We can also convince baby food manufacturers to develop foods that are nutritious and safe, and yet require a child to chew a lot. We can make sure schools have chairs that produce the right kind of posture in kids because that seems to affect the oral posture as well. It’s a place where society, if it pays attention, can do a lot. 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.”

So when Sandra was looking for the right way to treat her eldest child without extracting teeth, she first turned to “myofunctional therapy” as a rising and popular form of treatment. The idea was that how you chew, how you swallow, and how you position your tongue, repeated thousands of times a day for your entire life, would result in changes to your teeth and your smile. Imagine if every time you swallowed you pushed your teeth out a bit; eventually your teeth should move outward. Sandra enrolled her preteen children in myofunctional therapy and marched them through the exercises. At the same time, she kept studying the literature and investigating more intensely, while keeping a close eye on the kids’ development. 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.Dentists should encourage “forwardontics,” a program focused on keeping the airway open, through sets of exercises designed to correct jaw “posture.” We have learned that how one’s jaws and tongue are held when not eating or talking is key to healthy jaw development. Stanford News spoke with Ehrlich about the evidence he and Kahn present in this book and what he wants people to take away from this work. A. Qureshi, R. D. Ballard, and H. S. Nelson. 2003. Obstructive sleep apnea. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 112: 643–651 A. Sheiham. 2005. Oral health, general health and quality of life. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 83: 644–644; A. Sheiham and R. G. Watt. 2000. The common risk factor approach: A rational basis for promoting oral health. Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology 28: 399–406; R. G. Watt and A. Sheiham. 2012. Integrating the common risk factor approach into a social determinants framework. Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology 40: 289–296; and Matthew Walker. 2017. Sleep the good sleep: The role of sleep in causing Alzheimer’s disease is undeniable; here’s how you can protect yourself. New Scientist October 14–20: 30–33.

C. All royalties from Jaws will go to supporting work related to the subject of the book, making human lives better in a rapidly changing environment.This manuscript looks beyond the flashy smile that so many of us pay our orthodontists for and asks the hard question: Why is it we are almost all born with the faces of angels, yet so few maintain that face value of our innate and inborn beauty? The answer revealed is intriguing, thought provoking and a much needed call to action to fight for the fullest physical potential for all our children. A must read!" It’s also fantastic if you are well aware of the effect tongue ties have on the body as a whole, because you get answers as to the why, as well as an answer to the question: what do I do next? You should try to reduce exposure to allergens and consider breathing exercises designed to improve nose breathing and breathing efficiency, like good oral posture exercises. And you can do something that my parents would have hated: Recommend that your kids chew gum. The stakes aren’t as high as with something like climate disruption, which could lead to billions of premature deaths. But Jaws describes an epidemic that is causing a lot of expense – think braces – and misery. Many people’s lives could be improved if it were dealt with. It’s also a public health problem where some of the power to avoid it rests in your own hands.