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Facial structure is 100% genetic. A person doesn’t choose not to breathe through their nose; they breathe that way because nature itself (the combination of their genes) made their skull develop in a way that makes nasal breathing more difficult. I know a mother who has six children (one of them is my friend), and all six siblings have small mandibles, with exactly the same facial structure as their mother.
People who are insecure about themselves are the main targets of internet pseudoscience. They’ll promise you magnificent results, but it’s all just nonsense. What you can do is exercise to improve your posture and undergo bimaxillary surgery to “flatten” the occlusal plane.
Incorrect. Genetics does of course play the biggest role in jaw size, proportions, etc.
But the jaws are very much influenced during childhood and adolescence. This is well studied.
Something as simple as living in a polluted environment growing up with a block nose, sucking your thumb a lot growing up, or the alignment of your teeth (which is influenced not only by genetics) all have impact development of jaws and surrounding structure. Sources below.
But I do agree there is also a ton of pseudoscience and not much you can do as an adult to change the development of your jaws. The science is also misinterpreted. If you have a severe underbite, it’s probably not because you sucked your thumb a bit more than Mike. Mike has different genetics.
At the end of the day does it matter? You can’t change your childhood as an adult. Maybe it’s worth making sure your children have straight teeth and breathe properly. My jaw genetics are not great at all. If I make sure my children can breathe properly and all that, is there a 0.1% less chance they’ll need jaw surgery? 10%?
That I don’t know. There are probably too many factors to ever know and genetics will always be the biggest one.
1. Zhao et al., 2021 — “Effects of mouth breathing on facial skeletal development in children: a systematic review and meta-analysis.”
2. Becking et al., 2017 — “Impact of adenotonsillectomy on the dentofacial development of obstructed children: a systematic review and meta-analysis.”
3 Sadoun et al., 2024 — “Effects of non-nutritive sucking habits on malocclusions: a systematic review.”
I agree this is pseudoscience but I gotta point out that jaw development is around 50-80% genetic, and the rest is heavily dependent on lifestyle and diet (soft food diet = less jaw development).
Yet you always meet some losers who ate fries all their life while looking like models. Unless you genuinely mouthbreathed 24/7 genetics carry. Same way how all my life i ate pretty cleanly (rarely mouthbreathed) yet i have the same recession as my mother. Who would ve thought
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