44 YEARS INCORRECTLY - THE SCIENCE THAT CHANGED MY LIFE!

I lived the first 44 years of my life not breathing correctly, and I was a mouth breather. I went on for years and years and years breathing through my mouth, never slept through a night that I can ever remember one time breathing through my nostrils, and I exercised with my mouth open, I lived with my mouth open, I was drooling all over the pillow all the time, and then I saw the research on the impact of nasal breathing, on cognition, on your scholastic abilities, on your exercise performance, on your blood flow, and it's been one step in changing my life. So we're going to look at the research on this. Hey everybody, Chad Kruiser here with Health and Homestead, and I can tell you it has helped me with my exercise, my energy levels, probably even slightly happier as a result of it. It's been fantastic actually, but let's delve into the research. So I'm going to begin looking at when you take a deep breath into your nasal passages, it goes up into what's called the paranasal sinuses. So you have these cavities in your skull that you breathe into, it helps warm up the air before it ends up going into your lungs, and it filters out the air, but if you breathe straight into your mouth and into your lungs, you're not filtering like you were designed to do. In these paranasal sinuses that we have, there's a layer of cells surrounding them called the epithelial layer, and these epithelial cells, some of them called goblet cells, they produce the mucus that we need, and you also have on these other cells called ciliated cells, you have these hairs, these hair-like protrusions called cilia, and they work by doing something kind of like the wave you've seen maybe in a football stadium where people are all waving their arms, well they do the kind of the same thing, and the debris that comes in, the dust, the pollen, the bacteria, the mold, they're caught in the mucus, and these cilia help move it at about a half an inch per minute, and finally you swallow it, it goes down into your stomach, it is sterilized there, and finally you let it out in your feces. And so that's one of the reasons you're meant to breathe through your nostrils. Nitric oxide, you probably heard, is a vasodilator, meaning your blood vessels can either dilate or they can constrict, and nitric oxide is a vasodilator. That's something you've probably heard about being in green leafy vegetables or things like beets, but it's also produced in your nostrils. Nitric oxide is made in the epithelial cells in the paranasal sinuses. Much of this nitric oxide is breathed into the lungs where it helps dilate the lungs. Nitric oxide activates the cilia to move and also stimulates the cells to secrete mucus. This has a beneficial impact on expelling pollutants from the nose. When you've ever had your blood pressure measured with a blood pressure cuff, they typically are doing it here, and it's checking the blood pressure on the brachial artery. The brachial artery is a primary blood vessel in the upper arm responsible for supplying blood to the arm, forearm, and hand. Researchers had 45 male volunteers exercise breathing through their nostrils and at a separate time through their mouth. It was random whether a person would breathe through the nose or mouth first, and they found that there was significantly more dilation of the brachial artery while breathing through the nose compared to the mouth. They suggest that this is from the nitric oxide that is produced in the nostrils which helps dilate the blood vessels. If we want our blood vessels to dilate as much as possible, one of the things that we can do is nasal breathing rather than breathing through our mouth. What about nasal breathing in the brain? A study published in the International Journal of Exercise Science explores how breathing through the nose impacts brain function during physical activity. They compared breathing through the nose during exercise to breathing through the mouth, or breathing through the nose and the mouth combined, and while breathing through the nostrils, the participants had increased cerebral blood flow, that's blood flow to the brain, and the researchers state that nasal breathing may benefit cognition because of the increased blood flow. You may have heard the saying, perfect health is dependent upon perfect circulation. Here's some more research on mouth breathing in the brain. 42 children who had an average age of eight with what researchers call mouth breathing syndrome. They were compared to nasal breathers in regard to their cognition and scholastic abilities. Mouth breathing children had significantly reduced working memory, reading comprehension, and arithmetic skills. Now I know what was wrong with me growing up. Well, at least one thing that was wrong with me growing up, and it turns out that kids who grow up, and I did, I grew up with a house that kind of had a mildew issue in the basement, and so I was continually congested. What about its impact on depression? Chronic rhinosinusitis is a condition where the nasal passages and sinuses become inflamed and often cause symptoms like nasal congestion, facial pain, and headaches. Researchers looked at 94 patients with chronic rhinosinusitis and found that those with more severe nasal obstruction were more likely to have symptoms of depression. I don't want you to get the idea that I think that all depression is because you're breathing through your mouth. No, but what if it just makes a 10% difference in somebody's life? Every healthy habit that we take on, or every healthy habit that we avoid, may make us just a few points more likely to become depressed or significantly happier. Nasal breathing and nitric oxide. Researchers have compared how much nitric oxide is generated by nasal breathing compared to mouth breathing. They found that nasal breathing can produce six times more nitric oxide than mouth breathing. As we saw, nitric oxide is a vasodilator, meaning it dilates or opens up the blood vessels, but it's also a bronchodilator where it dilates the lungs, making it easier to breathe. And I have found this, that my energy when I go for a run, I love to run, and once I learn to run breathing through my nostrils rather than my mouth, I notice that I almost don't get tired. It's incredible. Now, I didn't get all that tired before, but it's a whole other level in just the ease of running. Takes a little bit of practice, though. If I exercise too hard, I have something called nasal valve collapse, where my nose literally slams shut because my nostrils are too close together. The researchers suggest that this is because if you were a mouth breather your whole life like me, this means your jaw has not expanded as much as it should have. And so, as a result, my jaw is thinner than it should be. And because of that, it's pushing even my nose together. And so, as a result of that, if I exercise too vigorously, my nostrils slam shut. And so, you can get these little rubber or plastic things that you stuff in your nose. You simply stick them up your nose. Nothing quite as trendy as sticking something up your nose and running with it, but it does help the nasal passages. No matter how hard I breathe, I can't slam my nostrils shut. They do work. It's kind of hard in cold weather because it feels super cold breathing into them, but they do help keep my nostrils open when necessary. There's also these little strips that you can use. They're another option. These might work for somebody else, but I'm not. I'm still having the same problem. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. This is incredible though. Breathing versus humming. Research in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine reports that humming significantly increases nasal nitric oxide levels compared to quiet nasal exhalation. Here it is a chart kind of giving you an idea how much. If you're just quietly breathing versus humming, you can see a significant increase in nasal nitric oxide. The study showed that humming caused on average a 15-fold increase in nasal nitric oxide output compared to normal nasal breathing. This dramatic rise in nitric oxide levels during humming is likely due to enhanced ventilation of the paranasal sinuses, which are major producers of nitric oxide. Going along and just humming a song. You might be thinking, okay, this guy's not a very good singer and that's why I'm humming, right? But the humming can actually increase the amount of nasal nitric oxide by 15-fold, so that may be doing some serious dilation to both lungs and potentially to the blood vessels. The Journal of Microbes and Infection reports on nitric oxide's antimicrobial impact on viruses, fungi, bacteria, and protozoa. There's even research that has found that people who mouth breathe during sleep are more likely to have respiratory tract infections than nasal breathers. It's fascinating this idea of nasal breathing versus mouth breathing. The Bible said millennia ago in the book of Isaiah, man whose breath is in his nostrils. It didn't say man whose breath is in his mouth. It talks about us breathing out of our mouth when we talk, but when we're just breathing, the Bible mentions man whose breath is in his nostrils. Even Genesis 2, 7 says, the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul or a living being. And so throughout the scriptures, it talks about men breathing through our nostrils, and we now know why that we're healthier, potentially happier, have better blood flow when we breathe through our nostrils. Even going to bed at night, I have found that I can sleep about an hour less. Normally I need my eight hours of sleep. If I breathe through the night, through my nostrils, I wake up after seven hours fully refreshed. I used to wake up, and you know it takes five, ten, fifteen minutes to kind of wake up, but now if I sleep through the night breathing straight through my nostrils, I wake up in the morning fully refreshed, ready to go. I mean I get out of bed and it's like it's like midday to me. It's life-changing, I gotta say. So I am so happy that I learned about this. Now I want to share with you some quick ways that you can open up your nasal passages if you are in a situation where your nostrils are clogged a lot of the time. Number one is try to get either clean out the environment that you're in. If you have mold, mildew, those kind of things can really clog up the sinuses. So that's number one. Number two is that I have to drink quite a bit of water in the morning because when I wake up I'm somewhat dehydrated and that alone can make the mucus in your nose a lot thicker, whereas when you're well hydrated it becomes much more watery and helps that process of cleaning out the nasal passages. So drinking, I have to drink 20, 30, actually more like 30, 40, 50 ounces of water and my nose just opens right up. The next thing is exercise. Exercise, when I get exercise my nostrils just open right up. So getting some relatively vigorous exercise can open the nasal passages. Another one is eating a lot of greens, green leafy vegetables. I've noticed having either a lot of salad, regular salads or, I don't mean every single meal, but having salads regularly or drinking greens where you juice the greens. That can be very good at opening the nasal passages. And the final one has to do with nasal irrigation or saline nasal irrigation. I'm not talking about using afrin to clean out the nasal passages but rather using something like a neti pot. And I have an incredible video on this and it literally could save your life next time you come down with the flu, COVID, these kind of things. There's amazing research. You're not going to want to miss that. Check out that video right here. If you like this video, hit the subscribe button, hit the bell notifications. God bless and have a fantastic day.