James Nestor wants you to shut up...in a nice way
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
By James Nestor
Riverhead Books, 2020
Hardcover, 304 Pages
ISBN-10: 0735213615
ISBN-13: 978-0735213616
List: $28.00 Amazon: $16.80
By Richard Murphy
An old joke has it that an elderly man was asked his secret to long life and replied, "First thing I did was inhale, second exhale, it has been inhale, exhale ever since. Nothing to it."
It turns out, it's not that simple, and odds are, we are all doing it wrong. A reaction might be ”what do you mean? I haven't suffocated." True enough, but our mouths and noses are a mess because we don't get it right.
James Nestor was going through a bad patch of subpar health. His doctor suggested a breathing class of a technique called Sudarshan Kriya might help his failing lungs and he duly showed up for his first session. It did not look promising. He was unimpressed by the decrepit house the lesson was taking place in. Fellow students seemed a motley lot and the instructor did not excite confidence.
The class did not start off with a bang. He was instructed by an odd voice from a cassette to breath in and out through the nose, slowly, focusing on the breath.
As the evening continued, he was less and less feeling it. Good manners and free admission kept him there.
His grudging tenacity paid off. Nestor did not notice a transformation or change but it happened, “I never felt myself relax or the swarm of nagging thoughts leave my head. But it was as if I'd been taken from one place and deposited somewhere else. It happened in an instant."
He noted some physical changes and had an even better feeling of well-being the next day. Wanting to learn more led to a quest that would last several years. The book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art would be the result.
Breath is his hunt for what has happened to us over time such that as a species we are having trouble with breathing and maladies associated with it.
The author introduces us to a "rogue group" of explorers he calls "pulmonauts” who have had some of the same questions he had. Many early members of that tribe were not scientists, but tinkerers "who stumbled on the powers of breathing because nothing else could help them."
There were searchers among the ancients but, for us, it started in the Nineteenth Century. George Catlin, the most famous artist of the West, was one of the first. A lawyer, then a portraitist in failing health, he left it all to live among and paint the Lakota Sioux. That is what he is most famous for.
What he found was a people in excellent health who knew how to breathe. Without dentists, he reported their teeth "as regular as the keys of a piano." Mothers would train infants to grow up breathing through the nose.
Catlin would bind his own mouth shut so that he would sleep with it closed as did the indigenes. Restoring health, he lived to a more advanced age than average Americans of the time.
Another "pulmonaut" was Carl Stough, who, according to Nestor, was somewhat a man of mystery as he left little record. In his time, however, he had a big following. From Opera singers to dying emphysemics, thousands found him. His key to breathing well: "the transformative power of full exhalation." He figured out, for example, emphysema patients suffered not because they could not get air into the lungs, but because they could not get enough stale air out.
There are others who have led the way. Konstantin Buteyko was an advocate of breathing less to get more. Czech runner, Emil Zátopek won Olympic gold with a similar technique. Wim Hof seems more than a little eccentric, but no matter. All of Nestor's subjects are interesting and people to learn from.
The author himself was his own subject of exploration, taking up "freediving." Freediving does not take place at an Olympic pool where they don't charge admission, though it originated in Greece. It was there that he explored the "ancient practice of diving hundreds of feet below the water's surface on a single breath of air." This was also the subject of another book he wrote.
Being successful in going deep might make one think his troubles were over, but there was so much research to be done and nothing could stop him, no matter how much he had to suffer for science.
In the first chapter, James reveals the disaster area that was his nose (It was disgusting), and will embark on a project that seems destined to make it worse. He, with fellow pulmonaut Anders Olsson, will have their noses stopped up to spend 10 days mouth breathing for science.
Olsson seems even more of a monomaniac than the author. He feared his father's fate, wished to avoid it, and started his crusade.
A prosperous Swedish businessman, Olsson got a divorce, sold off his company and cars and large house, and moved to smaller digs. He read everything and talked to scientists, surgeons, and anyone worth talking to about breathing.
When the noses were opened, it must have seemed anticlimactic that just about every vital sign and metric had gotten worse. The second part of the test, naturally enough, was shutting off the mouth and only breathing through the nose. The improvement post-experiment was also not unexpected.
So, just don't breathe through the mouth. Well, yes, but it is not that simple, as habits of a lifetime and especially, their effects are not easily reversed. But, some can be cured and some ameliorated. It is not easy, and seems kind of weird, but there are methods.
One of the strangest is proposed by the dentist and pulmonaut, Mark Burhenne. Dr. Mark asserts that mouth breathing contributes to periodontal disease, bad breath and "was the number one cause of cavities, even more damaging than sugar consumption, bad diet, or poor hygiene." I feel less guilty about all those M&Ms I ate as a child.
What's his cure? Before you go to bed, you don't have to bind your mouth like Catlin. Instead, tape it shut. Not sensing a mass conversion among readers, but there are results.
A five-year-old was cured of ADHD. The vital gas Nitric Oxide is increased. The author claims it ended his sleep apnea and snoring.
There is another problem that modern man and woman suffer from, small mouths. It was noticed to happen in the mid 1800s, and leads to problems in eating, speaking and breathing as well as crooked teeth and overbite. The cure: expand the mouth.
This is done by putting a device that expands the mouth into the mouth. It is a plastic retainer and dowel screw that forces the upper palate to grow outward
Nestor submitted to wearing a similar contraption at night. Around a year later, his small mouth had grown appreciably in size. It works because the affected bones in the mouth, unlike others, can actually grow into one's seventies. The author, due to the year of suffering, is breathing better, but at the bottom of the page he tells us it's all unnecessary. One can get the same benefits by chewing gum a couple of hours a day.
Hard chewing is missing from the soft foods we eat and that contributes to diminutive mouths. Humans are supposed to chew. He doesn't recommend the bubble gum I got with baseball cards as a kid. Rather, he suggests a sugarless Turkish gum. No flavor, but not unpleasant. You too can improve the structure of your mouth and breathe better.
One aspect of breathing that was a surprise is that carbon dioxide is as important as oxygen. One would not think so, after all, scuba divers do not go under with carbon dioxide tanks. Nestor claims we always have enough oxygen, even when we are short of breath. It's the CO2 we need more of. That gas has many functions in the circulation of blood, and when we lose weight, it is mostly exhaling the end product of fat as Carbon Dioxide. Who knew?
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art is a book that investigates many facets of the human respiratory system and few modern men and women are without problems. James Nestor looks at more issues than are covered in this review and prescribes solutions for many.
In the first chapter, one of his interviewees asks "Why would we evolve to make ourselves sick?" It is a flip answer, but fair enough to say, because we can. We like our soft and rich foods. Few would choose to live like the Sioux, maybe not even contemporary Sioux.
The book is an adventure and Nestor writes well. With no medical credentials, I cannot judge the science of Breath. Still, the author is persuasive and my recommendation is personal. Readers can evaluate Breath to their own judgement.
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