My rating: ⭐⭐
From the cover:
"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 Sao 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."
Oof, I have issues with this book. The tl;dr version is that it is heavy on the anecdotal evidence and pseudoscience and incredibly light on any actual evidence. Even the description is misleading...for example, by "Journalist James Nestor travels the world" what they actually mean is that he goes to Stockholm to talk to a fellow self-proclaimed expert on "proper" breathing and later travels to Paris to visit some catacombs and talk to an orthodontist. He does finally at the end of the book talk about a visit to Brazil to talk to a Pranayama expert, but he never visits India, China, Japan, etc to speak with any Buddhists or other practitioners of the ancient breath practices he spends the entire book talking about. No thanks, bud.
Also, bypassing the more passive fatphobia included in his writing, the first thing he brings up when he gets to the topic of proper breathing helping with weight loss is BMI, which...is bullshit? So yeah, going to need more than some anecdotes about the miraculous power of breath and reliance on a "healthy weight" measurement that has been pretty thoroughly proved useless to get me on board there. Add to that that there's no reason a person has to be thin to be healthy and...yeah...
Next up, while I do believe our breath is a powerful tool and that there are techniques we can use to benefit our physical and mental health, all of the miraculous claims of breath seemingly curing incurable chronic illnesses rubbed me the wrong way. He starts off the book saying that there hasn't been much research into how breath can impact our health, but then every anecdotal story he shares is presented as though it is proven medical fact and as though people experiencing these chronic issues are fools for not just breathing better. At the very end of the book, there's like a sentence disclaimer, saying that breathing isn't a cure-all for chronic illnesses, but after an entire book extolling the virtues of "proper" breathing over medication, that seems like way too little too late. The ableism throughout this book didn't sit well with me.
And finally, while this isn't any fault of the author (aside from his decision to include them, I guess), there were a number of studies shared that included some seriously fucked up animal experimentation. As if I needed one more reason to dislike this...hard pass on that shit. I was pretty excited to read this, but it was a letdown for me.
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