The Shrinking Face

Deep Dive

The Shrinking Face

Chapter 6 of the tour tells this story in four moves: Weston Price surveyed traditional-diet populations around the world and concluded their jaws were naturally superior; a 1981 critique showed his methodology could not support that conclusion; a more rigorous 1984 study found a real, if narrower, version of the same pattern; and a 2024 disciplinary case against a social-media dentist shows how far the modern "mewing" trend has strayed from what any of that evidence actually says. This deep-dive works through each move in more depth than the tour chapter has room for — what Price actually did and claimed, what specifically was wrong with it, what the real comparative data shows instead, and exactly where the line sits between a documented regulatory finding and a scientific verdict on a popular claim.

What Price actually did

Weston Price was a practicing dentist from Cleveland who, starting around 1931 and continuing for close to a decade, traveled to isolated communities on nearly every inhabited continent specifically to examine teeth and jaws before those communities had fully adopted Western processed food. His itinerary included Gaelic-speaking villages in the Outer Hebrides, remote valleys of the Swiss Alps — most famously the Loetschental Valley — Inuit communities in the Canadian north, several East African pastoral and agricultural groups, Aboriginal Australians, Melanesian and Polynesian islanders in the Pacific, and indigenous populations in Peru and other parts of the Americas. In each location he examined dental arch width and crowding, counted decayed teeth, and photographed facial structure, and wherever he could he compared people within the same community or even the same family who were still eating traditional foods against relatives who had switched to what he called "the displacing foods of modern commerce" — white flour, refined sugar, and canned goods brought in by trading posts, missions, and expanding transportation networks.¹

The pattern he reported was strikingly consistent: broad, well-formed dental arches with little crowding and very low rates of decay among people eating unprocessed local diets — wild and cultivated foods, organ meats, whole grains, fermented dairy, seasonal seafood, depending on the region — set against narrower arches, visible crowding, and sharply higher decay in the same populations' diet-switched members, sometimes appearing within a single generation. Price generalized from this to a causal claim: that the shift away from traditional, nutrient-dense diets toward refined, processed foods was directly responsible for a decline in facial and dental development, and that this decline was heritable and progressive across generations rather than something that simply happened to affect diet-switched individuals themselves. Published in 1939 as Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, the book's photographs of wide, symmetrical faces and jaws in traditional-diet groups next to crowded, narrower faces in modernized relatives became — and remain — the most widely circulated visual argument for the idea that industrial diets are actively deforming the human face.

Price's name did not retire with him. The Weston A. Price Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 1999, still promotes his dental and dietary conclusions as settled fact and runs an annual raw-milk symposium — a stance a 2015 physician review in Science-Based Medicine called, in its author's own assessment, part of one of the worst health websites she had evaluated.²

What was actually wrong with it

In 1981, William T. Jarvis — a health educator at Loma Linda University's School of Dentistry — published a direct methodological critique of Price's project in Nutrition Today, framing it as a textbook case of what he called the "myth of the healthy savage": the belief that people living in technologically simpler conditions are automatically healthier than people in industrial societies.³ Jarvis's objections were specific, not just a general dismissal. Price's fieldwork had no quantitative dietary analysis behind it — no measured nutrient content, no controlled sampling — and relied instead on impressionistic comparisons made on relatively short visits to each community. Price also had, in Jarvis's reading, a preconceived conviction that traditional-diet populations were healthy before he ever measured them, which shaped which observations he emphasized and which he set aside; his accounts of these communities largely ignored problems known to affect them, including periodontal disease, tuberculosis, and other infectious conditions with severe consequences for longevity and health that had nothing to do with jaw shape. Jarvis further pointed out that Price rarely considered alternative explanations for the pattern he did find — malnutrition and general poverty in some of the "traditional" groups, or overindulgence rather than any inherent property of processed food itself, as competing causes of the modernized groups' worse dental outcomes.

The critique carried weight because of who was making it. Jarvis was already the era's leading professional debunker of health fraud: five years before the Price essay, he and a colleague co-founded the group that became the National Council Against Health Fraud, after watching promoters of laetrile — an unproven apricot-pit "cancer cure" — talk state legislatures into carving it out of consumer-protection law.⁴ His objections to Price were the objections of someone who spent his career distinguishing real evidence from its imitations.

The deeper problem Jarvis named is a framing problem, not just a data problem. The "healthy savage" lens treats "unspoiled," pre-contact ways of life as a nutritional baseline against which modernity can only be a decline — a romanticized inversion of the older, more openly racist "primitive savage" trope, but still a distortion, because it selectively idealizes traditional societies rather than assessing them on the evidence. That framing is what let Price move from "these two groups of people have different teeth" to "processed food is degrading the human jaw" without the intermediate methodological steps — ruling out confounds, quantifying diet, controlling for the populations being genuinely comparable in every way except food — that a claim of that size requires. None of this makes Price's underlying intuition false. It means his specific evidence does not establish it, and the book's enduring popularity as proof of a "lost paradise" of primitive dental perfection outruns what Price actually demonstrated.

The real comparative data

A genuinely rigorous version of Price's intuition arrived four decades later. In 1984, biological anthropologist Robert S. Corruccini published An Epidemiologic Transition in Dental Occlusion in World Populations in the American Journal of Orthodontics, synthesizing occlusal data gathered across multiple populations at different stages of urbanization and dietary change rather than relying on impressionistic travel observation.⁵ The comparisons spanned groups in North America, India, and Melanesia, among others, and used a standardized clinical severity scale — the Treatment Priority Index, a weighted measure of arch crowding, crossbite, overjet, and related occlusal problems — rather than the unquantified "well-formed" versus "crowded" judgments Price had relied on. Corruccini's own earlier fieldwork with a rural Kentucky Appalachian community had already shown that middle-aged adults in that community, who had grown up eating a tougher, less processed local diet, had markedly better occlusion than younger community members raised on softer modern food — a difference that showed up within a single population and could not be explained by age alone.⁶ Comparable contrasts appeared between rural and urbanized populations in India, and between earlier and more recently urbanized cohorts elsewhere, with industrializing groups consistently scoring worse on the standardized index than their less-industrialized counterparts in the same region.

The pattern Corruccini named an "epidemiologic transition" is the same shape as the well-established rise in diabetes and cardiovascular disease that tracks industrialization — a measurable, population-level shift in disease prevalence that moves too fast across generations to be explained by genetic change, and that instead points to a shared environmental driver. For occlusion, the leading candidate driver is mechanical: chewing tougher, less processed food during childhood places more repeated mechanical load on the growing jaw, and bone — including the mandible — grows in response to the load placed on it during development, the same loading-driven growth logic that applies to any other developing bone. Direct skeletal confirmation of that mechanism came later, in 2011, when biological anthropologist Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel compared mandible shape across a global sample of hunter-gatherer and agricultural populations in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finding that mandible shape tracked subsistence strategy — tougher-food hunter-gatherer diets producing longer, narrower jaws than softer agricultural diets — independent of the neutral genetic ancestry that shapes the rest of the skull.⁷ Between Corruccini's population-level occlusal data and von Cramon-Taubadel's skeletal mechanism, the diet–jaw link Price gestured at in 1939 is real — just far more specific, and far more modest in what it actually predicts, than the "lost paradise" reading of Price's own book suggests.

The strongest evidence for cause rather than correlation came from an experiment. In 1982 Corruccini and the anatomist Robert M. Beecher raised squirrel monkeys on either naturally tough food or a softened equivalent, holding genetics and everything else constant; the soft-food animals grew significantly narrower dental arches with more rotated, crowded teeth.⁸ It is the controlled test Price's own travel photographs could never be — diet as the only manipulated variable, and malocclusion as the measured result.

Why the mewing claim is appealing — and where it overreaches

"Mewing" — named for the British orthodontist John Mew and popularized on social video largely by his son, the dentist Mike Mew — holds that sustained tongue posture against the roof of the mouth, combined with jaw-focused exercises, can reshape an adult or growing child's jaw and face, widen the airway, and correct crowding without conventional orthodontic treatment. Part of what makes the claim land is that it is not built from nothing: it borrows a real, published mechanism — Corruccini's diet-driven occlusal transition and von Cramon-Taubadel's mechanical-loading evidence, both genuinely showing that sustained physical forces during jaw development change bone shape — and extends it to a much larger claim than that evidence supports. The extension fails on two separate grounds. First, the underlying research describes years of habitual heavy chewing load across childhood skeletal development, not a tongue-posture habit practiced for minutes a day, often by adults whose jaw growth plates have already fused and whose bone is no longer in an active growth phase. Second, and independent of that plausibility gap, no controlled clinical trial has actually tested whether mewing produces the specific facial, jaw, or airway changes claimed for it — the evidence base is limited to practitioner case series, before-and-after photographs, and testimonials, none of which control for the confounds a claim about slow shape change over months or years actually requires.

That gap between a real mechanism and an untested extension of it is precisely the pattern the tour chapter warns about with Price's own overreach — a genuine observation stretched by a compelling narrative past what the underlying evidence can carry. It is worth being exact about what is and is not established here: that mechanical load can reshape a growing jaw is well supported; that a specific adult tongue-posture protocol reliably reshapes an already-mature face is, as of this writing, an untested claim resting on the appeal of the story rather than on any published controlled trial.

The 2024 regulatory finding, in more detail

The clearest concrete marker of how far the mewing claim has outrun its evidence is a real disciplinary case, not an online argument. On 6 November 2024, the UK's General Dental Council Professional Conduct Committee found Mike Mew's fitness to practise impaired by misconduct and ordered his erasure from the dental register, with immediate suspension pending erasure.⁹ The case centered on his treatment of two child patients: a six-year-old treated in 2016 and a second six-year-old, with normal craniofacial development and a normal bite, treated in 2018 — in both cases with orthotropic appliances, including arch expanders and headgear, that the panel found were applied without objective evidence they achieved their stated aims. The panel also cited a 2017 YouTube video, "Orthodontics Beyond the Teeth," in which Mew made public claims that creating additional tongue space could influence facial growth, craniofacial structure, and even brain development — claims the panel found inappropriate and misleading. Expert witnesses testified that orthotropics is not supported by the scientific literature and is not a specialty recognized by the NHS, the GDC, or the British Orthodontic Society, which separately issued guidance cautioning against claims of that kind.

The panel's choice of erasure over a lesser sanction such as suspension is itself informative: it found that Mew's "unwavering and longstanding belief" in orthotropics made it unlikely that a suspension would change his practice, and that erasure was the only sanction that would adequately protect the public. Mew appealed the decision to the High Court; the appeal was dismissed, and the GDC's own register confirms his erasure has stood since. None of that record is a scientific study, and it should not be read as one. It is a professional-conduct finding — about informed consent, evidence-based practice standards, and public statements made by a licensed dentist — decided by a regulatory panel applying UK dental-practice rules. It runs alongside the separate, purely scientific point made above: that no controlled trial has tested mewing's central claims. The two conclusions point the same direction, but they are not the same claim, and treating the GDC's ruling as if it were itself a scientific refutation of mewing would overstate what the panel was actually asked, and empowered, to decide.

Three claims, three different levels of evidence

Laid side by side, this history is really three separate claims, each resting on a different quality of evidence. Price's claim — that traditional diets produce naturally superior jaws, and that modern food is degrading them generation over generation — was built on real fieldwork across dozens of communities worldwide, but on methodology too loose, and a framing too romanticized, to establish what it claimed; Jarvis's critique showed why. Corruccini's claim — that industrialization tracks a measurable rise in malocclusion, with mechanical loading during childhood development as the likely driver — is the same underlying intuition rebuilt on standardized comparative data and, later, direct skeletal evidence, and it holds up. The modern mewing claim — that adults can replicate that childhood mechanical effect with a tongue-posture habit — borrows the credibility of Corruccini's real science while skipping the controlled evidence that would actually establish it, and the 2024 GDC case is a real regulatory consequence of that gap, not a scientific verdict standing in for one.

The honest version of "the shrinking face" sits in the middle claim, not the two overreaches on either side of it: the modern jaw is measurably narrower and more crowded than it was in populations eating tougher, less processed diets, diet is a genuine part of why, and the mechanism is mechanical loading during childhood development — not a lost paradise ruined by modernity, and not a shortcut an adult can exercise their way back to.

Further reading