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Book

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

Publish date:
May 26, 2020
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love

No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly.


There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences.

Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe.

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, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is.

Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent 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.


https://www.mrjamesnestor.com/breath-biblio


The Bibliography is fantastic and probably as good if not better than the book!

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James Nestor
Topics
Paleopathology
The study of diseases suffered by the dead and discovered through looking at their remains, mostly bones. Nutritional deficiencies, chronic disease, and pathogens are visible on bones.
Hunting - Hominid Evolution
Active hunting by hominids on prey
Scavenging - Hominid Evolution
All about theories connected to scavening meat from carcasses, such as percussion to access marrow or using cooperation or projectiles or smart brains to outwit other carnivores and steal kills.
Health Statistics
Health statistics are used to understand risk factors for communities, track and monitor diseases, see the impact of policy changes, and assess the quality and safety of health care. Health statistics are a form of evidence, or facts that can support a conclusion.
Hunter-Gatherer
Hunter-gatherer societies refer to a way of life that prevailed for most of human history, where people relied on hunting wild animals, fishing, and gathering edible plants, fruits, and nuts for their subsistence. This lifestyle was common before the development of agriculture around 10,000 years ago.
Pre-civilization races
Evolution
Human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years.
History Entries - 10 per page
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