Mark Bell's Power Project - Improve Your Nose to Upgrade Your Looks, Sleep & Performance - Sandra Kahn || MBPP Ep. 891

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

In this Podcast Episode, Sandra Kahn, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how the nose is EXTREMELY important in improving your performance and sleep, yet it is neglected. Forwardo...ntics website: https://www.forwardontics.com/index.html New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://hostagetape.com/powerproject Free shipping and free bedside tin! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en  Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Power Project family, how's it going? Now, this episode was pretty damn amazing. And if you want to look better, you're going to want to listen through the whole thing because we had Sandra Kahn on, who was the co-author of the book Jaws, who she wrote with Paul Ehrlich. But in this episode, you're going to learn how the way you eat and the way you breathe is negatively impacting the way your face and jaw develops, including the faces and jaws of your children. Another thing we learned is how proper oral posture or the way that your tongue sits in your mouth is also going to negatively impact the way that you breathe and the way you develop, which, as we know, impacts sleep, which is a huge thing. And there's so much more that we learned in this episode, so you want
Starting point is 00:00:39 to watch and sit through it. But also, if you guys have been enjoying the podcast and all the different guests and information we bring, it would help us out a lot also, if you guys have been enjoying the podcast and all the different guests and information we bring, it would help us out a lot if, if you're on YouTube, like the video and subscribe to the channel. But if you're on the audio side of the podcast, please give us a rating. It's been helping the podcast grow and reach more people and we really appreciate you all for that.
Starting point is 00:00:58 So without further ado, enjoy this episode with Sandra Khan. All right, let's just kick this off by maybe you can explain to us how you got into nasal breathing because we've been talking about it on the show for a long time. And I think there's maybe some things you're going to be able to walk us through that people will be excited about that we'll really be able to get a lot of value out of. So how did you kind of get into all this? I heard you earlier mentioned that you were a dentist and that kind of set you up to get into what you? I heard you earlier mention that you were a dentist. And did that kind of set you up to get into what you're into today? Well, I'm an orthodontist. So I used to do braces
Starting point is 00:01:31 on patients. And then I had my kids. And when they became, you know, they needed my work, I really didn't have any tools to help my own kid. My son had issues with mouth breathing and allergies and tonsils, adenoids, and he wasn't thriving. His jaws weren't growing right. And I was fortunate that his teeth were okay. So I knew that he had issues, but it wasn't a tooth problem. He had crowding or teeth problems. I would have probably just done that and expect those problems to go away.
Starting point is 00:02:08 But his teeth were okay, and I didn't know what to do. So I started looking in order to help my own kid. And I realized that we're basically connected. Some of my doctor friends and teeth colleagues now say that doctors treat patients without a mouth. And dentists, we treat mouth without a patient. And that's the state of how we work in dentistry and medicine. What were some of the symptoms that your kid was going through?
Starting point is 00:02:39 Well, he had all kinds of symptoms of hyperactivity. And one of the big symptoms with children is their mood state. He would throw a lot of tantrums. And I knew he wasn't sleeping well, but he had a lot of energy. It wasn't like he was falling asleep. So we got to understand that the symptoms of poor sleep are not always being tired for kids. They're actually the opposite. And the biggest thing when a kid doesn't breathe well, doesn't rest well, is they can't integrate their emotions.
Starting point is 00:03:12 So now we have, you know, questionnaire for kids that has seven questions. And four of those have to do with the emotional state and how they're doing in their relationships. And that's really important for deciding if there's a problem or not. And a sleep problem in a child will manifest itself in many ways, but they can be hyperactive, like overly energetic, and they can throw tantrums and they can have hard time with relationships. So this is something to look at. And my kids certainly had them all. Well, looking back on it now and knowing everything you know now, do you know what was maybe causing him not to be able to sleep well
Starting point is 00:03:57 and some things that you could have maybe done differently that you know? Well, I know for sure because he was my child how I breastfed him and then how he introduced solid foods. That's where, and this comes from Dr. Mew, John Mew, he's the first one that pointed that out, but it's how we introduce solid foods that's most important. And I did breastfeed my kid for over a year. So breastfeeding was okay, check. But then when I gave him solid foods, I started using a spoon and he was very, very hungry. He's an athlete and he was one of those kids that couldn't get enough. And I started giving him like, you know, oatmeal with a huge spoon and it was all over his face and he was engulfing everything. And, you know, that in Spanish we say entorpeció. It made
Starting point is 00:04:46 the whole learning of the tongue and the normal function get messed up because we use so many spoons. And I was more worried about giving him the amount of calories and the amount of food because he was very, very active. So I overfed him probably. And he engulfed everything. Later, he used to eat a hamburger in two bites and just engulf the whole thing. And I didn't spend the time teaching him how to chew, how to swallow. And obviously, there's some allergies. He's got asthma. And there were issues also with the breathing. So it's a compounding situation. It's not one single thing. But with my son, I could see every single part of what happened.
Starting point is 00:05:33 People ask me, well, if I do everything right, will they be okay? And we really don't know because there are, you know, a lot of kids where we're doing everything right. And there's still, their jaws are not growing well. There's new particles in the air. Since the 80s when we started using the screens, we started using the materials that are now in the air, and our nose is not made to filter anything bigger than two microns. So we're not filtering. So even if we do everything right, we might still have issues with our nose.
Starting point is 00:06:08 So we just, it's a new field and we are evolving. It's very interesting because Jaws came out in 2018. And I have four books post-Jaws. Some of them are out, some are not, some are in design, some are in addition. They have editors that are looking at them now. But I have four books of information since Jaws came out. And that's the great thing about science is that it evolves. And we learn, and with epidemiology, we look back and we see what happened. And then we say, okay, we used to think this, and this is not quite right.
Starting point is 00:06:46 So we have new hypotheses now. But definitely, I'm very, very focused on the nose. My new Stanford book, it's called Nose, capital N, capital O for nitric oxide. And I'm working with Paul Ehrlich, again, on the evolution of the nose. It's amazing. And an ENT, brilliant ENT that focuses on the nose.
Starting point is 00:07:05 We have to bring attention to the nose because the nose is not just a pathway for the air. It's actually an organ that adds a lot of important functions to our body. So the nose is a little bit of an ignored organ. That's what I'm focusing on now. Andrew, can you bring up the picture of the Chad-looking guy? Yeah. Giga Chad? Yeah, Giga Chad.
Starting point is 00:07:35 So your original, some of your original information, and I believe some of the information of some other colleagues of yours, I believe some of it's similar. Some of the belief is that we, in today's day and age, we have like a lot of soft foods and maybe we don't chew the same way as we used to as our ancestors. And then maybe therefore the formation of the jaw isn't what it used to be. The strength of the jaw is not what it used to be. And the shaping of the entire face starts to kind of happen through this
Starting point is 00:08:05 process. Maybe as a kid gets older, maybe they mouth breathe and, and things of that nature. And maybe they go from looking like the handsome gentleman at the top to ended up looking like the guy to the more like the, on the bottom there. Is that kind of about.
Starting point is 00:08:18 Yeah. I mean, the, the effects are clear. There's an epidemic. That's why we call Jaws the hidden epidemic. There is an epidemic where people don't have proper architecture in their face. Their jaws, their nose, their dental arches are too narrow.
Starting point is 00:08:38 And we know that that's a fact. The percentages and what we see are these. And we know we can look at the older skulls before the Industrial Revolution. They didn't have this shrinkage, right? And now we look at that as what we have. The question is, what is that from? Or what can we do to get back to where we were before? We're not going to get back to pre-industrial diets and lifestyle. We know, I don't know if you've seen my article that we published in Bioscience. That's really the article that it's definitive on genetics versus environmental impact on the jaws and the development of the teeth.
Starting point is 00:09:29 Yeah, I believe there's not enough time in evolution, right, for the jaw to have ended up the way that it's ended up. So we know the problem is there. How can we prevent it? How can we reverse it? What can we do? It's not clear. So it's a trial and error where we're trying to see if we give kids harder foods, if we wean them to solid foods with the new techniques that are popular, like baby
Starting point is 00:09:53 lead weaning, where we give the kids the solid food instead of using a spoon. And these things seem to be improving the situation and the growth. But we have a lot of things in the air now. The particles that are in the air, they were not there during the Industrial Revolution or before the Industrial Revolution. And since the 80s, since we've been doing the rare earth materials for the screens, we have particles in the air that are extremely difficult for our noses
Starting point is 00:10:29 to filter. So we have things in our body that we didn't have before. And what can parents do? We can try to have a nose that filters the best possible way. We can try to enhance the practices of breathing, of chewing, try to go back to what was normal and see if that will help develop better. It seems like it does, but it's not as easy to say you do this and you will have this one result. What are some of the right steps, do you think, for like the introduction of food? You know, Andrew's child is still pretty young, but I think he might have missed his window with reintroducing some of the foods. How does a parent reintroduce foods to a kid or introduce food to a kid, period? Well, I don't think we should go to mush. We shouldn't go from liquid diet, from breastfeeding,
Starting point is 00:11:26 then mush, then solid foods. I think that's reversed. We should do, and this is just a theory. It's not scientific. It's anecdotal. But I think we should go from liquid to solid. And once the babies develop, you know, they understand the tongue develops the strategies in order to move things around and chew, then we can introduce what we call viscous foods or mush or pot. But first we need to let the kids figure out, the children, how to chew,
Starting point is 00:11:55 use their teeth, use their tongue, move the food around. And again, we have techniques where we teach parents to be vigilant. So they have to not throw a carrot to your kid, right? But know how to get them out of trouble, how to, if they start choking, how to do an emergency procedure. But most kids will figure it out and will cough things out,
Starting point is 00:12:17 and we got to let them. It's like walking and tripping and then helping your kid to move along and learn how to walk. Same thing with chewing. The kids will chew, develop their fores, the muscles, and gum always helps. I've been in practices in Spain where they use a lot of gum. So giving gum to children, teaching them how to chew on both sides and making sure they have comfortable bites. And we give them foods that
Starting point is 00:12:42 have good consistency. That all helps. So those are techniques that we add on. So we give them foods that have good consistency, that all helps. So those are techniques that we add on. So we give them breastfeeding, then we introduce food, then we teach them how to chew. We give them gum. We tell them to chew on both sides. We make sure the bite is comfortable so they don't have any pain, cavities. All that affects the teeth. But we do have to understand that the floor of the nose
Starting point is 00:13:06 and the roof of the mouth are the same structure. So if we chew well, we will have a nice palate that will come down at its right time. But the palate, which is the floor of the nose, will come down and give space to the septum. If we don't chew well and we don't swallow well, then our palate stays too high. And because that takes room from the nose, the nose is a pyramid, and if we don't have a palate that comes down at the right time, then the septum doesn't have any room.
Starting point is 00:13:39 So when the time for the septum to grow comes, the septum doesn't have enough room, it'll be deviated. So a lot of deviated septums come from not having a good palate, not necessary trauma, having fallen or something. Oh, I always thought it was from getting like punched or something. Yeah, that's what people think. But a lot of pediatricians tell me that almost every kid has a deviated septum. And if you look at a kid that doesn't breathe well, or anybody that doesn't breathe well, you'll see that the roof of the mouth is very, very high.
Starting point is 00:14:09 And if you think of architecture, if you're taking the first floor and putting the roof higher into the second floor, then the second floor will have less room. So the second floor is the nose. So if the palate doesn't come down and it's high, you're taking room from the nose that has a septum that needs room. So a lot of the symptoms are getting just with natural growth because there's not enough room. And we were talking earlier about chewing and putting some pressure on the bone. And we know that if the bones don't have pressure, like when we send astronauts to space and there's no gravity, they lose bone, they lose minerals. So their bone has problems. So the same thing, if we're not chewing, then the bones are not being stimulated.
Starting point is 00:14:57 So we want to have that chewing to stimulate the growth so the palate doesn't come down because we're not chewing well. If we only have soft foods and we wean our kids to mush and then from there they go to hamburgers and mac and cheese and applesauce or whatever we give them, then they're not stimulating those bone cells. So we're not going to have that palate widening properly. The teeth will not fit. We'll have a narrow palate and that will connect into the nose. Power Project Family, how's it going? Now, we talk about sleep all the time on the podcast because it's one of the biggest things that helps you with your health and fitness,
Starting point is 00:15:33 your recovery, your muscle gain, your fat loss, everything. That's why we've partnered with Eight Sleep for such a long time now because the technology behind the mattress allows you to track your heart rate, the amount of times it takes you to fall asleep, your tosses and turns, your heart rate variability. It changes its temperature through the night based off how you sleep, but not only yourself, but maybe your partner on the other side of the bed. It is an amazing mattress. Andrew, how can they learn more? Yes, head over to 8sleep.com slash powerproject. That's 8 spelled out, E-I-G-H-T, sleep.com slash powerproject.
Starting point is 00:16:03 Along with more information, you guys will actually save $150 off of your entire order automatically. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. And what you were talking about, actually, I saw this in the book. It's interesting with everything that you talk about as far as like proper oral posture and the different habits that you need to have, not just as a child, but as you get older, in terms of the way that your mouth rests, the way you chew, etc. All those things are physical habits, whereas you were mentioning in the book, dentistry, they'll have appliances that are supposed to do these for you, right?
Starting point is 00:16:37 So what's the difference between what you do in forwardontics and dentistry? forwardontics and dentistry? Well, that's a very big topic. I'm hesitant to talk too much about it because there's no practitioners doing forwardontics. I have students in Europe and Mexico and different places, but some techniques like orthotropics, and there's orthotropics in the U.S. Forwardontics is just a term that we coined at Stanford because we didn't want to use the term orthotropics because we wanted to involve every technique or anything that you can do to grow forward.
Starting point is 00:17:14 So we called it forwardontics. I don't want to talk about it too much until we have enough practitioners so parents and people that want to get that treatment can find somebody to treat them. Got it. Myself, I don't even have a clinical practice right now. I'm too busy with research and books and stuff that I'm doing. So forward onyx really encompasses anything you can do to grow forward. So if you have a carrot and you can put it in front of someone and the jaws will grow that way, that would be a forward-onic treatment.
Starting point is 00:17:48 Anything that helps you grow forward as opposed to backwards. And orthodontics, regular orthodontics can have that focus where you can go to an orthodontist that will not push things back, will not give you headgear, will not give you the tools that will push you back. My ideal is that we learn to do all these things so that they happen naturally, that you don't have an artificial appliance that's doing it for you. I developed the bow, which is a headgear that actually the patent's on my son's name because he's the one that drew it and said, this is what I need. And so I had somebody make it for him. And that appliance helps put a little force on the jaw to come forward. But if you wear the bow and if you do expansion, then you teach yourself to hold your tongue in the right place with negative suction, then the tongue will be
Starting point is 00:18:44 your retainer, will be the maintenance for that forward development that you've created. As opposed to in orthodontics, I was in orthodontics for 25 years, and every single patient that had braces or in this line needed to have a retainer for the rest of their life. And that is not practical for anyone. So I wanted to find a way that what you do was permanent. And it can only be permanent if you hold the position through something that your body does naturally without, you know, thinking about it. And that's when we've,
Starting point is 00:19:19 you know, I started working with Dr. Engelke, who has published all the effects of holding negative suction in your mouth. If you hold a little bit of suction in your mouth, your tongue naturally goes to the roof of your mouth and it stays there. And the tongue will hold the shape of the jaw. So if you expand or you have any type of treatment, and then when you're done, you train yourself to recognize, not to fabricate it, just to recognize it. So you know when it's happening and then you can sustain it. So if you train yourself to hold your tongue with negative flexion, then that space will be taken on by the tongue and the teeth, the jaws will always be around that.
Starting point is 00:19:58 And you will have a, you know, that forward onic result will auto-maintain, which is the ideal. So this is actually interesting. I think probably people that are listening can kind of start thinking, if you are just walking around or you're chilling or even you're listening to the podcast and your tongue is at the bottom of your mouth, that's not necessarily the proper oral resting posture you're supposed to have, correct? Yes. This is something anybody listening could do,
Starting point is 00:20:25 which is put your teeth together and then swallow. We call it the invisible swallow. That means that you swallow without making any faces. And you can do it if you're driving. You're not going to look in the mirror. But if you're at home, just look in the mirror. Put your teeth lightly together and then swallow, thinking about putting the back of your tongue up.
Starting point is 00:20:46 And then hold that. After you swallow, usually we tell, or the protocol is to swallow three times really hard. And then you feel kind of all the tissues glue together. And we say they consolidate in front of the roof of the mouth. So that opens your airway. And you can teach yourself to hold that. It's hard to hold it if you don't have enough room,
Starting point is 00:21:08 and most of us don't have enough room. If you have enough room, you can teach yourself, and it will just naturally go park itself up there. But most of us don't have enough room, so we have to use something to help us recognize it and hold it at night, like our lip lockers that you can use. Or like you guys are talking about tape. That can be an adjunct that can help you while you learn that position.
Starting point is 00:21:35 And this is the lip locker. Yes. What's the negative impact of this? What have you seen? What's the epidemic? What's the negative impact of this? Like what have you seen? Like what's the epidemic?
Starting point is 00:21:50 Well, the epidemic, we have enough research on the fact that if you are not breathing well and you're not resting well, you're not recovering well, you will have side effects that can be, you know, they can go anywhere from just being tired to being, you know, having your cells being under stress. And stress is a cause of so many diseases, especially what we call Western diseases. So if you have a predisposition for disease and your cells are not protecting you,
Starting point is 00:22:18 then you're going to get to have that disease earlier in life. And we can't really say if you don't have a good jaw, you will develop Alzheimer's. That's not a result that can be... It's not scientific, yeah. Yeah, but we know that there's the resting mode and then there's the active mode. We have the sympathetic and the parasympathetic.
Starting point is 00:22:47 And we've done work in Stanford with Dr. Sapolsky, who's an expert in stress. And he basically knows that the more stress, the more you're going to break down yourself. So we want to be in parasympathetic, which is the rest and repair mode, as opposed to in the sympathetic, which is a fight and flight. Fight and flight is useful, but it should be very short and we should get out of it. But as humans, we're carrying on this stress because we're always thinking we're being in danger. That's what stress is. So our cells are vulnerable. If we are in parasympathetic mode, our cells are not vulnerable. So we want to be as long as possible in this parasympathetic rest and repair, digest. These are the longer times. So when we're asleep,
Starting point is 00:23:39 we want to be only in parasympathetic. If our mouth is open and we're struggling to breathe, We want to be only in parasympathetic. If our mouth is open and we're struggling to breathe or if we have sleep apnea, we are going to be the same as if a tiger was attacking us in the middle of the night. So we're going to put all our energy into fighting that stress, and we're going to leave ourselves vulnerable to disease. So these are all theories that we're looking into, but definitely having good sleep, good rest, good breathing will make us healthier. And the other thing is we look better.
Starting point is 00:24:14 The health, this is something that's in Jaws, in our appearance chapter. If you look better, you're probably going to be healthier because we are designed to be attracted to the mates that are going to have the best possibility to have healthier offsprings. So a nice jaw will look good because it's a healthy jaw, not because we just want to, you know, we think it's an opinion that we look better. We're going to be healthier if we have wider jaws with the possibility to breathe better. Good. I was just going to add to that. You know, there's such huge problems with people's sleep. And when it comes to nutrition, when it comes to exercise, people can overdo their food. They can underdo their exercise. They can underdo their exercise.
Starting point is 00:25:05 People can overdo their exercise, right? You can kind of have this wide variety of things. And what I usually say is as long as it doesn't negatively impact your sleep, as far as you, maybe somebody is trying to diet for a bodybuilding show, but once they get down to those last couple of weeks, that better just be a temporary position that you're in because it's going to be very difficult to sleep as you get leaner and more calorie deprived. On the other end of it, you have people that are eating probably too much food before they go to bed. Maybe they traditionally overeat and they're heavy and they're having a hard time going to sleep simply because they may have like sleep apnea, which I would imagine would be related to your body weight. But maybe it's more related to some of the airways.
Starting point is 00:25:46 But that's one of the main reasons why we're talking to you today is because so much of this has to do with the way that we breathe. And for people to, you know, sometimes people hear these kind of rabbit holes that we go down and they think it's outrageous or crazy, but I don't think it's crazy or outrageous for us to try to examine how can we breathe better. You know, breathing is definitely the one action that is most important.
Starting point is 00:26:13 Of everything that we do, breathing is most important. And there's something my ENT was talking about it when we were writing the new book, Nose. about it when we were writing the new book, Nose. He says, breathing is the only function that has two organs that we can use for the same. Like we have organs that we have two organs doing one thing, like two eyes, two ears, but we only have one function that has two organs. So you can breathe through your nose and your mouth because breathing is so important. And we have to make sure that we optimize the breathing based on whatever we want to achieve. So breathing is not, okay, breathe through your nose all the time. No. As humans, we can breathe through our mouth and that has helped us be the dominant animal in the planet. We can cool ourselves off. We can breathe through our mouth.
Starting point is 00:27:07 If we have an accident with our nose, we can compensate and breathe through our mouth. And we can have that extra air when we need to get away from danger. So breathing through our mouth is not bad. But we have to determine what are we breathing for. And when you're, you know, in athletics and, you know, that's not necessarily my field, nutrition and bodybuilding and, you know, lifting weights and all that. But I am involved in trying to get every sport has different demands of oxygen. You're not going to breathe the same if you're a swimmer than if you're a boxer. A boxer has a device in their mouth, so they cannot mouth breathe when they're doing their sport. And then they stop, and they have to recover really fast, and they have to get back into the sport, where a swimmer will swim, and then they're done. And they mouth
Starting point is 00:28:02 breathe. So it's adequate for a swimmer to mouth breathe. And it's fantastic that we can do it because we can go into the pool and swim. A lot of animals cannot. They cannot put their head in the water or whatever. So we have to decide what the function is. And then we actually have different types of breathing. We have mixed breathing, we have nasal breathing, we have mouth breathing, we have, you know, different positions that we can keep our jaw depending on what we're trying to do. And in that sense, you want to guide people to breathe the most efficient way for what they're doing, and then try to get as fast as possible into your recovery breathing. Recovery breathing, we call it uplock breathing because that's the breathing where you have
Starting point is 00:28:51 a little bubble of space, not air, but space in the roof of the mouth, and that bubble actually holds the tongue away from the airway. So that we call it uplock, like a plane that's flying. The uplock is the wheels that go up, but they stay up without active energy. So you want your athlete or the person to go back into that mode as soon as possible because that's when we regenerate better.
Starting point is 00:29:22 And we should spend more time in that position. And that's when we are looking at athletes and we're trying to do studies to see if their pulse goes back faster to the resting pulse when they're in this position, if their lactic acid is being used more efficiently when they're in this position. So we got to bring the athlete back into recovery because that's the key. And I know you guys are, you know, you get neurologists and you show too.
Starting point is 00:29:55 And we talk about recovery and you want to regenerate your cells and you want to have protection from disease. So going to that mode of recovery faster is better. And I like to talk about the extremes because that gives us a clear picture of where we're at. And if we look at the extreme in life, when people are dying, they usually have a mouth open. If you go to a hospice situation, you will see that people are struggling to get air, and they open their mouth to get more volume because the respiration in the cell is inefficient. The wall is not allowing the oxygen to go in, so we want more volume. That's why we open the mouth. In the other
Starting point is 00:30:45 extreme, newborns should only breathe through their nose. They can't even breathe through their mouth. A baby cannot breathe through their mouth, a newborn. So those are the two extremes. We know the baby, everything's new, right? Like you get a new car, everything functions well, everything's great. And that's the baby. Its parts are new. So we're breathing through our nose. When everything is falling apart, we're breathing through our mouth. So what do we want in the middle? To try to stay in the nasal recovery breathing as much as possible because that's when we are going to have things work better.
Starting point is 00:31:22 And if our cell is efficient and the respiration inside the cell is happening properly, then we don't need a lot of volume. When we need that volume is when, you know, when we're not getting what we need. Our mitochondria are not getting the energy that they need to function inside the cell because the lungs might not be getting enough air. And that can be because our nose is inefficient or because our jaw is too small. And we have things that are in the path of that air. And we have to get more volume because we're not getting that efficiency.
Starting point is 00:31:58 So in that sense, for athletes that are working on different programs that you advise, you need to figure out what they're doing and then make sure the recovery is the best possible recovery. Sleep, obviously, is important. If they're doing something short term, it's fine. But for the long term health maintenance, you want them to have good sleep. And without good breathing, there's no possibility of good recovery have good sleep. And without good breathing, there's no possibility of good recovery and good sleep. Is it possible, because we've had a few people that have come onto the show and we've asked them about snoring and some of them have said, snoring is not a big deal,
Starting point is 00:32:35 but is it possible to be able to breathe through your mouth at night and not have it be a problem for your health? Or is that a problem that you need to figure out? Look, we have a tendency to compensate. And everything, not only humans, every being in the planet can compensate. And the question is who can compensate better? And when do you get to the breakdown? If you are snoring a little bit, but you are getting good sleep, your stress is low, you have good body mass index, and there's other things that are good, then snoring might not be a huge problem.
Starting point is 00:33:18 If you start gaining weight and you have a very stressful life and you live in a polluted place and you add more things and you won't be able to compensate. So every individual is different, but the need for oxygen and for nose breathing is the same for everyone. But some of us can compensate better than others, and we can try to thrive. I love the wellness community because the wellness community is not necessarily a sick community. It's actually healthy, but they want to make sure they continue to be healthy. And some comedians say they're greedy because they're already healthy, but they want more. And yeah, we are greedy. I consider myself healthy, but they want more. And yeah, we are greedy.
Starting point is 00:34:05 I consider myself healthy, but I don't want to be sick. My ex-husband always says, if Sandra is in pain, the whole world is in pain. So we have to make sure that she's not suffering. So I don't like to be in pain. I don't like to suffer. I like to be healthy. I don't want to have things that don't work well in my body. That's why I do the work it takes.
Starting point is 00:34:28 And in any case, we want to be well. We want to make sure we focus on the things that can help anybody be better. And the nose is one of them because, as my ENT that's writing with me now says, the nose doesn't have a disease. Nobody goes and says, oh, I have a disease of my nose. It's very rare. We do have ear infections. We have an infection in your eye or your throat, but nobody's sick of the nose. So as doctors, they go to medical school and they are taught how to, okay, you have this disease, you cure it this way. You have this disease, you cure it this way.
Starting point is 00:35:10 And that's what you learn in medical school. You don't learn to maintain health, to foster health. And I don't talk about prevention. This I got from Dr. Fuster, Valentin Fuster, head of cardiology in New York. He said, don't talk about prevention because prevention is also focusing on, I don't want this one bad thing to happen. So prevention is already talking about disease.
Starting point is 00:35:39 Talk about fostering health. How can we foster all the activities that will make us healthier? And that's what the wellness community does. And this is what we're trying to teach anybody that comes into the Forward Onyx universe is, okay, all these things will make you better. I don't know if they're going to prevent a bad problem from happening, but we know from experience that all these things can help you improve your situation and keep it that way. You mentioned earlier getting your tongue kind of away from your airway. What does that mean? Well, you don't want, if there's a tube, if you have a pipe in your house, you don't want
Starting point is 00:36:17 anything inside that pipe, right? You want that pipe to be free for the flow, right? You want the air that gets injected to go in from the environment to your lung with little effort. So if the tongue or the soft palate are in that tube, it's going to be harder. You're going to have to create an effort to get the air into the lung. So if you learn to suction that tongue away from the airway, that soft palate away from the airway, then there's a tube that's open that can very efficiently take in the air without taking energy from the individual. And basically we can just kind of keep that airway open just by keeping the tongue to the roof of the mouth.
Starting point is 00:37:09 You suggested like swallowing three times kind of gives you like a little bit of suction. Now what would be really cool if there was a product or some sort of device that helps keep your tongue to the roof of your mouth. You've been working on a product for a while now? Yeah, actually I have more ideas than things that I've made available. But actually, we have created CPAP that actually has a little tube that helps you with that negative suction. And it does it for you. Because some people cannot do it on their own. If your jaw is too narrow, you're never going to be comfortably holding your tongue by
Starting point is 00:37:45 itself. So if you cannot get expansion, if your tongue is very wide and you cannot hold it by itself, then we have we call it the Oblux CPAP that we've designed. We also have the activators that go
Starting point is 00:38:01 in a manometer and that help you measure the pressure inside your mouth so you know when you're doing it right. And that gives you the positive reinforcement that if you know and you look at a number and you go, okay, this number is right, then you can make sure you stay in that area the longest. Also, we have a manometer that helps us measure the nose. We call it the nasometer. And you can put it outside your nose and it can tell you how much resistance there is. So you
Starting point is 00:38:34 know if your nose is free or if you have to struggle to get the air in. And we say, if you're trying to take air through a cocktail straw, it's going to take a lot of struggle from your lungs and from your chest to generate the suction. If you're trying to breathe through a fire hose, then you don't need to work as hard. So that's why we want an open airway that doesn't have anything flopping in there. And your tongue, your soft palate, all the soft things inside in the back of your throat, also tonsils and adenoids can also block. They're not in the nose, but they're in the pharynx. And they can also cause, you know, the passage to be blocked. And you have to, again, expend more energy in order to pull the air in. You know, this might be, and I want us to come back to this, but you did mention the
Starting point is 00:39:26 tonsils. The tonsils and the wisdom teeth are something that you hear a lot of people end up getting removed. I know maybe there are some situations where they actually, the tonsils need to get removed. But when, let's say a dentist is telling somebody's teenage kid or whatever, hey, you're going to have to get your tonsils removed. telling somebody's teenage kid or whatever, hey, you're going to have to get your tonsils removed.
Starting point is 00:39:50 What should parents be thinking about if it's actually something that's needed or how would they know if it's necessary or if it's not? Look, every case is individual and you have to evaluate what's going on. If something is not optimal and it's actually causing a problem, we can sometimes remove it if it doesn't have a function or if it's not functioning properly. So if you have tonsils and adenoids that are enlarged, that have atrophied, that are too big and they're not doing their job, then sometimes they can be removed.
Starting point is 00:40:25 Ideally, they have a function. They're filtering. But if they're too big and they're a problem, if your jaw didn't grow enough and you don't have room and your wisdom teeth don't have room to be in, you have to remove them because you can get an infection. They can get stuck. So you have to evaluate every case.
Starting point is 00:40:46 Ideally, you don't want to remove anything in the body, right? But you have to evaluate the case. And sometimes tonsils may get big, distended, because they have to do filtering, constant filtering, because we're mouth breathing, or we're in a situation where there's pollution and the immunity part of the body has created several areas of protection so that whatever's in the air doesn't go to your lung. So the tonsils will be protecting you, the adenoid will be protecting you. But if they're forced and they're not doing their job well, you might have to remove them because they might be causing more damage than help. It just depends.
Starting point is 00:41:33 I do know cases like my son never had them removed, and they were big. When he started nose breathing, the nose started filtering, so the tonsil didn't have to filter that much and it became smaller so he didn't have to have it removed so in some cases if you fix the filtering problem then the other part will you know improve my kids both of them didn't have their their wisdom teeth removed and they're just now coming in on their early teenagers. But we expanded their jaw a lot. You know, when my son goes to the dentist and they have to take a mold, he's not a big guy, but he uses the extra, extra large
Starting point is 00:42:15 because his expansion is a caveman expansion. So question about when you say you expanded the jaws a lot, you guys didn't use a device for that or was it just through habits? No, we used a device. You used devices to expand the jaw. He used a bow. He used the Stage 1 mu appliance, which is fantastic. There's a plug for the best orthodontic device there is.
Starting point is 00:42:39 What's it called again? It's part of the orthotropic armamentarium or tools, and it's the stage one, which is an expander, and the bottom one has been redesigned by Dr. Wong, and it's a great appliance that gets so much room, and you can use it
Starting point is 00:42:57 in four-year-olds as early as you want. I know Dr. Santos in Argentina, she uses it on two-year-olds. So she gets the expansion early. We're now working with a group of neonatologists and we have a series of pacifiers
Starting point is 00:43:15 to get the expansion and the proper breathing and the proper tongue posture from the day the kids are born with a series of different pacifiers that they can transition into. So you can do expansion with a lot of devices. And the key is to make the house bigger so the furniture can fit. And if the house is big enough, then you can train yourself to get the furniture right.
Starting point is 00:43:43 So the tongue, if you have enough room, you can train the tongue to hold that room and maintain what we're calling this fostering of health. But you do need the architecture to be bigger. In the case of my children, we had to expand them because I didn't know what I know now. And if you start with the little kids and they have good habits, they may not need anything.
Starting point is 00:44:04 We all know people that didn't need any braces and they breathe fine and have beautiful jaws and they never had any work, but they probably had a good environment. So the earlier you work with the environment and get it right, the less devices you have to use. But if you're at the point where you need to use devices, then if you're very young, you can use devices that are very easy. As you get older, you might need more complicated devices. If you're an adult, you might need surgery. And surgery can be done very well and minimally invasive with less side effects if the right surgeon and the right team helps.
Starting point is 00:44:42 Also, if you have snoring, sleep apnea. and the right team helps. Also, if you have snoring, sleep apnea, if you have a team, like we have a team, we just did a snoring workshop in Mexico. We had the ENT, the sleep physician, the lab technician, and the orthodontist all in one room for five days with the same patient. So we were able to cure everybody from their sleep apnea
Starting point is 00:45:01 because we had the four treating doctors involved and we had the technician and we had a scope that went down the nose so we saw exactly where the problem was. So we were able to cure everyone, but only because we worked together as a team. So the solutions are there, but they're complicated. The earliest you change the environment, the less you're going to have to mitigate with more invasive techniques. You have this lip lock. I've seen you were showing us some people training with it, which is really fascinating. What would it do for sleep? Somebody that is having a hard time keeping their tongue on the roof of your mouth. I tried the product and I was messing with it and you can kind of suction, I guess,
Starting point is 00:45:51 however hard you think, however hard you want, but you mentioned kind of keeping it just lightly on the roof of the mouth. What have people reported with that product? Have people really noticed big differences in sleep? And have you been able to actually test it with things that are tracking your sleep and things like that? Well, yes. And it's exciting because we have the first study out of Spain. It's going to publication where they actually used a lip locker with children that had tonsil and adenoidectomy. And they had a group that just had the surgery, and they went home,
Starting point is 00:46:31 and they had a group that had the surgery, and they were given the lip locker. And actually, the ones that were given the lip locker started nose breathing and did a lot better than the other ones. So that was very exciting. This is a study that was done in children. And, you know, like everything, there's a learning curve, and you have to be, you know, with someone that can guide you on how to use it. And certainly you can get it and use it at home and figure it out,
Starting point is 00:46:59 but you do have to, like I said, have the right architecture, the right width to be able to hold the negative suction. Most of us can do it if we can swallow. If anybody listening can swallow, they can generate negative suction. Some people can't swallow. We're working with older people that lose the swallowing reflex and some of our cleft kids at Stanford, they can't swallow. They have to use a feeding tube. But anybody that can swallow can generate negative pressure because we don't swallow by pushing. We swallow by creating negative pressure, and then the seal breaks,
Starting point is 00:47:38 and then by suction, the saliva accelerates into the esophagus, which is quite far. So we have to create that negative suction. So anybody that can swallow can do it. The key is, can you hold that suction lightly? Most of us can't. You can train yourself, like learning curve, like a bicycle. You do it first with the little extra wheels, and then you take them off as you get good at it. If we don't have room, we might never be able to do it. But the lip locker, it helps you hold that pressure. Recognize it and hold it for longer periods. I do have people, I don't even call them patients because they're not even my patients,
Starting point is 00:48:28 but people that use it, and in one night they start sleeping well and they feel their nose is cleared off because if you have negative pressure inside your mouth, that translates into, because of the gradient of pressures, into the nose naturally pulling air. So the nose becomes more efficient if you have negative pressure inside your mouth. So I've had people report, we have tons of testimonials of people that put it on and all of a sudden they sleep better and their nose feels, you know, more clear. And that's been exciting. But we do have to do the research and we do have to, you know, see the variables and compare
Starting point is 00:49:01 things scientifically so we can make more statements about this. But the first study was very, very exciting because the kids after surgery that were mouth breathers became nose breathers. And these were only kids. So when you work with kids, it's fantastic because you have the clay to form the individual and you can fix the problem so easily. Adults, it'll take a little bit longer, but we're definitely going to look into doing research on how to help people that are struggling.
Starting point is 00:49:31 I think this is really cool because, you know, we were talking about this off air and Andrew actually mentioned something interesting. You know, sometimes when people tape their mouth shut at night, their tongue is still resting at the bottom of their mouth. So even though they might be breathing through their nose, they're not doing what you're talking about just because their mouth is shut. So this is something, it's another habit that you need to try to ingrain during your day. And this can actually help with that so that whether you're sleeping with mouth tape or not, if you can create that suction, you can then start breathing through your nose. But it's an action that you need to continue to take so you can build that intrinsic habit. Yeah, I noticed for myself that
Starting point is 00:50:10 my jaw will kind of open up and kind of relax. So I was like trying to figure that out. I'm like, how do I keep my jaw, even with mouth tape on, the teeth will, the mouth tape won't come off. It will keep my lips shut. I'm still breathing in on my nose, but my jaw will open up a little bit. won't come off. It will keep my lips shut. I'm still breathing in on my nose, but my jaw will open up a little bit. Yeah, it's the problem when we're trying to do things as adults when the shape is not right. And if the shape is not right, we can try to improve the situation, but it's not going to be, you know, correct at 100%. So we have to figure out if we need surgery, if we can do a little bit of expansion, and if we can focus on something and improve it.
Starting point is 00:50:49 Normally we can, just by knowing what to do, we can improve it in some percentage. And when we go to sleep, we are going to relax. Otherwise we can't sleep. There's no way you can do something and practice it mechanically and then go to sleep and have that happen while you're asleep. We will relax. So your muscles, it doesn't matter how much tone you have and you build, your muscles will relax. This is why utilizing the dynamic of fluids, that suction,
Starting point is 00:51:21 the dynamic of fluids, that suction, is the one thing that can hold a heavy tongue. Tongues can be up to 250 grams. They can be very heavy. And the suction, one of the examples we use, if you take a syringe and you put your finger in the tip, without a needle, obviously, and you try to pull the plunger, if that space is closed,
Starting point is 00:51:50 it doesn't matter how hard you pull, the plunger will not come out. So if we use that concept and we think of that space that I talked about in the roof of the mouth, if that has negative pressure, the tongue can't stay. But we have to learn, recognize it, and then, you know, make it second nature. And that takes a long time. And everybody has to find their own point where they can hold it or not. And then, you know, I know some people even wear things under their jaw to try to keep it. And, you know, if you're not going to have surgery, you don't have access to expansion,
Starting point is 00:52:27 and you want that to be a situation for you, you might be able to find a little, in Spanish we say muletilla, like something that holds you and helps you get there, even if you have to do it all the time. I think we need like a helmet at this point. Power Project family, we talk about meat all the time on the podcast because protein is essential for your health. That's why I partner with Piedmontese. And if you head to their website, they have such so much different types of beef. They have beef sticks, beef jerky, tons of different cuts of meat. You should go check
Starting point is 00:52:57 them out. Andrew, how can they learn more? You guys got to head over to piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com. And at checkout, enter promo code POWER to save 25% off your entire order. And if your order is over $150 or more, you get free two-day shipping. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. You were mentioning that you sometimes wear the lip lock even when you're training? Mm-hmm. You know, I train a little bit of interval weights and I do like to wear my lip locker when I'm training. It just gives me a little, like a solid place to be when I'm
Starting point is 00:53:36 not exerting myself aerobically. And, you know, for me, it's a habit now. I think my mouth goes there naturally but it just gives me that, it's more like a security blanket for me. And when you're lifting weights, you want to make sure that you're not breathing through your mouth. I'm not a trainer myself but my trainer says it's good to have your tongue on the roof of your mouth when you're lifting weights. Even people that are not focused in breathing,
Starting point is 00:54:12 when you're lifting heavy weights, a lot of the trainers say, you know, push your tongue up in the roof of your mouth. It gives you like that solid, you know, structure to kind of anchor from. And then I saw you had athletes wearing it, like doing some aerobic activities, cyclists and things like that, but that was maybe a slightly different device, or is that the same one? No, we're trying the lip locker with athletes. I'm working at the hospital at Göttingen in Germany with athletes, and they're using these lip lockers for so many things. They want to
Starting point is 00:54:46 determine what we call the switch point. And the switch point is when you go from nose breathing into a combined breathing through the mouth and nose. This is when your body, whatever activity you're doing, has a requirement of more volume of air. So when you need more volume, then you breathe through your mouth. And that's what they call the switch point. So when you're soccer players, let's say, they're playing and you want them to be nose breathing. And then when they're running after the ball, you want them to get as much air so they go into the switch point. And sometimes the longer it takes to get into the switch point, the more fit you are. Again, I go to the extremes.
Starting point is 00:55:31 If you have somebody that's very unfit, heavy, unfit, doesn't do an activity, walks 10 steps and has to stop and mouth read. And if you have a marathon runner, they can run for an hour without exerting themselves. So the longer it takes to get to the switch point, the more fit you are. So this is something that we're doing. We're like the cyclists, the endurance athletes, they put it on and they try to keep it on as long as possible. And then we're checking their lactic acid. We're looking at their resting pulse and see if they get to the resting pulse faster. So when they're done with their sport, they put this on, and then we measure their pulse,
Starting point is 00:56:14 and we compare it to when they're mouth breathing. And they're getting back into their resting pulse faster. And so we're looking into sports and using this as something that you can have with you. It's very non-intrusive. Some of the bikers put it in a string and they put it in and out. Although we saw that more, they keep it in the mouth and they open their mouth and they're able to breathe under the lip locker. And locker when they're going up the hill. And then as soon as they can, they suction again. They swallow two or three times, and they suction again, and they keep going.
Starting point is 00:56:52 So the long endurance athletes are using it physically. And it also helps you pay attention to your breathing, and that's always valuable in every activity so with the um what is it called the activator is that what it's called right the this guy right here uplocker this one though yeah okay so will this because like when i swallow three times and then i keep my tongue up what ends up happening is more saliva will come out and I end up losing that suction. So will this help like prep me and keep that from happening? Well, saliva is an issue.
Starting point is 00:57:32 So you have to, like I said, there's a learning curve. If you suck too hard, you will squeeze your salivary glands and you can hurt your teeth and your gums. If you're a mouth breather, your gums might start bleeding. So you have to learn to recognize that light pressure. And it does take some time of using it. When I started using it, I definitely was hurting my teeth. I would use it while I was driving for 45 minutes.
Starting point is 00:58:03 And when I took it off, my teeth were sore. And when I connect the manometer and I saw the pressure that I was holding, I was holding almost the same pressure from the swallow, which can be from minus 100 to 200 millibars of negative pressure. So swallowing generates a lot of pressure. But swallowing is a very fast movement. It happens very quickly. And then you go into the longer, you know, the posture after you swallow is longer. So you need to let go of
Starting point is 00:58:33 that pressure and go all the way to the 10% of the pressure that you use for swallowing. You just go down to 10% and you learn to hold it. And definitely when you first use it, the little membrane gets full of saliva and you take it out and it's like all over the place. And as you use it more, you learn not to be squeezing the salivary glands. Also, your brain thinks anything you put inside your mouth, immediately you're going to salivate because your brain says, oh, it's food. I need to salivate because your brain says, oh, it's food. I need to salivate. Until you keep it there long enough where your brain says, oh, this is part of me now.
Starting point is 00:59:10 So you will stop that salivation. So it's that learning curve that it takes a little while. But I do get a lot of, especially with children, moms that call me and say, you know, my kid watches TV for an hour and he knows that I will turn the TV off if the bubble is not in. And so she goes in and checks the bubble and the kids are holding it and the kids figure out very easily how to hold it with minimal pressure so the bubble stays in. So the kids are smart doing that and we can learn that by using it a lot. On the topic of like moms and kids, there are some mothers who they're not able to breastfeed.
Starting point is 00:59:47 And in JAWS, you talked about how breastfeeding actually helps with the development of those different muscles for children, right? So are there ways that if a child is unable to get breastfed that they can still get the same development as children that are getting breastfed? Look, there's not one thing that will make it or break it. Breastfeeding is important for many reasons. I'm not a lactation specialist. But when we breastfeed, we have connection with the mom. We have the chemical and immune benefits of the milk, we have the muscle action, we're sucking in and we're squeezing the muscles,
Starting point is 01:00:34 and it's much harder to generate that suction when we're breastfeeding. The one thing that we know now from looking at breastfeeding and not MRIs, ultrasound, we know that the tongue doesn't squeeze the breast. The tongue just allows a generation of pressure by sliding forward and back. So there's a lot of things with breastfeeding that are extremely valuable. So if we can do anything, if we can recreate breastfeeding for people that cannot do it, that's better. But we can mitigate not having breastfed with other things. I love pacifiers.
Starting point is 01:01:15 I actually have designed a series of four transitional pacifiers that help with breathing and development of the jaw. I'm very excited about that because the pacifier helps you generate this suction. And if you look at a baby, I have tons of videos. I'm always taking videos of babies with pacifiers. You see a baby in a stroller and you see physically how they are creating that suction. And they're completely asleep, and you see them,
Starting point is 01:01:46 and then they stop. And then probably they lost the suction, and they start again, totally asleep. They start, and they generate this suction. So their tongue, the roof of the mouth, the soft palate, everything's away from their airway. And they are naturally doing it with the pacifier. And I was obsessed with pacifiers because somebody told me oh sandra you hate pacifiers i said where i've written seven books
Starting point is 01:02:10 and i've never said a single bad thing about pacifiers i adore them but people think because i don't like the bottle the you know the in spanish it's called the baby bottle if i don't like that artificial then they immediately think that the pacifier is bad. But the pacifier, we even have evidence of pacifiers for hunter-gatherers that they were using and they think they were given to the babies because it helps you generate that suction, that healthy airway from the day you're born. So pacifiers are great. Pacifiers show us how a child, an infant, is generating that negative pressure, and it's holding it while they're asleep. So if a baby, I mean, we say, you know, I don't know why we say I slept like a baby
Starting point is 01:03:01 because babies wake up all night. It's horrible. But babies rest. They sleep a lot and they rest well and they're growing when they're sleeping. And when you give them a pacifier, we can see them doing this one thing, sucking, holding negative pressure, and then they lose it for whatever reason and they do it again and they're completely asleep. So they are naturally, their brain is maintaining a free air
Starting point is 01:03:25 way through the use of this negative pressure. And this is new stuff. I didn't know this when I wrote Jaws. I had no clue. Jaws is from 2018. And now I have, you know, four books that I've written. They're not out, all of them, but I've written four books or three and a half since Jaws. And now I understand this negative pressure, which I didn't know about. And Dr. Engelke's work in Germany, he's the one that has been publishing on this stuff since the 2000s. And he's an ENT, maxillofacial surgeon, phonology, triple PhD. He spent eight years focusing on the soft palate.
Starting point is 01:04:07 He learned about the soft palate for eight years. Very German, very obsessed. And the knowledge that he has and the way he does science is so clean and so everything's evidence-based. And I went to Germany to learn about all this. And it makes sense. And when we look at the science, and anecdotally we look at a baby, we're like, yeah, there it is, right there. They're creating that negative suction.
Starting point is 01:04:35 So let's just teach our babies to hold it. And when you're breastfeeding, you need that suction, negative pressure. And then when you're done breastfeeding and you move to a cup or solid foods or whatever you're going, let's have a pacifier to make sure we maintain a healthy airway with the tongue in the right position. And these kids will grow so much healthier than the kids of the last generation.
Starting point is 01:05:02 I'm excited. People didn't used to have crooked teeth? Nope. Like the skulls that got studied and stuff like that that's talked about in your book, right? Yeah. That is a modern situation, modern disease. The paleontologist from Stanford, I just forgot his name, but he's held more skulls, pre-industrial, pre-agricultural skulls than anybody else.
Starting point is 01:05:28 And he says he's never seen one with crooked teeth. After, you know, we developed agriculture about 10,000 years ago. So after agriculture was introduced, then we started seeing a little bit of crowding. And then it spiraled after industrialization. That's when really the problem started. And the last 10, 20 years has been disastrous. Dr. Santos in Argentina that treats two-year-olds, she tells me that the two-year-olds are coming in like monsters. She says she's never, I mean, she's also in her 50s, and she's been a pediatric dentist, orthodontist for decades.
Starting point is 01:06:08 And he says just in the last few years, and the pandemic is even creating more problems, more mouth breathing and more problems with the teeth. She says that two-year-olds already have issues. In the last generation, you know, when I was a kid, two-year-olds did not have problems with crowding. That came later.
Starting point is 01:06:28 And now every kid, you know, needs to have braces because the situation is just spiraling out of control. That's why we called it an epidemic. Mm-hmm. What do you suspect might also be at play, might also be happening if our jaws are kind of not optimal, not optimized? Do you think that might be putting like undue pressure on the neck causing like forward head posture? Or I know you like to stick to like the science, but what are just some of your thoughts on that? No, well, posture,
Starting point is 01:06:57 there's a lot of science on posture. And definitely, you know, if we cannot keep our patent airway, we are going to compensate for that. And lifting the chin is the first thing that we do. There's the maneuver to somebody that's choking is to move the jaw forward and up to open the airway. So the Eschmatt maneuver, which we know for many decades, it's what we do to open the airway. So the Eschmatt maneuver, which we know for many decades, it's what we do to open the airway. That's the treatment for snoring where they put your jaw forward. It's based on the Eschmatt maneuver that opens the airway. So if we need to open the airway, we have a small airway, we're going to put our chin up. If we put our chin up, then our neck's going to have to move forward because we can't be looking at the sky while we're functioning in society. So in order to keep our eyes level, we are going to move our neck forward. So this is all
Starting point is 01:07:55 the posture of the poor airway posture, not necessarily mouth breathing, but we're going to change our posture. And the same, we can't really improve our breathing if we just improve our jaw or if we just learn to hold that suction. We also have to make sure that our posture is good because if our feet are not fine and our hips are not rotated back and our shoulders are too far forward then everything else is going to fall apart so we have to really think of posture oral posture and body posture as as something that goes hand in hand with the right environment you know one cool thing that i think it's really awesome you mentioned in the book too is that there's um there's a lot of focus on the environment and that people can actually make these changes themselves.
Starting point is 01:08:46 And it's not purely based off of their genetics. Because, for example, in the health space, there are some people that think, oh, yeah, well, the reason why some individuals are bigger is because of their genetics. But we know that there are things that you can do to, let's say that you did have a propensity to be a bit heavier. Well, you don't have to be
Starting point is 01:09:05 if you change certain things as far as your habits are concerned. And it does seem to be that when it comes to your mouth, your breathing, there are a lot of things that you can do as far as your environment and the actions you take to change that. It's not based off of your genes. Well, we have to be careful what we say. We can't say it's not based on your genes because everything, and Dr. Ehrlich, Paul Ehrlich, the evolutionary biologist, he always uses the example of a rectangle. You have the height and the width. You can't have a rectangle that only has one,
Starting point is 01:09:38 but one is bigger than the other, more important. So obviously there's a genetic component. There's a predisposition. There is stuff that we're dealing with. But there's that environmental situation too. But the environmental part is much bigger. We tend to think it's 80-20. You have 20% of the hand you're dealt,
Starting point is 01:10:01 and 80% is what you do with that. And if you think in that way, you know that, you know, I'm not going to be a basketball player. I'm five feet tall. There's no way. And this is genetic. Obviously, I didn't sleep well. I had poor patterns.
Starting point is 01:10:17 I would get up at five in the morning every day since I was a kid. So I didn't get enough sleep. I blame my mom for that. But, you know, I probably could have been a little taller. My parents have great jaws, and they're both taller than me. But there is a component that I'm not going to be a basketball player. But within the envelope, I could be on the extreme one side or the other if I improve my environment. And had I slept better, maybe I would be on the extreme one side or the other if I improve my environment.
Starting point is 01:10:46 And had I slept better, maybe I would be taller. As far as the joke is, we, and this is from Dr. Mew, I don't know how scientific that is, but he says the muscles tend to be more genetic, the bone is more environmental. And the more I look into things, the more I think he's right, where your muscles, the shape of your muscles, some people have wider muscles, some people are languier, so that your situation of your muscles is more genetic, and the bone will react more.
Starting point is 01:11:22 And definitely, Wolf's Law from 100 years ago, he says, you know, if the muscle and the bone fight, the bone will lose. The muscle will win. And that all, you know, has to do with, you know, as we are using our body, all the functions, we want to make sure our muscles are, you know, we're working improperly, and then the bone will follow. And in the jaw, we have the structure of the jaw, which is bony, and then we have the muscles, the masseters. So that's why, you know, chewing and what we do with the muscles is super important so that the jaws can develop. And I do see in Spain where they do a lot of the chewing with the gum
Starting point is 01:12:06 and they teach very small kids to chew on both sides with harder foods. I do see that kids have very well-defined jaws. I don't know if that's just part of their genetic for that country, which is a combination, but I do see that they pay more attention to chewing, chewing with your mouth closed, chewing on both sides. I've never heard anybody said to a kid, make sure you chew on both sides. I do hear people etiquette say, chew with your mouth closed, but never chew on both sides. And in Spain, it's a big thing where when I was in Galicia, I would hear the mom say, make sure you chew on both sides.
Starting point is 01:12:44 And that is huge for development. Chew with your mouth closed might not be right either. Well, chewing with your mouth closed is important, obviously. Some of my ENTs that treat children, they say, well, if your nose doesn't work, that's why you chew with your mouth. It's not like the child is deciding to chew with the mouth open. And he says to the child, well, why don't you put a clothespin on your mom's nose and ask her to chew with her mouth closed? And then the kid realizes, you know,
Starting point is 01:13:17 this is not just me. And the mom says, okay, let's go find somebody that can work with the nose too. And if the doctor says, you know, wear decongestant and oil your nose, the mom's going to make sure she does that. But unless she really understands that this is not a choice that the kid is doing just because he's lazy, it's a physical problem that the nose is not working well. Question about the chewing on both sides of the mouth. So that isn't necessarily an automatic thing for many people? Like some people just chew on one side and not the other? Well, it should be an automatic thing.
Starting point is 01:13:55 The issue with chewing is if you get a cavity on one side or if you have any pain or for any reason you are not chewing on one side, then it stays as a habit. And even if the cavity gets fixed, you develop the neural pathway to just chew on one side. So if you're just going to chew on one side and continue, also another thing is like the side that you sleep in. That can have an impact too. So I don't know if you need to make sure you sleep on both sides.
Starting point is 01:14:28 But chewing on one side is common for people that have – more for more adults. But sometimes kids just get into the habit of chewing on one side because they have an issue and then they never go back to chewing on both sides. It should be natural. I would imagine cavemen and hunter-gatherers, they chew on both sides. I think everybody has like asymmetries though. They got like things that are a little off and like we have one eye lower than the other and there's like all kinds of things. So I'd imagine even if you're trying to be diligent with that, there's probably like
Starting point is 01:14:57 X percentage more on one side just because of habit or whatever, right? Yeah, I mean we're not completely symmetric but we should be always able to chew on both sides. Makes a lot of sense. Got anything over there, Andrew? Yeah, I wanted to ask about the expanders. They look pretty vicious. It looks like it'd be pretty difficult. So how are they successfully getting those into kids' mouths,
Starting point is 01:15:23 especially as young as two? It just seems like they would reject it pretty quickly. Well, the Stage 1 device is brilliant. Because it's designed to have its bone anchored, not tooth anchored. And the way it's designed um it has an insertion path and you know this is not a technical show but really you go under the the embrasure of the tooth and then the way you put it in is sideways it's not up and down it's like a denture and when it's designed properly then i used to have kids two or three, four years old in the practice, and the mom had to hold them.
Starting point is 01:16:08 I used to work at Stanford at the craniofacial. So we even had newborns that we had to put obturators on. So the mom would hold the kid, and you would go in and click, click, and then the kid will tantrum on the ground, and we would just give them ice cream until they forgot that the appliance was in there. So if it's well-designed, it'll click in and there's a learning or adaptation period. But then after a week or two, it's like part of them.
Starting point is 01:16:40 And these are expanders that are not worn for long periods. They're usually 12 weeks to six months, and no more than that. And that should take care of the expansion. So we use something called, we don't open the suture. We do contact resorption. So this has plastic, and it pushes on the tissue every day, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. So it's a constant force that reshapes the palate.
Starting point is 01:17:13 It's not opening the suture and then holding that. It's actually little by little reshaping the architecture of the bone through pushing. So they look scary, but if you really look at anything the orthodontist does, they all look scary. Everything we do, even braces. If you've never seen braces and you see all this metal with sharp wires and everything in somebody's mouth, it's amazing that we've convinced humans to wear these for two, three,
Starting point is 01:17:42 four years. You know, sadly sadly like braces actually ruined my mom's teeth um she a dentist had her get him as an adult and he was having her do adjustments each year but there was a point that she had them in her mouth for like six seven years and then when they were finally taken out a few of her teeth fell out because of like the amount of time he had them left in her mouth. So it's just, it's unfortunate. Well, that's a very unusual story. I mean, I was an orthodontist for 25 years.
Starting point is 01:18:17 Knock on wood, I've never had that happen. Yeah, that's good. They do have side effects that are not ideal. I'm curious. You were an orthodontist for such a long time and you're continuing to learn more and more and more. And now you're even focused on the nose, right? What do you think as far as maybe the education in the industry or the way that they think about the mouth and everything? What would you have?
Starting point is 01:18:42 What would you change in the industry in the way that they think about it? Well, number one, I always like to underline the fact that I am an orthodontist. That's my profession. I love the profession. I think we do amazing work. I'm not against orthodontics, but I do think that we have to evolve to include other things. And my co-author for the book knows, he quotes the term, you know, he says that we as dentists treat mouths without a patient and doctors treat patients without a mouth. So we need to do the transdiscipline where we're working together and we have to communicate with our ENTs and make sure that whatever we do enhances the airway. Because we knew from the founders of orthodontics that the face grows around the airway. So we always consider the airway the backbone of how we develop. And the orthodontist is a specialist in growth and development. Nobody knows more about how bones develop and grow than the orthodontist. It's that
Starting point is 01:19:53 profession that we focus our training into growth and development. And we know that the airway is first and then everything will set around that airway. So we need to go back and focus and make sure that the techniques that are not airway positive or they're not airway, I don't like to use the term airway centric, but if the airway is not considered first or if there's anything that's going to hinder the airway, then we get rid of that technique. Like headgear, the traditional headgear, the airway is not considered first or if there's anything that's going to hinder the airway,
Starting point is 01:20:30 then we get rid of that technique. Like headgear, the traditional headgear, I would say we got to get rid of it. I know that it's still being used and there's enough research saying it pushes things back and makes that channel where the air needs to come in smaller. So we got to get rid of those techniques. It's hard to get rid of things that we've done for many generations. And orthodontics is having a hard time moving on, but we are moving on as a profession. And I think my books are helping, and there's other people like Dr. Mew that's making the idea popular that you have to think of the airway, the function, the tongue, the things that are around the teeth, not just the teeth. I don't know if that answers your question. No, it does.
Starting point is 01:21:10 I'm sorry about your mom. Yeah, no, me too. A lot of people struggle with breathing in and out of their nose. Do you have any, like most of the comments I see on my Instagram will be, you know, I can't try the mouth tape because I can't breathe in and out of my nose. I have a deviated septum. I see all these things all the time. Do you have any advice for how people can kind of clear their nose or get their nose to work better in a quick way? Well, our book Nose is coming up, so we will have a lot of suggestions there. It's funny that I was
Starting point is 01:21:42 saying the nose doesn't get a disease, so it's an ignored organ. And I know my trainer, she says, oh, I'm a mouth breather. Like that was a fact. Like I'm from Mexico. I am a mouth breather. It's like, no, you're not a mouth breather. You've been mouth breathing, but that doesn't make you a mouth breather. But people think it's just a fact. And we have to think about the fact that we have to use every part of our body as it was designed.
Starting point is 01:22:12 So one of the things that I've learned recently is the nose has to be oiled. And we suggest for the kids to use sweet almond oil and clean the nose, but then oil it so it's moisturized so it's working more efficiently. Is there anything convenient that you can use for that or you just like grab some almond oil and stick it in there? Yeah, I mean they sell these things that you spray into your nose
Starting point is 01:22:38 and you can just use one of those. An almond oil thing? Well, they sell the sprayer and then you can put the almond oil in there and then you spray the oil in your nose. I do have – through my website, you can contact me and I have ENTs that you can ask them about different things that are available. There's the dilators of the nose. There's a dentist in Spain, and he calls himself el dentista de la nariz, the dentist of the nose.
Starting point is 01:23:15 And he has a lot of different gadgets because he says, you can't be a dentist if the nose doesn't work. And I'm not a dentist, really. I'm an orthodontist. He's a dentist. And he says, the patients that don't have a good nose have more decay, have cavities, they have bone loss, their teeth get loose, they get more staining, they get bad breath. I mean, there's so many side effects of dental health and not breathing through your nose properly. So he's created some dilators and different things that you can put in your nose.
Starting point is 01:23:48 There's decongestants that you can use that are not necessarily steroids, but they help you with that distension that you have inside your turbinates. And if you have a deviated septum, get it taken care of, but go to an ENT that has a rhinoscope, that has a tube with a video that puts down your nose so you can see your septum. And then you can see what's wrong. And then if you choose to have surgery, then that same doctor will put that tube in and you can see in the video if you have more spades.
Starting point is 01:24:23 Because so many people have surgery after surgery after surgery and they only have like the front part of the septum or they just have part of the problem taken care of so they're not getting better because the surgery is not done well and that's because we as a profession have not focused on the nose when i sent kids to the ent and i said well their nose is not working the the mom comes back and says, oh, the ENT said the tonsils were fine and the adenos were fine. I say, those are not in the nose. So have them go back and look into the nose with a rhinoscope, with a video to see what's going on, and then treat the nose.
Starting point is 01:24:59 So it's very important that we find the right practitioner and the right tools to have the nose be optimal. And that will translate in so many good things from not having bad breath and to, you know, if you're growing, to growing better and to not having gum disease and decay and so many good things of nose breathing. And of course, you as you're in the athletic and sports world, you know about nitric oxide and that's produced in the sinuses. So the air gets coated with this amazing chemical. It's a neurological facilitator that helps you sleep better, function better, perform better. Nitric oxide is amazing. And if you breathe through your nose you're coating the air that goes into your lungs with that chemical quick question about the um the reno scope and making sure that when you go to your ent you have them do that just like you know um in fitness there's there's trainers with
Starting point is 01:25:56 different skill levels there's doctors with different skill levels and i would assume that there's ents with different skill levels so if you go to your ens here and you're like i need you to put a reno scope down there they're probably like, what the fuck do you know? You know what I mean? So how would you even know that if they did that, they would know what different type of thing to do? Since you're saying it's not common practice, right, for them to do that? No, it's not common practice. But, you know, you're making me realize
Starting point is 01:26:26 that we hate the patients. We hate the Google patients that come into your office. And we talk to each other and you refer someone that says, I'm so sorry I referred this person. He's a Google patient. And you're like, no, please don't. They sit down in your chair and they're like, I need a bridge. You're like, well, I your phone. They sit down in your chair and they're like, I need a bridge. You're like, well, I didn't even get a chance to examine you yet. Yeah. And then you have the people that, you know, they see the ads for certain medications. And most doctors will, if you ask for it, they'll give it to you so you go away.
Starting point is 01:26:59 Because we are stressed. We have too many patients. We have to make a living. So there's a problem with the medical system. Don't get me started on that. They're like like, I saw Dr. Oz the other day. I'm like, oh my God. But just be mindful and call and say, do you have a rhinoscope?
Starting point is 01:27:16 Is it possible to, you know, do it? And that I can show you videos and videos and videos. A good ENT will get that little tube. It's tiny. And, you know, getting your COVID test is much more uncomfortable than having a rhinoscope, a rhinoscopy done. Because it goes in and it travels in through this path where the air goes. And a person that knows the anatomy of the tongue will be very gentle. You won't even feel it.
Starting point is 01:27:44 And we do it on kids that are 2, 3, 4 years old. So a good ENT will know how to do it. I tell my orthodontic students to find themselves a good ENT to refer. And so the first thing you ask, find one that owns a renal skull because they don't even own it. And, you know, you have to have a pediatric rhinoscope, which is really thin. It's a couple millimeters. And it's beautiful when you learn and you go in and you can see things before and after.
Starting point is 01:28:18 That's why I developed our nasometer because you can see if there's resistance. Then you can squirt your nose with either oil or decongestant, or you can wash and rinse your nose, and then you can measure again. So if you put the tube down and you see that everything is red and dry, and then you put a little oil and you put it in again, and you see the tissue is getting smaller and it's not red anymore and it's moist and you can see that it's doing its job, then it makes you feel good.
Starting point is 01:28:50 And that part of like psychologically, you will start breathing through your nose because you're seeing the path. Speaking of feeling good, how good does it feel to be in the position that you're in? You seem so passionate and excited about all this stuff. It's horrible. Because we've been talking for like three hours straight, a little hour and a half or so before the show.
Starting point is 01:29:12 I'm very passionate. I want to help people and I want other people to have what I had available for my own kids. But it's frustrating because there's not enough practitioners. I had available for my own kids. But it's frustrating because there's not enough practitioners. And this is why I write all these books, because I want to get this information out and I want other people to pick it up. And if anybody's listening and there's a young orthodontist that wants to take over, I'm happy setting a full practice with a snoring team and, you know team and finding ENTs.
Starting point is 01:29:46 But there's not a lot of practitioners that are interested and that have the position because, again, there's problems with the medical field, but there are also problems with our schooling where kids are coming out of school with such debt that they can't take the time to learn this stuff right they have to go in and work really hard making money more because of their loans so but if anybody wants to learn about this and they're young i'm 57 so i'm you know it's a little late for me but if there's a
Starting point is 01:30:20 30 year old that wants to learn this I'm happy to help anyone and hold their hand so that it can actually be more practitioners doing this stuff. And I think it will come, but it's too slow. Pat Brodrick, family, how's it going? Hope you're enjoying the episode. And this episode is brought to you by Merrick Health, the premium telehealth clinic from Derek from More Plates, More Dates. Now, if you've been wanting to get your blood work done, or if you wanted to get your blood work analyzed by a physician, Merrick has your back on that. And Andrew, can you tell them how to do that? Yeah, absolutely. So if you guys know exactly what labs you want to get, you guys can load them all up into your cart and at checkout enter promo code POWERPROJECT10 to
Starting point is 01:30:57 save 10% off all labs. But if you're like me and you're not sure exactly where to start, you guys can get the Power Project panel. You guys can head over to MerrickHealth.com slash Power Project, and you guys will see a whole panel of like over 26 different labs, everything from head to toe that you're going to need to know what's going on under the hood.
Starting point is 01:31:13 And again, to get in on that, head over to MerrickHealth.com slash Power Project and at checkout, enter promo code Power Project to save $101 off of that entire panel. Links to them and all the information down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. What's it like being at Stanford?
Starting point is 01:31:31 I mean, that's like one of the best hospitals in the world. You've got some great colleagues, right? Well, I'm not technically at Stanford anymore, but there's a lot of rep there. Well, you're able to rub elbows with some of the best people in the world. That's got to be pretty cool. Yeah, that is really cool
Starting point is 01:31:50 and especially now that I'm not active in either practice then I can choose and work with anybody I want and I go to Stanford on Sundays. Dr. Herlich and I are there on Sundays. There's nobody and we are able to sit down and write and pick up the phone and talk to Mark Feldman, the most important geneticist. And we
Starting point is 01:32:15 just say, can you come on Sunday? And he'll come down and we'll just have a sandwich on Sunday at Stanford. So it's really, really great. The problem really is that there's no young people that are able to get into these techniques. And I do most of my work in Spain. And Spain is amazing. Their health care system is the best. I do stuff in Mexico too, because I have a lot of colleagues there. And I have a license there. But it's hard. There have a lot of colleagues there and I have a license there. But it's hard. There's a lot of red tape in California, in Stanford. There's brilliant people.
Starting point is 01:32:52 But practically, it's very hard to get new things and to think outside the box. So my books hopefully will inspire people to really find a way to bring it here too. I'm curious if you know, because I don't know the things that have happened with Dr. Mew, but I know that he's been running into like legal stuff. And there are some articles of people online saying, oh, like trying to, I guess, disparage some of the information he's put out. And these are professionals in the field. Do you know anything that that's gone on there and why that's happening?
Starting point is 01:33:29 I mean, I know them very well. And, you know, they're trying to get information out. I know that JAWS, if you go online, you see some of the top orthodontists in the profession criticizing what I've written. And it's funny because none of those orthodontists have articles in Bioscience, which is a top journal for health policy. But there's always going to be pushback when something new comes. John Mu is amazing.
Starting point is 01:34:06 He came up with a lot of ideas. But I do find that the science is lacking in what they say and what they do. And there has to be more science behind their theories. And I've looked at stuff that John has done. I'm helping Dr. Wong from Australia get 200 consecutive cases into research. His cases are being evaluated by two universities with a top orthodontist in vertical growth. Looking at that, Dr. Huchang and Dr. Flores-Mir and Lagardere, we're trying to get some science behind the anecdotal evidence.
Starting point is 01:34:48 And, you know, sometimes there's anecdotal evidence, and some of it is scientific and some is not. So we have to help find the stuff that can be replicated and that works. And I think they're doing a good job, and they're actually the first in line so they're going to be shut down first and then we'll come behind them I don't agree with everything they're doing but they're they're the basis of what they're saying I think is right and I don't know if you've seen but my book is Dr. Ehrlich and I dedicated Jaws to them because they're the ones that started us in this route.
Starting point is 01:35:25 It'd be so hard to like have scientific evidence on some of this stuff because some of the, some of the people that are doing this are young people and young people might not all the way be developed and you don't know what they would develop into otherwise. You know, you seeing some of the stuff with the chin and the jaw and some of that is pretty amazing, but you kind of, you would have to of the stuff with the chin and the jaw and some of that is pretty amazing. But you kind of, you would have to have something to compare it to. So what would you compare it to? Like how would you, I don't even know how you would speculate on how to run a study like that.
Starting point is 01:35:54 Twins. Yeah, that's the problem with the first. Yeah, occasionally twins, yeah. The first case that came out of Dr. Bouchang's group was inconclusive because orthodontics only looks at people for two years. And we treat, you know, at least six years. And we keep looking at how patients improve through good posture. And that takes sometimes decades. So it's very hard, as you say, to compare. And the one thing that I know is that some of the things that adults are trying to do are not going to help them because once you're an adult, you're fully developed. So you're not going to change majorly your jaw unless you consider surgery. And in that way, I really
Starting point is 01:36:40 have not seen that a lot of the techniques that young people are doing or fully grown people are doing that are going to be worth the effort that they're putting in. So I think we need to have better surgeons and combine doing some things and also correcting surgically the things that are not going to be correct. And then people will be able to have effort that has really good returns. If you are doing something and you're not using all the techniques, including surgery, you're going to put a lot of effort for a very tiny result. And that's what I think is tragic.
Starting point is 01:37:19 So we're trying to figure it out. Why are you not a huge fan of mouth tape? and we're trying to figure it out. Why are you not a huge fan of mouth tape? I think mouth tape is only part of the mechanical tools that can help start breathing through the nose, but it doesn't address anything behind the tongue, behind the airway. And the tape sometimes can cause more stress
Starting point is 01:37:48 if the nose is not working well. Like if you look at this book that I brought, it has the protocol, and it's hierarchical. Nose is first. So you have to address the nose first before you address anything else. Because if you just address the tape and you don't address the nose, then the nose is going to have a harder time,
Starting point is 01:38:10 and the brain might react to that extra stress. So it might not be good for the brain to put tape and force yourself to breathe through a very tiny hole. That might have to, you know, then your lungs might have to, your chest might have to create more negative pressure to suction in that small space. So if you use it in addition with other things, it might be helpful.
Starting point is 01:38:35 And it's the first place to start. I would say use a tape during the day, not during sleep. Because during the day, you can utilize the, your nose will work better through gravity because the blood's not being held when you lie down then gravity is not helping you to clear your airway and if there's a problem with the nose during the day you can mitigate it like i have patients that come in and they say, oh, my kid sleeps.
Starting point is 01:39:09 My kid's nose works fine, always the mouth closed, whatever. But when they go to sleep, the nose is not working. So it's a different organ that has different requirements during the day when you're vertical than when you're horizontal. So the tape, I would say, use it during the day to start teaching your brain what it's like to filter the air, to moisturize the air, to give it nitric oxide, to warm up the air. So there's those four functions that are critical. So the tape will help your brain recognize it and say, hmm, I like this.
Starting point is 01:39:38 But going directly to sleep with tape works for a lot of people. A lot of people say, you know, it stops their snoring and it makes them feel good. But I do think that we have to learn more about what the brain is doing and how much struggle that is. I think generating the suction and then maybe supporting it with a tape might be a better thing. And that's like a huge deal. Like, again, we were talking about this earlier,
Starting point is 01:40:07 but if you're putting tape on and you're not generating suction, I mean, it's better than nothing, but you're still not building the intrinsic habits in the mouth to actually have everything work the right way. That's why, I mean, that's why this works really well. It's like you put it in your mouth. I wish I could do this right now, but it forces you to generate suction,
Starting point is 01:40:27 tongue's on the roof of your mouth, your mouth's closed. That's the posture that you want to maintain. Yeah. And that's a posture that naturally is self-sustainable. So if you have something that's glued on by suction,
Starting point is 01:40:42 you don't have to think about it. It will stay, just like the suction cup on the window. The suction cup is not pushing into the window. It's staying there. So if you try to generate things that will auto-maintain themselves, that's the best.
Starting point is 01:40:56 And you were saying to use that device before you go to sleep, maybe 20 minutes before you go to sleep. Is that right? Yes. The OpLocker, the vacuum activator, we recommend, and this is published since 2003, the first articles by Dr. Eng.
Starting point is 01:41:10 That one right there? Yeah. Okay. So you wear that 20 minutes before you go to sleep. And that, again, trains your nose and your brain that this is a better position. And then you can recognize that suction. So when you're asleep, your brain will naturally go there.
Starting point is 01:41:27 And then you can yawn, you can cough, you can whatever, and you will go back to that position. And those 20 minutes before you go to sleep is preparing you to hold that all night. Awesome. That's actually the tongue thing. When I started learning about mewing, it was back in 2017 or rather 2016, people called it looks maxing. I don't know if you've ever heard that. Yeah. And you talk about like pressing the tongue against the roof of your mouth and
Starting point is 01:41:57 it's like train that or whatever. And then also the suction aspect of things. But it like, if that's not something you currently do, that can make a big difference over time. You just need to be diligent in terms of doing it. And that's why that device is helpful because if that's in your mouth, then you don't necessarily have to think about it. But if you're doing it on your own, you're going to have to think about doing it throughout the day if you don't actually do it already. And you don't want to think about anything when you're asleep. You want, like we say in Mexico, que sueñas con los angelitos. You want to think about little angels. You don't want to be thinking about your tongue or your breathing.
Starting point is 01:42:37 And you want to be dreaming about those fun things that you have to do. And you want to be cleaning your brain. And you want to be integrating your brain and you want to be integrating your emotions and organizing your memories and your brain has so much stuff to do and yesterday we were coining for the for the book the brain is the king and if the king goes to sleep you never want to bring the king to do the cleaning. But if you have to move your muscles or do anything that requires voluntary decisions, the king's going to have to come and sweep. And you don't want that.
Starting point is 01:43:16 You want the king to be doing what the king needs to be doing to organize the kingdom. And your memories, your emotions, cleaning the amyloid plates. I know that Andrew Kuberman here will come and talk about that. The brain has so much to do. Let's make sure they do it. And the kids need to do that stuff. I'm so passionate about letting the brain really do what the brain needs to do at night. And we don't have to bother the brain.
Starting point is 01:43:44 Our brainstem outside the brain can take care at night. And we don't have to bother the brain. Our brainstem outside the brain can take care of the very light breathing and we learn to do more with less. Yeah. You know, curious about this, as far as expansion of the palate, I'm not sure what the surgery is called. And you mentioned that some adults may need that. Number one, how would you know as an adult if that's something that you should pursue? And then what are the different options? Because you mentioned when you're older, when you get older, you're not going to be able to make the changes you need to just by sticking the tongue under the roof of your mouth and chewing gum. You might actually need to get some surgery. So what are the different options?
Starting point is 01:44:22 Look, everybody's different. I do a lot of consultations on my website, and people call me, and then I say, okay, you need surgery. Here's the name of, you know, he doesn't pay me to advertise him, but Hernández Alfaro, who did my surgery and my daughter's surgery in Spain and Barcelona. And I say, here's his email. Go get a consultation with him, and don't bother with things that are not going to get you where you're going. If it's a little like, okay, where do you live? I'm in California. Okay, we have these two doctors. They do stage one.
Starting point is 01:44:52 Go to them and get that expansion and you should be fine. So just by looking at someone, I'll be able to guide you. Which way, if they're little kids, we have Dr. Santos in Argentina. She does a GoPix program and it's all in the app on the phone. If you have a two-year-old, a three-year-old, four-year-old, you can contact her, and through the app, she does the 90 days of training of good posture. So you can, depending on who you are and what your situation is, and also what your chief complaint is. If you have sleep apnea, you got to have a CPAP.
Starting point is 01:45:26 You've got to keep that airway open every day, every night. So I'm not going to tell you go do something crazy. I would say use your CPAP. But combine it with training. Before you put your CPAP at night, use 20 minutes of this device. And then you will optimize your CPAP so you don't have to calibrate it to something that's very aggressive. You can have it very light because you're adding this plus this. Or if you need an advancement device.
Starting point is 01:45:55 Like some people say, oh, I bought this advancement device over the internet. Well, you can't use that alone. You have to add it to the suction, then advance a little, then the CPAP. And those devices pull the jaw forward? Yeah. Okay. But if you use it with other things like suction, then you only have to move it a slightly bit. Or your jaw, if it's free, you can suction and the jaw will come forward by itself. If you have the right splint, we have our own that just has like a little spherical surface.
Starting point is 01:46:30 So you tend to slide your jaw forward. It doesn't hold you there. But you add the suction and then if that's not enough, you add a little bit of the CPAP. So the pressure is very light, very gentle. If you just try to do one individual, then you have to move the jaw forward so much, you'll end up hurting your jaw. So you got to add, and again, we need more professionals that want to learn about sleep, that want to learn how to utilize all these tools together.
Starting point is 01:46:59 Do you have any specific nasal dilators that you recommend? No, I don't use them because I really don't think the dilators are that important because most people's blockage is in the back, not in the front. But I do have patients and colleagues that swear by the dilators. They swear by them and they do think they help. Some of the ones you have outside or some of the ones you have inside. There's tons of them. And I would just trial and error because if they make you breathe better, it all adds up. I'm just curious about this because you've mentioned that your shift has really started to focus on the nose.
Starting point is 01:47:43 Is there anything that we haven't mentioned about the nose here since you've been learning so much and discovering so much about it? Like, is there something that is fairly alarming that we just haven't heard or know about the nose yet? Wow. This interview has been incredibly thorough. I don't think I've had such a long, detailed, great questions. And there's three of you, which is fantastic. I commend you. This is a fantastic show. I'm going to have to be a fan because I wasn't familiar with this show.
Starting point is 01:48:11 But I think you've touched every part of it. The stuff with the nose is, and I like to say that, the nose is in the middle of our faces. Do you ever put anything in the middle that is not important? I mean, if it wasn't important, it wouldn't be sitting right in the middle and we ignore it. People just say, oh, my nose doesn't work. Next. I'm like, excuse me? If your legs wouldn't work, you'd be worried. And this is right in the middle. I mean, you can't miss it.
Starting point is 01:48:48 I mean, I'm not a religious person, but I think there's some design. And the nose was placed in the middle for a reason. So we need to go back and focus on it and make sure it's not a hallway. We think it's just a hallway that moves, you know, in your house, a hallway, you don't even care about where it is, right? The nose is not a hallway. It's incredible. It's beautiful.
Starting point is 01:49:12 If you ever see, go online and see videos of the nose and the turbinates, it's like a labyrinth and the air goes in and the mucus is like this factory that grabs the particles and then moves them away so they don't go into your lung. I mean, the nose has so many fantastic things. There's seven structures inside the nose. There's a septum in the middle, and there's six turbinates. It's just a beautiful, beautiful mechanical part of our body. We can't continue to ignore it.
Starting point is 01:49:43 I mean, I'm enamored of the nose these days. And I did fall in love with the soft palate, which I didn't even know that it had any function. So from the soft palate, I've now become enamored of the nose. But those are two structures in a body that are pretty ignored. If you go to anatomy books, sometimes they don't even draw the soft palate. Because when you're drawing from a cadaver, it's not really clear what's going on there. So the nose needs to be in the forefront of everything. And as I said, in the protocols, the protocols are hierarchical. The nose is first.
Starting point is 01:50:21 Whatever you're going to do, check your nose first. Did you guys see the soft palate on that person? Unbelievable. They keep it tight. Andrew, take us on out of here. Alright, let us know what you guys learned on today's podcast. Drop those comments down below and let us know what you guys think about the conversation. Hit that like button and subscribe if you guys
Starting point is 01:50:39 are not subscribed already. For everything podcast related, head over to powerproject.live and follow the podcast everywhere at m to powerproject.live and follow the podcast everywhere at mb power project my instagram is at i am andrew z and sema where you at and sema in yang on instagram and youtube and sema yin yang on tiktok and twitter sandra where can people find you and if they want to learn from you where can they find you also forward on next.com forward.com why do uh some little kids always go, all the time? I start some of my videos.
Starting point is 01:51:08 Sometimes I started out with a, like that because my daughter's friend, when she was in kindergarten, would do that all the time. And I was like, what's up with your friend? She says sniffles all the time. What causes that?
Starting point is 01:51:20 Well, that's the postnatal drip. And I have a pet peeve. If I'm in a lecture or something, somebody is sucking their boogers, my head explodes. I can't stand it. Blow your nose! But it's definitely,
Starting point is 01:51:36 there's a relationship with allergies and different things. I'm not an ENT, but it's definitely a cry for help. I'm at Mark Smiley Bell. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.
Starting point is 01:51:50 Bye.

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