Patrick McKeown explains how breathing and diet connect to sleep and overall health. He argues that proper breathing is foundational to well-being, and discusses why most people breathe inefficiently and what to do about it.
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Do you think food matters versus breathing matters? Do you have to get the food right for the breathing to work? Do you have to get the breathing right based on what you eat? How correlated or connected are they?
One influences the other. And it's kind of strange because people with bad diets tend to have bad breathing. If you go into, you know, go into a fast food restaurant and you see somebody who's quite maybe obese there and look at their breathing and look at the food they are eating now, what's, what's feeding into the other? Just the human body is so complex and there's so many bidirectional relationships and you know, if our breathing is off we can pretty feel lousy. I was in increased sympathetic drive, increased stress response, poor sleep, caught for breath, feeling air hunger. You know, you don't tend to want to eat good food, you tend to just go for comfort and you don't want to do physical exercise because if you go out for a walk or a jog you feel excessively breathless. So there is something. The two go very much hand in hand and I'm going to be biased towards the breadth. You know, I really will want to because I think in actual fact if I was to improve one thing, I'm writing a new book at the moment and this is going back to the, the problems I had when I was in secondary school, that's high school and university. I had poor concentration and had a poor attention Spanish. And society demands that we have good concentration and attention span. Society demands it but nobody is teaching us how, how can we improve concentration and attention span. So if in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs that needs to be revised for the today's world. And deep sleep is the foundation, that's what we have to get right first. And then functional breathing and then breath aware, body aware, mind aware and self actualization. So you know, I don't think we have anything without that deep sleep. And if you look at diet, you know people who are having sleep apnea that's going to impact hormones, increases ghrelin, they eat more food, put on more weight, increase sleep apnea, insomnia, mental health issues are very tied in with poor sleep and breathing is tied in with both. And yeah, like the whole sleep industry has really, really been neglected here. You know, if you think of the. The only. Well the main gold standard of treatment is a cpap machine and 50% of people abandon it after six weeks. It's hardly a success. What about the 50% of people who are not able to tolerate it. And there's a huge connection here with breathing. I wrote an article with two ear, nose and throat doctors. It was published in the Journal of clinical medicine about two months ago and it's a 10,000 word article exploring the phenotypes of sleep apnea, basically sleep disorder. Breathing has changed quite a bit in the last seven years and breathing exercises tie in very nicely. So it's just starting to get that awareness out there. But it does come back to that, Dave. I think if you get sleep right, a lot of the other things can fall into place.
