The Power Of Breath As Medicine with James Nestor

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Breathing is the quickest way of breaking that stress feedback loop. So you can change your breathing and break your stress and you can measure what happens to your body when you do that.

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Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Pharmacy Without a Place for Conversations that Matter. And if you care about your health, one of the neglected aspects of our health is our breath. And it just happens that we breathe, we don't think about it. It's something that is critically important, and most of us kind of are crappy breathers, which can explain a lot of health issues. So today I'm really pleased to have as our guest an expert in breath. James Nestor is an author, he's a journalist, he's written for many, many important publications, including Scientific American and Outside Magazine, New York Times. His book, Breath: the New Science of a Lost Art was an instant New York Times bestseller. And he explores how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly and how to get it back. Breath spent 18 weeks on New York Times bestseller list. It's awesome. Translated in 30 languages. And it's a real wonderful explication of how we've missed the mark on one of the most important aspects of our health, which is our breath. And he's presented at Stanford Medical School, Yale School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Union, many other places. He's been on Fresh Air with Terry.

Gross, Joe Rogan, and so on and so forth.

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

I think humans are very reactionary species. Only when we lose something do we become aware of it. And that's exactly what happened during COVID We lost the ability to breathe and we're like, oh my God, maybe breathing is important because this is just something that's been in, it's an unconscious activity. It's in the back of our minds. so once you establish, I think once you lose the ability to breathe, you appreciate it. And once you appreciate it, you can start focusing your breath to really significantly impact your health, mental health, physical health, bolster immune function, athletic performance and more. And the reason why breathing is so important is because we get most of our energy from air, from our breath. A lot of people think that we get most of our energy from what we eat and drink. not true. We get most of our energy from air. And I can prove this to you by. Why don't you hold your breath for about four minutes and see how much energy you have?

Yeah, not so much.

Don't do that at home, everybody.

Yeah, well, I think you're right. I think we, you know, we don't connect to our breath. And, you know, I I. When I was younger, I took yoga teacher training course. you know, was 23 and became a yoga teacher and learned the science, the ancient science of pranayama, which is a whole series of breathing techniques to activate different aspects of our health and well-being and whether you, they're calming breasts, activating breasts. It's, it's such a powerful thing that we have pretty much ignored as a vehicle toward health in this culture. And yet in ancient cultures, it's pretty amazing. And you've got like Wim Hof who is this kind of crazy dude who they call the Iceman, but he's master techniques of breathing that allow him to climb Mount Everest in his underwear, basically with no shoes on, not freeze to death, or to sit in an ice bath for whatever bazillion minutes he sits in an ice bath for. And he's been able to train other people who are just regular humans how to do the same thing. So it is a doorway to accessing all sorts of our physiology that we just sort of ignore. So can you kind of break down for us what is going on with our breath why does it affect us so importantly? And how do we start to develop a better relationship with our breathing?

Well, breathing practices have been around for at least 5,000 years. Ancient Hindus studied it, ancient Chinese studied it, Native Americans studied it and more. And they understood our breathing as a medicine. This wasn't just something we did unconsciously. It was something that you can control. So this knowledge has been around for a long time, but lo and behold, in the 1900s and in this century, we have instruments that can actually measure objectively what happens when you breathe in different ways. So no longer is this subjective. It's objective. It's a science. You can collect data. That's what I think is so exciting that a lot of people can access wearables that can tell them what happens to their heart rate, what happened to their heart rate variability, what happens to their stress levels, what happens to their blood pressure, their blood oxygen, more and more and more by just shifting breathing. And I think that this is one of the things that has really made this stuff so convincing. It's one thing to read scientific papers and hear people talk about it. It's another thing to change your breathing for two minutes and watch your blood pressure go down 10 to 15 points and watch your heart rate variability store. And, and I think that's why so many people have, have personally experienced the benefits of this from not a lot of effort and work. and said, wow, it actually does what it's supposed to do. And the science just confirms that.

It's amazing. You know, one of the things that, you know, we're all focused on today is our immune system. And most of us don't think that our breath has anything to do with our immune system, but you've discovered that it has. So can you kind of explain how our breath connects to our immune system and why we need to learn how to breathe better in order to boost our immune system, which everybody should be doing now because of COVID and in general?

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

As a doctor, it's really clear when you look at the biology of breathing that there's a lot going on and often people are shallow breathers or they're mouth breathers. There's all kinds of challenges that happen biologically when you do that. But one of the things that people don't realize is that their diaphragm, which is basically the muscle that moves when you breathe, expands and contracts in order to actually fill up and empty your lungs. the main nerve that relaxes your body goes through there. And that's why when you take a deep breath, you relax. And it's called the vagus nerve.

And.

And what's fascinating is there's all this incredible science around how we have to do, you know, injections around the vagus nerve, or we do sort of certain kinds of, you know, trans, like, magnetic therapies for the vagus nerve, all those different things, but we always have access to be able to. activate the vagus nerve through our breath. So can you kind of explain how that all works and why the diaphragm is so important and why we need to understand how to breathe differently and what it does to our biology?

Sure. That vagus nerve travels right along our throats as well. So this is one of the reasons why yoga practices have a lot of humming and singing and ohm that allows for better vagal tone. It calms you down. but the vagus nerve is also, I mean, it spreads throughout the whole abdomen. It's the longest nerve in the body, vagus, like a vagrant, it's a wandering nerve. So when you are breathing in a shallow way, you are sending messages through the vagus nerve and the phrenic nerve to your brain that you are stressed. So 80% of the messages between the body and the brain are coming from the body. so you can send your brain, if you want to do this, constant stress signals by breathing too much and by breathing in a shallow way. And the lungs don't inflate themselves, right? They need something to do that. And that's what the diaphragm does. So most people understand the role of the diaphragm in, in expanding the lungs and deflating the lungs. But what I didn't know, and I'm learning more recently, is that the diaphragm is also essential that diaphragmatic movement is essential in the circulation of lymph fluid and in circulation of blood. This is a pump. This is like, you can think of your body as a, there's a piston in your body, okay? It's the diaphragm and you need those fluids constantly moving in an efficient way. You can get by breathing in this very short and stilted way. A lot of people do, but compensation is different than being healthy.

Yeah, well, this is a very important point because the, you know, the body, we think, you know, exhales carbon dioxide as a way of detoxifying something that can actually be harmful to us in excess, right? And that's what the breath does. You breathe out carbon dioxide, you breathe in oxygen. But also what you're saying is that it detoxifies us in way more complicated ways through the lymph system, which actually clears out all the waste and metabolites from your tissues and your cells and brings it back to the heart to filter and do all that stuff that has to do with the liver and clean it up. So, if you don't have your lymph circulating, you're gonna get sick. And, I actually had a podcast with Dr. Mehmet Oz and his father-in-law, Jerry Lamo, talking about the importance of lymph and lymph function to health. And, breath, like you said, is one of the most powerful doorways to actually activate lymph circulation. So, very, very important. Tell me, tell me how you got into breath, because I think you had a particular story that was quite interesting, and, and it really kind of led you down this rabbit hole researching what actually was causing some of your issues.

Yeah. As a science journalist, you don't think that you're gonna one day write a book about breathing, which seems like such a simple and, and mundane and completely boring subject. But I had, uh, this was a long time ago, about 10 years ago, plus. Plus, I had constant respiratory problems. I was eating the right food. I was exercising all the time. I was sleeping eight hours a night. You know, I was tuned into my health but I kept getting bronchitis. I kept getting mild pneumonia. I was wheezing when I was working out. Every time I went to my doctor, I was told it was normal and whenever I got mild pneumonia, you know, I'd get a Z-Pac and be sent on my way and it worked but it didn't fix the core problem. every year I kept coming back and they were just like, oh, you're back. You have pneumonia? Yeah, I have pneumonia again. And so it just, something seemed a little off. That went on for years until one doctor friend said, oh, you should explore a breathing class. I said, what does breathing have to do with immune function or my chances of getting pneumonia or bronchitis? She said she had had experience with yoga. She said, you'd be surprised. So in San Francisco, you know, it's hard to throw a tennis ball and not hit four different breathing classes. So, I just sort of spun the roulette wheel, found one, and had an extremely powerful experience. But, as a journalist, I'm not going to write a memoir about breathing. So, I didn't know what to do with this experience and years went by before I found a way to tell a larger story. And, it was specifically learning from freedivers, people who are doing things that are supposed to be medically impossible with their body. And they do it every day. 10 minutes underneath.

Right. It's like a. It's a whole doorway to health that we hadn't really thought about. And, you know, a lot of us, you know, we don't think about our breath, but we often don't breathe very well. My mother, you know, had a lung issues, and she was a mouth breather. And she. I was always trying to get her to breathe through her nose, and she just couldn't do it. But tell us about the distinction between nose breathing and mouth breathing. why is mouth breathing not good for you and why is nose breathing good for you?

So when we breathe through our mouths, we're exposing ourselves to everything in the environment. If you live in a city like me, that means pollen, that means pollutants, it means smog, it means mold, and there's nothing filtering that air all day long. If you breathe through the nose, and I so happen to have a special guest here, is a cross section of a human head, and if you see what happens when you breathe through the nose here, you're forcing this air through all of these very ornate structures. And, as that air goes through these structures, it's heated up, it's moistened, it's filtered, and you get this huge profusion of nitric oxide as well, which guess what? Nitric oxide helps kill viruses and bacteria. Yes. And, it's a vasodilator. So, when you're breathing through the mouth, you get none of those advantages. You can survive mouth breathing, but it's going to wear you down and make you sick. And, that's just how things work. And, you can very clearly see this by just looking at our physiology and looking at our anatomy. It's quite amazing, what you just brought.

Up is really important.

We had Louis Ignarro on the podcast who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of nitric oxide. And, this cute little 80-year-old Italian guy, who think he'd be like your uncle or something. he's so sweet. And he just, he just really explained how important it is to breathe through your nose and how nitric oxide is produced, which is, like you said, anti-microbial and also increases in your ability to fight inflammation as an antioxidant. And, you know, it's the main, main thing that happens when you take Viagra, which is you increase nitric oxide, which is dilation of blood vessels and so forth. So it's fascinating. And he's, he even said, this was fascinating. They're doing some preliminary studies around COVID. where they were giving nitric oxide gas to COVID patients and seeing remarkable changes in their biology and improvement in their lung function and their overall health. So it's kind of interesting that our body knows what to do, but we often have sort of latched to these habits around mouth breathing. And actually, there's this kind of new trend out there. I'd love to hear what you think about it. Are you using mouth tape at night? for people to breathe through their nose at night instead of through their mouth.

What do you think about that? Well, what I learned about nitric oxide was from Ignaro. So, he won the Nobel in the 90s. I think last time, last interview I heard with him, he said there were 11 clinical trials looking at patients who had severe COVID and giving them nitric oxide. Some of those trials have come out. They're official published studies and it works incredibly well because of course it does. you know, it's just we're supplementing what our natural body in its natural form would be doing otherwise. It's important to note, too, if you hum, you increase that nitric oxide 15-fold so I I think that this would be an interesting thing to explore. And there. A lot of yoga practices have you hum. I wish someone would do this study. Yeah. You know, it's never going to get funded, but. but he's an amazing guy. I've learned so much from him. That's so great.

And, you did an interesting study where you were at Stanford when you were sort of researching the breath for your book where your nose was completely plugged for 10 days and you had to breathe just through your mouth. So, what was that study and what did you find out?

So, I've been working with a chief of rhinology research at Stanford, a guy named Dr. Jayakar Nayak who probably knows more about the nose and nasal breathing than anyone on the planet. so we had had several interviews, and there had been animal studies looking at what happens when you make an animal, a monkey, specifically, a mouth breather, and all the awful things that happen to their health and their facial structure. Don't read those studies. They're. They're horrendous. But I asked Nyack, I said, has there ever been a human study of this? And he said, no. And I said, well, why don't you do it? You're at Stanford. You You study this stuff all the time. He said doing so would be unethical because he knew of all the damage it could do. So I said, well, why don't I volunteer for an experiment?

I'll try to- I'm gonna inform consent, right?

Yeah. And two, you know, I wish it were a hundred people. We had to pay for the study ourselves, which at Stanford was not cheap. And the longest we were allowed to do this was for 10 days, 10 days just mouth breathing, 10 days nasal breathing. and as advertised, it completely destroyed us. And we have all the data to show that there was extreme fatigue. My blood pressure went through the roof. I got home after about three hours of mouth breathing. My blood pressure was 158 over 100, which was about three times higher than I had ever seen it. And I said, oh, you know, I'm. I'm stressed out. I need to go to sleep for the first time that I'm aware of. I started snoring, then I started getting sleep apnea. It got worse and worse the longer we have this. The other subject in the study had the exact same thing at the same time. We had trouble focusing. Our mouths were completely dry. We were miserable. Athletic performance plummeted. I mean, this, to be clear, two people in an experiment means nothing. What I was doing was personally experiencing what science has known for literally decades and decades.

Well, there are N of 1 studies, so I don't think it's meaningless. There is a whole science and the NIH is actually advancing this, which is looking at changes in an individual and that being relevant. And, if you measure changes before and after, it's actually not insignificant. So, I wouldn't discount what you're saying as being more widely available to sort of think about. And, I think that you know, you actually have a lot of different things that you talk about as a way of fixing your breathing pattern. Maybe you can share a little bit of what are the tips? How should we breathing? How do we get enough quality breath? How do we stop mouth breathing? What do we have to do?

Luckily, in that Stanford study, we did 10 days of mouth breathing, followed by 10 days of just nasal breathing. This is where the sleep tape comes in. So it's easy to nasal breathe in the day. You just shut your mouth. But at night, more than 60% of us breathe through our mouths. And so, how do you keep your mouth shut at night? About a hundred years ago, they used to have chin straps. So, they knew how damaging mouth breathing was a hundred years ago. We seem to have lost that knowledge. But nowadays, we have tape. So, I learned from a breathing therapist at Stanford. She prescribes tape. for her patients, for every one of her patients to tape their mouths at night. This is not full on hostage situation stuff. This is not duct tape. No.

And there's a little hole in it.

There's a specific tape. It's a surgical tape. It's called micropore tape and it's very light adhesive. You want to take this stuff off with your tongue, never pull it off of your lips. That's where people go wrong. But, what this tape does is it's just a gentle reminder at any time in the night, you can go if you're uncomfortable and it pops off. But, this has been all of that snoring that I was doing mouth breathing immediately went away by just with one hack closing my mouth. And, this is the one thing I've literally heard this from thousands of people have written and they said, this was the most profound health hack that they've experienced. It's for a lot of people.

I've heard the same thing.

And I'm not saying it's going to work for everyone, especially with advanced severe sleep apnea. You're going to need more treatments, but it's free. And breathing through your nose is only going to help you. So you may benefit a little or you may benefit a lot. And it. I. I cannot sleep. I mean, I. Technically, I can sleep, but I can't sleep well. without sleep tape now. It's a real afflictor.

Amazing.

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All right, James, so tell us what tape you use and what are the options out there for people? 'Cause it sounds like after this conversation, a lot of people are gonna get around and wanna buy tape, I don't want them to get like scotch tape or some masking tape or something. It's not the right tape.

Well, there's so many different types of tape that work and it really depends on the person and their preference. I went through about 30 different types of tape before I found one that I really liked and that worked for me. I'm not getting paid to say this. It is a micropore tape, a surgical tape by 3M, has a really light adhesive. for sensitive skin. That's the best stuff I've found. Other people like different brands. There's specific brands now that are just sleep tape that you can buy on Amazon or wherever else. They work great. So, I would say play around, find something you like. You want something with a very light adhesive. And, most importantly, as I mentioned, you don't need a very fat strip of this stuff. All you need is something about the size of a postage stamp. This is the whole technology here. That's sleep tape. Okay? It's just keep it. I can even talk to you when I have this stuff on. You take it off with your tongue. Not. Don't rip it off. Take it off with your tongue, and you won't get any irritation to your mouth. That way. I love that.

That's amazing. Okay. That's a wonderful hack. You think everybody should do that or. How many people breathe through their mouth at night? Is it a common thing? Why would we if it's not supposed to? Is it just because we're unhealthy or because we're stressed or what?

I think that about 60%, this is the percentage I heard, more than 60% of us breathe through our mouth at night. And, if you were like me, you would go to sleep with a huge mug of water because you would wake up throughout the night and be hitting on this water because your mouth was so dry. Breathing through the mouth at night, especially the right Eight hours at a time will also change the pH in your mouth and make you much more susceptible to having cavities and periodontal disease. So, everyone should be breathing through their noses at night. You need to find a way of doing this.

So, that's one technique. What are the other techniques around breathing that you could do when you're not sleeping?

Well, breathe through your nose as often as you can. That includes while working out. That includes while sitting in front of your desk. There are so many different breathing techniques to practice nasal breathing techniques. It doesn't matter if for 15-20 minutes a day you're doing Wim Hof Method or Tumo or Kundalini and you're breathing through your mouth during these practices. Perfectly fine. Ocean breath, totally fine. I'm talking about habitual chronic breathing needs to be through the nose. So, we've got that. When you're breathing through your nose, you will also be breathing more slowly, lightly and deeply. And that's the other part of this. Most of us breathe way too much air. We think that by breathing more, we are getting more oxygen, but the opposite is happening. And I can prove this to you by if you took 30 really big breaths right now, you're going to feel some tingling in your fingers, lightness in your head. That's from a decrease of circulation. And that's what happens when you breathe too much. So you want to be breathing such simple stuff through the nose slowly, lightly, and deeply. Just doing that can be really transformative for people.

Powerful. And you also talk a lot in the book about these sort of ancient lost arts of breathing. What are those things that you rediscovered and what should we be doing with them today? Are they relevant?

Well, it's interesting. You start looking at ancient cultures and the different techniques they used, and you find that they were all basically saying the same thing in slightly different ways with different terms, especially if you look at Qigong and yoga. And you find that so many of their practices are breathing through the nose, almost all of them. many of their practices are include breath holds. That's huge in pranayama, and it's huge in qigong. And a lot of their practices also have temporary very, for a very short amount of time, you over breathe. If anyone's done, anyone listening has done Kundalini or pranayama or Wim Hof. Part of that is to purposely breathe too much. What that does is purposely stresses your body out. You may be thinking, why the heck do I want to do that? I'm stressed out enough. But that allows you to control stress to turn it on and specifically to turn it off. And if you look at the science and the studies behind sudarshan kriya, even Wim Hof method, pranayama, these are such powerful techniques and they've been around for thousands of years.

Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I did some of the Wim Hof breathing. I know him and it's amazing. You do the breathing practice, then you can hold your breath for two, three minutes. even a bother, which is impossible. If I told you to hold your breath right now for three minutes, you'd pass out, right? So, we really have an access to ancient technologies that actually will allow us to revitalize our health and have what seems like sometimes superpowers. I mean, think about it. I mean, to regulate your breathing so you can sit in an ice bath for half an hour, that's a big deal. You can climb up Mount Colima Jaro in your shorts and be fine. Like, that's wild, right? And, and you mentioned something just briefly called tumo. which is a Tibetan technique for those listening that is used by monks to master their biology. And essentially, they have this practice called drying of the sheets. And they'll take these Buddhist monks up in the high Himalayas, and they'll put these sheets in ice water, and then they'll wrap them in the sheets in ice water. And they literally have to dry the sheets with the heat of their body and activate their own heat. And then once they master that, they go out in a loin cloth into the Himalayas up in the mountains at night and have to literally sit there all night naked. heating their body using the power of breath. And so we really have not even begun to tap the power of breath for health or for healing. And, and it's one of those sort of simple doorways that we all have access to that we don't need any equipment for. And it's always available to us if we learn the techniques. So you've got, you know, the pranayama techniques from yoga, you've got the Kundalini techniques, which are a little different. You've got the Tibetan techniques, the Tuma breathing, Wim Hof, which sort of derived a lot from that, Qigong and so forth, Chinese medicine techniques. There's a whole science around this and we really sort of begun to understand the biology of it, but these ancient cultures really knew a lot about how to activate the breath to heal. And I find it one of the most powerful things you can do. And we do breath work, we do various kinds of you know, calming breaths or activating breaths or breaths that actually help you to kind of shift your nervous system. And I think we all have the ability at any time to change our mental state and our emotional state through the power of the breath. And it's like we have a superpower we haven't even accessed. And I think that's what's so great about your book. It teaches us about how we can start to use those superpowers to regulate our health and our well-being and our mental health. It's amazing. Right.

So.

I think, you know, what I think I want to love you to talk a little bit more about that you had certain research was this guy called Maurice Debard who was really a teenager in a French village living in a hospital with tuberculosis and lung inflammation and he was able to cure his body even though his doctors gave up on him. So what did you find and what does that story have to teach us?

Well, this is his story was so similar to so many other stories that I dug up. I wasn't looking for these stories, but they all, these people all seem to share the same arc where I think misery is this mother of invention. You get really curious about how to cure your body of chronic problems after you've been so miserable for so long. And Maurice Dubar certainly fits into that. he spent years in a hospital as a kid. They were going to start to remove his lungs because he was so sick for so long. And a missionary came in. This was like in the 1940s, 1940s and 50s. Missionary came in and said, hey, I just heard about this thing called yoga. Maybe you should check it out. So, DeBard was scheduled for surgery to have part of his lungs removed and he started practicing this breathing technique. Not only was he able to leave the hospital but he got this almost superhuman ability. So, he was the Wim Hof before Wim Hof. So, he was sitting in ice baths for 40 minutes at a time on French TV. He was hiking up snowy mountains at the age of 72. He went on a bike ride for I think it was two months in the Himalayas, minus 20 degrees. So he is just an example of this amazing machine we have called our body that if we feed it the right inputs, it can do all of these incredible things. And I just want to mention what you were saying about the Tummo monks. Nobody would believe that this is possible. And nobody did for hundreds of years when travelers came back from Tibet and they said, there's these guys. They sit nude in the snow for eight hours in Meltzer. No one would believe it until Herbert Benson from Harvard Medical School went up and measured these guys and published it in Nature.

So, I think that we're just- There's a documentary on it.

I've seen it. It's very impressive. Yeah. And, I mean, there it is. And still, I get letters from people saying, this stuff's impossible. But there's no way people can do that. And, you know, all I can do as a journalist is present the data, present the information. But I'm not saying breathing is going to cure everything for everyone. Just like food is not going to cure everything for everyone, but it's only going to help. And I think the more you access it and the more you acknowledge it, the more you can benefit from it.

Yeah, it can make you high too. I mean, if you do breathing techniques from some of these practices, it's like you feel so energized, so juiced up. And I just say loop back to what you said before about energy. the way our bodies make energy, which is called ATP, adenosine triphosphate, it's really the source of energy for our body. It's made in our mitochondria. It really is produced by the input of two ingredients, oxygen, which is from your breath, and food. And actually, one of the things you talk about in the book was the Framingham study that has been going on for 70 years. and they found the most accurate marker of health and longevity isn't your genes or cardiovascular health. It was lung capacity and respiratory health. So how does that connect and how can you connect the dots for us on why that's so? Because it seems so counterintuitive.

So what happens as we age is we lose lung capacity. So between the ages of about 30 and 50, we'll lose about 12 to 15% of our lung capacity. And as we age more, that lung capacity continues to decrease. If we make it to 80, we'll have 30% of our lung capacity that we had when we were 15 or 16 years old. And this is right at the time when we need it the most. When you have smaller lungs, when you struggle 25,000 times a day to breathe or to do anything, it's going to wear you down. So by having larger lungs, you can take fewer breaths. And by taking fewer breaths, you are breathing more efficiently and you're allowing your heart rate to come down and your blood pressure to go down as well. So the Framing Hand study, that's what they found and someone was apprehensive about their data. So 30 years after they released that, they did another study looking at new numbers and they found that it's 100% right. And then some surgeons were apprehensive about that data. And so they said the only real way of doing this is to look at people who had lung transplants. So they looked at, I think it was 800 people with lung transplants. Those transplanted with larger lungs lived way longer than those with smaller lungs. To me, it makes sense.

Wow. So if you got lucky enough to have like lungs from somebody had big lungs, you were, wow, that's amazing.

But the good news is the lungs, we can expand them at any age. So we have control that we can't expand the size of our brains, of or, you know, our livers, we can, our stomachs, I suppose, but with our lungs, by doing stretches, by making the intercostals more flexible, the rib cage more flexible, we can increase our lung capacity. And, if you look at the data, larger lungs, longer life.

Amazing. And, it is not related to the data on what we call VO2 max, which is your ability to consume oxygen. how efficient your oxygen consumption is. It's not related to that, is it?

It's not. And, and I wish they would.

That's also a predictor.

Oh, huge. But that, I mean, that's more looking at mitochondrial function, right? How, how efficient are you at, at turning around that oxygen and creating ATP out of it? But VO2 max is, is a great predictor of performance and of longevity.

Amazing. How, how do you use the techniques and what techniques you use to actually increase your lung capacity, increase lung volume. Because, you know, it's not everybody's going to intuitively understand how to do that. And, and I'm sure this is all in your book, which I encourage people to get. It's called breath, the new science of a lost art. And, and it's available everywhere you get books.

So it's all in there, but I really want you to kind of explain that for us. So luckily, getting larger lungs is pretty easy. It's doing all the things that you talk about every week. it's exercising, just moderate exercise, a light to moderate exercise can increase your lung capacity by about 15% if you do it regularly. And there's something called yoga. Guess what yoga does? It has you stretch your lungs and breathe and then stretch over here and breathe. So yoga is a science of increasing and maintaining lung capacity. That's its main role. And and Qigong does the exact same thing. More standing poses, breathing in, twisting, remaining flexible. So luckily, you don't need to buy special new tech gizmo to do this. You just need to do what our ancestors did. Hunter gather populations, a few that are still left, they don't need these exercises. because they live in a natural environment in which they're breathing in a natural way and keeping themselves flexible. Yeah.

So we don't need to reinvent something. These ancient technologies of yoga and other things like qigong and tai chi are technologies that have been around forever. I kind of joke and I say, we kind of in the West have been so focused on the outer technologies. and in the East, they've been focused on the inner technologies, and they've been able to access Realms of human experience and healing and insights into how to optimize for not just spiritual health, but physical health. And, and it's, it's, it's important that we realize that. And that your, your book, talking about some of these lost Arts is so important because it actually helps us be able to bring these in without a lot of woo weirdness, but just understand the technology of it and be able to start to use these in our own lives to optimize our health and feel better and deal with stress and sleep and anxiety and depression. It's very powerful and energy and, and even COVID. So it's pretty amazing.

I think that if you look at what's happening in, in our understanding of Health right now, we're finding that the further we've, as a species, have moved away from nature, the sicker we're getting. that's very clear. And, the further we move back into nature, the better we're getting. It's no coincidence why your diet and so many other diets that are really effective, what are they doing? Is they're stripping out all of the industrialized foods and they're replacing it with foods that we would eat if we were in the wild. And, exercise is the same thing. Our ancestors didn't need to lift barbells. I mean, if they would see us now from 500 years ago, lifting something up to put it down in the same place inside of our houses. This is nuts. So, I think any way you can incorporate more elements of the natural world, light exposure at night, we have blue blocking glasses to mimic what it would be like to sit in front of candles or a campfire. And breathing is a part of that, to breathe the way your ancestors did. They also had different faces than we did. They had larger mouhs and significantly different airways, which is one of the reasons why so many of us are breathing so poorly now.

Well, that's a whole interesting conversation. I love your thoughts on that because there was a scientist, a dentist back at the turn of the 1900s who went around to all these indigenous cultures and took pictures and Imaging of some of these indigenous cultures when they were still a fair bit of them around and saw that their teeth were perfect, their airways were perfect, and I didn't have all the issues that we have and it was so related to their diet. And, this is sort of part of where the whole idea of a Paleolithic diet came from was that if we actually eat more in alignment with our ancestors, that we actually will change the structure and the function of our mouth and our face and our airways, which impacts our health hugely.

Yeah, Weston Price did 10 years of research into this, collected something like 23,000 thousand samples, meticulous research, and anyone can see this for themselves. All you have to do is look at an ancient human skull and look at its teeth. I've looked at hundreds of these. They all have perfectly straight teeth. Doesn't matter if the skull's from Asia, Africa, South America, Polynesia, it doesn't matter. I went to a lab where one of the largest collections of pre-industrial skulls in the world, they're all perfectly straight.

And then I looked at some great.

Orthodontists back then, then, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. the Invisalign back there. Yeah, the headgear made out of deer bones and tendons was really good. So, no, they didn't need braces. And so that got me, this was early in my research, it got me thinking, it's like, why are we the only species that need our wisdom teeth yanked out? Like, why doesn't my dog need that? And it turns out our ancestors didn't need their wisdom teeth. yanked out because their mouths were huge and they were huge all the way up until the Industrial Revolution. And that's what Weston Price found cultures that half of the village was eating industrialized food, other half was sticking with traditional diet. And, I think you know the rest of the story.

So, I mean, it's interesting because, you know, he took pictures. So, it's just so obvious when you look at the pictures of their mouths and their teeth, it's like, Holy mackerel. You know, like we kind of veered away from our natural way of living and being in a ways that have actually undermined our health and caused all sorts of chronic diseases. And I think your, your understanding of the breath and it's, it's a doorway to health is just, is a beautiful gift because most of us don't think about that. And if, if all your book does is help people think about it, read through their nose, maybe a little mouth tape, maybe explore some of the pranayama practices, Tai Chi, Qigong, and incorporate those daily. I mean, I even just, like, I, I encourage people to just take deep breaths. Like, I, I call it take five, you know, take five deep breaths five times a day when you wake up before each meal and when you go to bed, in, out, just through your nose and just, like, breathe and let your diaphragm fill up. And it just, it's amazing how quickly your biology changes. You can go from a state of, you know, stress and activation to a state of peace and calm and. particularly around food is so important because when you eat under a stress state, you actually are not going to burn the calories, you're going to store them and you gain weight and stress actually through the vagus nerve and other innervations in the gut and actually affects your absorption of nutrients and affects your metabolism. It affects the fat cells ability to sort of suck up food and it makes them more likely to gain weight. Whereas the breath, if you just activate the breath in the middle of all that, it actually is a powerful sort of antidote to the stress we just are experiencing all the time.

If you think about what many of our ancestors used to do before a meal, what did they do? They'd stop for a moment, they'd pray, whether that's a Christian prayer or Hindu prayer or what are you doing when you are quietly praying for a moment, you were slowing down your breathing, you're relaxing your body, you were preparing yourself to better digest food. So, you don't have to pray to get those benefits. You can just breathe. You can take a moment to be appreciative of the food you're about to eat and breathe in this slow, deep, light way. Absolutely. It's just quite remarkable.

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

So, so, yeah, you, you can't offer a blanket prescription and say, this is what's gonna happen after three days. This is what's gonna happen after six days, because different people are contending with different respiratory problems. someone with severe asthma is going to take a lot longer to get to normal, right? A lot of us have structural issues in our noses because of this dys-evolution that's happened to the human face and the human mouth. So some people will need some kind of therapy. There's various things. Sometimes surgery is helpful. Oftentimes it's not needed. I just want to throw that out for some people with severely deviated septums and polyps. that could be one of the problems that, that you're having for people who don't have that. Then I think once you start adopting, it doesn't have to be like sitting in a quiet room and, and you're putting on your yoga pants and focusing with breathing all the time so you can improve your breathing at any time of the day or night. I've found the habits are more effective than the, I'm just going to do six minutes a day and then go back to hyperventilating, creating a habit of nasal breathing. wear a little piece of tape while you're answering emails for an hour, while you're doing something that doesn't require you talking, get used to nasal breathing. When you're walking, nasal breathe and practice breathing slower, sometimes holding your breath for four steps and then breathing for six steps. So there's dozens of different ways of doing this, but they're all variations on the same thing. And that theme is breathe through the nose, breathe slowly, try to breathe less and try to breathe very light and deeply. Yeah. I don't know about you all listening.

But as James is talking, I'm definitely way more aware of my breath. And I've been like, my breathing through my nose and everything. I'm like, changing my breathing just by being aware of it. So the first step is just being aware of it.

Right. Don't write a book about this stuff for five years, everyone. It will make you a complete neurotic. No, no, no. Trust me on that. And, like, luckily. It takes a while to establish habits. So this isn't going to happen overnight. It's going to happen gradually. And if you've been a mouth breather for five decades, four decades, three decades, it's going to take a long time to convert to nasal breathing. But you will only be benefiting as you're practicing this stuff. There's only a net gain. And sometimes that gain is transformative in a very short amount of time. Sometimes it isn't.

Yeah, it's true. You also mentioned, I'm getting older and you mentioned that lung capacity and pulmonary function are the most important predictors of your mortality even more than heart disease or the cardiovascular risk factors, which is sort of surprising, right? How do we enhance, improve, expand our lung capacity as we get older? Because I'm asking for selfish reasons, but I think that probably people want to know too. what do I have to do?

I think keep doing what you're doing. My understanding of your daily protocol is you're a healthy dude, right? You exercise.

I'll try.

Yeah. You are nasal breathing. You hopefully do some yoga or some stretching. This is how you Stave off those deleterious effects of Aging. As far as the lungs and lung capacity is concerned, is you just keep I mean, think about these people who are 90 years old and 100 years, they share the same habits, right? They exercise. It doesn't have to be turbo exercise, but they're walking a lot, right? Just doing that will help stave off that decrease of lung size that happens with age. If you want to go turbo into this, you can start doing Kundalini's fantastic. You can do more vigorous pranayamas. you can do more stretching. But this is not rocket science. It's so surprising how simple this stuff is, but what a profound change it can make to your health.

So, when you say Kundalini, I don't know if people know what that is. What is that? Pranayama is the science of breath in yoga, and Kundalini is a specific type of breathing within the yoga sphere. So, tell us more about that.

Yes, Kundalini is specifically creating energy through your breath with very rhythmic, very intense breathing practices. Almost all Kundalini practices. You got it.

That's it.

You're gonna look like a dedicated pervert doing this. So do it alone. But it's about moving the stomach in and out. So, when you're breathing, a lot of people are so concerned about their abs. They want these killer flat abs. They wanna be looking good. what you really want is flexibility in your stomach and with those muscles. And some people who go to a gym too often have something called this, that's been called like a corset of muscles that really inhibits healthy breathing. And it's, it's not healthy. So Kundalini is activating that energy, moving your stomach in and out very fast. And I can attest this is extremely powerful stuff. It feels incredible. It's not easy if you're someone who wants to do a lighter version of this, stick with some soft and easy yoga. But, Kundalini, especially for respiratory health, for energy, I have found to be very powerful. Not only me, but millions of people around the world have found that as well.

Yeah, no, I agree. Breathwork is now a thing. You can go to breathwork classes and it's a thing. So I encourage people to explore it and think about where, where, where they're at in terms of their breath, because it's one of those easy and available Pathways to health that we've pretty much ignored. I mean, I don't even think I, I learned anything about, I mean, we learned almost nothing about nutrition. We, we learn less about breath, and I really didn't really learn anything about it until I, I actually did my yoga teacher training. And it was just so powerful to not only learn these techniques, but actually to experience the changes in your biology and your well-being your mental Clarity, your focus and your overall health simply by practicing some of these techniques. I think the other thing you mentioned briefly is stretching. And I think, you know, just for people to put in their heads, a lot of our life is spent over computers, phones with a kind of curving in of our chest and collapsing of our upper body and bending over as opposed to sort of like opening up and stretching. And so we really constricted our ribs and our lungs and, and, you know, people can lay on their back with foam rollers and do kinds, all kinds of stuff to open that up. You know, I started sort of learning surfing and so you gotta like have your back way up. It's the opposite of being on your phone. And as you've got to like really stretch that out so you can actually lift your torso and stretch your back. it's pretty awesome. So, you know, it's one more thing to think about with your health, but I think it's, it's really an important piece of work you've done to, to sort of map this out, to look at the science of it, to actually explain what to do, help people navigate to an easy set of, of tools and resources that help them actually have some help through their breath.

Oh, well, thank you very much for, for saying that. You know, it definitely impacted me, and I, I would suggest that people, if they are apprehensive, There are no negative side effects to being more efficient throughout life to doing something better. And I think that you'll be amazed that these seemingly simple things can really provoke some profound changes. The science is very clear on that, but nothing is better than personal experience.

That's great. So, what would you leave listeners with as summing up the sort of main thesis of your book and what people should do, what action should they take as a result?

I would just say don't take your breathing for granted, especially if you have chronic underlying issues. If you have snoring and sleep apnea, you need to find a way of fixing that immediately. It is going to destroy your health. I am convinced that you will never ever be healthy doesn't matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how much you sleep, unless you get chronic respiratory issues out of the way. People with with allergies, other mouth breathing, other things that cause mouth mouth breathing and asthma. These modern drugs can work incredibly well for acute problems, for attacks. But what can really work well for the core issue of so many of these issues is to figure out your breathing to increase your airway health. to breathe in that slow and easy way. I've seen this with hundreds of people and I've looked at thousands of studies and talked with dozens and dozens of researchers who have seen the same exact thing happen over and over. So it's all legit stuff. Some of this stuff seems too good to be true until you go and spend years and find that these impossible stories are indeed true and everyone can.

Benefit from Thank you so much. And tell us, James, where can people find your work? Where can they find you on social media? How do they get to know more about what you're doing?

My publisher allowed me to put up my entire bibliography because I realized so much of what I'm saying sounds absolutely nuts. So you can feel free to go to my website at mrjamesnester.com that's mrjamesnester with an O-R at the end.com the bibliographies up there. I have interviews with breathing experts from Harvard, from all over the world. Everything is free. there are breathing methods as well. So, all of that, that whole website is open access and free to everyone. And then, of course, there's the book. Fantastic.

And, I just really appreciate your work. I encourage everybody to get a copy of Breath: the New Science of a Lost Art and put into practice some of the things we're talking about because I think it can really upgrade your health. If you love this podcast, share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment how you work with your breath to gain back your health. subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

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