If you're able to improve your health and improve the efficiency of your body within a few minutes, just imagine what's going to happen after a few days or a few weeks or a few months and you start to understand how your breathing is such an integral part of your healing and your long term health. Hi, my name is Rangan Chastity. Welcome to Feel Better Live More hello, how are you doing? Thank you for joining me for another episode of my podcast and this week's conversation is a good one.
My guest is the brilliant science journalist and author of the international bestseller Breath the New Science of the lost arts mysterious Mr. James Nestor. Now, if you're a regular listener of my show, you'll know that I spoke to James about a year ago back on episode 124 and it was a really popular episode. In fact, the YouTube version of that conversation is my most watched show to date.
We covered a whole variety of different topics last time, but breath work is such a big topic and one that I find endlessly fascinating. So to celebrate the paperback release of James Book, I invited him back onto the show to talk more about the untapped potential of our breath, especially when it comes to improving the health of our bodies and our minds. Now, since its publication last spring, James Book has become a huge international bestseller, translated into 30 different languages, and I think I think much of its appeal comes from James. Easy to read, yet rigorous and objective approach.
You see, James doesn't tries to convince us that any one technique is better than another, or to push his opinion. He writes as an inquiring journalist looking for the science to support effects that have been celebrated for thousands of years. It really doesn't matter if you missed last year's conversation with James or you're brand new to the concepts of breath work, as this episode is a handy recap. We cover all the basics of nasal breathing, the science of carbon dioxide tolerance, and the benefits of harnessing our breath for a whole variety of different conditions such as asthma, anxiety, emphysema and scoliosis.
And if you did catch our previous conversation, rest assured we go way deeper in this one and cover a variety of brand new topics. We really go deep into what James calls super breathing techniques like tummo breathing as popularised by Wim Hof, Holotropic breathwork and Sudarsh in Korea. And James shares his own experience of each as well as the evidence behind them. I guess what I love most about talking to James is his passion.
He's been talking about his findings for well over a year to a global audience on podcasts online. Yet he's still just as passionate as the first time I spoke to him. And that's because he says he's got first hand knowledge of how life changing breathwork can be. It's free, it's easy, and it doesn't require much of your time.
I'm pretty sure by the end of this conversation you'll be motivated and inspired to try some of the tips that James shares. I think this is an incredibly fascinating conversation. I really hope you enjoy listening. And now onto my conversation with Mr.
James Neston. What percentage of Western populations are thought to breathe through their mouth? And why is that so problematic? Well, it's hard to pin down exactly how many people are habitual mouth breathers, but the percentages that I've seen in studies range from about 25% all the way up to 50%.
Kids tend to mouth breathe more than adults, females tend to mouth breathe more than males. And we know that about 60 to 70% of the population sleeps with an open mouth. So it's the majority in some cases of us are sleeping or are breathing with an open mouth throughout hours and hours of the day, which is bad news across the board. If someone is sleeping with their mouth open, we say bad news.
But what's actually going on in the body? What actually happens? And why should people care about changing from mouth breathing to nose breathing? So I've been sleeping with an open mouth as far as I've known.
I'm sure it began in childhood. I was definitely sleeping with an open mouth in adulthood, which is why I would go to sleep with this by my bed every single night. No matter if I was in a hotel or if I was camping, I would always have water by my bed because I would wake up, my mouth would be parched, dry. So not only does it dehydrate us, we lose about 40% more moisture breathing through the mouth, but it changes the ph in our mouths, which makes us more susceptible to cavities.
And dentists have known this for more than a hundred years. There's studies dating back over a hundred years that say that mouth breathing directly contributes to cavities. Dr. Mark Burhanna, who's a dentist out here and a sleep researcher, he believes that mouth breathing is the number one cause of cavities, even beyond sugar consumption.
So not only does it mess up our mouths, but we're also exposing ourselves to everything in the external environment. So when we mouth breathe, our lungs become an external organ. If you live in a city Like I do. That means you're making yourself so much more susceptible to inhaling pollution, allergens, even viruses and other pathogens.
Our nose is our first line of defense for the body. And it's really important to breathe through your nose at night as well, because it helps to push back those tissues at the back of the throat. And it can in some cases make you less susceptible to snoring and sleep apnea. Those potential downsides are pretty serious, but the potential upside is also pretty profound there.
And I've got to say a big thank you to you actually, James, because the first time you came on my podcast, you shared a tip, a very simple tip that has been transformative within my own family home. Okay. I have had other experts on before talking about the breath, nasal breathing. Brilliant people like Brian McKenzie, Patrick McKeown and my audience have always responded really well to those conversations.
You get a tip about just a small bit of tape when you put on your mouth. Nothing to make you feel claustrophobic or if you can't breathe, just a small bit of tape, like a stamp, a postage stamp size, I think is what you said. My wife implemented that tip immediately and I tell you what happens. Yeah, like you said, she wasn't drinking during the nights.
Normally she has a big glass of water and she drinks several times throughout the night. But the most striking thing was I've always been the only wiser in the house and I love that time to myself. I'm downstairs, I make my coffee, I do some reading, and then a couple days later, my wife Lynne rocks up at 6am in the kitchen. I'm like, hey, babe, what's that here?
I feel great. I'm like, what are you doing? She says, I just woke up, I feel great. I've come down.
That was not a one off. That has continued. So essentially we have re experimented this with this. We have seen times when she doesn't wear the tape, at times where she does and she gets up earlier and she feels fresher.
So this has been completely game changing. I just want to say big thank you for that. Well, I wish I could be responsible for that hack. And if so, I'm sure I would have made a billion dollars and would be calling in from my yacht and Monte Carlo.
But I had learned about this from researchers in the field and it sounded so sketchy to me. Then I went on YouTube and saw stuff that was even sketchier. So this idea of sleep taping, to a lot of people, it reminds them of a hostage situation, which is bad or It's a bondage thing, which for some of us is bad. I guess some people enjoy that, and that's great.
But the only thing it's really doing is that it's training your mouth to be shut. This isn't hermetically sealing your mouth up. Okay? It's just a little piece of tape.
And if your mouth is shut at night, that means your nasal breathing. And if you're nasal breathing, you're better protecting your lungs, you're breathing more healthily, you're breathing more efficiently, your heart rate's going to go down, likely, and you're going to be able to celebrate in so many other benefits. So there's nothing sketchy about that, nothing controversial about the fact that when we nasal breathe, we can sleep better. And this has been completely transformative for me as well.
And if there's one thing I've heard from people in the last year since the book has come out, received thousands of letters from people saying, I no longer snore. Some people say I no longer have sleep apnea. Here's my sleep data. People with kids who had ADHD and other developmental problems are saying their kids are sleeping so much better using this.
So, you know, again, I would love to take credit, but it's really the researchers who have been spending decades and decades researching the difference between nasal breathing and mouth breathing, the importance of nasal breathing at night, that should really take the credit for that. What was really striking in our first conversation just about a year ago now was the realization that you approached the whole of breathing and breath work through the mind of a skeptic. You approached. You weren't sure, what is all this?
Is it really true? And I find that fascinating that through that lens, you found the research, you found the science, and then you've arguably written one of the most impactful books on breath work and breathing full time. Given the impact your book has had, the reach it's had, the way, it's really putting it on the map in a way that very few books have managed to do. What do you attribute that to?
Well, it's interesting that we look at journalism now as being different from skepticism, but in my mind, journalism is. You are paid to be a skeptic. You are paid to be truly objective. But there's so much BS from both sides of the argument now, whether you're talking about medicine or politics or the environment or whatever, that you can't really make out what's really true throughout all of that noise, everyone constantly yelling at you.
So I don't view myself so much as, you know, a dyed in wolf skeptic. I do view myself as a science journalist. And so my job is to go out and listen to everybody and interview everybody. I probably did 200, 300 interviews for this book.
You know, I spent so many years looking at the real science and talked to experts in the field, but I also talked to people who were breathing therapists, who weren't experts in the medical science of breathing, but who were clinicians who worked with people for decades and decades and helped teach thousands of people how to breathe better and saw how they improved. So in a lot of ways, I just viewed this book as me doing my job. I have no skin in the game on one side of the camp or the other camp to believe anything. But I do have an interest in looking at data and looking at what's been measured and looking at what has worked.
And so that's how I want to continue approaching subjects is to call BS when I see it, but at the same time be open minded enough to really listen to everybody and look at what they've done and see where the truth lies. Yeah. Given that you've had so many emails and so much feedback, you've mentioned that mouth taping at nights is something that comes up regularly. What are some of the other things that come up where people have fed back to you that I tried this, James, and actually this has now got better, etc.
Etc. Well, a lot of people have written and said that they are so grateful for having this information, but behind their thankfulness there is an irritation and a frustration that it took them reading a book to learn about these things, to learn how asthma can be significantly reduced, it can even be reversed by taking control of your breathing. And if you don't believe me, all you have to do is look at the dozens and dozens and dozens of scientific studies that have proven this or talk to Patrick McEwen, who I know was on your show. This guy's.
For 20 years, he's been teaching people how to reverse their asthma. So I think that some of this is due to, again, all of the noise that has to do with the Internet. Everyone got a voice now, which is great, but it's also problematic as we're seeing. And it took, I guess, you know, someone to go in objectively and to really look at this stuff and to look at what had worked and to talk to the people on, again, both sides.
So I think that this knowledge is obviously a great thing and that's the only thing that we really have Right now that the Internet can provide is knowledge. People have access to information they would not have access to 20 years ago through podcasts like yours, through books. And I think that through that knowledge, people are becoming empowered to start to take control of their health in different ways and to listen to experts who have years and years of experience actually helping people, not just conducting studies, but helping people day in and day out. And I think that that information and those perspectives are really the most valuable.
It's interesting that there's an anger and a frustration coming through, and I can see why I would be in anger, because if you can reduce how much you're taking your inhaler, let's say, for asthma, if you can reduce your anxiety or even eliminate your anxiety by working on some breathing practices, you may well be thinking, well, why the hell have I not heard about this before when I've been to my doctor or my healthcare professional? So I understand that anger. I really do. Well, a lot of it comes to the capacity that healthcare professionals have with their patients.
There's doctors in my family, we talk about this stuff all the time, and they're dealing with acute, often serious problems. So if I get in a car accident, the last thing I want is breathing practices. I want surgery. I want the latest in Western technology to help sew me up.
But the people who have been left out in the cold are the people with these milder, chronic issues. It's only when these milder chronic issues become really serious that people get treatment. But oftentimes that's too late. And I heard this so many times through so many researchers and so many doctors over the years, and I'm still hearing it all the time.
And there's a quote that actually Brian McKenzie told me, which I thought was great. Eastern medicine is great if you want to live. Western medicine is great if you don't want to die. So there's a big difference in those two things, and I think that they both have enormous benefits.
But we shouldn't be thinking that you have to pick one or the other. And I think that's where it gets really problematic. If you have a very serious disease and Western medicine can help you, why on earth wouldn't you help yourself through that? So it's about integrating these two things and knowing when to say when to each of them, which I think is really the key.
And if you look at the top medical institutions in the world right now, this is the direction everything's going in, from Harvard to Stanford to Yale to Oxford, you know, and that's inspiring. It's taking a while to get there, but these scientific revolutions can take decades. You know, I love that quote that Brian shared with you. It's really made me think of it.
It's spot on. You know, Certainly in my 20 years experience seeing patients, I have to say that is completely spot on. I recognize maybe five years. And actually, you know what?
We're really good at acutes. We're just not as good with this sort of chronic stuff a lot of the time. I'm very proud to be a doctor, but I also, I think we should be honest and say these tools are great, but actually we're a bit limited. Can we get a bigger toolbox in certain areas?
One of the sort of modern voices who has really helped to elevate breathwork is Wim Hof. And you know, I want to talk about Wim's methods and some of the pros and the potential cons that some people talk about with those sort of hyperventilation type breaths. I think that's really important. But what is why she.
James, I talk about breath work a lot and what I hear is there's a lot of confusion. There's a lot of confusion that, oh, you know, I thought we need to breathe less. But now you're saying to breathe 30 times, then hold my breath within Hoff methods. And I wonder if you could sort of unpick that for people.
What are the broad principles of these different breathing techniques and when and how should people think about bringing them into their lives? So I was as confused as anyone when I was researching this book and learned this exact thing. And when you start investigating different breathing methods, there are different breathing philosophies and different breathing camps. So the Buteyko people will say you only breathe very slowly.
You only breathe through your nose. You never want to over breathe. And the Wim Hof people, including women, self, no breathe, everybody breathe. Go, go, go.
So who's right and they're both right is what I learned. It just depends on what you want to get out of your breath. So for the majority of the time, you do want to breathe slowly, rhythmically, lightly through the nose. Okay?
That is how you're going to get the most oxygen, the most energy for the least effort. And that's exactly what you want throughout the day. But sometimes you want to push your breath and you want to use it to purposely stress your body out. A lot of you may be thinking, why do I ever want to stress my body out?
Right? I'm stressed throughout the day. I'm answering emails, dealing with calls, dealing with the kids exercising. But that's exactly why you should use breathing to stress your body out.
Because what these practices do is they focus that stress into a controlled space in your day. So the WIM HOF method, you're not going to do that all day. Just like you wouldn't be going to the gym and lifting weights all day. It would destroy your body.
Wim's method, you do it for about 20 minutes. And the point is that you use this method to purposely stress your body out so that the other 23 and a half hours of the day you can be in a state of calm and control. And you know, Wim calls it the WIM HOF method, but he's so clear that these practices have been around thousands and thousands of years. You can call it tummo, you can call it Sudarshan kriya, you can call it pranayama, whatever.
They're all doing the same thing. They're forcing you to over breathe, to stress yourself out, then control your breath and then to stress yourself out again, then control it again, like interval training, so that you can control your stress. And the science is very clear that these methods can have an incredible impact on both mental health and and physical health, including autoimmune diseases. One of the most memorable bits in your book for me was when you were talking about your own experience of trying tummo breathing and you said something to the effect of I was stressing my body out, that this stress felt very different to the stress that I feel when I'm running late for an important meeting.
And I thought it was really fascinating, this idea of stress, which we typically associate as being a bad thing. Certainly the societal narrative around stress is stress is bad, we want to avoid it. But that was a beautiful way of describing sort of helpful stress and unhelpful stress. And I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit.
I think the difference is when you are rushing to a meeting, when you are trying to answer emails and trying to answer calls and getting very frustrated with the amount of work you have to do every day, there's no outlet for, for that stress. That stress seems to build and build and build and it starts coming out in different ways. You get angry, you can't think straight, your blood pressure goes up, you start clenching your fists or your muscles tighten, and that's such bad news. But if you clench your fist and tighten your muscles and control your breath and learn to do this consciously, you can learn what that stress feels like.
And you can then learn to turn it off. So a lot of these practices have you do that to, I mean, whim has, you know, you're holding your breath and then you're breathing as hard as you can and then you're holding your breath again and taking one breath and then exhaling it. So this is stressful to the body. But what the body doesn't want is to be in these states of low grade stress throughout the day and throughout the night.
Periodic stress is very good. Okay. Hermetic stress is very good for the body. That's how we evolved to go run after a tiger or fight off someone and then to chill out for the rest of the day and the rest of the night.
What's happening now is so many of us are staying in this chronic state of stress. It's like this IV drip of stress throughout the day. And you can see that in what this has done to our health. So inflammation is behind the vast majority of modern chronic diseases, whether you're looking at diabetes or heart disease or hypertension or whatever.
And so this inflammation is exacerbated by this constant low grade stress. Whether that stress is coming from the foods you're eating, whether it's coming from the environment. So it's no coincidence that hunter gatherer populations don't have any of these modern diseases that we have. It's no coincidence that our ancestors, as far as we can see, didn't have the vast majority of these diseases we have today either.
So that's a long way of saying that controlling the stress and using breathing as your pressure release valve can have enormous benefits to your day to day health. We're living in incredibly stressful times at the moment. The world has significantly changed the way people live over the last 12, 15, 16 months or so. And stress, anxiety is ramped up in many ways for so many people.
One thing I don't think people still quite fully understand is how intimately our stress levels are linked with the way that we breathe. And therefore without that understanding, it's hard sometimes to persuade people that, hey, you know what, if you, you literally can hack that system by working on your breath, not for hours a day, just a few simple things, you can actually start to change your biology. Can you speak a bit to how stress and breath are linked? Well, this is what's so great about breathing is you can feel the effects and you can see the effects immediately when you're changing your diet.
Usually that takes a little while, right? To really see the transformative effects, it has to eat a Healthy diet, it'll take maybe a few days, but if you want to lose weight, it's going to take a few weeks or it's going to take a few months. And you know, so many of us today, we have a very short attention span. So I think that's one reason people fall off their diets.
They're just like, oh, I'm sick of doing this. But with breathing, one of my favorite things to do is to put a pulse oximeter on someone, put a heart rate variability monitor on someone, have them breathe in a very specific way and then watch what happens after a minute. Right? Even after a few seconds, you can see this transformation taking place in your body.
You can watch your blood pressure go down 10 or 15 points. I've seen mine even go down 20 points if I went from a state of being stressed to controlling my breathing and de stressing myself through those means. So I think that that's what's been so convincing with a lot of the readers of the book and also to myself, is if you're able to improve your health and improve the efficiency of your body within a few minutes, just imagine what's going to happen after a few days or a few weeks or a few months and you start to understand how your breathing is such an integral part of your healing and your long term health. So I could get into the biochemical processes of it, but that's the umbrell, that's the overview of what these things are doing.
And again, if there are skeptics out there, and I hope there are, question what I'm saying. But then go and grab some of these monitors and breathe in a certain way and tell me what happens to your body and what happens to your brain. Because what's happening in the body as well is happening in the brain. EEG patterns transform.
When we start breathing in a slow, rhythmic way, different areas of the brain start coming online. You're able to think more clearly because you're allowing your brain to function at peak efficiency. I mean, feel free to expand on the biochemistry because you know in that section where you were talking about your own experience with tumor breathing, you also had this gorgeous phrase that it was as if tummo opened up your own body's pharmacy. And that stuck with me.
I thought we've got these chemicals inside us already. But it seems as though certain breath practices can sort of unlock like that full potential that we're sort of be keeping suppressed because of the way we're breathing and the way we're living our daily Lives. Today's episode is sponsored by AG1, a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over seven years now. This is the time of year when our immune systems are under the most pressure.
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See all [email protected] LiveMore well, this is what's been so fascinating. Great to see about what Wim has been doing. So he's had so many skeptics too over the last 20 years. He said, okay, be skeptical.
Just take me into your lab and I'll do whatever you can. Shoot me up with E. Coli. Sure, sounds great.
You can take blood work at various levels while I breathe. We can bring in some other people, you can take their blood work and see what happens. And that's what he's shown. We've known this for a long time, that breathing in certain ways will create and trigger these responses in your body to release hormones, to release stress hormones, to release relaxing hormones, to open up the blood vessels.
We already know all that. But I think that such a superhuman breather as Wim is, he's able to show the true potential of where breathing can take us. So I think that what he has shown is this stressful breathing can help the body better defend itself. It can bolster the immune function.
Which is why Wim Hof breathing has been shown to be so effective. For some people with autoimmune diseases, their immune systems have gone rampant. They're attacking healthy tissues in the body that helps to reverse that. But we can also use breathing to release different feel good hormones.
And when we do that, we can trigger those releases at any time. And this is one of the reasons that I think Wim Hof breathing has become so popular, because it's so hard not to feel amazing at the end of that breathing session. If anyone out there has done it. It's hard to see someone who hasn't had a very profound reaction after 20 minutes.
Wow, I feel so good. You feel that because you're triggering the release of these hormones in your body. And that's what to me allows people to keep coming back to this and to keep using it because you're creating a positive feedback loop to allow yourself to heal and also to allow your monkey mind to be entertained by the constant good feelings. Right?
The constant sometimes hallucinations that some of these breath work practices bring on. And it's great. I love the Wim Hof method. I do it as often as I can, which is usually a couple times a week.
I also love Kundalini. I also love Sudarshan Kriya. But all of these things are essentially doing the same thing to your body and brain. Some people say that in a society full of stress, full of adrenaline already, that these hyperventilation practices like Tummo, like the Wim Hof method, are not necessarily the best choices.
So I wonder what you would say to that. Could this potentially be the wrong method for some people? To me, it's just another option. It's just another tool you have in your back pocket.
So people are going to want to come to breathing for different reasons. And there is no overarching prescription that you can use to cure everyone's woes. There is a foundation of healthy breathing that I tried to establish in the book, said, okay, I don't care if you're an ultramarathoner or an asthmatic or have long haul Covid or are just anxious. Here are some breathing practices that will help everybody.
And there are zero side effects to this, right? You're only going to feel better. You're only going to be able to perform better. It's just like with food.
We know that eating a healthy diet benefits everybody. But when you get into more specific chronic conditions, you're absolutely right. Some people with panic and anxiety would hate Wim Hof breathing and they'd hate Sudarshan Kriya because these incorporate states of extreme hyperventilation. And that's gonna give them a lot of Trouble.
So with people like that, I would say start slow, right? Start with that. Five and a half seconds in, five and a half seconds out. That's even too much for a lot of people.
So it's so important not to try to go and kick your breathing's butt. And this is what Westerners tend to do with everything, but to really dip into it slowly and become immersed into it at your body and your mind's own level of comfort. And so with people with anxiety and with people with asthma and panic, what I've tried to tell them is go very slowly, start with three seconds in, three seconds out. And you would be amazed how few people have actually breathed in that way.
Just three seconds in, three seconds out. Get comfortable with that and extend it. So if you're talking about someone who is already an extreme biohacker, you know, they're in constant ketosis and they're eating all the right stuff and taking all the right pills and potions and they just want to totally push it. Go big.
Then go do the Wim Hof method, Go try holotropic breathwork. That'll really, really send you on the whirl. And those people are already prepared, right? They're conditioned to do this.
It's the same reason why you wouldn't say to somebody who's been sitting on a couch for the past year, go and run a marathon, because it's gonna be really good for your body. You have to do what your body is telling you to do and to listen to your body and go into this stuff slowly. One of the things that I love personally with breathwork and that I've seen so impactful with hundreds, if not thousands of my patients is that tuning into your breath tunes you into your body, right? You start to gain an awareness that often people have never had, certainly for many, many years, just to stop, quieten the noise and actually listen to things like.
I'm interested in what practices you do on a daily basis, if any. What I do, I usually take my mouth at night, but I also love doing breath holds when I'm walking. I know you have written about this in your book, but when I'm out for a walk after about five or 10 minutes, I will do. I will be breathing through my nose, I'll breathe out, I'll sort of breathe out normal night sail and I'll see how far I can walk until I get that sort of median air hunger.
And I'll do that five or ten times. What I love about that A, I can see myself Getting better. So my body is better able to tolerate that carbon dioxide buildup compared to, let's say, two years ago. So that's really great to see.
But also if I haven't slept well or if I'm quite stressed and tense with work pressures and deadlines, I find I can't hold my breath as long. And it's almost like an early warning sign for me as to what else is going on in my body. So that's one thing I'd love. And I would really encourage people to get into some form of breath work because I think, I think it kind of teaches you about yourself and your state of stress.
So breath holding has been a part of every breathing practice for thousands and thousands of years. Ancient Hindus were talking about breath holding, you know, 3,000, 4,000 years ago, the Chinese, ancient Chinese were saying the exact same thing, same exact practice, different culture. Were they talking to one another then? I don't think so.
And yet they came to the same conclusions. So to me, it's no coincidence that now modern science is really catching up to what our ancestors have been saying for so long. And we know that CO2 tolerance plays a huge role in panic, in asthma, in anxiety. We know that because the studies have shown very clearly that people who can't hold their breath for a very long time are much more susceptible to suffer from these conditions.
I thought that this was fascinating. I went out to the Laureate Institute of Brain Research and met with Dr. Justin Feinstein, who is a neuropsychologist out there doing CO2 work. And he's one of the only researchers I found doing work into this thing called CO2 and CO2 tolerance.
And he had a huge NIH study looking at CO2 tolerance and panic. And he's the one who told me that so many of his patients over the years, he would ask them just to sit down and before he hooked them up to any monitors, he'd ask them just to take a sip of air and hold their breath. And this is what they did. Then he'd ask them to do it again.
Usually they last about 2 seconds, 3 seconds. And you see this all the time with asthmatics and with people suffering from even anorexia and other fear based disorders. So he kept wondering if you could allow them to tolerate more CO2, if it would allow them to better control their condition, because so much of their condition was caused by this perpetual hyperventilation. They were so scared of holding their breath because a breath hold to them reminded them of a panic attack or an asthma attack.
Or an anxiety attack, that they had conditioned themselves to breathe like this all the time. And this wasn't just a few people either. This is so common in communities of people who have those issues. So he has continued doing this research and what I thought was even more fascinating is he's not the one who invented this stuff.
You can look back more than a hundred years and see researchers at Yale and Harvard and Boston University and University of Wisconsin doing work in CO2 and mental health conditions. And this stuff worked incredibly well. Not just breathing retraining, but actually having these people inhale a bit of CO2. And what does that do?
It replicates holding your breath. That's what it does. Because when you hold your breath, your CO2 increases. These people can hold their breath, so they allow them to celebrate the benefits of breath holding by giving them a mouthful of CO2.
So I just kept finding these stories over and over again where we had learned this. It had been studied at the most prestigious medical institutions and proven to be incredibly effective. And then we had forgotten it. And now a few people are re remembering it right now.
And that's what's been exciting since the book has come out, is there seems to be a lot more interest in CO2 and CO2 tolerance, both in athletes and in people who are looking to overcome mental health issues. Yeah, I mean, just a recap for people. If they didn't hear our first conversation, they're not familiar. That drive to breathe doesn't come from our oxygen levels dropping.
It comes from our carbon dioxide levels building up. And if we can't tolerate that, we have to breathe. Right. So this CO2, the carbon dioxide training that you're talking about, can have.
I could just see physiologically how many different conditions that could immediately have impact on particularly anxiety. You can really see how it would help people. You mentioned athletics and I know you've written and spoken about, about. I think it was the 1968 men's track and field team.
And tell us a little bit about that and how athletes and fitness enthusiasts can use sort of breath holding and nasal breathing and all kinds of methods to actually improve their performance. Well, again, these were methods that have been used for decades and decades, but kind of became less popular for some reason in the last few decades. But one story in particular which I thought was so interesting was Carl Sau's work looking at a long exhale. So he was a choral conductor and he found that so many of his singers were breathing these very shallow breaths.
And when you breathe very shallowly, you don't have the resonance, and you can't carry a note for as long. So he started training them to exhale longer. And how our breath comes into our bodies. The lungs just don't inflate on their own, right?
They need something to do this. They're just like two balloons, but we have something called a diaphragm underneath the lungs. And when we breathe in, that diaphragm lowers, and when we breathe out, that diaphragm lifts up. So Stau found that even within the singers, they had such a limited range of their diaphragms, and by extending the range of their diaphragms, they allowed themselves more lung capacity and they could sing so much better.
So he ended up going and retraining singers at the Met Opera who were already pretty good singers to begin with, but they were even better after he taught them these new tricks. And he got so popular that VA hospitals on the east coast asked him to come in and help people with emphysema who were basically put on gurneys with an oxygen cannula up to their noses and fed a steady diet of antibiotics and left in the hospital to die. Nobody had any idea what to do with these people. Emphysemics lose the ability to engage their diaphragm.
Parts of their lungs get inflamed and destroyed by emphysema. Those parts don't grow back. But if you engage more of your diaphragm, you can use the rest of the lung to compensate. So Stau was able to take these people who were literally left for dead, retrain them only in breathing.
That's the only thing he did. And these people got up and left the hospital and went to live normal lives. And there's X rays of this, there's data sheets of it. I have even heard from a few of these patients whom Stout treated, and they said he absolutely saved their lives.
So that's a very long way of saying style. Then got even more popular that he was asked by the Olympic Committee for the US to come and retrain the runners for the Mexico City Olympics and use the exact same methods, engaging more diaphragmatic movement. And these runners went to Mexico City, which has an elevation of like 6,000 or 7,000ft, and they were the only thing not to use oxygen before and after, and they destroyed everybody. It's still the greatest performance of any track team in the history of the Olympics.
And they were able to do this because they knew how to breathe properly. So a lot of trainers, Patrick McEwen being one, Brian McKenzie being the other, they have adopted these same tricks and they're using them to create these absolute monster of athletes right now. These people who are just really outperforming anything they were able to do before. For me, I mean, fascinating to hear that.
But it's not just about performance because I'm currently training to see the London Marathon in October. Never done marathon before. Two years ago, I probably wouldn't have considered myself a runner, certainly not a long distance runner. Long story as to how this came about, but I have got really clear in my goals for this.
And one of my goals is I'm going to complete the London Marathon. Nasal breathing the entire way around. That is my goal. Now some people say, oh, you're not going to manage it?
Or, you know, I'm not saying everyone has to do this. I know there are times when you want mouth breathing run faster and maybe move more oxygen, I get that. But what I'm noticing, and when I speak to other runners who've recreational runners who've moved from mouth breathing to nasal breathing, it's not that. Yes, performance can get better a lot of the time after a bit of crossover periods, but recovery tends to be quicker.
Sleep is often better afterwards. People who wear trackers, heart rate comes down a lot quicker afterwards. These are super important metrics for overall health and well being. So I really want to emphasize that point because it ain't just about getting faster.
It is about doing all of these activities in a way that's just more physiologically sort of harmonious with our bodies and the way they're meant to work. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because this is also something that Brian McKenzie has mentioned to me various times. He's dealing with the very elite level of athletes.
So sometimes these people are entering zone five, zone four, you know, even, and somehow breathing can help them when they're absolutely peaking during a competition, that's perfectly fine to occasionally breathe through your mouth. And I just want to make that really clear because some people have written so confused they're trying not to ever open their mouth during the day and say, oh God, what have I done here? So right now I'm breathing through my mouth a little bit. Right when we laugh, we breathe through my mouth.
I'm going to sigh right now. I'm breathing through my mouth. This is perfectly fine. I'm talking about habitual breathing and that includes in athletic performance.
So Brian trained some of his athletes. When they really reach these extreme states, you might want to Default to mouth breathing for about 15 seconds and then bring it back down. And that's great. So with jogging, the whole point of athletic performance is to work at peak efficiency, especially when you're competing.
Why would you want to be expending energy on something if you didn't have to? And an analogy that I've used before, it's imagine you're in a car and would you at every stop sign just be revving the motor? Would you just be peaking the RPMs like every single time you could without moving fast? No.
You want to be working that car at the level of the performance you need. So if you want to go fast, yeah, pedal to the metal. But the rest of the time, it should be operating in a state of efficiency. Your body is no different.
We have this huge piston right here in our chest, right. And it's called a diaphragm. And it goes up and down just like a piston. So if you can allow that diaphragm to go up and down fewer times, and each time it goes up and each time it goes down, you get more energy, why on earth wouldn't you want to do that?
And so that's what nasal breathing can help you do. You tend to take very deep breaths when you're nasal breathing, especially when you're working out. And you will be taking slower breaths, so you will be able to gain more energy with less effort. And I'm very curious to see what happens.
Rangit, I hope you don't get hurt, because then this whole theory is just thrown out the window. A lot of pressure now. Not too. These analogies with exercise, with diet, they're so apt.
We don't see breathing the same way, but we really should. We understand that people got to find the right diet for them. They can. You know, there's some broad principles that kind of most people.
Microorgan, most people would agree on and. But within that, you can experiment to find what really works for you. I kind of see breathwork and breathing practice in the same way. There are some broad things.
You know, generally speaking, we want to be breathing through our nose as much as possible, but there are various techniques we might want to use at various times to get a certain effect. And as you say, there is that confusion. It becomes oversimplified. I tried that.
It doesn't work. I'm not going to bother with breathing. And really we need a bit more nuance than that. And I got to say, I think your book does a fantastic job off that nuance there and showing that there's all these different methods, these different techniques.
James, I'm really struck chatting to you that when you tell these stories, there's still this real passion and fire in your belly that I heard from you almost 12 months ago when we first spoke. And your book has been a global smash hit. Right. You will have done hundreds of interviews, short form ones on television shows, long form ones like on my podcast and other long form shows.
Why are you still so passionate about it? Do you ever get bored talking about this stuff? Because I never get that impression from you that you're done talking about it. Well, either I'm a great actor, which I'm not, or I'm genuinely interested in this stuff and I'm more interested in it now than I ever was.
I know that sounds like a cliche, but it's really true. I get really turned on by this because I know how much it can help people. I know how much it's helped me and it's helped the hundreds of other people that I've talked to and the thousands of people that I've heard from. And what I like about breathing so much is it's free, it's available to everybody.
You can use it when you want to. You can use it on the couch, you can use it on your bicycle, you can use it during a conference call. It's always with us. And so if it's always with us, we always have an opportunity to do it a little better.
And this doesn't require you to wear special robes and to sit in a corner for an hour a day. It's something that, just as you had mentioned, you're walking around, I'm gonna try my breath holds, you're sitting, watching tv. I'm gonna try to breathe more slowly. You can really do it at any time and always get the benefits from it.
And that's really the last thing is I have seen no negative side effects to breathing better. You only get benefits from it. And it's a small ask for a lot of people. It's one thing to ask someone to go who's a carnivore to go vegan or keto.
It's another thing to ask them just to take something they're already doing all day and to slightly tweak it so that they could be a little bit healthier and in some cases be a lot healthier. So I think that's the thing that keeps me really excited about this. Another thing is I have been lucky enough to speak at various medical schools in the US Here at Harvard At Stanford, at Yale. And I'm seeing the excitement within these places, which is ironic because so much of the research that I put in this book was researched at these institutions.
And these people are like, where do you find this stuff? And I've said, in your medical library here. Here it is. Here are the 20 papers I there.
And that's what's really exciting because I really believe that this, you know, this message shouldn't be a us against them or this or that. It needs to be a collaboration and it needs to be based on real science, real measurements, and that's what this stuff is based on. And so to be able to now collaborate with some of these people is an absolute thrill. You know, it's making my days a little more hectic, but it's something that I'll never give up doing.
And there's various initiatives we're trying to put together right now. They're all volunteer based, trying to get the word out, you know, especially the kids, especially people in developing nations who this stuff could really help. Yeah, I mean, the subtitle. I think of your books as all the New Science of a Lost Arts.
You really give homage to where this comes from in all the interviews I've seen you do before. Tell us a little bit about some of these origins. So again, my job was to look at the full story of conscious breathing. And I had no interest in just focusing on one thing or the other, which is why this book was such an absolute nightmare to write and put together.
So when you're taking something that's been around for 5,000 years and misunderstood for most of that time, there's a lot of weeds to go through to find the real kernels of truth. But one of the most interesting things that I'm able to do as a researcher is to look through history and make these connections. And this is the part of book research I actually love the most is to read these ancient texts and to see so much of what they've been saying we have then rediscovered, but we have just rephrased it in different ways. So that includes ancient Chinese texts of the dao to ancient Hindu texts.
And I was able to meet with Sergio Alvarez Derose, who is a real scholar of the ancient Hindu text. And he's the one who really was able to point out the text that showed me that this concept we have today of yoga, of this vinyasa flow, of these movements, and then you hold a pose and then you move again, which I'm a huge fan of. I do it all the Time, I love it. That has nothing to do with ancient yoga.
So ancient yogis didn't move around, they sat in one place and breathe. Breathed. So yoga was a entire technology of breathing, and it started in the Indus valley civilization about 5,000 years ago. Even longer than that, there are figurines and there are sculptures of people in conscious breathing poses, unmistakable poses.
So scholars attribute that as the beginning of yoga and of breathwork. It had probably been around for thousands of years before that. And then we get into when people started writing these practices down, Rig Veda, other books in yoga, and they start really describing the specifics on how to do these practices. They collect them all.
Panchanjoli's Yoga Sutras is the famous text really codifying and including all of these different practices. But what was so interesting to me, one of many things that was interesting, was to see this tract in ancient Hindu text, right? Understanding breathing, adopting these specific practices, then seeing the exact same track in ancient Chinese texts, saying the exact same stuff, you know, just in different words. And so you know that there's something there.
These people didn't have pulse oximeters. They weren't able to check blood pressure. But what they did have was time. They had time and they had patience to look at what worked and what didn't work.
Luckily, today we have all these instruments to measure what they were saying and to actually see how it pans out. And it turns out that so much of what they were saying was 100% true. And again, don't believe me. You can see this in the measurements on modern machines.
I spoke to Ryan Holiday a little while ago on the show, and a similar theme came up, which is some of these truths that he writes about. You know, you can see, yes, in ancient Greek texts and Roman texts and Indian texts and Chinese texts, you know, very different civilizations at different times in different parts of the planet. And we were just talking about how that should just give us more confidence that, hey, this stuff is real. It's so humbling.
And I think it should be very humbling for modern humans. You know, I think we do sometimes have this arrogance that we've got all this incredible science now. I'm not against it. I think it's great to have the science to back stuff up, but it's also very humbling.
So, actually, you know what, humans have been pretty clever for a long period of time, and they kind of figured out a lot of stuff that they kind of just knew worked well. I think we are apprehensive about things that we've discovered in the past because a lot of that stuff was false. If you look at all the hucksters, all the snake oil salesmen at the beginning of the century, I think this is what made people so paranoid about accepting and using things that weren't in the system. Even though a lot of people didn't realize a lot of what was in the system was also false and didn't work and had been co opted by corporate.
Look at sugar. Look what happened to our diet. Eat more processed grain, everybody. It's good for you.
Let's put that at the very top of the US food pyramid. We know that stuff is a disaster for our health, right? And yet it's taken us 50 years to start to reverse that. So even when you think about nasal breathing, here's a quote from the DAO that's about 1300 years old.
It says the breath inhaled through the mouth is called Niqi or adverse breath. Be extremely careful not to breathe your breath through the mouth. I mean, this goes to do with everything that we had just been mentioning about nasal breathing. And I sprinkled the book at some of these quotes throughout it, but there were so many more that were even more profound, they just happened to be even longer.
So I think that this idea that whatever is new is better. We know this is false. Because if you look at medicine, and this is something that three different doctors told me about years ago, they said about 50 to 70% of what we've known about medicine in the past has been proven wrong, including now, today, about 50 to 70% of how we're treating ourselves with medicine. Medicine will be proven wrong in the future.
So when you think about things like that, you think that, oh, that's impossible. How can that be? Look at all the procedures we used to do 20 years ago. Look at all the different drugs we used to use 20 years ago that aren't being used now.
So if you think about some of these practices which have really been time proven over hundreds or thousands of years, why would a practice continue if it weren't working? You know, books were extremely valuable back in the day. Why would they continue to fill their books with the same exact message over and over? If this stuff wasn't working, you could say, or maybe they were clueless or this is spiritual stuff and it doesn't apply to us now, that's fine.
But again, as I keep mentioning, we have instruments to measure it. So why not? If something sounds crazy, that's fine, be skeptical, but measure it. That's how science is supposed to work.
Science is supposed to be the exploration of the unknown. Right. You're not supposed to keep proving the same thing over and over again, which is what so much of science is doing right now. You're supposed to explore the unknown.
And it's those scientists and researchers which really change our worldview and in many cases have drastically changed our understanding of health. And those are the people that I try to track down and write about. Yeah, I think it was in first year or second year at medical school we were told the exact same thing by one of our professors. 50% of what we're teaching you is going to be false.
The problem is we don't know what which is the 50%. And I think we all need just to keep that humbleness and humility as we go through all the video. Is this really true or may we just be seeing one side of this here? It's kind of super fascinating.
And you mentioned scientists in research. I would also add to that clinicians. I really love chatting to experienced clinicians who have. These are often any CO1 things.
I totally understand you can't replicate proper science done in proper conditions that can be repeated over and over again. But I think sometimes we get the ideas from clinicians who say, you know what, I'm trying this and I'm seeing this over and over again, that this is helping people and this is working. And I know certainly that's been a huge part of my own journey. A real frustration that the tools I was taught I found brilliant for some people, but for a lot of my patients, I thought this is just really limited.
I don't really feel I'm helping them. I feel I'm often just putting a stick in plaster on their symptom and speaking to breath work. About six or seven years ago, I started talking to patients about something I called the 345 breath. Breathing for three, hold for four breathe out of three.
The. And I've written about it before and I still get messages from people saying, this is my go to for anxiety. This is my go to before a stressful meeting. It just helps to calm me down.
Or students before their exams. And again, there's no research done yet on the 3, 4, 5 breath. But the principle of a longer exhale than inhale, consciously slowing down your breath, I mean, there's research on that is just something I found to be super practical that people could put in their back pocket. They don't need to remember anything complicated.
Wherever they are, they can access it there and then without spending a single penny. Well, what you found is, I believe it is scientifically validated because just as you mentioned, there briefly, when you're inhaling, you're eliciting a sympathetic response, which is why your heart rate goes up. Right. You're activating your body.
And when you exhale or hold your breath. Breath, you're relaxing your body. So if you're exhaling and holding your breath for three quarters of the time you're breathing, you're going to become more relaxed. So all those things are measured.
Some people prefer the 4, 7, 8 breathing. I've noticed with people with anxiety or asthma, that's way too long. It's too long, isn't it, to do? Yeah.
But if you look at 4, 7, 8 too, it's just doing the exact same thing. Box breathing, what's that doing? Four in, four hold, four out, four hold. Three quarters of the time you're holding your breath or exhaling.
So this is, this is kind of what I was talking about. You find just these same variations on the same themes that are eliciting the same responses. And in my opinion, and this is just my opinion, I believe that the information, the data we get from clinicians who deal with people day in, day out, who have dealt with thousands of people, that in many ways is more important and valuable than a study with 20 people in a controlled environment. And the reason I say this is because the randomized controlled studies, that's the gold standard and it's fantastic.
Double blind, I love it. But look at all the different drugs and procedures that have passed through that gold standard. And look at how many of those drugs are no longer used because they killed people or made them sicker. So there's something slightly off with that.
It's only when you get these things out to huge groups of people, if you can do randomized, double blind controlled studies in enormous groups of people, which is basically impossible, that you get the real kernel of truth there. So if we know that's not possible, to have these huge randomized studies with thousands of thousands of people, what's the next best thing? An objective, scientifically minded clinician who sees what has worked, who adjusts his or her own practices to suit the patients, and watches what happens. To me, that's solid gold right there.
And that's why I think so many of these breathing practices have been developed by clinicians, right. And they've been tweaked by clinicians who have found just small little alterations here and there will have an even better effect and a better outcome. Before, when we were Talking about being in a car accident and wanting the very best treatment that modern medicine has and contrasting that with sort of more chronic conditions where we can put in practices like breath work or preventive practices like breath work to stop people getting ill in the first place, I think that broadly works. But when you were talking about car stuff's words with emphysema, these are people severely ill at the end of life having huge benefit from learning to use their diaphragm better.
I mean, that also speaks to the fact that it's about integrating it everywhere. Yes, it's prevention, but also when people are serious. Yeah, maybe you have to take some medication, but you can also do breathing practices as well. I have several patients who use breathing practices.
They've got very advanced pain from autoimmune arthritis type conditions and breath work actually reduces their need for pain medication. Breathwork helps them sleep better. So again, just emphasizing it's not either or. It can just be part of that armory that we're using no matter what we're facing.
If we want to stay healthy and well, we don't do that. Practice, practice. But if we are severely as well, well, we can also use certain ones, I think, to help us. Yeah, that's really true.
You know, one thing that Michael Gal, who's a doctor in dentist and sleep researcher and he's on every board of dentistry imaginable, he's been doing this stuff for 30 years. He said that. He's like, oh, I only deal with walking dead. It's only when people get so bad that they come to me and then, oh my God, now I have to fix you up with that problem.
The point with so much of health, if you look at health from an ancient yoga perspective, if you look at health from an ancient Chinese perspective or a Persian perspective, it is to not get sick. Health is used to as a preventive maintenance. You don't want to get sick sick. You stop paying your doctor when you get sick in Chinese medicine and you continue pain as long as you're healthy.
That seems like an interesting way of doing this. I'm not saying that's the best way to go, but it's interesting that they've taken that philosophy. So, yeah, I want to be clear that breathing is so effective as preventative maintenance to keep a healthy lung volume as you grow older, to keep yourself calm, to keep yourself running efficiently. So it's very effective for that.
But for even acute serious problems, it depends what that problem is. Stage 4 cancer don't just do breath work and stop Everything that's a bad idea. And this is where I think that people get the wrong idea about this. They want to learn something, say, oh, this is going to fix me, I'm going to ditch everything else and just go into this.
Well, that's where you get into real trouble. But for people with these long standing chronic respiratory issues and autoimmune issues, breath work can be incredibly effective. Alyssa Epel, she is a researcher here at University of California, San Francisco, just completed a study in rheumatoid arthritis and breath work and cold exposure. Basically the WIM HOF method.
And you're starting to see this all over the place right now, because I think that this is one of the reasons there's no drawbacks to breathing better. You know, there's some drawbacks. There's always side effects to taking certain pharmaceutical drugs, even though health benefits are gonna far outweigh those side effects most of the time. But learning how to breathe better has zero negative side effects.
And for people with COPD and emphysema, what I found that was so sad is Carl Stao found a way of helping so many of these people. And again, again, the science is there, it's validated. But when he left the hospital system, so did his research, so does his practice. And emphysemics are treated much the same they were in the 1950s right now.
And I think some of that is due to cost. It's very expensive to have a personalized respiratory therapist train each and every patient. But it also has to do with apprehension within the larger medical community that breath work could actually benefit people with emphysema. All you have to do is look at the science and you'll see the answer to that question.
What goes wrong, James? What happens? We're born as babies, right? We presumably alloy fus at that point, have got good posture, we've got good positioning of everything we're able to breathe.
What happens so that we then need these dozens, these hundreds of breathing practices to sort of enhance our health. Presumably some of them are just bringing us back to where we might have been had we not sort of gone off track somewhere. What has happened to us as a species whereby we need so much help at learning how to do one of the most basic and most important functions that exists. Well, I think you can see right now what's happening with the different ways that we found are very effective for healing our bodies and healing our minds is the further we get away from the modern environment that we've lived in all our lives.
Lives. The healthier we get if we replace processed food and cookies and Fritos and Tortilla chips and all that other stuff that we've been told is healthy. With the food our ancestors ate, we can vastly improve our health. If we get rid of the phones that we have on or the laptops at night, if we regulate the amount of time we spend on the Internet and social media, this can have a vast effect on our mental health.
So we've lost the ability to breathe properly. You can see the proof all over the place. The first thing that we've lost is the skeletal structure of our faces. And as we mentioned in the last podcast, this is due to the shrinking of our mouths caused by lack of breastfeeding and lack of chewing.
When we're young, if we don't have that stress, our faces don't build properly. And if they don't build properly, our mouths will grow too small, which is why we have crooked teeth. Our teeth have nowhere to go, so they grow in crooked. And having that smaller mouth also impacts the sinus cavities.
So this is not a theory, it's not a hypothesis, this is a fact. And if you don't believe me, you can just look at ancient skulls, which is something I did for a few months with some real leaders in the field. I was absolutely shocked to see I could not find an ancient skull with crooked teeth. I could not find an ancient skull that ever had their wisdom teeth removed, or braces, or any sort of dentistry orthodontics.
They didn't need any of that stuff. Just like today, we need supplements, vitamins, goos, powders to supplement a diet that is so devoid of proper nutri. If you look at our ancestors, they needed none of that stuff. Were they popping their vitamin C so they wouldn't get scurvy, or their vitamin D so they wouldn't get rickets?
No, their environment provided all of that, because of course it did. We evolved from a wild environment, which is why other animals that live in the wild don't need any of these interventions that we need now to be healthy. Okay? It's only when we put them in zoos and feed them a western diet and acclimate them to our modern environment that they get really sick.
So breathing is a huge part of this, because losing the ability to breathe, losing the anatomy to breathe properly, then gaining these very improper habits that make it very hard to breathe in just a healthy way, it's dramatically affected our health. And we could talk about the anatomical changes, we could talk about posture, we could Talk about pollution. But it's really been a perfect storm of different modern day environmental inputs which have made us the worst breeders in the animal kingdom. A couple of things to pick up on.
There's a lot of young parents who listen and watch this show. You mentioned last time about chewing real food and how important that is. But we also have this modern fear sometimes that we shouldn't give our kids these foods that need to be mushed and pureed and soft. And it all kind of speaks to what you were just saying, doesn't it, about how far removed our lifestyles now are compared to how we've evolved.
And so what are some of those simple things that people can think about doing with their children whilst they're still young to enhance their breathing in childhood and beyond? I was talking to my mom about this when I was first researching this book. I said, hey, what did I eat when I was young? I was trying to understand why my mouth was so small, why I needed extractions and braces and how that might have impacted my breathing and how it might have impacted my facial form.
And she said, you know, when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, nobody was breastfeeding. She said, no, absolutely not. Everyone was bottle fed. And then you were weaned onto Gerber applesauce, directly onto it.
And I just thought that was interesting. But she said that it wasn't even something people talk about. This is just what it was done because modern science had said, oh, bottle feeding is better. You have to wean onto canned and bottled and jarred processed foods.
That's. This is the scientifically sound way of doing it. And as she was talking, I was thinking about how odd this is, that all of our ancestors up until 200 years ago were breastfed and then they were weaned on the hard foods. These foods were not processed before they were given to kids.
And if that was so injurious to health, why are we all here today? And why did they all have perfectly straight teeth and we're able to breathe so much more efficiently and effortlessly than we are right now? So I think it's just this lap and a lap of truly long term thinking that has given us this new worldview, that everything new has been both vetted and is better for our health? So that answers.
That's a very long way of saying, to answer your question specifically, there's this huge movement called baby led weaning. I am not the expert in this, so I will not speak very in detail about this, but this is all about returning our kids and returning infants to their natural way of developing proper facial structure. And it does that by incorporating as much breastfeeding as a mother is able to do, as long as a mother is able to do it. And then weaning onto hard foods just like our ancestors did.
And it sounds dangerous, but again, if you look at the past and if you look at indigenous cultures right now who don't have processed food, you know, they turn out just fine and they don't have any of the many of the chronic problems that we have later on in life. Yeah. I mean, even related to that, you see this, you know, in cafes and restaurants. I'm not talking about babies now, but kids as they get older.
There's kids meals and there's adult meals. You go out somewhere and it's like, oh, there's real food on the adults menu. Menu. And on the kids menu, it's chicken nuggets and fries.
And again, I'm not super clear. I'm not trying to criticize anyone for the choices they make with their own children. I understand that there's certain things that are normal in society that we often end up doing without thinking about it. I just always find it quite fascinating that we have kids meals as well as adult meals because food is food, right?