Photo by Alexandr Podvalny on Pexels.com
I barely believed what I heard when science journalist James Nestor visited Start The Week on Monday. He reiterated some of what he wrote in his book Breath:
Modern research in in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance, rejuvenate internal organs, halt snoring, allergies, asthma, and autoimmune disease, and even straighten scoliotic spines.
From Start The Week, and pardon some transcription errors which were performed by Snipd.
Andrew Marr
if there is one simple lesson to take out of this book, it is always breathed through your nose. And in the beginning of the book, you take part in a a experiment about this. And it is, frankly, an awesomely disgusting experiment. Just tell us about it.
James Nestor
Yes, I was given the opportunity to participate in an experiment at Stanford university to look at the different effects of mouth breathing and nasal breathing on the mind and the body. So we've known for decades that the pathway through which we breathe air can significantly effect how we think, our athletic performance, our sleep quality and more. So i wanted to experience this first hand. And so me and one other subject spent ten days with plugs up our nose, so we were just breathing through our mouths. And then we spent ten days just breathing through our noses, and compared data sets. And during the mouth breathing ten days, what happened? Everything awful. We knew it wasn't going to be fun, but we didn't know it was going to be so bad. And we didn't know it was going to come on so suddenly. So blood pressure shifts. Ah, my blood pressure went up about 20 points a sleep quality went down pitously in the first day. And then a few days later, we were both snoring. We both got sleep apnia. From zero snoring and zero sleep apnea to suffering from severe snoring and sleep apnea, just by switching the pathway through which we breathe.
Some info on how to why it matters to breathe more through your left nostril than your right
James Nestor
When we breathe air through our noses, we are forcing it through this labyrinth of different structures, where its heated, it's pressurised, it's moistened, and so many different pathogens and different pollutants are extracted in our nasal cavities. This is our first line of defense. And this is something that I just think people have forgotten about, even though our ancient ancestors were practising habitual nasal breathing all the time.
Andrew Marr
Tell us a little bit more about the nose, because i was fascinated by this, for instance, the fact that the two nostrils, left and right, perform different functions. I never knew that.
James Nestor
So, yoga has said for about 1500 years, different scriptures in yoga have mentioned that inhaling and exhaling, though left nostril will calm the body down. It's the cooling channel, and breathing in through the right nostril will heat the body up. That's all fair and good, but it doesn't mean anything unless you can test it. So in the last few decades, people have tested it and found that that's entirely true. When we breathe air in and out of our left nostril, our heart rates go down, our blood pressure goes down, we enter this state of relaxation. And the opposite happens when we breathe air in through our right nostril. We heat the body up. The heart rate increases, blood pressure increases.
There's a lot more to the episode, like why it's essential to breathe through your nose instead of your mouth when using a face mask:
Andrew Marr talks to two of the leading scientists who were at the forefront of research into fighting the spread of Covid-19. Professor Teresa Lambe was one of the Principal Investigators overseeing the Oxford/ AstraZeneca vaccine programme. She co-designed the vaccine and led the pre-clinical studies, as well overseeing the impact on immunity. She will be taking part in this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (to be aired on BBC 4 at 8pm on 28th, 29th and 30th December), alongside Professor Catherine Noakes. As an engineer Noakes is one of a tiny number of specialists worldwide who study ventilation and the spread of airborne diseases. From the beginning of the pandemic she has been instrumental in providing advice on how the virus transmits and the best strategies to control its spread.
Covid-19 is a respiratory disease and one of the books on this year’s Royal Society prize shortlist is at the centre of revived interest in how we breathe. James Nestor argues, in his book Breath, that humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with damaging consequences that reach beyond snoring, asthma and allergies. Drawing on ancient wisdom and the latest scientific studies Nestor highlights the huge benefits from breathing through your nose, rather than your mouth.