TikTokers can’t shut up about this one simple trick. All you need to do is seal your mouth with tape before going to bed, and you will apparently collect a slew of benefits. It will give you more energy, chisel your jawline, and even improve the health of your heart in the long run.
The trick is knowing which tape to use, and young influencers on the social media platform are quick to enter into paid partnerships to sell the one brand of mouth tape you really need. If you don’t trust “randos” on TikTok, you might be swayed by actress Emma Roberts (“it’s life-changing”), neuroscientist Andrew Huberman (“it completely changes the structure of your face in just two, three months”), or podcasting superstar Joe Rogan, whose preferred brand, of course, is called Hostage Tape, which describes itself as “the most badass beard-safe mouth tape.” (It comes in black for men and pink for women, possibly to make sure you remember your gender when you wake up.) If only we could convince Rogan to wear it during the day.
TikTok really is awash with influencers of every stripe to convince just about anyone that they need to force themselves to breathe through their nose while dozing off. Doctors in scrubs add that expert edge (with one even shooting his video in front of his massive operating room lights), and if you’re into AI, you can watch this artificially generated video clip which imagines men lacking in the looks department asking gym hunks how they got so attractive: it’s mouth tape, of course, and a specific brand of mouth tape. Name in the bio.
Where did this social media mouth-taping mania begin?
Breathe, Pray, Love
A few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, when so many people were struggling to breathe and ending up in the hospital, a book came out whose cover must have looked at the time like a way out. It was called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.
Its author, James Nestor, is not a scientist or a doctor; he holds a Master’s degree in English with a minor in Art History, and he crafted a career for himself as a freelance writer publishing about sport, travel, and science in major outlets. He became so enraptured with the topic of his book on breathing—in the common parlance of the Internet, one might say he got “breathpilled”—that he is now leading breathing workshops for fellow “pulmonauts.” The last one took place in Costa Rica and all-inclusive packages for the week ran the gamut from USD 2,500 to 4,250.
The book itself is adorned with blurbs from, shall I say, questionable people. There’s Iceman Wim Hof, and lectin-free-diet promoter Steven Gundry, and Joe Rogan. Also, the author of the popular memoir Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. Maybe when the movie gets a remake, the Julia Roberts character will put on mouth tape before going to bed in Bali.
I flipped through Nestor’s Breath, a book about how most of us are breathing wrong. These books are a dime a dozen, and I’m not surprised this one became an international best-seller. They fearmonger and offer salvation at the same time. They zero in on something we all do and reveal that this thing—this popular thing you are probably doing right now!—is the one true cause of all diseases. Read the whole book and you will be sold the solution. It’s the one-two punch of boogeyman and panacea.
That Breath was a finalist for the Royal Society Science Book Prize boggles my mind. Its author points out that your doctor probably didn’t check your respiratory rate or your blood oxygen/carbon dioxide levels at your last checkup. Hence the crisis: the scientists who ask the real questions discovered that “90 percent of us—very likely me, you, and almost everyone you know—is breathing incorrectly and that this failure is either causing or aggravating a laundry list of chronic diseases.” Nestor claims that by just changing the way in which we breathe, we could reduce or reverse diseases like asthma, anxiety, ADHD, psoriasis, and more. “This work,” he writes in the introduction, “was upending long-held beliefs in Western medicine.” This reeks of alternative medicine, of pseudoscience, of trusting fringe voices instead of field experts, and as you will see, this is precisely what happened with his section on mouth taping.
18 percent
The mouth tape appears in chapter 3.
How did Nestor hear about it? From a functional dentist named Mark Burhenne, who also tells him that mouth breathing is the #1 cause of cavities. (It’s not.) A look at Burhenne’s website and associated writings reveal that he is anti-fluoride. He sells his own brand of fluoride-free toothpaste and his shop, where he gets a cut from Amazon purchases referred by him, includes supplements, an electromagnetic frequency detector, and of course mouth tape. Functional dentistry is the oral sibling of functional medicine: both are pipelines to steer genuine healthcare professionals into alternative medicine, get them to order unnecessary tests, and encourage them to prescribe unneeded and poorly regulated (if regulated at all) dietary supplements.
Nestor plays the “I was skeptical at first” card, so he then finds a speech-language pathologist, Ann Kearny, who swears by mouth taping after suffering from chronic congestion. Nestor experiences a conversion when he tries the tape himself: his snoring goes away, followed by his sleep apnea (a temporary cessation of breathing). He suggests a postage-stamp-size piece of 3M Nexcare Durapore cloth tape on the centre of the lips, “a Charlie Chaplin mustache moved down an inch.”
The plausibility of mouth tape hinges on the differences between breathing through our mouth versus breathing through our nose. Let’s take a closer look.
Jawlines are often mentioned in these conversations. In dispiriting corners of the Internet, young men unhappy with their romantic prospects are told they should embrace “looksmaxxing:” a spectrum of interventions to improve their appearance, from mouth taping to cosmetic surgery. They are told that the apex of masculinity, the Chads, have a chiseled jawline, but that losers, because they breathe through their mouth, have pudgy jaws and chins. By taping the mouth shut at night, the jaw is meant to tighten, leading to more dates.
Some young men will claim it worked for them, but it may simply be that they aged out of their baby fat. Facial structure is mostly driven by the genes you inherit from your parents: even the idea that always breathing through your mouth will lead to a slack facial appearance is currently disputed, as the arrow of causation might be pointing in the opposite direction.
As for all of the other alleged benefits—feeling more rested, improving your heart health—they hinge on another bit of science: that breathing through your nose releases a ton of nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is not to be confused with nitrous oxide, AKA laughing gas, an anesthetic and pain reliever. When we breathe through our nose, our sinuses release nitric oxide, a biological messenger, which spreads throughout the body and benefits us in many ways. It opens up our blood vessels, for example, and it is this very function that Viagra taps into to cause an erection.
The book Breath wants to convince us that the increase in nitric oxide production from breathing through our nose is so significant, it will improve our health in multiple ways. In fact, its author narrows it down to a number: nose-breathing means we absorb “18% more oxygen” than when we breathe through our mouth, because the nitric oxide produced by the sinuses helps us hold onto the oxygen in the air.
The problem? None of the author’s three references behind that claim show this. One is to a 2002 study that did not even measure oxygen levels; the second is to one of the functional dentist’s blog posts, which does not mention the number; and the third is to a New Scientist magazine article that speaks of a boost of “up to 20% more oxygen” without sourcing that number. After a half hour of searching, I found the origin of that 18%: a 1996 paper by Jon Lundberg in which six hospitalized and intubated patients breathing with the use of a machine had an 18% increase in oxygen pressure inside their body—a measure related to how much oxygen reaches the tissues of the body—after “nasal air” was fed to them instead of ambient air. If you are reading this, you are unlikely to be hooked up to a mechanical ventilator. The study also took the measurement in healthy people who breathed through their mouth, then through their nose. The increase in oxygen was on average 10%, although in two of the six participants, there was no increase, period.
None of this lack of bibliographic diligence on Nestor’s part matters, of course, because his book became a best-seller and its claims have been sucked out of it, repeated with anecdotal authority on TikTok.
How the viral sausage gets made
The mouth taping phenomenon exemplifies how these wellness interventions, often devoid of scientific evidence, go viral.
Fringe figures in the health space, predisposed to thinking of themselves as revolutionaries, believe they have discovered The One True Cause of All Diseases and its associated cure-all. They catch the attention of a naïve journalist, who lacks formal training in science but is writing a book about some topic they find fascinating. In order to sell, the book has to fit a specific mold. It has to stoke fears about something we all do and offer to transform our health with a secret that is at once ancient and brand-new, hidden from us by a mainstream establishment that has forsaken its duty.
The author ends up on a whirlwind tour of media appearances and the book becomes a success. The message reaches major influencers, like Logan Paul and Jimmy Fallon, who adopt its solution and rave about it. Lesser TikTok and Instagram creators jump on the bandwagon and enter into paid sponsorships to endorse the products that have developed in the wake of the book’s publication. And health journalists, desperate to cover what’s trending, reach out to actual doctors to ask if this thing works. This is how a fringe theory gets mainstream-washed.
In the case of mouth taping, those doctors receiving calls from reporters are quite baffled. I read reports by medical practitioners who were taken aback by a journalist’s query about the evidence behind mouth taping. They search the scientific literature for answers and find very little. “Kids are doing what?” I can imagine them saying to the journalist at the other end of the line.
There are studies: in fact, earlier this year, two reviews came out with the evidence we have so far, one from the United States and one from Canada. The first, a scoping review—meaning a mapping of the available evidence, often when few studies exist—found nine studies and concluded that they were very different and showed “little consensus” on the benefits of mouth taping. It also scoped out how TikTok videos talked about mouth taping, highlighting that health benefits are often claimed while risks go mostly unspoken. Meanwhile, the Canadian systematic review, which found ten studies with a total of 213 participants, similarly concluded that the benefits were uncertain. The dangers, however, were real.
Mouth taping is appealing to people who suffer from obstructive sleep apnea and who are told by doctors that they need to invest in an expensive and cumbersome CPAP machine. A motor blows air into a tube, forcing this air into a mask strapped to the sleeper’s face. No wonder so many patients abandon them. A piece of tape sounds like a relief by comparison.
But sleep apnea is complex. For some, the cause is an obstruction in the nose, either something they were born with, some inflammatory process, or even cancer. Sealing their mouth shut with tape to force air through an obstructed nose would make the apnea worse, not better. That’s the problem with a universal solution when the problem it’s trying to fix is not simple.
There are advantages to breathing through the nose as opposed to the mouth. The nose warms up the air coming in, filters it, and humidifies it, and that burst of nitric oxide produced by the sinuses is a good thing. But we shouldn’t think of mouth taping as some ultimate Band-Aid solution to everything that’s wrong with our health and looks.
It is possible that mouth taping has some specific benefit for certain people. More studies are needed, although given the crackdown on health science funding in the United States and how mouth taping got its start with fringe figures, should we really expect more studies on this trend?
I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Take-home message:
- Mouth taping is the trend of putting a small piece of tape over your mouth before going to bed to force yourself to breathe through your nose, which is supposed to lead to multiple health benefits
- What popularized the practice is James Nestor’s best-selling book, Breath, in which he found out about it from a dentist who embraces pseudoscience
- There is very little scientific evidence that mouth taping is beneficial, and for some people who have sleep apnea, it can actually be dangerous because their nose is obstructed
