The Shrinking Modern Face

Chapter 6

The Shrinking Modern Face

Price and the "primitive" jaw

In 1939, the dentist Weston A. Price published Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, a report on nearly a decade of travel to communities around the world — from Swiss alpine villages to Pacific islands to indigenous communities in the Americas and Africa — comparing the teeth and facial development of people eating traditional, unrefined diets against relatives who had switched to imported "foods of commerce": white flour, sugar, and canned goods.¹ Price reported wide, well-formed dental arches and low rates of crowding and decay in the traditional-diet groups, and narrower arches, crowded teeth, and more decay in the diet-switched groups within the same populations, and he concluded that modern, processed food was degrading jaw development and dental health generation to generation. The photographs are striking, and the book remains widely cited outside dentistry as proof that "primitive" people had naturally perfect jaws that industrial diets ruined.

The critique: a flawed frame

That reading does not hold up. In 1981, the health educator William T. Jarvis published a direct critique of Price's project and the broader "healthy savage" narrative it fed, in the journal Nutrition Today.² Jarvis's core objection was methodological: Price's fieldwork was observational and anecdotal rather than controlled, with no quantitative dietary analysis behind the comparisons, no attempt to rule out other differences between the groups he was comparing, and no reckoning with the real malnutrition, infectious disease, and short life expectancy that also existed in many of the "primitive" populations he idealized. The "healthy savage" framing — untouched traditional life as a lost nutritional paradise — was doing more work in Price's conclusions than his data could actually support. None of this means diet is irrelevant to jaw development; it means Price's specific evidence for exactly how and why does not meet a modern evidentiary standard, and should not be treated as settled science.

The real science: chewing less, changing shape

A more rigorous version of Price's underlying intuition does hold up. In 1984, the biological anthropologist Robert S. Corruccini described what he called an epidemiologic transition in dental occlusion: as populations urbanize and industrialize, rates of malocclusion — crowded, crooked, poorly aligned teeth — rise sharply, tracking the same modernization curve that drives up rates of diabetes and heart disease.³ Rural populations in developing and developed countries alike show measurably better occlusion than their urbanized counterparts, and the pattern shows up too fast across generations to be genetic drift — pointing toward environment, and specifically diet, as the driver. The leading mechanism is mechanical: softer, more processed modern food requires far less chewing force and fewer chewing cycles than the fibrous, tough traditional diets it replaced, and the jaw — like other bones — grows in response to the mechanical loads placed on it during development. Less chewing stress during childhood appears to mean a smaller, less fully grown jaw, with too little room for a full set of teeth.

The specific study behind that pattern is worth seeing. Before Corruccini ran his world survey, he tested the idea inside a single isolated, highly inbred rural Kentucky community that had eaten tough, hard-to-chew food until industry reached the area within living memory. Using standardized wax-bite impressions, he found the older generation raised on the traditional diet had significantly better occlusion than the younger generation on modern soft food — the same gene pool, a different diet.⁴ Holding ancestry roughly constant is exactly what Price's travel photographs never did.

Direct skeletal evidence for that mechanism came in 2011, when the biological anthropologist Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel compared mandible shape across a global sample of hunter-gatherer and agricultural populations, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.⁵ Unlike the skull as a whole, whose shape mostly tracks neutral genetic ancestry and population history, the mandible tracked subsistence strategy directly: hunter-gatherers, who chew tougher, less processed food, had consistently longer and narrower mandibles than agriculturalists eating softer, more cultivated and cooked diets, regardless of which populations were being compared. That is a genuine example of subsistence tracking jaw shape: a real developmental signal, driven by real differences in mechanical demand during growth, independent of the flawed framing Price built around a similar observation decades earlier. How much this explains is worth stating honestly, though. The field's own largest analysis finds the diet effect real but modest next to inherited ancestry and population history, and any individual's crowding still reflects the tooth and jaw proportions they inherit, not diet alone. That fuller, evidence-graded picture — evolution, diet, and genetics together — is the subject of a dedicated guide on why teeth crowd.

Mewing and the limits of the evidence

That real science is also where the current internet phenomenon of "mewing" and adult orthotropics overreaches. Popularized largely through social video by the orthodontist John Mew and his son, the specialist orthodontist Mike Mew, the claim is that sustained tongue posture and jaw exercises in adults and children can reliably reshape the jaw and face, expand the airway, and correct crowding without conventional orthodontic treatment. The mastication research above shows that jaw bone does respond to sustained mechanical load during growth — but it describes years of habitual heavy chewing across childhood development, not a tongue-posture exercise practiced by an adult with fused growth plates, and no controlled clinical evidence has demonstrated that mewing produces the specific facial or airway changes claimed online.

That gap between claim and evidence had a concrete regulatory consequence. In November 2024, the UK's General Dental Council found Mike Mew's fitness to practise impaired by misconduct, after a disciplinary panel concluded he had used orthotropic treatments — including arch expanders and headgear — on child patients without objective evidence that the approach achieved its stated aims, and had made misleading public statements, including a claim that expanding tongue space could influence brain growth.⁶ Expert witnesses in the case 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; the panel erased Mew from the UK dental register rather than imposing a lesser sanction, finding his continued conviction in the method made a repeat unlikely to be prevented any other way. That is a real regulatory finding against a real practitioner, not an internet argument — and it is the clearest available marker of how far current mewing claims have outrun the evidence base.

The 2024 case was not the first time the regulator came for a Mew. In 2017 the GDC removed the licence of Mike Mew's father, John Mew — the originator of orthotropics — on separate findings of false advertising and a breach of patient confidentiality.⁷ A second generation of the same family disciplined for the same underlying pattern of claims outrunning evidence is a sharper marker than any single case.

What actually changed, and what didn't

Malocclusion is not only a modern-food story. A cephalometric analysis of Tutankhamun's mummy documented a retrognathic lower jaw and overbite, in a dynasty whose close-kin marriages are independently well documented — malocclusion driven by inherited jaw-and-face proportions three thousand years before Weston Price ever picked up a camera, in a population eating nothing like modern processed food.⁸

Put together: the modern face is genuinely narrower and more crowded than it once was, and diet is a real part of why — softer, more processed food reduces the chewing demand that shapes the growing jaw, exactly as Corruccini's epidemiologic pattern and von Cramon-Taubadel's mandible data show. What is not supported is Price's specific "lost paradise" narrative, built on uncontrolled fieldwork and a romanticized frame Jarvis dismantled decades ago, or the modern claim that adults can reverse the pattern with tongue posture and jaw exercises alone. The honest version sits between those two overreaches: real change, a real and partially understood mechanical cause rooted in childhood development, and no shortcut back.

Further reading