Do you, as a rule keep your mouth shut?
28 Jul 2022
Dear LPG,
I think that once you get hooked there is so much information to be found on the internet and if you become a habitual browser you can learn the most unusual of things. Please don’t ask me why I hit upon this subject but having read a little I felt it might be worth sharing. The lessons to be learned there are numerous and varied and this quite fundamental nugget of knowledge came as a bit of a jaw-dropper to me even though dropping your jaw might well be one of the roots of the problem.
You would think that after doing it for the past seventy odd years I would have learnt all there is to know about successful breathing. Most of us learn to do it so well that we don’t even think about it. But did you know that up to half of the people in the world could do a better job?
When we teach our children the reasons for the individual features on our faces, we teach them that our eyes are for seeing with, our ears are for hearing with, our mouth is for eating and talking with and our nose is for breathing with, but did you know that roughly half of the world’s population don’t use their noses properly.
Apparently, when you breathe through your mouth, which so many of us do, the air that gets to your lungs is not as filtered as if it gets to your lungs via your nose. Your nose is your body’s air filter and those of us who don’t use it are cheating our lungs of better-quality air. The other thing to take into consideration is that all that unfiltered stuff that we inhale can adversely affect what happens in your mouth too.
The internet tells that up to half of us human animals breathe through our mouths as a matter of course although we have a practically redundant instrument exclusively for the task of breathing.
It is something I have not really thought about until now, but I bet that, if you have read this, you might give the quality of your air intake a bit more thought in the future.
SE, Bellingham
SE shares the evidence that backs up his findings…
