"one of the most important molecules in your body"
Blazing Reader,
In response to my previous posts about how I train my brain and belly to breathe less, a concerned subscriber sent this email:
"I'm concerned that you are practicing 'non-breathing' exercises. I wonder where you got this idea from?"
Well, the first place I heard about the health benefits of breathing less was in an interview with Patrick McKeown (the founder of Ireland's Buteyko Breathing Clinic) on the world's most visited natural health website, Mercola.com.
By coincidence, just as I was getting lambasted by my subscribers for claiming that most people's carbon dioxide levels are too low, Dr. Mercola sent his subscribers an article where he states:
"...I really value CO2. It's probably one of the most important molecules in your body... strategies to increase your CO2 are probably some of the best things you can do to optimize your health. The higher the level you can get within the biological normal optimal range, the better."
Dr. Mercola, like me, has been quite outspoken against mask-wearing. But, like me, he isn't going to blame masks for causing hypoxia or "poisoning" people with carbon dioxide.
"Contrary to popular belief," says Mercola, "deep breathing does not improve oxygenation. When you’re deep breathing, blood flow to your brain actually decreases as a result of a tightening of the blood vessels (vasoconstriction) in the brain."
Here people are worried about the masks causing maybe a 10% reduction in air flow, when they are already over-breathing 300%. It's sort of like the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings who eat six meals a day being concerned about cutting back to five and half.
"So, the outcome of overbreathing is loss of blood in the brain," explains Mercola, "loss of oxygen, loss of glucose and electrolyte changes in the brain that then lead to setting the stage for lactic acidosis in neurons (brain cells)."
He then quotes respiratory expert, Peter Litchfield, Ph.D: “Most people, lay or professional, have no idea that this is going on."
Well, I rarely fall into the "most people" category. I don't like crowds.
"In reality, you need far less air than you think," says Litchfield, who obviously thinks about such things a lot. "For every litre of blood you can move through your lungs, you can move 20 litres of air. But you only need one litre of air. So optimal breathing is usually not about getting enough oxygen. It's about regulating the CO2 concentrations in your extracellular body fluids, like blood plasma."
You can read the entire article here: https://blazingpinecone.com/news/2024/01/25/proper-breathing-mercola.pdf
And see that I'm not crazy.
Unless I hallucinated the article into existence in a hypoxic stupor.
—John C.A. Manley
PS I run 6 km six days a week with my mouth closed. This is great for raising CO2 and sending more blood to the brain. Many of my best story ideas come when running. You can see my "Writer's Workout" music video here: https://youtu.be/0NNbrBbQ200
John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of speculative fiction. Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber at: https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe/
