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Podcast 132: Breathe Deeply for Health

Our actions and behaviors give results that are not usually instant, so it can be difficult to connect the causes and effects.

Our breathing is so important, and deep breaths relieve stress and lower blood pressure. When we breathe with shallow breaths, we limit our oxygen intake and that is bad for health.

You have two lungs with an amazing air capacity. Unfortunately, most of us use only a fraction of our lung capacity, and we suffer for it. Infants are instinctive “belly breathers;” but most of us have learned to breathe from our chest in short, shallow breaths that resemble a pant more than a deep breath. The body (and the brain and nervous system in particular) thrives on abundant oxygen. Proper breathing relieves stress and lowers blood pressure. Breathe from the abdomen or “belly” instead of from the chest. If your stomach moves outward when you take a deep breath (and any breath for that matter), then you have learned the secret of breathing fully from the diaphragm.

ABC of Asthma, Allergies and Lupus was written in response to hundreds of requests I received asking for more information on asthma, a dreaded disease that strikes 17 million Americans – 14 million of them children – and kills several thousand sufferers each year. The book also shares with my readers some of the many heartwarming letters I receive each month – including from medical doctors – describing cures of asthma, allergies and many other diseases through nothing more than increased water and salt intake.

This 240-page paperback focuses on the direct relationship between asthma, allergies and autoimmune diseases, such as lupus, and a lack of water in the body. It explains how to prevent and cure childhood asthma without medication, and how to recognize the signs of an imminent asthma attack.

Since I wrote my book “Your Body’s Many Cries for Water” in 1992, and made the videotapes and audio tapes that you may have already seen, I have continued researching the medicinal effects of simple water in the prevention and treatment of various degenerative diseases. I have now expanded on the past information on water, salt, diet and exercise, and have published the highlights of my findings in a new book “ABC of Asthma, Allergies and Lupus“.

Life Enthusiast podcast 132 – Breathing

Scott: Welcome back everybody you are listening to the Life Enthusiast co-op online radio network, restoring vitality to you and to the planet. I am your co-host Scott Patton along with Martin Pytela, hey Martin how are you doing today?

Martin: It is a really sunny day here and I am just loving it, you know the sunlight pouring into the windows and the sky just pure blue and it is just so glorious.

Scott: Yeah it’s nice I went for a bike ride where I am it is sunny too we live a few miles apart and the blackberries are in full season. They are plump and ripe and just sitting on the branches waiting for some bicyclist to come by and pick them and eat them and they were just delicious.

Martin: Oh gosh yes, I used to live in your area years ago and my wife and I would just go for walks and pick them and enjoy them tremendously. There aren’t that many where I am now and I miss that dearly.

Scott: Yeah and it is beautiful and I go for a lot of bike rides because I live by this river and can ride up and down and I can also head straight east towards Pitt Lake and the lake is just surrounded by massive mounds and it is absolutely gorgeous and saw four black bears foraging in the fields. So they were far enough away that I felt I could safely escape if they got mad at me but it surprised me because there were two groups of people who had not ordinary cameras these were the cameras that had the little box and the massive lens and this one guy was there and he was crouched down and he had two dogs and the dogs weren’t the type of dogs to scare a bear and you know I am watching him and the bear is walking towards us looking for food, because we happen to be on this dyke and I am thinking you know because I am on a bike right and the worst case scenario is the bear will get this guy and his two dogs but I am thinking holy smokes they are wild creatures that are bigger than us. We don’t have too many of those around and I was just surprised it seemed to me not very considerate of his safety this gentleman. Not that he was getting too close but the bear was walking our way so it was getting closer and closer and I know they can run thirty miles an hour for a short period of time which meant that in ten seconds if it wanted to it could hey how are you guys doing.

Martin: Yeah it will easily outrun a man, I know that …

Scott: So anyway it was just interesting and the reason I bring it up is because it also reflects the theme of our last few podcasts not our last one where we were talking about the flu but the previous ones where we were sort of tongue and cheek this is what you need to do to get sick.

Martin: So this is what you need to do to get eaten?

Scott: Yeah exactly but it shows I think a non awareness and maybe he has done this for thirty years I mean he was a fifty year old guy, maybe he has done this all his life and knows where it is and where it isn’t I don’t know but just from what I could see was that he just wasn’t aware of the fact that this was a dangerous animal, this wasn’t like a well I was going to say a moose or something, and they can be dangerous, too.

Martin: but this is no house pet

Scott: and I guess I am a little sensitive to bears because I used to live up in the interior of BC and I knew a lot of people that would go hunting in the woods and plant trees in the woods and that sort of stuff and I remember this one guy telling me about his dad and him hunting a dear and his dad was up on a ridge and he was below and the dad was kind of quietly creeping along the ridge closer to the deer and the son looks up and twenty five or thirty feet behind the dad was a bear stalking his dad and he was like dad turn around. So these things can be pretty quiet.

Martin: Oh yeah they are hunters too right.

Scott: I mean they eat meat and I happen to be meat and this guy was meat fortunately we are not their nature prey.

Martin: You know when they are fattening up for the winter sleep they will take just about anything.

Scott: So anyway it just brought to the forefront again about how do we act and how do we behave and what sort of actions do we take and then we wonder later on why we are being eaten by a bear and why we are sick and why this thing happened to me and a lot of this I think is that we are doing things that just give us that result and because it is not an instantaneous result we don’t always connect the cause and effect together and I think that is one of the reasons why I think this series that we are doing is so important and one of the topics that I want to touch on today is breathing, because our breathing is so important and I know for so long I even deliberately tried to breathe as shallow as possible.

Martin: I would like to say this I don’t know if you have noticed it whenever a person is scared, whenever fear sets in, we actually stop breathing you know and block and lock. I suppose it’s a reasonable to stop all motions and even the breathing until you declare the situation safe.

Scott: Yeah or you are ready to run or fight.

Martin: Well like the first response is to stay still like don’t move a thing and then evaluate and then decide what the next course of action is, but anyway when we stop breathing that’s one thing and we lock it up completely and the second thing is I don’t know if you have noticed about scared people but they are panting shallow breaths, their top of their chests just below the base of their necks is heaving up and down really quick.

Scott: Yeah I am just doing it now as you are describing it, absolutely.

Martin: That is a sign of fear and actually brings in a very limited amount of oxygen into our body.

Scott: And that’s part of the problem we have learned to breathe shallow instead of taking these deep breaths and maybe making a bit of a sound that’s not considered polite.

Martin: Well some of it is cultural you know, we have been told to puff up our chest instead of full forward and bulge out our belly I mean the natural breathing that you will watch babies do will be the abdominal breathing where with every breath coming in the belly actually pulls open like out and then on an exhalation the belly just pulls back in. That is really not the best image like a man is supposed to have a big chest, shoulders out, pects out right?

Scott: Tummy in.

Martin: Yeah that’s it. There you just said it, the moment you pull it in and lock it you are just stuck with the top lobes of your lungs. Well you just gave up two thirds of your breathing capacity.

Scott: And getting that oxygen into our systems is important for our overall health.

Martin: I can even speculate that there is a finite number of breaths that we get to take in our lifetime and so if you are taking shallow ones then you are going to have to take many more which means you are going to run out of breaths sooner.

Scott: That’s an interesting concept and not only that you are going to be struggling more because you are not going to be getting the oxygen in and not getting the regeneration you need from that you know you look at the hyperbarics and they are just pushing and forcing oxygen into the body and just the amazing impact that that has on people’s health.

Martin: Yes that’s right, there is your direct demonstration of this principle in action and if you can get more oxygen into the tissues then your prognosis improves dramatically. Your overall health goes up directly proportional to the amount of oxygen you can carry in your bodily fluids and we have talked about this some other time where the pH of the lymphatic fluids directs or controls the amount of oxygen that will circulate but before it actually gets to circulate you have to supply it.

Scott: Exactly something that people don’t think about and I understand that the level of oxygen in the air today is less than what it was a hundred years ago so we probably need to breathe more deeply to get the same affects that our ancestors got.

Martin: Yes I am not sure how big that difference is but what the heck let’s just go with that. I am speculating that the difference is it was 21 percent and now it is 20.5 percent kind of thing. We will have to research that one.

Scott: Yeah that’s right and if you do something like if you are a singer and you go to a singing coach or you are a speaker and you go to a speaking coach or yoga they talk a lot about the importance of breathing and getting a lung full of air and also breathing through like you said the stomach because the stomach actually expands whereas the chest is rock solid like how do you expand your lungs in your chest not very much.

Martin: Well if you want the terminology we are talking about diaphragmatic breathing, the diaphragm is this big flat muscle sitting at the base of your chest cavity and it is like bellows when it pushes in it expels air out of your lungs and when it pushes down towards the belly it forces the air by vacuum. It’s just like bellows you know if you have ever seen the bellows that you blow into a fire place. I don’t know if this is an old technology or if many people have it these days or just a bicycle pump I mean when you push down on it the air is going out and when you pull up on the stick the air is flowing right back into the chamber well that is the same action that the diaphragm is directing and so there we are with the diaphragm forcing it down so if we force it down only partly we only fill the lungs to a small degree whereas if we go all the way that of course forces the belly to come out because of the organs there they have to go somewhere.

Scott: So it is a way of exercising your inner organs as well.

Martin: Oh yeah that is an excellent point, we massage the organs.

Scott: Okay so if you want to get sick breathe shallow, don’t let any of that good oxygen get into your system because who knows what it might fix and if you do proper breathing you are going to be relieving stress and lower your blood pressure.

Martin: No, you wouldn’t want to give that up, that is an important one to hang onto I am sure.

Scott: So a topic that is also close to shallow breathes that I want to make sure we cover is similar in some ways when you think about it is swallowing your food without chewing it or without chewing it very well.

Martin: I agree that we should go to that but before we get to that one I would like to mention wearing tight underclothing especially stuff that constricts your chest. My wife and I were out for lunch yesterday and I just looked sideways at the next table and there was this beautiful young gal and I think she was wearing a bikini top under her shirt and you could see the line about a finger wide just dug into her chest. You know every time this gal inhaled, this thing just dug into her rib cage.

Scott: Owe.

Martin: So what’s that telling you well she is going to breathe a lot shallower and the other thing that reminded me of that instantly was that beautiful garment they used to wear in Victorian times this thing that will cinch the waist on the ladies? Do you remember the name of it?

Scott: I don’t.

Martin: It’s the corset my wife says. She is here and doing the faithful, I know this one it’s great without her help I would be in trouble. So that sort of thing the corset would probably be the best example of tight under clothing affecting your breathing. I mean it just doesn’t get any better than that. So these Victorian chicks would be reduced to sitting pretty, panting and then they would faint because there would be not enough oxygen for them to even get excited.

Scott: Right that happened on a movie pirates of the Caribbean, the heroine is about to get married and she is in this big dress and she is up in the top of the castle right at the edge and she is talking to the man that she is supposed to be marrying and he is not paying any attention to her and she is starting to feel faint and she falls off of the cliff into the water so yeah that is exactly what happens even in a movie.

Martin: Well I am sure this is based on traditional documentation people would faint back then.

Scott: Yeah and we would wonder why they would be fainting and of course it’s because they are not getting any air.

Martin: Yeah and in the excitement you are supposed to take more breaths and you can’t. so there is this other thing of course that this will do to you which is constrict the movement of the lymph. Now we have talked about restricting the movement of the lymph which means the toxins cannot move they stagnate and you know what happens to water when it stagnates well it starts to putrefy, to rot.

Scott: Exactly.

Martin: A swamp is a great example of that sort of thing so I wonder if in the constricted lymphatic system is the cause of cancer lymphoma, breast cancer that sort of stuff. I think what we should do is vote for the liberation from the bra. I think the bra is a bad idea and it causes women to get ill.

Scott: In some cases I would agree with you and in other cases I am not so sure and that is purely from a visual perspective.

Martin: I am just concerned that this might not be the best health policy for our female friends but anyway that’s me going off on a tangent. Tight underclothing especially the bra I am really concerned about those like the tighter they are the more they will constrict the movement of the fluids I suspect somehow even tight underwear might do it. I have often wondered if testicular cancer that Lance Armstrong got was from too much bicycling.

Scott: Well I think everyone thinks that’s exactly right.

Martin: Yeah I don’t know it and I don’t want to point a finger but who knows?

Scott: There is a lot of people who bike at that level it is not unusual for them to get cancer and you know you are putting a lot of pressure on certain points of the body and restricting fluids and circulation.

Martin: Maybe that’s how it happens.

Scott: And also the clothes they wear would probably also fit under this category of being tight.

Martin: Oh yeah for sure you know I think those are quite tight. So the story is wear looser clothing and don’t try to put a tourniquets on your body because it will probably block the flow of fluids and that’s not a good idea.

Scott: Exactly I think we can all agree on that.

Martin: Okay let’s go back to the one you suggested we talk about which was the eating chewing thing.

Scott: Yeah I am thinking if you breathe short breathes and that is one side because this is all going in the same thing like air going in or food and water going in and often times the fast food industry like if you go into McDonalds and you look at the kids eating and they are just shoving it into their mouths and down their throats and there is not a lot of chewing going on and the idea is that you have to be fast and they will wash it down with Coca Cola.

Martin: Actually I remember when I was a kid long ago but I remember the eating contests. I remember people would just fill their gullets just as fast as they could fill them and it was like a badge of honor if you could finish early and this habit is established early in life and sets you up for years of suffering and potential for significant health problems. There actually is a good reason for chewing right and the main reason that we are supposed to chew even if it is already a blended drink like a smoothie the idea is that you need to mix in ptyalin the enzyme the first alkalizing enzyme in your mouth the one that is responsible for dealing with sugars and that sort of thing.

Scott: Oh okay.

Martin: It’s the amylase that breaks down carbohydrates so if for instance you don’t mix your saliva with your coca-cola your stomach has to deal with it so there is just not enough of the ptyalin in it and so if you have a sweet drink like a fruit smoothie if you don’t take the time to properly process it in your mouth you are giving your stomach a greater work out pushing it in and it doesn’t appreciate it. What else, oh yeah the particle size, you know the particle size of food is all important because your digestive system can only extract nutrients at the surface level at the interface level you know you cannot extract let’s just say you are extracting some amino acids out of a protein out of a piece of meat well you can only extract the molecule that is on the surface. You cannot reach past the molecule that is on the surface and reach for the second one down because you are only digesting things on the interface so if it is not chewed up fine or blended in a high powered blender or if it not milled into a fine powder like we do with the Exsula super foods you are able to extract nutrients only at the interface level so not chewing your food is essentially preventing you from extracting the nutrients that are in it.

Scott: That is a really important part of this whole thing.

Martin: Truly scary thought when you think about it so I guess if you want to absorb more calories but few nutrients then you would want to not chew your food properly. So that is pretty much a safe way to reach fatness faster.

Scott: Right and we all know if you are obese the chances of heart disease and stroke go up exponentially so here is another way to help you get sick.

Martin: Right and here is another one that goes along with that and that is to have emotions that are contrary, that are negative, that are fear filled and angry and that sort of thing you know the sort of emotions you would get from watching TV news or talking with people about things you don’t like you know having a discussion with people about the health care policy or something like that instead we should probably talk about art, the appreciation of the finer things in life.

Scott: I think it becomes an orientation in the way we look at life like we can look around and say you know what I have old kitchen chairs or you can look around and say it’s a beautiful view I have looking through my patio window doors and I basically looked at one place and then another place and I had two completely different thoughts and I think what we don’t realize is those are habitual and if you look at everything and you just start being grateful then it becomes a habit and it is really weird because you have a page on Dr Emoto and his research on water and everything else and then we did the enawaterment.com site which got into more videos about what he and Mr Sereda say about the consciousness of water and of course one of my functions around here is to get those pages up and summarize them and what I have noticed as I have gone through all those videos I used to think who has time to go love the water repeatedly but what we don’t realize is that we do a lot of the on a subconscious basis so what I notice as I am pouring myself some water is I hear in the background this love being sent to the water from my subconscious right and I am going oh it doesn’t have to take any time but the problem is that you have to develop the habit and get it into the subconscious. Like if you brush your teeth before you go to bed you go hey lots of love into the water before you drink it and it is just amazing but to me it’s part of you make a decision and then you work on making it a habit.

Martin: Okay so you said it really well we should make the dinner a secession about complaining about everything let’s sit down and review everything that was wrong with our day.

Scott: You know what is scary about that, you and I could look at it and say this is what is wrong and everyone else would say there is nothing wrong with that it is actually kind of nice. It is a total perspective, I guess that is my point right someone could look at a sunny day and say oh it’s pretty hot, it’s too hot I am going to get all sweaty and then someone else can go oh it’s hot let’s head to the beach so it is so subjective and that’s why we say we can make our lives.

Martin: Yeah absolutely that is exactly right so when you are wolfing your food down quickly remember to focus on all the negative things that have happened to you that day, it’s useful to review all the upsets as you are eating your dinner that pretty much is the quickest way to stomach ulcers and indigestion but what the heck a couple of Tums will fix that.

Scott: Yeah that would be a really good way to make sure you get sick later on right.

Martin: Oh yeah we were already talking about prescription and over the counter drugs, the more the merrier.

Scott: That’s right so Martin if somebody wanted to decide that they didn’t want to live like that and be sick and one of my things is that people are living to seventy or eighty and the largest part of the population are people over a hundred and so the question in my mind is how do I get to be a hundred you know going for walks and enjoying my life and you know still with my own teeth compared to my grandparents who spent the last five years of their lives in a home but unable to walk and feed themselves, unable to go to the bathroom, unable to have a bath so if someone was saying okay there was two paths in the future fairly healthy because there are fairly active hundred year olds but there also are way more just waiting to die, people on life support or they have people who have to feed them and all of that stuff.

Martin: I think they are just waiting for the savings to run out and for the insurance limits to run out then it becomes sort of easy to unplug them but until they run out of all the money that can be squeezed out of them I think they will be kept alive.

Scott: Yeah that is a sad thought.

Martin: Well I am giving it to you with the blackest of perspectives that I can muster.

Scott: Well let’s go with a white perspective or a bright perspective so if someone wanted to have a brighter perspective on life and they wanted to reject the nurse feeding them and being helpless and basically encased in a prison how could they get a hold of you to talk about what Life Enthusiast can offer.

Martin: Yeah to explore other options to restore helpful and helping and restoring vitality to you and to the planet call us at 1-866-543-3388 and look it up online at www.life-enthusiast.com and this probably marks the end of our broadcast for the day, thanks everyone for listening.

Scott: Thanks everybody, talk to you soon.