Are There Two Vital Signs That Doctors Have Neglected for Half a Century? 

With the great advances in modern medicine, attention has shifted from health education and promotion to pathology and the treatment of disease. This is why we now find our medical services under such pressure and often unable to meet the demands on them. This is in part due to a sicker society that has come to believe they no longer need to live a healthy life, rather they can just get a pill from their doctor when they fall ill.

This serious problem is only now being recognised and some efforts are being made to re-establish a better balance between health education and disease treatment.

Two Vitally Important Signs

A good start could be made by focusing on two vital signs of health: our diet and our breathing.

When was the last time your GP checked the quality of your breathing? Unless you presented with asthma or bronchitis I would guess never, unless you are lucky enough to have a very forward-thinking doctor!

When was the last time your GP checked your diet in detail and gave you specific dietary advice? Once again, I would guess never, unless you have that special doctor who is ahead of the profession being interested in improving your health with lifestyle changes you need to make.

We must all agree “That we are what we eat, how could it be otherwise, we can’t make eyeballs from chocolate bars?” And as we know we can live for weeks without eating, for days without drinking, though only two or three minutes without breathing. 

“Surely, based on this alone we should give the quality of our breathing high priority?” 

The Vital Importance of Good Breathing

If we need any more assurance of the vital importance of good breathing, did you know that all mammals, including you and me, have the same number of breaths in a lifetime? We and all our cousin mammals from mice to elephants all take roughly half a billion breaths in a lifetime. The fast-living shrew that breathes at about 800 breaths per minute lives only a year compared to some whales breathing 3 – 4 breaths per minute, potentially living over a hundred years. 

So, the less we breathe the longer we may live, the faster we breathe the shorter our lifespan! Have a look at the chart below:

“The perfect man breathes as if he is not breathing”

Lao Tzu (4th Century BC) Lao Tzu is claimed to have lived to 160 years old. Perhaps he only breathed about five breaths per minute

“The more you breathe the closer you are to death. The less you breathe the longer you will live.”

Konstantin Buteyko 1923-2003

With humans, one of the major factors that cause chronic hidden hyperventilation is stress. Stress triggers the primitive fight/flight response repeatedly, eventually causing the CO2 receptors to accept a lower level of CO2 and thereby establishing an over-breathing pattern.

Improve Your Diet to Improve Your Breathing

For the past fifteen years I have been helping patients to improve either their breathing or their diet and have discovered that as a person’s diet improves so does their breathing or as their breathing improves so do their eating habits.

My measure of diet quality has been how close the person is to a Whole Plant-Based Diet and my measure of their quality of breathing has been the well-established “Control Pause” of the Buteyko Method.

You can learn more about the relationship between diet and breathing by clicking this link HERE.

The good news for us all is that it appears there is a win-win relationship. If we improve one of these two vital signs, the other will improve as well! 

There are good physiological reasons for some of these associations. If we consume a predominately acid diet of meat and processed foods our bodies need to reduce the acidity by breathing more and expelling more carbon dioxide.

If we are stressed, the fight/flight response kicks in to cause us to breathe faster to prepare us for running away or fighting. When we are breathing normally, we are more relaxed and more inclined to sit down to eat and savour our food, and when we are rushed and under pressure, we are more likely to grab any quick sugary snack on the run. 

More research needs to be done to verify this relationship, but my findings are based on over two hundred patients over a period of a decade.

So, until you are checked and advised by your GP on these two vital signs, (though looking at the way medicine is going I suggest you don’t hold your breath!), it is up to each one of us to be aware of these two vital factors in our health and longevity.

I have spent forty years as a natural health therapist trying to find ways of providing this support and help to my patients. The result is all on my website www.totalhealthmatters.co.uk. Here, you will be able to check the quality of your breathing and your diet  in a matter of a few minutes.

You will then be able to help yourself improve both with free training material such as a Buteyko breath training podcast “Better Breathing Means Better Health”  or with the Whole Plant-Based Diet training podcast “The World’s Finest Diet” 

In addition you will have access to two free e-Books, The Breath Connection and The Food Connection that will explain the fundamentals of respiration and nutrition.

If you want help getting started, why not get in contact and book an appointment with me in Hawkhurst for a one-hour consultation to decide the best way forward to improve your general health? 

This will be a “Mini Health Audit” and include the above tests and additional checks on other basic health promoting factors. The fee for this is £60.

Words: Michael Lingard BSc. DO