Toggle Navigation

[U.S.EH]

Great one-stop-shop for wellness related discussions! I have to say though, you could really broaden your audience by juxtaposing most male-specific health topics with female ones; how the effects of, for example, intermittent fasting are at once similar and dissimilar in males and females, or how nutrition needs might change in preparation for conception and throughout the gestational period. Good stuff, though!

Posting to sleep ‘cause I think it might be beneficial to your readers if you address another fundamental aspect of health and wellness – proper tongue and mouth posture and exclusive nasal breathing, which are the primary focal points of myofunctional therapy. The consequences of improper tongue posture, open mouth posture, and mouth breathing are conducive to numerous – numerous! – negative health effects. If any of your readers are parents, I think it’s vital that they recognize these issues and address them as early in the child’s life as possible. In truth, every single person will realize only health improvements from nasal breathing. Mouth posture is not a particularly often accused health concern (but it should be), so people “don’t know what they don’t know” and unfortunately don’t even consider it the possible source for sleep apnea, TMJ issues, behavioral concerns, and others.

Keep the good stuff coming!

[UpRiverGreg]

Hello U.S.EH. Thank you for your forum contribution and welcome to UpRiver!

Incorporating more of the female perspective is definitely pretty common among some of the initial feedback, and I agree it would be a great way to widen our potential audience! As it stands right now, UpRiver is completely run by three guys with a shared passion for health and wellness, solely within our own free time. We didn’t feel like we would really be capable of writing quality articles on more female-specific health topics, due to us obviously not having any first-hand experience with them. It is our aim/dream to grow UpRiver to the point where we can expand our team and potentially bring on some female talent so we can expand more into the female health world.

Great suggestion about nasal breathing! It definetley much lesser known of an issue and one that could fit very well hear. I remember doing some research on the topic a year or two ago and some of the results were pretty astounding! It seems that mouth breathing and improper tongue position can have an absolutely massive affect on the development of your facial structure, especially during early childhood. Kids who are mouthbreathers often end up with a more sunken jaw/face. I’ve heard that some people manage to correct this latter in life via a practice called “mewing” where they gently apply pressure to the roof throughout the day with their tongue. Some people swear that doing this for a couple years, even in adulthood, can drastically improve your facial structure.

On a somewhat related note, drawing parallels to nutrition, I also read a study which compared the affects of early childhood diet on facial and teeth development. The most interesting part to me was when they studied a set of twins from what I believe was a native Australian tribe. One of the twins was fed the natural native Australian diet, whereas the other was fed a standard western diet. By the time they hit puberty, the twin who was fed the traditional diet had nearly perfectly straight teeth whereas the twin who was fed the western diet had very messed up teeth, in need of extensive dental work.

The theory for why this happened is that the native diet involved more difficult to eat foods, so the child developed a proper chewing technique, which applies force to the teeth, jaw and mouth, whereas the western diet involved very easy to eat foods (think mushy baby food) so the child never really learned how to chew properly and instead would do more a swallowing action

[UpRiverMatt]

Hi US E.H. Good point to bring up about breathing in terms of tongue posture and the benefits of nasal breathing over mouth breathing. Breathing is definitely on our radar to delve into more! One interesting thing I stumbled across once was that nose breathing also allows the use of Nitric Oxide in the nasal cavities to dilate blood vessels and improve circulation (might need to fact check me on this).

Great response Greg, interesting examples!

Another thing I would add about breathing is the diaphragmatic breathing is much better than breathing using the muscles around the rib cage or chest breathing. It seems to oxygenate the body better due to higher density of capillaries around the lower vs upper lungs.

A third point about breathing is rhythm and its effect on the central nervous system. It seems a great gateway between the conscious and subconscious is breathing. By having calm breathing patterns, the nervous system calms down and vice versa. I think this is really important for stress and general health.

Good comparison on the detrimental effects on facial bone and teeth formation in modern, processes more industrial diets vs the traditional unprocessed diet Greg. I would have to disagree with you on the true cause of this effect however. I think it has much less to do with how one chews or the difficulty or practice of chewing and much more to do with nutritional adequacy to allow the body the proper building blocks and co factors for proper metabolic and other bodily system health, especially during periods of more growth like infancy and adolescence. If you look at not just the facial bone formation, but also the bone formation throughout the whole skeleton you can see the bone formation is much poorer on processed diets vs traditional lending evidence to the systemic effects of poor nutrition over the chewing hypothesis. Shorter stature, more dental cavities and other health effects are at play as well not to mention chronic inflammation and likely most modern disease. I’d suggest the book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Western A. Price for more in-depth research on this.

Also, to the female audience, we are interested in getting into those differences for things like fasting where I believe it is more ideal to have a longer feeding window for hormonal health in women vs men etc. We did debate this at the beginning, but decided to stick more to what we knew to start. As Greg says, we hopefully can get into these topics soon and expand our audience.

Great topic again E.H.! I too share concerns about pre-conception, conception and pregnancy since it is so vital and I believe there is much work to do in the West on re-educating mothers and families as to the importance of many factors on the health of their children and the coming generation!

[Author]

Posts