"You will never breathe the same again" with Sachin Patel and James Nestor

Hello my friends, and welcome to Perfect Practice today. I am super thrilled. This is a conversation that I've been waiting to have for quite some time. And finally, the stars have aligned. In order for this to take place, I'm interviewing somebody who's become, you know, a household name for us and really a household name in many of our community members homes. And, and that's James Nestor. James's book Breath, which is officially my all time favorite book, is the number one book that I gave away last year to my clients. Because what we're going to talk about today is so impactful and something that's so easy for us to overlook. And it's something that you in your practices might be overlooking. And I want that to stop immediately after and perhaps even during our conversation today. So without further ado, welcome James. Thanks for joining me today.

Thanks a lot for having me.

Well, I know you've done literally hundreds of interviews. I've probably listened to half of them. And every time I hear you speak, I learn something new. So I'm fascinated to see where this conversation goes. What I'd love to start with is understanding a little bit more and sharing with the audience. You know, I've read your book, I've read several of your books actually. I'd love to start with how did you get into breathing? What took you there? So take us to when breath became part of your first awareness.

It was several years ago, almost a decade ago now. I know that seems nuts, but that's just the path that it took where I was contending with various respiratory issues. I thought I was doing everything right. I was exercising all the time and sleeping and eating right and all that stuff. But I kept having respiratory problems and I kept going to my doctor who would give me some antibiotics, which would work, by the way. They were great. They did nothing for the core reason why I was having these issues. So that went on for years actually, and until I met another doctor who suggested I go to a breathing class. And those are very easy to find here in San Francisco.

So.

So I went and found one and had a pretty wild experience just sitting in a corner and breathing this very rhythmic rate. But I had no idea what to do with that information. I'm a science journalist. I wasn't going to write a memoir about breathing and I forgot about it for a number of years. All my respiratory problems went away, by the way, once I started focusing on my breath. But, you know, again, was it a magazine story? I did not think it was a book at all until I Met free divers who. And these are people who were doing things that are supposed to be scientifically impossible. And not only can they dive to hundreds of meters in a single breath of air, but they were also able to do all of these fascinating things with their breathing. That proved to me that this was more than just some. Some quaint thing. It wasn't a New age conceit, it was real science. And I was watching the people practicing this right in front of me. So that's a very long answer to a very short question, but there you go. That's how I got into it.

Yeah. One of the things that you mentioned when you had your first experience, which just for reference, was the Sudarshan Kriya method, you broke out in a sweat and you said your clothes were kind of drenched. And what was that? What did that feel like? Were you just shocked and kind of blown away or just kind of wondering what's happening to my body?

Well, the first few times I did Sudarshan Korea, I really liked it, but it didn't do much for me. And I wasn't disappointed. I just said, oh, this is part of the process. It's like eating broccoli. You don't feel the effects of broccoli after eating broccoli. It'll maybe take months and months of switching your diet. So it wasn't until I was in a pretty stressed state that I went back. This was probably months after I first learned this technique. I went back for a Sunday follow up session and. And literally within a few minutes, I was sweating so profusely that my hair was sopping wet, my T shirt was wet, there were sweat stains on my jeans. I've never experienced something as extreme as this. There were other people in the class. They all saw it. No one. You know, I had so many witnesses. I even ended up becoming a friend with one of the guys who saw it. He's like, dude, are you okay? So everyone, you know, thought I had a fever or that I was wearing too many clothes. This is wintertime in San Francisco, not warm here. Trust me on that. Nobody had an explanation. I didn't have an explanation. I looked in scientific literature. I saw people talking about Kundalini syndrome, but there were no measurements of it. And so that's why I was like, well, this was a very interesting personal experience, but I have no idea what to do with this story. But I still practice Sudarshan Kriya and it's extremely powerful. I've had very similar experiences like that. It turns out that most people Have I wasn't really special in the that regard.

Yeah. You know, when I took the training, the same thing happened to me. And it's such a simple technique. And you're at first you're thinking, okay, is this really doing anything? And then you start getting into this altered state, so to speak. And you know, it was really powerful for me is I'm also a breathwork facilitator. So I've taken people through several different breathing practices and strategies and I found that the simple practice of the sky breathing technique works just as well as anything else. So sometimes simple is, you know, just as good as complicated or sometimes even better because it's so easy for us to do. And what I like about the sky breathing is that you really don't need any fancy equipment. You have all the fancy equipment and it's just a matter of learning how to use it. Which, which kind of brings me to, you know, one of one of my next questions, which is why in just from your perspective, do you think is breathing so overlooked? I know your father in law is a pulmonologist and pulmonologists are usually working on more complicated issues related to the lungs. So who would the average person even go to to evaluate proper breathing and things like that? And why do you think it's so overlooked?

I think you really hit it there when you mentioned how simple it is. People really like things to be overcomplicated. Now, overcomplicated to them more technically difficult means it will work better. I mean, if you look at what's happened to the science of healthy eating now, how many supplements are you supposed to buy? And you mix that with that, but you don't mix that with that and you eat at this time. And that time we didn't need to do this until a few hundred years ago when we switched into eating three meals a day at the same time and into eating industrialized foods. So. And the best diet is a simple diet eat foods in their simplest form. You know, Isaac Newton said nature does nothing in vain and more is in vain when less will serve. For nature's pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes. It's a very rococo way of saying keep it simple. You know, nature is simple yet subtle. So I think that's the main driver. I don't think it has really anything to do with how effective it is. It's been proven. I don't know how many studies. There are all now like literally tens of thousands. Sudarshan Kriya has 100 independent studies done at Columbia, Harvard and more. So I don't think it has anything much to do with the science. It's just people have a hard time nowadays believing that their breath can do so much. But what I tried to do in the book is to show that we get most of our energy through our breathing. How you breathe affects every single cell of your body. It affects how your brain functions, it affects your circulation, your heart rate, I mean everything. So of course how you breathe is going to affect your health and your lifespan and your mood and your ability to sleep. That doesn't seem too much of a leap of logic to me, although to a lot of people it really is, including pulmonologists. They said they're only concerned that you're breathing if you're not breathing. If you get a car accident, see a pulmonologist, get surgery, that's what you need to do. They don't care how you breathe. That's my father in law told me. He's like, when you stop breathing, come and see me. Until then, go away. Fair enough.

So with breathing, the simplicity is really like Da Vinci said something very similar. He said that the greatest sign of sophistication is simplicity. And you're in San Francisco, so very close to Silicon Valley, where Steve Jobs kind of echoed the same thing. And that's what we see in a lot of Apple products is simplicity in the user interface. And I believe the body is the most sophisticated thing that we've ever discovered or uncovered and it should be simple and easy to take care of. However, just like you said, we love as humans to over intellectualize things and overcomplicate things. And if it's simple, it's not sexy. In our practice, the first three things that we help people with is proper breathing, because they can change that immediately. And we'll talk about some of those things today. Proper sleep, because they can change that tonight. And proper circadian rhythm, and they can change that either today or tomorrow. And those three things, those three foundational pillars kind of set the domino effect of so many other things to start working better in their bodies. And what's cool is now we do have technology that can measure and quantify and show them the progress that they're making doing simple things. So I love that you're echoing that same sentiment that simplicity is the key. And one of the things that I heard you say in other interviews is that but it's so important for us to keep things simple if we want people to actually apply. And one of the Things with breathing is that it's also easy to measure. So it's easy to quantify, which makes it easy for us to track. Like we can assess pretty easily and then we can track progress that people are making. What are some of the ways that somebody can assess their breathing? If I wanted to do a self assessment on myself, practitioners watching this right now, they want to make sure that they're, they're checking off the boxes for correct breathing. What are some of the pieces of advice you could offer?

Well, luckily these technologies are really cheap now, and this wasn't the case 10 or 20 years ago. So I think if people are apprehensive, if, even though there's tens of thousands of studies showing very clearly what this does to your body and to your brain, don't believe any of them. Try it out yourself and see what happens. So a blood pressure cuff, I think is, has some real value. Pulse oximeter is great. If you can track heart rate variability in real time, that's, that's even better. I wish someone would come out with a cheaper cabinometer. Hopefully that's coming soon. But I think just with those devices, and you can probably buy all three of those for under 60 bucks or something, it's negligible amount of money for, for what you're able to do. But you can literally see in real time what happens to your heart rate, what happens to your oxygen levels, what happens to your circulation, your nervous system function. So you no longer have to say, oh, it's just a placebo effect. You know, you can think about whatever you want as you're breathing. Doesn't matter. Meditation is the next level. It's extremely powerful. But, you know, meditation doesn't also have you breathe in a certain way. So I really think that, that once you see for yourself, especially with, if you have border lung, higher blood pressure, as I do, or as I did, you can see a drop of 10 to 15 points within a couple of minutes. So that is not by accident. That is something you are willing your body to do. You're running more efficiently, which is why your blood pressure is dropping, your heart rate's dropping, you're feeling calmer, you can think about it just like driving a car. What is going to happen with the pressure in a car? Or why would you overwork a car and just be tinging the RPMs all the time? That's what so many people are doing right now. By over breathing, we're breathing way too much, just like most of us are eating too much. We don't need to. And you can see for yourself what's happening with your oxygen and your own body when you switch your breathing. And oftentimes the slower you breathe, the, the oxygen goes up.

Yeah, and that's kind of paradoxical, right? Most people think they need to breathe more to better oxygenate their tissues. So maybe we can talk about that a little bit, because that, that is kind of, kind of tricky, right, when you think about it. But there is a physiological reason for that. So maybe you can describe that and why that happens.

Well, what happens when you're over breathing is. I won't get too deep into the biochemistry is you're, you are offloading too much carbon dioxide. And a lot of people think that carbon dioxide is this evil molecule because all we hear about is too much CO2 in the atmosphere, which is a hundred percent true. But in your body, you really need a balance of CO2 and O2. And when you breathe too much, too much CO2 is depleted from your body, okay? And without that CO2, you get constriction. And so right now, if you, if you breathe like that, you'll feel lightheaded, you might feel some numbness, some tingling, that is from this vasoconstriction. Your blood vessels are getting smaller and smaller and smaller, which makes it much harder for them to deliver fresh oxygenated blood to all of your hungry cells. Some people stay in this perpetually hyperventilating. And hyperventilation doesn't need to look like this. It can look like this. You don't even see me hyperventilating. I'm just breathing more air than I need to. You will get oxygen this way. You will stay alive, but you won't stay healthy. And this is what researchers have been saying. I mean, this, this research goes back almost a hundred years. They're saying the same thing over and over and over again. And it just seems like that message hasn't really made it out to too many of us. So this is one of the reasons that you want to breathe in line with your metabolic needs, which is almost always slower than you think it is. Slower and more fluidly.

You know, one thing I heard you say that really caught my attention was that you want to work out to. You know, usually when, when you're working out with a trainer or when you first start exercising, they say, stop, you know, doing the exercise when your form breaks down. But one thing that you said, which I thought was really interesting, is stop exercising or pull back a little bit when your breathing breaks down. So maybe you can talk about That a little bit, too.

You should never work out harder than you can breathe correctly. So that doesn't mean you shouldn't work out hard. It just means that you need to build yourself up. So many of us want to speed up our. Whatever we're doing, we want to get to the finish line quicker, but we're not looking at sustainability. So whenever you're jogging and you notice yourself, you need to slow way down until you're breathing normally and fluidly and effortlessly build that base and then push it forward. So this is the one thing I've heard from so many elite trainers of Olympians and ultra marathoners. This is the biggest thing that they're using right now. They assess breathing. It's the very first thing they do. And they work on the breathing more than anything else. They said it is the number one performance enhancer period across the board. These people are already fit, they're already competing. But what they're allowing them to do is to function at their peak level while using less energy because they're breathing less.

And.

And guess what happens if you can hit your peak level using less energy, you then have more energy to push it even further, to push it faster, to push it longer. That's what they're finding. We have what's like a piston in the middle of our chest. It's our diaphragm. So why would you want this piston working out like this? You know, when it could work out like this, you could breathe half the breaths per minute while getting more oxygen into your body. Guess what's going to happen? You're going to completely kick ass. And they're showing this in so many studies now. And I've been hearing this from people, even within a few weeks, they're increasing their personal best by 3% or 4%. Doesn't sound like much talk to an athlete who isn't looking for a 0.5% increase over the course of a year. It's a huge gain.

Yeah. One of my clients is actually the world's fastest human, or he was at one point, and he's only looking for, like, even a 0.1% edge. And nobody in his. In his career really focused on breathing. So I'm so in, like, I'm so fascinated, as we're working together, to share some of these breathing techniques with him because he's still very athletic, still very healthy, and still has, you know, some of the best years ahead of him. So it's interesting to see that something as simple and something as overlooked as breathing is now Getting the attention that it deserves. Now, you mentioned the diaphragm, and people here who are watching this are very well versed in the anatomy. However, we don't really get much training on the diaphragm. We don't really get much training on how to breathe correctly. I'd love for you to talk about maybe we start from the head down and we go through some of the anatomy, we go through some of the fun facts about the erectile tissue in the nose. And I'd love to talk about dental arches because I know that plays a huge role in breathing. So let's start at the top. Like, what are some of the things that we can start doing to either assess if we have the right anatomical aptitude, if you will, and how we can improve upon it, and then we'll work our way down from there. So let's start by first, probably the mind. I think that's the first place to start if we're going to start breathing correctly, is bringing our breath to our awareness. Do you have any strategies or techniques or apps that you use to help with that?

I think that you're right. Awareness, it's so boring to tell. Someone wants the secret sauce, right? They're like, tell me what you've learned over 10 years. The most powerful thing is to become aware of your breathing. Because what I've noticed, once you become aware of your breathing, you realize what a terrible breather you are throughout the entire day and for most of us, throughout the entire night. I had no idea I was breathing so dysfunctionally until I learned about this stuff. Until I started to pay attention to how I was breathing when I was answering emails, how I was breathing when I was working out, when I was surfing, when I was sleeping. And so once you're aware of your breathing, then you can assess the problem and you can fix it. So it all starts with that. So when we breathe in air, we'll start from up here and then we'll get to what breathing does to the brain. So there's a difference between the air we take from our mouth and the air we take from our noses. Right now, if I want to take a big breath of air through the mouth, there's no resistance. I can take a huge gulp of air. That's great. In an emergency, that's what I want to do. But for the rest of the time, I want to be breathing through my nose. And why you ask? Because I'm going to grab something. Because if you look at what happens in the nose here, when you are Taking breath through the nose, you're forcing it to all of these structures. Those structures aren't there by accident. We have evolved to have these structures just like every other mammal, because when we breathe air through the nose, we're able to filter it and pressurize it and remove toxins, battle viruses. I could go on and on. There's about 30 different functions to nasal breathing that the mouth doesn't have nitric oxide. First, all you have to do is look at our biology. Why would we evolve this enormous, very intricate organ randomly? This is not random. Then you look at all of the functions of the mouth during breathing. They have. There are zero functions, zero advantages. So that's really the first thing. You have to breathe through your nose. Not all the time, but most of the time. And throughout all of sleep, you should be breathing through your nose when you're working out, except maybe some points of, like, zone five, upper zone four. You can temporarily default to mouth breathing temporarily to reset your respiration and then go back to nasal breathing totally fine. So we know from various studies, and if Anyone has an EEG at home, they have some wearable EEGs now. One is called Muse, which, which I have, which is interesting. You can see what happens when you breathe differently and what happens to your brain waves. So you are increasing oxygenation to the brain just by breathing through your nose, and you get about 20% more oxygen overall breathing through your nose than you do equivalent breaths through your mouth, which is going to make a huge, huge difference. Shall I keep going down the body or do you want to step in here? What works?

Well, I'd love to maybe discuss the role of nitric oxide in fighting viruses and the erectile tissue in the nose as well. I know that plays a huge role in how people breathe and how obstructed their nasal passage can be.

Sure. So, people, right now, what you can do is block one nostril and breathe through the other. Then block the other and breathe through the other. There's a good chance one is going to be. Unless you have congestion or allergies, one nostril is going to be more open than the other one. Sometimes they're both open at the same level. But throughout the day, every 30 minutes to around three or four hours, our nostrils will switch dominance. Our nostrils are covered with this erectile tissue, these turbinates are. And that erectile tissue, just like the erectile tissue, you know, where can engorge with blood and become clogged and hard, and then it can become flaccid as Blood leaves and that's what happens in our nostrils. So I'm sure a lot of the people here are familiar with alternate nostril breathing. Nadi Sharana so this is a whole technology, you could say, of gaming these effects that naturally occur in our body. You're hacking into this natural flow that, this ultradian rhythm that happens throughout, many times throughout the day. So the next question is, well, why? What does that do? Turns out there's been numerous studies that have looked at how just breathing through one nostril or the other affects our brain's function. It affects our heart rate, affects our blood pressure and more. And the short version is left nostril in and out is very calming. So your heart rate's going to go down, blood pressure is going to go down, right brain is going to get more activity to it. That's the creative side. Right nostril inhale is stimulating. So heart rate is going to go up, blood pressure is going to go up. You'd be amazed by how many studies at UCSD was doing a bunch of studies into this have been done and you can play around with this yourself. I think it's just fascinating that this practice has been around for 1300 years and just now we have the instruments just recently to actually measure that it does. Ancient yogis knew it worked, that's why it's been around so long. And very technical instructions, do this but don't do this, do this but don't do this. And they developed that for a reason, because they were able to use this for thousands and thousands of people over hundreds and hundreds of years.

One easy way I find to remember that is to think of the gas pedal and the brake pedal for us to go into a more relaxed state. Just like we would hit the brake, which is on the left hand side, we would breathe through our left nostril and vice versa. We can alter our states depending on the task that we're trying to accomplish and use the correct nostril in order to get there. Do you ever use silicone plugs or anything like that to plug one nostril to, you know, kind of not have your hand there? Have you done any? Do you recommend that at all? Do you, or do you recommend using your, your thumb or your finger to, to create that effect?

I've noticed that you can just sort of switch your nervous system function and influence different states after a few minutes. So a lot of alternate nostril breathing has you breathing over both because most of the time you want to balance. People say, well, I Just want to be chilled out all the time. No, not, not really. If you're working, you want to be balanced. And this is a nice way of resetting things. It's interesting to look at any picture of the Buddha sleeping and he's always sleeping on his right side. That opens up the left nostril to calm the body down. So, you know, hacks, different hacks, people want to do different stuff. That's great as long as you understand the general premise and you know, if a little of something may be good for you, it doesn't necessarily mean that a lot of something's going to be great. So don't get a westerner on this and try to kick your nose's ass. Just like calmly do it for a few minutes. If it feels good, you can increase that a little bit. And knowing that this is pretty powerful stuff.

Yeah, well said. You know, we, as, as practitioners and biohackers, we want to hack the crap out of stuff. And really what you said is beautiful. It's really about finding balance and kind of working with the body's natural flow and rhythm instead of trying to be dominant on one side versus the other. Now, before we move on to the mouth, what I'd love to also know is there's several devices, right, non medicinal devices, like plugs that you can put in your nose that help open up the airways. There's a Breathe Right strip, which is something that I wear. What are your thoughts and recommendations there?

I think all of those are fantastic. It's hard to give a blanket prescription and I'm a reporter, so I'm not a doctor. I'm not going to prescribe anything. But everyone's different. Everyone breathes slightly different and everyone has a slightly different breathing issue. Some people don't have nasal congestion at all, but they have problems with their lungs. Other people have a severely deviated septum, you know, so I think it's about playing around with these things and seeing what works for you. A lot of people thought that, you know, anything that was an intervention that wasn't natural was, was bad. That is not at all what I'm saying. These little hacks are fantastic. Breathe Right strips to acclimate yourself to nasal breathing, especially when you're working out or when you're sleeping, work fantastically. There's also mute inserts. These are actually inserted into your nostrils. They increase airflow by 30%. These are wonderful training wheels to just get your body used to this after a while. Sleep tape. Using a little piece of tape on your lips at night has absolutely transformed my sleep. I track my sleep and I know when what my sleep is going to be by not using this stuff. It works for me. Is it going to work for everyone? I have no idea. But you can try it because most of these things are either very low cost or free. And there's. That's the one thing I've heard more from people than anything else. Thousands and thousands of people. Just shutting your mouth and especially at night, just by breathing through the nose at night can transform your sleep and it's not going to cost you a dime.

Yeah, I would agree. And you know, for me, I mouth tape at night as well and I've done that consistently for the last couple of years and it's transformational. So my entire family does it, my wife does it, my 11 year old son does it. It's like our nighttime ritual to put that small piece of tape on. And we're not trying to hermetically seal the mouth, right? We're just trying to put something in there that gently nudges us and gives us that feedback loop to keep our mouth in that closed position. And for me, my deep sleep has improved, my respiratory rate has improved, my HRV has improved, I completely eliminated snoring. So it's been profoundly impactful for me. And one of the things I also noticed is I started dreaming again. So for a while there I stopped dreaming and I was just like, oh my God, what supplement do I need to take to get my dreams back? And turns out it was actually altering or optimizing rather my breathing patterns that made the difference for me.

This is the thing that I find pretty frustrating. I try to keep my feelings out of my work, but it's so frustrating that people aren't looking at breathing first and foremost, especially when you're looking at kids with adhd, kids who have metabolic issues, kids who have trouble sleeping, chronic insomnia, they have other autoimmune related issues. I'm not saying it's all related to breathing, of course not. But if they are snoring and have sleep apnea throughout the night, their health is going to be absolutely devastated. And I've heard from so many parents whose kids were on 12 different drugs, nothing was working. They had their kid improve their sleep, specifically with using sleep tape, and the vast majority of the problems went away after years and years of seeing doctors. So I'm not trying to get on a high horse here, but I've also heard this from sleep doctors, from dentists, from sleep medicine experts at Harvard and Stanford, who have been trying to tell people this for years and years. So breathing isn't going to fix all the world's problems. It's not going to fix all your problems, but you have to look at it. And it's so simple that I find the most benefit would be to look at it first, fix the breathing dysfunction, and then you can work up to supplements and medications and all the rest.

I know there's, like, anatomical changes in the face that can help us identify if somebody may have the potential to be a bad breather. Obviously, we can observe somebody as they're sitting there if they're breathing correctly. So let's move on to the mouth, because this is an area that you may not know this, but you transform my son's life with the knowledge from your book. And I appreciate that so much, because when a couple years ago he wanted to. Well, we were going to the dentist, and the dentist said, he's got a ton of cavities. And we're like, what? Like, he eats healthy, eats whole foods. Like, we don't feed him candy bars and all that stuff. And we're like, oh, my God, like, maybe we should have been feeding him this stuff all the time, because what we're doing isn't working. And turns out that the number one cause of cavities I learned from you is mouth breathing. And so he was breastfed for two and a half years. My wife actually had a major complication during her pregnancy, lost a ton of blood. They told her she'd never be able to breastfeed again. And that inspired both of us to use our knowledge to regain her ability to breastfeed. So she did that for two and a half years. But one of the things that we noticed with my son was that his or we noticed is that he had overcrowding. And all the dentists that we went to, the orthodontist we went to wanted to pull his teeth. So there was a few clues that we had that were like, something isn't quite right here, and there's got to be a better way. Thankfully, we found an orthodontist who recommended a palatal expander for him instead of pulling his teeth. And that was confirmed by the work that you've done and the research that you shared that that's probably a much better option because it actually changes the structure of the jaw. And of course, when our facial structure changes, a lot of things change, not just how we breathe, our attractiveness to the opposite sex. There's all these things that also are amplified or modified. When we have correct anatomical structure, we put a palatal expander in his mouth and his jaw formation naturally corrected itself. His underbite became a natural bite. And I don't even think he's going to need braces anymore. So, you know, what's fascinating is that most parents, if they didn't have this knowledge or didn't have the right orthodontist, probably would have had a whole bunch of teeth pulled and that would have perpetuated the anatomical imbalance and never corrected it. And I know you can still do these things. I know you had some palatal expansion work done. So even into adulthood, you know, we can correct these things. But, you know, that may have led to decades of improper breathing for him until he discovered that. So why do you think that's the case? Why do you think most dentists don't recommend something like that and they're so quick to pull teeth in situations like this?

Well, what you mentioned is exactly what happened to me, right? I had teeth pulled, I had headgear, I had braces, I had all that. And I had X rays done a few years ago and showed that it profoundly affected not only my profile, but, but my mouth size and my ability to breathe. And this isn't my opinion that this was done with X rays. They looked at the cranial base and said, this is where you should have been, this is where you are now. So this isn't really controversial either, I think, with your kid. What people don't understand is the reason why our mouths have grown so small. It's caused by numerous things. Breastfeeding is one of them. Kids who are bottle fed will have a larger chance of having sore and sleep apnea later on in life because their mouths are smaller. Okay, we know that, but it's not just like, okay, I've got my breastfeeding done, the kid's away and everything's good. There has to be these habits that are maintained as a kid is developing. Eating hard foods, chewing a lot. But what is extremely important is oral posture. How is the oral posture throughout the day? Just because you had two years of breastfeeding doesn't mean if then for the next seven or eight years, as this kid is developing oral postures like this, and at night it's like this, the face will develop around this and it can impact the growth of the mouth. So sometimes it's genetic, but epigenetics is about 50%, dictates 50% of our airway health and our facial shape, which isn't to say Genetics doesn't dictate. A lot of. It does. But epigenetics dictates almost as much, 40 to 50%. So I think with mouse size right now, people can go into the mirror, or if you have a thumb, you can put your thumb on the roof of your mouth. And that upper palate, there's a very good chance it's going to have a really big indentation in it. I'm a perfect example of this. This is new to our species. If you look at any ancient skull, their palates were flat and they were huge and wide. They only got those flat and wide palates from breastfeeding. Okay? It starts with a proper oral posture. That's how we know they were nasal breathers and from eating hard foods and not eating industrialized crap. So the reason why you want that flat palate and not the one that goes up like mine is because when it goes up, it can impede the space in the sinus cavities and make it harder to breathe through your nose. Guess what happens? You breathe like this through your mouth. And the more you breathe through your mouth, the more your nose is going to get clogged. So it's this cascading effect that happens. Luckily, as you found, we have technologies to now reverse some of the damage that's been done from industrialized food to restore us the way we would have been before we had these foods. So it's a little ironic that most of the medical interventions are right now are just returning us to our natural state, but they can be incredibly effective. And again, I'm not a dentist. I'm not saying this is going to work for everyone everywhere, but if you just look at the math here, you have a mouth that's so small that your teeth are growing and crooked. Okay, That's a problem. No one wants crooked teeth. What's going to happen if I take some teeth out and then I take those remaining teeth and just crane them closer together? You do this to a kid who's 8 years old and keep them in braces for four years. Like, it doesn't. You know what I mean? It doesn't take a lot of thinking to be like. Be like Chinese foot. Foot binding, what they. What the royals used to do, right? Yeah, that's exactly what's what's happened. This is very controversial, what I'm saying, but go do the research and go look at the geometry, and that's what's happened. So I think you've done your kid a huge favor by allowing him to have a Larger mouth, because that larger mouth means a larger airway. And as you mentioned, it also significantly affects the profile.

Having a big mouth is a compliment, right?

Well, I think relatively speaking.

Tell me about sucking the thumb and how that affects the palate.

Terrible. And I also learned this as well that, that pacifiers after around six months are really bad because what happens is the face and the mouth will grow around the pacifier. So there's this whole movement called baby led weaning. You can learn. There's a whole book on this. It's very interesting. But this is one of those things where it just makes sense. If a kid is sucking his or her throat, thumb all the time in those stages of very fast development, the mouth will, will shape around that and you can go look up thumb sucking and mouth and see these mouths, these teeth that are almost circular. You know, it's like, it's almost like a shark's mouth. And that's what happens if you do it long enough. So this doesn't mean that you can't suck on a lollipop or suck on things on occasion. I'm talking chronic habitual movement in one area or the other is obviously going to affect how your face grows because you're setting a foundation in early age to how you will look and how you will breathe later on in life. That's why it's so important.

You know, I had a. I went to India when I was 12 and I was old enough to start asking questions. And one of the things that they do there, and maybe you came across this in some of your research, is they would have you chew on a branch in the morning and almost like a dog with a bone. So you'd have to chew this branch, it's usually from a neem tree or another tree, and then you would turn that branch into bristles and then brush your teeth with it. And so my parents, grandparents, like none of them had braces. They have perfect arches, you know, perfect teeth, fully aligned, everything. So when they moved to Canada, like this idea, like, I never had braces. My brother didn't either. This idea of having braces was so foreign to them. They're like, what's, why do you, why do all these kids need braces for? And then I realized that it's probably because they were chewing on this branch every morning, stimulating the stem cell production in their jaw, chewing and pulling, so probably expanding the jaw. And of course, the oils from the tree were probably beneficial for their gum health and dental health. Did you come across any of that in Your research to, to demonstrate if that's beneficial for the reasons I just.

Suggested, not those specific branches, but every culture, before industrialized cultures took over the entire world had chewing. They would chew for three or four hours a day sometimes. They're constantly chewing fibrous stuff. And this is a perfect example is some family somewhere, thousands of years ago was probably doing this in the morning. And other families are like, wait, hey, what are they doing? Their faces are so, they have such perfect faces, perfect mouths, even though the other people also would have straight teeth.

It's.

To me, this makes perfect sense. And so we have all these different products now to stimulate or to simulate what we were doing in the past naturally, thousands or even hundreds of years, or in your case, decades ago, I would not be surprised if that wasn't one of the reasons why they had such great teeth. And if you look at the, this is still up on the National Institutes of Health here in the U.S. they say the causes of crooked teeth are genetic, but this is clearly not, not the case. If your kid was going to get braces and if your parents, you know, had perfectly straight teeth. It's like, what is going on here?

Yeah, you know, we talk about soft foods, right? We've be, we've relegated to processing our foods, cooking our foods, blending our foods. And so we're actually chewing so much less because we're, we're letting the cooking process and the blending process do a lot of that for us. So especially when kids, when they're first starting to eat their solids, they're not even eating solids, they're eating liquids. What role does that play? Or what suggestions do you have for parents with children that are really young at that age?

Well, it's interesting that we have just in the past, what, 70 years or so, come up with this stuff called baby food. We say, oh, this is, this is what babies have to eat now. Well, that's not what they had to eat for the last 2 million years. Like, it's, it's insane. And obviously it's a marketing ploy so that you buy a ton of these teeny little jars of stuff where you have to throw away the lid and here's your applesauce. So metabolically, that's bad too, because we process this different, differently. It's lacking the fiber of fruits. So it's a disaster on all fronts. And I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who studies nutrition, who studies dentation that doesn't already know this. This is, you know, Robert Lustig has been talking about this at UCSF for decades and decades. So the next question is, well, you know, it's dangerous for babies to eat adult food, but if that were the case, again, how are any of us here? All of our ancestors would have died. So there is this, this thing, this process called baby led weaning, which teaches you exactly how to do this and what to look for. Because if you start a kid from breastfeeding immediately onto regular hard foods, guess what happens? They start working out their jaws, they develop this musculature, they develop the skeleton, they're able to build this powerful face. So aesthetically, that powerful prognathic face is considered more attractive. Okay, that's all fine and great but functionally, that larger mouth, that face that comes out has a larger airway which as we've been talking about, affects everything. Your ability to calmly and easily get air in and out of your body is essential for your long term survival. If you are struggling to breathe, to do something we do 20,000 times a day, it is going to wear you down, it is going to break your body, which is exactly what we have seen in so many cases with so many people.

You know, one thing I have noticed when we first gave our son his toothbrush is he started chewing on it. So it's almost intuitive for us to do that. And then of course, as parents, we get upset with them. And I didn't know this when he was at that age, but we get upset, we're like, no, you're not supposed to chew on the thing, you're supposed to brush your teeth with. It turns out you can probably do both, right? And so I think children intuitively know these things, even animals intuitively know these things. If you ever see a dog chewing on a bone, they're not just biting on the bone, they're pulling it. And that's probably pulling their jaw out to do that. So, so fascinating, right, to, to see this and, and how we as adults try to override this innate intelligence that our children have.

Well, I think someone needs to go out and find those branches you were talking about and, and market those. I'm, I'm all in. I, I, what, what kind of branch is that? Do you know? The, the tree?

It's usually a neem tree, but you can actually, if you go to Amazon, I'll say, you know what, I'll send some to you. There's a, there's a product you can get on Amazon. They're individually, they almost look like little jerky strips and they're individually wrapped and you chew on it. You just. And then you cut off the 2 inches that you chew. And you can re. You know, you use it until it's down to a nub. But, yeah, so there's, you know, those things are available in some cultures. They still use them because they work. You know, my. My mom has no cavities, like, zero cavities. And, you know, she didn't have the fortune of having a dentist going every six months, like, you know, like we do now. And she's got perfect teeth. And a lot of that we can attribute to, you know, some of those early habits growing up, for sure.

And I think that keeping your mouth shut, just, just as you learned, is. Is so essential to having the. To keeping the healthy oral microbiome. There's a microbiome in our mouths as there is in our noses. If you open your mouth, you're switching the PH of your mouth and making it a breeding ground for bacteria, which is why mouth breathing at night is a really bad idea. So I think this sounds like a fantastic idea. And it doesn't shock me that your mom didn't have cavities because all of our ancestors weren't living, did not. Some of them had a few cavities here and there, but it was not a widespread thing at all. So you ask yourself the question, where did we go wrong and how. How can we fix it? And I love the idea of chewing on a piece of branch because now there's products, of course there are, which are pieces of plastic, pieces of rubber. I think that just sounds like a bad idea to me, just chewing on a piece of, you know, petroleum, a piece of rubber, plastic product for so long. I much prefer chewing on a branch. So I can't wait to give it a go.

All right, well, consider it in the mail. So as we move on, I think another thing that excites me about some of the work that you're doing is the profound effects it has on lymphatics. And one of the things that I learned is that the biggest lymph nodes are actually underneath the diaphragm. And you talked about that piston. And so as we breathe correctly and as the diaphragm moves up and down, it's moving that lymph, getting rid of some of that stagnation. One thing you said in one of your interviews with Mike Mutzl, which I thought was really fascinating as well, this is part of what we teach our clients, is that when we are in a state of stress, which can be induced by improper breathing, we actually put some of our organs in a state of suspended animation. And that 90% of cancers start in the organs that don't get adequate lymphatic drainage and blood flow. I'd love to unpack that a little bit and, and see if there's anything that you can share about breathing and lymphatic function.

Yeah, I learned that tidbit from Dr. Steven park at Albert Einstein Medical College. And I thought it was fascinating because he was trying to figure out why are so many cancers in so many areas of the body so prevalent and why are they so rare in other parts of the body? That's what he discovered, is these states of constant low grade stress, which is what the majority of people are dealing with, are tied to most modern illnesses because it keeps the body in this constantly inflamed state. We know that inflammation is behind the vast majority of modern illnesses. These are illnesses of inflammation. We have two different sides of the nervous system, the parasympathetic, the sympathetic. I'm sure everybody knows this stuff. When we're constantly sympathetic, that's good to be in sympathetic. Sometimes we need to do that, that hormetic stress, but, but not all the time. The vast majority of the time we should be relaxed. But when we're in that sympathetic state, we do block the energy, the blood flow to several organs that are considered non essential in emergencies. You don't need your liver or kidneys or sexual organs when you're running away from a tiger or an elephant. So if we're constantly in that state, then those organs after a while can start to suffer from serious malfunctioning. And Dr. Stephen Porges, whom I'm very happy to be talking with next week, has been writing about this for 40 years now, and it's still called a theory. It's not a theory, it's a fact. So breathing is actually the quickest way of resetting your nervous system function. It's much quicker than supplements or diet or whatever. You just stop and take control of your breathing and you can reset yourself. And another reason why breathing slowly and breathing in those deep fluid breaths is so important is that that diaphragm is this pump. And every time it goes down, when you take a big deep breath of air, that diaphragm goes down and softly massages those lymphs and also those organs down there. It is very crowded down there. So our bodies were designed to do this. When you softly massage your organs, it allows them to leach out lymph fluid and toxins and metabolites. Which you have to get out of your body. Your body likes movement. It doesn't like things to stagnate too long. When you're breathing just up into your chest, you don't get that massage. And so this can cause lymph issues. I've heard from about three or four doctors since the book has come out about all this, which was news to me. I knew a little bit about it. I couldn't fit it into the book. I didn't have space. But in the next paperback edition, I'm going to be revising that session to talk about the essential functions of proper breathing and lymph fluid function and circulation.

Yeah. Most diseases in our organs start because of that lymphatic stagnation. They can't clear out the toxins and. And in our periphery, our lymphatic tissue is woven into our musculature. So every time we move, walk around, move our arms, it's squeezing that lymph and sending it back to the thoracic duct. But as we know, our abdominal organs don't have muscles enveloping them, but they do have the abdominal muscles, the transverse abdominis, rectus abdominis, and the diaphragm. So when used correctly, those organs are going to gently pump that lymph out and keep it moving. I always say people don't get finger cancer. They get cancer of the liver, the kidneys, the digestive organs. And when we're in that persistently stressed out state, or if we're persistently breathing incorrectly, which creates that altered state of physiology, putting us into a pseudo sympathetic state instead of a true sympathetic state, it's going to create that disruption. So easy sometimes to fix these things once we again raise our awareness around them.

You look how ancient practices of Kundalini and so many different yoga practices, so many different pranayamas. What are you doing? You're putting your hands up and flexing this section. So the diaphragm does a lot of the work, but you can also use the musculature to massage this area. This is the energy center we're finding with the gut microbiome. That's 100% true. There's three pounds of microbiome in there that are essential to how we think, how we function, every aspect of health.

Yeah. This is so fascinating and I know that there's so much that we can continue to unpack here. So I'm going to encourage everyone to pick up a copy of this book. Do you have a timeline on the paperback version?

It's Going to be a long, long time. Yeah, we're all backed up, so it'll probably be a couple of years.

Okay, so get the hard copy version. So much wisdom in there, so much knowledge in there. There's actually a whole section on various breathing techniques that you can use. So I want to encourage all of you practitioners to grab your copy. James, how can we support the work that you're doing? How can we support you? You know, you've been so gracious with your time. I've seen, seen you everywhere spreading this message. So I want to do my best to help and support getting this message out there. What can we do collectively as a community to support you?

I think the last hour having me on here has been great. It's always a pleasure talking with you. I'm, you know, I'm on trying to get better at social media stuff. I'm booting up a couple new projects. We're hopefully going to take a lot of these messages into a miniseries soon. So we'll, we'll see what happens. But people can go on to Instagram. I'm no, no puppy pictures there. I'm just only posting things that have to do with science and breathing and related subjects. And my handle is Mr. That's Mr. James nester.com my website also has all of these breathing practices, all for free, all the scientific references, interviews with experts and more. And that's all for free. There's no paywall or anything.

Okay. And not to ask too loaded of a question, but is there anything that you would like the practitioners who are tuned in to know that we didn't cover today?

I think we covered a lot of it. I think just doubling down on serious resp. If you have patients with COPD with emphysema, breathing is the number one thing that you should be focusing on. Specifically not only the active breathing and respiratory rate, that's usually what people focus on, but the flexibility of the rib cage and the intercostals. With aging patients, we lose lung capacity as we grow older, precipitously after 50 and by losing this lung capacity, guess what happens? We're forced to breathe more and more just to get that oxygen. So I would look at older people especially and look at their flexibility and work on that with some very simple exercises that people really respond to. All they are is basic yoga exercises. Don't call them yoga. Call them some complex scientific name and people might be more interested in it. But that is the only the thing that I keep finding over and over and over again.

Amazing. Well, thank you, my friend. And I am so looking forward to sending these branches over to you. Keep an eye out for those and here's to an amazing year ahead and you know, best wishes and best health to you and you know, thank you again for spreading this powerful message. It's so simple, so profound, so practical, so applicable, so relevant, especially with what's going on in the world right now. And I want to do whatever I can to help you spread this message. So thank you for honoring us with your knowledge, your time, your wisdom, your humility. It's greatly appreciated.

Thanks a lot for having me. Take care, everybody.

All right, well, there you have it, everyone. Mr. James Nestor, please support his work. Please help him spread this message. Please more importantly, apply this into your own personal life. Apply this with your family, apply this with your communities and let's transform the world together one breath at a time.