Patrick McKeown meets James Nestor, author of Breath The new science of a lost art

James Nestor is here with me and if you want to read one of the best books that I have ever read about breathing his is - and the name of the book is called Brett I only have a galley copy and but you'll see the title there and it's Brett the new science of a lost art so I'm speaking with James and I'm intrigued I have been working with breathing for 18 years and I suppose I'm gonna approach it from a bias perspective because that's my work and James has an independent mind he's an investigative journalist well I'm not sure about investigative but certainly journalists will be investigators anyway and I'm intrigued and James thanks very much this is a podcast I'm very interested in having a chat with you about and I think this could be a tremendous your book in paving the way for recognition or at least a debate about breathing so I for a little bit of background how did you get into it it's completely random this is not something I set out to do on purpose and I guess the first instance that stimulated some some thought about where the subject could go was about thirteen twelve thirteen years ago when a doctor friend of mine suggested I attend a breathing class because I had had a number of respiratory problems it was wheezing a bit I had had pneumonia for the past few years in a row bronchitis you name it was even snoring a little bit so I attended this breathing class and had this extremely strange physiological reaction I just sitting there cross-legged in a room with other people breathing very slowly and then very fast over and over again within about 15 to 20 minutes of this I noticed that I was sweating my entire body was sweating so there were sweat blotches on my jeans on my shirt on my sweater my hair was sopping wet and I thought wow that was a pretty interesting experience when asked my doctor friends about it and they said oh you had a fever you were wearing a jacket that was too big which is all false so I filed that away in the back of my brain I didn't know what to do with it because it was a subjective experience and I usually don't write from that perspective I'm a journalist I focused a lot on science and I look at things that are based on facts and studies and people have studied things so about five years after that I was asked to cover something called the world freediving championship it's a very strange sport in which athletes challenge one another to see how deep they can dive on a single breath and come back to the surface conscious if that sounds insane because it absolutely is sure but I remember being out on this boat and watching swan dive hurt William Trubridge take a single breath of air I was wearing no fins nothing but a wetsuit and completely disappear into the ocean for about five minutes and come back to the surface take a breath get back on the boat go back to land so he had just dived about 330 feet on a single breath of air so when I started talking to these free divers said how do you do what you do they said oh we can only hold her breath by breathing and you not only get these benefits by learning how to breathe in the water by being able to die very deep but they also benefits on land and one of the divers told me he's like right now take your hand hold it on your heart and breathe extremely slowly and exhale to account was about eight feel how your heart lowers mm-hmm he explained that how we breathe affects or blood pressure it affects our respiratory health it affects the bone density in our skeleton on and on and on things that sounded completely crazy but was intriguing enough that after I wrote a book on free diving I'd filed away all these stories this very large file and I figured this was what I was gonna do next explore freedom no not that were breathing but how we're breathing in those nuances yeah and the title is the new science of a lost art and that I find out interesting because I know when I when right I talked to a stranger about breathing the rise will often glass over and they're not too interested and you know that's it's often the way it is in your to interpretation why is it a lost art I think it's because of the medicine you know that you're prescribing air there are very few people that think how we inhale in exhale those 25,000 breaths a day will affect the skeleton skeleton sure of our faces hmm how it will affect our asthma how it will affect our allergies our snoring our sleep apnea our hypertension our psoriasis I mean I can go on and on and on and everyone is extremely skeptical that something so basic that is within our power can be so transformative and I certainly was skeptical as well which is why I was hesitant to go into this world and explore these subjects at the beginning because I thought well what if this is a complete bust right what if these stories that these freedivers were telling me are completely fabricated are their studio science so it took me years of research and luckily I was able to find leaders in the field top institutions Harvard Stanford University of Pennsylvania who were doing this research so I was able to learn from them they took me into their worlds and showed me their science and then showed me studies from 20 years ago 50 years ago and a hundred years ago all of these studies were saying the same thing but for some reason nobody really listened which is still that's a bit of a mystery to me when the science is solid and there's a century of it and yet still people have been hesitant about accepting it but I'm definitely seeing a change in that now with with kovat and our awareness of respiratory health yeah no I agree and you were you were finding it frustrating writing about it try teaching it for so many years and you there's plenty of resistance you know over the years like tell you one thing it really gives you a a very kind of different ie into medicine health and and silos that people operation that you know professions are very stuck to their what they have learned and seldom go outside of the box but what really kind of shocked me was back in 2008 or seven I got a call from a dentist dr. Hugh McDermott and he said I'd love you to give a talk about the importance of nasal breathing to my group of dentists and then I got speaking with them and they told me all about craniofacial growth and I know you've went down this part and you've spoke with different people and nobody seems to know about this the parent who is bringing their child in for orthodontic treatment is not aware rRNA of the impact of mouth breathing on the development of that child's face yeah and this was something where this my path into this research really took a strange turn where in nonfiction writing you submit a proposal and it's about 50 pages and you say these are the people I'm gonna talk to these are the subjects I'm gonna check out this is what I'm gonna do for the next two years so I did that and got a contract to write this book that I thought I had it all figured out and it wasn't till about six months into this research that I realized the real story is several layers below that and I had to throw out my entire contract and six months of work and start over again and it started with a conversation I had with a biological anthropologist to look at the changes in the human body I was talking to people who are looking at the changes in the human face and they asked me a rhetorical question and it was why do humans have crooked teeth and I was like well well we have crooked teeth because of genetics right that's we're just heritage well that doesn't make any sense so doesn't make any sense that you can go into the wild and look at 5400 different mammals and they all look perfectly straight teeth you can take a skeleton a human skeleton from a thousand years ago ten thousand years ago a hundred thousand years ago or million years ago and they have straight teeth they never needed to get their wisdom teeth removed they never needed braces they have perfectly straight teeth so I started thinking about this question more and more and then they started explaining to me that in the last 400 years 300 400 years because of our diet and the softness of our diet our mouths have gone grown so small that our teeth no longer fit so they grown crooked now there's another problem with having a mouth that's too small your Airways smaller which means it's harder to breathe and if your mouth is also small the very top of your mouth that be the arch there be shaped arch ya can penetrate into the sinuses and can inhibit nasal breathing yeah so because of these changes humans are now the most plugged up animals on earth this partly explains why we snore we have sleep apnea certain problems asthma is correlated with this even ADHD on and on and on yeah so this is the really keystone of why we are breathing so bad and yet from what I found nobody's talking about this and nobody knows like why aren't we being told this in school why aren't we being told this before we get braces and I was I was absolutely shocked about why so much of this was has been so I won't say berry but ignored for so long and even though the data the science is absolutely proven and I thought what else is out there something this big is out there what else is out there it's I see you not I mean you know these stories you've known him for 10 years so this is old news to you but for someone coming in out of left field into this world I just couldn't believe it yeah but I'd love to see if I love to see that you've you went out there and you've you found it out and because we've been shouting this from the rooftops and you know sometimes it can be met with resistance and he even with asthma because I is a kid growing up at us my was two child who was snoring having obstructive sleep apnoea I didn't even know it at the time but I was tired school I was falling asleep my my grades were affected I really had to work hard and nobody told me in 20 years to breathe through my nose and I found ice decide for myself and you know I often felt very frustrated and I feel very let down at 25 to 50% of study children are persistently my breathing and with the exception of a few you know there are some really tremendous doctors and orthodontists but that they are the minority in terms of the knowledge that they have and did the advocacy in terms of getting children to breech with the nose and you spoke about the high or purplish dr. Christian game you know he published a paper a few years ago and he looked at young infants who died as a result of sudden infant death syndrome which must be the most traumatic thing that any parent would have to go through all of these kids had a higher purplish and that could have been easily addressed and the only thing that they had proceeding that was a runny nose can you imagine that a runny nose led to the death of these kids you know some hearing hearing more stats like this more data like this even though the book has been Don's been done for a while like oh my god I keep collecting these stories to put in a revised edition because it really feels like awareness even with this and he's down at Stanford top institution yeah and he stopped the dig several layers deep to read any of his papers yeah I don't understand why more people aren't discussing these topics Bree mouse-free you don't have to I think it's because it's buried in medical journals no sadly he passed away about six months ago but you were talking about the science been available their dental cars must back in 1909 wrote about the effect of mouth breathing in kids and have you came to a conclusion you know why hasn't it got out there is it is it because we are stuck in our silos is it because there's too much money to be made am I being cynical by asking that question is there too much money to be made by the current scheme of things with children having crooked teeth allow these kids to mouth bridge or is it people don't have the time or it what's the reasons I think there's too many guilty parties and you can't pin it on on one group or another group you really can't I think awareness is the number one thing and especially and that starts with parents teaching their kids the awareness not mouth reading I mean I look at pictures of me as a kid and I was probably mouth reading the entire time I didn't know didn't know better no one was talking about this and the distinction is important if you're out on a soccer field or you're you know swimming you're breathing through your mouth I swim all the time in the ocean I try to breathe through my nose it's not gonna work when you're ducking up and down but that's an hour out of the day the rest of the time you have to be breathing through nose I think a lot of the resistance is at least from what I've heard from people including runners or other athletes or even people who snore or people who are otherwise feeling healthy that they say well I can't I can't you tell me breathe through my nose I can't breathe through my nose and so that's where I think it's interesting a conversation I had with an Kearney down at Stanford a breathing therapist down there and she mentioned that this is the nose is really a user or lose it organ so she looked at 200 patients with laryngectomy z-- who had a hole drilled in their throat for one reason or the other mostly due to cancer and she found that from 2 to 2 years their nose is completely 100% plugged up so the less the nose is used the less the nose can be used now she was a chronic mouth breather herself this is someone breathing therapist at Stanford yeah and she was scheduled for surgery and she said I don't want surgery I'm gonna try to fix this myself so she started using sleep babe she's really focused on breathing through her nose couple months later she is now yeah digital nose breather and she was so convinced of the power of this that she's now trying to round up a study of 500 people to study the effects of nasal breathing on sleep apnea and snoring so so Stanford big researcher yeah very good institution and still doesn't seem like there's a lot of awareness about this and again I do think it goes back to people just said well I can't so why do I bother and it's and for some people that's true they do need surgery but I would say from my experience the vast majority they just need to try a little harder and focus on it yeah no it's I've had 7,000 people in front of me it's over about 18 years and primarily I was working with teaching nasal breathing for asthma for sleep for anxiety for panic disorder children for craniofacial development there was there were only about 15 people that we weren't able to establish nasal breathing and since 1923 it has been known that if you if you do Breck tolling and physical exercise which amer closed it opens up your nose that when a man or woman when human beings hold their breath their nose open up now it's not exactly known how it's happening but whenever I talk to medical doctors I always steer away from deteriorate except because sometimes when a medical doctor asked me what's going on here like I'll give you an example I gave us a talk to 150 year nose and throat doctors in Madrid last year and I had them all do the exercise all nodding up and downloading their heads and they I seen him then starting to look at each other so obviously they were feeling a difference to their nose but these their ear nose and throat doctors they weren't aware of the exercise obviously and but if we were to talk about what was going on their carbon dioxide this is very it doesn't detract the most accepted reason and but I really like what you said I read that in your book about Kearny and that when we do breach with the nose the nose works absolutely better and you did point out that 60 to 75 percent people have deviated septums as I have for the line going down the is crooked but the human nose is an amazing organ once we start using it and I suppose what you're saying to people is start breathing through your nose even if you feel a bit of air hunger keep on doing it for sure in hearing stats from a clinician like you someone who deals with people daily is really interesting because I'm I'm usually talking to scientists or researchers who are in the lab they're not in the field so if you say you've you've taught 7,000 people have a nasal breathe and 15 of those 7,000 people can imagine yeah that's a pretty good percentage what ninety nine point four percent success rate so when I hear things like that it it inspires me cuz I have to be very careful in how I present this stuff because an EMT is gonna come at me and say you know 40 percent of the people do need surgery and this is why and here the cat scans which is why my I'm speaking from my own perspective and from my own experience I had a cat scan of my nose it is a complete mess deviated said way over here Concha bullosa these growths I mean the NT doctor Jayakar Nayak who helped me with with the study and some of the research for the book he said you are a perfect candidate for surgery if I saw this you're a perfect candidate I thought I'd take another route and start habitually reading from my nose and I feel absolutely no no need for that surgery this is my personal yes Barry it's here I exercise all the time pretty high volumes and I don't feel like I need more air I know that my nose is moderating and allowing me to gain 20% more oxygen breathing through my nose so that's 20% less air I would have to take into my mouth so you start doing the math here and it just makes sense more sense across the board yeah yeah yeah totally and we have a rule of thumb we do the nose and blocking exercise and if the person can breathe through their nose for one minute they can do it for life so even if they feel a little bit of air hunger now I'm not saying that all 7,000 people that I've worked with switch to nasal breathing but what I am saying is that they could switch to nasal breathing and they could breach with their nose because there's also a bit of work in changing the behavior you know when we bear in mind all of the children who were getting tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy there's very little follow-up in terms of restoring nasal breathing with these kids and most notably discharged on will it be mouth waiters because if you have an obstruction to the back of the nose you don't feel that you have enough air so you you you revert to mouth breathing when you feel air hunger breathing through your nose but even when the obstruction room is removed the behavior continues and that's why like I think there should be a respiratory rehabilitation in hospitals with these children that are coming out of tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy and also adults who have no surgery I had no surgery in 1994 but nobody told me true afterwards so I kept breathing through an open mouth until about 1998 and it was a newspaper article where I read about the importance of nasal breathing that newspaper article completely changed my life now coming back to game you know 60 there's a 65% worsening in the ahii index in children which is the apnea hypopnea index within three years unless nasal breathing is not is restored so it's only short-term so we're putting children through traumatic traumatic operations and it's only a short-term outcome if we don't change the behavior and so yeah so it's it's it's really I suppose it comes back to the intelligence of the human body there is so much in the human body if we can tap into it as you say with - awareness so you plug your nose for ten days I know Anders as well by the way and Anders from from Sweden so the two of you plot your noses for ten days I'm intrigued tell me about it so working with NIOSH who is the chief of rhinology research at Stanford I had this idea we know that it's well established now you certainly know this I'm sure your viewers and listeners know this mouth breathing is bad news taking an unfiltered unheated unconditioned air everything about it is bad but nobody really knew how quickly the problems associated with Mal breathing came on they knew after years it could be bad but good few months a mouth breathing to be bad few weeks even a few days nobody knew and I knew nobody was gonna do this study so I convinced Nayak to do a 20-day experiment with me and I wanted one other person because otherwise just an n1 somewhat meaningful but not really meaningful you have two people at least you can look at both datasets and compare them so for 10 days we plugged our noses completely no air was getting in silicon I mean it was awful earplugs of the nodes with tape especially at night really really bad news and the point of this wasn't to do some supersize me stunts really as you had mentioned from 25 to 50% of us our mouth breathers and some of the you know maybe it's just a slightly smaller percentage is mouth breathing all the time so in many ways we're lonely know ourselves into a a state in which the vast huge swath of the population is already experiencing and I had certainly experienced as a kid so we took every imaginable data marker pulmonary function tests blood work cortisol levels hormones co2 both I mean on and on and on and within the first night of forced mouth breathing my snoring increased by thirteen hundred percent a couple days later I was snoring for hours throughout the night I went from snoring about two minutes to four hours in about three days I suddenly got sleep apnea Anders had the exact same experience his was even worse and the day that the glorious day we took all this crap out of our noses and were able to breathe through our mouths or through through our noses as opposed to our mouths all that snoring disappeared and all of the sleep apnea disappeared and all of our scores changed stress levels changed heart rate variability shot through the roof heart rate variability is good you want that I mean I could go on and on and beyond just how we felt fatigue awareness on an emotional level not constantly dehydrated was a tremendous difference and I was lucky enough to feel both sides of this the really bad part of it and the really good part of it after I'd restored proper breathing but a lot of people don't because they're conditioned to constantly breathe through their mouths and their bodies are acclimated to struggle to keep up with mouth breathing to constantly have to defend the body against all the pathogens that come in against the dry air the cold air and all the rest so it was an extremely valuable lesson for me Nayak it was a research scientist very interested in it Anders thought it was fascinating and breathing therapists but it's also something I'm never ever gonna do again and do not suggest anyone else do all of our data sheets are gonna be available online so everyone can see our weight of blood pressure that's another thing my blood pressure just through mouth breathing shut up about 15 points at one point it was 20 points higher right when I switched to nasal breathing it just plummeted yeah yeah no it's I get it I was there and and when you consider the populations who are my operating the ruffed and you know individuals they're not fit like you guys they're not acting like you you guys and there is a relationship that as we get sicker our breathing becomes labored and we will often switch to married and old folks in an old folks home you know their mouth breathing and a question that will often I suppose come up is that there are so many different breathing techniques and everyone one guy is saying this thing and the other guy is saying that thing and tostadas saying whatever and everybody we're all seem to be contradicting each other what's your take on it when you look at slow breathing nose breathing hard breathing using holotropic or the vehm half technique yo you're breathing and the list goes on can you can you give us a commentary on - yeah I was lucky enough to go into this world with no ulterior motive I had absolutely no slant there was no benefit to me to say nasal breathing was really good and I might have had a much more interesting book had I said I just discovered something amazing mouth breathing is so good for the body don't believe 3,000 years of ancient research but but I found that almost everything that the ancients had figured out thousands of years ago is is now some in regards to breathing and especially breathing into the mouth or the nose is now supported by by modern science so what's interesting you mentioned something about seniors and breathing and mouth breathing I think a lot of this is due to what happens to the lungs as we age so starting at around the age of 30 we're gonna start losing our lung capacity so by the time we're 50 we'll have about 12 to 15 percent less by the time we're 80 we'll have about the lung capacity of someone in there maybe 17 17 19 years old so so it shrinks up and it keeps shrinking up and if you look at charts of this it's really scary because when we're very old is when we need respiratory health the most and we don't have it so I believe that that's why some people switch from nasal breathing to mouth reading because they feel they're not getting enough air but what they need to do instead is take slower deeper breaths and engage their diaphragm so that they can get more air more oxygen you get out more toxins with each breath instead of taking hmm tons of little breaths to do the same thing an analogy that I learned was that you know breathing should be looked at like rowing a boat you can take a million short little strokes you can get to where you're going but a pales in comparison doesn't really focused a few very deep very long strokes I really think breathing needs to be considered like that and again I was lucky enough to go into this world not knowing much about it not knowing the researchers so I talked to everybody I talked to the heavy breathers I talked to the wim HOF people talk to the 2mo people holotropic who take a people slow breathers on and on and on and was able to form in my mind what I believe to be a fair assessment of the benefits of all of these things what I learned is they all have benefits so if someone is gonna tell you you can only breathe very shallow very slowly right into your chest you don't want too much breath that has very profound benefits for some people in the population and some time mm-hmm but there are a zillion different ways of breathing as many ways to breathe as there are foods to eat do you think of all the nutritious foods to eat there are a lot of them so why not access all of them to various conditions and learn about them that's what I tried to do in this boat that I did not your books are very close where I did not find this where there was this generalist view of these different areas and these different approaches and how to incorporate them in the backstory and again I think that you know the how of this there's a zillion books on how to breathe right you can go online and find steps on how to breathe right but unless you know why it's important where it came from and what its gonna do for you I find that a lot of people will dismiss it and that's what I try to do is focus on that backstory of how this has been an essential part of human health for thousands of years and how it's just coming out in modern science of how effective and transformative it can really be ya know I think we're stuck in silos I you know it's I was I'm beauti Co is my background of course you know that and with oxygen advantage I open it up for sports because we weren't getting healthy people doing Beauty Co I found to freedom with oxygen advantage so we've now brought in coherent breathing cadence breathing deep breathing so because and I think this is the way like if you train in a particular field it's not up to me to change Beauty Co because you take OS dub you take a method so to his phone I when I started on this journey that I felt to freedom that I could start opening it up and possibly that's what's happening with her and with other therapists as well the ogre world for example I think like Beauty it was very much about the biochemistry and yoga is very much about the biomechanics and coherent breathing is about heart rate variability but beauty Coe is not looking really at the biomechanics in an HIV and hecho RV isn't looking at the biomechanics and M biochemistry and that's what I felt I had to open up as well and you've certainly touched on it in great detail in this book and so the other thing is the I was always wondering about holotropic breathing how it was bringing benefits I was teaching people to reverse chronic hyperventilation for almost 20 years and then I went to do a talk and holotropic and I nearly ran out of the room because they were doing the absolute OPS's and geez I better get out of here but I didn't I stayed what's your take how does it work well if you look at the original yoga it was not intended to heal people of problems you were supposed to do yoga once you were already healthy and this would allow you to go the next rung up and human potential so something like holotropic if you're dealing with with someone who has was a constant hyperventilate ER that's probably the worst thing you could do is have them go in hyperventilate some somewhere else so this is another reason why I think you have to be a generalist about this stuff I you know someone and I've seen how profoundly holotropic breathing works with people with certain conditions absolutely works from eyford but pardon for trauma for trauma for chronic anxieties for even there was a study where someone used it with 11,000 patients in st. Louis and and studied 480 of them and found this therapy worked better than any other therapy for serious mental disorders like even schizophrenia zone depression and addiction so it's a great tool but I've also seen on the other end how effective Buteyko is I've talked to several people who both teach Buteyko and several people who have been been cured or healed or bettered their life through Buteyko breathing no doubt it absolutely works but when you talk to a lot of Buteyko teachers they say this is the one way you have to breathe all the time limit your air intake never want to take these deep breaths never sleep on your back and that's true for a lot of people some of the time but not for all of the people all the time and so I really think just like how the medical community needs to start looking outside of their specific silos start looking beyond pathologies and looking at prevention I think the breathing community would benefit from doing the same and looking at all of these different ways of breathing all of these different therapies and adjusting them per for the clients who are coming in as far as what they need so specifically to your question like I would consider holotropic once you have the foundations of Helly healthy breathing so you know how to breathe slow didn't breathing less you're always ringing through your nose big exhale then you can go this next step up and I call it in the book there's the last section of the books called breathing plus cuz you need to have that foundation before you go into it because it gets pretty wild but I was interested enough in it and uh I tried it out talked to Stan Grof who invented this in the 70s and looked at the science to it and what I did find was so interesting was that a lot of the therapists that I talked to said breathing like this oxygenates the body that's why you're having these hallucinations that's why you're able to remove yourself from normal consciousness and go into your subconscious and unconscious thought but what you're doing is absolutely it's the opposite so if you are denying yourself in your brain of oxygen up up to you know 40 percent which is an incredible amount that's not to say this isn't therapeutic completely therapeutic but to be able to understand the from a scientific perspective and to acknowledge that that you're not oxygenating your body we're depriving that but there is a benefit in consciously depriving yourself of oxygen this counterintuitive as that sounds and that's why again why I call these therapies breathing plus because they're definitely they're the step up they're gonna kick your butt in a lot of ways but they can also work pretty tremendously so so it's really it's it's hyperventilation over a sustained period of time and when I was reading the the few paragraphs in it this it seemed that you you used the word recess it's almost that you're that the is it that the I let you you discuss such how do you think it might be working so if you look at someone with anxiety and and how slow breathing would benefit them you're helping them to increase their tolerance for co2 I think that's that's a big benefit you're engaging their diaphragms so they're able to calm themselves and most importantly they're you're able to put them back in their bodies so they can control their mental states whenever you're feeling panicked or anxious and just stop for a moment read through your nose set yourself up and breathe slowly mmm absolutely works I've talked to psychiatrists who use this for patients with depression or anxiety or bulimia absolutely works but for some people they need a little harder shove in that direction and they're willing to take that so for them I think that this conscious overbreeding can be effective because it shows them how to turn on acute stress and it shows them how to turn it off so you are not relaxing yourself when you're breathing for three hours in a room with Lehren music in here as hard as you as heart I don't know if any of your listeners have done this but it's pretty wild experience your breathing as hard as you can for three hours there's nothing relaxing about that the benefit of this is you try to blow a fuse in your brain and reset your system so that afterwards you're going to spend next few weeks few months few years in a state of relaxation so it's turning on stressed specifically to turn it off and that's what wim HOF does as well that is a stress state you're putting yourself in with with Touma wim Hof's version of to melt and then after you do that for 20 minutes you can spend the next 23 and a half hours in a state of relaxation which is where you really want to be you're not half stressed and you're not half relaxed you're either fully stressed or fully relaxed I do too mo I do heavy breathing every other day a big fan of it I can definitely feel a difference in myself being able to control my nervous system and even my immune function this way it really does all that and that's backed up by various studies mm-hmm yeah there's interesting study about vim Huff from Matthias Cox back in 2014 where they injected endotoxins and I think it's very appropriate appropriate in today's climate with bovid and I really like the paragraph that you used and about doctors who are one doctor made a comment about TB patients back some some one thing in nineteen twenties about mouth-breathing yeah so this again I call this the new signs of a lost art because it seems like we figured this stuff out numerous times forgotten about it and it keeps popping up in a different culture at a different time but in the 20s the head of a large Hospital had studied people with tuberculosis and he said I forget the percentage it was up to 60 or 70 percent he said or chronic mouth breathers and there was an absolute correlation with the onset and the infection rates of tuberculosis in the pathway in which we're breathing but this was in the 20s and even before him this had been something that was that was known I had heard from another researcher I haven't been able to find the study and looked and looked that somebody did a large study of sailors of sailors who were in the same ship at the same time those who are mouth breathing those who were nasal breathing and the onset of illness between those two groups so you know III don't know if there's anyone willing or curious enough to do a study like this today but I do think it would be interesting we do know about in in regards to COBIT that respiratory health it absolutely affects the level at which you're gonna be suffering from symptoms of mobit absolutely so this this isn't something that we should think about once we get Kovac it's something we need to focus on now to help prevent us from it's not gonna stop you from getting the virus okay but it is going to help you deal with it deal with the symptoms of it much better and we do know that yeah yeah just even the gas nitric oxide is an antiviral and emanating from the nose in the nasal cavity and just clinical trials now underway and in the United States if you if you look at clinical trials nitric oxide dovid and but one one aspect was this person Slough can you talk a little bit about I actually felt sorry for the individual at the end he did such tremendous work yeah maybe a little bit out there but some of us are a little bit out there you know you don't go into something on the fringes of society unless you are out there you have to be a little bit of a pioneer and it's kind of a you know you think of little bit left the field because if we were all mainstream we would be accountants or we would be and you know we'd be very much in the mainstream professions and slow his his or her story I can't remember and I was in a manner of female but yes so this is just another example of someone who was brought into breathing and the research of breathing and using breathing as a therapy who had absolutely no interest or no motive to do so but just found it was the one thing that worked he was a choral teacher and found that so many of his singers weren't singing well because they weren't exhaling properly so he taught them this way of inhaling fully engaging their diaphragm and really exhaling properly because if you think about singing or talking or any vocalizations always made on the exhale so you really have to focus on on exhaling if you're gonna become a better singer for and have a better tone and resonance so we developed this method of this diaphragmatic breathing these exercises to develop the respiratory health and the lungs and the ability to exhale more thoroughly and he became quite famous famous enough that the Met Opera hired him to start training with with opera singers so he did this for a number of years until he got a call from the chief of emphysema management at a very large VA hospital on the East Coast who said you seem to know something about breathing that we don't want you come down here we've got a bunch of patients for you so he went to the hospital is absolutely horrified for the for the past 50 years they would take people with emphysema and roll them into this room and put oxygen put a mask up to him and leave him there to basically die they had no way of treating them they got infections they give him antibiotics beyond that they would prop a pillow on their back so their chest would be trained up so sound knew enough about breathing that he knew that having a pillow in your back is the worst thing you could possibly do knowing that more of the lungs are gonna flex in your back than in the chest so if you have someone with emphysema you don't want to place them on their back all the time you want to sit them up or have them at least on their sides so we started with that started training these patients and they suddenly had these remarkable recoveries so by just engaging their diaphragms they were breathing like this you know cuz that's the only that was the muscle memory of breathing they had got this high in their chest you know just by turning that five percent of diaphragmatic capacity to about 10% then 20% and 50% just half of where it should be yeah it's such a tremendous this impact they stopped using oxygen several did this was after several weeks it wasn't a next day kind of thing yeah started walking around them and walked around for four years at a time and several left the hospital and we're fine yeah so the stout worked within the hospital system for about ten years and this wasn't a placebo effect because they started taking extra x-rays and x-ray films of what was happening and they even the staff found that what he was doing was considered medically impossible you weren't supposed to be able to develop an internal organ they said you can't develop the longest you can't develop so in other words the irreversible damage in the lung tissue is was being healed that lung tissue damage was irreversible okay which was still irreversible okay when the the alveoli is when it's when it's gone it's gone rocky rocky Olli are detached from the out there's no way to get that bad what he was doing though was expanding their lungs in their lung maybe they had lost 10% of their lungs but they still had ninety 90 percent of the healthy lungs and by just that he was able to to really restore these nations to hell and when he when he left the hospital system all of his therapy left I know such a pity and today look at the treatments for emphysema there's four million Americans who have emphysema yeah it's bronchodilators it's antibiotics it's diet training it's the helping to quit smoking there's no talk about the diaphragm yeah yeah I think it's really important but emphysema that you know it's inevitable when we're suffocating that we are going to have labored breathing fast upper chest breathing and as you said it's totally inefficient because all we are doing is bringing air into dead space and with the human lungs the greatest concentration is in the lower lobes so which stars work in terms of bringing the breath down into the regions have to die from that as the patient is breathing in that their ribs are moving out and as the patient is breathing out the ribs are moving in and he did manual manipulation there as well if you can breathe slower you waste so you know in slower breathing is just more economical because if we're breathing 20 breaths per minute and 150 mil of that air is dead space when there's 20 by 150 that's lost the dead space so there's three liters that is not going to getting down into the alveoli for gas exchange to take place and I know if you do the calculations and I took them from bernardi's work and I see your sighted luciana Bernardi as well that 12 breaths per minute and a tidal volume of a half a liter he gives you six liters and of that 4.2 litres gets into the smaller air sacs but when you reduce the respiratory rate from 12 breaths down to six breaths per minute and if you allowed to tidal volume to increase to a thousand alveolar ventilation increases to five point one percent and you gave the figure twenty percent earlier on which is very close to that and it's amazing it often even with physical exercise why do people not breathe with remote closed and doing physical exercises I know that's another topic of conversation I want to come back to the vim Huff technique in the injecting of two endotoxins did you look at that paper and what was your take Enosh yeah I it seemed irrefutable what they came up with and what really throws people off about the wim HOF technique is the benefit and the benefit is you're stimulating adrenaline you're stimulating norepinephrine you're stimulating cortisol and we've learned in our lives that having these things in your body is bad cortisols back get that cortisol down north never get that down adrenaline like if you really need it but but you don't want to run on adrenaline you need to get that down but what people don't understand about this is when you consciously do this when you willingly place yourself into a state for 20 minutes hold your breath mm-hmm this has tremendous tremendous benefits if you look at people with autoimmune disease is incurable autoimmune diseases that goes type on diabetes rheumatoid arthritis yeah psoriasis eczema these people nothing else had worked for them once they learned how to control their nervous system they were able to help control their immune system once they were able to control their immune system so many of the symptoms of these chronic conditions were baited and it's the combination of occasional cold therapy but also but mostly breathing and I say mostly breathing because I've gotten some flack from wim HOF people they say no the cold therapy that's the most important thing breathing the secondary it's not if you look at other heavy breathing techniques like Sudarshan Kriya which is the same exact thing not same exact pretty close heavy breathing to very slow breathing heavy breathing to very slow breathing has the same almost the same list of benefits and helps here or lessen the symptoms of almost all the same conditions as wim HOF so when I look at that the cold therapy absolutely works super important it's great but it breathing is the anchor here yeah I think we have to be very careful what I say about the vim half because that anything that I say I get a lot of flack as well and you know it can be meant with the best of intentions because all I'm trying to do is explore bright and I think that's very interesting about surgery there's a therapy that goes fast breathing which is going to stimulate everything and stress the body and then slow breathing which is doing the complete opposite to stimulate the vagus nerve to activate the parasympathetic response and back to fast breathing it's it's amazing stuff you know it's it's tremendous in terms of what you must have been surprised you're you've written your book and I know it's been it's it's out it's available in the United States we're currently in May okay it's made May 26 so I don't know when you gonna be putting this out so a couple weeks I put it on next week and then yeah and Oh perfect and then in July in the UK it's supposed to come out at the same time but this pandemic think gotten away with distribution so July it will be in the UK and your overall take from your journey as an independent person looking into the bread do you feel that breathing is going to become more mainstream get more science it's already happening you know I I wasn't the one to really dig this up and I'm not gonna be the one to you know be the big catalyst to get people thinking about it my team I don't think I did I I hopped on a wave at the right time right with with what is happening in the scientific community and how people are talking about this stuff I think 10 years it would have been a different story but there is so much awareness right now even in pulmonology even in ER even in ryan ology about the importance of breathing and again this stuff is being studied at top institutions and I knew that a lot of people are gonna be apprehensive about these facts which is why I put on my website now the bibliographies there there's 557 scientific references so if you don't agree with my conclusions you can check that stuff out yourself and come to your own conclusions but from from what I've learned and I really believe this at this point this is something that a researcher told me years ago he said how we breathe is as important as how much we exercise and what foods we eat it's this missing pillar of health and it needs to be considered alongside those things if you really want to have a long and healthy life and I absolutely at this point agree with that more than at any other time you believe in that - thank you very much James Thank You Patrick

Channel: Oxygen Advantage®

Views: 303,684

Keywords: patrick mckeown, oxygen advantage, breathing sports, breathing muscles, strenghten breathing muscles, respiratory muscle training, athlete breathing, improved aerobic performance, reduced breathlessness, exercise induced asthma, high performance breathing, performance breathing, golf

Id: wl4J2LMXcx8

Length: 53min 3sec (3183 seconds)

Published: Mon May 18 2020