I finally finished Breath by James Nestor. I’m going to highlight a few key points here, but I recommend you read it. It’s an important topic that could impact your health!

As food choices can improve health, so can proper breathing. Proper breathing is breathing in alignment with our body’s complex and spectacular design.

If you only do 1 thing after reading this,

Try breathing in and out of your nose only on your next wall. If it feels awkward, if it feels challenging, you are in the right place. Keep going!

Now on to the takeaways.

1. Most of us are doing it wrong.

We assume that breathing is a passive action. That it is something that we all do well, and without effort.

The book covers “… how our ability to breathe has deteriorated over the ages, and why our cavemen ancestors didn’t snore,” among many other breathing-reated maladies — including crooked teeth. Who else had braces?! 🙋

Don’t think of yourself as a ‘mouth breather?’ You’re probably breathing from your mouth more often than you think.

2. This isn’t new.

The relationship between breathing and health has been known for millennia.

As early as 1500 BCE, the Ebers Papyrus, the most extensive record of ancient Egyptian medicine known, relayed why nostrils, not the mouth, were supposed to feed air to the heart and lungs. In the eighth century AD, a Chinese Taoist text “noted that the nose was the ‘heavenly door,’ and that breath must be taken in through it. ‘Never do otherwise,’ the text warned, ‘for breath would be in danger and illness would set in.’”

If you’re a yogi, you may have taken pranayama classes. In pranayama classes, students learn practices for moving the breath to support life force, or prana. 🧘

3. The relationship between soft foods and our bones.

“Our ancient ancestors chewed for hours a day, every day. And because they chewed so much, their mouths, teeth, throats, and faces grew to be wide and strong and pronounced. Food in industrialized societies was so processed that it hardly required any chewing at all.” The result is narrow faces, small mouths, and crooked teeth. It’s one of the reasons many of us snore, experience congestion and clogged airways.

Sleep apnea, snoring, asthma, and ADHD are all linked to obstruction in the mouth. About 90 percent of us have some form of malocclusion, or imperfect positioning of the teeth when the jaw is closed.

Who else has had permanent teeth removed as a child because their mouth was too small? 🙋

“Chewing. The more we gnaw, the more stem cells release, the more bone density and growth we’ll trigger, the younger we’ll look and the better we’ll breathe.”

🌱 Eat More Plants tip 🌱

Buy more raw, hard foods like carrots. Instead of cutting carrots into small pieces, try eating them whole to give your jaw a workout. It’s not a quiet activity. That’s ok. 😎

4. We bring tens of billions of molecules into our bodies with every breath. These molecules influence nearly every internal organ.

Breathing powers the autonomic nervous system which controls heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, digestion, moods, and more.

5. Author’s recommendations

Based on his multi-year study of the topic:

Shut your mouth.
Breathe through your nose.
Exhale.
Chew.
Breathe more, on occasion.
Hold your breath.
How we breathe matters.

Want to try sleeping with mouth tape? This is the one I’ve used.

Personal story

Near the beginning of the pandemic, one of my local yoga teachers began offering nearly daily classes on Zoom. I’d long known that many yoga traditions require students to breathe in and out through the nose only during the length of class. I decided to make a conscious effort to practice this during these pandemic classes. I was using a Fitbit at the time, which records heart rate. What I learned via the fitness tracker is: once I began consciously focusing on breathing in and out through my nose, my heart rate during class dropped significantly, even during periods of moderate to intense activity.

This doesn’t mean I then carried ‘optimal breathing practices’ into all aspects of my life, but the data was clear there was something to this.

Grab the book (or pick it up at your favorite local bookstore). Read it over time. I think you’ll find it interesting and valuable.

Have you read Breath? What did you think of it? Did it change anything you’re doing? Let me know in the comments below!

Thanks for reading!

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