Not me trying to pronounce those with an underbite just to be contrarian
This is discussed at length in (Breath)[0] which also discusses other things about how it's caused issues with breathing.
This book is amazing. Two useful bits that really helped me were mastic gum and mouth tape. Both of them made it much easier for me to breath through my nose at night and avoid waking up with a dry mouth in the morning.
There are also some interesting bits on breathwork and the scientific aspects of it. I was able to use those techniques to temporarily lower my heart rate to 45 BPM during meditation.
> I was able to use those techniques to temporarily lower my heart rate to 45 BPM during meditation.
What's your normal resting heart rate? Mine hovers around 39-40, so getting to 45 isn't really an issue.
An average of 60-70 according to watch.
Great book. I’m still working on breathing because of it. Here’s a bookshop.org ebook link for it: https://bookshop.org/p/books/breath-the-new-science-of-a-los...
That's also why humans have maybe the weakest teeth among the mammals ... and a narrow mouth which caused us to lose certain teeth we no longer have nowadays.
In an interview with Joe Rogan, James Nestor suggested to encourage our kids to eat non soft food daily.
Does he give some examples of non soft foods?
Guy sounds like a crockpot like half of Joe Rogan's guests these days, but isn't it obvious which foods make you chew or not? Compare yogurt to a bowl of vegetables.
How reliable is this finding?
It's hard to believe that we gained an overbite over a few thousand years. Evolution doesn't generally happen that fast, nor will it happen worldwide at the same time. And the idea that someone born today will develop an overbite vs edge-to-edge bite based on diet is generally not accepted by scientists, correct?
And trying to prove how ancient peoples pronounced words seems virtually impossible. It's one thing to find a change in writing, but it's another thing to assume you know how the given consonants were actually pronounced. Even today, there can be gigantic variation in pronunciation between dialects of the same language, including consonants.
So this finding seems extremely hypothetical at best, unless I'm missing something?
This is not about a genetic, evolutionary change from an underbite/edge-to-edge mastication back to overbite/up-down mastication. The theory is that this happens in individual humans based on their diet growing up: if you were to take a hunter gatherer child and raise them with a modern diet, they would have the modern overbite; and conversely, if you raised your child with a hunter-gatherer diet, they would develop an underbite.
And while the exact cause may be debatable, as is the impact on language, the fact that this change happened over the last few thousand years is established fact, easily visible in human skeletons.
It’s not evolution, just look at your mouth breather friend as an example. Recessed jaw, poor intake of breath due to a constricted airway, sleep apnea, gerd, bruxism, cavities… it’s all related.
Can someone help me find this amazing site that was once featured on HN that had basically a cut-out anatomical view of the human mouth and throat and then you could pick any sound to see how the body forms it with an animation in-sync with the audio (iirc)?
That was wild
It reminds me of this weird theory about proto-Castillan. According to some scholars, the change from initial /f/ in Latin to /h/ in Spanish could have been caused by the bad teeth of the speakers of lore, a phenomenon ultimately due to the water quality in some areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_change_%22f_%E2%86%92...
Needless to say I've always found this hypothesis doesn't really hold water...
All speakers of old Spanish had bad teeth? And from all zones? Doesn’t make sense.
It also gave us sleep apnea.
Agriculture was without a doubt the worst thing to ever happen to us.
Na, the worst thing to ever happen to us was hyperbole.
What sounds can we only pronounce with underbites?
There's a sound you can make like an /f/ by pressing your lower row of teeth against your top lip and blowing. That one. (It sounds basically the same as /f/).
I really dont buy the premisse of this piece. I can easily make the same sounds with an underbite
“By means of some 90 models of Eskimo teeth, Dr. Adelbert Fernald, Curator of the Harvard Dental School Museum, has proved that eating a strictly meat diet is the ideal way in which to keep the human mouth in a healthy condition, and that it is due to the fact that civilized people do not eat enough meat that they as a rule have decayed teeth.” - Harvard Crimson (1929) [1]*
The neolithic flip completely upended the world of Homo-Sapiens such that majority of modern humans come from the bottlnecked group of 10-100k sapiens that left Africa, interbred with Neanderthal and developed the structural heirarchical systems that dominate the world now.
Almost no humans today eat, cohabitate, socialize, “work” or play in a way that is coherent with our biology.
*Notable that the student newspaper from 1929 is better science reporting than any news outlet today
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1929/1/29/esquimo-teeth-p...
Someone's claim in a 1929 blog satisfies your epistemic standards?
Most ancient mummies also have atherosclerosis.
Fortunately we can run the test today to see what causes these things, not regress to story-telling about what might be true because we want to believe it.
"Coherent with our biology" is just going to cash out into yet more story-telling over evidence.
> Almost no humans today eat, cohabitate, socialize, “work” or play in a way that is coherent with our biology.
We have adaptations for lactose tolerance that emerged in the fast few thousand years. Our extremely energy-intensive brains can only be fed because we pre-digest our meals through fire.
We are, in fact, quite well adapted to the society that we've built, certainly much more so than peoples who had to spend a good chunk of their life just looking for food and not dying of mosquito-borne diseases.
>Our extremely energy-intensive brains can only be fed because we pre-digest our meals through fire.
The exception being animal derived foods. ( eggs, meat, fish, milk etc.). These food can be raw, and will still reliably fuel the brain.
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Just a reminder that we are in the middle of a silent epidemic of small jaws [0] and that if you feed your kids hard food they will grow up to be healthier and more attractive.
On a related (?) note, I was taken aback by the scene from "Kill Bill 2" ([1]), where Bill makes a sandwich for Bibi and... cuts off the crust. And it was the soft "toast" bread anyway. Doing this was not a thing when I was a kid; actually, eating the crunchy heel of a (Central-European style) loaf was a pleasure.
As a kid, I hated the crust. It tasted gross.
But that's because it was gross industrial bread to begin with, and the crust was just drier and unpleasant.
But I also remember eating sourdough with its chewy crust and loving that.
Cutting off crusts is very specific to bread that is bad to begin with, I think.
This is an absurdly common request from small children.
If you don't do it, you may still find them eating around the crusts, for instance if you cut a sandwich in half, or even gnawing through a single point on the sandwich's crust and then leaving behind a crust-rind when they're done.
As a parent, you're then left with no other choice than to eat all of the grilled cheese rinds yourself, so you don't tend to push too hard on the childish habit.
Rich vs poor. The rich can literally chop off food and throw it in the trash.
But the crust is nice, why would you throw it away just because you're rich?
I grew up in the Wonder Bread days, and definitely remember people cutting off the crusts.
...so mewing is real and it is not a coincidence that it's suddenly a thing now?
Mewing is something intended to address this, but evidence isn't there. Everyone wants a non-invasive solution rather than jaw expanders, braces, retainers etc.. so depending on where your bias, you might be against "Big-Ortho" and try this, or you could invest in proven orthodontics.
> proven
Dr Mew doesn't claim that orthodontics don't work, he points out they are expensive and lucrative, and he claims that if we maintain a "jaw healthy" diet from childhood, orthodontic problems will be much less prevalent in the population (this is a related but independent claim from the "mewing" regimen) He says that the evidence is found by comparing modern jaws/bites with historical skulls which show there has been a dramatic "20th century" emergence of orthodontic problems which would indicate a developmental issue rather than a genetic one.
I don't know if he is correct or not, but it's a claim that can be independently measured/verified. Instead of using and publishing such sound science, the orthodontia community is using "cancellation" against him which certainly matches the lucrative aspect, though doesn't provide direct evidence.
Well, can you link us to the best scientific evidence that he's not full of shit instead of just saying he's being "cancelled"?
Please no more blog posts or journal articles.
What is hard food? Can you be more specific?
I am definitely interested in this.
Not OP, but I remember as a kid being told to eat crispbread (freely available in schools, I assume in most of Scandinavia) because it was good for your teeth/jaw.
I guess one could also include chewy / starchy food; my Asian side family had similar saying but more towards chewing thing properly. (chew 100 times per food in mouth)
So things like crispbread, (raw) carrots, dried fruits/vegetables/meat/squid, etc
Anything that requires hard chewing like nuts, raw vegetables and tough meats.
The first I ever heard of this topic was from reading the book "The Evolution of the Human Head" (2011) by Daniel E. Lieberman. It's an academic book, and parts are not exactly light reading targeted for the general public. I had read it when it first came out, seemingly well before it because such of point of discussion.
The problem with this topic is, if you try to look anything up on line you can quickly find yourself in the "manosphere" with its associated toxicity.
Some people chew on the bones of meat.
That's too hard. Chew on raw carrots.
I feel there are so many health issues plaguing our modern population.
-Bad conditions for eyes leads to growing amounts of glasses wearers, glasses make an active healthy lifestyle harder, early health development seems really important (playing physically as a kid) putting glasses on kids seems a terrible thing, and worse, people act like this is normal.
-The types of food we eat, and our bad breathing habits (maybe from posture or air pollution), maybe even our tongue posture, leave us with poor jawlines, poor facial structure.
-Our disconnect from the natural world leaves us unwhole.
-The extreme of either sedentary lifestyles (office worker) or too repetitively physical (warehouse worker) breaks people down.
Its really sad, most people I see today seem really unhealthy. Fat or flabby, aching body, bad posture, stressed out. I fell into the trap too, had to loose 50 pounds recently. Cleaned up diet, working on posture, flexibility, strength, proper muscle activation, knowing ones body. And that is hard to do, maybe only possible because a WFH job lends towards healthy living. Most are not so fortunate. Also having no family or responsibility beside myself really helps. But neglecting such things are not sustainable for society.
We need a society where being healthy is easier, and better rewarded.
I am sorry if this rant is not acceptable to Hacker News, but I wish as a society our focus was "what makes us healthy". Literally that should be a primary principle in guiding our politics. Compared to the rest of history, we are living in a special time, at least in developed countries. We have the means to be creating healthy, beautiful, smart, well rounded, well adjusted individuals. But I feel the opposite is happening, and it seems like the majority of people don't care
Your comment makes me feel mixed feelings. First, I think generally speaking, we do live in a time and society where people can be and are healthier than ever before. I agree with you, that it should be a priority to further improve that situation. Some of your points however (e.g. glasses, jawline, beatiful, well rounded) sound like you are confusing modern beauty standards with good health. As someone who really enjoys wearing glasses, I am also a tiny bit offended by your view :) And kids seeing well with glasses vs not seeing sharp is an absolute no brainer to me... There are glasses for doing sports too. The main driver of poor health today, imo is inequality. Being healthy is a privilege. While, generally speaking, illness does not care about your net worth, treatment options do. Eating healthy is expensive in terms of money and time. So are healthy hobbies, physio therapists and so on. Living a healthy lifestyle should not be better rewarded but more accessible.
Health is just a means to an end. Eating healthy and exercising comes at a cost. There is no benefit I see for me in having different jaw lines or facial structure. I don't need to live as long as possible. I just want to maximize the enjoyment while I am here. So I just do enough so I have the body to do my favorite hobbies.
Some hobbies also happen to be exercise and can be done nearly daily. Just do more of them and now there's a much lower 'cost' to exercise. Whether or not you find these types of hobbies enjoyable is another story.
"Our disconnect from the natural world" makes us not die at 40 from a broken leg.
> putting glasses on kids seems a terrible thing, and worse, people act like this is normal
I'm not following on this one - is it because this may make them less physically active?
You should be asking what kind of vision problems they may have, that got them the glasses in the first place. For example, I have astigmatism, have crossed eyes without glasses, and +8 power correction. I had to have surgery when I was 3 years old just to be able to get glasses in the future. Not having glasses is a great way to make me miserable and unable to see or read anything.
The intent is to reduce the likelihood of these conditions developing by encouraging exposure to sunlight and far distances as a child.
Not wearing glasses is a poor solution, to say the least. I, personally, would much rather have myopia as an adult than be unable to see or read well for years as a kid.
There’s an interesting middle ground that’s being studied: “peripheral defocus” lenses. The idea, as I understand it, is to give sharp central vision, but to blur the peripheral vision in a way that encourages the eyes to grow appropriately.
There are plenty of people who got exposure to sunlight and far distances as a child who need glasses anyway.
My dad grew up on a farm, and rarely spent much time inside, still needed strong glasses all his life to see.
Anecdotally, I grew up playing outdoors on a farm, not much computer time until I was 11 or 12 or so, which is also around the time I had to get glasses with almost the same prescription strength as my father.
Either computers are quick to ruin eyesight or it was genetic.
Hence GP's use of the word reduce instead of eliminate
I got plenty of both of those things as a child (grew up on a farm). I still needed glasses from the age of 9 to see far away things clearly. Some people get cursed with bad genes.
In my case, I'm farsighted; and while screen time and lack of sunlight can make myopia worse, there's already a genetic tendency that is being aggravated.
Farsighted though is awfully convenient for staring at screens with a good prescription - at worst, my vision improves over time. :)
I'm glad you're getting healthier, but what are the odds that all of your theories have any basis in reality, after spending , I'm guessing, years or decades living an unhealthy lifestyle.
Like, do you really think your tongue position is affecting your facial and jaw structure? I'm guessing you believe in "mewing", and every before/after image I have seen has just been a joke.
I'm waiting for them to drop mouth-breather as some kind of slur.
I was able to!
“Not me” bruh.
breh