A book about breathing woes has an uncomfortable resonance right now—as if we need more stories about people gasping and wheezing. But “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art” strives to be bigger than the current pandemic. Rather than focus on respiratory illnesses, James Nestor investigates the chronic, everyday breathing problems that, he argues, have devastated the health of modern humans. And while grounded in science, the book is also something of a spiritual quest, although ultimately a debatable one.
Mr. Nestor claims that 90% of people breathe incorrectly—that is, through our mouths instead of our noses. This difference might seem trivial—air is air, right?—but unlike the mouth, the nose cleans, heats and moistens air before it enters the body. The author calls the nose our “silent warrior: the gatekeeper of our bodies, pharmacist to our minds, and weather vane to our emotions.”
As for why we breathe through our mouths, he traces the trouble to our diets. Like muscles, bones need tension and resistance to develop properly. The soft, processed foods that we eat nowadays leave our jaws and facial bones underworked and smaller than they would be otherwise. This leads to “stunted bone development” in the “dental arches and sinus cavity,” he writes, “leading to chronic nasal congestion.” Humans, he adds, “have the sad distinction of being the most plugged-up species on Earth.”
Mr. Nestor looks in the mirror and ticks off the supposed consequences of this underdevelopment: “sagging eyes, doughy cheeks, a sloping forehead, and a protruding nose.” More troubling, he argues that small, cramped airways contribute to a whole host of modern scourges, especially sleep apnea, which in turn correlates with heart disease, diabetes and chronic insomnia.
Breath
By James Nestor
Riverhead, 280 pages, $28
To counteract these woes, Mr. Nestor, a California-based science journalist, experiments with all sorts of breathing exercises. In his previous book, “Deep,” he learned the dangerous art of diving underwater without the aid of breathing gear. He seems no less game for adventure here. He takes an illegal tour of the Paris catacombs to study bone development in old skulls. He plugs his own nostrils with silicone for 10 days (250,000 breaths) to drive home how bad mouth-breathing is.
He spends more time, however, investigating the spiritual side of breathing. Nearly every cliché of the Western Spiritual Quest makes an appearance: Tibetan monks, Indian yogis, chai tea, “spiritual awakenings” and, of course, ancient powers that have “been inside us all this time, just waiting to be tapped.” He’s a bit wide-eyed in repeating claims from self-proclaimed breathing experts (“pulmonauts”) who can supposedly kill E. coli, or cure hemorrhoids and gout, or treat epilepsy and diabetes and arthritis, all through proper breathing. To be sure, Mr. Nestor slaps down the more outlandish claims, such as curing cancer. But then a few pages later we’re inevitably off to purge a schizophrenic woman’s hallucinations by teaching her to breathe through her right, “ ‘logical’ nostril.”
And while there’s no reason to doubt Mr. Nestor when he says that breathing exercises improved his life, the real question is why they improved his life so much. One big lacuna in the book is the placebo effect. Many people associate placebos with “fake” outcomes, but that’s not right. Placebos have real, documented medical benefits: Almost any treatment regimen can boost your health as long as you believe it will. That’s not fakery as much as an acknowledgment that the mind has a physical basis in the brain, which in turn interacts with the body. And although Mr. Nestor mentions placebos briefly, he never grapples with the effect as a plausible explanation for the invigoration he feels.
Other evidence looks dicey as well. Mr. Nestor cites an anthropological survey from the 1930s that examined the jaws, airways and overall health of hunter-gatherers around the world. The hunter-gatherers were reportedly much healthier than people in industrial societies, a result Mr. Nestor automatically links to their better-developed airways and improved breathing. But the hunter-gatherers almost certainly got more exercise than industrialized people, ate less sugar and slept better, too. How can we conclude that better breathing was the real cause?
Throughout “Breath,” I was reminded of the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling, a scientific giant who nevertheless went a little quacky late in life. Like Mr. Nestor, Pauling was plagued with colds and sinus infections. Then he started taking megadoses of vitamin C, which he claimed cured him. In truth, there’s no scientific evidence that vitamin C helps colds—they’re a placebo. (As even the Linus Pauling Institute admits, vitamin C “does not reduce the risk of becoming ill,” and “taking supplements once cold symptomshave already begun has no proven benefits.”) Yet Pauling, a brilliant scientist, insisted otherwise. I can’t help but feel a similar skepticism about whether Mr. Nestor’s ancient breathing exercises are a cure-all for modern ailments.
Worse, Mr. Nestor sometimes crosses the line from relaxing, meditation-type breathing practices to techniques that, he admits, can plunge you into states “considered damaging” that “would require medical care.” He insists that “heavy sweats, nausea, and exhaustion,” among other symptoms, are “the respiratory gauntlet required to get to the other side.” But even other pulmonauts disavow some of these techniques—and reading about them during a respiratory pandemic induces winces.
Breathing properly would no doubt boost the health of many people—as would sitting up straight and exercising regularly and getting better sleep. We do lots of crummy things to our bodies nowadays. There’s a good foundation here, but Mr. Nestor’s, well, breathless account would have benefited from more skepticism.
Mr. Kean is the author of “The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb.” His new podcast is “The Disappearing Spoon.”
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