 Our next speaker, his name is Dr. Mike Mu and he is a dentist, more specifically a orthodontist who's been practicing for over 20 years. He's London based and an expert on dietary effects on facial growth. His researching treatments to affect facial growth to avoid orthodontics and other problems. And he's also a third generation dentist. His grandfather was a dentist, his father was a dentist, so we're in good hands. Let's welcome Mike. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you very much for inviting me along and thank you very much for listening to me. I'm going to approach something that kind of seems very obvious when I say it, but I would imagine it's going to be something relatively new to most of you. We have to ask the question, what makes us beautiful? We could ask what gives us a good body? Well, undoubtedly genetics plays an important role. You couldn't grow without your genes. Also, of course, diets are important. We've heard a lot about that and I'm not going to stray too much into diet because that's not the direction I'm coming from. I was specific to the diet. Of course, use, how much you use your body, I'm going to talk more about that and I'm going to talk about posture. No one would doubt that use can change the form and shape of your body. We don't talk as much about posture, but you know that people who posture well have good physical shape. Now, what gives you a good face? It's a general rule most people think is pretty genetic because we look similar to our parents, so the assumption has been there that it's genetic. Now, I'm Mike Mew. I qualified at the Royal London Medical College in Whitechapel, which for those of you who don't know the area, it's literally a couple of miles further east from here. I then went into facial surgery. I did some in South Africa. I also did some in Brighton. I studied my orthodontics in Denmark because it's the best place for orthodontics one of the best in the world and probably certainly the best for adult orthodontics in the world. I learned orthotropics. Well, it's a concept my father came out with, looking at some of the ideas and concepts of my grandfather. I did learn it with the practice and pearly why I work with my father, but you know, I've been listening to this since I could first learn to talk and walk. Now, studying orthodontics would always struck me as strange, because we didn't know the cause of what we were treating. This diagram here, it talks about 60, 60 plus percent of the population having some form of malocclusion, which is crooked teeth. That's slightly arbitrary. You could argue that that's higher. It depends what way you define it. Now, the most interesting thing is we only know the cause of 5%. So we've got a problem, a disease, if you will, that affects the majority of the population. We only know a small percentage of the causes. Those causes tend to be people with diseases, people with syndromes, traumas, infections, the obvious ones. I would argue that that 5% has been fairly consistent through history. It's this big 60%, or it depends how you define it, larger group, that we really don't know. So if most of you have crooked teeth, we don't know the cause of what you have. I can't put a finger on it. Now, we're talking crooked teeth and jaws. That's the definition of malocclusion. Now, how are we treating it? Well, at the moment, we're taking teeth out of this too many teeth, and then we're pushing the rest of the teeth into position. Sometimes we'll widen it to reduce the number of teeth we have to take out. But either ways, it's a surgical mechanical correction. You usually do this if you've accepted an inheritance. So we've kind of come to a decision that is inherited. So the suggestion of causes is a mixed inheritance. The suggestion is that, well, now that we can travel, we get one group of people mixing with another group of people, you have a mismatch with the genes, and that's what's causing the problem. There's another theory that there's a trend to a smaller jaws. Our ancestors had bigger jaws, or rather the ape ancestors we came from had larger jaws, and so it's just an aproprogression. That's the way it goes. Really not much evidence for either of those. Now, what interests me is we've been anatomical humans for the minimum of 160,000 years, maximum something like 220,000 years, and by anatomical humans, we've got all the bits that would go to make us humans. 40,000 years ago, we were effectively what we are now, which is Stone Age Man. Now, most of that group, right the way through to about 10,000 years ago, the Neolithic period, there was less than 5% of these crooked teeth, no crooked jaws, really. Now, by the same definition as different from the previous slide, there's now 95%. That's a huge change, just really from the Neolithic period, and it's really happened in the last 150 years, 200 years. That's when the crunch times happened. We've also got, we are one of 5,400 species of mammal. The human race, just one. Now, of those other 5,400 species, none of them get these problems. None of them get crooked teeth. Maybe a few domesticated cats and dogs and some feral foxes, but then there's not really representative of wild animals or natural animals. Of course, then we've got other issues. We've got some indigenous populations today. You look at them. You see the documentaries. You see these individuals in the tribal groupings, and they've nearly always all got perfectly straight teeth and nice wide arches. And there's interest in watching the rapid lifestyle changes in populations. One of my personal interests is a lot of the Afro-Caribbean population that I treat here in London. You'll see grandparents coming with great facial development, perfectly straight teeth. They've been brought up, particularly in Africa or the Caribbean. They then come with all those, rather, their children bring the grandchildren, the third generation. The children were brought up in this country generally on ethnically sourced foods, and they've got pretty straight teeth, fairly nice faces. They'll have a gap between the front teeth, maybe one tooth out of the way, a little bit of crowding at the bottom, but pretty nice development. Their children, they've been brought up on McDonald's and television meals, and they've got the same level of crowding as we have, the general population. So it seems as if it's entering in this population that causes this change. Of course, we've got twin research, and the twin research generally points to the environment. It says it's not a genetic problem that we're dealing with here. And of course, just off the bottom of the page, I hope too many of our slides aren't like that. We've got population studies. People have gone out and done big population studies, and again, this shows it generally is the environment. It's not the genes causing us. Interests me greatly, because of course you can affect the environment.