Over the summer, I linked to an interesting longread in The Guardian, an excerpt from a new book by James Nestor called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. The excerpt and the title both promised an evidence-based approach to the rather fundamental act of respiration, one that comes up in areas from pulmonary and cardiovascular health to allergies to meditation and mindfulness. It was a huge disappointment: Breath is a lot of woo and anecdote, with a little bit of science hidden in the endnotes. It imparts very little useful information on how to improve your breathing, or address any problems with it.
Nestor starts Breath explaining an experiment he and a fellow “pulmonaut” underwent, where they agreed to block their nasal passages so they’d be forced to breath through their mouths for about three weeks , so they could see how much their health would deteriorate in the meantime. From there, he points out that humans are the only species with our wide range of dental problems, a product of evolution and our changing diet, and speculates that this has led to a constricted airway (which creates the conditions for sleep apnea) and says most of us are just breathing the wrong way.
One major way in which we do it wrong is breathing through our mouths, which bypasses the nose’s air-filtering, humidifying, and warming mechanisms, which came about via evolution and allow us to take less particulate matter into our lungs, while getting warmer, less dry air. Nasal breathing helps filter out some airborne pathogens, while the mouth has no such filtration. There’s even some evidence that breathing through the nose while exercising can improve performance, because “breathing through the nose releases nitric oxide, which is necessary to increase carbon dioxide (CO2) in the blood, which, in turn, is what releases oxygen.”
There’s at least some scientific evidence to back up the claims he presents in those parts of the book, and there’s copious evidence that sleep apnea is associated with serious health problems over the long term. As the book progresses, however, he veers farther and farther into pseudoscientific territory, discussing the Hindu concept of prana (the life force coursing through all living things in Hinduism) as if it were a scientific fact, which it’s not. He mentions how he breathes through his right nostril to improve his digestion, a belief from yoga that appears to have zero scientific evidence to support it. He also appears to advocate some extreme breathing hacks, such as the Buddhist method known as g Tum-mo meditation, that have little to no controlled research showing their efficacy or safety. There are even some internal contradictions here around hypoventilation and its effects, especially since there’s at least some literature showing a connection between hypoventilation and obesity.
I have some very mild breathing issues, mostly connected to sleeping, and thought I might get some useful tips from Breath to help with that, but all I really got out of the book was the advice to breathe more slowly, and remind myself to breathe through my nose when exercising. The former is something you’d get from any resource on mindful meditation, all of which start out with awareness-of-breath exercises. The latter is something I tried on Monday during a run … without success. It turns out that when it’s 40 degrees outside, breathing through your nose is not all that effective in delivering warm, moist air to your lungs, which is counterproductive when you’re trying to run at peak capacity. Apparently this is something you can build up to doing through practice, which I will continue to try to do over the next few weeks, but this isn’t advice for the larger audience.
There’s probably a decent book to write on this topic, but Breath isn’t it. With too much reliance on anecdote and the eventual devolution into woo, it’s not the kind of evidence-based argument I’d want to see for anything related to health or wellness.
Next up: I’ve got a few other books to review, but at the moment I’m reading Jude the Obscure.
I finished this over the weekend and had a similar reaction to it, at least insofar as it doesn’t really live up to its promise in teaching a person how to breathe better. I will say, however, that while the latter section of the book is light on the science, Nestor states early on that a lot of this stuff just hasn’t been studied in a rigorous way. I didn’t take anything from the Breathing+ section (as he calls it) as an endorsement so much as “Here’s some crazy breathing stuff people do.”
I found the contradictions really frustrating though. If I breathe at a supposedly ideal rate of 5.5 breaths per second, I can’t completely empty your lungs unless you exhale really *hard*. And I understand that there may be different schools of thought about which approach is better, but Nestor doesn’t really try to square the circle or even address the differences.
I found the book interesting, but underwhelming.