How does your child breathe while asleep — through the mouth or nose? Does it really matter, you may ask? Yes, it does – BIG TIME! Let me tell you the story of George Catlin to open your eyes of the importance of nose breathing while sleeping.

George Catlin was born in Pennsylvania in 1796 and started his career as a lawyer, which he did not enjoy. His dream was to paint. Catlin loved people and he loved expressive faces. His life was changed forever when he met a delegation of about fifteen Native Americans from several tribes who were passing through Philadelphia on their way to Washington D.C. Catlin was fascinated by the Indians and their looks and culture. Within just a few days, he decided to make it his life mission to paint and document Indian culture and history.

What Catlin has left behind in his paintings and his book Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life provide revelatory and unique insight into Native Americans life. His testimony also carries with it the fundamental key to what I believe true health is based upon – nasal breathing. We “modern, civilized” people have a lot to learn by studying how the “savages” lived and the exceptional health they possessed despite a lack of modern comforts.

Native American Indians had fantastic health

Between 1830 and 1860, Catlin visited more than 150 Native American tribes in the North, Central, and South America. In total, these tribes had more than two million members.

Catlin noted that those Indian tribes that had not been influenced by the western lifestyle had zero infant mortality.

Moreover, there were no deformities in their children, and no child deaths from disease.

In contrast, European mortality records during the 1850s revealed that one in four children died at birth, and only one in four survived beyond 25 years of age.

I have devoted the greater part of my life in visiting, and recording the looks of, the various native Races of North and South America; and during those researches, observing the healthy condition and physical perfection of those people, in their primitive state, as contrasted with the deplorable mortality, the numerous diseases and deformities, in civilized communities, I have been led to search for, and able, I believe, to discover, the main causes leading to such different results.

Breathing is the major difference

An important clue to Catlin’s great health discovery can be found in his own personal life. Catlin’s wife and one of his children died of pneumonia. In pneumonia, breathing is likely to be shallow, rapid, and in and out through the mouth.

Shallow breathing prevents air from reaching the bottom of the lungs. This creates a fertile environment for bacterial growth and the result could be pneumonia.

Catlin himself had suffered the consequences of this, having since childhood developed the habit of breathing through his mouth. Catlin noted in his book that Indians from all the tribes he met breathed through their noses both day and night, whereas white people, to a large extent, were mouth breathers.

No diseases are natural. I am compelled to believe, and feel authorized to assert, that a great proportion of the diseases prematurely fatal to human life, as well as mental and physical deformities, and destruction of the teeth, are caused by the abuse of the lungs, in the Mal-respiration of Sleep: and also, that the pernicious habit, though contracted in infancy or childhood, or manhood, may generally be corrected by a steady and determined perseverance [sic], based upon a conviction of its baneful and fatal results.

The method of breathing was the single major difference he discerned between the Native American’s strong and healthy population compared to the “civilized” man with his deteriorated health and short lifespan.

Closed mouth during sleep

Most habits that are against nature will lead to disease if they are not changed. Apart from man, there is no other animal that sleeps with an open mouth.

Incessant mouth breathing at rest means that we are hyperventilating. This leads to oxygen deficiency, which causes us to sleep less deeply and compromises our ability to heal and repair our body.

If man’s unconscious existence for nearly one-third of the hours of his breathing life depends, from one moment to another, upon the air that passes through his nostrils; and his repose during those hours, and his bodily health and enjoyment between them, depend upon the soothed and tempered character of the currents that are passed through his nose to his lungs, how mysteriously intricate in its construction and important in its functions is that feature, and how disastrous may be the omission in education which sanctions a departure from the full and natural use of this wise arrangement!

Fine teeth and beautiful faces

As a pioneering anthropologist and a painter with a skilled eye and a great interest in details, Catlin recorded his observations of the Native American’s physical characteristics.

Like so many other early observers, Catlin was struck by the beauty of their teeth. These people, who talk little and sleep naturally, have no dentists nor dentifrice, nor do they require either; their teeth almost invariably rise from the gums and arrange themselves as regular as the keys of a piano; and without decay or aches, preserve their soundness and enamel, and powers of mastication.

Catlin was convinced that the habit of sleeping with their mouths closed contributed to the development of the Native Americans’ fine teeth and beautiful faces. He surmised that it is important for teeth, while they are forming, to meet and constantly feel each other and are thus reminded of their relative, natural positions in the mouth. This is especially true of infants who sleep two-thirds of their lives.

When withdrawing the nipple from the mouth of a baby, he observed that Indian mothers carefully closed its lips with her fingers.

The child shall not be too hot

As with sheep, when a lamb is born outdoors in the spring, an infant is able to breathe the fresh and cold outdoor air. An infant has a very high metabolism and a special kind of fat — brown fat — which makes it easier for them to keep warm compared to adults.

Children get too hot when they sleep inside in bedrooms that are too hot, or have too many clothes, or sleep in their parent’s bed and get exposed to their body heat. The risk here is that the child will open its mouth to breathe more and expel some of the heat through exhalation. It is similar to when a dog pants (over-breathes) after physical activity because it does not have the ability to sweat.

The Savage Mother, instead of embracing her infant in her sleeping hours, in the heated exhalation of her body, places it at her arm’s length from her, and compels it to breathe the fresh air, the coldness of which generally prompts it to shut the mouth, in default of which, she presses its lips together in the manner that has been stated, until she fixes the habit which is to last it through life; and the contrast to this, which is too often practiced by mothers in the Civilized world, in the mistaken belief that warmth is the essential thing for their darling babes, I believe to be the innocent foundation of the principal, and as yet unexplained, cause of the deadly diseases so frightfully swelling the Bills of Mortality in Civilized communities.

Mothers giving direction to the destinies of man

Upon returning from his last voyage in 1860, at the age of 64, Catlin wrote:

If I were to endeavor to bequeath to posterity the most important motto which human language can convey, it should be in three words — Shut your Mouth.

Catlin’s last words in the book about the breath are magnificent:

Rest assured that the great secret of life is the breathing principle, for which Nature has rightly prepared the material, and the proper mode of using it; and at the incipient stage of life where mothers are the physicians, is the easiest place to contract habits against Nature, or to correct them; and that there is woman’s post, her appropriate sphere; where she takes to herself the sweetest pleasures of her existence, and draws the highest admiration of the world, whilst, like ‘a guardian angel’, she is watching over, and giving direction to, the Destinies of Man. There is great wisdom here that I aspire to share with as many people — especially parents — as possible.

Anders Olsson inspires people to improve their breathing habits through his Conscious Breathing Retraining Program. He is the author of The Power of Your Breath and the creator of the Relaxator Breathing Retrainer and Sleep Tape. 

Power of Breath Kit Giveaway

References

• “George Catlin” — An important American artist, from Voice of America
• “George Catlin Painted Native Americans” from Voice of America
• Book by George Catlin – “Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life“
• Weston A. Price — “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration”