About 10 years ago, the author was in rough shape, respiratorily and otherwise. “Even if we want to breathe properly, so many of us are so messed up anatomically now that it’s a real struggle,” Nestor says in a phone conversation from his home in San Francisco. Essentially, our faces caved in: our mouths shrunk, our nasal passages became more constricted and our airways suffered the shortfall. This, says Nestor, was the biggest surprise in his research: how our jaws and teeth went into semi-retirement when processed food became the staple of our diet with the onset of the industrial age. And yet, Nestor writes, “around half of us are habitual mouth-breathers” on account of the ways the human skull has evolved over the last 300,000-and especially the last 500-years. It triggers the sinuses to release nitric oxide, a molecule that plays an essential role in delivering oxygen to our cells-we can absorb 18 per cent more oxygen breathing nasally than we do by breathing orally. Nasal breathing boosts our immune system, our circulation, our mood and even our sexual functioning. This is the book’s biggest takeaway: Breathe through your nose. Nestor’s blood pressure rose by an average of 13 points, he had 25 apnea events (which amount to mini-choking episodes) while sleeping and a diphtheroid Corynebacterium (which can lead to infection and disease) had settled into his face. The abridged version of the study’s results: quite a lot. But two years ago, Nestor wasn’t being tested for COVID-19 he was part of an experiment at Stanford University looking at how much damage might be caused if a person were to breathe exclusively through their mouth for 10 days (after the snot was procured, Nestor’s nose was sealed tight with silicone plugs and surgical tape). Today, many readers will have had a similar experience, or can expect to in the near future. It almost feels like foreshadowing when, early in his new book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, James Nestor describes having a long implement stuck deep into his nasal cavity for the purpose of extracting a culture.
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