The world awaits my seminal paper, In Defense of Mouth-breathers.
I don’t know about you, but I need a lot of air. It might have something to do with all my cycling, which instills the need to suck in oxygen at prodigious rates. Or it could be a vague feeling that my nose is filtering out the good stuff. Whatever the reason, I am not ashamed to admit to giving my lungs the biggest hole in my arsenal to inflate themselves.
My concern is that breathing using your mouth is too often tainted with negative connotations. As The Urban Dictionary puts it, a mouth-breather is
1. Literally, someone who lacks enough intelligence that they never learned to breathe through their nose.
2. A really dumb person.
When humans first acquired the power of speech, doubtless they quickly moved on to insults. “Why can’t you just yawn and be done with it?” said Lucy to the “handy” habilis painting her cave, ignoring the 1.2 million year gap.
RDH Magazine has this to say: “Mouth breathing affects the pH of the entire body… A low pH oral environment is not only corrosive to the teeth directly, but the acidic pH activates the acidophilic and acidogenic bacteria to set up housekeeping. Building a healthy biofilm in the presence of acidic saliva is nearly impossible. Acid begets acid.” Oh dear. Parenthetically, RDH, you don’t make it easy find out what those letters stand for. Rooting for Dental Hygiene?
“We know that breaking a habit is nearly impossible and starting a new habit is just as hard. And like it or not, one habit will be replaced by another, so finding an alternate habit is a good strategy.” Just when I was about to take up the harmonica.
How they used to “cure” mouth-breathers in unenlightened times