The Future of Breathing (Talk + Q&A) | James Nestor

hi i'm nicholas paul breiswitz the director of development here at the long now foundation and i want to begin tonight's program by letting you know how much we appreciate your support for our work long now is a non-profit organization and every one of our projects and programs is entirely funded by members and donors like you so thank you for helping us foster long-term thinking we believe that civilization scale challenges call for this kind of civilization scale thinking and this has been an especially challenging year for so many people and so many organizations including ours if you're able please consider making a special donation to our annual fundraising campaign you can make an online donation in just minutes by visiting longnow.org support by making a tax-deductible gift to the long now foundation you'll not only be helping an organization directly affected by this civilization scale challenge but you'll be helping us help everyone get better at addressing all such civilization scale challenges learn more at longnow.org support and please don't forget to ask your employer if they have a charitable gift matching program that could double or even triple your impact on long-term thinking thank you again for all your support enjoy the seminar hello i'm alexander rose the executive director here at long now we are coming to you from the interval here in san francisco where james nestor and i will watch the pre-recorded talk with you all and stay on to answer questions afterward many of you may remember james from his talk he gave here at the interval on the way humans can hold their breath for tens of minutes at a time and how that ability came from our underwater ancestry in his most recent book james takes us on a deep dive in a very different way into the way that we actually breathe and how that has been affected by modern agriculture and dentistry welcome james nester thank you xander several years ago i came here and spoke at the long now foundation about the human connection to the ocean i talked about magnetoreception this kind of natural form of gps that allows sharks and whales and even humans to navigate the world without a map i talked about echolocation and how cetaceans and people too can actually see without ever opening our eyes and i talked about these people freedivers athletes who had honed the mammalian dive reflexes that all marine mammals share and use them to dive hundreds of feet deep on a single breath of air when i asked these free divers how they could do what they did they told me it was easy anyone in reasonable health could do it all you had to do was master the art of breathing it was only by really learning how to breathe that we could survive underwater for five six seven eight minutes at a time and plummet to such extreme depths but these free divers told me something else they told me that the art of breathing extended beyond just deep diving they told me about a man who'd been injected with the bacterial endotoxin e coli then breathed in a rhythmic pattern to stimulate his immune system and destroy the toxins within minutes they told me about a woman who'd overcome decades of autoimmune diseases by simply changing the way she breathed and they told me about an 85 year old who'd rediscovered an ancient practice to super heat himself and sit in the snow for hours without ever getting hypothermia or frostbite again using only his breath all of this sounded insane of course and i look forward to finding these charlatans and exposing them but as i began digging more deeply into the art of breathing after i spent months and months reading through scientific studies and talking to experts in the field i discovered that these impossible stories were actually true breathing was this extraordinary tool we could all use to hack into otherwise autonomic functions we could breathe in ways to control our nervous system shift our brain states even correct our skelecature each of us takes in about 30 pounds of air in and out of our bodies every single day far more than we eat and drink the new science of breathing was showing us that how we took in all of that air and how we exhaled it determined so much of our health our lifespan and our human potential how we breathe was in many ways as important as what we ate or how much we exercised it really was a missing pillar of health the experts i began working with told me something else that most of us are breathing all wrong now i've been breathing my whole life as of all of you and i thought i've been doing it well enough after all i'm still here i'm still alive but breathing it turns out is not a binary practice it's not just if we do it or if we don't do it it's how we do it that's so important and so many of us have forgotten how to breathe healthily about nine percent of the us population suffers from asthma about 16 million of us suffer from copd it's the third leading cause of death about half of a snore about 20 percent of us suffer from nightly exfixiation known as sleep apnea this list goes on and on and on these respiratory problems and other poor breathing habits can exacerbate or in some cases cause a laundry list of serious health issues increased risk of stroke adhd heart disease there were even links between poor breathing and metabolic problems like diabetes so how did this happen how have humans become so divorced from our most basic biological function the answers i was told could be found in ancient human skulls it turns out that the pathway through which humans take in and exhale air has changed dramatically in the past few centuries because the human face has dramatically changed over the past few centuries and for the worst wait what i'd always learned in school that evolution is a straight line forward of progress it's all about survival of the fittest and darwinism and all that but as i waded deeper into this research i learned that that interpretation of evolution is wrong evolution means change and life can change for better or for worse take for instance the concept of natural selection natural selection does not produce organisms perfectly suited to their environments instead natural selection produces a range of traits that allow a species to be good enough to survive we just need to be good enough to pass on our genes to the next generation this helps explain why humans have grown more obese why we've grown more myopic why we've grown more allergic depressed and fragile none of these traits are of any benefit to us they aren't making us stronger or faster or more resilient but at the same time they aren't really stopping us from breeding harvard anthropologist daniel lieberman coined a name for this kind of regressive change he called it dis evolution and to a large extent this dis-evolution explains why humans have also become such poor breathers in other words we weren't always this way just a few centuries ago our mouths and our sinuses and our airways were vastly different they allowed us in many ways to breathe more easily i visited the museum of archaeology and anthropology at the university of pennsylvania to see how we'd changed the museum contains one of the largest collections of pre-industrial skulls in the world the lead curator there janet monge showed me a few dozen different ancient human skulls and every single one of them had these powerful jaws these wide faces and these broad mouths monge pointed out something else these skulls had perfect teeth the skull you see here is not some rarity monge told me that she'd never seen a hunter gather with crooked teeth not one of them this was true for all humans all over the world in india africa china europe south america and more the further back in time you went to 5 000 years old 50 000 years old 150 000 years old you'd see even more powerful jaws even wider nasal passages even bigger mouths you'd see universally perfectly straight teeth here's the jaw of one of the oldest human skulls it's about 300 000 years old notice its teeth perfectly straight even older a million years ago our skulls looked like this notice the huge nasal cavity here this very wide and powerful forward-growing face again straight teeth the skull you are seeing now is about 8 000 years old still this very large powerful jaw forward growing face straight teeth now look at how our skulls look about 2000 years ago notice how much smaller the jaw is getting how the face is more narrow still straight teeth but things are getting tighter here is how we look today almost like another species very narrow jaw small mouth very slender face with a mouth this small teeth no longer fit they have to fight for space so they grow in crooked ninety percent of us now have some sort of misalignment or malocclusion in our teeth this is why we need extractions and braces and headgear and all that our teeth no longer fit in our two small mouths there's another problem in having a mouth that's too small for its face it's given humans a different kind of profile what you're seeing now is a typical profile of an ancient skull almost every single skull measured at the museum of archaeology and anthropology was found to be ahead of that perpendicular line what's called a prognathic profile but in the last 300 400 years our profiles have been receding 90 of the human population now has a face that grows behind that perpendicular line called a retrognathic profile there's a more serious issue to having this retrognathic profile than just aesthetics it's shrunken our airways a smaller mouth and flatter face means less room to breathe this is why so many of us have such a hard time getting air in and out of our bodies beyond a few breeds of bulls pugs or other highly inbred brachycephalic dogs modern humans are the only species to consistently share these traits we are perhaps the only mammals in the history of life on earth to have chronically crooked teeth these researchers told me something else if i didn't believe any of this all i needed to do was look at animals in the wild so of course i did i looked at chimps they all have perfectly straight teeth i looked at berberaf mccox straight teeth dolphins straight teeth i looked at my mutt of a dog straight teeth meanwhile this is what we're stuck with and if we don't do anything about it we can end up looking like this this is how we became the worst breathers in the animal kingdom so much for survival of the fittest all of this brings up a larger question why why did this happen to us and what caused it how could our mouths shrink and airways become so obstructed so quickly i looked to the national institutes of health for answers they provided a very clear answer they said that crooked teeth were mostly inherited we get them from our parents great but that does nothing to explain why our ancestors just a few hundred years ago were so well formed and why the vast majority of us today are so messed up i became pretty obsessed with tracking this down and so i wanted to see more skulls specifically i wanted to see the turning point when our faces fell apart on a mass scale i wanted to do this to really get my head around this subject and in order to do this i needed to get my hands on some skulls old ones and lots of them i called some friends at a foundation which shall remain nameless the longmouth foundation and one of them told me my best chance of stumbling upon a large trove of centuries-old skulls was to fly to paris and crawl 60 feet below the garden of luxembourg down there within 170 miles of old limestone quarries was one of the largest graveyards on earth six million skeletons dating back from a couple thousand years to a couple hundred years so i arrived in paris and was put in contact with some freelance urban explorers they were three women in pantsuits and they called themselves cataphiles they'd spent years mapping out the underground passageways and claimed to know the location of an ancient ossuary filled with a few thousand victims of a cholera epidemic that ravaged paris in 1832 this was the time in western history when small mouths crooked teeth and obstructed airways became the norm throughout paris and much of industrialized europe these cataphiles had spent countless days and nights exploring where there were no tourists no descriptive plaques no ropes no lights and no rules where nothing was off limits to be clear this wasn't the most legal thing i've ever done after an hour of climbing and digging through caves and hallways we reached an enormous pile of fibulas ribs and jaws bones all of them human and skulls hundreds and hundreds of them i'll admit i was very much a novice at inspecting skeletons but there really was a clear difference in the shape and symmetry of these skulls from the 1800s compared to the hunter gatherers and other ancient indigenous populations i'd seen before these were the patient zeros the modern obstructive face i left paris mildly haunted to think that we've been so perfect for so long and then just devastated by this diss evolution in a relative blink of an eye but then again why what was it that changed in the 1800s to cause all of this damage i still didn't know and i wasn't the first person to wonder turned out that dozens of scientists from all over the world have been asking the same question for hundreds of years i started pouring through their research trying to piece together the story of our breathing and how it all went so wrong for much of the past two millennia the commonly held belief was that disease deformities and other ailments were caused by some sort of toxic exposure of some noxious and dirty stuff infiltrating our bodies and making us sick the ancient romans had a name for it they called it miasma which meant bad air they believed miasma emanated from the ground or from the breath of snakes and other poisonous animals if we were exposed to too much of it we might get a skin disease or bubonic plague maybe we'd get leprosy or crooked teeth so human sickness was spread through these huge clouds of poisonous air this miasma theory stuck around until around the late 1700s when a dutch drape shop owner named anthony van leeuwenhoek began collecting glass lenses in a metal tube constructing the first super powerful microscope lewinhoke intended to use this device to inspect the thread he was selling in his shop but after a while he got curious began inspecting other stuff skin sperm wood pulp insects and rain water he noticed something extraordinary festering within substances were these little organisms he called them little animals or animolecules lemonhoak determined that yes our bodies were being infiltrated by toxins and these substances were making us sick perhaps even deforming us but it wasn't miasma it was these little evil animolecules they would later get a different name we would call them germs so germ paranoia quickly spread throughout europe people began covering their mouths and their bodies and their windows anything to keep these little beasts away but no matter how well populations clean themselves no matter how many face masks they wore people kept getting sick and even stranger whole populations started getting sick with new diseases nobody had ever seen before that few had even heard of city dwellers in england were among the hardest hit in the 16 and 1700s tens of thousands of children men and women began suffering from bendable bones babies were born that couldn't sit up or move they couldn't really hold their heads up or even crawl many had deformed jaws and mouths and had difficulty just getting a breath in and out one doctor at the time wrote their bones were flexible like wax that is rather liquid so that the flabby and toneless legs scarcely sustain the weight of the superimposed body this new disease seemed to affect the rich more than the poor king charles of england suffered from it later his daughter would die of it deformities of the bones became so common that the condition would be referred to as the english disease it would later be called rickets the king blamed ricketts on britain's damp climate but britain's climate hadn't changed it was as damp and dreary and awful as it had always been what had changed was the english diet around this time at the dawn of the industrial age a whole host of new technologies were developed to process food more quickly and cheaply roller mills and later steam mills ripped the germ and bran from wheat leaving only a soft white flour meats and fruits and vegetables were canned and bottled sugar which was once a prized commodity of the wealthy became increasingly common and inexpensive for the first time in human history humans could spend their entire lives eating nothing but processed food nothing fresh nothing raw nothing natural and millions did and as they did millions became sick with new mysterious ailments all the while the human face began rapidly deteriorating mouths shrank and facial bones grew stunted dental disease became common in the incidence of crooked teeth and jaws increased tenfold our mouths got so bad so overcrowded that it became common to have teeth removed altogether these maladies affected not just england but cities throughout continental europe really anyone who subsisted on this new diet bottled processed industrialized food meanwhile while all of this awfulness was going on in continental europe people living in asia were suffering from yet another entirely new and strange disease it too started with a shortness of breath then a numbness would take over the hands and feet legs would become paralyzed the mouth would become grossly deformed and teeth would fall out this disease was called beriberi named after the sri lankan senelese words for week week or i cannot i cannot said twice to add emphasis by the early 19th century barry berry was responsible for 35 of all sicknesses in asia a quarter of the japanese navy was afflicted and more than a million people in the region would die like ricketts it too was believed to have been spread by germs but eventually researchers found the real culprit once again it was industrialized food advances in industrial milling made it quick and cost effective to remove the germ and bran from rice leaving only the starchy white seed white rice was considered better tasting and of higher quality than the brown chewy pre-milled variety it quickly became the staple of asian diets but this white rice was also deforming people and making them sick what was making everyone so sick wasn't something in the rice it wasn't germs it was what the rice was lacking beriberi was a disease of deficiency the bran and germ of rice contained something called thiamin thiamin would later be called a vital amine or vitamin it turned out that rice bran and germ was a rich source of vitamins specifically vitamin b without sufficient levels of b the muscles and nerves can't function properly teeth would become crooked and mouths would deform breathing would become labored the exact ingredient removed during industrial milling was vitamin b ricketts was also a disease of deficiency but the missing ingredient causing all of those bendable bones and mashed mouths was vitamin d the richest forms of vitamin d were found in butter fish oils or suet all foods that had been removed in the modern diet animal bodies can also make vitamin d but they need regular exposure to sunlight in smoggy soot filled london and other industrialized cities throughout europe sunlight was in short supply and even when the sun did shine modesty required that populations be covered from head to toe by the late 1800s and early 1900s vitamins b c and d were distributed via supplements juices or other nutrient-rich sources incidents of beriberi throughout asia quickly plummeted and practically disappeared as did ricketts this was the age of vitamins one of the greatest revolutions in medical history this new understanding of nutrition enabled us to blunt then almost entirely kill off so many epidemics which had plagued humans for hundreds and hundreds of years hooray for vitamins and yet something wasn't quite right no matter how much orange juice we drank no matter how much sun exposure we got our mouths just kept getting smaller and smaller our teeth kept growing more crooked and our breeding became more obstructed and labored by the 1920s a cincinnati-based dentist and researcher by the name of weston price was seeing it firsthand each new generation of kids he treated were suffering from worse and worse dental disease and crooked teeth price's own son would die after a dental procedure and still nobody knew why price dedicated the rest of his life to finding out but price took a different approach working alongside a national geographic researcher and explorer price compiled more than 15 000 print photographs more than 4 000 slides he compiled saliva and food samples and a library of detailed notes the same story played out no matter where he went societies that had replaced their traditional diet with industrialized foods suffered up to 10 times more cavities severely crooked teeth obstructed airways respiratory issues and overall poorer health the modern diets were all the same white flour white rice jam sweetened juice canned vegetables and processed meats the traditional diets were all different he traveled to the swiss alps and visited villages where the locals ate a diet that consisted almost entirely of hand-milled bread and homemade raw milk cheese he traveled to the scottish isles where the populations ate mostly fish and oatmeal to alaska where communities subsisted almost entirely on seal fish and lichen deep inside melanesia islands he found tribes whose meals consisted of pumpkins pawpaws coconut crabs and sometimes long pigs also known as humans some cultures ate nothing but meat while others were mostly vegetarian some relied primarily on homemade cheese while others consumed no dairy at all their teeth were almost always perfect their mouths were exceptionally wide their nasal apertures broad they suffered from few if any cavities in dental disease respiratory problems like asthma or even tuberculosis price reported were practically non-existent while the foods in these diets may have all varied they all contained the same high amounts of vitamins and minerals from one and a half to 50 times that of modern diets all of them price became convinced that the cause of our shrinking mouths and obstructive airways was deficiencies not just in b or c or d but of all essential vitamins vitamins after all often work in symbiosis one needs the other to be effective this explained why supplements could be useless unless they were in the presence of other supplements we needed the full spectrum to develop strong bones throughout the body especially in the mouth and face by 1939 price published nutrition and physical degeneration a 500 page door stop of data that he collected during his travels it was a quote masterpiece of research according to the canadian medical association journal ernest houghton a harvard professor called it one of the ethical pieces of research but others hated it they couldn't comprehend that these so-called primitive people had somehow shared in systems of health that were far superior than those in the modern world in the end price turned out only to be half right yes vitamin deficiencies might explain why so many people eating industrialized foods were sick but they couldn't fully explain the sudden and extreme shrinking of the mouth and the blocking of airways that had swept through modern societies even if our ancestors consumed a full spectrum of vitamins and minerals every day mouths would very likely still grow too small what was true for our ancestors was also true for us because the problem had less to do with what we were eating than how we ate it chewing it was the constant stress of chewing that was lacking from our diets not specifically vitamins a b c or d 95 of the industrialized diet was soft our ancient ancestors chewed for hours a day every day because they chewed so much their mouths their teeth their throats and their faces grew to be wide and strong and pronounced this larger mouth with straighter teeth allowed them to breathe more easily food in industrialized societies was so processed that it hardly required any chewing at all here's some of the industrialized mush that i grew up eating yes of course i had extractions yes of course i need braces and headgear and everything else here's the typical modern american diet today cheese sauces baked goods spaghetti fried roots it's all soft even what's considered healthy foods smoothies yogurt avocados oatmeal it's all soft healthy chewing starts in infancy the chewing and sucking stress required for breastfeeding exercises the masseter and other facial muscles and stimulates more bone growth allowing for that upper palate to drop which leads to wider airways tell a few hundred years ago mothers would breastfeed infants up to two to four years sometimes even longer the more time infants spent chewing and sucking the more they'd increase their chances of breathing better later on in life with industrialization came bottle feeding and baby formula soon in many societies infants were hardly breastfed at all now dozens and dozens of studies in the past two decades have supported this claim they've shown lower incidence of snoring and sleep apnea in infants who were breastfed longer versus those who were bottle-fed this is why so many of the skulls that i'd examined in the museum of archaeology and anthropology that i'd seen at the paris quarries this is why they had narrow faces and crooked teeth it's one of the main reasons why so many of us today are chronically stuffed up why our airways are clogged why we need sprays and pills and surgery just to get a fresh breath of air a couple weeks ago i was corresponding with dr kevin boyd he's a pediatric dentist and biological anthropologist in chicago boyd has spent years working with dr marianna evans at the university of pennsylvania trying to more deeply understand how our mouths have changed through the lack of chewing and how this has changed our breathing and our health they've spent a lot of time examining fetal skulls boyd shared with me some of his research here are some pre-industrial fetal skulls from around two to three hundred years ago these fetuses were from around 18 to 32 weeks old you'll notice that profile that pronatic growth that pronounced jaw that wider face now on the left is another pre-industrial fetal skull and on the right a very typical modern skull at around the same stage of development notice the difference in profiles notice on the right that retrognathic growth the receding jaw the smaller mouth all of the hallmarks of a modern obstructed airway again another modern skull and another you get the idea our clogged airways and two small mouths are now heritable traits they are getting passed down and appear to becoming more pronounced with every new generation in other words most modern humans are screwed right out of the gate this helps explain why so many infants snore why they suffer from sleep apnea and as a result why so many kids now are afflicted with adhd and other chronic health issues they can't breathe and if they can't breathe they can't sleep and if they can't sleep and breathe properly cognitive and skeletal development takes a big hit but i didn't research the ever shrinking mouth and human disevolution just to dwell on the negative i wanted to uncover the core underlying problems of our breathing so that we could understand them so that we could better diagnose them and do something about it so we could find ways of fixing our breathing and improving our health and luckily i discovered that so much of this disevolution in our mouths and airways is reversible there's a sweeping movement in dentistry right now focused on straightening teeth while also widening our two small mouths so many patients with sleep apnea or snoring even allergies and asthma have had their issues go away once they could breathe normally again by widening the mouth to the size it was supposed to have been we can also return to that pronatic profile as an experiment i wore a device that stimulated chewing stress and minimal palatal expansion at night in an attempt to fix my own obstructive breathing after a year i developed about 15 to 20 percent more space in my airways now the irony isn't lost on me with all this how odd it is today that we are using industrialized technologies to restore ourselves to the way we were supposed to have been hundreds of thousands of years before industrialized technologies damaged us but life is a paradox and what are you going to do about it not all of us need such procedures to restore our breathing for some of us our airways are just fine we're suffering from other poor breathing habits due to other environmental factors like polluted air constant stress or poor posture correcting these inputs is even more simple sitting and standing straight allows more air to enter our lungs more easily i found a researcher who'd actually used breathing to straighten scoliotic spines these methods are now being used at johns hopkins and other institutions breathing through the nose has innumerable benefits and today up to 25 to 50 percent of the modern population habitually breathes through its mouth this makes us more susceptible to snoring and sleep apnea and various respiratory problems mouth breathing actually impacts our ability to think the solution here is even more simple just shut your mouth by breathing through the nose we can filter air heat it moisten it and condition it we get 20 percent more oxygen in nasal breaths than we do equivalent breaths through the mouth so nasal breathing also helps protect us from viruses and other pathogens which is especially important today it's really our first line of defense with a bit more effort we can learn breathing practices to hack into our nervous systems to heat ourselves and to heal ourselves even more some practices have been shown to blunt or in some miraculous instances effectively cure a laundry list of modern maladies like autoimmune diseases asthma and anxiety so none of this should really come as too much of a surprise the ancients have been writing about the power of breathing for thousands of years almost every major religion and dozens of ancient cultures from the greeks to the buddhists the hindus to the native americans celebrated breathing as a medicine indian yogis train themselves to decrease the amount of air they take in at rest not increase it they'd adjust the air coming in through different nostrils to elicit different physiological responses the history of these practices goes back around 4 000 years the ancient chinese wrote seven books entirely focused on breathing all the bad things that would happen if we did it incorrectly and all the benefits of doing it right the chinese called their system of conscious breathing qigong chi meaning breath gong meaning work or put together breath work a quote from the dao reads therefore the scholar who nourishes his life refines the form and nourishes his breath isn't this evident i think it's becoming more evident now just in the past decade hundreds and hundreds of studies are showing clear measurable benefits of adopting healthy breathing habits a quick search on pubmed shows more than 46 000 research studies on how breathing affects the body and the mind this work is being done at top institutions and the vast majority of the data is confirming what so many of the ancients have said for so many thousands of years that how we breathe really is a missing pillar of health i only hope that this time around we don't soon forget it thank you very much for your time thank you so much james well um as you can see um since we recorded this doc in my intro we've had a shelter in place order uh come through the bay area and so we'll be doing the questions from each of our homes i'd like to welcome uh james nester thanks a lot for having me hey hey thanks for being here and um and we also have uh dr kevin boyd um a chicago chicago pediatric dentist and a sleep medicine consultant uh as well as an assistant professor of anthropology which i think is such a great combo for what you're working on uh at the university of arkansas i'd love to welcome in him into the stream too because i know we're gonna have a lot of um medical questions so glad kevin dr boy i'm here i'm glad to be here all right and i'd love to how did you end up being both a pediatric dentist sleep medicine consultant and a anthropologist really sick drilling teeth and you know tooth decay is 100 preventable and didn't want to make a living you know putting out sugar fires and got curious in the origins of tooth decay which led me to the origins of malocclusion you know crooked teeth and james did a beautiful job of describing how that happened and they didn't teach us that in dental school so i had to go back and almost get a bachelor's in anthropology and then it led to uh mentoring phd research and anthropology and dental anthropologists uh so that's all just curiosity and anger that my own education that's great [Laughter] and james do you want to say a little bit about how you found the researchers uh like uh like kevin here for sure i thought i had the whole breathing field pretty well worked out uh in non-fiction what you do is you write a proposal and i spent about six months writing a proposal had all the chapters had all the researchers and it wasn't until i got much deeper into this research that i was missing a huge piece of the puzzle which is why are we breathing so poorly it's not just anxiety it's not just from the environment from pollution from allergens it's an anatomical problem and once i discovered that everything really opened up in a whole very weird new way as you saw from some of that research in the talk cool and i mean i'm really curious i mean it seems like 90 of the things that you that you kind of discovered here have happened in the last 100 to 200 years um of it's not it's not really human evolution at that at that kind of rate it's just um it's just some deformations and so do you think in a few generations or you know five to ten generations we could we could get back to our our straight teeth you know large airways well the human body is malleable you know just as we've we've injured it uh we can get it back certainly i think it's going to take a while i think that these these things can come on very quickly but to help repair them might take a while i think that we really need to change how we're eating food other environmental inputs or oral posture and so many other things that that really are contributing to not only crooked teeth not only poor breathing but look at all the other diseases of civilization out there you know the top killers in the world weren't really around [Music] uh that huge numbers 200 years ago if you're looking at diabetes if if you're looking at heart disease so many other issues right and i'm curious um kevin how how widely accepted is this into the the dentistry world in orthodontics and and medical world where where do we stand in uh how this is penetrated into the field well like like anything you know i was trained to drill phil and bill and orthodontists are trying to you know um straighten crooked teeth and teenagers and they're making i was making a great living at just meeting the public demand and an orthodontist you know the ex the public expectations are being met and so we can make good livings at it but um like i said i became very discontent i don't want to do that this is these are preventable diseases crooked teeth is preventable the world health organization has two initiatives ending childhood obesity ending childhood tooth decay what does that mean that means it can go away in a generation you ask the question that's a great question the and i proposed um not officially yet but proposed ending childhood malocclusion if it's not as a result or a symptom of a syndrome these are preventable things and they can go away now they won't completely go away but we can mitigate these huge number pandemic numbers you know of tooth decay obesity and malocclusion uh so that that's uh is being met with resistance by people who are very comfortable um making good living at what they were trained to do and what's the matter with that i i don't shame them i just i i broke out of it i don't know why i'm sorry can you remind me what male occlusion is male occlusion is just poor alignment you know crooked teeth james was that's that was good you know it's crooked teeth poorly aligned jaws and teeth that's smell occlusion nice and um and i love the part where you went into the paris underground to get a sense of some of the skulls and you know we had a great talk uh from some of those some of those guys a while back who were amazing enough to both fly from paris as well as kind of led us into their amazing world um but i wonder if you could say a little bit more about that trip yeah uh you know as a journalist i didn't want to just phone it in and this was right at the beginning when i had found kevin's research and found found marianna evans research and i just wanted to sort of more deeply understand it and i had the opportunity um through through some contacts at the long nail foundation to do this and i figured i might as well do it did i learn anything you know revolutionary you know as far as research goes no i didn't but i was curious uh to see it for myself because i was even though the proof was all over the place i was still doubting it that that why hadn't i learned this earlier um and all you have to do if you doubt it is just look at ancient skulls and then look in the mirror and look at the difference so so you know if this is controversial i i can't really understand that because the proof is all over the place and being down in the paris uh quarries was just a way to to try to see that uh face to face you know get a little more intimate with the subject as it were right all right we have some questions from uh from the streams um forest pound who actually works with us on the stream um he has a three-year-old that is too young for breathing exercises or is she um but it should should they be considering dietary changes like you know brown rice and things like that at this point kevin this is right up your alley pediatric dentist you take this one yeah depending on you know where she lives um she should establish a dental home we call it by age one so she's already been to a dentist uh even if it's a specialist depending on where they're trained they don't know about this i mean this is only starting to come to light and enter uh hopefully the curriculum of dentistry and how they teach it so eating hard food you know i mean james talked about breastfeeding and weaning is really important those terms should never be separated nursing and weaning breastfeeding and weaning onto hard unprocessed foods so right now the question was about food yes chew celery carrots apples boom boom boom but at three years old that kid is entering into what i call a geriatrics patient i like to get them at two and a half i can start expanding a kid and helping the jaw grow but they're going to look at if that dad walks into a pediatric dental office and says look i i think my kid might need expansion they'll think he's crazy uh because this isn't taught in school yet it will be uh thankfully for what you're doing this this might help change it that's interesting so yeah finding things to chew on the chewiest foods the better huh yeah it's interesting my family always made fun of me for only eating raw vegetables uh because they're from the south and they boiled everything to death um but i ended up with straight you know basically straight teeth and i never even saw a dentist just because we didn't really have access to them until i was almost in college so my teeth my teeth kind of may have benefited from that as well i wonder if that was it um let's see we have david madden from uh one of our feeds uh who said he loved your talk and that um he'd really love to hear more about the the changes that take place in the womb and what's causing that uh it seems like you had some of your slides that were showing that they haven't even got a chance to chew yet right no no that's right and this is this is something that just absolutely blew my mind that these are heritable traits so it brings up the question is how can this be be happening if this kid isn't you know being trained to correct oral posture or it doesn't have the chance to breastfeed and this is something that kevin and i were just talking about a couple weeks ago uh gestational apnea and i think that he would be the the better person to explain this because it does get complicated babies do too you know fetuses do chew in the womb they chew amniotic fluid yeah they develop sucking and swallowing on about mid just eight you know 20 weeks 20 25 weeks and we have um ultrasounds of kids and they're you know you you can't do this experiment this is not uh you know a hypothesis that can be explored but you can't go back in time and look at a kid on an ultrasound 500 years ago but you can see stillborn you know fetuses at 20 25 weeks and compare them like james showed that slide of you know what really a fairly typical ultrasound looks like at 20 weeks so we have proposed a hypothesis at tufts university dental school i have an orthodontic resident that i'm mentoring there and she is collecting the proposing you know she's going through the irb proposal to collect on kids that present to the orthodontic clinic at tufts say they're 12 and they have you know jaws are too far back like mine and getting their ultrasounds from you know bringing a woman's house wherever they were born in boston and comparing what the jaw looked like at 20 weeks in utero and maybe there's an algorithm there that we can predict uh and this could be something to hey maybe if you know you should breastfeed rather than bottle feed i i'm very reluctant to talk about breastfeeding because i'm a guy and if there's any women that guy he's never done it he shouldn't be talking about breastfeeding so but you know there's there's research going on and that's what james you have really laid the foundation is that there needs to be research and data collected there just isn't now we can look at ancient fetuses and say their jaws are forward well something must have happened what is it maybe it's the way the mom's eating the way she's uh breathing gestational apnea is something james brought up who's heard of gestational apnea you know it's it's in the it's in the literature gestational diabetes gestational hypertension aha gestational apnea that could be part of it we're proposing it and i can't help thinking that that perhaps if the mother has difficulty breathing if if she is not eating a fully balanced diet that this can have a downstream effect to the feeder if if a mother has has sleep apnea you know and there and and is uh periodically hypoxic that this could but but again how do you test this you know sit here all we want but it's it's a pretty hard thing to test there's already been an experiment that was inadvertently done and that's called smoking you know pregnant women uh when they smoked their babies were small for gestational age sometimes pre-term so in in cigarette companies in the 40s and 50s were advertising a win-win the beautiful taste of winston and a smaller baby easier to liver to deliver no really i can show you ads discussions but they've just shown that they they know the long bones are smaller when when a woman can't breathe well during like smoking but um how about the jawbones i mean if the long bones if the legs are small why wouldn't the jaws be small and that's kind of what we're going to explore at tufts uh about this well it's interesting and i'm i'm curious like i i just want to be very clear that sorry i think we have a little bit of delay there um but that um i'm i'm a little bit curious about things like chewing gum or that we have a question from darren online who's asking um if is there equivalent of a chew toy to widen passageways like are there other i know that some things that you where you chew and you don't swallow can actually cause stomach problems like chewing gum repeatedly but i'm curious are there are there kind of some chewing exercises that we can do i think there are oral pharyngeal exercises which have been found to be very effective in increasing airway health expanding airways they've been studying these exercises for snoring and sleep apnea and they're they have a not a subtle uh changes that that are occurring in the airway and what these are are just exercises so if we're just eating soft food all the time we're not exercising this this big powerful muscle called the tongue right and so everything back here can get flabby but if you start doing these exercises just like you're doing your curls or push-ups or whatever you can start to to influence some fitness and to tone these areas so there are several studies i think four or five studies looking at just doing these exercises and their effect to improve your breathing interesting um and um oh hold on uh am and and anne marie from uh from one of our streams is asking how about how do you learn about the breathing techniques and where do you suggest that she start uh you know uh you start with this incredible book called breath no no no you don't need to do that you can uh you there there are thousands of years of of uh of of research into breathing how to breathe properly and there are literally hundreds of different books i've found in my personal experience the simplest things um can be the best um try to focus on your breath try to breathe slowly breathe your nose all the time start with that build that foundation and then you can get into fancy pranayamas but it's it's amazing how few people have proper oral posture how few people are really breathing efficiently or in line with their metabolic needs and so i think you really start with the simplest steps here and then you can build up from there nice and um and that actually is a good next question from dan um who was asking you know what is your current uh life and health situation after learning all this and you know starting from a path of of doing breathing exercises and working your way here and actually i think you in your book you talk a bit more about how you kind of you went to your first your first breathing class and it kind of freaked you out yeah it freaked me out and you know breathing classes are a dime a dozen here in san francisco you can throw a whiskey bottle and not hit three or four uh places like golden breathing classes so my doctor actually told me to to go to breathing class because i kept getting pneumonia year in year out i was eating the right foods i was sleeping i was exercising all the time i kept getting sick i kept having respiratory problems and it did freak me out because i i just started sweating uh in in a way that that felt completely unnatural and so that is one of the things that really spurred me to research this more deeply and it took me years and years to get my head around it to understand exactly what happens to the body what happens with the brain when we breathe in different ways when we take conscious control of this biological function interesting and so and do you feel healthier now after doing all this well it makes you a complete neurotic when you're writing about breathing for two more years but don't do it people trust trust me on this um but after that uh the whole point of this is to do it in a certain way to understand what proper breathing is so it becomes an unconscious habit you don't want to walk around like i did with you know looking at an app or looking at a notepad you want to be able to acclimate your body to slightly higher levels of co2 to acclimate your body so that it's very comfortable breathing through its nose all the time and very comfortable breathing slowly but i you know as as an anecdote as a subjective experience it absolutely changed my life and the cat scans show that a year before and a year after doing some just very simple things massive uh expansion in in my airways i haven't had a stuffed nose since then you know that that's been my own experience i'm not going to say it's going to work for everyone but if you look at the science behind this stuff what happens when you do take control of your breathing especially if you're breathing dysfunctionally or you're a mouth breather it's not subtle what what happens and the science is very clear on all that nice and um kevin i'm curious if like how you know those of us with kids and you know they do already have crooked teeth and like now like do you send them to a dentist can you find dentists that are is there a you know a catalog of dentists that kind of are are are understanding how to broaden these air passages and teeth pallets yeah or how does that work right now like something like this it an orthodontist will call me pediatric dentist will call me general dennis will call me look um i want to help you know my dental hygienist kid i want to help my own kid i i've got patients i don't know how to do this and we're we're setting up a coaching network um it's through the academy uh it's the american academy of physiological aapmd physiological and medical dentistry aapmd and we formed this group called the endeavor and it's a it's a consortium of about 20 myofunctional therapists which are speech pathologists and hygienists that help kids do those chewing exercises that james talked about um but also orthodontists pediatric dentists and general dentists who see kids and we are coming up with a way uh to teach dentists well you know that didn't learn this in school like i didn't i had to learn this um after dental school after my pediatric residency training and we're forming this consortium of teaching dentists here's how you present a case you show me 10 pictures of this four-year-old in your practice you describe the child's sleep and breathing and we have definite validated risk assessment tools and then you send them to me or one of the other 14 members and then we will sort it out and we'll have a group discussion and we will help you um treat this kid you know from afar and then eventually we need you to take certain classes that are out there that you didn't get in dental school but that's that's where it's going and james has done more for this movement james is actually the only non-doctor clinician uh that's a member of the endeavor collaborative um and he's done so much to raise awareness and help little kids he has no idea how many little kids you've already helped james well i i will say i had the i had the easy job here because i am an objective journalist going into a field that i knew zero about i spent several years in it and talked to people like you who have been working on this stuff for decades and decades and decades so i was just putting the pieces of this puzzle together and and one thing that uh kevin hasn't mentioned yet is a hundred years ago guess how we were treating crooked teeth we were expanding pallets so this is how it was 10 years old at when you expand the pallet you expand the airway larger mouth larger airway and and so only in the 1940s did we start extracting and using braces and in headgear and and in europe uh that expansion lasted a lot longer so that was a part of the presentation that that got cut out but uh but it's all out there and it's it's all in the scientific literature and anyone can look it up nice uh we're gonna welcome uh one of the founding board members of long now kevin kelly and the editor at large and from wired welcome kevin kelly hello how are you guys doing good hi kevin i'm the second kevin okay yeah a couple calves you have dr kevin and you kevin yes right i am not a doctor um i i have a question i one of the the this is for the anthropological side but um it was always my understanding that when humanoids invented cooking the discovery of control of fire and cooking which acted as a kind of a secondary outside stomach that allowed us to digest nutrition that we could not do easily that that actually changed our jaws and our teeth in on the historical you know i don't know whether it's million years or certainly hundreds of thousands of years and so i'm wondering if if what we're seeing now is kind of continuation of that longer story uh that's exactly what happened though 800 000 years ago um i think that's one of the earliest uh discoveries of the use of controlled fire and so having all of this extra energy available that we save from from chewing that was released in cooking allowed us to grow a larger brain and that brain needed space so it took that space from the front of the face and our faces started growing flatter okay and our teeth start getting smaller and our jaws start getting smaller but these changes happen over tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years and we acclimated to these changes just fine so according to the skeletal record we were breathing just fine so uh what has happened to modern humans in the past few hundred years this happens so quick we have not been able to cat right so our mouths are way too small our teeth are okay our ways are but but the the general trend though is a continuation of that trend right of reducing the size of the jaws and the teeth so you could kind of say that it's sort of like a continuation of that same process of modernization and eating cooked food that's like saying obesity is a continuation and we're just going to keep getting fatter and you know i i know i know exactly what you meant there but no we have to stop this trend i i mean narrowing jaws and obesity there one is um over abundance and too big and the other one is too small and under um you know uh achievement if you will it's just no it's a trend that has to stop but yeah if it continues it's it's disaster so um if you take the kind of again the long view and this time going not the long past but the long future if you imagine uh some scenarios for the next hundred years um what would our jaws look like in a hundred years do we imagine that they would be the same size they were in the last couple thousand years would we like to have we identified any genes of our jaw size and teeth that we might want to engineer to make larger or i mean like if we could imagine us taking control of this what would you imagine we might do you could have more than one scenario but what would be some of the things we might do in a hundred years regarding our draws and tea size yeah uh you know go back to eating whole foods is is the first thing that that you should do i mean we want to live up to our epigenetic potential right we don't want our mouths to continue growing smaller and smaller and smaller and their teeth to be getting more and more crooked so jeans can be turned on they can be turned off so if we see this dis evolution happening right now if we've taken a sharp left turn if our airways have taken a sharp left turn we can work to help restore that i've found even if you're in middle age you can show improvement to your palate you can show improvement to your airway so uh the the body is plastic i was just talking to someone about neuroplasticity i think we should be talking about breathing plasticity or mouth plasticity uh the human body can be changed for the better or for the worse depending on what environment environmental inputs are given to it and so kevin do you have an idea of what might happen over 100 years again what some of the possibilities would be the the genes you know there there isn't a gene that or as a suite of genes you know there's no there's just not one gene one trait it doesn't work that way very seldom there are a few things like that is that there's groups of genes on individual chromosomes that interact with genes on other chromosomes in concert interacting with the environment it's epigenetics so you can have a group of genes that will code for type 2 diabetes that never expresses itself if the person lives a healthy lifestyle you can you can carry those genes but they just won't turn on unless you subject it to an environment and it's the same thing with malocclusion so in the next hundred years you know people are going to wake up i mean you know james james has an acumen for anthropology and natural selection that rivals like hugely rivals most health care professionals we don't have to learn about how natural selection works when we're in medical and dental school you know we deal with proximate cause you got a fever take an aspirin um well maybe we should find out what pathogen is causing causing the fever and james has really grasped such an understanding and an appreciation of how important it is to understand the evolutionary explanation rather than the proximate cause of disease so getting to your question like well is it a linear projection in a hundred years like if the jaws have gotten this small and a hundred years what's it gonna be a hundred years from now and is it it won't be linear i i think if it were that it would contribute to human extinction and and i just don't think people like to think that humans can go extinct a lot of that is religious but we can like every other species on earth 99.9 of everything that's ever been born from the first bacteria 4 billion years ago everything's extinct except a few things that are here now and that's where we're headed if we don't get you know this and other things breathing properly through the nose and having jaws that are conducive to that and taking in adequate nutrition we're smart we have a big frontal cortex lucky for us we better start using it nice well we're going to wrap this up and i'd love to thank actually both kevin's dr kevin boyd and kevin kelly um and we'll uh we'll just go to james and i as we i give the last couple questions um thank you guys um james i'm i think uh kev dr kevin boyd did a great job of pointing out how bad i think um many times when people are siloed in their professions they're really bad at kind of connecting the dots and and we've seen you know over and over again with some of our like all species initiatives and the language initiatives that uh it's rare that people can you know they they actually kind of get uh academia really rewards specialization and doesn't really reward generalization and so the work that you've done here and kind of helping these people kind of connect with each other i suspect you even in your research you help them find each other uh to some extent uh in what they're doing so i think it's it's it was a great effort and um and so cool to see and so i'm really curious as to what your next project is i have another book idea but the idea of uh you know sitting in a in a room for three years and riding alone uh just kind of makes me queasy so i'm gonna just uh continue talking about uh breathing for a little while longer i'm still excited about the subject every time i talk to kevin i get all amped up and i wanna get this word out but hopefully we're gonna bring um this and and some of the other subjects i've talked about at long now uh into a different medium uh perhaps into a a video kind of series and so um i'm looking into that but you know in about a year i think i'll be it'll be time for to sink back into a new project well we're all stuck in rooms in front of our computer screens now so we're all writers now but uh yeah we've all got beards now everybody yeah nice well i want to thank you for your book and i do want to say like that that you did a great job of kind of going down a much more long now angle of what your book is and there's so many more great stories in your book and i really want to encourage people to read it it reads really well and i was i've been listening to it or i listened i ended up listening to all of it and you do a great job reading your book so it's great to hear your voice uh in the audio version which i i enjoyed so thank you so much for joining us and um thank you all for joining the live stream and look forward to um i think we're coming up on our last event of the year we'll be next will be uh lost landscapes um which will not be one of our normal events but uh we'll be back on in january and hopefully on the other side of 2020. thank you all thank you

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 8,684

Keywords: Culture, Evolution, Futures, Science, Technology, Anthropology, Archaeology, Ancient, Modern, Health, Nutrition, Vitamin, Processed Food, Disease, Dentistry, Breath, Respiratory, Chewing, Breastfeeding, Orthodontics, Skulls, Rickets, Weston Price, Catacombs, Paris, Urban Exploration

Id: dbk-tKRtiW4

Length: 68min 10sec (4090 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 26 2020