Does Mewing Straighten Teeth? Or Spread Them Apart?
You've undoubtedly heard about the miraculous effects that mewing may have on the bone structure of your face.
The act of masticating, which helps to avoid malocclusions, is also beneficial to the teeth.
Correcting crooked teeth by mewing is impossible, particularly if the teeth are very curved.
While clenching and grinding your teeth as a child may help prevent your teeth from crowding and shifting out of place, it will not straighten out teeth that are already crooked.
Malocclusions are a term used to describe abnormalities in the alignment of the teeth, including crooked teeth.
They can potentially have devastating effects on how your face looks.
What You Need to Know About Mewing
Mewing is simply just a typical position for the tongue and lips.
However, many individuals have tongue and mouth posture problems due to our sedentary lives, lack of eating meals that are difficult to chew, mouth breathing, and other factors.
Consider that cavemen were much less likely to behave with weak jaws and crooked teeth, which may seem counterintuitive to the idea that appropriate tongue and mouth position might benefit you.
This was because most of their diet consisted of tougher items, which required greater chewing on the part of the subjects.
The jaws of a caveman's skull were open, and there was no evidence of malocclusion.
The most well-known benefit of mewing is that it may direct the growth of facial bones in a certain direction.
It causes the facial bones to grow so that you have more pronounced cheekbones, a more chiselled jawline, hollows in your cheeks, and so on.
In addition to the visual advantages, there are also potential health benefits associated with mewing.
For example, meowing may assist you in overcoming the habit of breathing through your lips.
According to the findings of one research, children who breathe through their mouths have an increased risk of snoring and having sleep apnea (Izu et al., 2010).
You may be able to cure your sleep apnea and stop snoring if you adjust the position of your tongue and breathe through your nose instead of your mouth.
Mewing may help strengthen the bone and muscles in your jaw, improve the position of your tongue, and widen your mouth, among other benefits.
As a result, mewing might benefit patients who suffer from sinusitis, temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMD), speech abnormalities, and breathing and swallowing issues.
While many cosmetic and health advantages are associated with mewing, straightening your teeth is not one of them.
Straightening crooked teeth by mewing is impossible, particularly if orthodontic treatment or retainers are required.
As a result, mewing cannot serve as a suitable alternative for orthodontic retainers or braces.
Are There Ways Mewing Can Help My Teeth?
Even while mewing cannot straighten crooked teeth, this does not imply that it cannot assist you in any way, particularly if you are still young.
There are advantages to mewing that extend beyond the teeth alone.
As was already said, how we live now often results in crooked teeth.
Take note of how much the teeth of ancient people had been worn down.
Cavemen fully used their teeth and jaws by clenching and grinding them together.
They chewed the tough meal with their lips and tore it with their teeth.
Most of the things that make up our meals nowadays are soft, processed foods such as cooked vegetables, yoghurt, cookies, pizza, soft bread, and other similar items.
However, it is impossible to simply return to the diet cavemen followed since doing so would be challenging in our modern culture.
To our good fortune, here is where mewing comes into play.
When you mew, you engage the muscles beneath your chin, which in turn helps you improve the posture of your tongue and lips.
Especially when combined with gum chewing, it helps you build jaw muscle and encourages correct alignment of your teeth, which is important for oral health.
In addition to that, it helps broaden your palette.
Although it may be done by anybody, regardless of age, the benefits are often more noticeable in younger individuals because their bones are still more pliable.
After one to two years of consistent use, people in their 21st to 25th years may begin to see the benefits of mewing.
Even though it becomes much more challenging beyond childhood, mewing has been successful for many individuals once they have completed puberty.
Please go here to see more before and after photographs of the mewing.
You may reduce the risk of having teeth that are too close together if you stretch out your palate.
Because there is not enough space in your mouth, having too many teeth in too little space might cause your teeth to become misaligned.
As a result, you may sidestep that problem by mewing.
Mewing and Teeth
There is a possibility that your teeth might get more damaged if you do not properly maintain your oral hygiene routine.
Even if the act of mewing is rather straightforward, you must check that you are doing it correctly.
Consider the following scenario: the tip of your tongue is in contact with your teeth, and you choose to exert extra force there.
That is not the correct technique to make a mewing sound.
Because of the stress, your teeth could protrude forward.
Some individuals have also linked mewing to an increase in the severity of their overbites.
Again, this might be because they are applying excessive pressure to the tip of their tongue, which causes it to push outward.
You need to concentrate on applying little pressure, putting more of your attention on the third of your tongue located at the rear of your mouth.
You are lucky since you may sidestep that problem by just mewing correctly.
If you are already using braces or retainers, you may need to make some adjustments to the method that you go about doing it.
Mewing With Braces and Retainers
You may improve your facial appearance, reduce tooth crowding, and get health advantages by using orthodontic appliances such as braces and retainers.
However, this is conditional upon the kind of braces or retainers you use.
Conduct a quick test to find out the answer.
Simply give mewing a try; you should be able to do it if you can place your tongue on your palate without making contact with your braces, retainers, or teeth.
It shouldn't be too difficult for you to mew, regardless of whether you have the old-fashioned metal ones, the ceramic ones, or the Invisalign ones.
It is sufficient for you to check that your tongue is not pressing on your teeth.
Having lingual braces, on the other hand, may prevent you from being able to mew.
Because the brackets of lingual braces are placed behind the teeth, there is a possibility that there is not enough space for your tongue to rest on your palate without coming into contact with the braces.
Bear in mind that you should not place an excessive amount of lateral pressure on your dental arch by concentrating on doing so.
Your palate will not enlarge because you are wearing braces and retainers.
Instead, you should concentrate on exerting pressure in an upward direction.
Before starting mewing, it is important to remember that you should talk to either your dentist or your orthodontist.
They can evaluate your situation and advise you whether or not it would be beneficial for you to mew.
If a person's teeth are pushed outward by braces or retainers, they may make a mewing sound.
Therefore, their appropriate mewing shouldn't impede their development in any way.
Mewing, on the other hand, maybe discouraged by your orthodontist or dentist if they see that your retainers or braces are causing your teeth to move inward.
Because the power of your tongue is counteracting the braces, which are preventing you from making progress, this is why.
When you take off your braces, you should see whether you can start mewing again. Braces tend to pull teeth inwards.
Check our tutorial on Mewing While Wearing Retainers to ensure that you are doing this activity securely.
Palatal Expansion Without Mewing
Some individuals likely have a smaller palate than others, making it difficult or impossible for them to mew.
This is because there will not be enough room for them to properly place their tongue on their palate to rest it there.
This might be a problem for you if you seek a technique to prevent teeth from crowding together and crooked teeth.
As was discussed, mewing may cause your palate to expand, which can assist keep your teeth from crowding together.
However, there are various methods to enlarge the space that the tongue has to rest on to do so pleasantly when the palate is too tiny.
You may, for instance, acquire a Maxillary Skeletal Expander, abbreviated MSE for convenience.
It is a tool that is used in the process of broadening the palette. Teenagers in their latter years can effectively separate their midpalatal sutures using MSE (Cantarella et al., 2017).
MSE is often only made available to those 18 years of age or older.
It is a technique that does not involve surgery.
On the other hand, those between the ages of 25 and 30 and older may need a palatal extension that is helped by surgery.
You should be able to mew without difficulty after your palate has been broadened with gadgets like MSE.
Because your nasal airways have also widened, you will also find that it is easier to breathe and that you snore less due to this change.
🍀 GOOD LUCK 🍀
Matt Phelps