Sandra Kahn

In his travels among those who had been relatively isolated from the culture of the European settlers he was struck by the difference in facial structure and bearing of the Native Americans compared to the people of European background he had grown up with

Image 12. Illustrations from Catlin’s Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life contrasting natural sleep (left) and unnatural sleep (right)

And the most abominable, disgusting, and dangerous habit belonging to the human race . . . of sleeping with the mouth open

Yet evidence that we’ll discuss later shows that people switching from traditional to industrialized diets can manifest oral-facial changes in a single generation

the evolution of agriculture, which appeared in different parts of the world about 10,000 to 6,000 years ago and wrought a huge change in human diets

Anthropologists and archaeologists have documented the importance of diet diversity in human history1 and have shown that the advent of agriculture produced both dietary changes2 and new styles of eating

The mechanical forces generated by chewing food not only help your jaws grow to the right size and shape, they also help your teeth fit properly within the jaw.

Changes in chewing changed human jaws and faces.

Pottenger fed one group of cats soft cooked food and pasteurized milk and compared their development to that of cats that ate their traditional raw meat diet. The cats reared on cooked food grew to be smaller than their meat-eating counterparts, developed health problems, and were unable to reproduce

even the wisdom teeth, so often troublesome in the West, had room to fit comfortably in the wide smooth arch of teeth in a normal indigenous mouth