The latest trend on TikTok recommends taping your mouth together while you sleep, but one physiology expert thinks it’s a concerning fad.
The trend recommends using a specific tape on your mouth as you sleep so you are forced to breathe through your nose.
Taping your mouth supposedly allows your nose to filter out dust, pollen and other matter in the air we breathe.
Videos of the practice, favoured by celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Bradbury and Erling Haaland, have gained more than 38.5 million views on TikTok.
UCC Physiology Professor Ken O’Halloran told Moncrieff breathing studies are commonplace and Stanford have done a study on mouth-taping.
“But there's really no evidence,” he said.
“It seems to have made its way through TikTok and it's catching on as a fad, which is rather worrying.”
He said if you tape your mouth shut overnight, that can be risky if your nose becomes blocked.
“Obstructive sleep apnoea is where lower down in the throat, the airway can become blocked, secluded, even for very short periods of time, interrupting sleep and interrupting the quality of sleep,” he said.
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“We breathe through the nose in the daytime - the nose filters the air and protects our lungs.
“It would be interesting to think, for the hours of the day in which we're not doing that, does it have some detriments to the lungs?
“But many of us breathe through our mouth naturally when we sleep, when we exercise.
Prof O’Halloran said one benefit to mouth-taping could be reducing dry mouth overnight, but that doesn’t seem to be one of the benefits promoted on TikTok.
“I'm not quite sure what the major claims of benefit are,” he said.
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Prof O'Halloran conceded there are probably potential benefits to mouth-taping, such as snoring less, but there are other ways to prevent many sleep problems without taping your mouth shut.
“What you're seeing here the mishmash of a lot of different fields,” he said.
“There might be good science and examples of where it can be beneficial just manifesting in a DIY tape.
“It seems foolhardy.”
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