The One You Feed - James Nestor on The Science of Breathing

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

James Nestor is an author and journalist who has written for Outside Magazine, The Atlantic, National Public Radio, The New York Times, and many more. Eric and James discuss his NY Times bestseller book, “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art”In this episode, Eric and James Nestor discuss the science of breathing, the importance of nasal breathing as opposed to mouth breathing, and the tremendous health benefits of breathing well.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, James Nestor and I Discuss the Science of Breathing and…His book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost ArtHow breath is the missing pillar of good health  His experience of participating in a study where he did only mouth breathing for 10 daysThe detrimental effects of mouth breathing such as high blood pressure, sleep apnea and snoringUnderstanding that the nose is the first line of defense for our bodiesHis experience of only nasal breathing and how the negative effects of mouth breathing were immediately reversedThe best breathing is gentle breath in for 5-6 seconds and gentle breath out for 5-6 secondsGood breathing increases the connections between the different areas of the brainBreathing slower and exhaling longer can help with anxiety or panic attacksHow lung capacity can improve with healthier breathing habitsHow we get more energy from the air than good nutritionThe different breathing methods and techniques are like interval training for your lungsBreathing well is vital to good health and longevity and is as important as eating well and exerciseJames Nestor Links:James’s WebsiteTwitterInstagramFacebookCalm App: The app designed to help you ease stress and get the best sleep of your life through meditations and sleep stories. Join the 85 million people around the world who use Calm to get better sleep. Get 40% off a Calm Premium Subscription (a limited time offer!) by going to www.calm.com/wolfAncient Nutrition offers whole food nutritional products that are designed to provide Ancient Nutrients in a modern, convenient form to power the body and mind and restore health, strength, and vitality. Enter promo code WOLF at ancientnutrition.com to get 20% off your first order If you enjoyed this conversation with James Nestor on the Science of Breathing, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Mind Over Matter with Wim HofJillian PranskySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

By breathing in this slow way, we can reconnect those emotional centers, the hippocampus, amygdala, with that frontal cortex and allow ourselves to make more reasoned decisions instead of these rash, irate, angry, emotional outbursts. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast.

Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF. And me, Mandy B. As we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations.

From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that'll resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is gonna be your go-to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join the conversation.

Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is James Nestor, an author and journalist who's written for Outside Magazine, The Atlantic, National Public Radio, The New York Times, and many, many more. Today, James and Eric discuss his New York Times bestselling book, Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art. Hi, James. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on. Your new book is called Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art, and I was really excited to read it. I've been looking forward to it for quite some

time, as I was telling you before the show, and it really lives up to the hype. It's a wonderful book, and we're going to get into it, but we're going to start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, I would have to associate it directly with breathing, and I would view that bad wolf as mouth breathing, and I would view that good wolf as nasal breathing. And depending on which of those pathways you breathe is really going to dictate so much of your health and how you're able to think about things and your mood and so much more. I think that's a great intro and mouth breathing is a big topic in the book. And we're going to get to that in a second. Before we go all the way there, though, I want to talk just a little bit about a statement that you made a couple different times in the book. And I

think it's an important one. You basically say that the missing pillar in health is breath. Say a little more about that. Well, I think most of us have gotten the message on what to eat, right? At least most of us compared to how we were 50 years ago. We're aware that eating whole foods, that staying away from highly processed carbs. You know, that's the way to eat properly. We're also aware that we need to move around. We need to exercise. We constantly need to be in motion. Otherwise, some bad things can happen to our bodies. And that message has been pretty clear.

But neither of those things really matter that much unless you're breathing properly, because you can go how long? Two weeks without food. You can go a lifetime without exercising, but you can only go a couple minutes without breathing. And how we get that breath, how we process it, it really determines so much of what we're able to do, where our potential is, and where our downfalls are as well. Yeah, I think it's interesting because I agree with you. I think that when I look at the fundamentals of health, both physical, mental, and emotional, I look at very foundational things, like you mentioned, movement or exercise, eating well. I think sleep, it's become incredibly apparent how important sleep is. For me, some sort of contemplative practice is a big part of that. important sleep is. For me, some sort of contemplative practice is a big part of that. But I think that a lot of us when we think of breathing, if we think of it at all, we think of it as something that maybe we call on occasionally or in times of trouble. Oh, if I'm stressed, I need to take some deep breaths. But we don't think of it as, as you said, I like that word, as one of those fundamental pillars to our overall well-being.

And I think the book really points out in a lot of detail how really important the way we breathe is. And it really influences the quality of our lives. And it really influences a lot of different health conditions. Well, it's great that breathing's an unconscious act, that we don't have to think about it. What a pain in the butt that would be to have to think about it 20,000 times a day, right? But that doesn't mean how we breathe is not affecting us in different ways. And the manner in which we breathe affects every single system of our body, right down to every single cell, you know? And a lot of us can get by with this dysfunctional breathing,

with breathing through the mouth, breathing too much, breathing too little, hunched over. But that doesn't mean we're healthy. Just like we can get by eating, you know, 20 ding-dongs a day and have enough calories. But that doesn't mean we're going to be healthy. And it's just this missing piece of this puzzle that I've found so many people are paying attention to, even though there's a huge foundation of science

showing that how we breathe has such an incredible effect on our physical body, our mental body, even how we grow on our bones. 20 ding-dongs a day is about the equivalent of your Stanford experiment that you did. That would be the food version of that, which would be to exist on 20 ding-dongs a day only for a month. But let's lead into that because one of the things that you started with when we talked about the good wolf and the bad wolf was mouth breathing and how bad it is for us. bad it is for us. So why don't you first just briefly tell us about the experiment you did, and then briefly tell us about why mouth breathing is so bad and what it does to us, which you demonstrate very well in what you did to yourself.

So I'm in San Francisco, and I'm pretty close to Stanford, and I use their medical library, their library all the time, their resources. I'm just poaching things from Stanford constantly. And I got to be pretty good friends with the chief of rhinology research down there. His name is Dr. Jayakar Nayak, big nose guy. And he was so depressed that so many of us are breathing through our mouths, something like 25 to 50% of us are habitual mouth breathers. And when we go to sleep, that increases to about 60, close to 70% of us breathe through our mouths. And he explained to me that the nose serves innumerable functions in our body. Helps to filter air, it heats it, it moistens it, it conditions it, all that. We get more oxygen breathing through the nose than we do through the mouth. All of this is known.

We've known this for a long time. But that damage of mouth breathing, exposing your lungs to everything in the environment and everything else that comes with it, the poor posture as well, no one knew how quickly that came on. Did it come on after decades or years? No one was sure. So after several meetings, several interviews, I said, well, why don't you do a test with this? You're at Stanford, man. You have all these resources. And he loved the idea, but he said that asking subjects to participate in tests like this, in his opinion, would be unethical, considering the potential damage it would do to them, even though 25 to 50 percent of the population is breathing this way. So it's a long way of saying I volunteered. damage it would do to them, even though 25 to 50% of the population is breathing this way. So

it's a long way of saying, I volunteered. I said, well, what if I willingly put myself in here as a subject? And what if I get someone else? So it's an end to experiment. And he said, okay, if you can do that. And I did. And the experiment was set up in two phases. For 10 days, we're just breathing through our mouths, which a lot of people think is some like jackass stunt. That was not the intention. We were just lulling ourselves into a position that so much of the population already knows. For the other 10 days, we'd be breathing through our noses as often as we possibly could. And we would be taking, collecting data the whole way through and comparing those data sets at the end of that experiment. And what happened?

Well, we knew the mouth breathing part was not going to be a picnic. I was pretty aware of that. But, you know, an hour after we were leaving Stanford, coming back, we're kind of laughing about it. Like, yeah, this is going to be terrible. And, you know, then I checked my blood pressure was as high as I've ever seen it in my life. And over breathing, causing your body to stress out by that constant flow of air, very bad for your body, and it can jack your blood pressure. And that's exactly what happened to me. Then I went to sleep that night. And I snored for the first time that I've ever

been aware of. And we recorded about two weeks of baseline before this, zero snoring or a couple minutes a night max. And I snored for an hour and a half. And the other subject, Anders Olsson, who came from Sweden to be a part of this experiment, was snoring even more than that. And the longer the experiment went on, the worse we were snoring. We got sleep apnea, we were fatigued, athletic performance really sank. I mean, you name it, there's a whole laundry list of problems. And it felt just awful beyond that. So basically, what you guys did was insert things in your nose so that you couldn't breathe through your nose, so you could only breathe through your mouth. And as you mentioned, all sorts of things that you could measure all got a lot worse. And as you said, you felt miserable. Yeah. And that's exactly what we did. We had silicone up our noses and a lot of people think,

oh my God, I'm just getting so paranoid just thinking of that. But if you consider that 15% of the population suffers from chronic sinusitis, you know, about 50% has inflamed turbinates. In allergy season, how many people are breathing through their noses? You know, it's, we become a population of mouth breathers. So again, this sounds like some heinous thing that we did, but it really wasn't when you consider how so many people are breathing right now. And so you can answer this one of two ways.

Why is mouth breathing so bad for us? Or what are some of the impacts of breathing through our mouth more often than we should? Sure. So the first one is if you grow up as a mouth, there's a delicature of your face. Because if you constantly hold your face in that position, your face will tend to be longer. Your face will be more recessed. Your chin will be more recessed. And this is so common that researchers have a name for it. They call it adenoid face for when kids have inflamed adenoids or even tonsils and they

have to open their mouths to breathe. So if you do that over a series of years, it will affect how you look. And according to a lot of people, you will look much less attractive than you would otherwise. It will also affect how your teeth will grow in. So habitual mouth breathing can also affect your mouth size and how you develop. So later on in life, when we're adults, if we're mouth breathing, you can just consider every time you take a breath through your mouth, you might as well have your lungs as an external organ because they're exposed to all the dust, all the mold,

all the pollution, all the allergens, anything else in the air, they're directly exposed to it. And if you live in a city like me, that means a whole bunch of crap every day. So our noses are our first line of defense for our body, for pathogens, for viruses, for bacteria, for pollution, all of that. That's what the nose does. So it's just something to consider when you're going out and walking around, you see all these people breathing through their mouths, they're just exposing themselves to everything around them. And so what are some ways that we can cut down on mouth breathing, particularly given that it sounds like more of us do it while we sleep? Yeah, this is a

tricky thing. It's one thing in the daytime because you're conscious and you can develop this habit of closing your mouth. So some people have very serious problems in their noses and their sinuses and they need surgical interventions. Okay. So, so for sure, but the majority of us don't, we just need better habits. We need to train ourselves to work this organ out, to let it do what it's naturally designed to do. So in the daytime for the second phase of the experiment, we wore a little piece of tape on our mouths in the day to teach ourselves, remind ourselves to just be breathing through our noses.

And at night we use that same little piece of tape. Now, this is not a hostage or pulp fiction kind of vibe going on here. It's a teeny piece of tape with a very light adhesive that comes immediately off if you just open your mouth. It's just a reminder to keep your mouth shut. And just by wearing that piece of tape, my snoring went from four hours

at its highest mouth breathing to zero. And my sleep apnea went to zero. Anders went from six hours of snoring a night to zero, zero sleep apnea, a H I. So, um, you know,

I'm not saying what worked for us is going to work for everyone, but I have heard from literally hundreds of people who are so pissed off that they weren't told this 30 years ago, it's worked amazingly well for them. And the best part is it's free and it's available to anyone. Well, I, after reading the book, am going to attempt this taping my mouth shut at night trick to see what happens. Yeah, let me know how it goes. I just want to be totally clear here to everyone. I'm not offering a blanket prescription to all your woes.

I'm not qualified to do that. I'm a journalist. And some people just have major nasal obstruction issues that will need surgery. But as I had said before, a lot of us don't. And I had heard this from Dr. Ann Kearney at Stanford who was slated for surgery. She's a breathing therapist at Stanford. And she just worked out her nose. She just, over a series of weeks, taught herself to breathe through her nose, and it completely

opened up, and I had the same experience. So what you're saying is even if we feel some degree of congestion, if we try and really practice breathing through our nose more, we might restore functionality. For many people, that's right. This is a use it or lose it organ. So much so that I was just talking to Ann Kearney and she had looked at people who had laryngectomies, a little hole drilled in their throats. And she found that between two months and two years, their noses were 100% obstructed.

They completely closed off because they weren't being used. Those sinus passages aren't just bone, right? They're covered in erectile tissue, which can become flaccid or erect, just like the tissue you know where. So it opens and closes all the time. So it can be conditioned to be more open and allow more air in there so that you can become a nasal breather. Excellent. So let's move on to some of the other key points in the book. One of the most important parts of breathing is not what a lot of us focus on, which is the inhale, but actually on the exhale.

Why is the exhale important to focus on? Why is it arguably more important than the inhale, or at least equally important? So a lot of us, especially when we get stressed, we'll breathe in, we'll breathe in on top of that, we'll breathe in on top of that, we'll breathe in on top of that. And we just keep packing air in. So our diaphragms aren't really moving. They're just staying in this very low position. It's so much more efficient to get that stale air out before we take a big breath in. For

the same reason is if you're driving cross country and you filled up your gas tank every time it went down to about three quarters of a tank and then you filled it up again and you filled it up again. That would take a lot of time, a lot of wear and tear. You can think of your breathing in your lungs in the same way. You want to breathe as few breaths as you can that still sustains your metabolic needs. And so for a lot of us, we tend to breathe way too much, breathing air on top of air. But by taking these fluid breaths, easy breath in, and then a full breath out, we can take fewer breaths and get more oxygen. And another cool thing about this is that diaphragm

that sits below the lungs, because the lungs don't do anything. They don't do anything on their own. They need this diaphragm to expand them and contract them. That diaphragm moves up and down like a piston in our body and helps with circulation and move lymph fluid as well. So it serves many functions, taking these fluid, deeper, slower breaths.

And so you describe in the book what you call the perfect breath, shown in a lot of different ways to be the right, I don't want to use the word, the right way to breathe, an optimal way to breathe. And lots of our spiritual traditions also show the same thing. Say a little bit more about the perfect breath and how you do it and some of the different places it shows up. I discovered this study that was put out about 20 years ago by some Italian researchers where they gathered a group of subjects

and they had them recite the Ave Maria in Latin and then they had them recite O Mani Padme Om, which is a famous Buddhist mantra. And they noticed that it took these subjects the same amount of time to recite each of these phrases, which works out to about five to six breaths per minute. That's about five to six seconds in and five to six seconds out. Now, this respiration rate also occurred in Sata Nama, Now, this respiration rate also occurred in Sat Na Ma, which is the famous Kundalini chant, and so many other prayers. And it turns out when we recite these prayers, when we breathe this way, we deliver more oxygen to the brain. We lower our blood pressure.

We calm ourselves down. We let the systems in our body work at a state of peak efficiency, which they called coherence, which is why this is called coherent breathing. So all it is, you don't have to pray to get these benefits. You pray, go ahead and pray. That's cool if you want to do that. But all you really need to do is take a gentle breath in to a count of about five or six and a gentle breath out to that same amount of time. And you get these benefits from just by breathing that way. Would you say that's the optimal way to breathe most of the time? I think it certainly wouldn't hurt. There's no such thing as having too much peak efficiency. Is it possible? Probably not. You know, this is a reminder throughout the day to slow down your breathing because the more

you breathe this way, the more you acclimate your body to feel safe and comfortable breathing at this slow, soft, and deeper rate. And that's what you want to do. I mean, if you're like me, I don't want to walk around with an Apple Watch beeping all the time reminding me to breathe or a notepad or whatever. I want this stuff to become an unconscious habit, but that can take a long time to establish those habits. So this is a great one to use before a phone call if you're nervous, if you want to slow down, if you really want to focus on something. Because at Northwestern University a few years ago, they found that this breathing pattern, when it was taken in and out of the nose also increases the connections between different areas of the

brain to allow us to remember and to think more clearly about things. So it really affects so many systems in the body. Yeah, brain connectivity is a big deal, connecting the different aspects of the brain. Of course, and if you look at what's happened to so many of us right now, we're losing context and losing connection with our prefrontal cortex, the area that is in control of logic and decision-making, and we're letting emotions control what we're thinking, right? And so by breathing in this slow way, we can reconnect those emotional centers, the hippocampus, amygdala, with that frontal cortex and allow ourselves to make more reasoned

decisions instead of these rash, irate, angry, emotional outbursts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, Really No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com and by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really.

No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's talk about an aspect, a word that you just used a sentence or two ago when you were describing this, and you described breathing in a light way. You know, I think there's a tendency, I've certainly had it, I learned a lot in this book, and I think one of the things for me is this tendency to breathe, if I'm going to do like some sort of breathing, let's say, you know,

breathing in a box, or 4-7-8 breathing, there's all these different ratios, right? It's this very heavy, deep breathing, trying to suck in as much as I can. But I started to get a hint of this in a lot of the Zen training I do where the teacher started talking about like, you want to breathe in way less when you breathe in. So talk about what light means. What is breathing lightly? Well, it depends on what you're doing, right? These are different tools in the toolbox to use in different situations. So a lot of Kundalini breathing, which I'm a big fan of, you're going for it. You know, that's a lot of the breathing in Kundalini pranayamas. And it's the same thing with Sudarshan Kriya, Wim Hof method, whatever.

So that is designed to elicit certain reactions in your body for a short amount of time, right? It's to hijack different autonomic functions. So this slower breathing, this very light breathing, this easy breathing, you can almost consider this as different kinds of music. You know, at the gym, if you want to get pumped up in the morning, maybe you want those big strong breaths, right? But at night, if you're cooking, if you're eating dinner, you want those slower breaths, just like you would want some slower, easier music. You know, at the gym, maybe you want some

death metal or something. So once you understand that these are different tools in the toolbox, because a lot of people seem confused. They're like, well, should I breathe too much? Should I breathe less? Should I hold my breath? It just depends on the context and what you're looking for at that moment. So the slower breathing can be used, you know, whenever you're chilling out. It's great for focus at the beginning of the day. That's when I use it a lot. And the thing is, as Westerners, we tend to overdo things all the time. Whenever I tell someone, you know, breathe in five to six, out five to six, they say, I got it. Yeah, I really feel that, man.

This is about calming the body down and regaining control of your nervous system function and putting that back online. And so in order to do that, it should be very light and imperceptible. So a lot of people tend to stick out their stomachs every time they breathe. This should be an extremely light activity that is calming. You want to run efficiently. You don't want to wear out yourself, you know, and expend energy you don't need to expend. Some point in the book, you reference that the common wisdom is take really deep breaths if you're feeling anxious. And you talk about how that may not be the right approach.

Terrible advice. And that is coming from Alicia Moret, who is at Southern Methodist University now. She was at Stanford before that and Harvard before that. So she really knows her stuff. And she did this study about 10 years ago with panic sufferers. And the only thing she did was she taught them to breathe less. She was able to see a panic attack coming on an hour before by looking at people's breathing.

And a lot of people who suffer from panic or asthma, when they feel that attack coming on, what do they do? They start breathing more and more and more because they feel like they're not going to be able to breathe. They feel like they're going to be denied a breath, which is about the worst thing you can do. When you over-breathe like that, you cause more vasoconstriction and you exacerbate or trigger an attack. So instead of doing that, if you feel a panic attack coming on, you can train yourself to exhale longer and breathe slowly and calm yourself down. Putting your hands in front of your face

is a good reminder to yourself to calm yourself down. I won't get into the biochemistry, but many asthmatics and as populations, panic sufferers and people with anxiety have much lower CO2, which means they are breathing too much. And that slower breathing is a way to get that CO2 back on track and calm themselves down. Well, let's go into that for just a minute, the CO2, because that's one thing that certainly I think is counterintuitive in the book, which is that we tend to think, I need more oxygen, I need more oxygen, I need to get my oxygen up. Whereas in reality, our problem is often too much oxygen, not enough carbon dioxide. So say a little bit more about that and how we know that, because that is very counterintuitive to what almost everybody believes.

The vast majority of us, our oxygen levels are fine. There's no such thing as having too much oxygen in our bloodstream, right? You know, we'll peak at 99%, 100% perhaps. But what so many of us are deficient in is CO2, because the only way that oxygen can disassociate from the hemoglobin, which is in our red blood cells, is in the presence of CO2. So for instance, if you are over breathing right now, you're going to feel some numbness in your fingers after a while, some lightness in your head. That is not caused by an increase of oxygenation in those areas, but a decrease of circulation. So you need CO2 for circulation to be a vasodilator to your arteries, your veins, your bloodstream. And without it, your body has a harder time of getting oxygen. So this is such confusing stuff, but it's nothing

revolutionary or strange. We've known this for over 120 years. It's just so few people consider that if you're a healthy person, your oxygen levels are going to be fine. But what you may be suffering from is a lack of proper balance of CO2 because you're breathing too much, which is another reason why the idea of a healthy person going into an oxygen bar, I mean, this is not doing anything for your body. And it's surprising that there are still oxygen bars out there because it just doesn't make any sense from a biochemical standpoint. What about at altitude?

If you suddenly are in the Rocky Mountains and you're at an altitude you're not used to, are you having an oxygen deficiency in that case? Yes, and thank you for bringing that up. So I'm talking about at sea level, a healthy person at sea level, where if you put on a pulse ox and you're at 98%, huffing oxygen for half an hour is going to do nothing for you. And this is something my father-in-law, who's a pulmonologist, had been telling me for years and years and years. And I thought he was full of BS until you really look at the biochemistry and you're like, that's not going to do anything. At altitude, of course, there are huge benefits to it because there's less oxygen or that oxygen is further apart, right? There's less pressure. So oxygen molecules are further apart. So that's why people become hypoxic at high elevations. Their blood O2s, their blood sats can go down to,

you know, 80%, which is really bad news. So oxygen would have a huge benefit for you at those altitudes. But I should mention there, of course, has been studies looking into breathing more slowly and through the nose at altitudes. And in one study, they found that the people who were doing this, instead of having their blood sats at 80%, they were at 89 just by breathing more slowly instead of over breathing like everyone else tends to do. While we're talking about chemicals, let's talk about nitric oxide. I've seen some things that you've posted recently about nitric oxide. So tell us a little bit about the role of nitric oxide. A lot of people get nitric oxide confused with nitrous oxide, which is laughing gas. Oh, I'm not interested. If we're not talking about whippets, I'm not interested. You know, a lot of people, their interest does go out the window there.

So you are like so many other people I've talked to. This interview is over. Yeah. You know what? In that case, we're going to talk about nitrous oxide and all the wonder. No, no, we won't do that. So nitric icy oxide is this wondrous molecule. is this wondrous molecule. We produce a profusion of it in our sinuses about six times more than we do breathing through our mouths. And it so happens to be that the drug Viagra, Sidenafil is its

actual name. Guess what that does to do what it does? releases nitric oxide in the body so it allows your body to produce more nitric oxide so you get more circulation you know where so we produce our own nitric oxide we produce it throughout the body but we produce a huge amount in our noses which is another reason you want to be breathing through your noses. You don't want to be breathing through your mouths. Not just for the, you know, perhaps sexual performance side of this. Nitric oxide is essential for circulation and oxygen delivery, which is why it's being studied in 11 clinical trials with COVID patients. The word on the street is it's working incredibly well

because they tested this 15 years ago and it worked incredibly well for the first round of SARS. Giving people nitric oxide? Yes, because having more nitric oxide allows you to get more oxygen, to utilize more oxygen. It opens up those bronchioles. It opens up all those little arteries and allows more circulation. It would be very interesting to see a study where they would have people mouth breathing versus nasal breathing, people with COVID. This is never gonna happen, by the way, for ethical reasons.

And if you hum, you produce 15 times more nitric oxide by humming. So it would be great to see a real study on the effects of this with people who are chronically ill. But again, I don't think that's going to happen because of ethical concerns. But I wish it would. I wish people would volunteer for this because I think we would learn so much. 15 times more nitric oxide than you do breathing through your mouth or 15 times more than you do breathing through your nose?

Than breathing through your mouth. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Well, humming sounds good. You're going to annoy everyone, but you know, you're going to be happier. You're going to have better circulation. So tell them that. There was one thing that you referenced in the book that really,

a bunch of things perked my ears up, so I shouldn't say one. The next thing in your book that really perked my ears up was, you talked about a study where they gathered two decades of data from 5,200 subjects and discovered that the greatest indicator of lifespan wasn't genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise. It was lung capacity. So say more about that. And then what are ways of developing lung capacity, if that really is such an important part of longevity? Sure. That study, I put it on my website and there's direct links to all of this. That's what they determined.

They said, you know, lung size is very similar. It's a good marker of lifespan. The healthier and larger your lungs are, the longer you're going to live. That's how the data stacked up, which to me makes a lot of sense because by having larger lungs, that means you can take fewer breaths to get that oxygen. By having these healthier lungs, that means you're getting this constant flow of energy to your body, right? We get actually more energy from air than we do from food.

And if we're doing that ineffectively, and if we're doing that in a dysfunctional way, it's going to wear us down. So the good news here is the lungs aren't like the brain or the liver or the kidneys or anything like that. The lungs and your lung capacity can change and you can change it by force of will. You can change it by adopting healthy breathing habits. So just by doing mild to moderate exercise can increase lung capacity by about 15%. If you really go for it, if you start doing yoga, I've known people who have doubled their lung capacity.

You can not only increase your lung capacity, but you can stave off that entropy that happens as we grow older and our lungs start shriveling up and go smaller and smaller and smaller. So exercise, yoga, is doing the type of breathing we described, the perfect breath, the five and a half in, five and a half out, does that increase the lung capacity? I believe that would help you maintain a healthy lung capacity. I've never seen any studies, longitudinal studies on that. If you think about yoga though, what is yoga? Stretching and breathing. Let's

stretch this arm over this way. Breathe into this lung. Let's stretch it over here. You want to keep the rib cage very flexible. And as we grow older, our rib cages start growing inwards, right? Our bones get more brittle. You want to keep it very flexible because you don't want breathing to be an effort, especially if you're doing it 20,000, 25,000 times a day. There was another fact in the book that blew my mind, which I had no idea about while we were talking about carbon dioxide would have been the time to bring it up, which is that when you're losing weight, you correct me, something like 80% of the weight that you lose, you breathe out. That's right. Yeah. A lot of people think that when we lose weight, it comes off in sweat or whatever, but none of that makes sense if you really look at the science. And that's what I

was just so amazed when I was researching this book, that there are such simple things that we have accepted in our culture as being correct, as being the conventional wisdom. If you're having a panic attack, you need to breathe way more. If you're having an asthma attack, we're breathing way more. None of this is based on anything. There's no paper that ever proved this. And so this guy in Australia wanted, he was a biophysicist, I believe, and he wanted to figure out what happened when we lose weight.

Because weight just doesn't disappear. It's an energy, right? It needs to go somewhere. And he found out that for every 10 pounds that you lose, eight and a half pounds of that comes out through your lungs. When I read that, I was like, that is certainly not correct. All right, I trust James to some degree, but that sounds not like it's right. But I went out and did the research. I was like,

I'll be damned. Sure is true. Yeah. Yeah. I had to really double down on this because I didn't believe it either. And my editor the whole time was like, this can't be true. You can't heat your body up with breathing. You can't heal yourself of autoimmune diseases with breathing. So she worked at NASA before she became a book editor. So she was such a hard ass. And I thank her for really putting me through the ringer because with these impossible claims, you really need to support it with science. And I put the entire bibliography up on my website that anyone can go look at those 500 studies. And I put videos up

there and the data sheets and all that. And you can peruse for yourself. So we've talked about this sort of standard, quote unquote, perfect breath, you know, breathing lightly five to six times per minute is sort of an ideal calming breath, sort of an ideal day-to-day breath. But in the book, you go into a lot of, you call it breathing plus techniques. You referenced Wim Hof a little while ago. We had Wim on the show, I don't know, a couple months ago. So let's talk about some of the benefits or the things that can happen if we breathe in more extreme ways. So let's just talk about, you know, Wim Hof for a minute and talk about his breathing method. And also, I think it'd be interesting to sort of, I'm glad that you eventually got to it because it was a question that I was thinking all through the book was, boy, all this sounds very different than what Wim Hof advocates, right?

Say a little bit more about this breathing plus. So it's interesting when you see Wim Hof on YouTube, or if you see him live, you only see the Wim Hof that's like turned on and amped up to 11, right? Breathe, everybody. Breathe, breathe. Everybody loves the good wolf. There you go. Okay. You're a convert as well. So a few people see him in the other 23 and a half hours of the day. And guess how he's breathing? Entirely through his nose, extremely slowly. He hums a lot and he is completely chill.

So the breathing that he has become so attached to. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden and together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot

on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's equivalent to going to the gym, right? This is breathing where you just blow it out, you work yourself out, so that the rest of the day you can relax. You've done your work for the day, and now your body is acclimated.

It's at this nice spot. So all of this stuff was so confusing to me because some people like buteyko people are saying you have to breathe less whim is saying you have to breathe more holotropic breathwork people are saying you have to breathe for three hours as hard as you possibly can and this is the way you're gonna and i was like who is right and the answer is they're all right it depends on the context so for the same reason you wouldn't go to a gym for 24 hours a day is the same reason you would never do Wim Hof's breathing for more than that, 30 minutes at a time. And this kind of breathing, you are purposely stressing your body out.

Just like at the gym, you are purposely stressing your body out to build yourself up, to become more fit so that the rest of the day you can take that time off and having done your work. It is a pressure release valve. And so you could call it Wim Hof method, you could call it TUMO, you call it Sudarshan Kriya or Priya or Pranayama, whatever. It's all doing the same general thing. I realize it gets confusing, but the middle of the book I tried to establish, I was like, this foundation of healthy breathing, this is a benefit to everyone who's an asthmatic, ultra marathoner, or a cyclist, or an office jockey. You will all benefit from breathing out of the nose, breathing slowly, breathing lightly and deeply. And then once you have that down, you can go off into some really weird areas into how to superheat your body or get rid of autoimmune diseases, you know, or get shot up with E. coli and breathe in a pattern to battle the endotoxins. That's what I saved for that. I call it breathing plus because it's the next step up the ladder of where breathing can take us. And you mentioned there, you sort of grouped a bunch of things together. You, you

grouped Wim Hof together, Sudarshan Kriya, Pranayama, often Kundalini breathing falls into this category. Something you called, that you said was Tummo, which is an ancient Tibetan, I believe, style of breathing. So you sort of group those together, sort of say in what way they're common. What are you doing in that style of breathing for people who may not be familiar? These are all variations on a theme. And when I started really looking at these and plotting them out, you know, it was like the usual suspects moment where I was just like, everything is lining up in this certain way. They're all doing the same general thing, but they're called different names.

They're developed at different times. There's slight variations here and there, but they're all adhering to the same practice. And the practice is you purposely over breathe for a certain amount of time. Then you purposely under breathe for a certain amount of time. Then you purposely under-breathe for a certain amount of time. And oftentimes, as in Wim Hof Method and TUMO, you hold your breath. So you go from to holding your breath to exhaling really long and do it all over again. So this is essentially interval training for your lungs, for your cardiorespiratory system.

That's what it is. I think that's a really useful way to frame it, right? As I've studied, what do we wanna do for cardio? And we think of like cardio exercise, right? And it appears that more and more what we're seeing is you want long periods. You reference Phil Maffetone in your book. So this is basically what you say there, right? We want these long periods of sustained effort at a

pretty low amount of strain on our body, often referred to as zone two cardio, but you know, you're on the lower end, and you want a lot of that. And then there is some belief, some people disagree on this, but there certainly seems to be a fair amount of belief also that there's a time and a place for some really high intensity work. or Tabata training, right, where we're going kind of all out. So I think the analogy you're making there of this gentle, slow, you know, five to six breaths per minute is sort of an ideal zone two cardio place to be, right? You want to spend a lot more time there. And then there is a place for some people to do this much more intense Wim Hof, Tummo, Pranayama type breathing. That's exactly right. And it also depends on what you're looking for. So I know Wim Hof, Tummo, Pranayama type breathing. That's exactly right. And it also depends on what you're looking for. So I know Wim, I've talked to him several times, and he's an amazing guy. I think he's brought breathing awareness to more people than anyone else,

you know, at least in the last 20 years or so. And he is a huge proponent of his breathing technique. He calls it his breathing technique, but he's also very clear that he's like, I didn't invent any of this stuff. It's been around for thousands of years. It's just had these different names on it. You know, if you really wanna rung yourself up, if you really wanna hop up to that next stage,

if you're healthy and want to go into a next level of potential, you can try these things out. What's interesting, or maybe not interesting, shouldn't be surprising, is different breathing techniques that are all around the same variations on this theme. They so happen to affect people in the same way. so happen to affect people in the same way. If you look at how Sudarshan Kriya affects people, it's so similar to the benefits behind Wim Hof breathing because these things are doing the same thing. You know, my job is great in the respect that I'm able to talk to people who have had their lives transformed, like utterly transformed by just healthy, practical breathing habits. I know that seems like a real pie in the sky stuff, but it's not. And especially with asthma, even autoimmune diseases. And there's so much exciting research happening right now in this

field. In the next couple of years, we're going to know even more. Yeah. And I think you do a nice job of also painting a picture at different points in the next couple of years, we're going to know even more. Yeah. And I think you do a nice job of also painting a picture at different points in the book of, look, and you've done a nice job of it in this interview of saying, well, you know, these things can help for certain things and certain people. And no, you're probably not going to cure cancer with the way you breathe. There's a certain amount of science that backs this up, and there's a certain amount of things that we see from a lot of people anecdotally. So there's real potential in this, and as you said, it's not a panacea. It's not like, well, just breathe a certain way every day,

and then go ahead and go on the 25 ding-dong a day diet, and everything will be fine. Yeah, it's for the same reason that exercise isn't a panacea or nutrition isn't a panacea. Although we do know that eating certain foods will decrease your risk of getting certain cancers, right? And in other chronic problems in life, we know that. And the same thing with exercise. Well, breathing is right along with those other two, for sure. And it's always been there. This was considered a very powerful medicine in ancient cultures. And that's all cool and peachy and great. But now we have the technologies to measure what actually happens in the body when we

breathe in different ways. And that's what I think is so exciting. Like, if you don't believe me, all you need to do is get a pulse oximeter on your finger and watch how breathing affects you. If you don't believe me, get a blood pressure monitor and take your blood pressure before and after doing some breathing exercises and tell me what your blood pressure is. So I've done this. I've watched my blood pressure go down 10 to 15 points after two minutes by breathing in certain ways. And that's not some outrageous claim.

This is basic physiology. This is how our bodies work. It's just been so out in left field and, in my opinion, pretty muddled over by a lot of sort of new age, high claims that this stuff can do everything for everyone, which it can't, but it can do a whole bunch. And the fact that it's available to everyone without a subscription, without a prescription is to me, even better. That's a great place to wrap up, but I'm not quite going to wrap us up there because I have one more question and it ties into what you just said there. And it's this idea of no subscription, no prescription. Like the stuff that you're describing is pretty straightforward,

right? The way to breathe it. You just, you basically laid out several of the key things, doing things like learning to do pranayama breathing or the Wim Hof method. Those things are freely available out there and you can learn them. And there's a lot of people who want to charge a lot of money to learn to really do this stuff right. And I'm kind of curious in your opinion, is there really that much more to learn? Is it really worth some of these expensive programs to really learn to do the perfect breath, to do coherent breathing? Or is it about as simple as you're describing? Well, think about nutrition, right? You can give someone a sheet of paper that says, here is the best way for you to eat. Cut out all processed

foods, period. We know this to be true. Just eat whole foods. How easy is that? You know, in one sentence, you can give someone that. Will they adhere to it? No, they won't. It's the same thing with exercise in many ways. So, you know, what I'm getting at here is it depends on who you are. If you're a big self-starter who wants to take control of his or her breathing and wants to go by these gizmos, you can absolutely

do that, you know, with no more technology than our brains and our lips and our lungs, you can do that. But some people need a helping hand, just like some people need a fitness coach and some people need a nutritionist and some people need cookbooks, you know, and so there is absolutely a place for breathing therapists, especially for people who have chronic issues, anxiety, asthma, panic, anorexia, I mean, on and on and on. Breathing can have such a profound effect on these people, and they need a lot of assistance, not only to keep with it, but to understand what's happening in their bodies. Excellent. That is a great answer. Thank you, James, so much for your time. You and I are going to talk briefly in the post-show conversation about an area that we didn't even get to at all, which is really about chewing and why we have crooked teeth and why we might actually be dis evolving in certain ways. You and I will talk about that in the post show conversation listeners, you can get access to that and other things like a weekly teaching song and a poem episode. I do add free episodes and lots of

other great things at one you feed.net slash join. James, thank you so much for coming on. Like I said, I really enjoyed the book. We didn't even get into all the wonderful stories that are in the book and all the characters that you meet along the way and the things that you do. We kind of stayed very dry, but the book is not dry at all. So again, thanks so much. Thanks a lot for having me. Please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits.

It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.