So How Does Breathing Affect My Teeth?

Breathe through your nose…

To put your tongue in the roof of your mouth.

To develop your jaws properly.

To make room for your teeth.

Breathe through your nose…..

To filter, humidify and warm the air.

To look after your immune system.

To be a healthier person.

Teeth are like bricks sitting on the foundation of the jaws. Jaw size, shape and position affects how well the teeth fit onto the foundation.

Important points to consider…

• If you mouth breathe, your tongue won’t spend enough time where it belongs – in the roof of your mouth.
  • Usually the tongue pushes on the palate throughout the day to cause it to grow to the correct size, shape and position.  Most of this happens during growth as a child.
  • It won’t do this if you mouth breathe.

• If the jaws are the wrong size, they can’t fit all the teeth in - This may look like crowded teeth.
• If the jaws are the wrong shape they won’t fit together properly - You may see this as an overbite, a retruded lower jaw, or a small or big chin.
• If the jaws are in the wrong position within the skull the jaw joint won’t be in the right position - They may also look like the above.

Postural Correction &
Nasal Breathing Program

More info on breathing can be found here: treatment for Sleep Apnea. With posture correction and a nasal breathing program, you can become a nose breather with a breathing program in many cases. Severe cases however, may need ENT surgery.

The relationships between breathing, posture, health and jaw development.

Other causes can be:

Postural Issues – as above this is linked to growth of the jaws and mouth breathing

Diet (inflammatory diets cause the nose to block up) – see www.Deflame.Com

Environmental Factors like dust mites or pollution – which also cause the nose to block

Poor Muscle Function of lips and tongue (myofunction) – see our section on Myofunctional Orthodontics

Keep an eye out for our Causes Page which will be here soon – it will speak in more detail of the above.

Oxygen & Breathing

Why do we breathe?

To bring oxygen to all body cells and remove excess CO2 and other waste material.

What does oxygen do?

It regenerates cells. If we don’t have enough of it we feel tired, listless and have no energy. Cells die, we sleep badly, have disturbed sleep patterns and wake up tired in the morning.

What makes us breathe?

2 mechanisms activate breathing:

• When CO2 reaches certain levels in the blood the pH will change, and breathing will either be slowed down or speeded up the normalise the pH.
• When the flow of oxygen to the brain is reduced, messages are sent to the diaphragm to increase breathing rate.

CO2 has 4 main jobs to do in the body…

1. Triggers our breathing mechanism – sends a message to our brain to tell us to breathe.
2. Protects smooth muscle from going into spasm – so keeps tubes open.
3. Facilitates the transfer of oxygen from the blood to our cells.
4. Maintains the correct pH (acid-alkali) balance in the blood.

Mouth Breathers

What happens when we breathe through our mouths?

The nose is an air conditioner

• We bypass the entire air filtration and air conditioning system and drag large volumes of untreated air directly into the sensitive lung passages.
• This air contains viral and bacterial matter and we can be more susceptible to coughs, colds and chest infections.
• We dry out and irritate the lung tissue and cause it to produce mucus to protect itself. Continued mouth breathing dries the mucus, makes it sticky and hard to shift. Mucus takes up valuable space in the airways which are already narrowed due to the smooth muscle spasm, and wheezing is a common result.
• We breathe out (through our mouth) far more CO2 than we would through our noses and this lower level of retained CO2 makes our breathing tubes much more susceptible to spasm. The constantly low level of CO2 which results from mouth breathing causes the breathing trigger to reset itself to a lower level. This makes us over-breathe on a permanent basis, but it feels normal to us.
• We also remove the support that the tongue provides to the upper jaw and this can cause narrowing of the jaw and crowded teeth.
• Constant mouth breathing alters the pH of the saliva, removes some of it’s antibacterial effect and we become more susceptible to tooth decay.
• Mouth breathing is directly related to many upper respiratory tract infections. especially ear, nose and throat, inflamed adenoids and sinuses.

What is the answer?

1. Learn how to breathe less through your mouth and more through your nose and bring your breathing pattern back to normal.
2. Store more CO2 in your lungs and blood.

Breathing from the diaphragm

• Slow, gentle and rhythmic breathing from the diaphragm is the key to this.
• Keeping the mouth closed and breathing through the nose is also important.
• Shallow breathing only uses the top one third of the lungs and severely restricts the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide that can be exchanged in the blood.

Above: Good posture is the key to diaphragm breathing.

Myofunctional Orthodontics

Correction of mouth breathing

Correction of mouth breathing helps put the tongue in the right position to help it direct the growth of your jaws. The tongue is a muscle (latin is “myo”) and it needs to function correctly for you to be healthy and have straight teeth and jaws.  This is called “myofunctional orthodontics” or  “myofunctional orthopedics”…

Trainer Systems / Myofunctional Correction

If your myofunction is not corrected and you have braces, you will probably need fixed retainers (wires) put on your teeth for life to stop relapse happening.  This is because fixed braces put the teeth in a zone of imbalance and when the braces come off, the teeth may be pushed by the lips and tongue and other forces.

If you can have the teeth and jaws moved without braces, using your own, proper myofunction (using myofunctional therapy), then you usually won’t need life-time retainers. Sometimes the teeth may not be absolutely straight, but at least they are straighter, the jaws are aligned, and they are in a zone of balance so relapse is less less likely. You can learn more about this topic on our new page here: Myofunctional Orthodontics

Note: Bookmark this page! We’ve got a lot more info headed this way…

More info related to this topic…

• Click here to find out just what is Myofunctional Orthodontics
• Click here for info on Sleep Apnea Treatments

Questions?

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