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Feature proof with Jonathan McRae on News Talk.

Proudly supported by Research Ireland.

Hello and welcome to Feature proof the podcast.

This is the show where we take a closer look at the world around us.

I'm Jonathan McRae.

Thanks for downloading, subscribing, rating,

coming up on this week's show.

It's a really good one.

We're going to be speaking to James Nestor

about his research into the power of our breath

and how breathing has an enormous effect on our health,

our mood, and even the shape of our face.

If you'd like to get in touch with the show,

you can email us, scienceatnewstalk.com.

We get to all of those comments at the end of the show.

First up, it's time to look back at some of the breaking stories

from the world of science this week.

We're joined by Dr. Ruth Freeman from Research Ireland

and Medic and Imminologist Dr. Laura Duncan.

You're both very welcome.

Our first story, Laura, has to do with babies and Spine Obifida.

It does, yeah. Sometimes these stories come along

and I just think, God, isn't science and medicine just absolutely amazing.

So most people in Ireland will have heard of Spine Obifida.

It's increasingly rare and now about 40 babies here are born with it

and it's a neural tube defect.

So effectively, where our brain and our spinal cord are in our body

should close over and then skin grows over it.

But in babies at Spine Obifida,

it often doesn't close over properly.

And sometimes it's quite severe.

So the nerves and effectively spinal cord protrude out of the lower back.

And obviously that can cause serious damage to the nerves

and lots of ongoing problems, bladder control,

bowel control, walking.

So what the standard of care is now and has been for at least 15 years

is that they do in-userose surgery, which is fascinating.

So they open up the mother's abdomen,

then they open a small hole in the uterus itself,

then they spin the baby around so that the part of the back that is affected

is at the hole in the uterus.

And they basically surgically stitch up the defect

in the neural tube or in the spine.

And it's even that alone is phenomenal.

But what they've done in this very, very small trial,

granted it was only six babies,

is that they have taken stem cells from placentas,

and they're not from the mother's placenta,

from donated placentas.

And they've grown up these stem cells effectively

on a little matrix.

So it's sort of like a stem cell plaster,

which is what my children would be able to relate to.

So what these surgeons are doing now,

is before they finally close the upper layers,

they're taking the stem cell plaster

and they're laying it on the defect

and then closing up around it.

And this happened in 2001-2002 for these six babies.

So we have a few years of data now on them,

and it has shown improved outcomes.

So there has been better control in terms of bladder bowel

and they're more likely to walk.

So it's very much proof of principle,

just to see that it's safe that it didn't cause tumors,

that it didn't cause any infections.

But it's just, it's fascinating.

I mean, the surgery alone is fascinating.

But now adding in the stem cells,

it's just, it's amazing, groundbreaking stuff.

You said it's increasingly rare.

Why is that?

So a lack of folic acid is one of the primary causes

of children being born with neural tube defects.

And almost everybody now does take their folic acid.

So it would have been something that was much more common,

certainly a hundred years ago and definitely 50 years ago.

And in certain parts of the world,

there is things like flour that has folic acid in it.

And some women just take folic acid at all stages

when they're still potentially able to conceive.

So it's increasingly rare as a result of that.

But it does still happen.

Right, okay, so that's what the folic acid is for.

Okay, very interesting.

It's great to, you know,

this is a simple intervention

that most people can take advantage of.

It's so effective that we're seeing nearly the,

the end of a condition like spinal bifida.

But this is an amazing result.

Is it, are they, did the researchers say anything

about being hopeful that this might,

you know, completely reverse spinal bifida

or is that just not a, not a mission goal?

Yeah, I suppose the thing is,

damage is done by the time that the baby is large enough

to be operated on the spine.

The nerves have been outside of the spine for long enough

that they've been exposed to amniotic fluid.

They've been exposed to forces within the uterus.

So it's going to be very hard to completely reverse this

and you can't operate when they're really tiny,

obviously because they're really tiny.

So it's not a perfect outcome,

but one would hope that it would give a better outcome

than surgery alone, which is already a pretty good outcome.

Amazing, that's fantastic.

I say, the story has to do with hair regrowth.

Yeah, I mean, millions and billions of euros and pounds

must have been spent on products for people

trying to either get their hair to grow back

or maybe not to grow in certain places.

So we have a particularly strong relationship with our hair.

But in reality, when it comes to hair loss,

I mean, it affects millions of people,

whether it's, you know, alopecia or premissure,

or balding,

and we don't really have any good treatments for it.

I mean, I guess people will have heard

of drugs like manoxidil,

which then things like rogaine,

and then people will have heard of hair transplant.

So those are kind of the options

that are on the table at the moment.

But this is a different approach

to thinking about hair growth,

because it's about thinking about what's going on

in the immune system around hair follicles.

And hair follicles, I suppose,

they're almost like a mini organ,

each little follicle.

And it goes to a cycle of growth.

So there's the image and their phase

where the hair is growing.

Then there's a regression phase

where it sort of just stops

and then there's a rest phase

called the telogen phase.

And what happens with boredom is the follicles

sort of get stuck in that rest phase.

And it's really, really hard to get them

to turn back on again.

So this research sort of takes two strands

that we already knew.

One was this idea

that the immune environment around hair follicles

might make a difference.

And the other one is this idea

of using something called cold atmospheric plasma.

And plasma is a gas

where the particles have been activated.

So plasma is what we see in lightning,

for example, when we see activated particles

in the atmosphere.

But we have seen that cold activated plasma

can help with wound healing.

Because essentially that activated,

those activated particles

can stimulate the immune system to start working.

And so researchers in Korea put these two things together.

It's definitely not drug-free.

It feels like it's quite a big intervention.

And but they injected a drug

interleukin two just under the surface of the skin.

Interleukin two is an immune signaling molecule

which tells things like T cells to replicate.

I've heard that of that before.

It's used in other treatments, right?

interleukin two?

It is. I mean, it's sort of common

signaling molecule in the immune system

that would be targeted in lots of different pathways.

But then they used cold plasma

to turn the liquid that they had injected

into sort of a soft gel inside the skin.

So it was sort of a slow release treatment

to change the immune system.

And what they found was,

and they weren't trying to force the hair to grow,

they were trying to turn it back into this growth phase.

And they did a whole lot of tests as scientists do

in petri dishes and things.

And they could see that the immune cells

were being turned back on.

So then they moved to the scientist's favorite,

the mice, and they removed the hair

from the back of mice.

And then they did this treatment.

And they were able to see that in the control group,

it took much, much longer for the hair follicles

to turn back on and regrow.

And actually the mice that got this treatment

within two weeks, their backs

where all the hair had been re-rooted,

it had all grown back.

And so it is also the one of those rooms

where this is promising,

but it's very much still in the lab.

And it was quite complicated.

I mean, it's not.

You want to be very careful about, you know,

about turning that machine on.

You want to make sure that it doesn't,

it doesn't overdo its job.

Absolutely, you don't overstimulate the immune system.

But I think, you know, this kind of work,

it's more probably about the understanding

of a hair follicle as a minion immune environment.

And you will, you know, as with many things in science,

maybe this won't be the therapy that people will guess

where they get an interleukin-2 injector

than then cold plasma on their head.

It sounds quite like quite a lot of just thinking,

it's not something you're going to find on a shelf.

No, not this week.

No. And, you know, as Reed's kind of pointed to,

obviously, it kind of feels like there's a disproportionate

of money and research that goes into hair loss,

but there obviously are some people

for whom it is problematic.

So it's, you know, be helpful in those things.

It's not just a vanity thing, but that, you know,

if we look at the numbers of what goes into that versus

some other things, it's kind of crazy.

Laura, a third story has to do with prostate cancer.

And again, another very interesting result.

It really is. These are great stories today.

This is a story that's just come from a conference over in San Francisco.

So it's not a peer-reviewed study yet,

but it looks very promising. It's a phase one trial of 58 men

in the US who got this brand new drug.

Now, it's quite a complex drug.

A lot of people these days have now heard of immunotherapy.

So it's the immune system's version of chemotherapy for cancer.

So you use the immune system's ability to kill cancer cells

rather than a sort of blunt instrument that is chemotherapy.

And the next phase of that is what we call

bi-specific antibodies. And they're fascinating.

So this antibody binds to a killer T cell.

A killer T cell's job is to kill the cancer cells.

And then it takes the killer T cell with it.

And the other part of the antibody binds to the cancer cell.

So it physically brings them into very close proximity.

And the killer T cell can then kill the cancer cell.

So it sounds very simple, but it is so advanced and so fascinating.

But it hasn't been working very well for solid tumors.

So solid tumors are things that are not lymphomas and leukemias.

So, you know, a suffigial cancer prostate,

cancer, those kind of things.

So just to add advantage, we talk about that in a way that I'm wondering,

does that actually translate to what actually the tumor feels like?

Is it is a hard tumor actually physically hard?

Or is that nothing to do with it?

No, it's not really anything to do because a long tumor

would be quite squishy and soft.

Whereas, say prostate cancer, it would be a bit harder.

But no, good question, but no, it's more just to do with the fact

that they're not circulating.

And obviously they can become metastatic and they circulate.

But anyway, that's on the side.

The other issue with this treatment is they can cause a huge amount of side effects.

When you non-specifically activate T cells, they can kill anything.

Right? So you can get a lot of inflammatory and autoimmune side effects.

So what these researchers have done is they have made this very targeted

just to prostate cells.

So it's got, it's, it's bi-specific.

One, it binds to the killer T cells,

but it then only binds to something that's found on prostate cells.

So that's already very clever.

But then they've made sure that it's only activated in the tumor microenvironment.

The reason tumor survivor, one of the reasons is they can create

their own environment like the way wex for it is all as sunny.

They can basically create a way that it dampens down all the immune responses

just in their environment so they survive.

But with that brings ways to manipulate them.

So when this drug gets to the tumor microenvironment, it uses the proteins

that are in the microenvironment to activate itself.

Then it becomes active only at the side of the tumor.

It targets the tumor and it has very few side effects.

And with the 58 men that it looked at, the effects were very dramatic.

One man had 14 metastatic lesions from his prostate cancer in his liver

and they all resolved after six cycles.

That's so rare that that's case study type things.

You know, that is not the kind of thing that you see frequently.

And pretty much everybody had a reduction in their PSA levels.

And it's just, it's so hopeful and so exciting.

And I don't think that this is the kind of thing we're talking about

in 15 or 20 years.

I think this will hopefully be useful in within five years in mainstream medicine

if the phase two and three trials go well.

Yeah, phase one, just to remind people, there's just testing to make sure that it's safe.

And then phase three is where you're actually testing using large numbers of people

to see whether or not it works and can be commercialized.

And you've got a huge amount of data to work with to make sure that

this is something that we should be using in medicine.

Is that right?

Yep, essentially, that's it.

Roughly, yeah, yeah.

Always good to check when I make these blankets statements.

Our final story read has to do with NASA.

And all this talk about sending people to the moon is,

it's rather disappointingly been turned upside down.

Yeah, it's proving much, much harder than maybe many people would think it should

to send people back to the moon.

So NASA, it's really been, and it's been 50 years since we sent people to the moon.

And it's quite incredible with 50 years of advancement in technology.

We are really finding it very, very difficult.

So the Apollo program was the original program that sent people to the moon.

So NASA, a few years ago,

decided through the Artemis program that they would send humans back to the moon.

And so Artemis won, went up in 2022,

and knew Orion spacecraft, and that just flew by the moon.

And it did that successfully.

And then the capsule came back down to Earth.

So we were waiting for Artemis to go up in the next couple of weeks.

So this was going to send humans.

Now that was the next big advancement.

So it was still going to be a fly by the moon,

but four astronauts were going to go up in the Artemis to spacecraft.

And then the idea was Artemis III would actually land on the moon.

But NASA has announced just this week that plans have changed

because during the wet dress rehearsal, which is what I believe they call it,

they found some issues with the rockets.

So they had a hydrogen leak, a fuel leak when they did the first test,

yet not good.

And then they also found an issue with some of the helium propellant as well

in the more recent test.

So they had actually got the astronauts to go and go into quarantine

because they really thought they were going to be ready to launch in the next couple of weeks.

But now it looks like it will be April at the earliest

that Artemis II will go up.

And they have also announced that Artemis III will not land on the moon.

So that was going to be probably 2028.

But now it looks like Artemis III will again be kind of a fly by

and it will be Artemis IV that will potentially land on the moon.

So we're getting out to probably 2030 by the time that's going to happen.

So significant delay.

Yeah, which is really a shame for anyone who wants to have their love of space exploration

sort of reignited by seeing people land on the moon.

Which I guess for the next generation,

we'll kind of feel like 1969, although we can.

We'll probably feel like that.

But it's crazy.

I never understood the idea of putting humans in a fly by on the moon.

It's so close, surely we know enough

to be able to just stick them on the moon when we do.

Surely we can put enough equipment on the probe to understand

what might happen to real humans.

It would just be looking at the window while you pass them in by.

It seems like the least fulfilling space exploration mission.

But it's all part of the machine again.

Yeah, and I guess they're trying to go to the South Pole this time.

They're not just landing, planting a flag and getting off.

So they do want to do something that's more complicated.

So they are taking their time to get that right.

And they're also really trying to follow the safety standards that they've been set.

The report came out from NASA, which really did raise red flags.

But still, you know, the other thing is they lost so much talent out of NASA.

Like back in the 70s, NASA was getting 4% of the US

and the whole sort of countries budget.

4% went in.

It now gets .04 and they just lost a huge amount of skills

when the space program was wound down.

So, you know, they're sort of having to build that back up again.

Yeah.

Well, Dr. Ruth Freeman and Dr. Laura Duncan.

Thank you very much, as always.

Take a moment to just take a breath.

Really, do it properly.

Breathe deeply through your nose.

This is something that we do 25,000 times a day.

Inhale, exhale, repeat.

It's the most automatic thing that we do.

And yet, according to science journalist James Nester,

we're spectacularly bad at it.

His New York Times best-selling book, Breath,

argues that how we breathe could be the missing pillar of health,

influencing everything from anxiety, to asthma, to snoring,

sleep out near, and even the shape of our faces he joins us now.

James, it's great to have you on the program.

I picked up your book when I was in France about two years ago.

And it got me in trouble because as I started reading it,

I couldn't stop reading it and I was late to pick up the kids from school.

This book is extraordinary because of the things that you did in it,

but also the claims in it and the simple obviousness of some of the arguments that you make.

So let's start off by talking about what is wrong with how we breathe.

Basically, everything.

If you look at the rates of chronic respiratory dysfunction around the world,

you find that the vast majority of people are suffering from it.

And that can manifest in asthma or COPD, but it can also manifest in simpler,

less noticeable chronic maladies like mouth breathing or mild snoring.

So this was something that just absolutely forward me when I first learned about it so many

years ago from a few different scientists, they say as a species, humans are terrible breathers

and it's one of the reasons why so many of us are suffering from so many problems.

When it comes to the way we breathe, a lot of us do breathe through our mouths for various

different reasons. What's wrong with that?

Well, it's fine as a backup system, right? If you're ingested, if you break your nose,

we have the mouth as a backup system. But the mouth was never designed to be the primary pathway

through which we should breathe. There are about 35 different functions that the nose serves

from increasing the oxygenation in each breath to fighting bacteria and viruses when we breathe

in and out of the nose to calming the nervous system. And this isn't some sort of new age mumbo

jumbo. This has been documented in so many different scientific studies over decades and decades.

The thing that's strange to me is that even though the science is very clear and the data's

there, the awareness for the general public isn't. And I was certainly somebody who was a terrible

breather for most of my life. You in the book detail some unusual experiments to try and test this

out. Maybe you might tell us about some of the things that you went through to try and examine

the effect of just math breathing, for example, or the effect of breathing on various activities

and how that comes. So I had been studying and talking to so many researchers over so many years

about all of the damage that mouth breathing could do to the body, to focus, to sleep and more.

And there's no real dispute about that. The data is all over the place and it's very clear.

But I did not know. So you're talking about improved cognitive function, improved memory,

what about the specifics? I'm talking about everything. So from cognitive function to executive

functions, to making better emotional decisions, to performing better on tests, to having less

respiratory illness, to having lower blood pressure. I mean, I could go on and on down this

laundry list of a hundred different benefits of nasal breathing. And that's been in the scientific

record for a very long time. But I wanted to know and wanted to experience personally the difference

between these two things. So I was able to work with a scientist at Stanford and we built an

experiment in which for 10 days I was an obligate mouth breather and then for 10 days I was breathing

most of my breaths through my nose. And we took data the entire time three times a day and just

looked at the difference between those two pathways. And so what did you see in that data? Because it

seemed like a very short amount of time. And of course, it's n equals one. So, you know, you have one

subject of that particular study. But just looking from that little anecdote, that was the thing that

really caught me. I was looking at what you were saying. And I was thinking, my God, that seems

enormous. Well, what exactly happened? Well, I tried to get about 50 people in this study. And I

petitioned for this for months and months and months. But there was no funding to do it. So,

the researcher I was working with allowed me to have two people, you know, two people is not

optimum. You should have 50 or 100 or 2000 if you can. But that's right. There's two of you.

That's that's the the was the absolute limit that his lab would take. And he said he didn't want

more people to do it because he felt that it would compromise his ethics because he knew all of

the damage that will be caused by mouth reading. What we didn't know was how quickly that damage

comes on. And so that's what we were just trying to experience. I don't even call this a study.

We call it an experiment, right? Because it's just two people. But what we found confirmed all

of those scientific studies, all of them. And the thing that took the biggest hit, the most

quickly was sleep was the quality of sleep was snoring was sleep apnea. It just came on

immediately and it grew worse and worse every day as long as we were mouth reading. And you were

you essentially sort of taped yourself off for each of these experiments. Essentially. Yeah, we ate

the same food. We walked the same amount of steps. We really took it seriously, went to bed at the same

time. So it was as controlled as we could make it outside of being in a lab. And the data was

irrefutable within a I don't snore. I don't have sleep apnea within a single night of becoming a

mouth breather. I was snoring an hour and a half and a few days after that, I was snoring through

most of the night. And that snoring kept there kept up as long as I was mouth reading. And this is

one of the reasons why so many people during allergy season sleep apnea and snoring go through

the roof. And what so many people don't know is that the pathway through which you agree there has

a huge influence on how much you snore. And for some people, even if you snore or not.

Some of the some of the stuff in the book I tried out myself. I was cycling at the time in the Alps.

And I was really interested to hear that some of the claims of the book about athletic performance

increasing significantly. There's been a bit of pushback from the initial book. I know this

has been a newer updated version of the book released. I'm just wondering where you sit with that.

I mean, in terms of the athletic performance because everybody's looking for an edge. And of course

people also want to be able to exercise for longer run faster or whatever it is they want to do.

How have you settled into the talk about athletic performance?

Well, I think the record is there. And as a science journalist, it's not my job to go out and

collect my own research and collect my own data. It's my job to go talk to the absolute leaders

in the field of each of the disciplines in which I'm writing. And so one of the things I did is I

talked to elite trainers of Olympians, football stars of tennis players. And they said that the

number one thing that they do for their athletes right now is they look at their breathing. And almost

all of them are breathing dysfunctionally. And by improving breathing, you're improving your

efficiency. You're able to do more with less energy. And that's what competition is all about.

And athletic trainers have been doing this with swimmers, with sprinters, with bicyclists and more

for so long, for decades and decades. And what I've heard from most people is what an incredible

difference it makes to lock in your respiratory rate with the level of your activity and to be able

to relax more, whether you're cycling, whether you're running, whether you're playing football.

And let's talk a bit about breathing correctly then, because we talked about mouth breathing,

but that's not really the only thing. There are other ways to improve how we breathe. What

what else is wrong with how we breathe? Well, if you're like me and you spend most of your time

indoors in front of a computer, working away, there's a very good chance you're sitting down. And

if you're sitting down, there's a very good chance your posture is a disaster. So by a disaster,

I mean, your spine is curved, you're hunched over. So even if you wanted to take a deep breath of

air, you can't, because the biomechanics aren't there for it. If anyone's listening to this in a

car and on a train, sitting in an office, right now you can just take a huge breath of air in

through your nose. All right. And feel, feel what happens to your posture, feel what happens to

your spine. So that is how we're supposed to be sitting. That's how we're supposed to be standing.

And as so many different therapists know, our posture is a disaster because we're spending 90

percent of our times indoors. So that's the very first thing is to look at your posture and to be

able to effortlessly take that deep breath we just took without feeling any strain in your spine or

anything. The next thing you can do is you can take your hand and place it just below your belly

button. And as you inhale through the nose, you should feel a slight expansion of that belly area,

that abdominal area. And as you exhale, that belly should be coming in. And from what I've

seen in my own experience is that the vast majority of people don't breathe this way because we're

very subconscious about our waist. We don't want our belly sticking out at all. But if you look at

any other animal, any other animals, especially animals in the wild that aren't in a house that aren't

in a zoo. And you look at how they're breathing. This is how they're breathing all the time. And humans

were designed to breathe the same way. So it feels like breathing correctly sort of puts our

body in the right position and not that it's the position that can have lots of other effects.

In the same way as breathing through our nose gives us better sleep. And so there's sort of a trickle

down effect of health that comes from the way we breathe is what you're saying. I think that if you

look at your breath as both a regulator of nervous system function, but also a reaction to nervous

system function, you also have to fold into that equation, the rate in which you're breathing.

So you want to be breathing slow, fluid, full breaths. This seems so simple. And it seems so

intuitive. And yet the vast majority of us are breathing into our chest. We're not taking those

deep breaths. We're breathing way too much. And when we breathe way too much, that sends signals

to our brain that we are stressed. So we stay in this vicious cycle of stress. And most of those breaths

for a while, wait, wait, you say breathe too much. What do you mean we're breathing too much? You heard

me. Breathe too much and breathe too often too often. Okay. No, but but breathe breathing too much

is a is a problem. You're not getting more oxygen when you are over breathing. This is the,

this is again, so counterintuitive, but this is what several pulmonologists told me. So we can just

go into that a little bit because I know this seems crazy to people. Right now, if you were,

and don't do this, if you're driving, but if you were to take about 20 very deep, very fast breaths,

yeah, you know, hyperventilate. So you would, you would think that you're like, well, I just took

all those breaths. I am oxygenating my body. I'm getting more air into my body. You're actually

doing the opposite. You're making it harder for your body to deliver oxygen to all of your hungry

cells. The reason is, is you were blowing off too much carbon dioxide. And the reason why your

hands start tingling, your head gets cloudy and it starts tingling and you feel cold is because all

of those blood vessels throughout your body are clenching up. So when we are constantly over

breathing, we are closing the plumbing throughout our body. And that's why we have all of these

sensations. So by breathing more slowly and fluidly and deeply, we deliver much more oxygen,

much more efficiently than we do when we're over breathing or we're breathing too much either at a

too fast of a rate or just too much air. What about how our breathing has shaped our joys and how

that's had a trickle-down effect? Yeah. So our jaws have mostly shaped our breathing. Those two

things go back and forth. This was something that I did not ever expect to be writing about,

especially on a book about breathing. And for the first few years that I was researching this book,

I never heard of this. And when I heard it, I thought there's no way this could have been true

because I would have heard about it in college or in high school or in grammar school. It's so

basic. And yet I didn't. And yet it's clearly the science is there. It's a clear fact. And that fact

is that the human mouth over the past around 300, 400 years has been growing smaller and smaller

and smaller. So much so that our teeth no longer fit in our mouths. That's why we have crooked teeth.

It's not a tooth problem. It's because our mouths are going smaller and smaller and smaller.

And with that small mouth, it's harder to breathe. We have a smaller pipe. And this is one of the

drivers for so much of snoring and sleep apnea and even anxiety because people can't breathe

properly because the mouths are too small. And so when you say there's two why have they gotten too

small? The eternal question. This was the question that I was confronted with early on. And I

asked these researchers. I was at this lab in Philadelphia where they have hundreds and hundreds

of ancient skulls from all over the world. It doesn't matter. You could pick them from Asia,

from Africa, from Europe. All of our ancestors had straight teeth. And they had these huge

pronathic, these forward growing faces. And you look at these ancient skulls and they almost

look like a different species from those of us today. And so a bunch of different researchers have

been asking this question, like how did this happen? This is an evolutionary advantage, right?

It's a disadvantage. It's making us sick. We don't want crooked teeth. And what they found was that

the moment industrialized processed foods came into a society within a single generation 50% of

that population had crooked teeth. 50%. Next generation 70. Next generation 80%. Next generation

here we are. 90% of us have some crookedness in our teeth. So it's the consistency of food is the

primary driver. All of that stuff from the Victorian era was bottled, was canned, was baked,

was processed, was boiled. It doesn't require any chewing. And without chewing, the

skeleton or musculature doesn't develop and you grow a small mouth just like me, just like everyone

else I know. It's a really fascinating book to take you down all of these different avenues and

there's lots of interesting characters along the way. I'm stretching my back while I'm speaking

to you James and trying to breathe noticeably. So let's finish up with something useful for people

because I would love for people to hear this and actually learn how to breathe more properly. So

how should we be breathing? So the first thing you need to learn how to do

is to take most of your breaths in and out of your nose. You can take some breaths through your mouth

and your laughing. Maybe if you're even working out at level four, level five, zone four,

zone five, you can default to that. But most of the breaths during the day should be in and out

through the nose and all of your breaths when you're sleeping should be in and out through the nose.

This is the number one foundational first step. How do you teach yourself to do that?

Like how on earth am I supposed to teach myself because I'm thinking about it a lot? How do I

force myself to do it when I'm not thinking about it? I knew you were going to ask for specifics.

So there is no blanket prescription here. Everyone is suffering from something just a slightly

different from their neighbor, right? So some people need surgery, right? That's the only they have

such a clearly deviated system that they need need surgery. For some people it's a habit. For

some people, they need to get rid of their allergies. They keep them constantly congested.

There are hundreds of different reasons why people are mouth breathing. So we don't have time to

get into that. But trust me, you have to find your core issue, find your core issue and fix it

because this is going to make an incredible difference to your health and well-being, to your

mental clarity, to your physical endurance and more. So that's the number one thing is to become

an obligate nasal breather. For those of you who are just breathing through the mouth out of habit,

you can set six or seven alarms that go off on your phone, just a little chime to remind you to

close your mouth. And after a few weeks you develop a habit and then you won't need any of these

tricks or these bells of whistles. You just, that will become your new default. I was a mouth

breather my whole life. It took me about five to six weeks to really train myself. Now I never,

ever do it. Ever. Even when I'm working out, even when I'm surfing, it has become my default habit.

So, so nasal breathing, that's number one. I talked about proper biomechanics, right?

Proper posture basically. So you can take that effortless deep breath through your nose and

feel that slight expansion in your belly area. And then when you exhale, it comes back in.

And the last thing of the most basic steps here is to learn to breathe slowly and rhythmically.

This is very important if you ever go to altitude. Everyone talks about altitude sickness. What is it

caused from? It's primarily caused by over breathing, over breathing because that is denying you

of oxygen. There's been so many studies that have shown the slower you breathe, the deeper you

breathe, the fewer breaths you take, your oxygen levels go way up up to nine points. So breathing slowly,

rhythmically will also send messages to your nervous system, to your brain, that you are calm

and in control. So if you can do those three things, then we can go down, you know, a whole bunch

of other things so you can do to fine tune your breathing. But those are the primary ones.

Well, the book is called Breath. It is definitely worth a look. James Nester, thank you so much

for your time. Thank you for having me. Okay, time to look back at some of your comments from

last week. We spoke to Steve Beebe from the University of Southampton about e-textiles,

this idea that the clothes of the future may have electronics woven into them. Someone says,

has this team had to create new materials or fabrication techniques to allow flexible

electronics circuits? So he has found a way to coat the clothes, but the problem is when you wash

clothing, those circuits, because they're supposed to be flexible and light and not, you know,

essentially be a whole suit made of wires, they don't wash very well and that is the big bottleneck

for him. He said, someone says, I have my doubts about the ability to monitor physiological

signals non-invasively. I disagree. I think it's really interesting when you look at things like

being able to look at the eye for general systemic health or if you look at someone's gate,

you can tell so much from someone's gate, by the way, they walk, you can identify them,

you can have a good idea of what sort of level of health they're at. If you put all of these

things together, all of the signals that our bodies give off, heat, heart rate, all that sort of

stuff, I think you're going to get quite a detailed, rich picture of someone's health.

And someone else says, have they felt much about the environmental sustainability of e-textiles,

particularly regarding end-of-life recycling? Good question doesn't sound like it's a particularly

recyclable fabric. So be interesting to see how you square that circle because the European Union

in particular doesn't want you making products that you can't disassemble. So that'll be a question

for future problems, I imagine. That's it for this episode. Thanks to Mariza Sullivan

Producing where we galvan on podcasts and Hugo De Silva on Sound. Thank you for listening. We'll

be back with a more future proof in your podcast feed on Tuesday in the meantime. Stay curious.