Stuff You Should Know - How do Tibetans avoid altitude sickness?

Episode Date: October 23, 2008

Due to the region's elevation, the average traveler to Tibet often experiences altitude sickness -- a condition caused by a lack of oxygen in the blood. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn how Tibetans have adapted to life in high altitudes. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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all. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. This podcast is brought to you by GoToMeeting, the best way to hold meetings over the internet. Reduce travel expenses, save time. Just hold an online meeting with GoToMeeting. Try it free. Visit GoToMeeting.com slash Stuff. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Where? Right there. Oh. You. Oh, okay. How's it going, Chuck? It's going great. Good. I'm glad to hear it. I'm glad to hear it.

Um, I don't know how many times a year you go to Tibet these days. Uh, I've had to cut back to two just because of finances and the economy. Yeah. I mean, jet fuel is very expensive. Very. Do you ever fly first class, business class? Nothing but. Oh, wow. Sometimes I fly it in the cockpit. It's awesome. Which is above first class, actually. Oh, yeah, definitely. That's like pilot class. Do you know a pilot? Is that how you get in or do you just kind of break in? No. You just show up like, hey, how's it going? Yeah, I'm an amiable guy. They just let me in there. Then they lock the door, of course, for safety reasons. Sure. After you're in. Yes. Yeah. I can see that. Well, well, when you've been to Tibet, which as I'm sure, you know, is the rooftop of the world. Right.

Right. Uh, there's all sorts of villages like high up on these mountains. Have you toured any of them? Uh, no, I've never been to Tibet. Okay. Oh, that all that was a lie then. I thought you meant Tibet, Georgia. Oh, you fly to Tibet, Georgia. Yeah. That's a short flight. It is. Okay. Well, no, no, Chuck, we're talking about Tibet, the, uh, the, the much disputed, uh, province outside of China. Right. I'm not entirely certain. Is it a part of China yet? I don't know. And actually look today and to see if it was in fact a country. And I think technically they still have to call it a region or a province. I got you. And I know they have the government in exile right by the Dalai Lama. Who I actually saw once. Did you know

that? Yeah, I did. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, we're, that's the Tibet we're talking about where the Dalai Lama hails from. Right. Okay. Um, well, it turns out that there's, there's villages everywhere. I've never visited either. I've just read about it. There's villages on the tops of these mountains, which is why it's called the rooftop of the world. Um, and these people are living at like 16,000 feet above sea level. Right. Which is really high. Really. Denver, our mile high city is like 5,000 feet above sea level. Right. So these people make Denver look like nothing. Yeah. It's technically, I think that the 3.03 mile high country or region. Right. That's, that's, that's what it's more commonly called. Yeah. Um, so if you go, if you're just,

you know, it's a regular sea level dweller, uh, like you or I, right. Uh, and we go visit Tibet, especially when we're visiting like these highest villages. Um, generally we would get hypoxia. Exactly. Altitude sickness, which is like, uh, nausea, dizziness, vomiting, shortness of breath. You can actually die from it. Um, and so you're sitting there puking your guts out, wishing you were dead. Right. And all of these Tibetans are running around happy as clams. Right. Sherpas are laughing at you. Sure. Yeah. They're doing somersaults and pointing and laughing. Yeah. Right. Um, and, and so you're wondering what, what it's going on here. Like, why aren't these people all, you know, dropping dead of heart attacks left and right and what's going on. And,

and obviously what you would think is, well, they're used to it, which makes sense. Right. Yeah. That's kind of an easy way to explain it. It is. It is. But when you think about it, they shouldn't be used to it. Humans shouldn't be used to hypoxia. So have, have you heard about how Tibetans avoid altitude sickness? I have, Josh. I read your awesome article and it actually was really interesting. I thought, oh yeah, I did too. Actually, it was one of those assignments where I was thinking, this is going to suck, but it turned out really well. And that actually has been my experience. The, the, the more I thought the article was going to suck, the better it turned out. Yeah. I've had that same experience actually. Yeah. It's kind of cool.

So Chuck, a little background on hypoxia, right? Right. All it is, is it's, it's a lack of oxygen in the blood. Right. And of course we need oxygen to carry out all sorts of vital processes. That's, you know, staying alive and metabolization and all that. Sure. Okay. So these people have been trying to figure out how the Tibetans aren't hypoxic. Okay. Yeah. I know it's coming. They actually are hypoxic. I know. I was kind of amazed by that. It is. It's a little amazing. These people are running around. They're hypoxic, but they're not displaying any symptoms. Right. So this, of course, raises a little bit of curiosity among researchers. If Tibetans are hypoxic, how are they, you know, not showing symptoms? Right. Why aren't they just vomiting

nonstop 24 seven? Yeah. What a bad country that would be. I don't think people would want to go to Tibet if that was the case. The national flag is some guy like just, you know, vomiting, projectile vomiting. Yeah. So these researchers, I think they were from, I can't remember where they were from. Maybe Emery or something? Case Western. Case Western. Same thing. Close in Ohio. Yeah. So these guys from Case Western go and they actually, they did this really hands-on investigation. They used instruments that can sense different types of particles in air. Right. And they asked Tibetans to breathe into this. To mouth breathe, which I know is one of your favorite subjects, mouth breathers. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, if they're, if they're being asked to mouth breathe,

as long as it's not like your default setting, I don't have a problem with it. Right. So they weren't like your, your arch enemy key for Sutherland. Famous mouth breather. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. They were mouth breathing. Agreed. But they were mouth breathing with Case Western instruments in front of them. Sure. And this is what the people found. This mystery has been solved. And it's pretty interesting stuff. When we exhale, you know, we, we exhale carbon dioxide. That's like the big star of our exhalation. That's what everybody knows about. We also exhale this stuff called nitric oxide. Right. Well, which our body gets rid of as a, as a waste product, right? Right. Through respiration. The thing is, is nitric oxide actually helps dilate blood vessels.

Okay. So the Tibetans of actually their bodies have acclimated to hypoxia by keeping more of the nitric oxide in the body. Right. So their blood vessels are dilated more all the time, which means their heart has to work less. Right. Which it's, it makes it easier to deliver the oxygen throughout the body. It's pretty cool. It is very cool. And okay. So now we have a perfect example of evolution and isolation. Yep. Okay. Some humans have gone up to where humans aren't supposed to be and have adapted. They're not the only group that's done that. There's some other groups, right? Indeed. So my hypothesis would be that, that these other groups would display the same phenotype, the same trait. Right. You would think that people, anyone living at a high altitude

anywhere in the world, because we evolved more or less at sea level. Is that correct? Yeah. And we're, we're sea level species and we're subtropical species. Right. Yeah. That's where we're supposed to be is, is, you know, we're beach comers essentially. Pretty, pretty modest. Yeah. Yeah. But of course, you know, we've got our Nordic friends up north, you know, and we have our friends down in Chile and, and, and these, you know, people in Tibet, humans live where we're not supposed to live. And the Tibetans show that we can adapt. Exactly. But wouldn't you think that we would all adapt the same way given the similar situations? I would think so. But we found out, or you found out through your research, that's not the case. Yes. And actually,

this has been known for a while. The, the Tibetan case Western study was, I think it's in the last decade. Yeah. 2005. There's this Frenchman named Francois Ville, I believe. And in 1890, he visited the Andes. This is another high altitude mountain dwelling people, Machu Picchu, you know, way up on the hills. South America. Right. So he goes down there because he had the same question, you know, a century or so ago. He wanted to know how these people were living at high altitudes when, you know, they should be suffering from hypoxia. Do you know what he found out? I do. And was it that they keep more nitric oxide? No, actually, he theorized and was correct that they had more red blood cells, a higher red blood

cell count. And that's important because red blood cells contain hemoglobin, which is sort of like the FedEx man of your body. Hemoglobin delivers oxygen. Right. Right. So they have their bodies produce more red blood cells. More red blood cells. So it can, I guess every part per million of blood can hold more oxygen than, you know, yours or mine. Right. So, okay. So we've got two high altitude dwelling groups of people that have evolved in isolation, but have evolved to or have adapted differently. Yeah. That's pretty interesting. Yes. And there's a third. There is a third. Yes. You want to tell them about them? Yeah. This is the highlands of Ethiopia, which I didn't realize Ethiopia had highlands. I don't know much about that place. I didn't either actually until

this very article, which is a great part about our job. We learn things all the time. Yeah. So they don't have either one of these, as you know, no, and they're living in a high altitude as well. I think the Tibetans live the highest up, but both the Andean dwellers and the people who live in the Ethiopian highlands, they're living at a high enough altitude that they should be hypoxic, right? Right. And also with studies of them, they haven't turned up any of the Ethiopian highlanders. They haven't turned up any kind of adaptation. Yeah. That's the one that really is strange. Right. They don't, they don't have any kind of oxygen delivery system like extra red blood cells. Right. They don't maintain their NO levels more than normal people. Right. And it's possible

that we just haven't found the phenotype, this adaptation. True. We haven't figured it out yet, but for all intents and purposes, these people should be dead, dying or vomiting at the very least all the time. Right. But they're not. No, it's weird. It's weird. Yeah. And you know, Josh, reading this article, it made me wonder, and there may be studies on this, if people from Tibet and the Ethiopian highlands, if they have trouble when they come down to sea level or below, let's say they went to Amsterdam for the weekend, which is half of Holland resides below sea level. Like up to 20 feet. Yeah. I wonder if they have problems breathing or if their body adapts to that quickly or what? Or if there'd be like a rush of oxygen. Yeah, exactly. They get too much of it.

Right. They might feel high all the time or something, which would be kind of cool. Of course, it is Amsterdam. Yeah, right. Right. I think that they would probably feel high no matter what. Right. Yeah. And hello to our Dutch friends. We love you. All right. So other than the Ethiopian highlanders, I mean, the questions have been asked and answered. We know why the Tibetans aren't hypoxic, and we also know why the Andean dwellers aren't hypoxic. Right. Well, actually, Tibetans are hypoxic. Yes. How they deal with it. Right. Sure. So I think we'll probably revisit it once we finally figure out what's going on with the Ethiopian highlanders. I think that's a great idea. And stick around to find out which article that Chuck and I think you should read in these

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