Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

“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,”