Herbal Health

Unless you’ve had lessons, chances are that you don’t know how to breathe. And that’s trouble, says breath researcher and psychologist Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., who has taught Olympic athletes and thousands of other people how to breathe at his Hendricks Institute in Santa Barbara, California.

Dr. Hendricks conducted experiments and reviewed more than 300 scientific studies of “breathwork” while researching his popular book Conscious Breathing. He is convinced that most of us could use a few breathing lessons. Here’s why.

Breathing is how we rid most toxins, like carbon dioxide, from our bodies and how we cleanse and oxygenate our blood and every cell, says Dr. Hendricks. The remaining wastes are discharged through urine, sweat, and defecation. If we aren’t breathing right, other purification systems-such as our kidneys-get overworked.

But, Dr. Hendricks says, “there is one universal breathing problem: the tendency to hold your belly muscles too tense so that you can’t get a deep breath down into the center of your body.” Instead most of us breathe from the top of our lungs. Here’s the problem with that. “Less than Mo liter of blood per minute flows through the top of the lungs; 2/3 liter per minute flows through the middle of the lungs, and more than a liter flows through the bottom,” says Dr. Hendricks.

The chest breather constantly discharges too much carbon dioxide and takes in too little oxygen through short, shallow breaths. The imbalance forces the heart to work unauthorized overtime, and that raises the blood pressure.

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The role of female hormones

The fact that breast cancer is about 100 times more common in women than in men suggests a role for the female sex hormones.

Women whose first period occurred at a young age seem to be more at risk of developing breast cancer, as are those who have had their first child late (at 30 to 34 years old), and those who have had a late menopause. It seems that the longer a woman is exposed to her own female hormones – particularly oestrogen -the more at risk she is. Some diets which can lead to obesity, particularly those high in fats, can also lead to an earlier onset of menstruation. Thus girls in the well-nourished and high socioeconomic groups of the industrialized West, where the incidence of breast cancer is high, tend to have their first periods younger than those in areas of malnutrition where the disease is less common.

In pre-menopausal women, it is the ovarian oestrogen which is relevant, and this is produced for as long as menstruation continues. Breast cancer is less common in women who have had an operation to remove their ovaries in their 30s or 40s, before their menopause.

In the past, the doses of oestrogen used in hormone replacement therapy (HRT) may have been linked to a slightly increased risk if taken for longer than 10 years. HRT is now normally given as a combination of oestrogen and progestogen, and the drug doses are much lower. There is no evidence that modern HRT is linked with the development of cancer; in fact, some doctors continue to give it to women who have breast cancer.

Modern contraceptive pills – which also contain a very low hormone dose – have little apparent risk. They do, however, reduce the risk for endometrial and ovarian cancers. Fibroadenomas in the breast are also less common in women taking the low-dose contraceptive pill.

Smoking

Cancer cells may spontaneously develop at any time and are usually destroyed by the body’s immune system. As smoking suppresses the immune system, it is not surprising that all cancers are more common in those who smoke.

Other risk factors

Other risk factors have been suggested, but with less supporting evidence. For example, there may be a small, but real, link between high alcohol consumption and breast cancer. Stress, either the experience of it or the way it is dealt with, has also been implicated.

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Testing blood fat levels

High blood cholesterols are clearly associated with a risk of heart attack but blood triglycerides (another sort of fat) are not. Screening for cholesterols is recommended every five years from the late teens. They are not worth screening for past 65.

Syphilis tests

Three-quarters of all cases of undetected syphilis will eventually develop incurable ‘tertiary’ complications which are very severe indeed. The ‘at-risk’ group is the 20-50 range. Recommendations for screening vary greatly but it is probably sensible to do one test when the person becomes sexually active and every five years after that to age 50. Pregnant women should be screened for syphilis as a routine

Gonorrhea tests

This is a disease without symptoms in 75 per cent of women and 10 per cent of men. Some people feel that screening is not warranted because the disease is relatively easy to treat, and because however well we screen we shall never be able to eliminate the disease from the population most at risk. Others recommend that yearly screening be done from the time a person becomes sexually active. Perhaps a good compromise is a test at the time of the first pelvic examination and then every five years to 44.

Screening for phenylketonuria

This disease, which can cause mental handicap if not detected and treated very early in life, is already routinely screened for at birth.

Chest X-rays

Because of the low cure rates of lung cancer (8 per cent survive 5 years, regardless of the stage of the tumour at detection), it is now no longer thought reasonable to do chest X-rays as a screening procedure. ‘At-risk’ populations should still be screened for tuberculosis though. Perhaps a baseline chest X-ray at 35 or 40 is sensible with a repeat at five- or ten-year intervals.

Electrocardiograms

It is useful to have a baseline ECG done at about age 35-40 with repeats every five to ten years.

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For years, Susan Carlson couldn’t stomach the thought of eating in the morning. But only after becoming a breakfast loyalist did she lose 36 pounds.

Faced with choosing between a bowl of cereal and another 15 minutes of sleep, Susan would always go for the extra snooze time. “Food first thing in the morning never appealed to me,” says the 42-year-old sales manager from Newport, Rhode Island.

Because she would eat dinner at around 6:00 P.M. and then skip breakfast, Susan was going foodless for up to 18 hours at a stretch. By noon, she’d be famished. So she’d plunge into a huge lunch, then spend the rest of the day snacking on cookies and potato chips.

By the time Susan reached her early thirties, she weighed 181 pounds. She was so embarrassed about her appearance that she stopped shopping in clothing stores. “I only ordered out of catalogs—always clothing with elastic waists,” she recalls.

After several unsuccessful weight-loss attempts, Susan asked some of her slender friends how they stay slim. Their answer: breakfast.

Susan started slowly, with one slice of toast and a cup of coffee. She eventually added a bowl of cereal or oatmeal to her morning meal. To her surprise, she was less hungry at lunch and her midday munching stopped.

Now, her favorite breakfast foods include oatmeal, Kashi cereal with strawberries, and whole-wheat toast with a slice of cheese. Susan lost 36 pounds in less than a year. Her slimmer figure has made her a breakfast believer.

WINNING ACTION

Eat a real breakfast. Many women, like Susan, skip breakfast—and overeat all day as a result. Research shows that people who eat a healthy and hearty breakfast are thinner than those who eat no breakfast at all. That’s because breakfast helps boost your metabolism,so you burn calories more efficiently all day. For years, I skipped breakfast, too. Now, I make sure to grab something in the morning: a banana, a CI if Bar, or some yogurt. It’s amazing how much more energy I have until lunchtime.

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