How to Increase Blood Oxygen Levels: Breathing Hack

Dr. Berg’s Healthy Keto and Intermittent Fasting Podcast

Dr. Eric Berg

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this podcast, we’re going to talk about breathing. Deep breathing does not increase blood oxygen levels. In fact, it can cause dizziness, make you tired, and even make you pass out.

Your red blood cells will not release oxygen unless enough carbon dioxide (CO2) is present. This is known as the Bohr effect. This means that the amount of oxygen released from your blood into your cells is dependent upon CO2.

If you’re breathing a lot or hyperventilating, you’ll get too much oxygen and not enough CO2. Too much oxygen can be dangerous to the body. If you give a baby too much oxygen, it can cause blindness, an epileptic seizure, or a coma. Too much oxygen also causes oxidation.

People in a panicked state experience acute hyperventilation. Chronic hyperventilation, also known as carbon dioxide syndrome, is a lack of carbon dioxide that occurs when a person is consuming too much air. This is often triggered by stress.

Mouth-breathing can deplete CO2 and inhibit oxygen absorption at the cellular level. This can affect the heart and cause hypoxia, fatigue, insomnia, muscle twitching, and increased histamine.

To fix this problem, you need to train your body to breathe properly to get oxygen deep into the cells by doing the following:

1. Relax your breathing.

Take soft, gentle breaths through your diaphragm and stomach, not your upper chest. Breathe in slowly for 5 seconds and exhale for 5 seconds. Practice this before you sleep at night, while driving, or while watching TV.

This simple breathing technique can help your body get out of fight-or-flight mode. You can even use a free app to help you time your breathing!

2. Breathe through your nose.

Your nose cleans, humidifies, and filters the air before it enters your lungs. Nose breathing increases your oxygen by 20%!

3. Use nose strips.

Nose strips can help open your airways and sinuses while you sleep to help you breathe better.

4. Use mouth tape.

Mouth tape can help you breathe through your nose while you sleep. You can filter the air all night, get more oxygen, and sleep better. You won’t wake up with a dry mouth, and you’ll wake up feeling refreshed. Mouth tape might even stop your snoring!

Book Link: https://www.amazon.com/Carbon-Dioxide...

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm going to show you how to increase your oxygen with a simple breathing technique.
0:06.6	There is a lot of confusion on this oxygen topic.
0:10.3	And one of the big ones is if you deep breathe, you're going to get more oxygen.
0:14.4	That is absolutely not true. In fact, if you want to prove it to yourself,
0:19.4	just start deep breathing right now and see how long it takes before you end up passing out.
0:25.0	You're going to start feeling dizzy, you're going to feel tired.
0:28.5	So yes, when you're deep breathing, you're getting more air, but you're not getting more oxygen.
0:34.3	You know, we have this false idea that oxygen is good and CO2 is bad.
0:40.2	It's a waste product.
0:41.4	But if we take a look at what's in air, there's a lot of oxygen, there's not a lot of CO2.
0:47.1	If we do a comparison between oxygen and CO2, in units, it'd be like 160 units of oxygen per given amount of air to one third of
0:59.6	1% that's 0.3, CO2. So the question is where is a CO2 coming from when we exhale? It's coming from our
1:09.9	cells. The mitochondria takes in oxygen, burn stuff, and releases CO2.
1:17.9	So our bodies are CO2 machines.
1:20.5	Of course, with plants, it's just the opposite. They eat CO2 and they put out oxygen.
1:27.6	But I want you to understand something about CO2 and oxygen.
1:32.4	There's something called the bore effect, that's Boh H R, and the bore effect kind of goes like this.
1:39.0	The oxygen will not be released from your red blood cells unless you have enough CO2.
1:49.2	The amount of oxygen that's released from your blood into your cells is dependent on CO2. If you're breathing a lot, right,
1:57.2	and you're not able to have enough CO2 in there, you're going to get too much oxygen.
2:03.0	Too much oxygen is very damaging to the body.
2:06.0	If you gave a baby pure oxygen, you can actually cause blindness.
	...

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