Drop Dead Healthy

The Lungs

The Quest to Breathe Better

ON A SATURDAY, we take our kids to the Bodies exhibit at the South Street Seaport. This popular museum show displays actual cadavers in various positions. Some are cut into slices like a deli pastrami. Some are stripped of skin and frozen in heroic stances, such as tossing a football or conducting a symphony.

The exhibit is a little more graphic than I anticipated. Maybe a little much for my four-year-old twins. Maybe a little much for me. In the bone section, one glass case holds a tiny pelvic bone from what looks to be a six-month-old child.

The woman next to me peers into the glass case, spots the remains, and says, with all earnestness, “Ohhhh. That’s so cute.” To me, not cute. Harrowing. It reminds me of Casper the Friendly Ghost, the strangest comic book in history. The creators just gloss right over the horrid backstory. Are we just supposed to forget that a child had to die to produce this chipper poltergeist?

Luckily, my sons aren’t too fazed. They are most interested by a huge plastic container filled waist-high with packs of discarded cigarettes. They love the colors and designs on the boxes.

A sign next to the container warns: EVERY TIME YOU SMOKE A PACK OF CIGARETTES, YOU LOSE THREE HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES OFF YOUR LIFE. Passersby are encouraged to drop their packs in the slot and regain those hours.

“Why do people smoke?” Jasper asks as we walk to the next room.

“Well, you know how Zane liked his pacifier?” Julie says. “It’s the same thing with grown-ups and cigarettes. It feels good. It gives you something to do with the mouth. Also, they’re supposed to be relaxing.”

What is she saying? Maybe she should add that cigarettes have a cool, refreshing flavor, like you’re breathing Rocky Mountain air.

I shoot her a look. “You don’t have to sell it quite that hard.”

“Yeah, that didn’t come out right,” she says.

For someone who hates smoking as much as Julie does, she sure knows how to talk it up. If we find Parliaments in our boys’ Incredible Hulk backpacks, I’ll know whom to blame.

I’ve been focusing on my lungs this month. Without those eleven-pound organs—and their 1,500 miles of airways and 500 million tiny air sacs—I wouldn’t be around to worry about any other body parts.

I’ve been reading a lot about smoking. I almost wish I’d been a smoker. That way, I could have made a huge improvement by quitting during Project Health. But sadly, I smoked my only cigarette at age fifteen. I spent the next ten minutes getting sick while clutching a sidewalk trash can with both hands.

So cigarettes made me ill in the short run. Which saved me from getting ill in the long run. Cigarettes are still the leading preventable cause of death in America, killing about 440,000 people a year. The unfortunate part is, if they weren’t so horribly bad for you, cigarettes could be very handy in stopping the obesity epidemic. Nicotine is one of the only proven appetite suppressants. Studies show that smokers are generally thinner than us nonpuffers. The cigarette industry has tried to exploit the weight-loss angle over the years. Consider the cleverly named Virginia Slims brand that was marketed to women. Or else Lucky Strikes’ famous 1920s campaign of “reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” (Which, incidentally, spawned one of the most ridiculous feuds in health history: The National Confectioners Association threatened to sue Lucky. The candy lobby published antismoking pamphlets that, as Allan Brandt writes in The Cigarette Century, stressed the importance of candy as food.)

But alas, cigarettes’ costs far outweigh any resulting trimness, just as asphyxiation outweighs the benefits of stretching out the spine when you hang yourself from a shower curtain rod.

The Science of Inhaling and Exhaling

I’ve been breathing wrong my whole life. By my calculations, I’ve taken 220,752,000 incorrect breaths, plus or minus.

According to people who think about the lungs a lot, my problem is twofold: I breathe shallowly and through my mouth.

Let me take those problems one at a time.

I’ve always been a mouth breather. When I listen back to interviews I’ve tape-recorded, it sounds like Darth Vader is doing push-ups in the background. I’d hoped this year to learn that mouth breathing is good for you, so I could proclaim its benefits and start a Mouth Breathing Pride movement.

Unfortunately, it’s not. The nose conditions the air—it warms it up, humidifies it, and filters out harmful bacteria. It provides multiple lines of defense, including regular hair, microscopic hair (cilia), bones called turbinates, and mucus. Plus, some doctors argue that nose breathing produces nitrous oxide, which dilates the blood vessels and increases oxygen absorption.

And then there’s deep breathing. According to The Harvard Medical School Guide to Stress Management, deep breathing slows your heart rate and lowers your blood pressure. (The same guide also has one of the greatest passages I’ve read all year: “A ‘washboard’ stomach, considered so attractive in our culture, encourages men and women to constrict their stomach muscles. This adds to tension and anxiety, and gradually makes ‘chest breathing’ feel normal.” Six-pack abs are bad for you! Harvard says so! A huge relief for me.)

I decided I needed some lessons in deep breathing. First, I went to see the owner of perhaps the most famous pair of lungs in America—David Blaine. Blaine has the world record for holding his breath. He did it for seventeen minutes and four seconds. He used a method called “lung-packing,” where you breathe in as much air as you can, then squeeze in even more air with four short inhalations. (I know this is an overused phrase, but if there’s one time it fits, this is it: PLEASE do not do this at home.)

I’d met Blaine when I interviewed him for Esquire. I went into the article skeptically but found him charming and thoughtful. Plus, he’s obsessed with health. (His morning juice recipe, which I’ve tested several times: “Two cloves of garlic, bok choy, kale, collard greens, spinach, half a beet, half an apple, two lemons, and cayenne pepper.”)

I arrived at Blaine’s office, with its huge posters of Houdini and a motorcycle in the entryway. When I got there, Blaine was on the phone having a normal, everyday conversation about an upcoming appearance. “Yeah, this is the last time I’m going to eat glass,” he says. “I promised my fiancée. It does crazy damage. It rips up my stomach, takes all the enamel off my teeth.” Agreed. Blaine hangs up.

He offers me a fist-size stalk of raw ginger, supposedly good for preventing colon cancer and inflammation. It would be rude to say no.

“Just chew it, get the juice, then spit it out,” he says. He tears into a hunk of his own with his enamel-free teeth.

I ask him about what to do to get the healthiest lungs.

“If you want the cleanest air, you should move to Tasmania or Antarctica. But if that’s not possible, you should get an IQAir Purifier. It’s the brand that the athletes used in the Beijing Olympics.”

And what about deep breathing? I don’t need to hold my breath for a quarter of an hour. But I would like to breathe deeper.

Blaine inhales. “Feel the air fill your lungs,” he says. I do. “Now feel the air fill your stomach, your shoulders, everywhere.” I try to imagine my whole torso filling with air. I hold it in, and then exhale. Blaine doesn’t.

“Now let’s do some stretches,” he says.

“How do you like your ginger?” he asks as we slowly wave our arms overhead. I tell him it’s got more of a kick than I imagined. He still hasn’t exhaled.

Before I leave, we chat some more about the Esquire article. He does, eventually, exhale. I liked Blaine’s advice about trying to get air into every crevice of your upper body. But I wanted a second opinion.

I got it from a vocal coach named Justin Stoney. Stoney had me lie on the floor, put my hand on my stomach, and feel it rise when I inhaled. “Don’t even try to inhale,” he said. “Just push out your stomach, and you’ll create a vacuum, and the air will come in. When you exhale, flatten your stomach out.”

This stomach-breathing turned out to be a life changer. A small life changer, but still. When I run, I stomach-breathe, and I don’t do nearly as much huffing and puffing as I used to. It saves me from that unpleasant burning-chest feeling. I’m doing it right now, at my treadmill desk. I’m pushing out my stomach on the inhale so that it resembles an Andrew Weil–like potbelly, then sucking back in on the exhale.

Moments of Zen

I can’t leave the topic of deep breathing without mentioning meditation. Meditation, like yoga and libertarianism, has gone mainstream. Marines meditate cross-legged, their rifles on their laps, as part of their training. My six-year-old son does breathing exercises at school (though their mantra is the not-so-Hindi “sniff the flower, blow out the candle”). The medical benefits are rock-solid: lower rates of depression and heart disease, improved attention.

I first learned meditation from a Zen center in the Village when I wrote an article on unitasking—the art of doing only one thing at a time. For the past few months, I’ve been meditating a couple of times a week in the living room, after Julie’s gone to sleep, sitting on the floor and staring at the wall for ten minutes.

But lately, I’ve tried to meditate every day. Because of time constraints, I end up doing what I call contextual meditation. I meditate anywhere when I have five minutes—on the bus, on the subway, waiting for a walk sign.

I’m not alone. I found a wellness website with instructions on how to meditate in a noisy environment. I tried it when I was undergoing an MRI the other day (I was getting scanned for a brief episode of blurry vision, which turned out to be nothing.) Now, if you’ve never had an MRI, you should know that they are loud, almost comically so. The technician gives you earplugs, but that doesn’t come close to blocking the sound. The MRI has a repertoire of noises that resemble, in no particular order: a game-show buzzer for a wrong answer, urgent knocking, a modem from 1992, a grizzly-bear growl, and a man with a raspy voice shouting what sounds like “mother cooler!”

The key is to let the noise glide through your brain without stopping to interpret it. Don’t try to block out the sound waves. Just notice them as they float by, and say, “Isn’t that interesting.” The website tells us not to ponder the sounds’ origins. Instead focus on the tones and vibrations. “Mo-ther-coo-ler. Mo-ther-coo-ler.”

That’s quite a sound. But it doesn’t bother me. It was the most relaxing MRI of my life.

A Breath of Fresh Air

On a Wednesday for lunch, Julie and I go to visit my grandfather. He is, no surprise, stretched out on the recliner, wearing a red shirt with long sleeves. He looks older. His wrists are as thin as broomstick handles, his eyes rheumy. His breathing is labored. Which is understandable. As you age, the lungs deteriorate. They lose the air sacs and capillaries, the diaphragm weakens, the muscles get less elastic.

Julie leans down to kiss him.

“Hi, dear,” he says, in between breaths.

He asks about my boys, but I can tell he can’t remember their names.

“What are you working on, A.J.?” he asks.

I tell him I am writing about lungs. “You know, you helped New Yorkers’ lungs,” I say.

“Oh?” he says.

“All the mass transit projects you worked on. You helped cut down on pollution.”

“Oh, yes?”

He seems pleased, but confused. I remind him of his bold idea. Long a booster of the subway and bus system, my grandfather decided a couple of years ago that mass transit should be free, like water or radio. The result would be fewer people driving cars, less smog, more efficiency. He funded a study and lobbied the mayor.

“That’s going to happen soon,” he says. Typical optimism, perhaps delusional.

“Hope so,” I say.

New York’s air pollution is bad, but it could be much worse. The American Lung Association recently found it to be the seventeenth worst city for ozone pollution (Los Angeles got first) and the twenty-first for particle pollution (Bakersfield, California, won the title).

Air pollution causes all sorts of problems, including emphysema, asthma, and cardiac diseases. The World Health Organization estimates that 2.1 million people die from air-pollution-related diseases every year. But that’s just a rough guess. It’s unclear how many New Yorkers succumb.

The best you can do is try to keep your house’s air clean. Don’t use scented candles or products. Clean the air conditioner every year. Some doctors say you should open the windows for fifteen minutes a day, because indoor air tends to be dirtier than outdoor air. If you have lung problems, buy a HEPA filter. Don’t bike or jog on busy roads, because the car fumes do more damage when you’re breathing heavily. And if you’re really committed, buy an N95 surgical mask, a special kind that screens out particles. I tested one out while walking on my smelly, rubber-burning treadmill. It was rain-forest hot to breathe into it.

“You seem to have survived the pollution, Grandpa,” Julie points out.

“Still hanging in there,” he replies, smiling.

“Actually, you picked a good place to live, Grandpa,” I say.

I tell him that despite the pollution, New York has a surprisingly high life expectancy: 78.6 as opposed to the national average of 77.8. Why? Theories vary, but most agree that a lot of it has to do with the amount New Yorkers walk. As the city’s former commissioner of public health told New York magazine, our metropolis is like one big gym.

“Though you could have done a little better,” I say. “Like Okinawa.”

The southern Japanese prefecture has the highest number of centenarians, thanks to a mix of factors (steep hills for walking, lots of manual labor even among the elderly, a low-fat, low-sugar diet, etc.).

“Or you could have been a Seventh-day Adventist in San Diego.” Another cluster of extremely long-lived people, thanks in part to close family ties and a strict no-meat diet.

“The what now?” he says.

“Seventh-day Adventists. They’re a religious group. You could join.”

“I think it’s too late.”

Checkup: Month 15

Weight: 158

Packs of gum chewed since tooth chapter: 48

Minutes spent meditating per day: 10

Minutes of that when actually meditating as opposed to thinking of something trivial: 2

My sedentary behavior is down to about four hours a day. Have I mentioned how much I love walking on the treadmill? I type on it, brush my teeth on it, take my fish-oil supplements on it. It gives me a sense of accomplishment, as odd as that may sound for something designed to keep you in place. I’ve now been working on this book for 880 miles. I’m hoping to break a thousand by the end.

I often wonder what the previous me would think of the me that I’ve become. I’m now the guy who wears bike shorts even when not biking. I’m the only one at parties who actually eats the crudités. At restaurants, I ask if the salmon is farm-raised or wild. And that it not be blackened (blackening has been linked to cancer). And that there be no starch on the plate when it is served.

I think the previous me would not return my e-mails.