The Surprising Dangers of Mouth Breathing—What No One Told You

Why Mouth Breathing Harms Health 0:00

What if the way that you're breathing is silently harming your health and no one told you about it? Well, not to be dramatic, but that's exactly what mouth breathing can do. Mouth breathing can affect all sorts of things from your oral health, whether you get cavities or not, to your breathing, your wellness, the way your brain works, your immunity, your mental health and on and on and on. Here at Total Care Dental, we have found that there are so many things that mouth breathing does influence and we have found natural root cause solutions for how to correct it and reverse some of the damaging aspects that come from it.

So what does mouth breathing cause? Well first of all it leads to a real dry mouth, right? Air is passing through the mouth all night long. Well that drying out can create a lot of problems with the teeth themselves because saliva is your natural tooth protectant. When it's dried out the teeth aren't protected and bacteria wreak havoc and lead to a lot of tooth decay. Also gums get really red and inflamed and tender and bleed easily when there's not a lot of saliva in the mouth. So that's the teeth effects.

Some of the other effects though are that the air that's coming through the mouth instead of the nose changes. You don't humidify it. The nose actually moistens the air that we breathe and so we get dry air straight into the lungs. It also filters. The nose filters things so you get dirty air straight into the tonsils or the lungs.

How Mouth Breathing Affects Teeth and Airway 1:32

The air also changes the way that the vasculature or the blood vessels work in the nose so when you're breathing through your nose you get something called nitric oxide forming which creates open blood vessels which allows that air that you're breathing to get deeper into the lungs to get into the muscles to get into your brain. When you're breathing through the mouth, it shortcuts all of that benefit. So you get hot, dry, unfiltered air that is not allowing that constriction or widening of the blood vessels to happen.

All of these are issues. The other thing that happens when mouth breathing is it actually changes the shape of the face during development. So if I see a child that's mouth breathing instead of nose breathing, I can almost predict that in the future they're going to have a small mouth, they're going to have crooked teeth, They're going to have airway or breathing issues that can show up as ADHD symptoms or bedwetting or focus problems, all sorts of things that you don't want down the road. So mouth breathing, is a big deal.

So you might wonder how do you know if you're mouth breathing? Well some of the signs are the things that I just described. If you wake up with a just bone dry mouth in the morning that's a sign that you are opening your mouth while you're asleep. Swollen tonsils are a sign because those tonsils then are bombarded by that hot dry unfiltered air. immune depression so you just feel like you're catching everything that comes along well again nothing is filtered as it comes in through the air and there's a lot of microbes coming in the air also you might notice things like fatigue you're just not feeling like you're refreshed in the morning even though

Signs You May Be Mouth Breathing 3:08

you feel like you slept okay and children we're going to see this show up as focus issues or tossing and turning their bed looks like there was a tornado that hit it in the morning you might also feel some of those same things hard time focusing depression just can't really feel like yourself all of these are signs that you are not getting air through the nose like you should and that your mouth breathing you're also going to see signs of growth and development issues in children a lot of long lean facial growth so what do we do about it well that's the question that les had when he arrived in my practice he was Long past growth and development, he actually was in his 50s and he had just had his first heart attack.

I say first because in his family, this is something that happened to most of the men. In fact, his father had died from a massive heart attack at about the same age that Les had had his first heart attack at. He'd also had uncles that had died from the same thing. So this was very concerning for him. As we talked, indeed, he did mouth breathe. He wakes up with a really dry mouth in the morning. red gums especially right here in the front where his lips have to open he just has a hard time focusing in the morning feels like he's never really fully rested a lot of the symptoms and signs that we talk about he had them all but the heart attack was the biggie and his wife had actually dragged him in because he was snoring So between all of these things, everything pointed to an airway problem, to the fact that he simply was not getting the air in where

Les's Heart Attack and Airway Problems 4:46

he needed it to go. And what did it do? Well, that lack of air and lack of air getting deeply into the muscles affected his heart function. It threw off the literal electrical signals in his heart and the beating of the heart, which led to, partially, what his heart attack was from. He was running scared at this point. He was so nervous that he was going to have another heart attack and leave his family, you know, at a young age. So he was willing to do anything at this point. As we looked in his mouth what we found out is that his mouth was very small.

Most likely, early on, developmentally, things had developed small, and part of it was because of a tongue tie. So what does a tongue tie have to do with this? Well, the tongue, part of the purpose of that tongue is when sucking, when an infant is brand new during those first few years of life, that tongue goes up against the nipple or the bottle, whatever they're sucking against, and that tongue pressure against the roof of the mouth actually forms the roof of the mouth. So he had a pretty severe tongue tie.

He was tying the tongue down to the floor of his mouth. I joked that he was probably a fussy baby kind of a colicky baby this is another sign that moms you can look for kind of a colicky baby because his tongue wasn't able to go all the way to the roof of the mouth so his face grew long and lean the jaw was very small now there wasn't room in his mouth for tongue for tissue for all of this Also, the roof of the mouth is the same bone as the floor of the nose. It's the same thing here. So if the roof of the mouth forms narrow, the nose also forms narrow.

Now you might think, great, I've got a really skinny nose. Bad because you can't breathe through it at all. This was the case for Les. So what did we do? We actually had a special appliance made that literally expands the roof of the mouth and as a result, the floor of the nose as well.

Tongue Tie, Expansion, and Myofunctional Therapy 6:34

What he noticed was that at about after six months or so, he could breathe through his nose easier than he ever could before. He started seeing some relief earlier than that because we also addressed his tongue position. We did something called Myofunctional Therapy, which trains the tongue how to come up and forward and out of the throat and airway. Also helping with nasal breathing some because if you're breathing through your nose, but it gets stuck and can't get past that big tongue, then you end up having to drop the mouth and bring the tongue forward.

All of these things. People even notice things and actually less notice that he was doing things like biting his tongue when he would focus or sticking his tongue out when he would focus. This was just bringing that tongue forward. So we did some revision. We did a tongue tie release and retrained his tongue what to do. All of these things were helping while we were expanding his mouth. All of these things put together all of a sudden after about a year, nine months to a year, he said, I'm keeping my lips closed at night and I feel like I actually slept when I woke up in the morning.

things have increasingly gotten better for him he's able to breathe through his nose now he's not getting sick nearly as often he feels more refreshed when he wakes up in the morning and really for him the big one is the heart attack and we don't know how that goes until we see his long-term history but what we've seen historically with a lot of our patients is that everything works better every cell works better when it's getting enough oxygen So what can you do? You need to first of all go see a dentist.

Come see us here at Total Care Dental. We'll do a cone beam CT scan. We'll determine is the mouth too small? Is the nose too small? Is everything too small to get air through it? If that's the case, we need to work to widen it.

How to Fix Mouth Breathing at the Root 8:20

Do you have a tongue tie? Do we need to retrain the tongue? All of those things are options as well. Sometimes people just do mouth taping. to help keep the lips together, but that doesn't fix the underlying problem. It may help some with the dry throat, the dry mouth, even some of the immunity issues, but really fixing the root cause is what we are all about here at Total Care Dental. This is something that you feel like we could help you with. We would love to see you here at Total Care Dental in Utah, but if you're not here close to us, then please go to LivingWellDrMichelle.com.

On that, I have a directory of dentists that are focusing on these exact things. This is simply to help you breathe better, live better, feel better, function better, because my whole goal is that you can live well.