Ed Harrold and Ruben Meerman discuss the relationship between the lungs, the exhale, and the science of how weight loss happens in the body.
Ed Harrold with Ruben Meerman. Originally published on YouTube April 22, 2021. Watch the original conversation on YouTube.
Ed Harrold and Ruben Meerman discuss the relationship between the lungs, the exhale, and the science of how weight loss happens in the body.
00:03.1 Hi, everyone. Ed Harold here. Welcome to our Life with Breath expert series. Greetings, everyone globally. My name's Eddie Harold. In this installment of our Life with Breath expert series, we have an amazing gentleman with us who's done some powerful research and work to try to help us live a more vibrant, happy, healthy life. I'd like to introduce us to Ruben Meerman. How you doing, Ruben? Good morning. Very well. How are you, Ed? Uh, you're in the future, aren't you? Yes, that's right. Although, amazing, I've got sunlight streaming in here. The same sunlight is hitting your side of the planet as we speak, so we're not that far away.
01:08.5 Well, I always wanted to meet someone from the future. Well, here I am. Well, this is great. So before we begin and dive deep into this amazing subject, just wanna do a little breathing and stretching, give folks a relationship with their lungs, get them centered and grounded, and then we're gonna dive as deep as we can into the next hour of our life. So if everyone could just plant their feet firmly down on the ground, relax their eyes and jaw, let your shoulder blades roll up, back, and down several rounds, and try to release any tension in the shoulder girdle. And as you roll the shoulders, see if you can keep control of your breath.
01:53.7 Don't allow the movement to disturb the length, depth, and pace of your inhale and exhale. Bring yourself fully present for the next hour of your life. Listen not just with your ears, but your entire body. And then roll your shoulder blades back and down, press your feet down, relax your eyes and jaw completely. Separate your teeth a fraction of an inch, and allow the tongue to rest on the upper palate. See if that feels nice. Now, breathing through your nostrils as slowly as you can, bring your hands up to your shoulders, press your feet down, and reach your right hand up to the ceiling. And when it can't go any further, reach it out to the left and open that rib cage inside that right lung.
02:45.5 Come back up, right hand down, left hand up. Press into your feet, reach out to your right, and get open underneath the left lung. Come back, bring that hand down. Do one on your own. Right hand up, press the feet down, reach left. Come on back, left hand down. Press your feet down, reach right. Come back to center, bring your hands down. Take a deep breath in through your nose, and when you can't inhale anymore through the nose, open your mouth with pursed lips, and then inhale through your mouth. Hold the breath in and feel that full expansion of your lungs. Now exhale through your nose as long as you can, and then right at the end, imagine you're blowing out a candle with pursed lips and
03:38.9 get a full deflation of your lungs, stretching that tissue. So nostril inhale as much as you can, and then mouth inhale. That's a full inhale. Feel the diaphragm down, the lungs expanding. Hold in. Nostril exhale slowly, and when you can't exhale anymore through your nose, pursed lips, blow out that candle. That's a complete exhale, complete exchange. One more. Nostril inhale. Mouth inhale. Open the chest, hold the breath in, press your feet down. Let the pressure build. Feel that heat. And then exhale slowly through your nose, and when you can't exhale any longer through your nose, pursed lips. Hold out for a moment. Inhale and smile, because you're you, and we've got an amazing hour for you.
04:40.2 Thanks for tuning in. Ah. My guest today, Ruben Meerman, is a physicist, educator, and author of Big Fat Myths: When You Lose Weight, Where Does the Fat Go? Ruben's fascination with carbon dioxide and breathing stems from his personal experience of losing 30 pounds and his wondering where all that fat had gone. His calculations revealed that 84% of the fat people lose is exhaled as CO2. Amazing. And the remaining 16% will become water. His findings were published in the British Medical Journal in 2014, and his TEDx talks on this topic have attracted more than 10 million visitor, or 10 million views globally. Ruben is now on a mission to ensure all children learn that they eat, that they...
05:40.1 what they eat is converted to carbon dioxide on the exhale. So Ruben, welcome. Nice to be here. It's nice to have you. I became aware of your work about 10 years ago, and it just stimulated me because I, I was a, a breathing guru, a breathing expert. I was bringing it into all sorts of, uh, different platforms, whether it be health and wellness or athletic training or corporate performance. And then I, I found your work and your videos, and it totally just made me feel so good all over because somehow what I was doing was actually mirroring the science and the physics, the biology that you had discovered.
06:25.7 So if you can, let's find a nice place to dive right into this. Where, where would you like to begin today? Well, I, I always want to make sure that people appreciate what it is that I actually figured out, because we've known since the 1770s that when people eat food, the weight of that food comes back out of their body as carbon dioxide. So that's actually not new. I hadn't learnt that very properly at school, though. So it's kind of a rediscovery of something from back in the 1770s. And that just the fact that everything we eat, and when I say everything, I'm gonna... I'm talking about the macronutrients in food, 'cause food's got a lot of water in it already.
07:10.8 But all of the carbohydrates, the fat, the protein, and if you drink alcohol, it too becomes carbon dioxide and water. And so you, you, you breathe out what you eat, and I think that's the most amazing fact I've ever learnt. And yet I had never learnt it until I lost a bit of weight and wondered about, you know, what's going on with the weight we're losing. So the fact that, um, someone who's thought about breathing for so long, yourself, the fact that it was news to you as well, I think is a really, really great place to start because obviously we're not being taught this as children at the moment.
07:46.2 I got to be an adult that didn't know this. Everyone that I've spoken to about it didn't know that they're breathing out their food, so I think there's an awareness that's missing out there, um, that we, we need to, we need to fix. Yeah, uh, uh, we have a health crisis, uh, in the world, and I think a lot of that could be traced back to a, uh, a breathing crisis. It, it all seems that, uh, you know, there's this fear that carbon dioxide i- is bad for us, and we, we want to get it out of our body as fast as possible. I, I don't think folks are aware that they, they inhale just as much oxygen as they exhale in CO2.
08:31.1 Yeah. And the difference is that the CO2 is simply atomically heavier than the O2 that we're bringing in. Is that correct? Yeah. So I've got a little demo for you there. So, um, this is CO2, right? Mm-hmm. It's a, a molecule of carbon and two oxygen atoms. You breathe in O2, but you breathe out CO2, and that third atom there that you're breathing out, it makes your exhale breath heavier. And, uh, the f- so every time you exhale, the air you're breathing out weighs more than the air you just breathed in, and that extra weight that you're breathing out is coming from the food that you ate.
09:14.7 So I'll just give you a little bit ... It's so convoluted, the biochemistry, but it's so great to know what's actually going on when you inhale oxygen. The oxygen you breathe in, y- you'd expect if you're breathing O2 in and CO2 out, you sort of might think that those, that O2, those two oxygen atoms that you sucked in, are the same two oxygen atoms that you breathe out, but now they've got carbon stuck between them. But that's actually not the case. When you breathe in oxygen, it, m- uh, gets into your bloodstream, it gets into your cells, it goes all the way down into little tiny organs inside your cells called mitochondria.
09:51.3 And in your mitochondria, there is an enzyme that takes oxygen and splits it, literally splits the two oxygen atoms apart, and then it's the hydrogen atoms in your food that get stuck to those oxygens, and the oxygen you breathe in is now water, H2O. So this is really convoluted. It actually, if we follow the food that you eat into your body, uh, that also goes to your cells, and, and a really great example is carbohydrates. The word carbohydrate comes from carbon, which has been hydrated by water. And the way plants make it, let's, l- let's go all the way to the beginning, 'cause it's plants that make our food for us.
10:39.4 So I'll show you a little demo I do for children in, uh, primary schools. I use these things called sticky atoms. They're little magnetic atoms, and I've just put on a green glove, and the green glove represents chlorophyll, which all plants have this green enzyme in them called chlorophyll. So here's what a plant actually does. It takes water up from its roots, fell down as rain. The plant sucks it up in its roots, up into its leaf. So we're inside a leaf here. Here's a water molecule. In comes a beam of sunlight, and it's only when chlorophyll is holding water that this happens, right? Sunlight comes in and breaks the bond between the oxygen atom and the hydrogen atom, and another sunlight beam comes in here.
11:24.4 We call them photons. And I've just ripped the hydrogen off water. This happens ... We need to do it twice to complete the first step of this trick. So the plant takes in a second water molecule, more sunlight zaps this bond, more sunlight zaps that bond. I've now ripped the hydrogen off two oxygen ... uh, two water molecules, I should say. And the plant then puts the two oxygen atoms together. It keeps the hydrogen, but it lets go of the oxygen, and that comes out of the leaf and into the atmosphere, and that's where we get our oxygen from. All of the oxygen humans and all animals, all the oxygen we breathe started off, every single molecule started off as two water molecules.
12:10.8 A- and plants rip the hydrogen off and give it to us to breathe. That's amazing. So that comes out of the plant. Step two of photosynthesis, which is making food. Um, we don't need the green glove. We don't need chlorophyll for this. Step two is plants suck carbon dioxide out of the air through the same little holes in their leaf that they release the oxygen from, and then what they do is take the hydrogen atoms that they ripped off the water, and they stick it to the carbon dioxide they suck out of the air. And what am I doing here? I'm sticking hydrogen to carbon dioxide.
12:50.3 I'm making carbohydrate. And if we keep doing that, if I build up a ring of carbon atoms and I just keep repeating this, put more water molecules in, take the hydrogens off, stick them on, by the time I've done it six times, I'll have made a glucose molecule, C6H12O6. So all of our food is made by plants to start with by ripping the hydrogen off water and sticking it to carbon dioxide, and when we eat food, we do the reverse process, and we turn our food back into carbon dioxide and water. It's the best thing I've ever learnt, and, uh, and we don't teach it properly in schools.
13:32.0 So, um, just to f- really sort of pin it down, we eat food, we then rip the hydrogen atoms off that food again, and we stick it back to oxygen. And so we're making water and carbon dioxide out of food, out of carbon dioxide and water that was turned into food for us. It's, it's the circle of life, literally. Um, and so just, just knowing that won't make you lose weight faster, it won't make your body do it faster. It's just a wonderful thing to know, and I think we should all grow up just understanding how our relationship with plants, sunlight, and the air that we breathe,
14:15.8 it's a beautiful scientific fact. Just great to know. I- it's amazing that this happens naturally on this planet to every living thing, including inside us organically, and then also outside us when we're in nature. It, it sounds to me like we're, we're talking about chemistry and physics, and we're also talking about biology. Absolutely. Can you tell me, explain where those two meet? So, uh, you know, it is literally all three of those subjects which we are taught in school, they all converge beautifully in this thing we call life. Um, so life really is, first of all, we need energy for it to happen. So the energy we are all using to just move, talk, think, it all started off as sunlight.
15:10.2 It comes from the sun, and so there's some beautiful physics in how the sun makes sunlight. It takes seven and a half minutes for a photon of light to reach the Earth once it leaves the sun. Once it gets here, it might hit the ocean, it might warm up the ocean a bit. It might hit some rocks and warm them up, but if it hits a leaf on a tree at the right time, it will cause a water molecule to have its hydro- hydrogen atom broken off. And now that that photon of sunlight doesn't exist anymore, it's now stored in what we call chemical energy.
15:46.0 It's still the same energy. Energy's just this most amazing thing which doesn't have a physical form, it's, it's just constantly on the go. And so we take physics, we need to know chemistry to understand, you know, first of all how plants turn food into c- um, turn carbon dioxide into food, but the biochemistry of what happens to the carbon dioxide we breathe out. From the moment that we produce it inside our mitochondria, it's, you know, let's say, let's look at your calf muscle- Mm ... which is a long way from your lungs. Um, it's constantly producing carbon dioxide. Uh, if you move it, if you start walking, it will m- make carbon dioxide at a much greater rate than when you're sitting still.
16:31.7 But it's always making carbon dioxide, and it's a long way from your calf muscle to your lungs to then breathe it out. So there's a bit of a misconception I bump into when I first explain what happens to the food you eat, or when, when I explain that you're breathing out, you know, your fat when you're losing weight. A lot of people hyperventilate when they learn this news. They'll sit there with their friends... I've done this talk for huge crowds many, many times, and I'll always see someone nudge their neighbor and do this. "I'm losing weight, I'm losing weight." And they have a giggle and it's hilarious- ...
17:07.4 'cause it's, you know, why wouldn't you think that? The thing is, hyperventilating doesn't make you lose weight, uh, faster in the long term. If you keep hyperventilating, and this is where you people who teach people about breath are so important, if you keep hyperventilating, you're, you're blowing off more carbon dioxide than your body is producing. Mm-hmm. And so the total amount of CO2 in your body will decrease. When that happens, it causes your blood to become less acidic. In other words, its pH goes up. And we can talk about that biochemistry. It's very well understood, it's called the Bohr effect, the Haldane effect, there's the Hamburger effect, there's all this beautiful chemistry.
17:48.2 The problem is, if you keep doing it, there is a whole constellation of symptoms that you'll develop. You'll, you might start to get tingly fingers, you might start to tremble. Um, you can faint if you keep hyperventilating for too long because your body needs the pH to be within a very narrow range. From 7.35 to 7.45 is where your blood pH should be, and if you hyperventilate, you'll bring it way above that and you can, um, you can knock yourself out. So if you don't believe me, try it, but do it while you're sitting down safe so you don't fall over and hurt yourself. And have someone with you because, you know, if you do that underwater, um, you can suffer a thing called shallow water blackout where you, you lose your consciousness
18:34.1 before you get the urge to breathe back. 'Cause as you know, there's this really strange, um, well it's, uh, counterintuitive that your urge to breathe comes from how much CO2's in your blood, not from how much oxygen's in your blood. So if you hyperventilate, you blow off too much CO2, your urge to breathe may not return before you run out of oxygen to keep yourself conscious. So there is so much great biochemistry here, Ed, it's just, it's, it's endless. So i- if someone's breathing the same way in the winter as they're doing in the summer, and in the summer there's more photons and heat coming from the sun down onto our body, there's more vibrancy in nature, there's more light, there's more heat.
19:21.2 Is this formula at all affected by, uh, winter a- a- and, and the s- qualities of summer? Um, so yes, uh, i- in terms of temperature it is. Um, in terms of going out into sunlight and being actually hit by photons, you might absorb a little bit more energy than if you stay in the shade. If you're in the shade- Mm-hmm ... you won't be getting as much warmth from the sun as if you stand in the direct sunlight. There was, um, and there have been some papers published on the effect of cold on your metabolic rate. Mm-hmm. So, um, all babies when they're first born have a special kind of...
20:04.0 a, a lot of a special kind of fat called brown fat, which just generates heat. Mm-hmm. It's an incredible, um, little organ that they're born with. Adults have a little bit of it left. If... So here's what happens as you start to cool down below what's called the thermoneutral zone. So if you go below room temperature, you know, we, we all need to start putting on clothes so that we don't start to shiver. Between the bit where you start to shiver and, um, the, the temperature at which you're comfortable, there's this little zone where if you have brown fat left in your body, which a lot of adults have a little bit, um, this sp- special kind of fat can just burn fat
20:46.3 without needing to do anything else with it. It can just use the energy and turn it straight into heat, whereas most of the time when we convert fat to carbon dioxide and water, we take the energy and we do something useful with it first. We turn it into adenosine triphosphate is what we actually do. Mm-hmm. Or we, we do some... There's a whole little pathway which is an intermediate, and then we can do something useful with it, like our kidney will use it to filter blood, our brain will use it to think, our muscle will use it to move, a hair follicle will make hair.
21:16.8 But brown fat can just, instead of doing something useful in the m- in the middle, it can just turn it straight into heat, and that heat is very useful for keeping... We need to be 37 degrees Celsius. So yes, if you get a little bit cold, you will actually be... Your metabolic rate goes up a little bit. Mm-hmm. And you get producing more carbon dioxide because your brown fat will start kicking off and, and to produce the heat that you need to stay warm. If you get much colder than that, then you'll sta- start shivering, and shivering is another way to try and warm up your, your body.
21:49.2 It's, it's making your muscles move so that they're producing heat. But, um, your... So the way you phrased it just before, I, I hope that answers the question okay. Yeah. Because what, what it doesn't really do is, um, like walking around in sunlight doesn't really increase the amount of CO2 we're producing per minute. So here's a really, really great way to, um, just ground our knowledge of what's actually going on. If we go out of our conscious mind for a second, because we all wanna, you know, affect how quickly we're losing weight and how we're living, but if you are in the intensive care unit at, um, you know, uh, because you've had either a brain injury or you've got COVID-19, if you
22:36.9 are not breathing for yourself and you're unconscious, the doctors in the ICU ward will program the machine that breathes for you. And the way they program it is they, uh, first of all measure your weight, and then they know that someone your weight will need... i- in fact, all humans need three and a half milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of us per minute. So they punch in the numbers so that the machine will breathe in and out for you so that you definitely get that much oxygen. The other thing that they can do is on your exhale, they can measure how much CO2's in your blood.
23:15.8 It's called capnography. Mm-hmm. We can measure how much CO2 is in your breath using infrared light shining through your exhaled breath, and they're measuring how much is absorbed of that infrared light. So it's- been around for quite a few years now. So you breathe out, the doctors can track how much CO2 is coming out of your body, and that number is almost the same for all humans. There's a little bit of variation between, um, individuals, but on average, we need three and a half milliliters of oxygen per minute per kilogram, and we will produce about 2.9 milliliters of carbon dioxide per minute. And this is when you're in a coma, right?
23:58.8 So this is your resting metabolic rate. The only way that you can make your body produce more carbon dioxide than it does when it's at rest, when it's in a coma- Mm-hmm ... or when it's asleep, the only way you can make more CO2 than that per minute is to move your muscles. You can move... A- any muscle that you move will cause your body to produce more CO2 per minute. You can also sit in a cold, um, room. That will cause your brown fat to kick off and you'll start shivering. So there's two ways you can consciously increase your CO2 production. And then beyond that, the only ways that you can increase the amount of CO2 you're breathing is, is mainly done through your, um, your nervous system without your control.
24:44.0 So I think that that's one of the most useful facts to know. Mm-hmm. The fact that if you wanna lose weight faster than you will by sitting still, if you wanna lose weight faster, you're gonna have to get up and move your body around, right? You're gonna need to move your muscles 'cause then you'll breathe more, and we all know we breathe more when we're moving 'cause you can feel it. Like, if you sprint- Mm-hmm ... as hard as you can, um, at maximum effort possible, then you'll be breathing 23 times more air per minute than you do when you're sitting still. Um, when you're walking, just going for a, just a lovely walk increases the amount of air you need to breathe four times above resting rate.
25:25.9 So, you know, I... When I'm doing this talk for a live audience, I'll have balloons behind me to, to represent how much air I breathe when I'm sitting still. I weigh 70 kilograms, so I need about one balloon of s- oxygen per hour in my body. But to get it, I've got to breathe 24 balloons worth of air, because air is not pure oxygen. So 24 balloons of air go into me an hour, 24 balloons come out in an hour. But when they go in, it's, um, oxygen and nitrogen. When it comes out, it's oxygen, nitrogen, and one balloon worth of CO2 per hour. And, and all of that carbon in that CO2 came from the food that I eat.
26:09.6 And so the secret to losing weight is to not eat as many carbon atoms back in as you have breathed out today. That's the only simple rule that you need to follow. Um, if you wanna do it in a healthy way, then you should definitely consider what you're eating, and you can have big arguments with people about whether you should eat mostly plants, whether you sh- should be eating nothing but meat. There are people who argue about that. I don't enter those arguments. People can eat whatever they like. The only fact that really matters is, are you eating more carbon atoms than you're breathing out?
26:46.5 If yes, you're gonna gain weight. Are you eating less carbon atoms than you're breathing out? If yes, you're gonna lose weight. You can't not. It's impossible to not lose weight if you eat less carbon atoms than you breathe out. So that's the key to everything. That's great. That... Wow. That's like a map for a healthy- Yeah ... life. I mean a healthy brain- Yep ... and a healthy gut. And we have this gut brain, and we've got this cognition brain. You know, for years I've been teaching folks to exhale longer than their inhale. And training the brain to exhale two or three times as long in, in time
27:35.2 as they inhale, and begin to train the brain subconsciously, the hindbrain, that this is the most efficient way for us to move through this moment in, in mind-body medicine. If you think about the inhale and exhale, they, they pull, they push and pull on each other. The inhale goes up, the exhale goes down, and there's pressure that takes place in the respiratory and cardiovascular system all the time a- as they push and pull on each other. And having folks to simply practice breathing through their nose, and then a brief breath retention, pressure will build in the lungs. And where's that pressure going to go? Well, it gives you the ability to organically exhale substantially longer than someone who is just taking an inhale and an exhale.
28:30.4 So I can get a cardiovascular workout, I can make my heart rate go up right here in this chair as this, as if I was swimming or going for a hike, simply by using different patterns of length, depth, and pace of my inhale and exhale to facilitate the alkalinity and inflammation reduction that you're speaking of. Yeah. So look, I, I, um... When I first stumbled into this, um, topic in 2013, just because I, I lost a bit of weight and I got suddenly interested in biochemistry. I've got a physics degree, so I'm not a biochemist. Um, I, I've learnt the biochemistry since. And I'm also not a medical person, so I'll stay in my lane a little bit here.
29:17.8 But, um, I was getting asked quite often by people, you know, it, um, the fact that you breathe out your weight when you're losing it as CO2, qu- ... I'd get questions like, you know, the hyperventilation question was one of them. A lot of people asked me, "Is that why yoga is, is a great way to lose weight?" So I looked into how much your metabolic rate increases when you're doing, um, yoga, and I get these numbers that I'm gonna talk about from the Compendium of Physical Activities. It's, um, maintained by the University of Arizona. It's a wonderful resource. It's evidence-based numbers on how much more oxygen are you consuming, or we could say, how much more CO2 are you producing, when you're doing
30:04.6 all these different physical activities, right? So there's, there's a huge list of physical activities they've, uh, studied. Yoga's one of them. Walking at all different paces with and without sticks, up hills, with a pram, without a pram. It's all there. So, um, if you compare yoga to just walking, they're about equal on how much more breathing you're doing. So, uh, they're very different in what they're doing to you as a whole person, obviously. Walking and practicing yoga are very different things. But if all that we are worried about is how much CO2 you're producing and, and breathing out, then roughly equivalent to, to, um, walking.
30:45.7 But I'll show you something really interesting, 'cause, you know, people were asking me, "Is the way you breathe important?" And I had no idea about the answer to that, say, eight years ago. And I was f- at first a little bit skeptical about, oh, you know, people would say, "Is there a right way or a wrong way to breathe?" And, and that struck me as such an odd question. I was thinking, "It's just breathing. You just suck air in, and you breathe air out." Like... And, uh, it just seemed like there was nothing there to think about. And then l- Look, over the last eight years, it's taken me eight years to really realize that, oh my God, of course the way you breathe has a big impact and here's one of the reasons, right?
31:24.6 So I've got some dry ice here. This is frozen carbon dioxide. It's solid, but it's the same as the CO2 we breathe out and it's, it's quite heavy. You can buy it in America at Walmart. Um, you can buy a block of it and, and, and muck around with it and, and prove to yourself that this stuff is heavy. Be careful 'cause it's -78 degrees Celsius. I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit. But here's a little demo I do for kids. First of all, if you just take ordinary water and you drop the CO2 in there, it will sit there and bubble, and that's beautiful, right?
31:59.2 Every kid should see this multiple times during their schooling. This little bit of dry ice will very quickly vanish. The bubbles that it's making are just pure carbon dioxide. Um, carbon dioxide on planet Earth does this, uh, incredible thing called sublime, which means it skips being a liquid on the Earth. It just goes straight from being a solid and turns straight into gas. We don't have liquid carbon dioxide on the Earth in an open container. We can make it inside a gas cylinder, but all of our carbon dioxide on Earth will be in the form of gas 'cause it's so hot on our planet. But we can make it cold enough so that we do turn it solid, and that's what it looks like.
32:46.3 Now, back to breathing. You just think about this for a minute. If you stop breathing, your body stays alive. Your body doesn't die between breaths, so we're const- e- every cell in our body is alive the whole time. When you stop breathing, you're still producing carbon dioxide. If you don't breathe it out, the amount of carbon dioxide in your body will start to increase because you're, you're consuming oxygen, you're producing CO2. And so as you sit still not breathing, the pH of your blood starts to decrease, and I'll show you why that is. First of all, I'll prove it. So here is, um, more water, but now I've put some pH indicator into it.
33:28.9 It's called phenolphthalein. Hard to pronounce. Phenolphthalein is pinkish or fuchsia when its, uh, pH is high, above 8.4. So to make this water, I added some phenolphthalein and I also added just some washing soda, which is, uh, sodium carbonate. Uh, not sodium bicarbonate, sodium carbonate. You can buy it from the supermarket. So I bought it from my local supermarket, and people use it to, uh, boost their washing powder. It's alkaline, very alkaline. So I'm gonna get another little piece of, um, dry ice here and just drop it in. This stuff turns crystal clear when its pH goes down, when it becomes acid. So if this goes clear, we know we've got this thing becoming acid.
34:19.7 Here we go. Little tiny bit of carbon dioxide in there. It's bubbling away, and as it bubbles, what it's doing is it's making carbonic acid. This is something that carbon dioxide always does when you react it with water. If you put carbon dioxide in water... I'll put in a second piece to speed it up a little bit 'cause I've got quite a bit of, uh, my sodium carbonate there, but here it goes. It's turning perfectly clear. So you've just witnessed the fact that carbon dioxide plus water makes carbonic acid. So I'll explain that in a little bit more detail. You get a H2O molecule. There's three atoms.
35:03.7 H2O. When it bumps into a CO2 molecule, that's also three atoms, so CO2 and H2O bump into each other, they s- can stick together to form a, a bigger atom, uh, molecule called carbonic acid. It has the chemical formula H2CO3, and it's an acid. So as soon as it forms, the pH of the water that it's in, so here it's the water, the pH of your blood goes down if you add more carbon dioxide to it. And so that's the reason that when you hold your breath, your blood becomes this more and more acidic, and until you breathe some of that CO2 out, it will stay down there at the lower pH.
35:52.9 When you breathe out, it will come back up again. Um, the chemistry of this is ha- it was all figured out in the 1900s, um, and it was figured out mostly by physicians who work in the either intensive care units or an- uh, anesthetists are the ones who really understand this. And in fact, I would... I'm gonna implore and beg of anesthetists and ICU physicians to get involved with this discussion and join in so that... because they've got the credibility, right? If, if I can get an anesthetist to stand up and say, "Yeah, this is all true. Like, yes, people's blood contains carbon dioxide that comes from their cells, and when they breathe it out, they're losing weight because there's carbon in there." These anesthetists
36:43.3 think about this more than probably anyone that you and I will ever meet because when they've got you anesthetized and you're being operated on, so it's imperative that you stay unconscious or else you'll wake up screaming in pain, these people are constantly watching your CO2 levels. They use capnography to watch how much CO2 is in your exhaled breath, and they keep a really close eye on your CO2 levels because it's an indication for them that you're okay. If the amount of CO2 is at the right level, you're doing fine. If the CO2 in your blood... Uh, sorry, in your breath starts to go down... You can ask a paramedic about this because they all use the same, um, equipment.
37:29.1 If you are at a, um, accident scene and you have got airway damage and you're unconscious, the paramedics will obviously start to breathe for you. They can either do that by, you know, mouth to mouth if there's no equipment around, or they can put a mask on you and breathe for you. If you've got airway damage, they'll insert a tube into your trachea, and then they can start pumping air into your lungs through this tube that's gone down into your trachea. But to make sure that the, the tube is sitting in your trachea and not in your esophagus, which goes to your stomach, which would be useless pumping air in and out of your stomach, it has to be in your
38:09.5 trachea. To confirm that the tube is in your trachea, they use capnography and they, they literally look for CO2 in your exhaled breath. If there's CO2 there, they're gold. If there's no CO2 coming out of you when they let the breath come back out, that's big trouble. That, that means they've put the tube in the wrong hole and they might have to reinsert it. The other reason there might not be CO2 in your breath, which would be even worse, is if your heart stops pumping blood to your lungs, then your lungs are not perfused by blood, and if they're not being perfused by blood that's coming from your body, the amount of CO2 you're breathing out starts to go
38:51.8 down. So there is so much useful information in your exhaled breath for a doctor, for a paramedic, and for people wanting to lose weight it's incredibly useful information because... 'Cause you know you're losing weight every time you breathe 'cause there's CO2 in your breath. It's, it's kind of like the, the thing that connects all the dots, um, is CO2. It's kind of such fundamental stuff. That's amazing. What a journey. Wow. Yeah. I, I think I just went to college for the last 15 minutes. That was a whole semester there. That was great. But you know, one- um, what I'll do after we've had this chat, um, I'll watch back over this, and I will put together a list of useful links that people can come
39:39.9 back and go and check everything that I've just said out. Because, you know, for a lot of people, this is the first time they're hearing it, but actually there's paramedics, there's doctors, there's ICU nurses who learn this stuff. It's, it's not new, but it... And it shouldn't be new to us- Right ... but it is. Um, so my, my mission in life, Ed, is to make sure that we do teach this stuff in school, 'cause kids are fascinated by this stuff as well. Yeah. Imagine growing up knowing all this stuff. Like, would you... I don't think that, um, you would look at your body the same way.
40:14.6 You, you wouldn't be so confused. Let's say you're 15 years old and you're starting to put on weight, which happens to lots of children. They get to their teenage years and they start to gain weight because their physical activity goes down and they can eat snack foods when people aren't looking and, you know. So we have this crisis, but imagine if those kids knew that actually all I have to do to stop this, stop myself getting bigger than I want to be, uh, if I wanna stop that happening, all I have to do is not eat as many carbon atoms as I'm breathing out. And, you know, that we don't, um...
40:50.6 Children are never encouraged to lose weight if they're overweight. They're, it, we want them to grow into their weight. So weight loss is not generally... And again, I'm not an expert on how to deal with children who are overweight. That's for dieticians and doctors. But they, we don't, um, encourage children to lose weight. We just encourage them to catch up to their weight by growing into it. But imagine what kind of a different life it would be for a kid who understands this from before they reach their teenage years, from when they're, you know, five, six, seven, eight years old, learning why am I breathing out carbon dioxide?
41:25.5 What do I need oxygen for? What is oxygen? Let's show it to them. Let's do science demonstrations in their classroom. There's so many great experiments. Here's one. Get yourself a bottle of soda water, right? And weigh it, and then open it like this so that you can see the bubbles coming out. That's carbon dioxide. If you just let this... Wee, don't do it that fast 'cause it'll squirt- ... water all over your computer, and you'll lose your, uh, webcast. Um, but open your bottle, don't let it spray out everywhere, uh, and mark the level in the bottle, and then leave it for a day. I promise you, when you come back and weigh the bottle again, it'll have lost about five grams, maybe a little bit more.
42:16.6 If you leave it for two days, it'll lose even more weight. The weight that it's losing is carbon dioxide coming out of solution and venting off into the air. So you're measuring the weight of the CO2 in the bottle by stealth, by weighing it first, letting it lose some weight, and weighing it again and doing mathematics. This is what grade... You know, three or four teachers should love this because we're gonna use mathematics to find out how much weight the, the thing has lost by weighing it before and after. And we're actually repeating an experiment that was done by Santorio Santorius, another amazing physician scientist, late 1500s.
42:58.7 He wanted to know what happens to the food that people eat. Um, they couldn't measure gases back then. But what he did was the same thing that we're saying here. He weighed himself, he weighed all the food that he ate, and then he sat on a s- on a, um, a steelyard, which is like a, a, a balance, right? He sat on this balance that could swing, and he knew how much food he'd put in. He, um, caught all of his excrement and then weighed all of that. And when he added up all the numbers and then subtracted, you know, he started off at this weight.
43:38.2 He put this much food into himself. Now he's this weight, and this much stuff came out of him. You subtract that from the starting point, he would always be missing some mass. Like, there would be some mass that he couldn't account for. It had vanished into thin air. So he called it insensible perspiration. Uh, he thought it was all just water, 'cause they knew that water can turn into gas. They'd seen puddles evaporate. They had no idea that there was a gas called carbon dioxide coming out of their lungs. It took another 100 years to figure out that, ah, when you eat food, you breathe it out as carbon dioxide.
44:16.1 Now we can start teaching kids how to think like that with just simple experiments in the classroom, and if we tie all those experiments back to their own body so that they understand this is how what I've just done relates to this thing that I'm living inside of, the question is, what, how will they grow up? Will they live a healthier life? Will their obesity rates go down? We don't know because no one's ever taught kids this stuff in primary school before, ever. Because I'll tell you why. We do not teach children about atoms until they are about 13 or 14. That's the curriculum, and it's in America, it's in Australia.
44:56.0 Every country in the world leaves this super fundamental concept that everything's made out of atoms, including the air you breathe. We don't teach kids that until they're about 14. And what are they like when they're 14? They're teenagers. So it's very hard to teach them this stuff 'cause it's, it's like learning a language, you know? Mm-hmm. It, it's very hard to learn a new language once you get above 13, and that's when we try to start teaching them the chem- the language of chemistry is what we need them to understand to get this stuff. So that's, that's my mission, Ed, is to get this into primary schools.
45:30.6 Yeah. Life skills class for our youngsters is, is so important to s- many things, uh, a strong mind, uh, a lot of, uh, calm energy, you know, focused intensity, learning how to control our emotions, uh, staying mentally focused on the goal at hand. So much of this ties in to, you know, really what I do in life, which is really about producing efficiency. And when you think about efficiency, you know, the lungs, you know, science research tends to indicate that around the age of 30, lung tissue begins to deteriorate. And, you know, there's certain exercises that we can do around training our inspiratory and expiratory muscles, always breathing through our nose.
46:16.7 You know, when we breathe through our nose, we create this molecule called nitric oxide, and nitric oxide is an anti-inflammatory molecule. It helps the alveoli sacs dilate, so we can exchange more oxygen and carbon dioxide with a lower heart rate. And, you know, I don't, I barely, I... When I'm working with clients, I very rarely use the word, uh, weight or fat. I, I... They become stigmatized. Mm-hmm. I use the word inflammation reduction. Mm-hmm. Would that be a fair assessment to, to utilize that word in that, uh, paradigm? Uh, so I'm not an expert on this. I mean, uh- Nitric oxide, um, um, I've heard...
46:56.0 I've known about the gas for years, but I had not really paid attention to the fact that it's produced in your nose when you inhale, and even when you hum it in- Mm ... increases apparently, um, as studies have shown. So I had not been paying any attention to nitric oxide until about, oh, look, a couple of maybe months ago, I was down on the beach, um, and I met some young breathing people who had just run a workshop down there. They'd had ice baths, they'd done some breathing, and they were... I, I run on the beach these days, and they were saying that, you know, I should try and breathe through my nose when I'm running.
47:32.9 And if they're listening that would be great, because I... they must have noticed the skepticism on my face. I thought, breathing through your nose when you're running, how the heck are you gonna get enough air into your lungs? I, I didn't think you could do it. But I've since learned that actually it took me a little while to get that working, but I can breathe through my nose. Mm-hmm. And when you breathe through your nose, you're right, so here is nitric oxide, right? Nitric oxide is one nitrogen atom stuck to one oxygen atom, and because nitrogen likes to make three bonds with other atoms, and I won't be able to explain this in great detail right now, but there's a bond missing here.
48:14.4 Nitrogen can make, for instance, this is ammonia. Nitrogen can make NH3. Ammonia is one nitrogen with three hydrogen atoms stuck to it, that's ammonia. All nitrogen atoms can make three bonds. Nitric oxide, it's made two bonds with an oxygen atom, and it's got one bond left that it can still make, and that's what makes it a radical. So you've... people have heard of free radicals, they've heard of antioxidants, which mop up free radicals. This is actually a very dangerous molecule if you have too much of it around. I did not know, uh, six months ago, uh, half of the stuff I know now about nitric oxide being produced in your nose.
49:01.2 It's true, it does get... make it into your lungs. It makes it to your lungs because it's in gas. When it's in liquid, it tends to react with stuff very quickly and it has a very short half life. It doesn't last long. But in air, it's not bumping into as many molecules and it can go further, so it can penetrate deep into your lungs. What happens from there, um, yes, it does vasodilation, so it opens up your airways, but beyond that, I'm out of my expertise zone at the moment. I'm still learning all of the effects of nitric oxide. Here's one great thing to know about it, though.
49:36.7 This molecule is what makes Viagra work. So when people take Viagra to stimulate, you know, a bit of growth downstairs, it's this molecule that's being produced by the drug Viagra causes this molecule to be produced in the erectile tissues and that opens up, um, the, the blood vessels, they get bigger and that makes... you know. It's same thing happens in your nostrils, as you know. Okay. Your nostrils have, um, the same sort of tissue in them. So look, I... like I said, I'm still learning this stuff. I've, I just read James Nestor's book, uh, Breath. People were telling me to read that last year, and it was your invitation that, to come on your show that really spurred me on to get this thing read, and it's a great book.
50:20.5 I mean, wow, he's done a, a phenomenal job of, of really bringing attention to- Mm ... uh, breathing and the fact that breathing differently has different effects. I'll tell you one more thing that I should have thought about a lot more earlier and, and, and discussed more with the people I speak to, and that is, um, your airways have a, a portion of them is called dead space. Mm-hmm. And that accounts for a heck of a lot of the reasons why taking deep breaths is different to taking shallow breaths. And I, I, you know, I had not thought of this when I first stumbled onto my...
50:56.2 and published my paper. This, this was just not in my thinking yet, but it makes total sense. The, um, airways from your mouth and your nose down until you get to your trachea, you get your bronchi, uh, then you get your bronchioles, all of that, um, surface area, that whole volume of air is, is up against surfaces that don't exchange gas. They don't let oxygen go into your blood, and they don't let CO2 come out of your blood. It's only the little sacks called alveoli right down in your lungs. It's your alveoli that can, that are thin enough for oxygen to go in and carbon dioxide to come out.
51:36.4 So there's all this space that you suck air into that doesn't, uh, contribute to the gas exchange. So in an average male like myself, it's about 130 milliliters of that air that first, that you suck in, that never reaches your alveoli. And for women it's a little bit less on average, but, you know, we're all a bit different. So let's call it 100 milliliters. If I take a breath that's only 500 milliliters, then one-fifth of that breath never reaches my alveoli, which is 20% of the total. But if I take a really big breath, like 2,000 milliliters, two liters, so that's about two of these, a big breath,
52:21.8 um, it's... the dead space is still only about 100 milliliters, but I've sucked it down and, uh, it's now part of a much bigger breath. So a much bigger percentage of that air reaches my alveoli. And so taking lots and lots and lots of little breaths means you're expanding and contracting your, um, rib cage and you're using all those muscles, but you're only 50% efficient if, if you're taking really tiny breaths. If, if your breath's only 200 milliliters, and 100 milliliters is only sticking around in the dead space, that means your breathing is 50% efficient. Whereas if you take big breaths, it's up to 90, 95% efficient.
52:59.2 So there's some really simple physiological stuff going on there, and then there's a whole bunch of really fascinating biochemistry, part of which is this nitric oxide question, which I'm, I'm sorry, I'm just not an expert in yet- You're great ... but I, uh, hope to be, yeah. No, you're great. When I, when I'm working with folks with their lungs, you know, I look at inspiratory muscles, muscles of inhale, and expiratory muscles, muscles of exhale. I'm looking at the movement of the abdominal diaphragm, the primary muscle of inhale. I'm looking to allow the- these muscles to become more efficient, and in that, the rib cage will become more elastic, because the lungs
53:37.8 aren't muscle, the lungs are tissue. In the average person who's not, who's only getting that 50% breath, they don't have the inspiratory and expiratory muscle strength to push their lungs into their ribs to get that full inhale. And when we break this down a little more, we can see that the physiology of the lower lobes of the lungs are parasympathetic. It's relaxing, so in the inhale the diaphragm's going down and the ingoing energy comes into the lower lobes of the lungs, which creates a relaxation response. And then as the air evolves through the lungs, the top of the lungs are sympathetic. So you have that acidic, that cortisol, that adrenaline, that heat, but we've relaxed into the moment first.
54:22.0 And then on the exhale, the diaphragm evacuating the abdomen, massaging the lower lobes of the lungs during that exhale, there's a relaxation parasympathetic response of oxygen, hemoglobin, uh, relaxation nerve endings at the lower lobes of the lungs that produce calm in the brain or non- threatening in the environment that we're in, and then in a natural, organic way we burn fat. Right. Well, yes. Um, but the, the, the thing about the, the, uh, the fat... And look, 100%, I, I, the, it's all biochemically 100% plausible that, you know, just by taking different breaths you can relax your mind. And, and not only is it plausible, as you know, people really actually do manage to calm themselves down.
55:11.9 There's a whole body of literature about whether or not hyperventilation and anxiety are related, and they certainly are. Um, so there's, there's definitely biochemistry going on. There's signals going from your lungs, whether it's the tissue of your lungs or the tissue of the muscles around your lungs, but there are molecules released that go straight up into your brain clearly that somehow help people who are suffering anxiety, can help them relax. I'm, I'm a newbie to, um, all of that science, and I'm so glad I've stumbled onto it at last. I've been so, not skeptical, but just distracted by making sure I've got my ducks in a row on the biochemistry of how does fat get from being inside a fat cell
55:53.5 to your lungs so you can exhale it. And that biochemistry, I mean, it's also, it's, it's complex, convoluted, but it's not beyond a kid who has learnt chemistry in primary school, the basics, the language of chemistry. That kid will be able to start to understand that when they get into their teenage years and, and become a learner. Around 15 years old we can start to teach them, instead of teaching them, you know, this in- inorganic chemistry that they get in high school, if we make it biochemistry, then it relates to their own body and they can, um, not only, not only is it interesting, it's, it's extremely useful to them at that point in their life.
56:35.0 So, you know, here's a thought for your viewers about when we should teach this stuff. If, if you ask a, a primary school teacher or a, actually a parent or even a non-parent, "What's the best way to teach a child to read and write? What, how would you begin? What's the first thing that a kid needs in order to be able to read and write? Where would you begin?" And everyone knows it's we teach them the alphabet. And not only do we teach them the alphabet, little kids get, uh, alphabet letters to stick on the fridge. They get toys, like soft cubes with the alphabet all over them.
57:10.0 They're surrounded by the alphabet. Once you know the alphabet, you can, when you get a little bit older, you can learn to put letters together to make words. Once you can make words, you can put the words together to make sentences. Once you can make sentences, you can put sentences together to make stories or poems or songs, and then you're all the way, you're off. You're up and running. The same thing goes for teaching children mathematics. Where, how do you teach mathematics? Where do you begin? We teach them how to count. We start when they're this big, and then we teach them the number one, the numeral.
57:43.9 We teach them how to write the, the numbers. We give them toys with numbers on them. They have them on the fridge. They have them everywhere. They're surrounded by numbers. They get to primary school, then we teach them how to add and subtract, how to multiply, divide, and they're off. What do we do in the science curriculum? Uh, if you sit down with the science curriculum in America, in Australia, in England, wherever you are, and see if you can spot any kind of logical sequence. It's not there. It jumps around between topics like a bullet ricocheting around a room. In, in fact, it comes back three times in, in Australia and where you are.
58:20.2 We teach them about solids, liquids, and gases, which is what we're talking about here. We're turning food into gas. Mm-hmm. Solid to gas. Amazing. We, we, we teach that three times without ever teaching them that what we're actually talking about is atoms, which can be in the form of a solid or a liquid or a gas. That, they don't get the word atom until grade nine. So I think that what we need to start to do is to start teaching children about atoms in primary school, because atoms are like the letters of the alphabet that Mother Nature uses, and in nature you get the letters of the alphabet, the atoms.
58:54.9 There's 92 kinds of them on the periodic table, from hydrogen to uranium. Kids love learning them. You take atoms, you stick two together, you've made a molecule. You take two molecules, you react them together, you've just written a chemical sentence. Carbon dioxide plus oxygen makes... Uh, sorry. Carbon... I stopped myself. Carbon dioxide plus oxygen for a plant makes glucose... Uh, sorry. Carbon dioxide and water. I've got two steps ahead of myself. Plants take carbon dioxide and water. Here's the best chemical sentence in the world. Carbon dioxide plus water makes glucose and oxygen. We take that same sentence and read it in reverse, we take glucose and we suck in oxygen and we turn it back into carbon dioxide and water.
59:44.9 And so if you look at life, life is really the best story that has ever been told using the alphabet of atoms, and we don't teach kids about atoms until they're teenagers. We need to start teaching them that stuff in grade four, five, two, preschool. We've got to get it in there so that they can understand what's happening inside their body and why they breathe out carbon dioxide. It's, it's just so simple when you think about it. Yeah, I think we ought to really try to push these primary schools to create some curriculum so the kids feel better about themselves. You know, there's a lot of bullying and shaming and blaming on what you look like and how you talk and, you know, all this other stuff.
60:29.7 It just takes kids out of feeling good about themselves. So I am totally 100% on board with this mission. And, uh, you know, I, I just look at these lungs, uh, you know, under a microscope and I look at the trees outside, and there's absolutely no different. We're, we're operating in, in the same chemical formula, the same biological formula as everything around us. And I look at the lungs as, uh, so underutilized in regard to where we should look first when there's issues around health or, uh, inflammation that we want to reduce, or high levels of stress which are sympathetic, or high levels of acidity in our
61:14.7 blood, which if it's uneliminated, it's gonna create fat. So thank you so much for helping the world understand how these machines work. It's, um, it's a joy. It's, it's the best mission to be on, Ed. I... It is so much fun teaching this to kids, adults, experts, non-experts. It's, um, it's just the most fun you could have. So, uh, let's do it again. Let's, let's talk more. Yeah. You know, I think what, what I'm trying to do, what you're trying to do is we're trying to be good ancestors. We're trying to leave a trail for the next generation so that they don't have to suffer maybe the way we did, and this is a major step to evolving
62:00.1 our ancestral skills to make the world a little nicer place. Thank you so much for spending some time with us and our audience. You're a real treasure to the world, and I hope you have a beautiful day. Thank you, Ed. Really great to chat to you. I'll talk to you again. Go be grateful. You too. Thank you, buddy. Keep working. Yeah. Bye-bye. See ya.