Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

The final book I read for the 2023 NONFICTION READER CHALLENGE is in the category Health. This book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor, 2020, received fairly good reviews on various blogs and was also positively reviewed by a blogger earlier this year for the Nonfiction Reader Challenge. But I don’t understand what all the praise is about. This book is about Nestor’s personal experiences with different breathing techniques, but with very poorly supported “research.”

The book’s blurb claims that “humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Science journalist James Nestor travels the world to discover what went wrong and how to fix it.”  However, for most of the information he ‘discovers,’ he gives weak or no support. The notes at the end of the book are rather random. So it was hard for me to believe some of his claims.

The first aspect of breathing he focuses on is ‘mouthbreathing,’ noting that breathing through the mouth (rather than the nose) is unhealthy and harmful. Everything he writes is based on the assumption that most people breathe through their mouths, rather than their nose, but he never gives any support for this.

At the beginning of the book he writes, “Forty percent of today’s population suffers from chronic nasal obstruction, and around half of us are habitual mouth breathers, with females and children suffering the most.”

But there is no support in the notes at the end of the book for “40% of today’s population” (and which population does he mean?) or for “females and children suffering most.”

The only note he has for this comment is: “Mouthbreathing estimates are murky and range from 5 to 75 percent [so why does he choose “around half”?]. Two independent studies in Brazil showed that more than 50 percent of children are mouthbreathers, but the condition may be more common than that.”

So these studies focused only on children and, presumably, these children were Brazilian, but from the note this is not clear or even how many children in total were in the studies. The titles of other studies are listed, but focus only on Brazil. So that doesn’t seem to be support for “half of us” (and who is “us”?).

Most of his information about mouth breathing comes from the writings of George Catlin, a lawyer and painter who in the early 19^th century travelled throughout the mid- to western United States and painted the indigenous people he met. Nestor writes:

“It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the Western population ever considered the glories of nasal breathing. It happened thanks to an adventurous artist and researcher named George Catlin.”

There are a few things that bother me about that comment. It seems to indicate that before the nineteenth century, the “Western population” (who or what is that, exactly?) breathed through their mouths. In the notes at the back of the book, there is no support for this whatsoever. The only note is the titles of the two books Catlin wrote. And were these two books so influential that it caused ‘the Western population’ to reconsider how they breathe?

Catlin wrote that in the tribes he met, people breathed through the nose rather than the mouth. This seems rather odd to me, since in my experience (and in observations after reading this book), most people everywhere breathe through their nose. Perhaps Catlin noted this because he was a mouth breather? He also wrote that mothers there “trained” their infants to breathe through the nose, such as by repeatedly closing their mouth during sleep. But if breathing through the nose is “natural” (which I certainly believe), then why would infants have to be “trained” to do it? Perhaps these women were doing something else and Catlin misunderstood. After all, he was not an anthropologist, and it wouldn’t be the first time that an “observer” from a different culture misunderstood what they were seeing in another culture.

Because it was hard for me to believe that almost everyone except me is breathing through their mouth, I’ve read more about mouth breathing after reading this book. From what I have found, people breathe through their mouths only when their nose is obstructed, usually for a medical reason. So, it doesn’t seem to be a problem for the majority of people or for the “Western population.”

Another strange assumption without any support is that over time, the mouth has become smaller. Nestor writes, “When mouths don’t grow wide enough, the roof of the mouth tends to rise up instead of out, forming what’s called a V-shape or high-arched palate. The upward growth impedes the development of the nasal cavity, shrinking it and disrupting the delicate structures n the nose. The reduced nasal space leads to obstruction and inhibits airflow.”

His support in the notes is a reference to an article on the website of the Mayo Clinic: “Symptoms: Nasal congestion/Causes.” I followed this link, which is one page with a list of causes, and not one of them is claimed to be because of the formation of a high-arched palate. In fact, none of the causes refers to the size or structure of the mouth.

Since his only “support” for this information does not support the information, I became even more skeptical about all of the information in the book.

In the chapter on chewing, Nestor writes again about the so-called change in the size of the mouth. First, because humans changed from hunted and foraged food and started farming, they started eating softer food, which started to change the shape of the mouth. There is no reference to this at all in the notes, but it seems strange to me because humans cooked the food they hunted and foraged, so it must have also been fairly soft.

And he claims a bigger change occurred more recently: “But the changes triggered by the rapid industrialization of farmed foods were severely damaging. Within just a few generations of eating this stuff, modern humans became the worst breathers in Homo history, the worst breathers in the animal kingdom.”

There is no reference to this information at all in Nestor’s notes.

Even more unbelievable is when he writes, “In these societies, for the first time in history, humans could spend their entire lives eating nothing but processed food – nothing fresh, nothing raw, nothing natural.” But the time period he is referring to is “By around 1500”! What “processed” or “industrialized” food was available five centuries ago?

And, again, there is no reference in the notes to support any of this information.

I wasn’t as interested in the detailed descriptions of his personal experiences with enforced mouth breathing and trying the variety of breathing techniques he writes about. I started skimming through those pages for more information about the “lost arts.” But considering the wild, unsupported claims he makes throughout the book, I became skeptical that I would really learn anything.

Part II focuses on the various “lost arts” of breathing and how they could be recovered. These include breathing through the nose; types of exhale; slowing the pace of breathing; and chewing more efficiently. Unfortunately, although this information is interesting, many of the methods he writes about are not practical for most people because they are too extreme, or require medical intervention.

The only part of the book that I found somewhat useful was the Appendix: Breathing Methods. This is 12 pages of step-by-step instructions of breathing techniques that improve the problems that he focused on in Part II.

But I could have found that information online or in a better book. The research for this book was incredibly sloppy or non-existent. As I wrote earlier, I find it hard to understand how anybody could read this book and give it a decent review. Unless they just weren’t paying attention.