 Welcome to Ancestral Health Today. Evolutionary insights into modern health. Do you have sleep apnea or trouble sleeping? Has anyone told you that you snore? Do you get winded when you go for a run or even just for a walk or work in the garden? Do you suffer from anxiety? These may seem like unrelated symptoms, but in many cases they're rooted in how we breathe and the connection between breathing and our autonomic nervous system, which is the system that energizes us to act or calms us down to rest. We'll be discussing these topics and more on this episode of Ancestral Health Today, a podcast providing evolutionary insights into modern health. I'm Todd Becker. Breathing seems so automatic, so invisible that most of us never think about it. It seems strange to even think about trying to change something so automatic. But our guest for this episode has written a bestselling book about the science and practice of breathing for better health. James Nestor is a science journalist and he's author of the book Breath, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for 18 weeks. And it won the 2020 prize for best general nonfiction. James also wrote a book about freedivers who test their limits by diving to the bottom of the ocean floor without oxygen tanks, and he's published articles in Scientific American, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Service Journal. James has suffered from some respiratory conditions himself, and he spoke to medical researchers, athletic trainers, and practitioners of different religious and meditative traditions, trying to understand the connection between breathing and health. Welcome to the podcast, James. Thanks for having me. So, James, I'd like to start out with the science. I'm going to kind of cut to the chase, to the punchline, and then we'll back up. One of the main messages of your book is that health can be improved by breathing more slowly and through the nose. And the biggest aha moment for me that was a little bit surprising was the fact that breathing slower increases carbon dioxide level in your blood, and that that's actually good for you. And breathing too fast or over breathing is kind of like overeating. More is not necessarily better. Now, I'm a chemical engineer. That's my training. So when you explain this in terms of chemistry and the Bohr effect, it made sense. So can you start out by explaining this carbon dioxide effect to the audience? So the key for healthy breathing and healthy respiration, when I say respiration, I mean not just for the body, but for all the cells that make up our body, is to get oxygen easily into these cells and to allow them to release carbon dioxide easily as well. When we over breathe or we breathe in dysfunctional ways, we mess up that balance. So when I'm saying more carbon dioxide is good, I'm referring to the majority of people who are over breathers and they off gas too much carbon dioxide. And because they're breathing off too much carbon dioxide, they make it harder for their bodies and their cells to get oxygen. This is so counterintuitive. It took me a few months to get my head around. But basically, carbon dioxide is a catalyst. It's a messenger so that in the presence of large amounts of carbon dioxide in the body, you are going to get more of an exchange of oxygen. So if you don't have enough carbon dioxide, oxygen just circulates in your bloodstream. It doesn't have any place to go. And it makes it harder carbon dioxide if you have a deficiency because carbon dioxide is a vasodilator. And when you don't have enough, those blood vessels get constricted. And this is why when you over breathe, you can feel your fingers getting cold. Sometimes your head, your head starts feeling light, you feel light headed, you feel out of it. This isn't from an increase of oxygen, but a decrease of circulation. So for all of those reasons, it's so important to have a balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide. And this works even at the level, the molecular level of oxygen hopping onto and off of hemoglobin, right? In the blood cells, red blood cells. Why would a higher carbon dioxide level help us get oxygen off the hemoglobin more easily? Because a higher carbon dioxide level allows our oxygen to know where to go and what to do. So right now, if you were to grab a weight and you were to lift a weight with one arm and not lift a weight with the other arm, that area that you are lifting is going to have priority for where the blood flow, where the oxygen goes. And part of the reason why that happens is because there's more carbon dioxide being emitted from all of those, being respired from all of those cells. And in that presence of carbon dioxide, more oxygen is going to rush in. Which is why you can apply carbon dioxide to areas of the body and you can create this tremendous vasodilating effect. And this is how people used to cure wounds before we had all the fancy medicines we have now is through carbon dioxide and through thermal baths. And it works great, right? It was never disproven. No, this is great. That's a key insight. And now go in steps further. So slower breathing helps us raise the carbon dioxide level, right? Slower breathing is just more efficient for your oxygen, for your carbon dioxide, for your blood flow, for your heart, for your brain, for absolutely every part of your body. When I say slower breathing, what I'm really saying is normal breathing. Because so many of us are over breathing. We're breathing too many breaths per minute and we're breathing too much air in and out. We think we're getting more oxygen this way. We are not. We're actually creating a de facto deficiency of oxygen by over breathing. So slower means normal, but I think about 2% of the population is breathing normally. So almost everyone can benefit from slower breathing. Slower breathing brings that balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide into the level where everything is able to work at peak efficiency. Which is why the slow breathing pattern is called coherent breathing or resonant breathing. That is the state of peak efficiency where everything works the way it's supposed to with the least amount of effort. And that's how you want to be throughout the day. You don't want your body constantly compensating and that's what happens when we're breathing dysfunctionally. What would be a good frequency or rate of breathing? Well, it depends on what you're doing. So if you're jogging, that's a different rate from when you're sprinting. That's a different rate from when you're having sex or sitting on a couch watching Netflix. So what you want to be doing is breathing into as close as possible to your metabolic needs. And so you say, well, what is that? How am I supposed to be able to calculate what my metabolic need is all of the time? Well, you can get a good general view by practicing. And our noses are the best thing to monitor the amount of air coming in and out of our bodies because there's so much more resistance than breathing through your mouth. And that resistance is very good. It slows down the breath. It traps more CO2. It creates more pressure. And so all of those things allow you to extract more oxygen. So we extract oxygen on the exhale as well, not only on the inhale. And having that longer exhale with a little more resistance allows us to get more oxygen, which is one of the reasons why a lot of people do this unjai breath or this like constriction of the throat and yoga is to accentuate that even more so you can get more of those benefits. So you mentioned this has got to be adjusted based on our activity level. But how about you and I just sitting here talking should we breathe in and out every five seconds, six seconds, 10 seconds, what would be a good average? You notice I avoided that question, but you're just doubling down here. So I will tell you a few things that I learned and then people can find whatever is best for their body. So the first thing I learned is that blanket prescription for everyone all the time or a disaster, right? Everyone's different and everyone has a different metabolism. Everyone has a different heart rate, but a general rule of thumb, very general here, is that a respiratory rate of about five to six breaths per minute, which equals about five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out, tends to be very beneficial for most people. And that's respiratory rate is called coherent breathing. I should mention that taller people, larger people can get more benefits from breathing even more slowly. They have larger diaphragms, larger lungs. So at a rate of about maybe seven to eight seconds in and seven to eight seconds out. And shorter people and kids have to have a much higher metabolism. So they have a higher respiratory rate and just like infants do as well. So it depends how old you are. It depends how big you are and it depends how healthy you are. But a good general view is you can play around with that five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out. Great. Now you mentioned the nose and that breathing through the nose is preferred over breathing through the mouth. Can you say a little bit more? What's the function of the nose? What happens when we breathe through the nose versus the mouse? And also there's some structures inside the nose. There's some physiology. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So this was something that pretty much shocked me when I learned about years and years ago, because I thought we have a mouth. Why, you know, we can breathe through our mouth. Why don't we just breathe through our mouth? What's the difference between nasal breathing, mouth breathing? Well, there's a reason why almost every mammal has an obligate nasal breather. They breathe in and out through their noses. And if you look at a horse sprinting, if you look at a cheetah sprinting, they're still breathing in and out of their noses all the time. So we have developed this very ornate, complex organ, our noses for a reason. It is designed specifically to breathe in and out of. So if something goes wrong with the nose, it's great to have a backup system, right? An emergency system. That's our mouths. And what a wonderful thing that we're imbued to have this backup system. That doesn't mean it should be our default system. And for so many people, mouth breathing in and out of the mouth is how they breathe all the time. So the nose, I mean, I can get into the physiology here. I can get into the biology, the biochemistry, but it serves innumerable purposes. All those things I mentioned, the slowing down air, humidifying air, pressurizing air, cleansing air. So by the time that air gets to the lungs, it's treated. And otherwise, if you're just breathing in and out of your mouth, that air is untreated. So you're taking in all these allergens, pollens, bacteria, viruses untreated. And so the nose also helps to purify air. It helps to kill bacteria and viruses just by breathing in and out of the nose. There's actually one piece of the physiology. You mentioned you could talk a lot about this, but there's one piece of the physiology I thought was particularly interesting. And that is its role, the nose's role in generating nitric oxide through these turbinate structures. How does that happen and why is that important? So nitric oxide is released throughout the body and the surface level and the epithelial level throughout the body. But there is a perfusion of nitric oxide released through the nose and through the tissues in the nose. And we know that you'll get about six times more nitric oxide, six-fold increase breathing in and out of your nose. And if you hum, that goes up to 15-fold increase. So it is an incredible amount of nitric oxide. And nitric oxide was, you know, in the 90s, it was called the molecule of the year. And it's the thing that erectile dysfunction drugs. This is what they stimulate in the body is the production of nitric oxide because nitric oxide is such a powerful vasodilator. It helps increase blood flow all over the body. It also helps kill viruses and bacteria. So this is our first line of defense is our noses, not only for its filtering properties, but for that huge perfusion, that release of nitric oxide. I mean, this is big for cardiovascular health, right? It's huge for cardiovascular health. And if you look at people with diabetes and ED and all these other issues, usually their nitric oxide levels are just in the gutter. They're terrible because they just are metabolically dysfunctional. But also, and it is because a lot of them are not breathing properly. They are not breathing in and out of their noses. I that's a big claim to make. But once I heard it from Lewis Ignaro, who won the Nobel Prize for his work in nitric oxide, I thought, OK, this guy's been studying this stuff for 50 years. And so, you know, ever ever since I heard from him years ago, I said, OK, this is legit. And he has looked at direct connections between pathologies between chronic disease and lack of nitric oxide. So interesting. Now, you talk to Nobel laureates, you read a lot, but you still you're a special kind of journalist. You you also have to prove things to yourself. And you did experiments on yourself with a fellow researcher, Anders Olson at Stanford, just to kind of prove this. It's all in your book. It's sound very painful. But can you just give us a sense of what you went through to convince yourself that nose breathing is better than mouth breathing? So I had read dozens and dozens of studies on the difference of nasal breathing versus mouth breathing and sleep quality and athletic performance and depression and anxiety and panic and asthma on and on and on. And I was working with a chief of rhinology research down at Stanford for a long time. We have lunch all the time. He'd give me different scientific articles and there's no controversy about this, right? And anyone who says that they're the same thing does not know what he or she is talking about. But as a journalist, I wanted to get inside the story a little more. I'm not a mouth breather. At least I thought I wasn't a mouth breather. And I don't have asthma or panic, but I wanted to understand what it would be like to become a mouth breather. And if just by switching the pathway through which you breathe air, would that affect your body? Would it affect your mind? Would it affect your stress levels, your athletic performance? And how long would that take to happen, right? What does this have to happen over years and years or decades or what? No one knows because there's never been a human study in mouth breathing versus nasal breathing, not one of them. So I went down to Stanford. I said, well, let's do a study. What do you need to do? He had no funding to do this. Stanford was hard up for cash, of course, and they couldn't find the funding for this. So I had to pay for an experiment. The max amount of people was two. I know an N of two doesn't mean much, but that's all I could do. And for 10 days, we just breathe through our mouths. We were obstructed in our noses. And then for 10 days, we breathe the vast majority of breaths. Abstracted, you put something in your nose? Yes, yes. It was awful. Silicone, tape, cotton. We had to change it once a day. He was worried it was going to get infected. So we'd have to hold a breath and change it and then put the tape back on there. And a lot of people said, oh, it's like a supersize me stunt. But I really didn't view it as that. I can see in retrospect, it kind of seems that way. But if you look at the percentage of people who are mouth breathers, especially kids, you're up around 50%. And when allergy season kicks in, you're talking about the majority of the population is starting to breathe in and out through their mouth. And they start to have all of these issues because of that. And they don't connect the two things. So I didn't view it as a prank. I viewed it as a way of personally experiencing what science is known for decades and decades. And that's how we approached it. And it sucked. It was terrible. It was terrible. We knew this was not going to be fun. But we were kind of going into it and kind of laughing at the beginning. Spent eight hours at Stanford, three different blood draws and pulmonary function tests and all this crap. And went home and my blood pressure was spiking about 35 points higher than it normally is. I went to sleep. I started snoring for the first time that I'm aware of. A few days later, I was snoring throughout the night. The other subject in the study, Anders, had sleep apnea. He was snoring within about four days. All the sort of giggles and laughs really went away because we felt ourselves just deteriorating. And it got kind of scary when our sleep was so bad that we were waking up. We're sleeping nine, 10 hours a night and still waking up tired and felt terrible. And I just couldn't help thinking like how many people out there on the planet are dealing with this day after day, night after night and not realizing it. So we experienced it personally and the good news is we got to take all that stuff out of our noses after 10 days, which was a very long week and a half, and then go to obligate nasal breathing. So we wore a little piece of tape to reacquain us with nasal breathing. And then we just kept our mouths shut and I cannot tell you what a difference it makes. And if anyone doubts this, try it yourself for a day and see how you feel. And the numbers reflected that, you know. The blood pressure went down, all the other numbers. Everything, everything, snoring 100% disappeared from snoring all night to zero within two days. Sleep apnea disappeared. So who knew that the pathway through which you be there can affect your snoring? Some people may suspect that, but it can also affect your sleep apnea. I hear from ENTs all the time. They say it's bullshit. No, mouth breathing doesn't affect sleep apnea. I said, well, did you see what happened to us? And they're like, yeah, that's NF2. I'm like, yeah, well, why don't you try it? You know, and since then, and of course they don't. So since then I've heard from literally thousands of people and many of whom have sleep apnea and have seen their numbers decrease by 50%, 70%. Some of them no longer have sleep apnea by learning how to nasal breathe. I want to be very clear. This is not a prescription for everyone to stop your sleep apnea and go do this. That will be a disaster for you. Don't do this. It doesn't work for everyone because sleep apnea can not only be a back of the mouth problem. It can be a tongue problem, it can be a nose problem, whatever. But for a lot of people it's worked and I'm still getting pushback from this. But these are from people who just aren't looking at the data or the physiology of the head. And it's good to be qualified that. But I can tell you from personal experience and you gave me this advice. I don't have sleep apnea, but I do snore. My wife has told me that. And I took some surgical tape, taped my mouth and used your app that you referred to. It's the Snore Lab. And it works. The snoring went way down. And so what can I say? And I'll add one more to your list of ends. Pretty cool. Yeah. We're hopefully going to do a citizen science study of this because no one's going to... Stanford finally, respiratory therapist there finally got funding from a private individual funder to do a study of I think 250 to 300 people with sleep apnea and sleep tape. So that is booting up. It's going to take a few years for it to get going. In the meantime I'm working with a group. We want to do a citizen science reporting because I'm just curious. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. I'm going to work with and try to get 100,000 people to wear sleep tape and record their snoring and sleep apnea and see what that data says. And I'm not citing for this or that. I'm telling you about my experience and the experience I hear. This is the one thing I hear more than anything else is how a little piece of tape transformed people's lives. And if you're doing that citizen science program, give us the information. We'll put it up on the podcast. So a range of different health issues. You mentioned issues relating to cardiovascular health, snoring, respiratory issues. Any other health issues you've seen tend to resolve when you go from mouth breathing to nose breathing. From what I've seen, there are zero negative side effects. People only benefit from learning how to breathe better and better breathing is in and out through the nose. Now to be clear, some people have structural issues in their noses and they need surgery. Surgery will transform them. Most of us do not. Most of us just need to practice nasal breathing a lot more and especially at night. So for some people, the benefits are pretty good. For other people, it utterly changes their life. I'm not sure you want that scope. Are you going to benefit to me if something's free and it's easy and I get a little benefit from it? Why wouldn't you do it? And the potential for huge transformative experience. So I'm going to talk about another finding that you write about in the book. And that is this idea of extending the exhale phase, even to the point of almost holding your breath, but for more and more times. And this is something that Patrick McEwen has written about in his book, Oxygen Advantage. It's been used with elite athletes, runners and swimmers. And even comes up with a method and I think that you and Anders tried it of counting how many steps you can go, whether you're walking flat or uphill with that with your breath fully exhaled and trying to improve that tolerance. So what did you find? What's the research say about extending the exhale phase as something that you can even use to improve athletic performance? So the rule of thumb is that when you inhale, you are eliciting a sympathetic response. And when you exhale, you're eliciting a parasympathetic response. And that parasympathetic response is that relaxation response. And the sympathetic is the stimulating response. We need both. Our bodies aren't meant to just be chilled out all the time. We're not meant to be stressed out all the time. We're balancing between these two things and it's fascinating to me to think our bodies balance that in our breath every time you breathe. You're helping to balance that. So using that, you can just imagine what would happen if you start to exhale longer than you inhale. What happens is you get more relaxed, you get more clear of mind. This is how you can help yourself prepare for sleep. This is how you can lower your heart rate. If you don't believe me, you can monitor your heart rate and your heart rate variability as you're breathing at different rates. And you can see in real time what happens to your ability to pump blood and your ability to relax yourself. So what they do for athletes is to condition them to have a higher threshold of CO2 because there are big benefits to having that higher threshold of CO2. That means you'll be able to more comfortably tolerate higher amounts of CO2 and that leads to better performance. So what they do is they have them inhale and exhale and see the maximum amount of steps that you can walk on that exhale. Now to be clear, this is not a full exhale out, pushing all the exhale out. This is an exhale to neutral. So if you take a breath in and just let it go until it stops without pushing, that's neutral. And what they've found is you should be able to walk about 35 to 40 steps at neutral on that exhaled breath. And that is a good general indication of general health. Where your CO2 is, how your body is operating, how your body is processing oxygen. Of course athletes want to be better than normal and they're super competitive. So they try to get them up to 60 and 70 and 80. And you'll notice day to day this changes. It changes depending on what you ate. It changes depending on how much you slept. It changes on your stress levels. So you don't go out and just do this once. You take the delta, you go out and do this 10 times, 20 times. What's the average number of steps from those 20 practices of doing that? And that will give you that number. And you can use this to track progress. When I read about this, I started out, I was really only around 20 or 25 steps. Now, if it's on the flat, I can do 40, right? What I found though is I like to walk a lot, sort of fast walking rather than running. When I'm going uphill, that decreases to maybe 18 or 20. So it really is relative to the amount of exertion, right? Probably a runner would get fewer steps, right? 100% if you're going up on an incline, you're using more energy. You're using more oxygen. So when you do these, it should be on the same. And it's fine if you always measure it on an incline, right? But don't measure it on an incline in a decline and flat, because it's going to be vastly, vastly different. So just if it sounds like you're a lot like me, I walk my dog twice a day, every single day, in the same park, on the same path. So it's very consistent. And I've found like if I'm traveling or I'm jet lagged, I can get like 17 or 18. It's terrible. And then if I've slept well, if I've eaten well, if I'm not stressed, I can crank it up to 50, close to 60. And the important thing about that CO2 threshold, again, is that it's not just the ability to hold your breath better. It's your ability to be comfortable with that CO2 that is opening up your blood vessels, making it easier for oxygen to go everywhere it needs to go. There are some more extreme ways to condition that CO2 threshold. We probably won't get into that, but that's the general idea. And you can take that as far or as lightly as you'd like to take it. Yeah. So I used to measure HRV, heart rate variability using, you know, a strap or a watch. And this breath counting thing I consider sort of like poor man's HRV. Because as you said, it tracks whether you're jet lagged or stressed or arrested. And you can get more steps when you're better conditioned. So it's easy to do for anyone. You don't have to buy anything. You just have to count. And if you spend a lot of time in airports like I do and have these god-awful layovers, like these little games you're playing with breathing, especially if your next gate is 20 minutes away and you've got a little time, this is an entertaining way. And I promise you once you lock into this, you're going to feel better by the time you hop on that next flight. Time and time again, I've found that to be true. Yeah. This is great. So let's shift to another topic. And this really relates to what a lot of our listeners are interested in, which is the evolutionary aspects of health. So here's a question for you. If slower nose breathing is really the healthier way to breathe, why do we need to learn it? Why didn't we just evolve to naturally breathe? It should be unconscious. It should be natural. And if evolution is about survival of the fittest, why didn't we just already evolve to breathe this way? Or did we evolve that way and something happened in human history? Well, this is how we were designed to breathe. This is how we breathe in a natural environment. If you look at the few indigenous populations still out there, they don't need coaching on how to breathe. This is how they naturally breathe. And pre-industrial populations, we know that they were breathing in and out through their noses by the virtue of how their faces were formed. So we know that when you're a mouth breather, your face is going to form differently. So it's the same reason why you can look at any other animal in the wild and look at how they're breathing. If they are healthy, they're breathing in and out of their noses. Look at a healthy infant in and out of their nose. When a horse gets very sick, it can breathe through its mouth. And that's when you're like, this horse is in real trouble. If a dog at rest is breathing through its mouth, it's in real trouble. Dogs thermoregulate heat, right? So they blow off heat because they can't sweat like we can. So they're going to be breathing in and out of their mouths at the park, right? And then they're going to come back and if they're healthy, they're going to go back to nasal breathing. So it is just because everyone in the modern industrial world is breathing in a dysfunctional way doesn't mean it's normal and doesn't mean it's good. You can say the same thing about diet or exercise. Why the hell do we have to learn how to re-learn how to eat? Oh, we should eat vegetables and meat in this way. Why do we have to re-learn how to exercise? Walk your 10,000 steps a day. Tell that to the hasda that they need to walk their 10,000 steps a day. They don't need to know this because they're already walking their 10,000 steps a day. So the answer is we did actually evolve to breathe this way. The short answer is of course we did. This is how we're designed, yes. Now part of the proof of that, you say this is the way it used to happen, you had to also convince yourself that you're a journalist. You went to Pennsylvania and you went to France to look at skulls and tell us what you learned there. Yeah, this is one of the scariest things that I've discovered as a journalist. It was utterly shocking to see this and this was pretty shocking to a lot of people who read the book and I don't think they believe me when I wrote about it and since then I said just go look for yourself. Don't believe me. I don't want you to believe me. Look at any ancient skull, any pre-industrial skull. They all have straight teeth for one. About 80, 90% of us today have some sort of crookedness or malocclusion in our mouths. All of our ancestors had straight teeth. Not only that, they had these huge pronathic faces. They had faces that grew outward because there's people who have been measuring this for decades and they have a distinctly different profile because they have these large mouths and these faces that grow outwards. 90% of us today have a face that grows backwards. You will start to notice in models or people who you deem to be, who a lot of people deem to be attractive, they have that old-fashioned pronathic growth. Look at their jawlines. Look at their facial structure. This was all started changing with the advent of the industrial diet. Once it started progressing and started being adopted by cultures around the world, we can see in a single generation, 50% of a population that converted to an industrial diet will have crooked teeth. This whole idea that evolution takes tens of thousands of years to complete garbage. Even groups of people who have not been as touched by modern industrial diets still show that evidence as recently as the last 50 or 100 years. I remember the books of Weston Price where he traveled around and he saw exactly what you said, the straight teeth, no malocclusion, anything like that. Still, what they told Weston Price in the 30s, so he spent 10 years traveling to 12 different countries. If you don't believe me, go check out his pictures and his films. So there's a few out there and he measured thousands of mouths and teeth and cavities of what they ate and the amount of vitamins and minerals and their milk and their cheese. I mean, meticulous research and the same story played out no matter where he went. As soon as you adopt an industrial diet, your teeth are going to grow crooked and respiratory problems are going to develop soon after. And Robert Corcini in the 70s followed up on that work, wrote a book about this 250 scientific papers, found the same exact thing. So you can still go to the NIH and look at the causes of malocclusion of crooked teeth. Nothing about industrialized food. They say it's genetic or caused by tumors or injuries at birth, which is garbage. I mean, I don't know how many more people need to come out with extremely thoroughly documented scientific studies to prove this. And maybe they're defending big food? I don't know, but those are the facts. People think, oh, that's a... Someone said to me, he's like, oh, this is a very interesting hypothesis you have about how our teeth have grown crooked. This is a scientific fact that I did not make up. I'm reporting on what other scientists have discovered over decades and decades. And it's not just certain hunter-gatherer populations or Australian Aboriginal people. You went to France and the same genetics, the same people who are modern French, you go back in time and you went under, you went down under the ground. What did you find there looking at the French from even a few centuries ago? It's not the most scientific survey up at UPenn. That's very scientific because we know exactly how old the skulls were. We know where they came from. And that's the largest assemblage of pre-industrial skulls in the world. But this was before I was able to get there, where I couldn't get access to labs. So I wanted to see a ton of skulls. And there are six million skulls beneath the streets of Paris from anywhere from 2,000 years ago until just 150, 125 years ago. That's where they used to bury people below their streets. So you can see these, and they're all buried in these same clumps, right? And it was usually because of a pandemic, like a cholera outbreak. And then they bury everyone in the same heap at the same time. So you would know the general date of the skulls you're looking at. And it was obvious then, I'm not an expert at looking at skulls, but it's obvious then that the closer you get to our modern age, the more quickly mouths start and skulls and profiles start disintegrating and just growing backwards. And again... How many centuries ago did you see good teeth? You know, it's hard to tell. What we did see is in the clump of bodies that were buried. I believe it was in the 1860s from cholera. They were already having severe problems. And you could see that with their jaws. You could see that in the few remaining teeth. You could just see the difference. Before then, my understanding is the skulls that we were passing, they had very different profiles. So again, this was not scientific because this was very illegal what I did. There are not signposts that said these skulls are from the 1600s, the 1400s, the 1200s. It was just a general view. You're like, wow, we look like a completely different species. More importantly for people who are interested in this is you can look at ancient skulls and you can look at indigenous populations. They still don't need orthodontics or braces or much of anything to live to be a ripe old age, which is what ancestral health is all about. So it's not just the teeth. It's also the nasal passages that it's all the features to better nose breathing rather than mouth breathing. Yes, so the causes of crooked teeth has nothing to do with teeth. Teeth will grow in straight if they have a large enough playing field. It has to do with the mouth size. If you have a small mouth, teeth are going to grow in crooked. What else happens when you have a small mouth? The face is going to grow more narrow. You're not going to have large enough sinus passages. And with that small mouth, you're going to have more obstruction in the back of the mouth. So you mentioned the diet is integrally involved in this. What is it about modern industrial food that you think is causative here? Is it the macronutrients? Is it the texture? What is it? Weston Price thought it was minerals and vitamins. He thought this because what he found in his food samples is the dairy from cows that were milked in springtime after eating freshly grown grass. And this is what the cheese was made from because these ancestral populations knew this was the most nutritious cheese. It had many times more fold more vitamins, nutrients, K2, D, A, you name it, across the board. But modern foods, especially grown in modern agriculture have significantly fewer vitamins and minerals. And newer studies, there was just a study done three years ago that showed that exact same thing. The stuff you grow in your backyard organically is going to have very different vitamin and numeral mineral content than the stuff grown in Big Ag. So with all of that and with understanding the vitamins and minerals, I wrote this whole book, but what he did not see is what Robert Corcini saw in the 1970s which was it's actually chewing stress is much more influential. And they've done animal models with this. Robert Corcini did the same thing as Western Price but eat for even longer. For 40 years traveled the world. But it's chewing stress especially in infancy, especially when we're young. If you're not eating hard foods, if you're not breastfeeding, you're going to have a different facial structure and you're going to have a smaller mouth. I get beat up every time I say this about breastfeeding because I'm a dude. I've never breastfed anything. I want to be very clear. I'm a journalist. I'm telling you what I have learned from experts in the field that yes how you are fed as an infant will influence your mouth size and very likely influence your ability to breathe later on in life. So even through childhood and adolescence softer, more processed food doesn't develop our jaws in a proper way. So we should encourage eating rougher, harder to chew foods, less processed foods. You should eat the foods that our ancestors ate, okay. They weren't eating applesauce and blended carrots. They were weaning kids from breastfeeding on to what everyone else was eating. That's what kids ate. They ate what the adults were eating. It's the ancestral diet, right? It's the ancestral diet. I just want to double down on this again. I'm not shaming anyone for eating a certain way. I'm not shaming anyone for not breastfeeding. That's not what I'm doing. I want to provide simple information. When you can do with this what you would like. Ignore it and that's fine or listen to it but that's what they found is that we're going eating ancestral foods in their purest as close to their rawest. You can cook things but still even if you're cooking whole foods you're still chewing. If you think about today with smoothies and bars and overcooking we're not chewing at all and it has affected how our mouths grow, how our teeth grow in straight and it's affected our breathing as well. We've got interested in it. This is really good information for children, adolescents during development. How about your R.H. and you have some malocclusion. Is there any benefit to eating less processed foods? Can your jaw actually change? Can your airways change? From a dietary point of view or are there other interventions we should consider that are corrective? There's never been a study that I'm aware of having adults middle aged people chew and look at the results from just having a hard diet versus a soft diet. They've done this with animals numerous times but not with humans. However there are several studies looking at if you do something called oral pharyngeal exercises. What this is is it's just chewing like exercises that you do with your mouth. Put your tongue on the top of your mouth. Stick your tongue out. Swallow with your tongue on the top. It's just these exercises that we're doing and in these studies they have found a few of these studies said they can significantly cut down on snoring and in some cases sleep apnea because what is happening is all of the soft tissue at the back of our mouths gets flabby because we don't exercise our mouths the more you exercise the more firm it gets. The more that tissue starts adhering to the cartilage in the muscle which is what it's supposed to do which means your airway opens up which means there's less flap to go at night. I'm absolutely convinced that eating harder food will make a difference to that airway. It will help tone the airway. Have there ever been any studies? There have not. But the oral pharyngeal exercises kind of prove that in a de facto way. Yeah, it makes sense so it's not just the skeletal structures it's the soft structures. It's the muscle tone. It's like working out your mouth and your past. But of course modern humans we don't want to exert any effort or very little effort to improve our lives. We want to have a pack, right? And so of course there are many hacks and what they do is they go in there and expand your mouth. And this is incredibly beneficial for people with some snoring for a lot of people with sleep apnea for people with respiratory problems for people with tooth problems they expand their mouths to the way our mouths were supposed to have been before industrialization and the models they're using are these ancient skulls they said these skulls were perfect. In your book but also in at AHS you've interacted with some of these innovative dentist orthodontists who are doing some of these techniques can you say anything about their work? I think that their work is so important. I have no stake in saying this. I'm not invested in anything that these people have to do it. I have talked with dozens of their patients. I've seen the difference it makes especially for kids. I think that there is one of the biggest public health nightmares right now is sleep disorder breathing with kids and nobody is talking about it. It's directly related to ADHD it's related to daytime sleepiness. It's related to stunting of growth later on in life and this isn't made up stuff. It's related to diabetes and no one seems to be looking at it so this group of dentists these functional dentists, these pediatric dentists are looking at kids at one year of age a year and a half and they're able to assess how they're going to be breathing later on in life and they have interventions to fix them early so they won't have breathing problems and also they very likely won't ever need braces because their teeth are going to grow straight because their mouths are the proper size. Can you mention names of some of these innovators? Sure. The ones that I know are Dr. Kevin Boyd I think that he is rock solid he specializes in pediatric dentistry. So Mike Mew is extremely controversial. You can check him out online. His father John Mew has been talking about everything I just mentioned here with teeth since the 1960s and the 1970s and has just been belittled by everyone but the science is coming out now and we will not be treating kids the way I was treated in 10 years and the reason is lawsuits people are suing their dentists for destroying how they look and destroying how they breathe. Yeah, no this is so important and it all goes back to the basic principles of breathing and the airways. So in the last part of our interview today or discussion and actually I am following your book now at the end you have what you call advanced breathing practices or breathing plus and there is a couple of interesting techniques there. One of these is almost the opposite of the standard breathing practice, the slow full exhale and it is based on a Tibetan technique called TUMO or Inner Fire and it has kind of been popularized by Wim Hof, everybody knows the Wim Hof method but it really relates to this ancient method but it seems to be the opposite and so you know it is what you would have called over breathing so why would we do the opposite of what you are advising in the first part of the book, what is the benefit? Yeah, this is where all of this breath work stuff gets very confusing and then you talk to different circles of breath work teachers and they say oh you can only breathe very slowly and then you talk to Wim Hof who I happen to know and he said go for it, breathe as hard as you can the difference is the amount of time you are doing this so when you do TUMO or Pranayama or Kunalini or Kriya or whatever the hell you want to call it this is a short amount of time and this breath work is designed to stress you out that is its sole purpose and this is a hermetic system going on Yes, this is a hermetic stress right, this is stress for a reason, it is the same stress from an ice bath, it stresses you out what it does is you do this for 30 minutes and then for the other 23 and a half hours of the day you are chilled out because you just release that stress you brought your body back down you've taught yourself how to turn on stress with breathing so that you can turn it off that's the purpose so if you are walking around constantly over breathing and stressing yourself unconsciously that's a disaster for your health and you know chronic stress is part of the majority of modern diseases right now so these heavy intensive breath work practices are conscious therefore a very short amount of time some of them can get longer once you're more advanced but it's for a very constructed amount of time and when you stop breathing those heavy heavy breaths you go back to breathing normally and your body is really reset it's the same thinking like with exercise you're not going to go and jog for 24 hours a day but you go and jog for half an hour that's stress for your body you come out on the other side feeling a lot better I'm glad you related it to Hormesis which is a big interest of mine and the analogy with cold plunge, cold exposures very good you're experiencing that almost heart attack level you can say that but intense intensity but then when you get out you're relaxed and it's also more than just the immediate effect afterward it's the adaptive effect so when you do cold exposure a lot your body actually learns how to warm itself up and over time you get better and I would imagine by practicing the TUMO or some of these intense breathing techniques there's an adaptive effect that if you do it enough you're going to actually improve not just your sympathetic but your parasympathetic system 100% and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of studies proving that with these intensive even these very intensive rigorous breathwork practices is they're so good for anxiety depression even autoimmune issues and more and you can see those studies people say you only do Pranayama you only do TUMO, only do Wim Hof they're all doing the same thing they're just a slightly different flavor of the same thing so they're for different purposes different times but for general breathing the slow, longer exhale for everyday life that's probably the preferred technique 100% if you're sitting around like me in front of computers all day the slow, rhythmic through the nose is going to do yourself a lot of favors so there's one other technique in your advanced breathing category that I thought was very interesting and this is something you learned about through a neuroscientist named Justin Feinstein and he goes even further than slow breathing to like breath holding and even deliberately boosting carbon dioxide and he's found this is beneficial in treating anxiety what can you tell us about that? well all those benefits of carbon dioxide we can get those from manipulating our breath from exhaling longer from holding our breath which is why in every single ancient culture that practice breath work, breath holding is the thing that is at center of every single type of breath work that's what Pranayama means this is part of Pranayama absolutely that's what the word means process of holding your breath but of course in the modern age people want a shortcut to everything and we figured one out and that is to give people this heroic dose of CO2 which helps reset the system it's like teaching someone how to do a 5 minute breath hold without the pain of doing a 5 minute breath hold because you just inhale CO2 and what's interesting is this isn't new at all it was actually used by Yale physiologist who for 40 years he found this to be the most effective thing for anxiety, asthma heart attacks and more fire engines used to have CO2 tanks on the back of them and then that all you probably have to be careful so you don't disfixate yourself but if you do this in a controlled fashion if you do this at home this is in a clinical setting with responsible people don't go get a CO2 tank and do this yourself you're going to die so don't die so this is with it's just like any other medicine it's just put in a very careful controlled environment and so we discovered this in the 1910s, 1920s worked incredibly well it was rediscovered in the 50s and 60s and the 80s and here we are it's rediscovered again and I really think that this is going to change things I've experienced it myself I've talked to people who have done it one treatment and people are dramatically transformed with their anxiety many psychologists and psychiatrists have said this is the best thing that they've seen the problem is it's basically free and anyone can do it so I think that's the thing that Justin is going to have to navigate and he's doing a really good job of it right now so he got NIH grant to go and research it and is helping other people do this research as well that's great to see that research going well I think we're coming up to the end of the hour and I'd like to sort of end by asking you if there's anything you learned since writing the book that could have been a missing chapter or kind of an extension of your work the one thing I missed that I should have written more about is that sleep disorder breathing in kids I mentioned it in a couple paragraphs but I should have doubled down on that and I've learned so much about that the other thing is CO2 in the environment not in the outside environment you know more CO2 bad I don't care what you think it's like causing a lot of I'm talking inside your house inside your office so I carry around a carbon dioxide meter and I am appalled by the level of CO2 and higher levels of CO2 up to around 2000-3000 parts per million has been implicated in blood vessel damage concentration damage problem sleeping whole bunch of other chronic issues and we are just bathing in this constant CO2 you would think it would have benefits but not when it's coming through an exogenous environment endogenous is different because that CO2 is produced at the cellular level our body knows how to handle that and balance it we're constantly huffing it in 24 hours a day when your hotel room you can't you spend a bunch of money on a hotel room you can't open the freaking windows it's a problem and I've seen levels I wonder why I feel so crappy in hotels 2000-3000 all the time which is considered hazardous to the people who study this so that's the one thing I should have mentioned and luckily I'm going to be able to drop in all the stuff when the paperback comes out next year and that's what I'm revising adding 20 new pages great so other than buying your book where can our listeners go to find out more about what you're up to if you think I'm totally full of crap and you don't believe anything I'm saying don't believe me, believe the researchers the experts in the field at mrjamesnester that's mrjamesnester.com because some other jerk took James Nester so I had to put an MR there the entire bibliography the publisher allowed me to put it up there there are pictures, there are graphs there's about 500 scientific references there's also interviews with experts in the field from all over the world there's no paywall, I'm not asking for your email address you can just go there and see for yourself what breathing can do for you great hey James, thanks so much for talking about your research, your book it was earth shattering for me or maybe I should say breath taking at least sorry about that there's a lot of good information there to improve your health, most of it's free so I'd really encourage you can get it anywhere good books are sold breath, James Nester again thanks for the interview and good luck thanks a lot for having me thanks for joining us on this episode of ancestral health today we hope you enjoyed our discussion on how evolutionary insights can inform modern health practices be sure to subscribe to our podcast to catch future episodes