The Dr. Hyman Show - The Power Of Breath As Medicine with James Nestor

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, BiOptimizers, and InsideTracker. The way we breathe impacts everything from how well we sleep to our metabolism, cognitive function, immunity, and more. That’s why it’s so alarming that most of us are doing it wrong. Today on The Doctor’s Farmacy, I talk all about the science and evolution of how we breathe, and how to get better at it, with James Nestor.  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 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. James has appeared on dozens of national television shows, including ABC’s Nightline and CBS’s Morning News, and on NPR. He lives and breathes in San Francisco. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, BiOptimizers, and InsideTracker. Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com.   BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough formula contains seven different forms of magnesium, all of which have different functions in the body. Go to magbreakthrough.com/hyman and use code hyman10 at checkout for 10% off your next order.   InsideTracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. Right now they’re offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version):  Why breathing is so important to our overall health (4:34 / ​​1:50) Using breath to boost your immune system and break stress (9:03 / 4:25)  The personal health issues that led James to study breath (14:26 / 11:25) Why breathing through your nose is better than breathing through your mouth (16:38 / 13:36)  The benefits of nighttime mouth taping (23:07 / 20:06)  Nasal breathing tips and techniques (29:19 / 25:30)  Ancient lost arts of breathing (30:36 / 27:14)  Lung capacity and aging (37:51 / 32:44) Breathe like your ancestors (43:13 / 37:06) What is kundalini? (53:19 / 48:13)   Learn more about James’ work and get his book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, at mrjamesnestor.com/order-now.

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Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about your health, one of the neglected aspects of our health is our breath. And it just happens that we breathe. We don't think about it. It's something that is critically important. And most of us kind of are crappy breathers, which can explain a lot of health issues. So today I'm really pleased to have as our guest, an expert in breath, James Nestor is an author. He's a journalist. He's written for many, many important publications, including Scientific American, Outside Magazine, New York Times. In his book, Breath, the new science of a lost art was an instant New York

Times bestseller. And he explores how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly and how to get it back. Breath spent 18 weeks on your time as a cellist. It's awesome. Translated in 30 languages. And it's a real wonderful explication of how we've missed the mark on one of the most important aspects of our health, which is our breath. And he's presented at Stanford Medical School, Yale School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, UN, many other places. He's been on Fresh Air with

Terry Gross, Joe Rogan, and so on and so forth. So welcome, James. Thanks a lot for having me. So our breath is, you know, taking center stage in this new era of COVID because one of the major symptoms is shortness of breath and lung damage. And we kind of take breath for granted. How is breath so important in our health? Because we all breathe, we don't think about it, we're just breathing every day. In fact, I think we breathe 25,000 times a day without really thinking about it. But it turns out that how we breathe is critically important to our overall health. And it turns out that how we breathe is critically important to our overall health. And it's not something I learned in medical school, but I'd love you to

sort of break it down for our audience. Why is breath important? Why has it been so neglected? And what do we know scientifically about the importance of breath and health? I think humans are a very reactionary species. Only when we lose something do we become aware of it. And that's exactly what happened during COVID. We lost the ability to breathe and we're like, oh my God, maybe breathing is important because this is just something that's been in, it's an unconscious activity. It's in the back of our minds. So once you establish, I think once you lose the ability to breathe, you appreciate it. And once you appreciate it, you can start focusing your breath to really significantly impact your health, mental health, physical health,

bolster immune function, athletic performance, and more. And the reason why breathing is so important is because we get most of our energy from air, from our breath. A lot of people think that we get most of our energy from what we eat and drink. Not true. We get most of our energy from air. And I can prove this to you by, why don't you hold your breath for about four minutes and see how much energy you have. Yeah, not so much. Don't do that at home, everybody. Yeah. Well, I think you're right. you know we don't connect to our breath and you know i i when i was uh younger i took yoga teacher training course you know i was 23 and

became a yoga teacher and learned the science the ancient science of pranayama which is a whole series of breathing techniques to activate different aspects of our health and well-being. And whether you're calming breaths, activating breaths, it's such a powerful thing that we have pretty much ignored as a vehicle toward health in this culture. And yet, in ancient cultures, it's pretty amazing. And you guys got like Wim Hof, who's this kind of crazy dude, they call him the Iceman, but he's mastered techniques of breathing that allow him to climb Mount Everest in his underwear, basically, and with no shoes on, not freeze to death, or to sit in an ice bath for whatever bazillion minutes he sits in an ice bath for. And he's been able to train other people who are just regular humans

how to do the same thing. So it is a doorway to accessing all sorts of our physiology that we just sort of ignore. So can you kind of break down for us what is going on with our breath? Why does it affect us so importantly? And how do we start to develop a better relationship with our breathing? Well, breathing practices have been around for at least 5,000 years. Ancient Hindus studied it, ancient Chinese studied it, Native Americans studied it, and more. And they understood our breathing as a medicine. This wasn't just something we did uncomfortably, it was something that you can control. So this knowledge has been around for a long time, but lo and behold, in the 1900s and this century, we have instruments that can actually measure

objectively what happens when you breathe in different ways so no longer is this subjective it's objective it's a science you can collect data that's what i think is so exciting that a lot of people can access wearables that can tell them what happens to their heart rate what happens to their heart rate variability what happens to their stress levels what happens to their blood pressure their their blood oxygen, more and more and more by just shifting their breathing. And I think that this is one of the things that has really made this stuff so convincing. It's one thing to read scientific papers and hear people talk about it. It's another thing to change your breathing for two minutes and watch your blood pressure go down 10 to 15 points and watch your heart rate variability score. And I think that's why so many people have personally experienced the benefits

of this from not a lot of effort and work and said, wow, it actually does what it's supposed to do. And the science just confirms that. It's amazing. You know, one of the things that, you know, we're all focused on today is our immune system. And most of us don't think that our breath has anything to do with our immune system, but you've discovered that it has. So can you kind of explain how our breath connects to our immune system and why we need to learn how to breathe better in order to boost our immune system, which everybody should be doing now because of COVID and in general? If you look at the vast majority of modern diseases, so many of them are tied to this chronic low-grade inflammation. So that chronic inflammation over years and years,

this is something you've written about and talk about all the time, it will destroy your health. And your breathing plays a big role in this because if you are constantly over breathing if you're breathing into your chest if you are tense if you are sitting in a chair and you can't even take a deep fulfilling easy breath then you are stressing your body out and you are sustaining that chronic inflammation in your body and you're releasing cortisol and adrenaline and all that good stuff. So on occasion, it's great to be stressed out, right? But not for 24 hours a day, maybe for 20 minutes or half an hour. That's fantastic. And so when people are disconnected from their breathing, when their mouth breathing at night, when they're over breathing in the day, when they're hunched over and their posture is bad, they are perpetuating this feedback loop of constant stress.

And breathing is the quickest way of breaking that stress feedback loop. So you can change your breathing and break your stress and you can measure what happens to your body when you do that. You know, as a doctor, you know, it's really clear when you look at the biology of breathing that, that there, I mean, there's a lot going on. Uh, and often people are shallow breathers or their mouth breathers. Um, there's all kinds of, of challenges that happen biologically when you do that. But one of the things that people don't realize is that their diaphragm, which is basically the muscle that moves when you breathe, expands and contracts in order to actually fill up and empty

your lungs, the main nerve that relaxes your body goes through there and that's why when you take a deep breath you relax and it's called the vagus nerve and and what's fascinating is there's all this incredible science around how we have to do you know injections around the vagus nerve or we do sort of certain kinds of you know trans like magnetic therapies for the vagus nerve all these different things but we always have access to be able to activate the vagus nerve through our breath. So can you kind of explain how that all works and why the diaphragm is so important and why we need to understand how to breathe differently and what it does to our biology? Sure. That vagus nerve travels right along our throats as well. So this is one of the reasons why yoga practices have a lot of humming and singing and ohm that allows for better vagal tone.

It calms you down. But the vagus nerve is also, I mean, it spreads throughout the whole abdomen. It's the longest nerve in the body, vagus, like a vagrant. It's a wandering nerve. So when you are breathing in a shallow way, you are sending messages through the vagus nerve and the phrenic nerve to your brain that you are stressed. So 80% of the messages between the body and the brain are coming from the body. So you can send your brain, if you want to do this, constant stress signals by breathing too much and by breathing in a shallow way and the lungs don't inflate themselves right they need something to do that and that's what the

diaphragm does so most people understand the role of the diaphragm in in expanding the lungs and deflating the lungs but what i didn't know and i'm learning more uh recently is that the diaphragm is also essential that diaphragmatic movement is essential in the circulation of lymph fluid and in circulation of blood this is a pump this is like you can think of your body as a there's a piston in your body okay it's the diaphragm and you need those fluids constantly moving in an efficient way. You can get by by breathing in this very short and stilted way. A lot of people do, but compensation is different than being healthy. Yeah, well, that's a very important point because the, you know, the body, we think,

you know, exhales carbon dioxide as a way of detoxifying something that can actually be harmful to us in excess, right? And that's what the breath does. You breathe out carbon dioxide, you breathe in oxygen. But also what you're saying is that it detoxifies us in way more complicated ways through the lymph system, which actually clears out all the waste and metabolites from your tissues and your cells and brings it back to the heart to filter and do all that stuff that has to do with the liver and clean it up. So if you don't have your lymph circulating, you're going to get sick. And I actually had a podcast with Dr. Mehmet Oz and his father-in-law, Jerry Lamo, talking about the importance of lymph and lymph function to health. And breath, like you said,

is one of the most powerful doorways to actually activate lymph circulation. So very, very important. Tell me how you got into breath because I think you had a particular story that was quite interesting and it really kind of led you down this rabbit hole researching what actually was causing some of your issues. Yeah, as a science journalist, you don't think that you're going to one day write a book about breathing, which seems like such a simple and mundane and completely boring subject. But I had, this was a long time ago, about 10 years ago. Plus I had constant respiratory problems. I was eating the right food. I was exercising all the time. I was sleeping eight hours a night. You know, I was tuned into my health, but I kept getting bronchitis. I was exercising all the time. I was sleeping eight hours a night. I was tuned into my health, but I kept getting bronchitis. I kept getting mild pneumonia. I was wheezing when I

was working out. Every time I went to my doctor, I was told it was normal. Whenever I got mild pneumonia, I'd get a Z-Pak and be sent on my way. It worked, but it didn't fix the core problem. Every year, I kept coming back and they were just like, oh, you're back. You have pneumonia. Yeah, I have pneumonia again. And so it just, something seemed a little off. That went on for years until one doctor friend said, oh, you should explore breathing classes. I said, what does breathing have to do with immune function or my chances of getting pneumonia or bronchitis? She said she had had experience with yoga. She said, you'd be surprised.

So in San Francisco, it's hard to throw a tennis ball and not hit four different breathing classes. So I just sort of spun the roulette wheel, found one and had an extremely powerful experience. But as a journalist, I'm not going to write a memoir about breathing. So I didn't know what to do with this experience. And years went by before I found a way to tell a larger story. And, and it was specifically learning from free divers, people who are doing things that are supposed to be medically impossible with their body. And they do it every day. It's like a, it's a whole doorway to health that we hadn't really thought about. And, uh, you know, a you know a lot of us um you know we don't think about our breath but we often don't breathe very well my mother you know had a lung issues and she was a mouth breather and i was always trying to get her to breathe through her nose and she just couldn't do it but tell us about

the distinction between nose breathing and mouth breathing you know why why is mouth breathing not good for you and why is nose breathing good for you so when we breathe through our mouths we're exposing ourselves to everything in the environment if you live in a city like me that means pollen that means pollutants means smog it means mold and there's nothing filtering that air all day long if you breathe through the nose and i so happen to have a special guest here is a a cross section of a human head and if you see what happens when you breathe through the nose here you're forcing this air through all of these very ornate structures and as that air goes through these structures it's heated up it's moistened it's filtered and you get this huge perfusion of nitric oxide as well which guess

what nitric oxide helps kill viruses and bacteria yes and it's a vasodilator so when you're when you're breathing through the mouth you get get none of those advantages. You can survive mouth breathing, but it's going to wear you down and make you sick. And that's just how things work. And you can very clearly see this by just looking at our physiology and looking at our anatomy. It's quite amazing. What you just brought up is really important. We had Louis Ignaro on the podcast who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of nitric oxide. He's this cute little 80-year-old Italian

guy who I think he'd be like your uncle or something. And he's so sweet. And he just really explained how important it is to breathe through your nose and how nitric oxide is produced, which is, like you said, antimicrobial and also increases your ability to fight inflammation as an antioxidant. And, you know, it's the main thing that happens when you take Viagra, which is you increase nitric oxide, which is dilation of blood vessels and so forth. So it's fascinating. And he even said, this was fascinating, they were doing some preliminary studies around COVID

where they were giving nitric oxide gas to COVID patients and seeing remarkable changes in their biology and improvement in their lung function and their overall health. So it's kind of interesting that our body knows what to do, but we often have sort of lapped in these habits around mouth breathing. And actually there's this kind of new trend out there. I'd love to hear what you think about using mouth tape at night for people to breathe through their nose at night instead of through their mouth. What do you think about that? Well, what I learned about nitric oxide was from Ignaro. So he won the Nobel in the 90s. And I think last time, last interview I heard with him,

he said there were 11 clinical trials looking at patients who had severe COVID and giving them nitric oxide. Some of those trials have come out, they're official published studies and it works incredibly well because of course it does. You know, it's just, we're supplementing what our natural body in its natural form would be doing otherwise. It's important to note too, if you hum, you increase that nitric oxide 15 fold. So I think that this would be an interesting thing to explore. And there are a lot of yoga practices have you home. I wish someone would do this study. You know, it's never going to get funded. But he's he's an amazing guy. I've learned so much from him. That's so great. And you did an interesting study where you were at Stanford when you were sort of researching

the breath for your book and where your nose was completely plugged for 10 days and you had to breathe just through your mouth. So what was that study and what did you find out? So I've been working with a chief of rhinology research at Stanford, a guy named Dr. Jayakar Nayak, who probably knows more about the nose and nasal breathing than anyone on the planet. So we had had several interviews and there had been animal studies looking at what happens when you make an animal, a monkey specifically, a mouth breather and all the awful things that happen to their health and their

facial structure. Don't read those studies. They're horrendous. But I asked Nyack, I said, has there ever been a human study of this? And he said, no. And I said, well, why don't you do it? You're at Stanford. You study this stuff all the time. He said doing so would be unethical because he knew of all the damage it could do.

So I said, well, why don't I volunteer for an experiment? I'll try to make informed consent. Right. Yeah. And to, you know, I wish it were a hundred people. We had to pay for the study ourselves, which at Stanford was, was not cheap. And the longest we were allowed to do this was for 10 days, 10 days, just mouth breathing, 10 days, nasal breathing. And as advertised, it completely destroyed us. And we have all the data to show that there was extreme fatigue. My blood pressure went through the roof. I got home after about three hours of mouth breathing. My blood pressure was 158 over

100, which was about 30 times higher than I had ever seen it. And I said, oh, you know, I'm stressed out. I need to go to sleep. For the first time that I'm aware of, I started snoring. Then I started getting sleep apnea. It got worse and worse the longer we have this. The other subject in the study had the exact same thing at the same time. We had trouble focusing. our mouths were completely dry we were miserable athletic performance plummeted i mean this to be clear two people in an experiment means nothing what i was doing was personally experiencing what science has known for for literally decades and decades well there are n of one studies so i don't think it's meaningless you know there are there is a whole science and the nih is actually advancing this which is looking at changes in an individual and that being relevant and if you measure changes before and

after it's actually not insignificant so i wouldn't discount what you're saying as being more widely available to sort of think about and i think think that you actually have a lot of different things that you talk about as a way of fixing your breathing pattern. Maybe you can share a little bit of what are the tips? How should we be breathing? How do we get enough quality breath? How do we stop mouth breathing? What do we have to do? Luckily in that Stanford study, we did 10 days of mouth breathing followed by 10 days of just nasal breathing. This is where the sleep tape comes in. So it's, it's easy to nasal breathe in the day. You just shut your mouth. But at night, more than 60% of us breathe through our mouths. And so how do you

keep your mouth shut at night? About a hundred years ago, they used to have chin straps. So they knew how damaging mouth breathing was a hundred years ago we we seem to have lost that knowledge but nowadays we have tape so i learned from a breathing therapist at stanford she prescribes tape uh for her patients for every one of her patients to tape their mouths at night this is not full-on hostage situation stuff this is not duct tape no and there's a little hole in it there's a little hole in it there's a specific tape it's a surgical tape it's called micropore tape and it's very light adhesive you want to take this stuff off with your tongue never pull it off of your lips that's where people go wrong but what this tape does is it's just a

gentle reminder at any time in the night you can go if you're uncomfortable and it pops off but this has been all of that snoring that i was doing mouth breathing immediately went away by just with one hack closing my mouth and this is the thing, I've literally heard this from thousands of people who've written, and they said, this was the most profound health hack that they've experienced. It's for a lot of people. I've heard the same thing.

And I'm not saying it's gonna work for everyone, especially with advanced severe sleep apnea. You're gonna need more treatments, but it's free. And breathing through your nose is only going to help you. So you may benefit a little or you may benefit a lot. And I cannot sleep. I mean, technically I can sleep, but I can't sleep well without sleep tape now. It's a real affliction. That's amazing. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now something I get more and more excited about every year is personalized medicine.

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So tell us what tape you use and what are the options out there for people? Because it sounds like after this conversation, a lot of people are going to run and want to buy tape. But I don't want them to get like scotch tape or some masking tape or something. It's not the right tape. Well, there's so many different types of tape that work. And it really depends on the person and their preference i went through about 30 different types of tape before i found one that i really liked and that worked for me it's uh i'm not getting paid to say this it is a micro pore tape a surgical tape by 3m

has a really light adhesive for sensitive skin that's the best stuff I've found. Other people like different brands. There's specific brands now that are just sleep tape that you can buy on Amazon or wherever else. They work great. So I would say play around, find something you like. You want something with a very light adhesive. And most importantly, as I mentioned, you don't need a very fat strip of this stuff. All you need is something about the size of a postage stamp. This is the whole technology here. That's sleep tape. Okay. It's just keep it. I can even talk to you when I have this stuff on. When I take it off, you take it off with your tongue. Not don't rip it off. Take it off with your tongue and you won't it off take it off with your tongue and you

won't get any irritation to your mouth that way love that that's amazing okay that's a wonderful hack you think everybody should do that or how many people breathe through their mouth at night is it a common thing or why why would we if it's not supposed to is it like just because we're unhealthy or because we're stressed or what i think that about 60 this is the the percentage i heard more than 60 of us breathe through our mouth at night. And if you were like me, you would go to sleep with a huge mug of water because you would wake up throughout the night and be hitting on this water because your mouth was so dry. Breathing through the mouth at night, especially for eight hours at a time, will also change the pH in your mouth and make you much more susceptible to having cavities and periodontal disease. So everyone should be breathing through their noses

at night. You need to find a way of doing this. So that's one technique. What are the other techniques around breathing that you could do when you're not sleeping? Well, breathe through your nose as often as you can. That includes while working out that includes while sitting in front of your desk there are so many different breathing techniques to practice nasal breathing techniques it doesn't matter if for 15 20 minutes a day you're doing Wim Hof method or tummo or kundalini and you're breathing through your mouth during these practices perfectly fine ocean breath totally fine i'm talking about habitual chronic breathing needs to be through the nose so we got that when you're breathing through your nose you will also be breathing more slowly lightly and deeply and that's the other part of this most of us breathe

way too much air we think that by breathing more, we are getting more oxygen, but the opposite is happening. And I can prove this to you by if you took 30 really big breaths right now, you're going to feel some tingling in your fingers, lightness in your head. That's from a decrease of circulation. And that's what happens when you breathe too much. So you want to be breathing such simple stuff through the nose, slowly, lightly. of circulation, and that's what happens when you breathe too much. So you want to be breathing such simple stuff through the nose, slowly, lightly, and deeply.

Just doing that can be really transformative for people. Powerful. And you also talk a lot in the book about these ancient lost arts of breathing. What are those things that you rediscovered and what should we be doing with them today? Are they relevant? Well, it's interesting. You start looking at ancient cultures and the different techniques they used, and you find that they were all basically saying the same thing in slightly different ways with different terms, especially if you look at

Qigong and yoga. And you find that so many of their practices are breathing through the nose, almost all of them. Many of their practices include breath holds. That's huge in pranayama, and it's huge in Qigong. And a lot of their practices also have temporary, for a very short amount of time, you over-breathe. If anyone's done, anyone listening has done Kundalini or Pranayama or Wim Hof, part of that is to purposely breathe too much.

What that does is it purposely stresses your body out. You may be thinking, why the heck do I want to do that? I'm stressed out enough but that allows you to control stress to turn it on and specifically to turn it off and if you look at the science and the studies behind sudarshan kriya even wim hop method pranayama these are such powerful techniques and they've been around for thousands of years yeah it's pretty interesting i did some of the wim hop breathing i know him and it's amazing you do the breath breathing practice then you can hold your breath for two three minutes without even a bother which is impossible if i told you to hold your breath right now for three minutes you'd pass out right so we we really

haven't accessed the ancient technologies that actually will allow us to revitalize our health and have what seems like sometimes superpowers. I mean, think about it. I mean, to regulate your breathing so you can sit in an ice bath for half an hour, that's a big deal. You can climb up Mount Kilimanjaro in your shorts and be fine. Like, that's wild, right? And you mentioned something just briefly called tummo, which is a Tibetan technique, for those listening, that is used by monks to master their biology. And essentially they have this practice called drying of the sheets. And they'll take these Buddhist monks up in the high Himalayas and they'll put these sheets in ice water and then they'll wrap

them in the sheets in ice water. And they literally have to dry the sheets with the heat of their body and activate their own heat. And then once they master that, they go out in a loincloth into the Himalayas, up in the mountains at night and have to literally sit there all night naked, heating their body using the power of breath. And so we really have not even begun to tap the power of breath for health or for healing. And it's one of those sort of simple doorways that we all have access to that we don't need any equipment for. and it's always available to us if we learn the techniques. So you've got, you know, the pranayama techniques from yoga, you've got the kundalini techniques, which is a little different. You've got the Tibetan techniques, the tumor breathing, Wim Hof, which sort of

is derived a lot from that, qigong and so forth, Chinese medicine techniques. There's a whole science around this. And we really sort of begun to understand the biology of it, but these ancient cultures really knew a lot about how to activate the breath to heal. And I, I find it one of the most powerful things you can do. And we do breath work. We do various kinds of, you know, calming breaths or activating breaths or breaths that actually help you to kind of shift your nervous system. And I think we all have the ability at any time to change our mental state and our emotional state through the power of the breath. And it's like we have a superpower we haven't even accessed. And I think that's what's so great about your book. It teaches us about how we can start to use those superpowers to regulate our health and our well-being and our mental health. It's amazing, right? So I think, you know, what I think I want to love you to talk a little bit more about that

you had sort of in your research was this guy called Maurice DeBard, who was really a teenager in a French village living in a hospital with tuberculosis and lung inflammation. And he was able to cure his body, even though his doctors gave up on him. So what did you find? And what does that story have to teach us? Well, this is his story was so similar to so many other stories that I dug up. I wasn't looking for these stories, but they all, these people all seem to share the same arc where I think misery is this mother of invention. You get really curious about how to cure your body of chronic problems after you've been so miserable for so long. Maurice DeBarge certainly fits into that. He spent years in a hospital as a kid. They were going to start to remove his lungs because he was so sick for so long.

And a missionary came in, and this was like in the 1940s, 1940s and 50s. Missionary came in and said, hey, I just heard about this thing called yoga. Maybe you should check it out. So DeBard was scheduled for surgery to have part of his lungs removed. And he started practicing this breathing technique, not only was able to leave the hospital, but he got this almost superhuman ability. So he, he was the Wim Hof before Wim Hof. So he was sitting in ice baths for 40 minutes at a time on French TV. He was hiking up snowy mountains. At the age of 72, he went on a bike ride for I think it was two months in the Himalayas, you know, minus 20 degrees.

So he is just an example of this amazing machine we have called our body that if we feed it the right inputs, it can do all of these incredible things. And I just want to mention what you were saying about the Tummo monks. Nobody would believe that this is possible. And nobody did for hundreds of years when travelers came back from Tibet and they said, there's these guys, they sit nude in the snow for eight hours and melt a sir. No one would believe it until Herbert Benson from Harvard Medical School went up and measured these guys and published it in Nature. So I think that we're just sort of- And I mean, there's a documentary on it. I've seen it. It's very impressive.

Yeah. And I mean, there it is. And still, I get letters from people saying, this stuff's impossible, that there's no way people can do that. And all I can do as a journalist is present the data, present the information, but I'm not saying breathing is going to cure everything for everyone, just like food is not going to cure everything for everyone, but it's only going to help. And I think the more you access it and the more you acknowledge it, the more you can benefit from it. Yeah, it can make you high too. I mean, if you do breathing techniques from some of these practices, it's like you feel so energized, so juiced up.

And I just loop back to what you said before about energy. You know, the way our bodies make energy, which is called ATP, adenosine triphosphate, it's really the source of energy for our bodies, made in our mitochondria, it really is produced by the input of two ingredients, oxygen, which is from your breath, and food. And actually, one of the things you talk about in the book was

the Framingham study that has been going on for 70 years. And they found the most accurate marker of health and longevity isn't your genes or cardiovascular health it was lung capacity and respiratory health so how does that connect and how can you connect the dots for us on why that's so because it seems so counterintuitive so what happens as we age is we lose lung capacity so between the ages of about 30 and 50 we'll lose about 12 to 15 percent of our lung capacity and as we age more, that lung capacity continues to decrease. If we make it to 80, we'll have 30% of our lung capacity that we had when we were 15 or 16 years old. And this is right at the time when we need it the most. When you have smaller lungs, when you struggle 25,000 times a day to breathe or to do anything,

it's going to wear you down. So by having larger lungs, you can take fewer breaths. And by taking fewer breaths, you are breathing more efficiently and you're allowing your heart rate to come down and your blood pressure to go down as well. So the Framingham study, that's what they found. And someone was apprehensive about their data. So 30 years after they released that, they did another study looking at new numbers

and they found that it's 100% right. And then some surgeons were apprehensive about that data. And so they said, the only real way of doing this is to look at people who had lung transplants. So they looked at, I think it at people who had lung transplants. So they looked at, I think it was 800 people with lung transplants. Those transplanted with larger lungs lived way longer than those with smaller lungs. To me, it makes perfect sense. Wow. So if you got lucky enough to have like a lungs from somebody had big lungs, you were,

wow, that's amazing. But the good news is the lungs, we can expand them at any age. So we have control. We can't expand the size of our brains or our livers. We can our stomachs, I suppose. But with our lungs, by doing stretches, by making the intercostals more flexible, the rib cage more flexible, we can increase our lung capacity. And if you look at the data, larger lungs, longer life. Amazing. And this is not related to the data on what we call VO2 max, which is your ability to consume oxygen, you know, how efficient your oxygen consumption is. It's not related to that, is it? It's not. And I wish they would. That's also a predictor. Oh, huge. But that, I mean, that's more looking at mitochondrial function, right? How efficient are you at turning around that oxygen and creating ATP out of it?

But VO2 max is a great predictor of performance and of longevity. Amazing. How do you use the techniques and what techniques you use to actually increase your lung capacity, increase lung volume? Because not everybody's going to intuitively understand how to do that. And I'm sure this is all in your book, which I encourage you to get. It's called Breath, the New Science of a Lost Art, and it's available everywhere you get books. So it's all in there, but I really want you to kind of explain that for us. So luckily getting larger lungs is pretty easy. It's doing all the things that you talk about every week. It's exercising, just moderate exercise, a light to moderate exercise can increase your lung capacity by about 15% if you do it regularly. And there's something called yoga guess what yoga does it has you stretch your lungs

and breathe and then stretch over here and breathe so yoga is a science of increasing and maintaining lung capacity that's its main role and and qigong does the exact same thing more standing poses breathing in twisting remaining flexible so luckily you don't need to buy a special uh new tech gizmo to do this you just need to do what our ancestors did uh hunter gather populations the few that are still left they don't need these exercises because they live in a natural environment in which they're breathing in a natural way and keeping themselves flexible. Yeah. So we don't need to reinvent something. These ancient technologies of yoga and other things like Qigong and Tai Chi are technologies

that have been around forever. You know, I kind of joke and I say, you know, we kind of in the West have been so focused on the outer technologies. And in the East, they've been focused on the inner technologies and they've been able to access realms of human experience and healing and insights into how to optimize for not just spiritual health, but physical health. And it's important that we realize that. And your book talking about some of these lost arts is so important because it actually helps us be able to bring these in without a lot of the weirdness, but just understand the technology of it and be able to start to use these in our own lives to optimize our health and feel better and deal with stress and sleep and anxiety and depression it's very powerful and energy and

and even covid so it's pretty amazing i think that if you look at what's happening in in our understanding of health right now we're finding that the further we've as a species have moved away from nature the sicker we're getting that's very clear and the further we move back into nature the better we're getting it's no coincidence why your diet and so many other diets that are really effective what are they doing is they're stripping out all of the industrialized foods and they're replacing it with foods that we would eat if we were in the wild. And exercise is the same thing.

Our ancestors didn't need to lift barbells. I mean, if they would see us now from 500 years ago, like lifting something up to put it down in the same place inside of our houses, like this is this is nuts. So I think any way you can incorporate more more elements of the natural world light exposure at night we have blue blocking glasses to to mimic what it would be like to sit in front of candles or a campfire and breathing is a part of that to breathe the way your ancestors did they also had different faces than we did they had larger mouths and significantly different airways which is one of the reasons why so many of us are breathing so poorly now. Well, that's a whole interesting conversation.

I love your thoughts on that because there was a scientist, a dentist back at the turn of the 1900s who went around to all these indigenous cultures and took pictures and imaging of some of these indigenous cultures when there were still a fair bit of them around and saw that their teeth were perfect, their airways were perfect, and they didn't have all the issues that we have. And it was so related to their diet. And this is sort of part of where the whole idea of a Paleolithic diet came from, was that if we actually eat more in alignment with our ancestors, that we actually will change the structure and the function of our mouth and our face and our airways, which impacts our health hugely. Yeah, Weston Price did 10 years of research into this, collected something like 20,000 samples, meticulous research. And anyone can see this for themselves. All you have to do is look at an ancient human skull and look at its teeth i've looked at hundreds of these they all have perfectly straight teeth doesn't

matter if the skulls from asia africa south america polynesia it doesn't matter i went to a lab where one of the largest collections of pre-industrial skulls in the world they're all perfectly straight and then i look at some great orthodontists back then then right oh yeah yeah you know the invisalign back then the head gear made out of deer bones and tendons was was really good so you know they didn't need braces and and so that got me this was early in my research it got me thinking it's like why are we the only species that need our wisdom teeth yanked out? Like, why doesn't my dog need that? And it turns out our ancestors didn't need their wisdom teeth yanked out because their mouths were huge.

And they were huge all the way up until the Industrial Revolution. And that's what Weston Price found found cultures that half of the village was eating industrialized food other half was sticking with traditional diet and i think you know the rest of this story so i mean it's it's interesting because you know he took pictures so it's just so obvious when you look at the pictures of their mouths and their teeth it's like holy mackerel you know like we've kind of veered away from our natural way of living and being in a ways that have actually undermined our health and caused all sorts of chronic diseases and i think your your understanding of the breath and it's the doorway to health is just is a beautiful gift because most of us don't

think about that and if all your book does is help people think about it, read through their nose, maybe a little mouth tape, maybe explore some of the pranayama practices, tai chi, qigong, and incorporate those daily. I mean, I encourage you to just take deep breaths. I call it take five. Take five deep breaths, five times a day, when you wake up, before each meal, and when you go to bed in out just

through nose and just like breathe and let your diaphragm fill up and it just it's amazing how quickly your biology changes you can go from a state of you know stress and activation to a state of peace and calm and particularly around food it's so important because when you eat under a stress state you actually are not going to burn the calories. You're going to store them and you gain weight and stress actually through the vagus nerve and other innervations in the gut and actually affects your absorption of nutrients and affects your metabolism and affects the fat cells ability to sort of suck up food and it makes them more likely to gain weight. Whereas the breath, if you just activate the breath in the

middle of all that, it actually is a powerful sort of antidote to the stress we just are experiencing all the time. If you think about what many of our ancestors used to do before a meal, what did they do? They'd stop for a moment, they'd pray. Whether that's a Christian prayer or Hindu prayer. What are you doing when you're quietly praying for a moment, you're slowing down your breathing, you're relaxing your body, you're preparing yourself to better digest food? So you don't have to pray to get those benefits. You can just breathe. You can take a moment to be appreciative of the food you're about to eat and breathe in this slow, deep, light way.

Absolutely. It's just quite, it's quite remarkable. And it's sort of there all the time. It's sort of like, reminds me of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. You know, she's got a ruby red slippers and she can get how many times she wants, but she never knows how to use them. So tell us, you know, what is the timeline on this? I mean, people start changing their breathing. They read your book. They practice some of the techniques of deep breathing. How soon do you see results?

Everybody's different. What can people expect? So yeah, you can't offer a blanket prescription and say, this is what's going to happen after three days. This is what's going to happen after six days. Because different people are contending with different respiratory problems. Someone with severe asthma is going to take a lot longer to get to normal, right? A lot of us have structural issues in our noses because of this dis-evolution that's happened to the human face and the human mouth. So some people will need some kind of therapy. There's various things. Sometimes surgery is helpful. Oftentimes it's not needed. I just want to throw like sitting in a quiet room and putting on your yoga pants and focusing. We're breathing all the time.

So you can improve your breathing at any time of the day or night. I've found the habits are more effective than the, I'm just gonna do six minutes a day and then go back to hyperventilating. Creating a habit of nasal breathing. Wear a little piece of tape while you're answering emails for an hour, while you're doing something that doesn't require you talking, get used to nasal breathing when you're walking nasal breathe, and practice

breathing slower, sometimes holding your breath for four steps, and then breathing for six steps. So there's there's dozens of different ways of doing this but they're all variations on the same thing and that theme is breathe through the nose breathe slowly try to breathe less and try to breathe very light and deeply yeah i don't know about you all listening but as james is talking i'm definitely way more aware of my breath and i've been like my breathing through my nose and i'm really not like changing my breathing just by being aware of it so the first step is just being aware of it right don't write a book about this stuff for five years everyone it will make you a complete neurotic

trust me on that and luckily it takes a while to establish habits so this isn't going to happen overnight it's going to happen gradually and if you've been a mouth breather for five decades, four decades, three decades, it's going to take a long time to convert to nasal breathing. But you will only be benefiting as you're practicing this stuff. There's only a net gain. And sometimes that gain is transformative in a very short amount of time. Sometimes it isn't. Yeah, it's true. You also mentioned, I'm getting older, and you mentioned that

lung capacity and pulmonary function are the most important predictors of your mortality, even more than heart disease or the cardiovascular risk factors, which is sort of surprising, right? How do we enhance improve expand our lung capacity as we get older because i'm asking for selfish reasons but i think that probably people want to know too what do i have to do i think keep doing what you're doing my understanding of your daily protocol is you're a healthy dude right you exercise i'll try it yeah you are nasal breathing you hopefully do some yoga or some stretching this is how you stave off those deleterious effects of aging as far as the lungs and lung capacity is concerned is you just keep i mean think about these people who are 90

years old and 100 years they share the same same habits, right? They exercise. It doesn't have to be turbo exercise, but they're walking a lot, right? Just doing that will help stave off that decrease of lung size that happens with age. If you want to go turbo into this, you can start doing kundalinis. Fantastic. You can do more vigorous pranayamas. You can do more stretching, but this is not rocket science. It's so surprising how simple this stuff is, but what a profound change it can make to your health. So what when you say kundalini, I don't know if people know what that is. What is that pranayama is the science of breath and yoga and kundalini is a specific type of breathing within the yoga sphere so tell us more about that yes kundalini is specifically creating energy through your breath with very

rhythmic very intense breathing practices almost all kundalini practices you you got it that's it you're gonna look like a dedicated pervert doing this do it alone uh but it's about moving the stomach in and out so when you're breathing a lot of people are so concerned about their abs they want these killer flat abs they want to be looking good what you really want is flexibility in your stomach and with those muscles. And some people who go to a gym too often have something called this, um, that's been called like a corset of muscles that really inhibits healthy breathing. And it's, it's not healthy. So Kundalini is activating that energy, moving your stomach in and out very fast. And I can attest, this is extremely powerful stuff. It feels incredible. It's not easy. If you're someone

who wants to do a lighter version of this, stick with some soft and easy yoga. But kundalini, especially for respiratory health, for energy, I have found to be very powerful. Not only me, but millions of people around the world have found that as well. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, and breathwork is now a thing. You can go to breathwork classes and it's a thing. So I encourage people to explore it and think about where they're at in terms of their breath, because it's one of those easy and available pathways to health that we've pretty much ignored. I mean, I don't even think I learned anything about – I mean, we learned almost nothing about nutrition. We learned less about breath.

And I really didn't really learn anything about it until I actually did my yoga teacher training. And it was just so powerful to not only learn these techniques, but actually to experience the changes in your biology and your well-being, your mental clarity, your focus, and your overall health simply by practicing some of these techniques. I think the other thing you mentioned briefly is stretching. And I think just for people to put in their heads, A lot of our life is spent over computers, phones, with a kind of curving in of our chest and collapsing of our upper body and bending over as opposed to sort of like opening up and stretching.

And so we really constricted our ribs and our lungs. And people can lay on their back with foam rollers and do all kinds of stuff to open that up. I started learning surfing. And so you've got to have your back way up. It's the opposite of being on your phone. And so you've got to really stretch that out so you can actually lift your torso and stretch your back.

It's pretty awesome. So it's one more thing to think about with your health, but I think it's really an important piece of work you've done to map this out, to look at the science of it, to actually explain what to do help people navigate to an easy set of of tools and resources that help them actually have some help through their breath oh well thank you very much for for saying that you know it definitely impacted me and and i i would suggest that people if they are apprehensive you there are no negative side effects to

being more efficient through throughout life to doing something better um and and i think that you'll you'll be amazed that these seemingly simple things can can really provoke some profound changes the science is very clear on that but but nothing is better than personal experience. That's great. So what would you leave listeners with, summing up the main thesis of your book, and what people should do, what action should they take as a result? I would just say don't take your breathing for granted, especially if you have chronic underlying issues. If you have snoring and sleep apnea, you need to find a way of fixing

that immediately it is going to destroy your health i am convinced that you will never ever be healthy doesn't matter what you eat how much you exercise how much you sleep unless you get a chronic respiratory issues out of the way people with with allergies other mouth breathing other things that cause other mouth breathing, other things that cause mouth breathing and asthma. These modern drugs can work incredibly well for acute problems, for attacks, but what can really work well for the core issue of so many of these issues is to figure out your breathing, to increase your airway health, to breathe in that slow and easy way. I've seen this with hundreds of people, and I've looked at thousands of studies

and talked with dozens and dozens of researchers who have seen the same exact thing happen over and over. So it's all legit stuff. Some of the stuff seems too good to be true until you go and spend years and find that these impossible stories are indeed true. And everyone can benefit from this. Thank you so much. And tell us, James, where can people find your work? Where can they find you on social media? How do they get to know more about what you're doing? My publisher allowed me to put up my entire bibliography because I realized so much of what I'm saying sounds absolutely nuts so you can

feel free to go to my website at mr james nestor dot com that's mr james nestor with an or at the end dot com the bibliography is up there i have interviews with breathing experts from harvard from all over the world everything is free there are breathing methods as well. So all of that, that whole website is open access and free to everyone. And then of course there's the book. Fantastic. And I just really appreciate your work. I encourage everybody to get a copy of breath, the new science of a lost art and put into practice some of the things we're talking about, because I think it can really upgrade your health. If you love this podcast, share with your friends and family on social media, leave a comment, how have you worked with your breath to gain back your health,

subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you to all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff

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