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“I mean, look at how we've convoluted and complicated the most simple things. Look at nutrition now, how many supplements are we supposed to take? How many grams of fat am I supposed to eat? And then grams of carbs, and then how many grams of sugar is tolerable? It's insane that we've managed, because I think a lot of people don't believe stuff unless it sounds scientific or it's extremely complicated. But nature isn't that complicated. Like why do all of these cultures, the few that are around now, indigenous cultures, they don't have high blood pressure, they don't have heart disease, they don't have diabetes, they don't have anxiety, they don't have panic, they all have straight teeth. They don't also have any big pharma, they don't have dentists, they don't need any of this stuff because they are living in an environment in which humans naturally evolved. You and I are not, we're living in an environment that is so different and it's no coincidence that the more we integrate back into nature, the better we get.”

So says my guest today, James Nestor. Nestor’s Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art is a mega-bestseller—across the globe—it’s also an award-winning work of science reporting, stringing together seemingly disparate streams of thought and science into a treatise on one of the most significant impacts on our health: The way we learned to breathe. Yep, breathe. James makes the case that our tendency toward mouth-breathing works against our very nature, distorting our faces and jaws, ramping our anxiety, and weakening our immune response…simply because our noses are designed to filter the world on our behalf. I loved our long-ranging conversation, and it was wonderful to be in James’s company again.

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves

James’s Website

(Edited slightly for clarity.)