in complex patterns starting around the time people began to settle down and practice agriculture. 17 As anthropologist Clark Larsen put it: “There has been a dramatic reduction in the size of the face and jaws wherever humans have made the transition from foraging to farming.” 18 I came into reading this book well aware that high palates, tongue ties, and jaw malocclusion were very much less than ideal for your posture, gut and more, but not fully knowing what to do next, or how to prevent the future generations from needing as much work as I do. While many may read this and believe it’s about “being attractive” (there are indeed references to mouth breathing and a recessed jaw being unattractive, and a wider jaw with better formation being a more attractive alternative), it is inevitably about function and how a poor jaw posture leads to deterioration of other skills, postures, and overall bodily function. It’s about health. People have some power to protect their children from this serious and cryptic environmental problem. Jaws lays out both causes and cures." Author: Gretchen C. Daily, Bing Professor of Environmental Science Source: Stanford University E. Josefsson, K. Bjerklin, and R. Lindsten. 2007. Malocclusion frequency in Swedish and immigrant adolescents—influence of origin on orthodontic treatment need. The European Journal of Orthodontics 29: 79–87.A new study says that parents and caregivers can take steps to promote proper mouth, jawbone and facial musculature development in children to help stave off future health burdens and chronic conditions. (Image credit: Getty Images) It is often said that the face is the window to the soul, but it is also a window on the health status of the person behind the face. The human face provides visible signals that could indicate serious underlying health problems. Not only can problems in oral-facial health be an indicator of problems in the rest of your body, but they can also be a determinant of how good you look. The habits that can make faces unattractive in our culture are, sadly, the habits that can make bodies unhealthy. Smile Direct within five years will do more orthodontics than all the orthodontists in the United States combined,” said orthodontist Bill Hang, DDS, MSD. “Every practice will be devastated.” The jaws epidemic is very serious, but the good news is, we can actually do something about it,” said Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies, Emeritus, at Stanford and one of the study’s authors.

Y. Chida, M. Hamer, J. Wardle, and A. Steptoe. 2008. Do stress-related psychosocial factors contribute to cancer incidence and survival? Nature Clinical Practice Oncology 5: 466–475.

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Despite the massive evidence that these problems are primarily environmental in origin, we discovered that many dentists still believe that jaw shrinkage is somehow genetic, even citing family resemblance and twin studies in support of that view. It is not necessary to revisit the massive literature on “heritability” demonstrating the fallacies of that approach. Indeed, in their early lives, children often transition from pablum to a fast food diet that is becoming increasingly soft and liquid-like. Few kids get to gnaw on a tough buffalo haunch, instead feasting on hamburgers, cakes and candies that melt in their mouth, sugary soft drinks, and the like. In his lecture “The melting face”; retrieved on February 20, 2016, from www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvoX_wEtwDk. About 90 percent of our children have bite problems. When more than 50 percent of a population has a problem it is an epidemic. Sandra Kahn and Paul Ehrlich present the causes and consequences of this epidemic affecting our young generations. This book educates the public and dental community on treating and preventing the underlying problem, instead of just aligning teeth."