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Let’s take a deep breath – the Republic

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We do this between 20 and 25 thousand times a day. Without realizing it, or almost. But we don’t always do it right. Indeed, we do it worse and worse, as he says James Nestor, an American journalist who collaborates with newspapers such as Scientific American, The New York Times, The San Francisco breaking latest news and author of The art of breathing. The basic rules for re-educating a natural gesture (Aboca 2021), from 18 March in bookstores in the Italian edition. Because actually breathing is the most natural thing in the world, but also the one we pay less attention to, while it deserves much more interest. Because, as Nestor says, if we breathe badly we will never be healthy. “We are all obsessed with what we eat, with physical activity, with the quality of our sleep. We do not realize that the most important, basic thing is the quality of our breathing. Only in this way can we overcome or at least reduce conditions that have a high impact on the quality of life, such as asthma, sleep apnea, snoring, hyperventilation, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease “. But also, in general, to keep cognitive faculties such as memory and attention in shape, or to keep blood pressure, heartbeat and body weight under control.

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The book comes out in Italy right in the middle of a global pandemic where, at the center of attention, there is precisely the respiratory system and the ability to take breath. But, Nestor swears, it is a completely random event. “I have been working on this book for at least ten years – he says from his home in San Francisco – breathing was a topic that fascinated me and I began to collect material. When I saw that the folders were getting bigger and bigger, someone suggested that I systematize the material and publish it. I felt ridiculous: who would want to read a book about breathing? Yet I continued to interview experts and listen to the stories of people who had changed their lives only by changing their way of breathing. Because behind such a simple thing there is a very thorough story ”. A book that, in time of Covid, can be even more useful: the pandemic – adds Nestor – has made people understand that breathing is an activity that we must never take for granted.

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The point is, Nestor continues, that we breathe worse than cavemen, as the skulls tell. Indeed, among the people who helped the journalist in his research Marianna Evans, an orthodontist and researcher who has spent the last few years studying the oral cavity of ancient and modern human skulls. In a basement at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, Evans analyzed hundreds of skulls of people from hundreds of years ago to several thousand, measuring angles from the top of the ear to the nose and from the forehead to the chin. . These measurements, which trace the so-called Frankfurt plane and the Na-A plane, illustrate the symmetry of each specimen: whether the mouth is proportionate to the face, the nose to the palate and, broadly speaking, how well the owners of these skulls. Observing the jaw and the conformation of the face, as well as the nasal openings, Evans noticed how all the cavities were twice as large as today, wider and more pronounced. “All ancient skulls had huge protruding jaws. They had large sinus cavities and spacious mouths. And, strange to say, even though none of these ancient characters must have ever flossed, or brushed, or met a dentist, they all had straight teeth, ”Nestor points out. The forward-projected facial development and spacious oral cavity also created wider airways. It is very likely that these people have never snored or suffered from obstructive apnea or sinusitis or the many other chronic respiratory disorders that affect modern populations. They did not suffer from it because they could not suffer from it. Their skulls were far too large, and their airways too wide for anything to block them. It was easy for them to breathe. And this ease of breathing has been true from the time Homo Sapiens first appeared, some 300,000 years ago, up until a few hundred years ago.

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Then something happened

“If we look at contemporary humans, we see that the mouths are smaller and the teeth no longer have much room to grow, so much so that almost all of us have overlaps, and we have to remove our wisdom teeth to make room, which our ancestors did. they didn’t need. When you have a small mouth not only changes the profile but also the size of the airways, and this is the reason why many of us have respiratory problems such as snoring, sleep apnea, chronic cough. It’s the fault of the anatomical changes that have taken place in our faces ”, continues Nestor. These are changes that occurred very recently: between a hundred thousand and ten thousand years ago. At that time, despite the changes in the faces, the respiratory tract was still able to guarantee the correct functionality of the entire system. But in the last 300 years, which in evolutionary terms is little more than a blink of an eye, other things have happened, and we haven’t been able to adapt. Industrial food has arrived. “Our ancestors ate hard, fibrous foods, and were forced to chew for three or four hours a day. Today we eat very tender, bottled or canned food. For the first time on the planet, a species was able to live only by eating processed food. And this has affected the way we breathe, changed the shape of the mouth and respiratory tract.

Learn to breathe

For this it is necessary to learn to breathe better. How? First of all by modifying ours lung capacity, with exercise and training. “It is not necessary to have diving lungs, which with training manage to have large chests like surfboards. But we need to know that as we get older we become less flexible around the ribs, and therefore we lose lung capacity. To reverse this trend, the first exercise to do is to learn to breathe through the nose. Thus the air reaches the lungs warmer, more humid and more filtered than when breathing through the mouth. Not only that: if we breathe through the nose we bring 20% ​​more oxygen to the lungs. People think they get more air with their mouth. But we humans don’t need more air. We need quality air. We breathe 20,000 times a day, and this inevitably has consequences on the body, on health, on energy levels ”.

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A better life

Of course, there is no one recipe for everyone. It would be easy to say “breathe like this, you will have a better life”. But we are all different: some breathe too often, others have sleep apnea, others hold their breath, the important thing, says Nestor, is to understand what the starting problem is and try to solve it. “There are a lot of studies in which people with asthma or chronic bronchial obstruction, or anxiety disorders, have been able to control or even reverse this condition by working on their breath,” he assures. The number one rule is always the same: whether you are 18 or 80, breathe through your nose. Even at night. Rule number two is: breathe more slowly, so as to get more oxygen to the brain. 4/5 seconds inside, 4/5 seconds outside, this is the rhythm. Breathing through the nose, and breathing slowly, we will breathe less. And this is rule number three. “Breathe less – concludes Nestor – it’s like eating less: it’s good for you. Because by breathing more we will no longer bring oxygen to the lungs ”.

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