﻿Dr Mew: You may have heard of mewing.
It’s a set of facial exercises and habits that has been blowing up in popularity over the last
few years because it promises amazing facial transformations for absolutely 0 cost and
relatively low effort. Too good to be true or an actual scientific miracle, we caught
up with the inventors Dr John Mew and Dr Mike Mew to investigate.
Dr Mike Mew is an unconventional orthodontist who believes in an environmentalist school of thought,
that facial development and thus beauty is influenced by your environment and upbringing. He
and his father pioneered the orthotropic idea that genetic control of the face’s development is not
precise and can be shepareded into an ideal form with postural and therapeutic exercises.. Dr Mew
himself describes these practises of ‘mewing,’ an eponym of his last name,
as a sheepdog shepherding sheep with just the tongue, lips and cheeks alone, whereas traditional
orthodontics is a precise endeavour using facial appliances to get perfect straightness.
The best known mewing exercise is resting the tongue on the back of hard palate of
the mouth with lips sealed, which as he suggests, is the natural facial posture.
There are plenty more exercises you can follow and add to your routine for mewing, but let’s
review the scientific evidence first. Dr Mew suggests in his own words that there
is no primary evidence for mewing but there is plenty of secondary evidence.
In simple terms, there are no direct scientific studies conducted on the effectiveness of mewing,
perhaps because it is a slow process, but there is plenty of theoretical evidence to suggest
that everything adds up to work. We know that many orofacial habits such as tongue thrust,
thumb sucking an mouth breathing significantly affect young children’s facial development,
so the question I asked Dr Mew is why is Mewing so controversial or such a foreign concept.
Mewing is a controversial idea because if it is proven to be true,
it undermines many previously held fundamentals of orthodontics, such as whether misalignments
should be treated by mewing exercises over time or by appliances much more quickly. What happens if
an orthodontist recommends mewing but it makes the issue worse. Secondly mewing implies that
facial development is to a degree controllable. That you look the way you do because you didn’t
try hard enough in your youth or that you were misguided in your orofacial habits. Whether it
is proven to be true or not, it doesn’t harm you to keep your lips sealed while you eat and to rest
your tongue on the roof of your mouth, so there is more upside than downside to mewing which is
why it is so popular on social media, it’s a DIY approach to an orthodontic problem.
In the interview, Dr Mew and I mention of three main pieces of research that are significant
proofs for mewing’s effectiveness. Dr Weston Price’s studies, Dr William Proffit’s studies
and Dr Egil Harvold’s studies, each one looking at a completely different aspect
of facial development, but all tying back to the environmentalist school of thought,
that facial development can be influenced by behaviours and environment.
Here are the cliffnotes of each of their findings:
Dr Weston Price went off into remote indigenous tribes and found that people consuming
traditional, unprocessed diets of tough fibrous materials had better teeth and tooth eruption
than their modernised counterparts with soft, processed diets. He also noted how
similar each face was to each other, implying that every face more or less reached their
genetic potential for beauty and there is less inequality in beauty for these groups.
Our takeaway from this is that diet does have an impact on facial development
as the human face, like every other muscle and bone works on a very much use it or lose it basis.
Much like how the body of a physical labour man is more robust and adapted than that of a desk job,
sedentary man, the jawline of those with tougher diets is on average wider, stronger and better
defined. We call these facial traits robustness. The jaw and thus the entie face become more robust
based on diet which is a tick for environmentalist orthodontics. From the Weston Price foundation
there are 20 dietary guidelines summarized from his book and realistically some are unavoidable
and others are scientifically questionable, after all his work is from 100 years ago. The
recommendations to follow 1. Avoid soft, processed foods, stick to single ingredient cooking
2. Avoid refined sugars and carbohydrates such as white flour and rice.
Dr William Proffit found that facial development is influenced by a number of forces. He utilized
the framework of an equilibrium theory, that teeth move when their forces are not in balance.
More interestingly a low force for a long duration can move metaphorical mountains.
The tongue resting on the roof of the mouth is a low force applied over a long duration
and Dr Proffit estimated that a minimum of 6 hours is needed daily of low applied pressure
for some kind of movement. Very high forces over short durations do not have as much of an effect
because of the gum’s shock absorbing nature during chewing.
Lastly, Dr Egil Horvarld performed some of the most thought provoking experiments in the early
80s. By blocking the nasal airways of primates he found that they adapted to mouth breathing
but that this also changed their jaw and muscle structure, arguably for the worse. Overtime, all
of the test monkeys with blocked noses diverged to a different facial appearance than the unblocked
control group. Human’s aren’t monkeys, but we’re not that different either. It is well documented
that mouth breathing is a detriment to facial attractiveness. It even produces a characteristic
looking face called adenoid face, which is another tick for the environmentalist viewpoint, where the
monkey’s and human’s mouth breathing behaviour has changed their skeletal and facial structure.
These secondary research point to mewing being a viable concept, that the small forces generated by
lips, cheeks and tongue are enough to remodel bones and muscles. However, many clinicians
and lay people in general are still sceptical that the tongue can generate the needed forces.
Dr Mew counters this mechanicalistic idea by giving the example of a patient he saw in Brighton
Hospital once where a cyst expanded through the bone to a huge size simply by the tiny but
consistent pressures of osmolarity as salt moves from cyst to bloodstream and vice versa.
Here’s the million dollar question, should you add mewing to your daily routine?
Dr Mew mentions that for mewing to be most effective, patients need to be practising below
a certain age. In many cases below 6. He also places a hard limit on mewing for 25 and beyond
and suggests that Orthotropics is not ideal, it is really only better than the alternative.
The main takeaway that Dr Mew keeps emphasizing is teaching young kids from the age of 5 to keep
their lips shut, from when they eat, breathe and sleep. This is because, as he explains,
forms structural memory that eventually becomes a habit. As humans are creatures of comfort,
no amount of training later on in life can build the same structural habit and posture as that
of a young child who has been practising proper orthotropic form. People who have been say mouth
breathing since childhood, have great difficulty in slipping out of these lifestyle habits
because their face, their structure literally have adapted to best serve
their functional breathing pattern, as we saw in Horvald’s experiment with monkeys.
The misconceptions around mewing are numerous. Many people from the internet fringes of the
manosphere, a cultural identity dedicated to male self-improvement use the unproveness
of mewing to promote their own products. It’s like saying, see mewing get’s results,
I was right about that and showed the haters, now buy my red light laser therapy for $4000,
because I was right about mewing wasn’t I. In doing so, the idea and concepts of what mewing
is have become deeply diluted as you hear about it from one bro scientist to another
who themselves heard it from someone who has 0 clue, much like a game of whispers
the original meaning, message and function get lost in the process. As Dr Mew and I conclude,
Mewing is only one piece of the puzzle, and it isn’t a replacement for traditional orthodontics,
it doesn’t work effectively at all ages and it isn’t the cure to your facial development.
These are postural practises that everyone should be using. You don’t expect to get brownie points
for brushing your teeth, you do it because the alternative is worse. The alternative to mewing
with poor postural development results in a face that is unaesthetic. Functionally, there is no
major downside to mewing. In some cases of teeth overjet, pushing against the palate can make the
difference ever more noticeable but for most people, with more neutral skeletal patterns,
these are low resting forces for the entirety of your life, they are habits not necessarily
exercises in which case it’s not an unnatural thing to be doing. Resting your tongue on the
roof of your mouth is not an unnatural behaviour and so the risks are comparatively low.
Anecdotally, I interviewed Male Model Karl Kugelman a while ago, and during
the conversation I asked him if he rests his tongue on the roof of his mouth naturally,
which he and many other models with well defined faces indeed do but this is not scientific
evidence by any means. If you want
to learn more about the specific mewing exercises and add it to your routine, we have drawn out a
short protocol for you to follow from Dr Mew’s own lecture notes, and he indicates to me that
they are releasing an app later in the year with all of the exercises for easier accessibility.