Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - "Mouth Breathing Is Making You Ugly and Sick." - With Science Journalist James Nestor

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Mouth breathing is a harmful subconscious habit that causes symptoms like changes in facial structure, oral health complications, poor sleep, and even anxiety. James Nestor, a New York Times bestselling science journalist, addresses why mouth breathing is so common, if there's a wrong way to breathe during sex, how chewing industrialized food affects the jaw, and treatments that help stop mouth breathing - that shockingly does not include mouth tape! Website | https://www.mrjamesnestor.com/ Instagram ‪@MrJamesNestor‬ |   / mrjamesnestor   . Try fresh squeezed juice packed with quality natural ingredients, a delicious taste, and filled with nutrients by visiting https://shop.squeezedjuice.com and using code ALEX for 25% off Support American farms and shop GOOD RANCHERS to try the New King Box and get FREE BACON FOR LIFE with code CLARK. https://www.goodranchers.com/ Get 100% Organic tampons & now PADS! Try GARNUU today at https://garnuu.com/ and use code ALEX for 15% off. Elevate your skincare routine with NIMI SKINCARE! Go to https://www.nimiskincare.com/ and use promo code ALEXCLARK to get 10% OFF your order. Switch to ALEAVIA organic prebiotic body wash and ditch artificial fragrances. Use code: ALEX15 for 15% OFF. https://www.aleavia.com/ Drink Freedom2o™ Speak your Thirst. Protect the First. We hydrate the spirit of freedom loving Americans across the country one bottle at a time. Speak Free. Think Free. Live Free. https://freedom2o.com Looking for like-minded friends? Join the Cuteservative Facebook group:   / 1234544066933796   Listen at 6 PM PST/ 9 PM EST every Thursday by subscribing to ‘The Spillover’ on Apple Podcasts and Spotify ☕️✨ . AlexClark Instagram |   / realalexclark   Instagram |   / poplitics   X | https://x.com/yoalexrapz Spotify |https://open.spotify.com/show/7M0C7cl... Shop Real Alex Clark Merch! https://tpusamerch.com/collections/real-alex-clark

Is the way we breathe making us ugly? Depending on how long you've been a listener, you know I have a fascination with what appears to be underdeveloped jawlines and mouth breathers. We're seeing escalating incidences of asthma, anxiety, hypertension, insomnia, and several other respiratory and chronic illnesses. Today's guest says many of the symptoms of these illnesses can be alleviated and even reversed by changing the way we breathe. Apparently, the majority of us, up to 80%, according to a study published in the International

Journal of Sports Physical Therapy, are not breathing the way that we are biologically supposed to. Today's guest is an award-winning science journalist who's tackling the correct way to breathe for optimal health, how industrialized food and baby formula changed facial structure, the damage chronic mouth breathing does to the body, if there's a wrong way to breathe during sex, his controversial opinions on mouth tape, why he strongly encourages baby lead weaning, and much, much more, including advice for people struggling with teeth grinding, panic attacks, sleep apnea, and asthma. I got to interview today's guest in person.

You can watch that on the Real Alex Clark YouTube channel. Don't forget that this show is produced by a nonprofit. So if you would like to support us financially, if this show has regularly taught you something new and you enjoy listening, you can make a tax-deductible donation in. the show notes. Also, leave a five-star review. If you are not financially able to give it this time, that is a free way to help support us. Please welcome New York Times best-selling author and science journalist James Nestor to the spillover. Was breathing incorrectly ruining your life? I mean, something must have happened for you to even discover all of this in the first place.

Yeah, I got into this stuff because I was having a number of respiratory problems over years and years that I wasn't finding any solution for. I was getting bronchitis all the time. I was getting mild pneumonia once a year. I surf, so that's not super uncommon, but it is uncommon to have these things reoccur over and over and over again. I think that health can seem complicated for people, nutrition can seem complicated. But what you explore in your book is that really so many things could improve if we were just breathing correctly. It's one of the simplest things that we can do and we can take control of. But because it's so simple, a lot of people think it's not going to work.

We really like to overcomplicate everything. We like to overcomplicate nutrition, exercise, sleep, and breathing. You know, but the basics, the foundation of healthy breathing is so deceptively simple. Are we living in a mouth breathing epidemic? Look around. You have to ask me about that. So around 50% of the population breathes in and out through the mouth. And kids are the worst offenders and then women and then men after that.

A lot of people say, well, who cares, right? Air is air. Well, I was going to say, isn't it personal preference? That's what some people might say. If it's personal preference, if you want to be sick or healthy, then, yeah, you can be sick and mouth breathe. But if that's your choice, then go for it. But what we know is that these two different pathways of breathing vastly affect us. So you are much more apt to have respiratory problems, asthma, allergies, sleep problems, anxiety, panic, poor athletic performance if you are breathing in and out of your mouth.

We know that. That is part of the scientific literature and it's been there for decades. I mean, you're not claiming that, hey, if you just start breathing through your nose, you're going to be able to cure cancer or anything like that. but you do say that breathing the right way can help prevent mild conditions from becoming more severe. How is that possible? That's exactly right. So we can get by by breathing improperly, just like you can get by eating bad food. Your body will compensate. I can eat three burgers a day or a bunch of cookies, and I can get enough calories to survive.

Does that mean I'm going to be able to excel in what I'm doing? Eventually, it's going to catch up to me, and breathing is the same exact thing. So you can compensate, you can breathe in an unhealthy way that will keep you alive, but it won't keep you healthy. And eventually it's going to lead to a number of more serious problems. And we're seeing that all over society right now. I think most people think, well, I just breathing is breathing. I mean, you don't think about it. It's just natural. Your body knows how to do it. So how is it possible that we could be doing it wrong? Well, we used to say eating is eating. Calories are calories. We know that's completely wrong. It depends where those calories come from, right?

And even beyond that, calories aren't even that important if you start to look at the combination of vegetables and meat and the nutrition behind that food. So we have learned to breathe wrong because we live in an industrial society in which it's almost impossible to be a healthy breather. We're constantly in air-conditioned rooms, which dries us out, makes us more congested. We sit around in really poor posture, kind of like what I'm doing here, even if I wanted to take a deep breath in, I can't. It gets stuck up into my chest, right? We are in a constant state of low-grade stress, which makes us breathe too much into the chest. We wear very tight clothes, the air is polluted. I could go on and on and on. But it's this perfect storm for respiratory disaster,

which is why the vast majority of people on the planet right now have some sort of respiratory problem. There was a woman, though, that was able to heal her scoliosis through breathing correctly. This sounds made up. Not only one woman, but thousands and thousands and thousands of women by adopting something called orthopedic breathing. I got a lot of pushback for having this in the book until people looked at the scientific studies. Okay, because people also were like, this is bonkers. Well, you can look at the studies, just like I did. I spent months and months looking at this because it seemed impossible to me.

Let me ask you a question. What causes scoliosis? I actually don't know. I figured it was something you're born with or something. We have no idea. So what percentage of women, especially women, have scoliosis? It's a huge amount of women around the world get scoliosis, especially in their teenage years. We still don't know what causes it.

So what I heard from Dr. Andrew Weil was that he suspects it's likely due to dysfunctional breathing early in life. You start breathing dysfunctionally as you're going through growth spur. your spine grows crooked. We don't know that. That's a hypothesis, okay? But what we do know is that with proper breathing, with proper stretches, you can straighten a scoliotic spine. So that seems crazy. It's called the Shroth method. It's still being used at Johns Hopkins University. It's used throughout the world. It takes a lot of time, a lot of practice, and a lot of effort, which is why a lot of people don't want to do it. But it absolutely works. And so this woman in particular, who you've discussed, her whole back just straightens out?

She was a teenager living in Dresden, Germany, and she was diagnosed with scoliosis, as so many teenagers are, and she didn't want to spend the rest of her life in a brace or in a wheelchair or sitting around in bed. So she started looking at human physiology, and she realized we have these two enormous balloons in our bodies, they're called our lungs. And if we really inflate them,

look what happens to our posture. Look what happens to the curvature of our spine. Yeah, you totally straighten up. Yes. So she was able to develop a method in which you accessed the full volume of your lungs, along with several different stretching techniques, and it straightens scoliotic spines for thousands and thousands of women. What are some of the other things that you saw improve for people

when they just started breathing differently and more through their nose? I think that asthma is another thing that we are told this is an incurable, So a lot of kids are diagnosed with it. They're given a broncholidilator and they're given oral steroids and they're put on their way. You're going to have asthma the rest of your life. This just happened to a good friend of mine. His kid is three years old and his doctor told him he was going to have asthma the rest of his life. What we do know is that proper breathing, especially nasal breathing, slower breathing, learning how to breathe less can significantly reduce the symptoms of asthma sometimes to the extent where people don't feel any symptoms of asthma at all.

And I've talked to hundreds and hundreds of people who have completely resolved their asthma by getting control of their breathing. How do you help a child that young who's struggling with asthma learn how to breathe with the correct technique? So he's actually my accountant. And he told me about this. And he's also a friend. So you can have an accountant that's a friend. It's very rare, but I happen to have one. So he told me he's just like, you know, I was like, hey, how's it going?

And he's like, oh, not very good. My kid's three years old. He just got diagnosed with asthma. He's given abuteral. He's told that he's going to have asthma his whole life. I said, is the kid around you right now? He's like, yeah, he's in the other room. But I want you to look at his breathing right now.

Is he breathing in and out through his mouth? He said, yeah, he always breathes in and out through his mouth. He said, how does he sleep? Can you hear him snoring? Does he have sleep apnea? He's like, oh, yeah, he's extremely loud the whole time. And I said, if you can fix those two things, especially at night to be breathing in and out through the nose at night

and you teach him to be a nasal breather in the daytime and teach him to breathe less because asthmatics breathe way too much air. My hunch is he will see a significant reduction in symptoms in the next week or two. So how do you teach? You say close your mouth and then try to get them to mimic you breathing in your nose?

Well, three-year-old's a little difficult to do this. It's easier when they're a little older, but there are different hacks you can use. there is a device called myotape. I get no money from any of these products, but I'm a big fan of this stuff. It goes around the mouth. Okay. It's just this little piece of sticky elastic that goes around the mouth and it just reminds you to keep your mouth shut. It doesn't force you to keep your mouth shut. It reminds the kid to keep the mouth shut. Once they wear that for a couple of days, they start to breathe through their noses a lot more often. And then once they start doing that after a

couple of weeks, you can transition to sleep. This is not right for every kid out there. Don't go up, tape your kid's mouths. That's not what I'm saying. Use some careful consideration of the situation and use a lot of common sense, which a lot of people don't want to have the responsibility to do. But I trust your listeners can use common sense around teaching their kids nasal breathing. One thing I like is that you kind of anticipated that people are going to be like, this is such crap. There is no way any of this is real. So you're like, okay. So part of my book, yeah, I'm going to talk about all these studies and stuff,

but I'm also going to live this life of a mouth breather for 10 days. I'm going to plug up my nose, you and another friend, and just to see what would happen to your health, what happened to you when you lived as a mouth breather exclusively for 10 days? Well, I'm a science journalist. So I listen to everyone's claims. Okay, it doesn't matter if it's the weirdo working out of a garage or the professor emeritus at the most storied institution on the planet. I talk to everybody. My opinions

don't matter. What I'm paid to do is to go out and find the data behind all of these things and to prove whether or not it's true, regardless of what I think about the therapies. So this book took me about six to seven years of constant research and exploring these different techniques and looking at data, if you can measure it and if you can repeat it over and over again, then you have to change your views. It doesn't matter what your hypotheses are about anything. So that's how I came to these conclusions and everything I'm telling you today, these are not my ideas or my theories or my hypotheses. These are scientific facts that I have learned on this very long journey to understand or breathing better. And part of that journey

entailed some self-experimentation only because no one else would do these studies. I was told that they were unethical. We would never find funders to do it. So I worked with a doctor at Stanford, the head of rhinology research. So this is the guy at the very top of his field. And he allowed me to do a two-person study into the effects of mouth breathing. That is it unethical. If you're volunteering like, hey, I want to breathe this way. What's unethical about that? Because he knew the damage. that would happen to people who did this. And he could not live with that. That's what he said.

He said, all I do is study the benefits of nasal breathing. He's a surgeon as well. He's like, I see what it does to people. And I see the damage caused by mouth breathing. I can't sleep at night if I'm bringing in a bunch of people and purposely making them sick. Okay. So is that where the 10 days came from? Was that a compromise of like, all right, what's the bare minimum we can do that will still show some sort of result?

Yeah. Okay. I wanted to do a month, and he said, no. Gosh, I don't know that I could do it. You can do 10. Yeah, I'm so happy that didn't happen, by the way. So he said, 10 days, you can do it. And, you know, he's at Stanford, which is flush with money.

They somehow could not find the money to fund this. Yeah. Stanford's really hard up for Cal. So we had to pay for the study at Stanford, which was not the cheapest thing I've ever had to pay for. But he allowed us to use his lap. And so we were doing constant measurements from blood work to pulmonary function test. I mean, everything. Well, let's go.

Why would they suddenly not be able to fund this? I mean, do we got big mouth breathing industries that we're trying to go up again? So what I heard, this is not from him. This is somebody else at a top-tier institution. They said if there is not a pathway to find further funding, to, i.e., to sell someone. at the end of a study, there's no purpose in them studying it. Oh, of course. Well, of course. And there's no product to be, there's no pill or powder at the end of this study.

There's only the knowledge to know what the human body can do and what it can't do. And those studies, they happen sometimes, but they are extremely hard to find funding for. That is really fascinating that most of these studies are like, is there something we can sell or some way we can make money off these people? It's not about our health. This is our world. And you can like it or you can hate it. But once you know how it works, you can navigate through it, which is what I've been trying to do. So, okay, walk us through the 10 days. Like on day one, this happens, day two, this happens. What did you notice when you were exclusively mouth breathing for 10 days? So we knew it was going to suck, right? We knew it was going to be terrible. There was enough

information to know that sleep would be affected. Energy levels would be effective. Focus would be effective. We didn't know it was going to be this bad. And we didn't know it was going to happen so suddenly. So within a few hours, my blood pressure shot up around 25 points to a dangerous level. I said, wow, well, that's weird. That might be a coincidence, right? I went to bed that that night. I don't snore. I don't have sleep apnea. Never have. Within a single night of mouth breathing, I turned into a snore. So I snored about an hour and a half that night. Within a couple of days, I was snoring all the night. The same exact thing happened with the other person in this study. Our stress levels were through the roof, athletic performance, plummeted significantly.

So were they having you do things like, you know, kick a soccer ball around? Like, how did you know your athletic performance was worse? We tested ourselves on a stationary bike looking at hard rate and looking at how hard we could push under certain heart rate, you know. Over. and over again. And we took data dumps about three times a day, just looking at CO2 levels, oxygen levels, stress levels, emotional regulation, so on and so forth. And we took a bunch of blood work before halfway through and at the end of it as well. And so then by the end of it, how much had your health deteriorated? It's hard to say because the body goes up and down, you know, throughout the day. And some of this could have been tied to the stress of just,

being in this study. But I felt absolutely terrible. I had become a full-time snore. I had sleep apnea as well. I couldn't focus. My blood pressure was up, an average of around 15 to 20 points. Blood pressure fluctuates throughout the day too. But on average, about 15, 15 points, just by mouth breathing. And, you know, more subjective markers is my mouth was constantly dry. And who knew that mouth breathing is the number one cause of cavities beyond sugar consumption mouth breathing is the number one cause of cavities i felt a bunch of problems happening in my mouth and uh i was so nervous to go to sleep every night because my sleep was absolutely awful uh i i was hardly having any dreams i wasn't falling into deep levels of sleep and i would wake up totally stressed out and a lot of people thought they're like oh there's like a supersized me

stunt, but we didn't view it as that because in supersized me, all the guy ate was McDonald's, you know, for 30 days. No, nobody does that. How many people mouth breathe, right? Up to 50% of the population, especially during allergy season. Huh, I wonder why snoring and sleep apnea goes through the roof during allergy season. I wonder why people start getting migraines, why they get cranky, you know, on and on and on. And these things are directly related to the pathway in which we breathe there. Are the negative effects of mouth breathing the same on adults versus children or different? They would be generally the same. The difference is with kids, I think it has an even more pronounced effect.

And the reason is if you are habitually mouth breathing at night and in the day, as so many kids do, you can go to any school and see this. Their jaws are slack open like this, right? They will develop the skeleture and musculature to this pose, which means their faces will not fully develop properly and their upper pallets of their mouths will not fully develop either. So a lot of the palatal development happens with the tongue on the roof of the mouth.

This is the natural position for the tongue. And when that happens, especially when you're swallowing, you put a little pressure to the roof of the mouth, helps open up that palate. You have a wider face. With a wider face, you have a wider airway. Everyone is in their mocktail era right now. Me too.

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I love to use it, too. Go to Alevia.com and use code Alex 15 for 15% off your order. That's Alevia.com with code Alex 15 for 15% off. Find everything in the description. How do you know if you're a mouth breather, though? Because I think a lot of people are like, well, I don't even know. You don't pay attention to it. So how would you advise someone to figure that out?

There are a few different things you can do. You can ask people around you because you are not reliable because no one wants to admit they're a mouth breather. You could ask people, if you happen to sleep with someone else in your bed, do I breathe through my mouth at night? If you're like 65% of the population, the answer is yes. In the daytime, it's much easier to diagnose because are your lips always chap? Is your mouth always dry? Do you find yourself breathing in and out through the mouth, even when you are jogging or

you're in the gym? So another thing you can do is to put a little piece of tape, of micropore tape, the tape that's It's meant to be put on skin. Don't use duct tape or grill a tape or anything like that. Put it across your lips, just your lips here. Go answer boring emails. Do the dishes. Is that comfortable for you?

Does it make you paranoid? If the answer is yes, you know, it makes me paranoid. It makes me panicky. Then there is a very good chance your mouth breather. And you don't have to be a mouth breather like this. You know, a lot of people, it's, this is mouth breathing. You can barely, barely see it. Barely. And your mouth is, I mean, barely open, too. If you're not watching this on YouTube and you're listening, I mean, it's so subtle. Wow. Okay. So the other thing you brought up, which is interesting, because I didn't even think about that, is the exercise is how you should breathe when you're exercising. Because I know a lot of people say, like, deep breath in, through your nose and then breathe out through your mouth when you're running hard or things like that. What is the correct way to breathe when you're exercising?

Just look to nature. So don't look to any of the joggers out there on the street because they're, by and large, breathing incorrectly, but look at a horse running at top speed, look at how it's breathing, look at a cheetah running at 60 miles per hour, look at a healthy dog running around, right? That's not thermoregulating. They're all breathing in and out of their noses

and they're breathing very deep. Diaphromatic breathing, deep, easy, slow, focused rhythmic breaths in and out of the nose. And you'd be hard pressed to find someone on the street breathing like that. We've completely lost touch with what proper breathing is. So you've kind of explained it, but if you were to do like, I don't know, your five steps to this is how you're supposed to breathe correctly, what would they be?

First thing I would do is to place a hand, put on your stomach here over your belly button. Everyone hates doing this. I can see how apprehensive you are. No, it's actually, I'm apprehensive because I don't know where my belly button is. My pants are so high-waisted, James. I'm like, where is my belly button? The general vicinity is where you want to do it. Okay.

The vast majority of people, when they take an inhale, they suck in their guts. Okay? When they exhale, they tend to let their gut out a little bit. This is the opposite of how you should be breathing. When you breathe in, you should feel a slight expansion down here. And you should also feel an expansion on the sides. It's not just about moving the belly. People call this belly breathing.

That's not correct. because I can hold my breath and move my belly in and out. This is about inhaling and filling up this vessel down here, very low. And when you exhale, there should be a slight contraction. Okay. So when you breathe, almost everyone has that reaction. They're like, whoa, that feels really weird. Yeah.

This is a natural breath. And the reason we don't do this is because our pants are too tight. Definitely me. We're very self-conscious, right? And so, and dudes are the worst. Men are the worst because they want to have their shoulders back the whole time. When they breathe in, they want to get jacked up, right? Show off their pecks.

That's all great. But eventually it's going to wear your body down. What is it about women versus men? Why do you think women are worse about this than men? Some people claim it has to do with anxiety and panic. So we know that people that suffer from anxiety and panic along with asthmatics and and other people who have other conditions in which they're constantly stressed out. Breathe way too much, way too much, sometimes twice as much as they need to.

And when you're constantly breathing too much, you are constantly breathing into your chest. That's sending your brain signals that you are stressed out. So you create this vicious loop in your brain between your diaphragm. This is stress, okay? This is how we respond to stress. adapted to breathe this way because when we were on the savannah about ready to fight something off or to run away we lock in our respiration we start breathing more because we're about to need all that oxygen nowadays people are sitting in front of the computers all day long oh yeah i didn't get enough

likes on instagram oh my god my boss is driving me crazy and this is such bad news for you i don't think it's a coincidence that the vast majority of diseases right now are tied to chronic low-grade stress. And your breathing plays a huge part in that. There are people too who might say, okay, James, well, I'm really, really good about exercise. You know, when we're talking about, you know, what true health is and the impact that breathing correctly plays, I have a stellar clean diet, but I don't breathe right, you know, is everything that I'm doing extra in my life, the eating right, the exercising, is it kind of null and void if you're still mouth breathing?

I wouldn't call it null and void. Okay. But you're never, ever really going to be healthy. You're not going to get the full benefits. You're not. And I've seen this so many times. I've talked to so many people who have been in this field for decades and they say the same thing, especially the people working in Manhattan.

They have these go-getter corporate clients, right? These people are at the top of their field. They are so controlling about what they're eating, right? They're so controlling about their exercise schedule. Now they're controlling about their sleep. But their breathing is terrible the whole way through. And they wonder why they are constantly sick and worn down. So it's not like all those other things don't count, but you have to have that other

leg on the stool. And a lot of people aren't talking about breathing. And to me, it is just as important as what you're eating, how much you're sleeping, how much you're exercising. How much does tongue posture really matter? It matters a lot because especially for kids, right? Once you're adults, everything's kind of set, you can still change your skeletature up here. You can change your airways. You can tone them. You can influence them. So we're not foregone conclusions. But kids are developing so fast, right, that if they don't have their tongues on the roof of the mouth, they aren't going to be able to grow to their true potential. And a lot of

lot of people don't realize that, you know, even if they're nasal breathing, their tongues are down low, right? At rest. Yeah, it's so weird. I feel like my tongue has always been right. I mean, my tongue sits on the top of, on the roof of my mouth and then pushes against my front teeth, which is why I have a slight overbite and always have my whole life. So my tongue is always up there, but some people is like, it's just like so uncomfortable if I try to put my tongue and keep it down, like closer to my bottom teeth that feels so unnatural. But there are some people that that is more what feels natural to them is to keep it less. For most people, I was certainly somebody like, no one told me any of this.

I wish I had known this when I was growing up. And this is one of the reasons why our teeth get so crooked, right? And we have crooked teeth because our mouths aren't big enough to accommodate teeth to grow in straight. This is why. People say, oh, it's genetic. Oh, it's this. Oh, it's that. It's not.

Your mouth is too small. And this is because of where your tongue sits and how you're breathing. Your tongue posture influences it. We don't know how much. it influence? Is it 30%, 35%, who cares? But it is an important part of this. So if you are somebody listening, you're like, oh my gosh, like I've never paid attention, but my mouth sits at the bottom of my mouth, it doesn't sit at the roof of my mouth, is it something you can change? It's like, no, your body and brain are accustomed to doing this now.

You can change anything. How do you do it? And this is what's so frustrated about what we're told about our health. Like people just think, they're like, oh, I have this. Oh, my mom was sick. Oh, this is genetic. About 10% of diseases. diseases that we get are genetic. 10%. And everyone blames their parents for their poor genes. So a lot of this is within our control and especially our breathing. So what you do is you get your back molars and you want a little piece of space between them. So about two millimeters of space, a quarter inch, right? And say ing, ing, wherever the tip of your tongue lands, okay? And it should just, be behind your front teeth.

Not pushing against your front teeth. When you say ing, it should be on the top teeth? In. In. Oh, I don't do that. Mine goes on the bottom. When you say N, N, pronounce N? In.

Okay, we're going to work on that. So there is this thing called the spot, and the tip of the tongue should be just behind the front teeth. Okay, the rest of the tongue rest on the roof of the mouth with your back mold. about that much space, two millimeters of space, between your back molars, okay, and lips lightly closed. This is the natural position. And when you swallow, you can swallow right now. Your tongue should be in that same position pushing on the roof of your mouth, that upper palate. I have that. A lot of kids, I would even say the majority of the kids, when they swallow, they do this. kind of stick their tongue out. Oh my gosh, you're so right. Stick their tongue and they push their teeth and you wonder why their teeth are always out of alignment even after they have had braces.

And Dennis aren't talking about this at all because they love when people come back and get a second set of braces. Wait, that is so weird. That face you made, that is literally like every little kid that I know. You see kids out in public or whatever at a restaurant. They do that. They make that face. Okay, that's insane. So here's what I was the most excited to talk to you about, is can we actually change our jaw alignment by changing the way that we breathe? Jaw alignment, possibly, we can absolutely change the tone of our airway and become better breathers. We can also influence the skeletal and the palatal development of our upper palate. So we can affect how our faces look with proper oral posture, absolutely.

And the thing is, is there's a bone in the body, the maxilla right here, that is made of a different kind of bone, this membranous bone, that is much more flexible than other bones in the body. We can actually build new bone in this area at any time in our life. We can graft new bone and develop it. So we can do that by having certain signals that promote this bone growth. And these signals come with chewing stress, with vigorous chewing stress. Our ancestors used to chew for two, three hours a day. How often do we chew today? I was going to say, you saying that I was like, oh my gosh, we take two, three bites max and swallow it.

It's like not even fully chewed up when we're swallowing food, I feel. we have a diet now both processed food and even what's considered health food now smoothies oatmeal augurts asa yboles we can go on down to list avocados my favorite food in the world how much chewing do any of those foods require of you barely any none zero now you look at processed foods you know fast food french fries mcribs mcnug i mean whatever there's there's no chewing now And so when we don't chew, we don't tone our airways or our airways get flabby and they become much more apt to suffer from these obstruction issues that so many of us are suffering from. And when we don't swallow and chew, we don't develop that upper palate in any way. How long should we be chewing? Let's talk about a bite of steak. How long should you be chewing that bite before swallowing?

34.2. I don't know. You chew it. I'm just joking. So you chew it until it is. is fully almost liquid, right? Oh my gosh. This is why the French, this is why the French takes so long at their meals, and we have 30-minute lunch breaks in America. You know, at work. If you're lucky, you have 30 minutes.

I have about six minutes. It's like 20 minutes. And so we have no time. That's why they're sitting there. They're digesting their food. They're chewing their food. And we wonder, like, well, how are they able to eat all this bread, you know, all this dairy,

and they're still so thin. They walk more than us. But also, I think them taking more time to chew and digest their meals probably plays a part, don't you think? 100%. So not only is this good for your airway health and the skeletature of your face, chewing pumps more blood to the brain. It calms down the nervous system. It opens up the station tubes in your ears, so it clears out the sinuses. We're designed to do this. We're supposed to be doing it. Our bodies have evolved to do this. And when we don't do it, we're going to take a hit

down the line, which is exactly what's been happening now. Some people probably just think, you know, beauty standards change. That's why everybody's now obsessed with having straight teeth. That's why we started wearing braces. You know, everybody just had crooked teeth before and they just didn't care. But is that actually true? That's 100% not true. And this was something that blew my mind.

And I did not believe it. But as a reporter, my job is to go out in the field and talk to the experts and figure it out. So I was told this like six, seven years ago that an anthropologist said, well, you know, all of our ancestors had straight teeth. I was like, that's complete garbage. That's, you know, because I look at my grandparents and my parents and they had crooked teeth and they had work done. And he said, no, just look at the skeletal record. Look at before industrialization. Look at the teeth of our ancient ancestors.

So I spent a few months doing this. I went to the largest collection of ancient skulls in the world at the University of Pennsylvania, and they have hundreds and hundreds of these things stacked up on shelves. And you walk into this room, and these are skulls from Asia, from Africa, from South America, North America, wherever, right, all over the planet. And they're all smiling back at you with perfectly straight teeth. How? Every single one of them. And the person who, the curator of that collection said she has, she has.

You had never seen a hunter-gatherer with crooked teeth, ever. And you look at other animals, and none of them have crooked teeth, right? Look at a dolphin. That's so true. Look at a bear. Perfectly straight. And the dolphins aren't wearing invisaline? No.

There's no orthodontas for dolphins. You know, they're not getting teeth extracted or headgear. So the next question is, what the hell happened? How did this happen? And how did it happen so quickly? Because I was always told that evolution took tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, right? This happened in a single generation. And it happened with the advent of industrialized food.

When we stopped chewing, we didn't have that stress. Our teeth grew crooked. Half of the population that developed crooked teeth went to industrialized food in a single generation. You're kidding me. A single generation. Yeah. So when we industrialized food, what do you explain like? they're five, what that means.

Sure, sure. So we used to eat foods that were raw, that were just picked out of the ground that required a lot of chewing. A lot more meat. A lot more meat. We found a way of controlling this thing called fire, which really allowed us to get a lot more calories from foods, our brains grew, but still, it requires a lot of chewing. So this is just how it was for millions of years until around the seven,

1700s, 1800, depending on where you were on the planet, we needed to feed these huge populations in cities, right? It was really hard to do that with fresh food. It would go bad. It would go bad. So we turned to grains, which you can store for a long time. We turn to canning stuff, to bottling stuff, to baking stuff, to adding sugar to stuff. So all of this processing, removing the bran and germ from rice, the same thing with wheat. all of this processing made this food extremely soft. It allowed it to have a very long shelf life,

which allowed you to feed millions of people living in a very small environment, such as London or Paris or Copenhagen. But we stopped chewing. And within a single generation, 50% of the population had crooked teeth. Oh my gosh. Does baby formula play a role in this? This is the very controversial part of the show here. I'm going to throw out a couple of caveat right now for everybody and I'm going to protect myself because I get a lot of crap from people when I talk about this, but I'm going to talk about this with you. So what I'm telling you right now, these are not my opinions. Okay. These are from interviews and from reading scientific research, again, from the leaders of the field, right? The top, top people. For the first time ever,

once we industrialized all food, we started feeding kids formula, right, and bottle feeding. Before then, kids were always breastfed, and they were breastfed for a minimum of two years, often four years. In some cultures, six years or eight years, but minimum two to four years. When a kid is breastfeeding exclusively breastfeeding helps pull the mouth out, okay, helps pull the face out, helps widen the mouth. They become nasal breathers. Why? Because you can't breathe if you are feeding through your mouth. you learn how to become an obligate nasal breather this way. And so there's a lot of research that has shown that kids who are breastfed have significantly less chances of having snoring in sleep apnea and braces later on in life because their teeth tend to grow in straight.

The longer they're breastfed, the better off they are. I'm not judging anyone for bottle feeding. We live in a modern world. It's impossible to get by. There is zero judgment. I'm just telling you what I've learned. So one thing you can do if you're bottle feeding your kid, as so many people have to do and massive respect for all the moms out there that are getting by, is you can wean that kid onto real food. It's called, you know, a child.

What is it? Baby led weaning. Baby led weaning. Thank you that had to escape me. But baby led weaning, in my opinion, is one of the best things you can do. At no time up until 100 years ago, where kids take a. from a bottle or a breast and given soft applesauce with plant-based lentils with a bunch of sugar in it. That did not exist.

They were weaned onto the food everyone else was eating. So what happens when you wean a kid onto regular whole foods? They learn how to chew and they learn how to chew a lot. And it's really scary at the beginning, right? Because there's some choking. but just know that your kid has a larynx that is much higher up than our larynxes, which makes it much harder for them to choke. They can still choke, but it's much harder for them to choke. They have to go through this process of learning what chewing is like.

They're going to have to do it sooner or later. So use common sense, another thing, in short supply nowadays, and be very careful about it and work with an expert to wean your kid onto Whole Foods. they're going to be so much better off, not just for the chewing stress, but for the nutrition and learning how to chew properly and have proper tongue posture. Whose brain is creating issues because you're overstimulated and hormonal? Me! Make Strawberry Week something to look forward to by living with your cycle instead of against it. Understanding your different phases, how best to support your body during your period,

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applewood smoked bacon for life. Find the link in the show notes. Good Ranchers. American Meat delivered. There was a 2014 study that looked into habitual mouth breathing and its effect on the jaw wasn't there? What did that study find? Oh, there's dozens and dozens and dozens of these studies that it changes the face of, it changes the shape of your face. That's what they have found time and time again. When I was talking about kids who had sleep apnea or snored, which we know are mouth breathing at night, they will have generally a different facial shape that is much more conducive to having those problems. So I am obsessed. My audience knows recently I've just become fascinated by, you know,

people's jaw structures and being able to look at somebody and mean like, you're a mouth breather. I, like, this whole thing is crazy to me. Am I nuts to say that I feel like recently, in the younger generations, it's like people have no chin. There's no jaw, really. Their face just blends right into their neck. There's just no jaw at all. Is that something that's recent? Does it have to do with the food that we're eating, the obsession with everybody's diet being basically processed food. Like, are we just seeing people's jaws disappear? So next time you're in a museum, check out the early models from ancient Greek culture, right? And including the paintings up until around the 1400s to 1500s.

I've done this at the British Museum, at Louvre, all over the place. And you notice they have very different jaw structure, okay, extremely, especially the Greece. Like, gorgeous, huge jaws, right? And then you start to see what happens in England and in France around the 1600s. And the only people getting their portraits done were royalty, right? What were royalty eating? They were eating all processed foods because this was the fancy stuff. Yeah, everybody has a soft round, pudgy face.

They have this soft round, well, not only that, but they have this, it's called this retronathic facial growth, where their faces look like they're growing backwards. Yeah. And you start to see it everywhere. So yes, the answer is absolutely that influences it. And there's been animal studies of this as well. So this is not a hypothesis and this is not some crazy thought experiment. This is documented. And if you don't believe me and you shouldn't test everything and challenge everything that I'm saying, go look at the skeletal record. Okay, for ancient humans. Find me an ancient human that had crooked teeth. Okay. And then look around today. And the vast majority of us have some sort of problem. I just feel like everybody has a concave bottom half of their face. Yeah, yeah.

And some of that, this is even more controversial, but I'll mention it, is so what happens when you have a kid whose mouth is too small for his or her face, right? They do those mouth stretcher contraptions. Well, sometimes, but you get crooked teeth. That's what happens when the mouth is too small. How do you fix these crooked teeth? back in the day when I was a young person, you fixed it by removing a bunch of teeth, taking the remaining teeth, and forcing them into this small mouth, and then holding them there as the rest of the head grows,

you're binding these teeth back. Okay, so you end up having straight teeth. Everybody wants straight teeth. Straight teeth are important, right? But you also end up having a mouth that's way too small for your face. So some dentists, I'd say about 50% of dentists are admitting this right now. And they're saying that these procedures, that I went through headgear retainers and all of that, have helped to contribute to this backwards growing face and the breathing problems that have resulted from that.

Oh, my gosh. If we stop mouth breathing and we start exclusively nose breathing, we will become hotter. I guess that's one way of. convincing kids that this is something worth doing. Because as we mentioned earlier, like, kids don't care about being healthy, right? What kid, when you're 13, you don't care about being healthy. They care about how they look. So this is one way you can sort of threaten kids to close their mouths and do them a lot of favors. I speak at a lot of schools. And, you know, I'll go through my whole thing about nitric oxide and blood levels in the brain. They don't care. And then you show pictures

of what can happen. Everybody cares all the sudden. Every single kid will shut their mouth and put that tongue to the roof of the mouth. And that's great. Like if that's what it takes to convince them to do this, and they'll thank you for other reasons later on. But for that immediate time,

they want to look better and how you position your tongue and how you swallow. And if your mouth is open at night, all of these things will affect your facial structure. Absolutely. Everyone on TikTok is obsessed with mewing. Mewing is this new thing. If you start mewing, your jaw's going to look better, like you're going to look more chisels, you're going to look hotter. Is mewing real? Is it legit? Do they have it right?

So I spoke with Mike Mew and John Mew, his dad. His dad lives in a castle that he hand-built. Stop. No, not the mewing guy lives in a castle. Does he know that he's trending on TikTok? No, oh, he's quite well aware of it. So his dad is like 92. This guy's awesome. He hand-built a castle. He didn't buy one. He didn't have money to buy one. He hand-built one over 10 years, made his own castle. That's how cool these guys are. So his dad was talking about this. Mike Mew's dad was talking about this for decades and just lambasted by everybody. So Mike took up the torch and he's talking about it now.

I really hope that there will be some studies done of this. And it's not that hard to do it. Take a scan of somebody before and then six months after and a year after. But again, how do you find funding for this? This is a free thing that you can do. I think that there is some factual basis behind this, based on what I know about how the airway can change, based on what I know about myofunctional therapy, which has been well researched, based on what I know about the studies that have shown, if you do these mouth exercises, including keeping your tongue on the roof of the mouth, you can significantly reduce snoring and sleep apnea. So these are scientific studies. So I believe that some of it is true. How much can it help you? Nobody knows.

So what about the people that are like, well, I can't do this. I can't breathe through my nose exclusively. I suffer with allergies. I have chronic congestion. Like this is not for everybody. I'm not here to convince anyone to do anything, right? I don't care what you do. You're just sharing the research. You're free to live your life. And I don't want to be an evangelist for any of this stuff. What I want to do is give people choices and information. So you can pick and choose whether or not you want to do this. It doesn't affect me one. way or the other. What does affect me, and one thing that I, one of the reasons I try to go out and do more of these talks is I want people who want to have choices to have the correct information to make the proper choices, right? So I think the majority of the population here, we know we should be eating better. They don't, right? Their blood sugar is just, just off the, but they know what they should be doing. But I think it's frustrating when you go to your doctor

and you're told asthma is an incurable condition. There's nothing you can do. No, you could say, hey, there are pills and powders that work incredibly well. There's a lot of doctors in my family. I'm a huge fan of Western medicine. I wouldn't be alive without Western medicine. But there's also this other thing you can do that's free, that's easy, that's available for everyone all the time. And the science has shown it is incredibly effective.

So you can choose, you can choose whatever path you want to take. And I think that's what's most important. What about sleep apnea? What can you tell us about that? I can tell you that around 960 million people on the planet suffer from sleep apnea. It is one of the main drivers to serious health conditions right now. It is a huge problem. It is extremely serious.

A lot of people with moderate to severe sleep apnea are undiagnosed. They wonder why they're getting diabetes, why they're getting heart disease, why they're having strokes, why they're getting Alzheimer's. I can go down this list, periodontal disease. but they don't connect this with sleep apnea and sleep apnea is behind all of these things. I'm not saying it is the number one thing, but it contributes to all of these issues. So sleep apnea is a huge problem.

A lot of us know that when you become overweight, you're much more apt to suffer from sleep apnea because you have this lateral pressure on your airway. You can't get air in. So people use CPAPs, right? How many millions, billions of people are using CPAPs? CEPs are these devices that put air, air into your body. They inflate you with air. And so many people sleep with these at night. And they work

wonderfully for that night to get rid of your sleep apnea. But they are just a temporary bandaid to the core issue. So you have to look at what is giving me sleep apnea. Is it the tongue falling to the back of my throat, making me choke on myself? Is it this lateral pressure because there's too much muscle or too much fat around my neck, is my airway untoned? So you find where the issue is and then you can try to fix it. So there are so many reasons why people have these sleep issues and you can't offer a blanket prescription for all of them. But people have to take charge of their own health

and to find where the core issue is. And then there's so many hacks you can do at home, which are completely free, which I have heard and I have seen from so many people can be really, really effective. Like what? Well, again, it depends what is causing that sleep apnea, that choking. So sleep apnea is different than snoring. Snoring is this slight obstruction.

Sleep apnea is when you hold your breath and your oxygen dips and you go, you're choking yourself. Yeah, we've all heard somebody sleep like that. This is the worst thing that you can do. I think it's even worse than eating a crappy diet. Really? Absolutely. Wow, that's severe. I really, it's that bad.

So what you can do, here I said I was going to offer blanket prescriptions. I'm going to offer a few ideas you might want to explore, okay? Number one, start sleeping on your side. So you can take a t-shirt and you can tape a ping pong ball or a sock or something to stop you from sleeping on your back. You can start with that. You can also prop another pillow up from your head and see if that's working. You can track your sleep with a pulse oxymeter. There are different wearables that can do this as well.

I'm a big fan of these different apps that record you throughout the night. You can have them offline. They record you throughout the night. Then they provide a spectrogram read out of how you were breathing throughout the night. Now, I have an aura ring, but I'm like, I don't know that it does breathing. It doesn't. That is just doing stages of sleep, which is good because people with sleep happening and don't get a lot of deep sleep, right? And deep sleep is this is the thing that cleans you out that you really need. So you can use all of these different things to see how you're progressing.

And then you can try these different hacks to see what is helping. Because if you're just trying different things and trying to say in the morning, oh, I think I feel better, oh, I'm not sure. You need data to prove that it's worth. So apps, I get no money from any of these. Snore Lab or Snor Clock, both of them have free versions. Put the phone on the side of the bed. This is especially important for couples where one person in the couple says, you snore, you have sleep happening all night. And the other person says, no, I don't. You do. This is a way of solving that once and for all. And once you're done with that, you can explore the possibility of using a little piece of tape on your mouth. Yes, let's talk about mouth taping. Do we all need to be mouth taping? The manufacturers of mouth tape would say yes, and I'm here to say no. Oh, I thought for sure you would say yes.

No, no, this is just more of this crap that is just peddled on Instagram and everywhere else. Oh my gosh, no! So here's the deal. About 35 to 40 percent of the population sleeps with a closed mouth. If you are sleeping with a closed mouth, you don't need tape over your mouth. Okay? What's the point? You've already got it figured out.

If you are one of that 60 or 65% that is mouth breathing, this could be something that might be beneficial for you. Use common sense. Okay? Don't just run off and do it. Don't drink a bunch of like Jaeger shots and tape your mouth shut. That's a stupid idea. Do this carefully.

Start in the daytime using a time. using a tiny piece of tape, okay, micropore tape, as I mentioned, it's meant to be put on skin, so it comes right off. I just use a teeny little piece, place it right here. Use that in the daytime until you get very comfortable. The center of your mouth vertical. You put it wherever you want on your lips. People say, how do you do that with a beard? It's impossible. That's why I can't do it. I've been doing it for seven, eight years. It works just fine. I don't have hair on my lips, right? I have hair around here. So you're just putting it on your lips. Okay. That's it. And then once you get comfortable enough and you can watch a movie, you can spend a few hours breathing this way. You can take a nap

doing this and you feel comfortable enough. You can transition to trying it out at night. And note, this is just a little piece of tape. So at any time you can go like this, it comes right off. Okay, at any time. There's no force involved. When you go on YouTube or whatever, you see these people, with these fat strips and it's just ridiculous to me. And that seems very unsafe. But wearing a teeny piece of tape that can come off at any time, I don't see any danger in that personally, use common sense. And I've never heard of anyone doing this method.

And I've heard from thousands and thousands of people that have not been able to just take it off. But I mean, there's so many people that say, like, I'm getting better, deeper sleep. I feel like my jaw's looking better. I feel like I'm getting deeper sleep by mouth taping. I cannot tell you how many letters I've gotten. People send me their sleep data. I don't ask for it.

So this is what's great about living in the modern world. There are many things that are great, but this is one great thing is we have access to all of these wearables, right, that are pretty cheap now that can track your sleep. And so you can see how it's affecting your sleep quality, right? You can see the next morning like, oh my God, I've got an hour and a half of deep sleep. I haven't had that in years and years. You can track this for yourself to see where the benefits are. It absolutely changed my sleep fundamentally, and I believe significantly bolstered my health once I was told by a researcher at Stanford to do this. She said not to mention this to anybody.

Uh-oh, well, a little late for that. I didn't mention her name, but now she's much more out with it because the stuff's becoming mainstream. And I think it's becoming mainstream, not because it's some TikTok sensation, but because, So many people have seen profound changes to their sleep. And you can't deny that after a while. It's that season of life for me. I am devouring any and all info on all things, anti-aging, skin care, lasers, treatments. I want to know it all.

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Everybody says that teeth grinding is due to stress. Is that true? I believe it is. I believe it's due to stress and I believe it's due to airway issues. One of the things we do to help open the airway, you can go like this, clench your teeth, the airway opens up. So a lot of people who work in sleep medicine have mentioned that when people have obstruction, this is their body's reflexive way of helping to open up the airway. And what they've also found is once they've removed that obstruction and allowed these people to breathe properly, the majority of the time, not all the time, the majority of the time, that bruxism, that teeth grinding is significantly reduced or completely gone. So I would address the airway issue first because those

things, stress and airway issues go hand in hand. And I don't think you can solve stress unless you're solving the airway issue. Why is lung capacity one of the key predictors of health and longevity? Because as we grow older, we start to grow more hunched over here. We start to breathe through mouths a lot more. So older people tend to be mouth breathers as well. We lose the capacity to have our diaphragm sink down low. And our diaphragm is the thing that allows our lungs to open up and create that vacuum. The diaphragm comes back up and we exhale. So we lose all of this, right? We lose bone mass. Our muscles start to atrophy. And we start walking around like this. Even if I wanted to take a healthy breath breathing like this, I can't. So what do I do to get oxygen?

you see this all, it's so sad to me, you see this on planes, on public transportation, wherever you are as these old people, at the time when they need more energy, when they need their body's ability to heal more easily, they're stressing themselves out all day long. So one of the most important thing older people can do is to develop proper posture and develop proper breathing habits to have your shoulders back and relaxed and to learn how to take a breath in through your nose to gently expand that belly which nobody wants to do that lateral expansion as well as you breathe in and as you exhale that stomach comes back in and you take a calm slow breath within about a half an hour of training seniors to do this I mean some of them break down in tears

because they have not felt this in so long. And they aren't told this. What's so pathetic to me is I'm a journalist. I shouldn't be teaching people how to do this stuff. This should be the doctors. This should be the medical professionals. This should be somebody else. Yeah.

And people aren't doing it. And it's really frustrating because it's not that complicated. But you have them place their hands here, right? You have them breathe in and out of their noses. You have them slow down the breath, relax their shoulders. and relax the tension in their face and keep their tongue up at the roof of the mouth. And it's transformative for people.

You say, if that felt so good after 30 seconds, guess what's going to happen if you keep this up after a week after a month? And I've seen, they've sent me pictures and they look like entirely different people. Is there any correlation at all between panic disorders and mouth breathing? 100%.

You're kidding me. I was literally like, there's no way. Like, I just was trying to come up with, like, random things. We can see a panic attack, coming on an hour before it happens by looking at respiratory rate and carbon dioxide levels. An hour before it happens. The people who suffer from panic, it's awful. These people have this condition.

It's like 2% of the population, huge amount of people. Panic doesn't just come on. We're not just sitting here and we don't just have a panic attack. It's this slow rise. Something triggers it. It throws you off. You get stressed out. You unconsciously start over breathing.

that over-breathing triggers more stress in your brain more stress that's in your brain makes you breathe even more you start breathing into the chest because you're breathing too much you finally reach that critical stage where you your body breaks down you think you can't get another breath so there are it's directly tied to it and i believe as well as so many other researchers you cannot cure panic. You cannot cure anxiety if you don't fix the breathing dysfunction. This is why drugs work so terribly for anxiety and for panic. People think they work for a little while, SSRIs, whatever you want to take. But then they keep having anxiety attacks and panic attacks. So the number one thing, in my opinion, is to get control of that stress. How do you get control of

that stress? You get control of your breathing. Okay, well, here's a wild question. did any of your research involve looking into the correct way to breathe during sex? I get this question a lot. Oh, you do? I don't see. I think this is going to be so unique. That section got cut from the book because it's a very PG-rated book. What I have found is, I mean, how spicy do we want to get here?

This is a family show. Look, you can turn it down if your kids are on. the car. But like, no, I'm so interested. Like, I want to know the scientific research on this. Is there a wrong or right way or you're just having sex and it doesn't matter? I mean, ultimately, if you're having a good time and your partner's having a good time, who cares, right? But if you want to prolong things because you're having a good time and it feels good and you want things to go on longer, why is, I'll ask you a couple questions. Why is it that when people are getting in the mood, they're kissing, right?

Kissing is obligate nasal breathing. It would be pretty unsexy to hold on, baby. I've got to take a couple breaths. They're kissing and they're humming, right? Mmm, mm, hmm. What does humming do? Mew. It increases nitric oxide by 15 times.

15-fold. Why is that important? What is the thing that is stimulated in the body when people take erectile dysfunction? drugs. What is the molecule? Just take a crazy guess. Oh my gosh. Nitric oxide. That is the molecule that opens up blood vessels that does everything that those drugs do. We can create our own nitric oxide by humming. We create so much of it. So I think there is an evolutionary adaptation for people about to get funky when they start kissing, nasal breathing, and this is nitric blood vessels.

are opening, it's showtime. So in the moment, in the conjugal bet, as people are doing whatever they are doing, we know that an orgasm is a sympathetic response. So there are, allegedly, according to some people, I think there are three sides of, or three functions of the nervous system. So parasympathetic and sympathetic. Parasympathetic is the rest and relaxation, where we are chill, where we are eating, where we are at peace. Sympathetic is the fight and flight, the fear response, the agro thing that we feel when we get angry. So an orgasm is a sympathetic part of the nervous system.

That is what is triggered. I don't think it's a coincidence that people right before they happen to do that, they start mouth breathing. When you are mouth breathing, this triggers a sympathetic response in your nervous system. So if people are in that moment and they want to continue being in that moment a little longer, they can try to go back to humming and nasal breathing, which will take that nervous system and shift it more to that parasympathetic side to rest and relax. And the more that you're humming, the more nitric oxide you're creating,

the more of those blood vessels stay open, which, in some situations is very beneficial for people. Does mouth breathing increase chances for things like dementia or Alzheimer's or anything like that? First of all, I have to congratulate you on that segue immediately from the sex talk to brain talk. We just, we went off on a tangent. Now we're back. Now we're back to the G-rated version of this show. Here we go.

Let's talk about brain health and mouth breathing versus nasal breathing. There was this study done in Japan a few years ago where they took a bunch of rats and they made half of those rats mouth breathers. And they made the other half natural. So nasal breathers. They just left them as they were. And they studied these rats going through a maze at seven weeks, 14 weeks, 21 weeks. And those rats that were mouth breathers took way longer to get through that maze. And they said, this is interesting.

I wonder if this mouth breathing is affecting their brain development. So they killed all these rats and they looked at their brains. And the mouth breathing rats had significantly fewer neurons in the areas of the brain that control learning, focus, and more. So there have been, those are with rats, but there have been human studies, not like that, maybe one day, but where they have looked at where oxygen dysfunction is, where there is a dysregulation of oxygen in the brain. When we mouth breathe, that happens in the prefrontal cortex here. what is governing our emotions and other areas in the brain aren't as synchronized as they are when we are nasal breathing. So what we found is people make significantly better decisions when they are nasal breathing, okay? They can focus a lot better. They can control their emotions

a lot better. So they can just become better workers and they can take better tests. So if you have a kid who is studying for big exams, breathing rhythmically in and out of the nose, we know absolutely affects our brain function. So cool. Okay, I love it. Okay, remind everybody what the name of your book is. And then what kind of experience are they going to have reading your book? And what are they going to learn? I mean, obviously, a lot of the stuff we talked about today, but I was kind of telling you behind the scenes what I enjoyed about your book. And you were like, well, that was kind of actually controversial that we did it that way. So share a little bit about Well, I don't think they're going to enjoy some parts of this book at all because those parts are very depressing. But the reason why these depressing parts are in the book, because I have to show you what the problem is before we can fix it, right? So a lot of people said the beginning of the book, they're like, oh, man, I'm such a bummer to learn about our teeth and all this. I said, no one else is talking about this, so I have to. And it was done that way for a reason, because I wanted to set up, here is why you're a poor breather. Because a lot of people doubt that they're poor breathers. They're like, no way. I'm a good breather.

I'm the best breather until you start diagnosing yourself. And then you realize that the vast majority of people are breathing them properly. And then I can show you the science behind and the steps on how to become a better breather. And I spend, as you know, the majority of the book is looking at these people who have figured out how to do things that are supposed to be medically, scientifically impossible with their breath, curing their asthma, curing their anxiety, curing their autoimmune issues, scoliosis. It sounds totally impossible until you look at the science. And what I really liked is that I said, oh, I love that your book wasn't just a bunch of scientific data. It was, like, also kind of a memoir of you going on this journey of trying these,

you know, different theories out and seeing if it's true, testing these studies. And you were like, oh, that was, my publisher really wanted me to go that route. And you didn't want to do that. But I said that I really liked that. That made the book so enjoyable to me as a nonfiction science read. Well, I'm starting at the same place as the reader, and I think that's important. When I do my books, it's never a subject I know anything about. I want to start at the same place and be like, I'm going to take you by the hand. I'm going to show you what I've learned along this way. Okay, I'm going to show you all the things I think are completely BS, but I'm going to also show you all the things that I think are completely legitimate and are being ignored right now. And these are things that can be really transformational to your health. So that journey through the book, it's my journey, but it's also the reader's journey because I'm, taking you along the travels around the world to try to figure out what happened to our breath. Yeah. And so your book, remind us what it's called, Where You Can Get It.

It's called Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art, and it's available kind of most places. It's everywhere. And where can we follow you on social media? Are you a social media person? I'm trying to get better at that. I get a lot of grief from my publisher. I promise I'm getting better. I'm in the middle of writing a new book, so I'm in that zone and not on the, the social media zone. But having said that, there's a bunch of new stuff coming out. When I learn new things about breathing and other tidbits, I posted on there and it's available for free for everybody. So my social media handle on Instagram is mrjamesnester.com. That's mister because I'm jerked to James Nestor. So I had to put an MR there. And also on my website, I have a bunch of free

resources. I'm not asking for your emails. There's no paywalls or anything. Different exercises on how to breathe. We run retreats for people who have never taken a proper breath before and a week later. They are absolute monsters and there are a bunch of other materials. The entire bibliography and all the scientific studies are available for free for everyone at Mr. James Nestor.com. And you've written a lot of books. Is there any other books that you've written that you're like, I think your audience might really like this one? My new book coming up, of course, but that's not going to be out for a couple of years. but the book, the one other book I wrote before this was for people who are into the ocean and the connection to the ocean and what you feel being in the ocean, I wrote a book about

the human connection from the very surface of the ocean to the very bottom of the deepest sea. And some of that explores a bit of breathing and free diving, but it's mostly our connection chemically and physically and biologically with the underwater world and the animals in it. Thank you so much for coming on. I think it's so fun when we have somebody that is an expert in like such a cool, specific area that also not only are you an expert, you have tips that we can implement today that will improve our life immediately, which I think is so fun. So thank you, James, for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. What was the most surprising thing James said in this episode?

It was the mouth tape for me. He did say if you're a chronic mouth breather and mouth tape has helped you. It is possible, but only if you really are a mouth breather at night. So I don't know. I would be curious to hear your success stories with Mouth Tape in the Kutervatives Facebook group. I'm Alex Clark, and this is The Spillover. Love you, mean it. Bye.