Did you know that Nobel Price Winner Otto Warburg demonstrated that cancer cells live in low oxygen environments? Here is what he said about oxygen and cancer:
“Cancer, above all other diseases, has countless secondary causes. But, even for cancer, there is only one prime cause. Summarized in a few words, the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar.” — Dr. Otto H. Warburg in Lecture
Simply put, as he decreased oxygen in cells, they became cancerous.
Okay, I’m no cancer expert. However, I know my body and I know I feel better when I’m breathing. I’ll catch myself contemplating some problem to solve, only to discover I have stopped breathing? Have you ever done that? You are feeling some pressure and so you just stop breathing?
Having taught sound medicine for years, I know most of us breath very shallowly. We are unaccustomed to really filling our lungs. Most of us don’t even realize our lungs go all the way up to your shoulders and all the way down to your solar plexus. We can and need to breathe into the back and sides of our lungs, as much as we do the front.
When breathing shallowly our heart and lungs have to work harder because you have to breathe more rapidly in order to get enough oxygen to your body. Plus you probably aren’t getting as much of the carbon dioxide out of your body, which means you may have too much carbon dioxide in your blood.
Breathe deeply and your heart slows down, you take in plenty of life-giving oxygen, you exhale enough of carbon dioxide—helping you maintain a better acid/alkaline balance for optimum health.
Doesn’t it feel great when you can get outside once or twice a day and just breathe? We live in a dynamic and wonderful symbiotic relationship with the trees and plants around us. They exhale oxygen and we breathe it in. We exhale carbon dioxide and they breathe it in.
So when you catch yourself not breathing or breathing shallowly, remind yourself to breathe and drink in that precious life-sustaining gift from the trees—oxygen!