273. Dr. Staci Whitman: The Surprising Oral Causes Behind Facial Asymmetry and How Your Face Ages | Part 2

Biohacking Beauty: The Anti-Aging Skincare Podcast

This episode continues a detailed conversation with Dr. Staci Whitman exploring how oral mechanics, airway function, and structural habits dictate facial aging and asymmetry. Dr. Whitman breaks down the

Key takeaways

• Dr. Staci Whitman explains that chronic under-eye darkness (Venus pooling) is primarily structural and inflammatory due to airway obstruction rather than simple pigment changes.
• One-sided chewing creates muscular hypertrophy on the dominant side and atrophy on the other, directly driving adult facial asymmetry over time.

Main topics

• Facial asymmetry & structural aging
• Airway health & nasal breathing

Notable quotes

"The act of chewing, form follows function. So the more we are chewing, the more we are nasal breathing, our tongue is up. That's all going to help keep this very stable and healthy."

Conclusion

Listeners leave with a clear framework for understanding how oral function shapes facial structure, along

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:05) Welcome to Biohacking Beauty. I'm Amitai Eshel. Speaker 3 (0:08) I'm Anastasia Kojaeva. And together we are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Yanko Skincare and also hosts of this very own Biohacking Beauty podcast. Speaker 2 (0:20) Yes, indeed. And this is the second episode or the second part of our discussion with Dr. Stacey Whitman, which was so amazing. We couldn't stop talking. and it became longer than what we would like for one episode to be. Speaker 3 (0:36) Yes, so in this conversation, we're continuing to talk about what actually builds the face, why going from four hours of chewing a day to four minutes changed how humans look, what mouth breathing costs you in the mirror, and what's still on the table for an adult whose face is already built. Speaker 2 (0:55) Yeah, I said this joke last time, but it is so good, I'm going to say it twice. Speaker 3 (0:59) This Speaker 2 (0:59) was a jaw-dropping episode. Speaker 3 (1:02) Yes, and we wanted the information to be, isn't it digestible for you? Stealing my Speaker 2 (1:07) jokes. Speaker 3 (1:08) So we brought it in two episodes, and here is the part two. I hope you're as excited as we're excited to share it with you guys because we think Dr. Stacey is just a world of information, and honestly, I don't think anybody brings it. together in the whole picture, the connection between oral health and overall wellness and longevity. And we're just so excited to share so many protocols with you that she shares so freely. So let's dive in. Speaker 2 (1:37) Let's do it. Please welcome Dr. Stacey Whippen. Speaker 2 (1:48) So under-eye darkness is definitely one of the things that we get asked most about. And you call it Venus pooling. Venus Speaker 1 (2:02) pooling. The Speaker 2 (2:03) question is how much of chronic under-eye darkness do you think is structural rather than pigment change? Speaker 1 (2:14) Sure. I don't have a stat on that, but it's more structural than pigment change. Now, there are genetic predispositions. There are some families that just have it, and your ethnicity will factor into that, certainly. But most patients that I see with that, it's an airway issue. It's inflammation due to airway. And a majority of humans have airway issues. I mean, the stats say... 60 to 80%. I think it's like 90 % of us. I mean, there's very few perfect breathers out there right now, you know? Speaker 2 (2:54) And Speaker 1 (2:54) so if you factor that in, you know, it's a big issue. And so you may, if you fritz your airway, you may still have some darkness under your eye. I mean, some of that's normal, right? But What we're seeing, too, is not only inflammation, but if the skeleton is changing and your eyes are changing, you're going to have more of an indentation of the orbit that's showing. So a lot of it's just postural, too, like how you're positioned in space and time is going to impact how that reads and looks to other people. So Speaker 2 (3:31) you are referring to... When we spoke until now about structural changes to the face, we mainly talked about, or we left out the jaw bone. And as we, to some extent, at least in our conversation, and many of the issues that people encounter when they get older is the kind of reduction in bone mass of the lower of the jaw bone, whether it is the thinning or retraction, right? The bone becomes less protruded. Are there ways to, so if you could speak to that, if you share my insight here, and then what can we do in order to support bone health and posture and function of the jawbone? Speaker 1 (4:17) Yeah. Well, just the same. Okay. So when your body doesn't isolate bones. Yeah. So when we talk about resistance training, let's say how important that is for bone health, that's helping your jaws too. No one thinks of that, but you mean that's your skeleton. It impacts your skeleton. Speaker 2 (4:39) And Speaker 1 (4:39) so like, do you get a DEXA scan early and in your life in your twenties or thirties, like as a preventative measure? hormones can impact this too. So hormone replacement therapy when it's appropriate, of course, making sure you're optimized with vitamin D3 and K2 and vitamin A and magnesium and all these minerals, calcium, phosphorus that are needed for bone. That's really important. And even if you're ingesting them, what's your gut health like? Are you absorbing them appropriately and utilizing them appropriately? So like, do you have intestinal permeability or leaky gut? But chewing too, I would say. So the act of chewing, form follows function. So the more we are chewing, the more we are nasal breathing, our tongue is up. That's all going to help keep this very stable and healthy. I would also probably say vitamin C and collagen are incredibly important. Your temple mandibular joint is cartilage, okay? So it needs to... be healthy, just like your knees and your shoulders do. And perimenopause and menopause can affect this as well. Just like we hear of women with low estrogen, they get frozen shoulder. Well, a lot of them suffer from temple and mandibular joint issues too. And this is why I'm so thankful for these conversations around women's health. And like, do we need early... intervention with our hormones to keep them stable because that will help as well. So I think all of those things, I mean, they apply again, the mouth isn't separate from the body. So what we're doing to optimize skeletal structure and collagen in the body translates back to the mouth and then try, you know, eat apples, eat carrots, eat meat, chew. We have to be chewing. A normal amount. You know, I don't want people chewing gum all day long because that's overusing the joints. But we need to move away from these ultra-processed foods that we just inhale and swallow. Yeah. Speaker 2 (6:41) So Speaker 1 (6:42) those would be my best tips. Speaker 2 (6:43) I have a question about that because you mentioned chewing. And facial asymmetry is, you know, we're also a skincare company. So we need to know what people search for. Right? We need to know what people are interested in when they ask GBT or Google or whatever. And facial asymmetry is one of the most searched terms in beauty. Speaker 1 (7:05) Interesting. Yeah. Speaker 2 (7:06) And you said previously, not on this podcast, but you've said previously that one-sided chewing gives you muscle hypertrophy only on that side, plus kind of a growth shift. So how much of adult asymmetry do you think traces back to how someone chews? And again, if we can talk about asymmetry in general, because to be completely honest, this is what drew me to you to begin with. The bit that I've heard first is you talking about facial asymmetry. Speaker 1 (7:36) Cool. Well, you know, I'll preface this by saying, I think... I think you Speaker 2 (7:41) talked about McConaughey, I think. Speaker 1 (7:44) Oh, maybe. Maybe. Okay. I don't remember. One of these guys Speaker 2 (7:50) that, you know... Speaker 1 (7:50) Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm a fan, so I probably did speak about it. So anyway, some asymmetry is normal. So I do think we tend to kind of be, we can be hyper-focused as a society on perfection and like this half of my face needs to perfectly match this half of my face. And that isn't true of anything. Like my hands are different. Everything's a little different. There is within normal, okay? If it seems significant, it can be many things. Like starting from infancy, you know, how were you born? What was your birth journey like? Do you have torticollis? Or what, again, we're going back to posture. That all can translate back up to the face. And so making sure you're in alignment, you know, maybe you need to work with an osteopath or craniosacral therapist or a chiropractor. That will all translate back up here as well. But to your point, many people do have weird habits. We all do have them. And like, do we chew more on one side? Do we sleep more on one side? Especially, you know, as kids, as we're growing and we're malleable. Do we grind our teeth in a certain way that can cause a dysfunction or a shift too? So, you know, we should be moving food back and forth between because again, form follows function. So if you're chewing more on this side, you will have more muscular development. And hypertrophy. And if you don't, you might have muscle loss on this side and atrophy. So we see this with weightlifting. I mean, just think if you only lifted weights on one side of your body, this side will be completely jacked and this would have not much muscle at all. So it's the same with chewing and facial symmetry as well. But also. It could have been from a habit in childhood. Like, did you have a pacifier for a long time? And like, did you shift it more to the right side of your mouth than the left? Or did you thumb suck? Or did you tongue thrust? All of these things then influenced how your facial structure developed. And did it develop optimally? And then if it didn't, what can we do to fix that? And again, there are things you can do in adult. your adult years to correct this, but we want to try to be upstream. This is functional, right? Preventative medicine. And so if I see that a child is growing asymmetrically, that's when I want to intervene with functional orthodontics and try to get that back on track, growing evenly again. And if we catch it, you know, most facial development is done by the age of 10. So you do want to start looking for this. I see babies and infants, so I'll start looking right out of the gate. But if not, like certainly having these conversations around four or five, six years old, at least just starting the conversation, I think is really important. Got it. I Speaker 2 (10:51) wanted Speaker 1 (10:52) to ask how you must think of gum. Speaker 2 (10:54) Yeah, I'm Speaker 3 (10:55) just Speaker 2 (10:55) wondering if that's why you say that you would want to know why people chew more on one side than the other before you correct it. Speaker 1 (11:05) Yeah, that's one reason. Also, like, yes. Definitely. But also sometimes we'll see more wear on those teeth, depending on what they're chewing on. And also sometimes I see cavities just on one side. So mother nature tends to be very symmetrical. So if you have cavities, usually they're kind of sprinkled throughout the mouth. So if I just see them on one side, I'm always thinking, do you chew mostly on this side? And then I usually can tell by palpating the masseter muscle here, it will be huge. And I'll say, oh, yeah. Or, which this is a myofunctional issue and a feeding issue, which we need to address. Or if you have cavities more on one side, this gets really interesting and nuanced. But if I had cavities mostly on my left side, I always ask, do you sleep on your right? Because the saliva pools down here and