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The Eye of Revelation, published in 1939.
the greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity.
larger lungs equaled longer lives.
The internal organs are malleable, and we can change them at nearly any time.
“orthopedic breathing.”
the most important aspect of breathing wasn’t just to take in air through the nose. Inhaling was the easy part. The key to breathing, lung expansion, and the long life that came with it was on the other end of respiration. It was in the transformative power of a full exhalation.
Emphysema, he realized, was a disease of exhalation.
what powers the thoracic pump is the diaphragm, the muscle that sits beneath the lungs in the shape of an umbrella.
the diaphragm is sometimes referred to as “the second heart,”
Over time, shallow breathing will limit the range of our diaphragms and lung capacity and can lead to the high-shouldered, chest-out, neck-extended posture common in those with emphysema, asthma, and other respiratory problems.
“Breathing Coordination,” when the respiratory and circulatory systems enter a state of equilibrium, when the amount of air that enters us equals the amount that leaves, and our bodies are able perform all their essential functions with the least exertion.
An Introduction to Respiratory Science: The Preventative Medicine of the Twenty-First Century.
we have 100 times more carbon dioxide in our bodies than oxygen (which is true), and that most of us need even more of it (also true).
good job of examining what causes breathing problems but done little to explore how they first develop and how we might prevent them.
few have paid much attention to the muscles that actually do the breathing,”
extend longevity was to focus on how we breathed, specifically to balance oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the body. To do this, we’d need to learn how to inhale and exhale slowly.
What’s less acknowledged is the role carbon dioxide plays in weight loss.
the way the body loses weight isn’t through profusely sweating or “burning it off.”
For every ten pounds of fat lost in our bodies, eight and a half pounds of it comes out through the lungs; most of it is carbon dioxide mixed with a bit of water vapor. The rest is sweated or urinated out. This is a fact that most doctors, nutritionists, and other medical professionals have historically gotten wrong. The lungs are the weight-regulating system of the body.
What our bodies really want, what they require to function properly, isn’t faster or deeper breaths. It’s not more air. What we need is more carbon dioxide.
when breathing at a normal rate, our lungs will absorb only about a quarter of the available oxygen in the air. The majority of that oxygen is exhaled back out.
By taking longer breaths, we allow our lungs to soak up more in fewer breaths.
ta na ma chant, one of the best-known techniques in Kundalini yoga,
It turned out that the most efficient breathing rhythm occurred when both the length of respirations and total breaths per minute were locked in to a spooky symmetry: 5.5-second inhales followed by 5.5-second exhales, which works out almost exactly to 5.5 breaths a minute.22 This was the same pattern of the rosary.
this resonant breathing offered the same benefits as meditation for people who didn’t want to meditate.
Prayer heals, especially when it’s practiced at 5.5 breaths a minute.
With some effort and training, however, breathing less can become an unconscious habit.
To be clear, breathing less is not the same as breathing slowly. Average adult lungs can hold about four to six liters of air. Which means that, even if we practice slow breathing at 5.5 breaths per minute, we could still be easily taking in twice the air we need. The key to optimum breathing, and all the health, endurance, and longevity benefits that come with it, is to practice fewer inhales and exhales in a smaller volume. To breathe, but to breathe less.
Slower, longer exhales, of course, mean higher carbon dioxide levels. With that bonus carbon dioxide, we gain a higher aerobic endurance. This measurement of highest oxygen consumption, called VO2 max, is the best gauge of cardiorespiratory fitness.
patients in the worst health all seemed to breathe far too much. The more they breathed, the worse off they were, especially those with hypertension.
What if overbreathing wasn’t the result of hypertension and headaches but the cause?
Heart disease, ulcers, and chronic inflammation were all linked to disturbances in circulation, blood pH, and metabolism.
How we breathe affects all those functions. Breathing just 20 percent, or even 10 percent more than the body’s n...
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limiting our inhales while extending exhales far past the point of what feels comfortable, or even safe.
Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing.
run as fast as he could holding his breath, take a few huffs and puffs and then do it all again.
become known as hypoventilation training.
The takeaway is that hypoventilation works. It helps train the body to do more with less.
drugs, in particular oral steroids, can have horrendous side effects after several years, including deteriorating lung function, worsened asthma symptoms, blindness, and increased risk of death.
Many of them have trained themselves to breathe less and reported dramatic improvement.
All of them claimed to have gained a boost in performance and blunted the symptoms of respiratory problems, simply by decreasing the volume of air in their lungs and increasing the carbon dioxide in their bodies.
Willing the body to breathe less air appeared to correct that system error.
When we breathe too much, we expel too much carbon dioxide, and our blood pH rises to become more alkaline; when we breathe slower and hold in more carbon dioxide, pH lowers and blood becomes more acidic. Almost all cellular functions in the body take place at a blood pH of 7.4, our sweet spot between alkaline and acid.
The techniques they used varied, but all circled around the same premise: to extend the length of time between inhalations and exhalations. The less one breathes, the more one absorbs the warming touch of respiratory efficiency—and the further a body can go.
They discovered that the optimum amount of air we should take in at rest per minute is 5.5 liters. The optimum breathing rate is about 5.5 breaths per minute. That’s 5.5-second inhales and 5.5-second exhales. This is the perfect breath.
Researchers have suspected that industrialized food was shrinking our mouths and destroying our breathing for as long as we’ve been eating this way.
Societies that replaced their traditional diet with modern, processed foods suffered up to ten times more cavities, severely crooked teeth, obstructed airways, and overall poorer health.
Price became convinced that the cause of our shrinking mouths and obstructed airways was deficiencies not of just D or C but all essential vitamins.
supplements could be useless unless they’re in the presence of other supplements.
The problem had less to do with what we were eating than how we ate it. Chewing.
