## Highlights Forty percent of today’s population suffers from chronic nasal obstruction, and around half of us are habitual mouthbreathers, with females and children suffering the most. — location: 292 ^ref-14948 --- bizarrely, even though none of the ancient people ever flossed, or brushed, or saw a dentist, they all had straight teeth. — location: 389 ^ref-42336 --- Of the 5,400 different species of mammals on the planet, humans are now the only ones to routinely have misaligned jaws, overbites, underbites, and snaggled teeth, a condition formally called malocclusion. — location: 398 ^ref-39883 --- The quickly growing brain needed space to stretch out, and it took it from the front of our faces, home to sinuses, mouths, and airways — location: 429 ^ref-9268 --- Sapiens would become the only animals, and the only human species, that could easily choke on food and die. — location: 460 ^ref-21467 --- This process explains why the first few minutes of an intense workout are often so miserable. Our lungs and respiratory system haven’t caught up to supply the oxygen our bodies need, and so the body has to use anaerobic respiration. This also explains why, after we’re warmed up, exercise feels easier. — location: 582 ^ref-28735 ---- They gathered two decades of data from 5,200 subjects, crunched the numbers, and discovered that the greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity. — location: 1021 ^ref-7080 --- 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. — location: 1331 ^ref-22804 --- carbon dioxide worked as a kind of divorce lawyer, a go-between to separate oxygen from its ties so it could be free to land another mate. This discovery explained why certain muscles used during exercise received more oxygen than lesser-used muscles. They were producing more carbon dioxide, which attracted more oxygen. It was supply on demand, at a molecular level. — location: 1347 ^ref-52152 --- A last word on slow breathing. It goes by another name: prayer. — location: 1444 ^ref-11710 --- Gerbarg and Brown would write books and publish several scientific articles about the restorative power of the slow breathing, which would become known as “resonant breathing” or Coherent Breathing. The technique required no real effort, time, or thoughtfulness. And we could do it anywhere, at any time. — location: 1475 ^ref-42548 --- What if overbreathing wasn’t the result of hypertension and headaches but the cause? — location: 1573 ^ref-19006 --- 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. — location: 1799 ^ref-44702 --- Why didn’t so many of the sleep doctors or dentists or pulmonologists I interviewed know this story? Because this research, I discovered, wasn’t happening in the halls of medicine. It was happening in ancient burial sites. The anthropologists working at these sites told me that if I wanted to really understand how such a sudden and dramatic change could happen to us, and why, I needed to leave the labs and get into the field. — location: 1848 ^ref-30070 --- Researchers have suspected that industrialized food was shrinking our mouths and destroying our breathing for as long as we’ve been eating this way. — location: 1934 ^ref-23157 --- “Since we have known for a long time that savages have excellent teeth and that civilized men have terrible teeth, it seems to me that we have been extraordinarily stupid in concentrating all of our attention upon the task of finding out why all our teeth are so poor, without ever bothering to learn why the savage’s teeth are good,” wrote Earnest Hooton, a Harvard anthropologist who supported Dr. Price’s work. — location: 1940 ^ref-48926 --- 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. This is why so many of those skulls I’d examined in the Paris ossuary had narrow faces and crooked teeth. It’s one of the reasons so many of us snore today, why our noses are stuffed, our airways clogged. — location: 1981 ^ref-1004 --- The earliest orthodontics devices weren’t intended to straighten teeth, but to widen the mouth and open airways — location: 2092 ^ref-49565 --- A smaller mouth might be easy for dentists to manage, but it also offered less room to breathe. — location: 2109 ^ref-42641 --- “In ten years, nobody will be using traditional orthodontics,” Gelb told me. “We’ll look back at what we’ve done and be horrified.” — location: 2138 ^ref-52063 --- the way we produce and signal stem cells to build more maxilla bone in the face is by engaging the masseter—by clamping down on the back molars over and over. 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. — location: 2235 ^ref-9938 --- The body becomes more adaptable and flexible and learns that all these physiological responses can come under our control. Conscious heavy breathing, McGee told me, allows us to bend so that we don’t get broken. — location: 2592 ^ref-9537 --- Holotropic Breathwork created by a Czech psychiatrist named Stanislav Grof. The main focus wasn’t to reboot the autonomic nervous system or heal the body; it was to rewire the mind. An estimated one million people had tried it, and today more than a thousand trained facilitators run workshops around the world. — location: 2620 ^ref-41289 --- “What’s interesting to me is that nobody disproved it,” says Feinstein of carbon dioxide therapy. “The data, the science, still holds today.” — location: 2875 ^ref-16393 --- Take a deep breath’ is not a helpful instruction,” Meuret wrote. Hold your breath is much better. — location: 2910 ^ref-56768 --- Chemoreceptors, after all, don’t care if the carbon dioxide in the bloodstream is generated from strangulation, drowning, panic, or a foil bag on a wall in Tulsa. They set off the same alarm bells. Experiencing such an attack in a controlled environment helps demystify it, teaching patients what an attack feels like before it comes on so we can prevent it. It gives us conscious power over what for too long has been considered an unconscious ailment, and shows us that many of the symptoms we’re suffering can be caused, and controlled, by breathing. — location: 2972 ^ref-4720 --- By the early 1970s, Swami Rama had become a bona fide breathing superstar, with his bushy eyebrows and laser-beam eyes showing up in Time, Playboy, Esquire, and, later, on daytime television talk shows like Donahue. Nobody in the Western world had seen anything like him before. But it turned out Rama wasn’t that special. — location: 3099 ^ref-55350 --- These artifacts are the first documented “yogic” postures in human history, which makes sense. The Indus Valley was the birthplace of yoga. — location: 3187 ^ref-16131 --- Ancient yoga, and its focus on prana, sitting, and breathing, has turned into a form of aerobic exercise. — location: 3217 ^ref-47567 --- Modern medicine, they said, was amazingly efficient at cutting out and stitching up parts of the body in emergencies, but sadly deficient at treating milder, chronic systemic maladies—the asthma, headaches, stress, and autoimmune issues that most of the modern population contends with. — location: 3312 ^ref-54523 --- The role of the modern doctor was to put out fires, not blow away smoke. — location: 3317 ^ref-26395 --- There is no more essential technique, and none more basic. Sit up straight, relax the shoulders and belly, and exhale. Inhale softly for 5.5 seconds, expanding the belly as air fills the bottom of the lungs. Without pausing, exhale softly for 5.5 seconds, bringing the belly in as the lungs empty. Each breath should feel like a circle. Repeat at least ten times, more if possible. Several apps offer timers and visual guides. My favorites are Paced Breathing and My Cardiac Coherence, both of which are free. — location: 3533 ^ref-53601 --- A diagnostic tool to gauge general respiratory health and breathing progress. Place a watch with a second hand or mobile phone with a stopwatch close by. Sit up with a straight back. Pinch both nostrils closed with the thumb and forefinger of either hand, then exhale softly out your mouth to the natural conclusion. Start the stopwatch and hold the breath. When you feel the first potent desire to breathe, note the time and take a soft inhale. — location: 3545 ^ref-43790 --- Yogic Breathing (Three-Part) A standard technique for any aspiring pranayama student. PHASE I Sit in a chair or cross-legged and upright on the floor and relax the shoulders. Place one hand over the navel and slowly breathe into the belly. You should feel the belly expand with each breath in, deflate with each breath out. Practice this a few times. Next, move the hand up a few inches so that it’s covering the bottom of the rib cage. Focus the breath into the location of the hand, expanding the ribs with each inhale, retracting them with each exhale. Practice this for about three to five breaths. Move the hand to just below the collarbone. Breathe deeply into this area and imagine the chest spreading out and withdrawing with each exhale. Do this for a few breaths. PHASE II Connect all these motions into one breath, inhaling into the stomach, lower rib cage, then chest. Exhale in the opposite direction, first emptying the chest, then the rib cage, then the stomach. Feel free to use a hand and feel each area as you breathe in and out of it. Continue this same sequence for about a dozen rounds. These motions will feel very awkward at first, but after a few breaths they get easier. — location: 3641 ^ref-42858 --- Navy SEALs use this technique to stay calm and focused in tense situations. It’s simple. Inhale to a count of 4; hold 4; exhale 4; hold 4. Repeat. Longer exhalations will elicit a stronger parasympathetic response. A variation of Box Breathing to more deeply relax the body that’s especially effective before sleeping is as follows: Inhale to a count of 4; hold 4; exhale 6; hold 2. Repeat. Try at least six rounds, more if necessary. — location: 3657 ^ref-44538 ---