Dhru Purohit Show - #244: The New Mind-Blowing Science of Breathing with James Nestor

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

The New Mind-Blowing Science of Breathing | This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and Cozy Earth. Most of us go throughout the day without giving the act of breathing a single thought. Considering how impactful the way we breathe is on our physical and mental health though, I think it’s time we change that. Breathing is such an underrecognized topic in the health space that today we’re resharing an in-depth episode all about it, with author James Nestor. How well our body takes in oxygen impacts our health on every level. From how well we sleep to our stress response and even our metabolism, breath is an incredible tool for optimizing health. On this episode of The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru talks to James Nestor about the forgotten power of breathing and how we can tap into it to dramatically improve how we feel.  James Nestor is an author and journalist who has written for Scientific American, Outside, The New York Times, and more. His latest book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, was released in May of this year and was an instant New York Times bestseller. Breath explores how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly--and how to get it back.  In this episode, we dive into:   -How important our breathing process is to human health (2:59)  -How our breath influences so much of our health (10:43)   -Stanford University breathing experiment (12:40)  -How our modern industrial diet has impacted the way we breathe (16:08)  -How lung capacity is synonymous with longevity (25:54)  -How breathing less increases oxygen and CO2 (31:01)  -How to establish better nasal breathing (47:39)  -Mouth breathing and dehydration (54:45)  -The importance of eliciting a parasympathetic response before you eat (59:39) -How to breathe in order to reduce inflammation in the body (1:00:56)  -Are we getting enough oxygen when we wear a mask? (1:04:07) For more on James Nestor follow him on Instagram @MrJamesNestor, Facebook @MrJamesNestor, Twitter @MrJamesNestor, and through his website https://www.mrjamesnestor.com/. Get his book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art at https://www.mrjamesnestor.com/breath. This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and Cozy Earth. BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough contains 7 different forms of magnesium, which all have different functions in the body. BiOptimizers is offering my community a few special bundles for a limited time, with select purchases. Just head to magbreakthrough.com/dhru with code DHRU10.   If you’re looking for super comfortable and stylish men’s and women’s pajamas, joggers, robes, and hoodies, Cozy Earth has you covered! Cozy Earth is offering my audience 40% off. Just head to cozyearth.com and use the discount code DHRUPODCAST. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Because our breathing can help take control of our chronic inflammation. We can breathe in ways to reduce inflammation. And if you look at all of the top killers right now, these are diseases of inflammation. And if you look at what happens with COVID, this is a virus that causes mass inflammation throughout the body and infects the respiratory system. So you need to be breathing properly. Hi, everyone, Drew Prode here. Today's episode of the podcast, we are re-airing one of our top episodes. from the last year, and because our podcast audience has grown, chances are that you haven't

heard it yet. It's with James Nestor, science author, and number one New York Times bestseller of the book, Breath. If you are looking for low-cost, no-cost solutions to take your help to the next level, the science around this lost art of breathing that James Nestor describes in his book and on today's interview is one of the lowest hanging fruits. If you change how you breathe, something so simple, you can fundamentally change your health. And that's what today's podcast is all about.

A lot of my friends have interviewed James Nestor, and I'm not tooting my own horn. I guess I am. This episode is largely considered to be one of the best interviews that James has done. So that's the feedback I got, but I'd love you to be the judge. Check out today's rebroadcast of our interview with James Nestor. There's a reason I've talked to so many of our experts. on the podcast about magnesium. This super mineral is needed for over 600 enzymatic reactions in your body.

In fact, every single cell contains it and needs it to function. Magnesium is essential for stress management and restful sleep because of its influence on our neurotransmitters. It supports insulin sensitivity and fights the risk of type 2 diabetes. And magnesium also reduces C-reactive protein and other markers of inflammation among so many other crucial functions. I personally started taking magnesium to help with my sleep, especially when I travel and it's been a game changer. But I don't just take any old magnesium. I take bio-optimizers, magnesium breakthrough. It contains seven, yes seven, different forms of magnesium, which all have

different functions in the body. I haven't found anything else like it on the market. Bio-optimizers is great because all their products are soy-free, gluten-free, lactose-free, non-GMO free of chemicals and fillers made with all natural ingredients. For limited time, bio-optimizers is also giving away free bottles of their best-selling products, P3OM and Mass Zimes, their best-selling enzyme with select purchases. This promotion will only run while supplies last, so act fast. Just head over to magbreakthrough.com slash Drew with the code Drew 10. That's MAG, M-A-G, breakthrough, B-R-E-A-K-T-R-U-G-H dot com slash D-H-R-U with the code Drew 10.

That's D-H-R-U-10. This episode is brought to you by cozy Earth. What happens when your favorite betting company starts making the most comfortable loungeware in the world? I'll tell you what happens. an explosion of joy and relaxation in every cell in your body. If you're looking for super comfortable and stylish men's and women's pajamas, joggers, robes, pullovers, and hoodies, my personal favorite, basically all the stuff that we're wearing working from home these days,

cozy earth has you covered. So what's cozy earth's not-so-secret fabric that powers their superior comfort? It's the miracle plant bamboo. The more I've learned about bamboo, the more I've fallen in love with it. Bamboo is just as soft as silk, but it's way more durable, which means you can wash it without worrying about destroying the quality. Bamboo is incredibly breathable, so it doesn't trap heat, which is key, especially for pajamas at night and the support with temperature regulation.

Nobody likes getting too hot or too cold at night. And bamboo is way better for the earth. It's sustainable. It lasts longer and requires. way less processing than cotton and other fabrics that are out there that are ruining our environment. If you're ready to make the upgrade to ultra soft, healthy for you and healthy for the planet, super stylish loungeware that you can wear both inside the home and the outside, it's time to give Cozy Earth a try.

Right now they're offering my community their highest discount ever. Listen to this. 40% off. Just go to CozyEarth.com with the discount code, Drew Podcast. That's cozy, C-O-Z-Y, Earth, E-A-R-T-H-E-A-R-T-H-R-U podcast, P-O-D-C-A-S-T. Check it out today. Keep in mind, by the way, that Cozy Earth has a 10-year warranty

so you really can't go wrong with giving them a try. Now let's get back to today's episode. Welcome to the Broken Brain podcast. I'm your host, Drew Perwitt, and each week my team and I bring on a new guest who can help you improve your brain help, feel better, and most importantly, live more. This week's guest is James Nestor. James is an author, journalist who has written for Scientific America outside the New York Times and many more other publications. His latest book, Breath, The New Science of a Lost

Art, was released in May of this year and was an instantaneous New York Times bestseller. Brett explores how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly and how to get it back. James has appeared on dozens of national television shows, including ABC's Nightline, CBS, and NPR. I can't wait to listen to his interview with one of my hosts that I look up to, Terry Gross on Fresh Air. He lives and breeds in San Francisco. James, welcome to the Broken Brain podcast. Thanks a lot for having me. Yeah, I've been fascinated with your book and been diving into it in the audio version. And as we were chit-chatting a little earlier,

we've done a bunch of episodes on breathing with a few mutual friends that we've had on the podcast. But I feel that your book, Breath, really in a beautiful way through your narrative and your story and your health issues that you openly share about, ties in all the dots together. So to set us up,

I want to take a quote that starts off from the beginning of the book to frame the conversation and then get into your hero's journey. So in the book you share that no matter what we eat, how much we exercise, how skinny or young we are or wise we are, none of it will matter unless we're breathing correctly.

When did you first start to become aware of how central the breath was in our breathing process to human health? It took me years and years. I had heard about the potential of breathing. I had experienced some pretty powerful breathwork years and years ago, but it wasn't until I really started talking to biological anthropologists until I started going down to Stanford and talking with rhinologists and pulmonologists,

that I realized that breathing was so essential to so many things that we don't really consider it to be so closely linked to metabolism, sleep, stress, on and on and on. but breathing affects all of these things. It's really the anchor that anchors all of the systems to our body. And if we're not doing that correctly, we're never, ever going to be healthy. And this was news to me. And I was surprised that it took me so long to figure this out. There's your personal health journey.

And I'd love for you to share a little bit of background information with our audience. Even though you are a journalist and you've written about deep sea divers, people who hold their breath for minutes at a time and you were highlighting them. In parallel with that work, there's also your own health issues that you've been dealing with. Can you share that parallel with our audience? Yeah, my health issues were really everyone else's health issues. They were nothing really extraordinary. I was growing up in Southern California, so exposed to a lot of smog. I got braces. I got extractions. I had head gear. All very normal things. It was. never when I was growing up if you were going to get braces, but just when you were going to be doing it.

So I didn't think that that would affect my breathing in any way. Who would have thought until much later on in life where I was very active. I was boxing a lot, doing martial arts, surfing, running. But I was just getting sick all the time. So change my diet, eat even more healthily. I would sleep even more hours, like beyond eight hours. But I was getting sick constantly. I was getting pneumonia year in and year out, very mild pneumonia, nothing too serious, bronchitis, on and on and on. And I was told that this was just a part of growing old, but that didn't seem right to me. I wanted to see if I could do something about it. So I started exploring the role that breath has in our general health and our metabolism, in our capacity to think clearly.

And through several years, very casually, I was reading books on this. I was collecting studies until that file cabinet got big enough that I figured there might be a book in all this. Powerful. And you mentioned Stanford. You went to Stanford through personal experimentation and wanting to go and really see what does your breathing capabilities look like. And in that discovery and in your reading, you learned something very important about human evolution, which is an early part of the book that helps really understand what sort of crazy times we're living. in in modern society that is so connected to to breath. So before we get into your personal experimentation at Stanford, tell us a little bit what you learned about human evolution and what's

happened specifically in the last 1.5 million to about 800,000 years. So a lot of people think that so many of the breathing problems that we're suffering from are all due to environmental inputs, to pollution or allergens. And that's true for some people for sure. But what I've found is most of the breathing issues that most of us suffer from are caused by evolutionary change. So anatomical changes that have occurred in our faces. So I had always learned in school, which for me was a million years ago, that evolution was progressive, that we were just getting stronger, we were getting better, we were getting fitter, which is complete garbage. And if you look at the human species, you can see how wrong that is. We are not getting fitter and stronger and better.

And our breathing has taken one of the biggest hits. And what I mean by that is our faces have grown so flat and our mouths have grown so small that our teeth no longer fit. They grow in crooked. And if you have a mouth that's too small for its face, you have a smaller airway, which makes it harder to breathe. So we're pretty much hosed right out of the gate to be suffering, to be more apt to suffer from dysfunctional breathing right from birth. and it was fascinating to me to spend weeks and weeks looking through ancient human skulls. I went to labs at the University of Pennsylvania, talked to biological anthropologists, looked at hundreds of these things.

All of our ancestors had straight teeth, all of them. And only modern humans were the only species to have chronically crooked teeth. And so if you believe that evolution is progressive, all you need do is look in the mirror and then look at our ancestors and you'll see how wrong that is. It's so true. And a friend of mine from the New York Times, a writer, his name is Anahad O'Connor. He's written a few articles about modern day hunter-gatherer societies. And people who listen to this podcast will also be familiar with some of our interviews with dentists where they've talked about Dr. Weston Price. And a few years ago, I went to Kenya to visit one of these modern-day hunter-gatherer societies called the, they're cousins of the Maasai called the Samburu tribe. They primarily consist on a diet of milk. They've been doing that. Twigs, eating.

Their teeth are perfect. They all fit in. They have the most beautiful smiles. They don't have access to modern dentistry. So when they do get into an accident that is a problematic because they can get a tooth infection or other things. But outside of accidents or fighting or sort of things like that, they have impeccable teeth.

And their jaws look more wider, more whole and more richer than hours do. And it reminded me that trip of something that you posted on Twitter that is related to what you just shared, which was you linked to an article, I believe it was in a UK paper, maybe the independent or the guardian. And it was featuring how we are actually potentially going backwards, that human evolution is not going forwards. And you said, the article said, more babies are being born today without wisdom teeth. And you commented on the article and said, Maybe we're not always in evolution. This could be an example of disevolution.

Well, disevolution is a known thing. Daniel Lieberman's been studying this for years and years. And what it is is we can't say this is de-evolution because we're not moving backwards. Evolution means change. So we're constantly changing, but we're not changing for the best, right? We're taking a very steep left turn. And if you look at what's happening with wisdom teeth, our ancestors didn't need. their wisdom teeth extracted. Okay. They, uh, but nearly all or I think over 50% of the human

population. I think it's way over that. Do need wisdom teeth extracted. Otherwise, they, they grow ingrown and they can cause a bunch of problems. So that alone is, is such a strange thing to me to think that we're now required to do all of these procedures just to get by. And how our ancestors didn't need to do this. So how that relates, you know, I wasn't too interested in teeth, too interested in dentistry, but how that relates to breathing really struck me. And it started to make a whole bunch of things very, very clear. So early in the book, one of the things that you brought up, as you started to tell family, friends, individuals that you were looking at this topic of breathing and breath,

one of the first things that came up for folks was, why do I need to learn how to breathe? I've been doing this for most of my life. So tell us the answer to that question. and help our audience understand why paying attention to their breath, even though it's something they've done all along, is actually something that could potentially help them alleviate from so many of these things that we've gotten used to as a species. Well, a lot of people think that breathing is binary.

I certainly did. It was if we were breathing, that was a good thing because we were alive. And if we weren't, that was bad. We were dead. We were really sick or unconscious. but how we breathe depends and it influences so much of our health it's just like what we eat you can't just say as long as I'm eating food I'm alive and if I'm not eating food that's that's bad you know it depends what kinds of food you're eating and with breathing it's it's how you take

in that air we breathe about 20,000 to 25,000 times a day and if you're struggling to do that if you're doing that in a dysfunctional way, it's going to affect your health. So there's not a lot of controversy about this. So anyone who's researched this knows that this is, this is so true and there's so much science behind it. But I was pretty shocked that it took me so long to figure this out and that everyone that I had talked to had no idea that they were breathing improperly and had no idea that so many of their chronic issues were attached to their poor breathing. And that's what I spent years and years trying to research, get my head around. And one of the ways that you researched that in the beginning was, as you started out the book, is you went to Stanford and you met a doctor there to participate in a program.

Share a little bit more about that. So I'm lucky enough to live in San Francisco where I'm really close to Stanford. So I use their medical library all the time. And I started interviewing experts there. And I found the chief of rhinology research at Stanford, this guy named Dr. Jayakar Nyak. So we had these very long lunches where we talked about all times. of things. He's a big nose guy. So he's very frustrated that many of us aren't breathing through our noses because we have this incredible organ in the front of our faces that serves so many

different functions. And yet 25 to 50% of the population is breathing through its mouth habitually, which is causing all kinds of damage, neurological problems, respiratory problems, high blood pressure. I mean, on and on and on. So we started talking more and more, over a course of several months. And he knew the problems associated with mouth breathing. Everyone in his field knew that. But nobody knew how quickly those problems came on. So I said, yeah, it's Stanford.

Why don't you test it? And he thought doing so would be, in his words, unethical because he knew how injurious it could be to the body. So I volunteered for an experiment. I said, hey, let me get one other person. So it's an N2 experiment. And let's just see what happens, 10 days of mouth breathing versus 10 days of nasal breathing and we'll collect a bunch of data before, during, and after, and just see if it affects us in any way.

And you actually went through that. And in that period of time, when you purposely forced yourself through a device on your nose, just a little contraption, you forced yourself to breathe through your mouth. What did you notice and what was surprising about it? So a lot of people, at least my friends at the time, thought this was some sort of supersized me stunt, you know, and I didn't view it that way at all. And either did NIAC or the researchers that were helping us out with this little experiment. We were just lolling ourselves into a position that so much of the population is already contending with. The difference was we were collecting data and seeing what happened.

So I had silicon of my nose. Sounds awful because it was. and I was just forced to breathe through my mouth, which sounds awful because it certainly was. But again, so many people are doing this day in and day out and are used to it. So the first thing that happened within just a couple hours, my blood pressure was as high as I'd ever seen it in my entire life. And I thought, oh, I'm just stressed out. It's been a crazy day.

We spent eight hours at Stanford getting four different blood draws, pulmonary function tests, not the most fun thing in the world. But then that night, I started snoring for the first time that I'm aware of. I was snoring for about an hour and a half. And that snoring got worse and worse as the study went on until I was snoring for four hours throughout the night. I got sleep apnea. So did the other subject in the study, Anders Olson, had the same exact thing. We were fatigued.

We were miserable. We can concentrate. I mean, it was so severe. We knew it wasn't going to be fun, but we had no idea this was going to be so brutal. And to think that so many people are walking around breathing this way and not realizing that at least some of their chronic issues are tied to the ways in which they're breathing was just absolutely bizarre and kind of sad to me. Let's make sure we connect this back to the concept of our disevolution or de-evolution, well, this evolution, how is it that since the root of farming and us more processing foods

and switching our diet to things that have changed the way that we were really evolved as human beings to eat. How has that had a direct impact on so many individuals that are out there that are mouth breathing and maybe not even realizing it? So the very first incidence of widespread crooked teeth occurred about 12,000 years ago with the very first farming cultures. So right when we started farming, right when we gave up hunting and gathering, we started getting crooked teeth. But it wasn't bad at all at first. These were cultures that were living on a mono diet, you know, just eating one soft thing. For most farming cultures, their teeth were just fine because a lot of the food that they were farming was still rough. They were chewing a lot. But as food progressively

got more soft and more processed, especially when the Industrial Revolution really started booting up in the late 1700s, early 1800s, that's when you just saw widespread. crooked teeth covering most of Western Europe and anywhere else where people were eating for the first time in human history a diet entirely a bottled stuff of canned stuff processed stuff high sugar stuff you know nothing pulled from the ground and you look at our society today what are we eating the same thing even what's considered healthy foods green smoothies avocados oatmeal yogurt gogurt whatever it's all soft so it's no that our teeth are just growing more and more crooked. So what happens is when you have that, as we mentioned at the beginning of the program here, when you have too small of a mouth, you have a smaller airway. And so the incidence of snoring and sleep apnea and respiratory problems also dramatically increased with this advent of the modern industrial diet.

And you can trace this all around the world. As this diet went all around the world, mouths got smaller, teeth got crooked. good respiratory problems shot through the roof. You know, there's this old saying that it's like, I don't know who discovered water, but I know it wasn't a fish, right? I'm sure you've heard that. Our audience has heard that. And in a way, we are living that because human beings, we take breath so much for granted

because it just feels like it's something that we're doing, that we don't pay attention to it. And we are suffering with all these aspects, which you mentioned, crooked teeth, health issues. As you started to go through this research a little further, you found many examples in different societies, including Native American tribes and other cultures that were so focused on the importance of nose breathing and getting their children, especially not to breathe through the mouth, that it was baked into how kids were raised from a young age. Can you share some examples of that or a story that comes to mind?

So if you look at ancient cultures all around the world, whether it's in India or in China or Native Americans, South America, they celebrated breathing as a medicine. This was a sacred thing. This was as important as other systems of health. And they wrote about it. They practice it. They had different technologies, different understanding and appreciation for it. So one very interesting story that I was reading about was with George Catlin. He was a painter, and in the 1830s, he decided to take off and go west and to start living with Native American tribes. And this was before these tribes were given Western food. It was before they had any of the creature comforts of the West. So what we understood of these tribes came much later after these people were already given alcohol and already so much of the food and influence of Western culture.

But he was there before all that. And he said in every single tribe, they consider nasal breathing this font of health. And mouth breathing was the most disrespectful thing you could do. So much so that mothers used to hold their infants. And whenever they were done nursing, they would calmly shut their mouths. And they would stand over them as the infant was sleeping and calmly shut the infant's mouth if they were opening their mouth at night. And again, there are so many health benefits to breathing. through the nose. And they obviously saw this through observational studies, through empirical

studies, whatever, but they weren't measuring it with instruments. But they saw it and was woven into their culture. And it had probably been woven into their culture for thousands and thousands of years. And Catlin went to South America and found the exact same thing with every single indigenous culture that he studied. I grew up in the Hindu Brahman Vedic tradition. That's my family. ancestry, even though I don't identify by that now, but I grew up in that tradition and that culture. And I can remember for a young age, anytime my grandmother would catch us breathing through our mouth, if we were just sitting there, she would tell us that it was a sign of being kind of lazy. Like, hey, don't be lazy. Close your mouth, breathe through your nose.

And in Arjuveda, it was a big thing that was talked about, especially because in the mornings, being part of this Brahmin tradition in India, my dad would do something in the morning called Buja, where you would have to recite certain things and do meditation for about 30 minutes. And when we would use prayer beads, rosary, you know, it has 108 beads that are around there, you would time the breath,

which was breathing in through the nose. And when I would be lazy and I'd breathe through the mouth, my dad would say, you can't do it that way. You have to breathe in the nose. These are all remnants of things that were passed down for generations. When I was young, I just thought of them as, oh, this is all just superstitions. But now we're learning how true they were and essentially a major part of our health.

I wish your mom was around Southern California in the 70s and 80s. I could really use some of that instruction. And, you know, those things have been around for so long, likely for a reason, because they saw what happened with people who were mouth breathing all the time. They saw what happened with people who were nasal breathing all the time. And it's one thing to talk about these ancient scripts and these ancient traditions is another thing to look at the actual science and to look at the data and to measure this stuff. And that's where it just becomes indisputable the benefits of nasal breathing versus mouth breathing. And I think that's a beautiful story inside of your book is that you say that you had that there was initially you had to look to a lot of the past literature and ancient.

text that was out there documenting this generational shift and how detrimental mouth breathing was and how important nose breathing was. But along the process of digging in, you met misfits, you call them in the book, misfits who were largely ignored, who then, because the science caught up, were able to actually provide the data showing how important it was. After meeting this first misfit, who went through this experiment with you at Stanford University. Who are other couple misfits that held to peel back the layers of the onion? So the term I was using was pulmonauts. You know, you could view these people as misfits,

but I called them pulmonauts because they all didn't fit under the same umbrella. These were researchers. Sometimes they were dentists. Sometimes they were freelancers. sometimes they were osteopaths, sometimes they were coral teachers, but they all shared in this wonder of health and using breathing to establish better health. And so these pulmonauts range from Yandel Henderson, who was at Yale for 30 or 40 years,

who discovered how essential having a balance of carbon dioxide was in the body. Everyone's talking about oxygen, but you need a balance of CO2 for oxygen to do its thing. His research is more than 100 years old. And it came out, nobody disputed it. It was completely legit. By the time he died, it was completely forgotten. The same thing happened with Carl Stow, another pulmonaut.

It was a choral conductor, and he was teaching singers how to sing better by breathing better. And then he was asked by the VA hospitals to help with emphysemic. And he did what was considered medically impossible. He restored the health of these people, people who had been just left to sit in a room and die. So the interesting thing about these stories is I was not looking for these people who had discovered this thing and then were forgotten. But they all seemed to follow the same arc where they would discover the wonders of breathing, the technology of breathing, how beneficial it would be. And then just forgotten again. That's why I called the book The New Science of a Lost Art because we kept finding this stuff,

but we kept losing it over and over again. I want to share some of that data that you've come across and that you featured inside the book. One of them was you shared about how the Framingham data from the Framingham Heart Study and some of the things they pulled out of there, especially when it comes to breathing and lung capacity. Can you talk about that with our audience? Sure. So a lot of people are looking at different metrics for lifespan. You know, they're looking at genetics, which can influence lifespan. They're looking at other environmental inputs of what you're eating, how much you're exercising. But the number one marker, the most accurate marker of lifespan is lung size and respiratory health. And this was discovered more than 30 years ago as part of the Framingham study, which is a 70 year longitude. study into cardiac health.

And so when they looked at all the data, all the people who were living the longest, it had to do with their vital capacity. They said vital capacity, lung capacity is synonymous with life capacity, with longevity. And this went so far, this didn't make it in the book. This is in the in notes. My editor thought was too weird. But some researchers even went so far to look at patients who had lung transplants. and they found that patients who had been transplanted with larger lungs lived way longer than

those who had normal size or smaller lungs. But you don't need to get a lung transplant to share in this larger lung size and longer lifespan. You just need to breathe properly. And what else is yoga, but stretching and breathing? You know, so much of the exercise is establishing proper respiratory health. that's engaging the diaphragm and keeping all the musculature and rib cage here flexible so that you can breathe easy later on in life.

On this podcast, we've had a lot of neuroscientists on here and individuals who talk about neuroplasticity. And that became a new term for a lot of individuals over the years because we all heard that story that you're born with a certain amount of brain cells and then it's all downhill from there. A big part of what your book talks about, about just as you were talking about the diaphragm is not just with the with the lungs but so many aspects that relate to our breath are plastic so you just gave that example of the lungs

let's go back to the nose and the mouth and the jaw which is how your book starts off where does plasticity come into play over there so just to sort of go into the lungs a little bit more the human lung, especially after the age of about 30, 30 to 50, you're going to lose about something like 15% lung capacity. And it goes down much quicker after that. So right when the time we need to breathe the easiest, when we really need lung capacity, we start losing it as we grow old. But the great thing about this is you can have a direct impact on this entropy. You can not only stave it off, but you can actually improve your lung capacity at virtually any age. So it's an inspiring tale behind all this depressing data. The same thing is true with

airway health. The same thing is true with our mouths. So I think that's a great analogy between neuroplasticity and body plasticity and breathing plasticity. Because so many of these things, which even things that we've inherited, we can change by force of will. And that's really what I spent so much of this book getting into. It's establishing the problems. It's like, here's a bunch of depressing information. We're screwed right out of the gate. Our faces are messed up.

There are environmental inputs. There's pollution, blah, blah, blah. But that's cool. But what are we going to do with it? And how can we improve upon that? How can we improve our health? When you started to look at the nose breathing versus mouth reading, immediately it was clear what one could do to,

improve their health, which is during the day, focus on breathing in through the nose. And as listeners of this podcast will be familiar and you go deep into it in the book, you also started to get into the world of mouth taping and how that can be beneficial at night, where I would say that a lot of people who do breathe through their nose during the day tend to end up breathing through their mouth at night. When it came to the lungs, tell us what you did personally as you started to get some of this information, especially when you start to get this mind-boggling information about CO2 and its relationship with oxygen.

Well, a sure way of becoming a complete neurotic about your breathing is to spend years studying this stuff. So, you know, every new study I was finding, I was like, oh, I'm screwed up in that way too. I'm screwed up in this way. How can I fix this? And I started getting really paranoid by how I was breathing and how to improve that. So one thing that I learned, which really blew my mind, is if we breathe more right now, if I'm going to breathe 20 deep breaths, you would think that I'm getting more oxygen in my body. You would think that I'm feeding all those hungry cells more O2 and I would have more energy. But the exact opposite is happening. If we breathe over or metabolic needs, our bodies have to struggle to get oxygen. because we're causing such vaso constriction.

And if you don't believe me, you can breathe 30 or 40 breaths. You'll feel some tingling in your fingers. You'll feel some lightness in your head. That's not from an increase of oxygen. It's from a decrease of oxygen to those areas. So the way to get the most energy, the most bang for your buck in breathing, is to breathe less.

Because by breathing less, we will be breathing in line more closely with our metabolic, needs and the vast majority of us are breathing way too much, just like so many of us are eating way too much. Our bodies want to operate at the state of efficiency. So we should be giving them the amount of oxygen they need, not constantly forcing them to work to get oxygen and air into the lungs just to push it back out without any use of it. So when we breathe very quickly, not even very quickly at almost the average rate of about 20 breasts per minute, we use about 50% of that air.

Not very much. If we breathe slowly at a rate of about six breaths per minute, deeper breaths, we use 85% of that air. So 35% different. You think that's going to make a difference to you throughout the day, working out, focusing, sleeping, whatever. Of course it is. So this is something that is available to all of us.

the fact that people haven't been talking about it too much, I just thought was bizarre because it has such a strong influence on every aspect of our health. In addition to our design of our face and our nasal and the narrowing of our jaws and our canals for breathing, what are some of the other things that contribute to the fact that we are breathing too much instead of at these ideal ratios that you talk about inside of the book. So if you think about nasal breathing, you can just take a breath through your nose with me here. It takes a while, doesn't it? It doesn't go in really easily. You can feel that negative pressure as it goes in. You can feel the positive pressure as it goes out. That's because when you breathe through

your nose, you're forcing it through this gauntlet of different structures where this air is slowed down. It's pressurized. It's conditioned. It's heated. It's moistened. So that by the time it gets to the lungs, the lungs can more easily extract that oxygen. It's the same thing with exhaling. It takes a while. So by forcing the air to slow down by pressurizing it, we can extract so much more oxygen. We take in about 20% more oxygen,

breathing breath through our nose than we do equivalent breaths through our mouths. Now, if you were to take a breath through your mouth, that's all it takes very quick. So it's much too fast for us to add. quickly use that breath to its full potential to extract that oxygen. So nasal breathing, this isn't some like new age, like hearsay. This is basic biology. I will show you a little model here for people listening.

You're not going to be able to see this, but I'm showing an anatomical model of the side of a face. And you just see this incredibly ornate structure of all the sinuses and the nose. That's there for a reason. We are supposed to be obligate nasal breathers. And when we don't breathe that way, our bodies really suffer. And in so many ways, you know, we've had, as I mentioned, when we were starting off this podcast, we've had Dr. Lou Ignaro on here, who was a Nobel Prize winner.

And then subsequently, you featured other individuals that have built on top of the work that's out there in the relationship of nitric oxide. It's almost like the nose doesn't get the credit that it deserves as being set. a central fixture on our body. Even it's so related to even things like sexual arousal. And that's something new that a lot of people learned inside of reading your book. Tell us a little about the nose and how that can be tied into arousal. So our noses are covered with erectile tissue, which is the exact same erectile tissue in our genitals.

So when one gets activated, the other responds in kind. And some people have such a strong connection between their genitals and their noses that every time they get sexually attracted or stimulated, they start uncontrollably sneezing. Because what happens is as the erectile tissue in the genitals becomes engorged with blood, so does the erectile tissue in the nose. And there is some fascinating research. This did not make it into the book. It just got way too weird about 100 years ago when they were looking at women suffering from severe cases of P.M.

they started doing surgery to their noses. They started removing some of their erectile tissue, and it helped incredibly well. They also started giving them cocaine to numb their nostrils, which I've heard also worked quite well for them. So it's beyond all that, beyond all this hucksterism and these quick quack fixes, this connection between our nose and genitals is known, and it's just part of how our bodies function. Help you understand that one a little bit more. Where would removing the tissue around the nose, how would that help the symptoms that the women were going through?

What's the thinking on that? Chronic congestion and a chronically stuffed nose. And so if you're chronically congested, you're breathing through your mouth and then you can suffer from neurological issues, metabolic problems, so on and so forth. I'm not sure that they had really clearly in their minds what they were doing and why they were doing it.

But if you look at the studies, I mean, it had a tremendous effect on these people. So I know that there's a connection there. Don't go out and do this at home, people. Not a good idea. But we do know that the nostrils also play different roles in the way that our bodies function and the way that we process thought. So the right nostril inhaling through it, it's going to heat the body up. The heart is going to speed up.

pressure is going to increase. The left nostril has the opposite effect. And so throughout the day, this erectile tissue in our noses, one side will open while the other side closes and the other side opens and the other side closes. And for so long, researchers have known this. They've known this for like 70 years, but for so long they didn't know why until they started measuring what happened when we breathe through the right nostril versus the left nostril. So in many ways, this very much could be the way our bodies help to stay balanced throughout the day, shifting these breaths throughout our noses. And as you mentioned inside the book, there's various sorts of practices that especially in pranayam, in yoga, in different traditions, they might encourage some of that.

They might say, okay, breathe through your left. They might say breathe through your right. But what you found for yourself is at an ongoing basis that if you primarily let your body do what it needs to do, that's one of the best ways for it to decide as long as you supporting the structures that need to be supported to nose breathe in the first place. Yeah, for sure. You know, nature is a perfect guide all the time. The past is usually great for prologue of how we should be treating our bodies and systems

of health. So our bodies will naturally do this every 30 minutes to three or four hours. Our noses will switch dominance from one side to the other. But what you can do is you can hack into this. You can use these different nostril breasts for different functions. And alternate nostril breathing, anyone who's been to a yoga class has heard about this. Nadi Shadhana, it's also called, it's been around for a thousand years. And this is just using your fingers to force yourself to breathe through your left nostril in,

force yourself to exhale through your right. So it's the inhale through the right that stimulates the body. Excellient will also have a calming effect. And there's a zillion different ways to do this, but they're all variations on the same thing, where you're taking control of this autonomic function to elicit different reactions in your body for different purposes. I want to read a quote that you shared on Twitter.

This was April 24th, and I'm going to totally butcher this gentleman's name. He's a Nobel Prize winner, Albert Zensigree. you know it probably correctly, so you can correct me after I show the quote. And the quote says, more than 60 years of research on living systems has convinced me that our body is much more nearly perfect than the endless list of ailments suggest. Its shortcomings are due less to its inborn imperfections than to our abusing it.

How did you find out about this quote? Where did you hear it and what inspired you to share it? That's one of my favorite quotes. He won a Nobel Prize for his work in vitamin C in the 1930s. And he's one of my favorite researchers. I'm working on a project now to get more deeply into his research. So he had studied cancer for years and years and years and years and found that cancer, just like so many chronic problems,

they aren't some fault to our bodies, right? Our bodies are this perfect machine. they're the fault of being exposed to too many toxic environmental inputs, be that stress, be that pollution or whatever. So the human body, if it were placed in a more natural environment without these modern industrial inputs, can naturally live a very long time. We keep thinking, you know, the argument is nowadays, it's like, hey, we're living longer, like people used to live only 30 years.

That is not true. you know these studies were conducted during the industrial revolution where you would have 16 kids and 12 of them would die in childbirth you know so there's a difference between longevity and lifespan so you know longevity the way that that is calculated is if I had two kids one dialed in childbirth and the other lived to be 80 I would say the average lifespan you know longevity would be 40 years but that doesn't mean we're all all host and that we're all going to live to be 40 years long. So, and we've known this for thousands of years. I found this somewhat recently when I was looking at all of these great philosophers and scientists from a thousand years ago, Roman philosophers, Greek philosophers. I was like, what? These guys were living to be 85 years old.

They were 87 years old. And there's a graveyard near a cabin I used to rent from graves from like the 1850s. And these people were living into their 70s and 80s, all of the. the time. So the reason I'm mentioning this sidebar information is that our bodies, I think, are programmed to live this long and healthy life. It just depends on how we treat them throughout our life, especially when we're younger and we set a good foundation. They're going to be much more apt to live longer. So true. And we just had a researcher on the podcast, Dr. Jason Fung, and his argument around cancer is that cancer is less.

something that happens to us, but it's more of an evolutionary survival mechanism that the body taps into. And this isn't some fringe guy. This guy has a couple of New York Times bestsellers in the category of insulin resistance and diabetes and talking about that whole trend. And so so many of these ailments, if we take that idea that many of the diseases that we suffer from in modern life, we think of them as things that are happening to us. But if we peel back to layer and go back into that quote that I was just sharing one of your favorite quotes, we can actually see how so many of our diseases are just adaptations where our body is trying to do the best that it can under the crazy circumstances that it's been put under.

And Stephen Park, Dr. Stephen Park at Albert Einstein Medical School has written about this a lot. So he's found that the organs that are usually cut off during times of chronic stress when we enter into states of sympathetic stress, our body prioritizes energy and blood flow to other areas that are essential for us to fight or to run away. So skeletal muscles, the heart, the brain. But other organs, the stomach, the kidneys, the liver, pancreas, like all of that gets cut off during these states of stress. So if we stay stressed for too long, these other areas aren't going to get the energy they need. They're not going to get their blood flow. So can Cancer grows in environment of low circulation, of low oxygen.

So he is hypothesized. This hasn't been proven, but he's hypothesized. He's that, hmm, look at all of the leading areas in the body that are afflicted with cancer throughout a population. Something like nine out of ten of them are these areas that are cut off from circulation because of stress. So stress, yes, is a major contributor to cancer. So to help reduce your chances of getting cancer, you have to take control of your stress. And one of the quickest ways of doing that and to take control of inflammation is to take control of your breathing. Powerful.

How has working on this book and actually launching it in the context of a pandemic, how is it given you a lens of seeing what we're going through with COVID with all the knowledge and information? that you've learned from these experts you've talked to on breathing. Yeah, it's funny. When the book came out in May, May 26th of this year, some people wrote and they said, oh, really convenient that you happen to release this book during a pandemic that affects the respiratory system. I've been working on this book for about five years,

nonstop and had been collecting data on it for about a decade. So, you know, if there's anything good to come out of this, foul foul pandemic is I think it's made people a lot more aware of their breathing and so many of these researchers that I had been working with people who had spent decades in this field no one was listening to them they were publishing all the time in academic journals but none of that data was making it to the general public I really think that this is this is their time right because what what they have proven what they've shown no one's arguing with it but people seem to poo poo breathe They're just like breathing, whatever.

You know, I'm going to eat right. I'm going to sleep right. I'm going to exercise, but I don't need to think how to breathe. I do that unconsciously automatically. And that's the whole problem. When you're doing something unconsciously and you're doing it wrong, you can really affect your body negatively in so many ways. And again, as we had said at the beginning of the program,

you're seeing that all over the place. Look at the amount of people who have asthma now, who have COPD, who suffer from sleep apnea, suffer from snoring from hypertension. I mean, the numbers are just off the charts. So we have become a culture, a species of the worst breathers in the animal kingdom. And once we have that knowledge, we can turn it around and try to fix it. I think in the category of books that would be very similar to your books, just saying in the category as a whole, you know, journalists going on a quest, you know, learning about, let's say, you know, similar to like, let's say a category of like

Michael Pollan going out there. One of the things that I really appreciate about your book is that you do go into the recommendations that are out there and not just generally like we have to pay more attention to this we should give it more love there are actually really amazing and emerging things that we can do to solve this at all sorts of levels and I really appreciate that because I think the challenge that a lot of journalists felt in the past was they make two strong recommendations do they come across as an advocate rather than a storyteller for it so thank you first and foremost for that I'd like to go into some some of those recommendations. And let's start first with the recommendations around our jaw.

So through this dis-evolutionary process of us not chewing, us having smaller nasal cavities and breathing airways and many other mechanisms that end up preventing us from breathing as deeply and getting as much oxygen in and through the right mechanism, which is through our nose, we've ended up at a place where we have all these issues that we've talked about. But as we mentioned with the plasticity, there are things that are out there tools that people can tap into to reverse a little bit of that process. What are some examples of those tools that you found through writing this book? Sure. I just want to dunk into the advocate evangelist thing just for a second. And I think you really nailed it.

That is not my job as a journalist. I have no background in medicine. I'm not selling anything. I'm not selling any product. My job is to go into a world. I don't understand and to try to figure it out and talk to the experts in the field. So I would like to be an advocate for data,

an evangelist for facts. And that's really the position I want to stay in. So I'm not a breathing therapist. I do not offer prescriptions, blanket prescription for people. What I do is I filter out research from the leading experts. and I show what has worked for other people per the science. So along those lines, so if you want to establish better nasal breathing,

if that's the first thing you need to do is to figure out your airway, because no matter how many pranayama's you do, no matter how much Sudarshan Kria or Wim Hof method you do, if your airways are messed up, it doesn't matter how focused you want to be or how learned you are in all of these different breathing techniques. you have to fix your airway. And that begins with breathing through your nose. A lot of people say, I would breathe through my nose, but I can't because I'm constantly

congested. So I just breathe through my mouth. You have to find a way of clearing your nose. It's as simple as that. Some people need surgical interventions. A lot of people don't. Dr. Jaya-Niak, I told me if a sink is plugged in your house, you're going to find a way of clearing it as soon as possible.

The nose needs to be considered the same thing. So going back into that blanket prescription, everyone's different. So some people I've found got benefit from starting with those breathe right strips, which help to open up the nostrils a little more. Mute inserts can also be helpful using sleep tape at night. I've found to be incredibly helpful. I've gotten hundreds of letters from people who say they no longer are snoring right now because of sleep tape. You know, so that's interesting. This is something Mark Burrheny has been researching for decades and decades.

So I would really start with those things. And if none of those work, if a netty pot doesn't work, then you can start exploring different procedures. But I would start with the things that are free, that have no side effects that are available to all of us. Because what I've seen is the vast majority of us can really get a ton of benefit from those. And that's what NIAC has seen as well.

And I know it's working because I've been into the world of mouth taping for a while. and I recently brought my fiancee into that world and she's getting the best sleep that she's ever had in her life is what she feels But previously when you would look up mouth tape on Amazon where a lot of people go one of the there's a prominent company that's out there that a lot of people would use their their product But since your book has come out I've seen one of the things that's come up in it is you say look There's a lot of really great solutions that's out there and there's different people that are meeting different needs but for people who want to start off with mouth taping, they can even just start off with a little square patch of surgical tape. That is one very low cost thing and a lot of companies make surgical tape and it's pretty easily accessible. And in this period of time, since I've been into mouth breathing,

I saw somewhere right around when your book came out, I knew that it was working because surgical tape came up to the top of mouth breathing when you typed it in inside of Amazon. So people are using it and they're getting better from the process. Yeah, I think 3M is extremely confused of what's going on with the rush for mouth tape right now. It was sold out for weeks and weeks. They're probably like, what the hell? A bunch of people doing home surgery now. This is very strange.

But whatever works for people works, I would not go on YouTube and look at advice unless you're looking at Dr. Mark Berheny or you're looking at Patrick McEwen and his advice because people are using duct tape. They're using masking tape. You don't need any of the stuff. This is not a hostage situation. This is just trying to train your jaw to be closed at night very softly. If you can breathe through the sides of your mouth, even if you can talk with this tape on, cool. The point of this is just to gently remind you to keep your mouth shut. And the great thing about so much of these hacks is we have technologies now that can measure how well they're working.

So I've measured my sleep not using mouth tape with a pulse oxymeter versus using mouth tape. I've used an app called SnorLab, which records your snoring throughout the night. You can take other metrics before and after. You can look at your pH. And breathing is so easy to measure. So the benefits of it are so easy to see in this day and age. So this is not some placebo effect. This is your body operating in an efficient way.

And the fact that it's helping so many people overcome snoring. I mean, nine out of ten of my friends who have tried it are no longer snoring. I'm not going to say it's going to work for you. I'm not promising anything. But it's free. And it's worth giving it a go. And if you look online, you can see hundreds or thousands of people who are saying the same thing. That one product, that branded type of mouth tape called Somnifix, it works great.

And it works great for a lot of people. So go for that. want to use it. So I'm not an evangelist. I'm not an advocate for any specific product. What I'm trying to say is there are benefits to nasal breathing, especially during sleep. You should really train yourself to do that by any means. One of the interesting stats just on the topic of nasal breathing on on during sleep and not breathing through your mouth is you shared inside the book something about water retention and basically holding on to moisture inside. Can you you share a little bit of that with the audience? Sure. So if you're breathing through your mouth,

you're exhaling, inhaling through your mouth, you were going to lose 42% more water. So there's a reason if you're a mouth breather in night that you wake up with this extremely dry mouth. And I did this for decades. I thought it was totally normal. So I would go to sleep. Didn't matter if I was camping or I was in a hotel. If I was at home, I would have a big bottle next to me. and I'd be hitting off that bottle all night because I would wake up, mouth dry, take another hit, go back to sleep. That's not normal. And if you look at people jogging right now,

I mean, they now have all of these backpacks with water in it, with little straws. They have belts with water bottles. And these people are cruising around. You just shut your mouth. You're not going to need this stuff for a five-mile jog, you know? To think you need water every 300 yards is absurd.

So this is again, the study was out years and years ago. No one's arguing with it, but still it seems like a lot of people aren't looking at the core issue of their constant dehydration. And so much of that has to do with the pathway through which they breathe air. So as people go down the rabbit hole of your book, they naturally start to ask themselves, okay, great. What is the quote unquote ideal breath or how should we be breathing ideally? And you do a great job of basically explaining, well, okay, through things like working out and maybe including in certain exercises, we may have periods of time where we are breathing more so that we can set up a better resting breath that's there.

Once we are in that resting phase where we're just doing our normal activities, what does a quote unquote ideal breath look like? So an ideal breath is breathing in line with your metabolic needs. So your metabolic needs are going to be different sitting on a couch and watching Queen's Gambit as they are when you're out jogging around, right? And it's hard to gauge that. How do you know you're breathing right in line with your metabolic needs? So what you can do is first to train yourself to breathe a little less. And the benefits of breathing less, I just told you you actually get more oxygen.

You're able to increase your CO2, which includes vasodilation, more release of nitric oxygen. I had so many other benefits of that. I found an exercise that works good for me is to breathe into a count of about five to six seconds and breathe out to that same count. And do this for five minutes, ten minutes a day. I have my phone. I put on this app and I put it on my desk

and just allow myself to breathe at this rate. And then once you do that, once you get the rhythm of it, you start breathing that way unconsciously. And that's the point of all this stuff. You don't want to have to be carrying around your phone or looking at an app or a notepad. You want to condition yourself so that you will breathe healthily when you're not thinking about it. And that starts by training yourself first into various methods of breathing less and breathing lightly and breathing deeper.

So I should mention if you ever want to decrease stress, really relax a lot more. you would increase your exhalations. So right now, if you take your hand and put it on your heart and you inhale to a count of about four and exhale to account about six or eight, what's ever comfortable to you, you'll notice your heart rate lowers. It gets slower and slower when you're exhaling. So at any time in the day, you can breathe into a count of about six. Exhale to about six or seven or eight, even shorten that inhale a little bit.

and you will notice that your body is getting calmer. Your blood pressure goes down. You'll feel some more warmth at your fingertips because you're entering that parasympathetic state. And again, this is stuff. No one's arguing that this stuff works. You can see it for yourself with simple wearables. It's the fact that a lot of people aren't accessing this.

That's what I was trying to do with the book is really good this information out there. Yeah, I see them as tools in the toolbox, simple, no cost, or even low costs that are out there widely available. And those are the best interventions. They're often written off as soft interventions, but when we add them up and actually integrate them into our life, they make such a difference.

One of those areas that you chat about, that's something that we all do too much often, but we all do, which is eating. And there is something that we can do when it comes to how we eat that could also benefit this process. And it has to do with chewing. Can you chat a little bit about chewing?

and how it's so central to what we're talking about here. Sure. There's a reason so many cultures did grace before a meal that would stop for a moment and pray and take this very slow breath. They're eliciting a parasympathetic response. And so when you elicit a parasympathetic response, you're going to be able to digest your food so much better because the stomach and the intestines,

those are some of the areas that are cut off when you're stressed out, which is why eating is so difficult after you've just had a big fight with someone. or if you're really amped up. So you can start by taking, you can pray if you want, that's great before a meal. And you can start by taking a very slow and easy breath before you tuck in and start eating something.

So beyond that, if you look at the way that the body gets rid of fat, it gets rid of fat with oxygen. You need oxygen to burn fat. So you want to be able to be breathing efficiently and having that good circulation throughout your body to really burn more fat. So there's a bunch of,

of different things tied to breathing and metabolism. Those are just a few of them to start off with. If you had the new Surgeon General's ear, and they were looking to these tools that we have in our toolbox that could have widespread implications if we brought them in, just like people right now are saying, okay, great, you know, COVID is going on. We're waiting for vaccine.

While we wait for it, there might be some usage of maybe even, even giving vitamin D because there's so much data on it out freely, especially to people who are in need, low cost, great intervention, and could have an incredible impact while we wait for other solutions. If you had the Surgeon General's ears, what tools in your toolbox you've talked about in the book are things that you might recommend that could have a massive impact if thought about on a public health level. I recently had a conversation with Dr. David Hascom, who's been working with Dr. Stephen

Porges, on a protocol for COVID. And this protocol is not only good for people who might be susceptible to getting COVID, but people who have had COVID or are suffering from COVID. It's a protocol that's good for everyone. So one thing that we don't seem to be looking at, we're into social distancing, which is great. We're into wearing masks, which is great. but we're not looking into our health, the health of our bodies.

So the way that our bodies are going to be able to defend themselves so much more better is if they're operating properly. So vitamin D plays a big part of that. Vitamin C plays a big part of that. Magnesium plays a big part of that as well. Because our breathing can help take control of our chronic inflammation. We can breathe in ways to reduce inflammation. And if you look at all of the top killers right now, these are diseases of inflammation.

And if you look at what happens with COVID, this is a virus that causes mass inflammation throughout the body and infects the respiratory system. So you need to be breathing properly. And I haven't heard anyone talking about this at all. I know that Lewis Ignaro is talking about nasal breathing and the power of nitric oxide. So our nose is produced six times more nitric oxide than breathing through the mouth. And it's no coincidence that there are 11 different clinical trials going on right now, looking at giving nitric oxide to people suffering from serious symptoms of COVID. We produce our own nitric oxide.

Who's talking about nasal breathing? Who's talking about breathing slowly to reduce inflammation and to calm yourself down? I don't hear really anyone. And, you know, I don't hear even Fauci talking about this. But the people who have been researching this for so long, including Hascom, including porridge, they've known this for a long time. So I would have the surgeon general call up these experts in the field and really lend their ear to establishing some sort of system for people to create a very hostile environment for a virus to take root. And that starts with breathing through the nose.

That starts with taking all of the appropriate and proper vitamins. And it starts by calming yourself down by breathing lightly and slowly. As a journalist who's very aware of the news and trends that are out there, masks has been something that has been very polarizing as anybody can see who's been just watching. As somebody who studies breath, can you talk a little bit about some of the concerns that people who maybe are against masks have that this feeling of, oh, well, see, this guy's talking about breath, masks are going to obstruct that. They're going to have these challenges that are there. I would just love to touch on it just because I feel I would be, I would be resound if I felt like,

I feel like you could address it better than anybody else talking about it because you're the guy that's looking at it and studying it. Well, now the pressure's on. So I have a feeling you're going to be very disappointed by what I have to offer here. But I have looked into this a bit. I've gotten about a zillion emails about it as well. So the main complaint with people wearing masks is they say, there's no way I'm getting enough oxygen. I'm just, I'm trying to breathe in. I'm not getting enough oxygen.

I'm starting to panic. This cannot be healthy for me. that is so wrong. And if people question this, what I don't understand is, why don't you go down to Walgreens and buy one of these things? So this is a pulse oxymeter costs about 15 bucks. Wear your mask and see what happens with your blood sats. And your bloodsats aren't going to be going down.

So there's many different kinds of masks. Maybe a five-ply mass will make breathing a lot more difficult. That need to breathe is dictated by rising levels of carbon dioxide, not by a lack of of oxygen in the body. So there's been various studies that are showing breathing through a mask does not affect oxygen levels. And again, if you don't believe the experts in this, check it out yourself.

So I have to wear a mask all the time. San Francisco was one of the most progressive cities in shutting down and forcing people to wear masks. I take this as an opportunity to breathe slowly, to focus on my breath, to breathe these very deep and enriching breaths. And knowing that that, that need to breathe, should I have it, is dictated by CO2, and that having more CO2 in the body

can actually have a lot of benefits to our health. Yeah, and it's something so fundamental that we learn from a young age, it's like they always get the example of like, well, if a human being went without food, okay, they can live this long. If they didn't have water, they can live this long. Well, if they didn't have oxygen, they can only live this much amount of time. And yes, that's partially true, but we never paid attention to CO2. Even I learned. so much new information from reading your book on that topic. So thank you for breaking it down, you know, so eloquently inside of the book. Sure. And, you know, I just want to mention the mass thing. Like the amount of energy and time people are spending on chat rooms, writing people

saying mass are unhealthy. They're not, I mean, people are spending hours and hours on this. Shouldn't they be spending that time actually testing if the mask that they're wearing is affecting their body in any way? So I know that this is part of a deep. deeper conversation of what's going on in this country. But it's just baffling. Why not spend a little time and look at the data and look at the real science behind this all? And you'll see the truth in that way instead of relying on someone else's opinion. So, you know, I understand that people are hesitant to wear masks.

There's other reasons people don't want to wear masks. But if you think it's causing you a deprivation of oxygen, you should think again and look at the actual data. For sure. And I love what you said earlier, which is the larger context of this, is that, and we have past podcast guests, Chris Cressor, who's somebody that we turn to a lot to, like, break down a lot of the science and talk about the wellness, is that we're putting so much attention on mask. There's other components that are there that deserve attention. Yes, masks are not perfect. They're not designed to be a panacea, even if every single person in the U.S. was wearing it, because we're struggling with obesity, because we're struggling with mouth breathing,

because we're struggling with all these things that other countries aren't struggling with, we'd probably still have really bad rates of COVID over here. And let's not give it that much attention on masks for, masks against. We need to do that and focus on these other aspects that we know can make a major difference today. I could not agree with you more. How many people are talking about the food you're eating right now? How many people are talking about exercise? How many people are talking about getting adequate sleep?

You know, there's sometimes a mention of vitamin D. sometimes a mention of vitamin C, but people aren't looking at this whole foundation of health. Because if they did, if they said, maybe you shouldn't go to Burger King today and get a triple whopper. Maybe you need to start paying attention to the food you're eating because that's going to affect your levels of inflammation and affect the general health in your body. But no one can do that in this country because doing so, I mean, that person would get thrown out. Luckily, we have other means of getting information. We have other scientists. We have other experts in the field who really do the work and can offer a clear way forward to establishing proper health to make

ourselves more resilient to viruses and other issues. And I think Dr. Stephen Portis and Dr. David Haskin, that's a great place to start. Their protocol is available for free for everyone. And it makes perfect sense. I've read it a few times. James, in conclusion, before we wrap up, up and tell our audience where they can keep in touch with you. Your book and immersing yourself into this world of breath was so much about taking this, as you say, lost art. This thing that we once knew so intimately as core to our existence as human being that we forgot about. In fact, when you wrote that, I thought of this quote by Eckhart Tolle, and I'm paraphrasing here, he said it's in the nature of human beings to have something. And he's talking about levels of

awareness around consciousness. It's in the nature of human beings to have something, lose it, find it again, and then understand it at a deeper level than they did when they first started off. Are there any other areas that you've been paying attention to that are similar or maybe have a lot of, yes, have a lot of similarities to this world of breath? Things that we so were so baked into our existence and maybe even evolution as human beings or core function of health, But we just forgot about it. And we don't even know maybe that we forgot about it. I think a really good analog is nutrition and is diet.

So 120, 130 years ago, nutritionists were saying this process industrialized food is crappy for us. It's ruining our teeth. It's ruining our health. Who listen to them? Not a lot of people. So instead, we build this food pyramid that puts carbs at the very top of this pyramid that establishes all of these foods that we knew weren't healthy for us. And this is a food pyramid we followed for a very long time.

But yet, people were finding that when they weren't eating foods within this food pyramid, when they were actually eating more calories, more than the 2,000 calories we were supposed to eat a day, they were losing weight. In some cases, they could use diet to get rid of some forms of epilepsy or some forms of cancer. And so it was only until, you're like, decades and decades of all of these incongruities in the data, in the established data, that we realized that this whole paradigm that we had built around nutrition was completely wrong. Eating fat does not make you fat, right? And that's what we, that's what I had been told growing up. Everything I ate was was low fat, high carb, high sugar.

I was told that this was the healthy stuff. So luckily, the cats had the best. with a food thing, right? It's hard to find people who are now defending eating processed grains as a means to health. We know that whole foods, the original foods that we were eating for so many millions of years, those are the proper foods. And I see that breathing is really this, it's so similar in so many ways. We keep discovering this stuff. It keeps going away. Discovered again, it's named something else. It's research somewhere else. It's considered a new discovery, it's just a rehash on what we've already learned from so many centuries past.

So I believe that we're right now at this new crest in breathing and in breathing awareness. And hopefully we have different ways of disseminating information. So I don't think it'll get buried again. The foundation of science is absolutely rock solid. And the great thing is you can see for yourself just adjusting your breathing in some very simple ways. You can just see how immediately that. that affects you and that's such an important legacy of the book is that simple interventions i've mentioned it before but that's the beauty of these things they're available to all of us and we can

all do them and they're right here so sometimes though we do need as human beings you know you've all know harari and his work so much of our evolution as human beings has been storytelling machines we need that story told to us and you wrote what a beautiful story uh to get people excited about about this area. I can't see, when your book first came out and I hadn't had a chance to read it, but I was doing these episodes with different people. I've never had that many people tell me that,

have you read this book? Have you read this book? So you're definitely making an impact. The book is out there. If you don't already own it, it's available to you. You should definitely get it. Brett, the new science of a lost art. James, how can people keep in touch to touch with you?

And are there any upcoming things that you wanna highlight? I've been seeing you doing some really cool content on Instagram and kind of workshops and Q&As with interesting people that are out there. So we'd love you to share any of that information with our audience. My website at Mr. James Nestor.com. You can put a backslash breath there to take you to the breath portal. I've published all the entire bibliography, something like over 500 scientific references with

x-rays, with data sheets. I've also had some expert Q&As where I would get so many questions from readers. is I would want to answer them, but that's not my role here. So I'd invite professors from Harvard, other doctors from other disciplines to come on and answer reader questions. I'm trying to do these as fast as I can. I've been a little plugged up with work. And there's this thing called social media that I'm pretty new at because I'm old,

but I've been trying to get better at that. I've actually hired someone to help me out. I won't be taking any pictures of my cute puppy dog here, who's very cute, but that won't be appearing on my page. I want to focus on breathing and focus on science and try to use that platform as a way of disseminating this information. Well, I'm excited for all the next stuff

that you get a chance to get into. If I heard correctly earlier, sounds like you might be doing a project related to that Nobel Prize author that I read his quote earlier, or maybe researching him a little bit more to present some information. That'll be exciting. And kind of full circle, a lot of this podcast,

we have functional medicine doctors. And so much of functional medicine has been inspired by orthomolecular medicine and systems biology. And another Nobel Prize winner, one of the only or one of the few Nobel Prize winners to win a Nobel Prize in two different categories, Linus Pauling also has done a lot of research in that world of vitamin C. And he was pretty much the direct inspiration for the functional medicine movement that later came.

So I'm sure we'll have you back on to talk about whatever you end up putting together. So. Thank you very much for having me. appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it. And again, thank you for a tremendous book. We'll be sure to pass on this incredible information to our audience, and we'll talk to you again soon.