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Close Your Mouth. And Chew!
There’s a relationship between how much we chew and how much we snore.
We use the term “mouth-breather” to refer to people who aren’t smart. It remains an insult even though there are growing numbers of people who breathe through our mouths, if not when we’re awake, when we’re asleep. But I didn’t know breathing through the mouth was terrible for our health until I read James Nestor’s Breath. And I had no idea there was a link between mouth-breathing and chewing.
Apparently the problem started with the development of agriculture. Before humans grew our own food we had to chew everything we ate, and we had to chew it a lot. Consider what we ate before humans started growing wheat, rice and other grains.
- Plants, including roots, straight from the ground
- Wild game (These animals were almost all muscle and we chewed through gristle and bone)
- Nuts
- Seeds
Prehistoric humans spent hours a day chewing. And what did that chewing do for their physiology? It gave them wide, muscular jaws that kept their airways nice and open. It turns out the shape of the jaw/face has a direct impact on…
