Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art PDF AZW3 EPUB MOBI TXT Download


THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER’Who would have thought something as simple as changing the way we breathe could be so revolutionary for our health, from snoring to allergies to immunity? A fascinating book, full of dazzling revelations’ Dr Rangan ChatterjeeThere is nothing more essential to our health and wellbeing than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat 25,000 times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. In Breath, journalist James Nestor travels the world to discover the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can: – jump-start athletic performance- rejuvenate internal organs- halt snoring, allergies, asthma and autoimmune disease, and even straighten scoliotic spinesNone of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of ancient wisdom and cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head.You will never breathe the same again.

James Nestor
July 8, 2021

English
978-0241289129

File Size: 84 MB
Available File Formats: PDF AZW3 DOCX EPUB MOBI TXT or Kindle audiobook Audio CD(Several files can be converted to each other)
Language: English, Francais, Italiano, Espanol, Deutsch, chinese

  • I got half way through this book before I had to stop. So many of the claims in this book are completely not backed up by science at all. Cure scoliosis by breathing through your nose? Also breathing through your nose will also supposedly cure ADHD! Scientists have been baffled for decades and apparently all the patients had to do is nose breath. Give me a break.I tried to investigate several claims such as this gem:”In the 1980s, researchers with the Framingham Study, a 70-year longitudinal research program focused on heart disease, attempted to find out if lung size really did correlate to longevity. 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.”The sources cited for this claim do not AT ALL support what the author is suggesting. I could not find any mention that lung capacity has a greater impact on life span than exercise and diet. In fact even looking at the authors cited source, I couldn’t even find the words “lung capacity” mentioned at all!The author even goes further to claim that breathing through your nose will improve your exercise performance. Somehow Olympic athletes all over the world have yet to crack this one… Usain Bolt and Courtney Dewaulter must be doing it wrong.I really wanted to like this book and learn something new, but there is soooo much unfounded bologna in here. It may be true that there are benefits to different breathing techniques, but the author has done an incredible job of hiding needles of truth in a hay pile of BS. You’re better of skipping this one.
  • This book changed my life more than any book since… Born to Run back in 2009? It’s full of amazing information, super fun to read, and is, like I said, life-changing. I snore a bit, my endurance is less than I’d like, and often I find myself just a bit low on energy. What this book taught me was that all things are connected! It’s the breath (obviously). What’s more, through a few simple exercises all of it can be safely and easily cured. Why didn’t my doctor tell me this? It’s all in here… and it works! I literally feel better because I bought and read this book.Plus, the book is really just a lot of fun to read. It’s a worthy worthy follow up to Nestor’s last book, DEEP, and this one just gets deeper and wierder and even more full of adventure. My favorite part is the chapter about how the human skull has changed over the last couple hundred years because of changes in how we breath. It could have been really boring — but Nestor doesn’t just write about it, he actually goes to Paris, crawls into a sewer, and breaks into the secret catacombs below the city to actually hold a hundreds of year old skull Hamlet-style. (“Alas poor Yorik…” &c. ) You actually see the skull and how they change! Unforgettable stuff. IMHO The book is a must read and must buy…
  • I am a 75 year old dentist, in practice for 50 years, the last 20 of which have been devoted to improving our patients’ oral health and total bodily health by addressing their structural, functional and behavioral problems caused by impaired growth and development of their jaws , faces, and airways, resulting in dysfunctional breathing, chewing, and swallowing….. and a myriad of health problems that are mostly managed by medications from their physicians rather than addressing and correcting the cause. The lines between dentistry and medicine are getting blurrier every day now. James Nestor’s great book will help move this change forward, to the benefit of everyone. He obviously didn’t do all this work for the money. He was on a quest and is now sharing what he learned and how it helped him personally with everyone who will read this book.Our interdisciplinary team is part of a growing movement in our profession which embraces the principles in James Nestor’s book and applies them daily with positive measurable and documentable improvement and elimination of as many as 20 symptoms of chronic inflammatory disease processes including hypertension, anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, upper airway resistance/snoring, obstructive sleep apnea, gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, atopic dermatitis, tmj pain, neck pain, poor posture and, yes, ADHD, which is almost always related to mouth breathing and poor quantity and quality of sleep.Oddly, this movement is not being led by physicians but by a growing group of enlightened dentists who, once they’ve seen the truth, can no longer ignore what’s been right there before our noses for so long, used to be part of dental and medical treatment, somehow faded after WWII, and finally is back in full flower, with science to support what’s wrong and how to fix it. Thanks to our movement, The American Dental Association has now mandated that every dentist should screen every new patient of any age, especially young children, for disordered breathing. This is the future of Health Care, and the future is now..For the first time in our history, a child born today will not live as long as its parents. We are breeding ourselves to extinction due to the post-industrial cultural changes beginning about 500 years ago with regards to proper diet, starting with lack of breast feeding. These changes, due to Epigenetic alteration of the expression of DNA, have now, as Nestor accurately states, have now become inheritable traits. All based on science.The flattening of our faces with incompetent jaws and airways, is the most rapid change in the evolutionary history of Homo Sapiens.The book and his website contain 500 references to science supporting what he says and what we’re now doing on a daily basis to improve the health and quality of life of ourselves, our families, our friends, and our patients.His book is a great public service in spreading awareness of the TRUTH.We’ve been hoping for years that someone exactly like James Nestor would come along without a conflict of interest and with the speaking and writing skills and the knowledge and charisma to take this message virally to the public, which will in turn demand that their health care providers forget their education and open their minds to this truth. Every dentist and physician should read this book. Anyone who snores or has a child or spouse who snores should read this book. Mothers, grandmothers, and wives should read this book as they are the Noticers and Motivators for family members who need help and don’t know where to get it.Nestor asked basic questions to try to understand and correct his own breathing problems and went on a search for the answers, following the exact trail (and more) of evidence and anthropology and knowledge that has brought our movement to where we are today. He ended up in the office of Dr. Ted Belfor, who provided him with a Homeoblock appliance which he wore nightly with his mouth taped for a year while working on naso-diaphragmatic breathing. He now breathes better, has more endurance, feels better, and has a more symmetrical face as shown in CT scans made before and after his self-treatment. I know exactly how this helped him, because I treated myself at age 68 with the same regime with Homeoblocks designed for me by Dr. Belfor. Our education taught us that growing bone in the human face was impossible after age 30. Colleagues told me I was just wasting my time. This is the same contempt before investigation seen in some of the negative reviews of his book on Amazon. This happens with all revolutionary ideas… First rejected, then violently opposed, then finally accepted as the truth after years, according to Schopenhauer and Jules Verne, the futurist of his generation.We made CT scans and facial photographs and casts of my teeth and jaws and sleep breathing recordings before and after my 18 month self-treatment, so that any positive changes could be measured and documented. I was a typical chronic mouth breather with poor head and shoulder posture. I had Central Sleep Apnea, caused by over-exhalation of CO2, as he discusses. I would just quit breathing during sleep until my CO2 levels got high enough to enable proper Oxygen transport to my body and brain. I had chronic respiratory illness and exzema as a child and was obese, topping out at 290 pounds at age 18. 5 hospitalizations and 3 surgeries for Crohn’s Disease. Stroke in my 40s .Advanced heart failure with permanent atrial fibrillation despite implanted pacemaker-defibrillator. Chronic Atopic Dermatitis with some lesions on my ankles for more than 30 years. Anxiety, Depression, Fatigue. What did I have to lose by trying this unusual approach?After 18 months with Homeoblocks, saline nasal spray before bed, mouth taped during sleep, and consciously working on posture, chewing, swallowing, and breathing through my nose with my mouth closed and my tongue in the roof of my mouth…I went from 245 pounds to 198 pounds without dieting. Still there after 6 years. Blood pressure normalized. No Chron’s symptoms anymore. All my skin lesions have completely healed. Better attitude and energy. More symmetrical face with measurable growth in all three dimensions in my airway and face. I’d call this something of miracle, and having lived it, we now use these same principles every day and have scores of documented case studies that show how successful it can be to help folks learn to breathe 24/7/365 from their noses and diaphragms while also improving their chewing and swallowing functions and behaviors.Nestor is a gift to us. This book and his appearances are the key to spreading the truth nationally and internationally so that the public can grasp this information and lead to a tidal wave of sea change inour current broken system of “sick care” as it becomes true Health Care by focusing on the importance of nasal breathing from the cradle to the grave. Six Stars!
  • I am in my mid-60s. As a former competitive athlete I was seeing a lot of the normal, as in average person nowadays, degradations of my quality of life. Additionally, like many people, I’ve been spending a lot more time in front of a screen. By one or 2 o’clock in the afternoon, naptime. In the first week since buying the book I haven’t gotten sleepy mid afternoon. The book is well researched, a great read story wise, and contains valuable exercises. I can’t recommend this book enough.
  • This book is a collection of anecdotes and pseudo science about breathing.These range from insubstantial; a man in the 1930’s met another man who’d benefited from visiting Tibetan monks who breath through their noses. To plausible; anxiety can be controlled with breathing, strengthening the chest muscles and diaphram can help with breathing (eg. physiotherapy is good for people with emphysema). To mystical; breathing can infuse the body with a magical ‘energy’ called Prana.Any conclusions seem to be contradictory: breath in little sips, take big breaths, reduce the amount of oxygen in our bodies, increase the amount etc.A lot is written concerning a study he and a friend took part in where they taped their noses shut for 10 days to force them to breath through their mouths. Apparently this will make you feel rotten, snore more and grow bacteria in your unused nasal cavity. Hardly surprising.
  • I have a professional, and also a personal, interest in the subject matter. I became an adult onset asthmatic quite some time ago, a category which has dramatically increased in the past 30-40 years, driven by levels of pollution and our love affair with the car. I had no history at all of childhood eczema, asthma or hayfever, or indeed any parental family history of this.Triggers for me were a combination of enforced passive smoking for some decades, before it got banned in public places, and, finally prolonged exposure to a chemical in the workplace, which had a disastrous respiratory effect on all of us, so exposedUnwilling initially to take medication I tried to explore various ways to improve lung capacity, some of which have been more or less successful, though I had to surrender eventually to medical management, and am generally well maintainedCovid has of course made us all intensely aware of lung health, and there has been an explosion in awareness of how we breathe, how this activity we might not even think about until we can’t, might impact, positively or negatively, health and wellbeing. Not to mention, how we might best recover long term if the virus takes hold and diminishes lung capacity long term.Decades ago, before it was more widely known, I had attempted to self-admiinister Buteyko, from a book. And not got on very well with it.James Nestor, a self-styled ‘aeronaut’ as he calls those who have deeply studied breathwork, and sought to educate and help others to breathe well, explores, clearly, so clearly, a whole range of extraordinary breathing techniques. I should probably rephrase that – they are not necessarily THAT extraordinary, they are representative of more natural, healthful ways of breathing – which almost all of us ‘grew out of’ – posture, diet , environment changes our breathing.Nestor goes well into the science of all this, and his book is absolutely fascinating. But what makes it outstanding for me is that he is a WRITER. Most of the other books I’ve read, share the passion, share the authors’ own journey and exploration of the field, but those writers don’t have the skill to convey the dryer stuff of the science so engagingly and absorbingly, or the light touch immediacy of writing which is like someone talking to you.For those who might be looking towards trying the various techniques, Nestor gives clear guidance within the book, – and yes, I found Buteyko so much easier to work, from this. He also promotes and explores several ‘aeronauts’ – Patrick McKeown (very much the approachable Buteyko international voice now) Anders Olsson, Wim Hof and others – and gives details and links to the wealth of video material out there. Indeed Nestor’s own website is full of wonderful, free resources.I also really like his pragmatic and generous approach. One of the biggest changes I’ve made – with excellent results – since reading this book, is to simply control how I breathe when sleeping. Nose breathing, not mouth breathing, is what we need to be doing, and though I have consciously tried to work with this, over many years, I certainly wasn’t doing this at night. Various complex devices are out on the market for this one – Nestor does talk them through, but also says he himself just uses simple micropore tape, to keep his mouth shut. It certainly looks a bit weird and startling but, I must say, since my first night with a small vertical strip from just above top lip to just below bottom lip, I not only had no trouble or discomfort with this, but no longer have a stuffy or runny nose on waking, and am more likely to sleep through the night, not needing to wake for a pee – and he explains the science behind this, a connection between a neurotransmitter, the autonomic nervous system, and depth of sleep. The nose is a wonderful thing, and the biochemistry of nose breathing and mouth breathing are different. Button that lip!
  • Mr Nestor has produced a superbly readable, meticulous, and well-argued popular science book that deserves a wide audience.I confess that I am kicking myself for not taking the intricacies of breathing seriously until the last few years and I wonder if I would have been as dismissive if I had read a ‘grounded’ a book as this, rather than texts that relied on ‘New Age-y’ type language that provoked my prejudices and closed my mind to the undoubted benefits of ‘breathwork’.In a concluding chapter, Mr Nestor forcefully states the benefits of Western medicine – and rightly so; the book is NOT opposed to the scientific method. What he does argue for, however, is that the Western model has ignored an elusive obvious: self-regulation of the breath as a means of stress reduction with a host of attendant benefits.In presenting his case, Mr Nestor takes the reader on a journey from the dawn of aerobic metabolism, through biological anthropology, into psychology, psychiatry, and dentistry, tying it all together with his own history of breath exploration as a means to control his own health issues.It is a dazzling read regardless of some passages that describe horrible animal experiments. There are appendices that describe some breathing techniques, along with bibliography and expanded notes. Mr Nestor’s website, with its dedicated ‘Breath’ page, is worth a look for new updates.Anecdotally, I ‘cured’ long-standing exercise-induced asthma through one of the methods outlined in the book (Buteyko) and I continue to dive into it to control a life-long anxiety disorder. From what I gather, my experience is commonplace, although the benefits have been quite startling on a personal level. Whether or not I experiment with the Wim Hof method discussed in the book is another matter; it may be the next step for me.All in all, this is a persuasive, well-researched, passionate, and inspiring book and I heartily recommend it.
  • Throughly enjoyed this book a great balance of fact and storytelling and lots of useful tips to help your breathing. As an asthmatic I have noticed significant improvements in my breathing after only a week of practicing. A must read for anyone with breathing difficulties.
  • Much of this book focuses on the authors breathing experiments and other research related to how our breathing has evolved etc. Initially I loved the style of the writing, the humour and interesting facts. However before too long I was bored and not learning. The breathing techniques section is very short and a bit sketchy (around six double sided pages). I have a policy never to leave bad reviews as everything is subjective, however I feel my bad review is justified as this book for me was a total waste of money.
  • About Aaovo.com :
    We are committed to sharing all kinds of e-books, learning resources, collection and packaging, reading notes and impressions. The book resources of the whole station are collected and sorted by netizens and uploaded to cloud disk, high-definition text scanning version and full-text free version. This site does not provide the storage of the file itself.
    Description of file download format: (Note: this website is completely free)
    The e-books shared by this site are all full versions, most of which are manually refined, and there are basically no omissions. Generally, there may be multiple versions of files. Please download the corresponding format files as needed. If there is no version you need, it is recommended to use the file format converter to read after conversion. Scanned PDF, text PDF, ePub, Mobi, TXT, docx, Doc, azw3, zip, rar and other file formats can be opened and read normally by using common readers.
    Copyright Disclaimer :
    This website does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to the content provided by other websites. If there is any copyrighted content, please contact the content provider to delete it and send us an email. We will delete the relevant link or content immediately.
    Download link description :
    We usually use Dropbox, Microsoft onedrive and Google drive to store files. Of course, we may also store backup files in other cloud content management service platforms such as Amazon cloud drive, pcloud, mega, mediafire and box. They are also great. You can choose the download link on demand.

    File Size: 84 MB