#352 Does Daytime Napping Age You Faster, Is Fried Food Healthy and More - Q&A w/ Siim Land

Siim Land (0:00)

Hey, welcome back to the channel. My name is Siim Land, and today we are doing another Instagram Q&A. If you want to ask me a question, then make sure you're following on Instagram at Siimland. All right, first question. Your opinion on hard mewing.

So this is an interesting question. So for those who don't know, mewing is more like this, let's say, facial exercise where you're teaching yourself to breathe through the nose, as well as kind of, you know, that they say that hypothetically it's supposed to also restructure your jawline in a way to make it look more attractive and more like squared, et cetera, not like a crooked jawline, but more, yeah, like a square jawline. And the way you do it is by, you know, trying to push the jaw like forward. And the way you do that is by pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth.

And, yeah, like many children who breathe through the mouth develop this kind of a weird and crooked jawline that isn't generally considered attractive. And it also obviously increases the risk of sleep apnea, diabetes, and other issues like high blood pressure, those things. So, you know, as a human, you should always breathe through the nose pretty much 99% of the time, except when you're like exercising hard or if you're like talking or, I don't know, like just running or whatever, like when you're under some sort of, you know, oxygen deprivation or when you need more oxygen, that's where it's okay to kind of grasp through the mouth and breathe more air in. But 99% of the time, especially in your sleep, you should breathe through the nose. And, you know, I think naturally that's what most people will end up doing anyway. But, you know, children, they may develop this poor habit to breathe through the mouth due to either some lack of these fat-soluble vitamins that also prevents the jawline from developing properly. And, you know, the way you can do that, obviously, is to just use mouth taping and different kinds of breathing exercises to achieve that. So I think the mewing is more of like, you know, yeah, it's a good exercise to try to teach yourself to breathe through the nose. I don't think it's going to have any significant impact on actually changing your, you know, jawline a lot. Like there are like these different channels and people who are doing this hard mewing all the time.

And I think it will become like, you know, too much of a like a too much of a focus. Like it will just take a lot of like your attention away from other things. So I think it's much better to just focus on trying to teach yourself to breathe through the nose. And, you know, the best way to do that is to just seal your mouth closed when you're like sleeping, for example, using mouth tape or just during daytime, also using something analogous to just remind yourself, hey, you just have to breathe through the nose. And yeah, like if you do press your tongue to the roof of your mouth, then that would, you know, automatically make you breathe through the nose as well. And it already automatically also, you know, creates some sort of this mewing effect where you're pushing your jaw as well forward a little bit. And, you know, maybe over time it would have like a minor, like a minor change in terms of actually changing the jawline structure or the aesthetics of it. But yeah, I think you should just, you know, try to breathe through the nose, teach yourself to breathe through the nose. And over time as a side effect, you will also achieve whatever you're after with the mewing type, so I don't specifically do any mewing or anything of that.

I just, you know, try to breathe through the nose as much as possible. Next question. How can we learn the optimal levels for each biomarker? Google doesn't give an accurate answer. Well, the thing with that is, yeah, like the medical guidelines, they're obviously applied to general, you know, general situations and for the average person. And I do think that most of the RDAs and the, as well as the biomarker ranges, generally can be quite like meaningful. They do will, you know, pretty much tell you what is the optimal range or a good range to aim for. For example, blood sugar. If your fasting blood sugar levels are above 150 milligrams, then that is a sign of prediabetes. And if your blood sugar is below 100, then that's very good. So there's very, you know, there's different kinds of ideas about what is optimal for in terms of like cholesterol, especially like different controversial biomarkers. But most of the biomarkers, I think, are pretty standardized already, like your vitamin D levels pretty much standardized, your biological levels, cholesterol is obviously more controversial.