Dedication

For my mother, Anne

Let your mind run deep;Let benevolence flood your relationships;Let your words sing freely and true;Let your decisions be peaceful and just;Let your business be done well;Let your actions be timely, fulling and complete.

Lao Tzu

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Part One: BodyWorks

Food

Air

Water

Sunlight

ShapeShifting (Exercise)

Part Two: Top-to-Toe

An A-Z of 80 Ailments and their Treatment, from Acne to Vitiligo

Part Three: Hands-On

An A-Z of Selected Complementary Therapies, from Acupuncture to Zero Balancing

Part Four: SoulWorks

Energy

Medicine Now!

Animal Magic

Meditation and Prayer

Time Out

Further Reading

Bibliography

Resources

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

You know St John’s Wort is nature’s own Prozac and good for mild to moderate depression, but you don’t know how much to take or for how long. You read somewhere that rotting banana skins can help heal a verruca, or was that one you imagined? Your sister told you there’s a great new hands-on massage treatment which will leave you feeling revitalised and centred, but you’ve forgotten the name and you’d love to escape to one of the new ‘spiritual spas’, but don’t know where to go or what to take with you.

If these are the kinds of things that race around your brain as you try to keep up with what’s new in holistic and complementary health, then this is the book for you. If you’re forever cutting health and lifestyle snippets from newspapers and magazines and then losing them, or if you push your trolley around the supermarket trying to remember which is better – oat bran or wheat bran? – then What Really Works has the answer.

Packed with cutting-edge advice and proven tips to help you lead a more holistic and nourishing life, it takes the legwork out of figuring out how best to enjoy optimum health and well-being for the rest of your life. You don’t have to do the research because I’ve done it for you.

In the first section, BodyWorks, you will learn, for example, about the most important five building blocks of good health – Food, Air, Water, Sunlight and Exercise. You’ll find out why prebiotics are the next big wave in digestive health and how to breathe properly again. Find out why you should not be hiding indoors from sun and how a form of Tai Chi with a broom handle (of all things!) can help keep you in good physical shape.

Section II, which is called Top-to-Toe, is an A–Z of everyday health complaints, from acne to vitiligo. Here you will find the same no-nonsense advice that has made my weekly columns in The Sunday Times, The Times and The Sun such a hit with 18 million readers. You’ll discover it’s true that a banana skin can help get rid of a verruca – but only if you tape the blackened inside of the skin over the head of the wart. You’ll also learn why homocysteine, a normal byproduct of metabolism, is a more important indicator of potential heart problems than cholesterol, and find out how you can reverse lots of digestive disorders.

Again, I’ve read the books, interviewed the health gurus and been pummelled and prodded by a variety of hands-on therapists so that I can report back on what really works. You will find the best nutritional, herbal, homeopathic and other natural remedies to 80 conditions, ranging from whey protein concentrate for athlete’s foot to nettle tea for the common and distressing Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Section III, Hands-On, will help you sort your Reiki (pronounced ray-key) from your Metas (Metamorphic Technique). If you’ve never heard of either, this A–Z section will unravel the mystery and help you decide which complementary treatment best suits you, your stage in life or any particular problem you may currently have. We’ve reviewed some of the very best complementary therapies and can tell you how to find a good practitioner, what will happen during treatment, and what you will feel during the session and after.

Discover, too, how just two supplements and a common herb will give you the same energy levels you had 10 years ago and find out more about the new concept of energy and vibrational medicine, which encourages practitioners to treat the cause and not the symptoms of an illness.

In SoulWorks, we turn to spiritual health – every bit as important as your physical well-being. This section draws from the world’s richest and most potent healing traditions to put you back in touch with your own inner voice. Find out how animals bring signs from those guiding you on your spiritual path. Discover the significance and the names of your own power animals, and learn some of the shamanic techniques that all our ancestors practised before modern medicine was born, when everyone accepted that sickness was a reflection of an ailing soul.

You will, and may already have, found you own spiritual path, but in the chapter devoted to Prayer & Meditation I will introduce you to a simple but powerful meditation technique where you get all the anti-stress and inner health benefits of stilling the mind, without having to sit on a cold, hard floor or remembering to chant ‘om’.

Finally, the last chapter, Time Out, shows you how to nourish your soul by taking off on a spiritual retreat. Forget limp lettuce leaves and carrot juice. The spiritual spa has taken over from the health farm as the ultimate escape for those seeking a new way of living. You can have warm oil poured over your mystical third eye, book an holistic body massage with a therapist who has trained for seven years with Thai monks or practise your yoga Sun Salutations to the sound of the Caribbean sea lapping the palm-fringed shore. In this chapter I recommend my own personal list of the Top 10 best secret hide-aways that really will give your mind, body and soul a break. You won’t find these in any spa or guidebook but you will, if you go to any of them, return to your daily life feeling inspired and spiritually renewed.

One of the biggest criticisms of complementary treatments is that there is no true evidence to show they work. This is rubbish. You just have to dig for it. Of course, most people do not have time to scour the latest scientific papers, read every new health book or talk to the experts, but that is my job. I am never off duty and I love what I do. I consider myself lucky to get paid for it, and even more fortunate to be able to pass what I learn on so that other people can also take responsibility for their own health.

This is not a book you have to read from cover to cover but, if you like, a reference manual which you can dip in and out of at will. There’s an excellent Resources section to help you find the practitioners and products you need to stay healthy, and a comprehensive Bibliography to help you start to build your own ‘health library’, or simply find out more.

Throughout the writing of this book, I’ve had one vivid image in mind. I live in the Chiltern Hills in Oxfordshire, about an hour out of London and opposite a lush green beechwood. As the idea of a book which bridged my twin interests of complementary health and a more sacred way of living took root, I noticed that the early summer foxgloves outside my home were growing with renewed vigour.

One afternoon, while walking my dog, I strayed from the marked footpath and stumbled across a magnificent row of six-footers; standing like sentries guarding the woodland. I had never noticed foxgloves in that spot before and I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again, but what struck me was the realisation that each and every one had it’s roots firmly in the woodland soil and shade but was growing, as fast as it could, towards the light.

I can’t think of a better metaphor for that new and more sacred way of living that so many of us have now set our hearts on. Take a detour from your own fixed path and you too will find yourself reaching away from the shadows towards the light. My wish for my book is that it will be a tool to help other like-minded people find the inner strength to recognise their own journey and embark on it.

Susan Clark

www.WhatReallyWorks.co.uk

part one

Body Works

Food

The Artificial Gut

In a humble laboratory at the Institute of Food Research in the UK, there is a machine which operates exactly like a real human gut. Each day it is ‘fed’ different foods so that the scientists can figure out just what does go on in the human colon. What they are particularly interested in is the balance of the bacteria in the human gut. What, for example, happens to the bacteria which normally help us digest our food when the diet is too high in sugar? How does the artificial gut cope with antibiotics or prescription drugs, including the contraceptive pill? How does a gut that is fed infant formula differ from one that is nourished with human breastmilk, and what happens when the researchers deliberately change the gut flora by introducing man-made molecules that can act as a kind of fast food for the good bacteria and which also work in the body to starve the toxic bad ones?

The work that is quietly going on in this lab is not to be laughed at or dismissed lightly, because if vitamin and mineral supplements were the first wave of getting back to good health in the 20th century, then the secrets of the human gut, which has to process these dietary supplements, holds the key to optimum health in this new century.

It is not right to say ‘you are what you eat’. You are, though, a reflection of how your body absorbs what you eat, and for too many adults in the West, the honest answer when asked ‘how are you?’ is ‘not great’.

This does not mean you are sick. You function. You get out of bed each day, run a household, sort out the kids, hold down a job, but you never feel 100%. You may be tired all the time, your skin may be less than glowing. Maybe you just don’t have the energy to get out there and exercise. However it shows up, you know you could be better.

Digestive disorders are the root cause of 70% of all complaints and health problems, according to naturopaths who treat illness with a combination of nutrition, homeopathy and herbalism. Gut problems now cause more days off work (after the common cold) than any other health problem, and a third of the adult population is troubled by Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), where the symptoms alternate between chronic constipation and diarrhoea.

More frightening is the fact that cancer of the colon is now the second biggest cancer killer after cancer of the breast in women and lung cancer in men. In humans, it is now believed that tumours arise 100 times more often in the large intestine, compared with the small one. What scientists must now find out is whether some of the large intestinal bacteria are actually producing carcinogenic or tumour-promoting compounds as a byproduct of their own metabolism. If this is what is going on, the solution may be as simple as changes to the diet. The progress of a colon cancer is slow, making it more than susceptible to the right kind of dietary intervention.

What to Eat

The message has not changed, so if you care about your health, you will have probably heard it before. If you want to avoid some of the worst toxins now used in the production of nutrient-poor foods from nutrient-robbed soils – and at the last count, there were an estimated 250,000 of them – switch to an organic diet wherever you can.

Organic food has been produced without the use of chemicals to protect the crop from insects or accelerate crop growth, and so while it may have been fashionable of late to join a backlash claiming there is no difference between organic and non-organic food, adopting this view flies in the face of both science and common sense.

Hard evidence that organic food is healthier to eat than conventional crops has now been published by scientists who claim they finally have the proof that plants grown without artificial pesticides and fertilisers contain higher levels of nutrients.

The study is one of the first to confirm what those of us who intuitively support organic farming have long suspected – that organic fruit and vegetables do not just taste better, but offer greater health benefits too.

Researchers backed by Britain’s organic watchdog The Soil Association compared plants grown under strict organic conditions with those grown by conventional farming methods. The team, based at the University of Copenhagen, found that organic plants contained higher levels of vitamins and far more ‘secondary metabolites’ – a family of compounds which help protect plants from outside attack. When eaten in fresh fruit and vegetables, some of these metabolites are thought to lower the risk of cancer and heart disease.

There is no question too, that increasing the amount of raw food in your diet will also make you healthier. This is because a raw food diet will boost levels of the enzymes we need to break down and digest our food, at every stage of this process from the mouth to the gut. Even a short time on a mostly raw food diet can help detox the body, boost energy levels and help normalise the digestive tract. I have included three simple but powerful detox diets in this book (see pages 130, 136 and 147). Try them and watch how, as your health gets better on the inside, this is reflected on the outside as the condition of your skin, hair and nails improve beyond recognition.

For everyday eating, government guidelines in most countries suggest you aim for five portions of fruit and vegetables daily. For optimum health, though, you should actually be aiming for eight. Thankfully, that means eight in total – that is, fruit or veg, not eight of each.

People often get confused about what constitutes a portion. There is no need to fret about exact weights or to spend hours counting the broccoli florets in your raw vegetable side-salad, but as a rough guideline a portion is the equivalent of a slice of bread, half a bowl of rice, half a standard side-salad, a broccoli spear or a small apple.

Aiming for eight portions is easier said than done, of course, since most people hate chomping their way through what are laughingly called ‘health foods’. Maybe not so funny, since, as this term implies, so many foods are not healthy at all. In fact, if you do give in to a junk diet and spend years eating these more popular but nutritionally-starved foods, then far from nourishing you, they will eventually make you sick.

If you are in any doubt that the food on your plate really can affect your health, reflect on this: in Japan, where the diet is rich in substances called phytochemicals, especially soya, 25% fewer women succumb to breast cancer than in the West. Men, too, benefit from these nutrients, because while the rates of prostate cancer in the East and the West are similar, far fewer Japanese men will actually die of the disease.

Conversely, cancer rates among East Asians who migrate and adopt Western diets mimic those of the Western world, within a shockingly short period of time.

Cheat Your Way to Better Health

Juicing is the ultimate cheat to better health. It’s the quickest way to get live enzymes straight into the stomach and bloodstream, and is also the fast-track way to eat those eight portions of raw fruit and vegetables without getting jaw ache. Think about it: You need to juice about 16 medium-sized carrots to make a glass of carrot juice for breakfast. Despite the fact that carrots are a superb source of antioxidant compounds called monoterpenes and betacarotenes, which help protect against killer cancers and heart disease if eaten regularly, you probably don’t eat half that number in a week.

Juicing used to be as dull as ditchwater, but there are now lots of excellent and inspiring new juicing books (see the Bibliography), so if, after a few weeks of juice therapy, you’re still stuck with carrot and celery, you will only have yourself to blame.

You can juice, blend and pulp any vegetable, fruit or seed you care to name. Can’t face grinding your way through a bowl of selenium-rich prostate-protecting brazil nuts? Make a nut milk instead. Nut milks are an excellent alternative to dairy, especially for kids who have allergies to milk but who can tolerate nuts. Since nuts are also rich in the essential fatty acids (especially omega-3s) which work in the body to dislodge stored fat, they can even help with weight loss and tackle unsightly cellulite.

You can buy a decent standard juicer for less than £50, but if you’re serious about juicing or if you suffer from any of the digestive disorders detailed later in this book (see Top-to-Toe) and which mean you should be aiming for a 70% raw food diet, then The Champion Juicer is the one all the professionals use. It’s actually quite sleek-looking and not too bad to clean. It can pulp, mash and grind, and while it is not cheap, it is a reliable workhorse that will not let you down.

Eat with the Seasons

Eating with the seasons not only means you are getting your food fresh, it also brings real health benefits. Fresh young spring greens, for example, help cleanse and detoxify your system after the stagnation of winter. Warm, nourishing root vegetables sustain the body through the colder months of winter, and in the summer, light salads and juicy ripe fruits will keep energy levels high and the body hydrated.

Why Are You Still Eating Meat?

At the risk of upsetting meat-producers everywhere, I have to report that whenever I analyse the nutrutional content of any meat recipe, I find it hard to justify it’s place in any health book … including my Vitality Cookbook! Most meat contains cholesterol-raising hidden saturated fats and, unless you buy organic, it’s quite likely to contain more than lingering traces of the antibiotics animals are pumped full of to promote faster growth and higher profit margins.

There are lots of reasons to stop eating meat. Buddhists and Hindus, for example, believe that when you eat meat you lower your spiritual vibrations, and that with every mouthful you swallow the terrifying death screams of the animal which at it’s slaughter, often at the hand of someone it trusted to feed and nurture it, seeps into the memory of the muscle tissues.

If that’s too far out for you and you don’t, in any event, object to meat on a soul level, then think about your physical health. Vegetarians are three times less likely to have a heart attack or a stroke than meat-eaters. They have a 40% lower incidence of cancer and are less likely to suffer from arthritis, obesity, diet-related diabetes, constipation, gallstones, hypertension and many other ailments.

If you don’t care about your health, what about your figure? When did you last see a fat tree or a fat vegetarian? Neither of these depends on meat for survival, and nor do we. The inner lining of the human colon is pocketed to slow down digestion. This, according to nutritional anthropologists, suggests that our natural diet should be one of fruit and vegetables. The inner surface of the colon of a canine animal like the dog is smooth and unpocketed for fast transit and the digestion of meat.

Meat that stays in the gut rots in the gut and can cause additional problems including diverticulosis and bad breath. Think what a piece of meat would look and smell like if you left it on the worktop in the kitchen for four days. US researchers reckon that, on average, there’s eight pounds of undigested, putrefying meat in the intestines of an adult American.

Still dying for that medium rare steak?

When and How to Eat

If you are eating the right foods – and, just as importantly, at the right times – you should be able to eat as much as you like, when you like. Digesting food, converting it to energy that the body can use and eliminating waste takes an astonishing 80% of your total energy reserves. No wonder, then, that so many people who have irregular mealtimes, impaired digestion and no time to prepare good food for themselves feel tired all the time – the amount of energy they are spending on the whole process must be even higher.

Smaller, more frequent meals make less of a demand on your digestive tract than one or two large and late-night meals. Adopt a ‘nil by mouth’ policy after 5 p.m., and any excess weight you carry will naturally drop off.

The French, of course, savour their meal times and you would never catch them wolfing their way through some gastronomic delight with eyes glued to the TV. The way we eat our food is just as important as what we eat, and the guidelines I like to follow, whenever possible, are those put forward by Ayurvedic practitioners, who take their inspiration from India. (For a full explanation of Ayurveda – or the ancient Indian ‘science of life’ – see page 272).

One simple but highly effective tip from these practitioners, especially for those of you suffering digestive disorders, is to make and drink a special ginger pickle 30 minutes before each meal. The pickle, a combination of honey, freshly grated root ginger and lemon juice, together with a pinch of salt, all dissolved in warm water, does not taste as bad as it sounds. In fact it has a warming quality and, I can promise you, it definitely works.

Other healthy eating tips from the older healing traditions include leaving the table when you are three-quarters full (this is customary in yoga traditions); replacing your cutlery on the plate between mouthfuls to slow the rate at which you eat, avoiding all gassy or fizzy drinks and taking a short walk to help ease digestion after each meal.

The most important thing is to make time for the food you have prepared, and that means setting the table and sitting down to eat. Even when you are alone. Eating on the hoof may be tempting when you are in a rush but you will, eventually, pay for this bad habit with a disruption to your digestion.

True Nutrition

Many humble, everyday foods bring huge health benefits. Did you know, for example, that rhubarb is an excellent source of calcium, or that eating just two apples a day can reduce blood cholesterol levels by 16%? True nutrition would have nothing to do with supplements and everything to do with what you choose to put on your plate.

The biggest irony in modern medicine is that doctors have little or no training in nutrition – in the UK, most qualify with just an hour of nutritional training – yet the very idea that good nutrition is paramount comes from their own founding father, Hippocrates who said: ‘Let food be thy medicine’ and who believed that adjusting the diet should be the first step in any treatment to alleviate or prevent ill health.

The following guidelines show just how easy it is for all of us to use food as medicine:

Beating Stress: The B vitamins are known as nature’s own stress busters. They always work better together than when eaten alone, and are found in foods as diverse as bananas, cheese, sunflower seeds and soya. Eat lentils and brown rice for vitamin B6, which can alleviate nausea and help treat morning sickness; eat dairy products and fish for B12, which boosts energy and improves memory and concentration. Dark, leafy green vegetables are rich in folic acid, which can slow down ageing and help prevent heart problems.

Banishing Fatigue: Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) is an antioxidant vitamin-like substance needed to produce energy in every single cell in the body. Frequently taken by athletes to increase stamina, it bolsters the immune system and revitalises the body by boosting circulation, increasing the oxygenation of tissues and strengthening muscles. Food sources include tuna, spinach, sardines, peanuts, mackerel, sesame seeds and legumes, but it is highly perishable and easily destroyed by cooking, storing and processing, so eat as many of these foods raw – say in the form of Japanese sushi – as you can. Magnesium also plays a crucial role in the production of energy – eat fish, seafood, green leafy vegetables, whole grains, nuts, lemons, figs, apples, apricots, bananas and brown rice.

Boosting Immunity: High cholesterol levels can prevent white blood cells from getting to infected sites and from multiplying, so keep the saturated fat content of your diet down and watch out for hidden fats in processed foods and meats. Disease-fighting white blood cells are also slower to mobilise after alcohol consumption, so cut back on drinking. Vitamin A promotes thymus health, which in turn supports the immune system, so eat lots of yellow fruits and vegetables,organic dairy products and oily fish. Vitamin C is also a potent immune booster: eat citrus fruits, broccoli, kale, peas, tomatoes, orange juice, kiwi fruits, guava and papaya. Shiitake and Reishi mushrooms are also used as immune enhancers in Asian food.

Balancing Hormones: Hormones serve as the body’s messengers. They are secreted into the bloodstream by different organs, and different hormones have specific jobs. Even minor fluctuations in hormone levels can have a dramatic impact on the body. Thanks to the use of synthetic hormones in medicine and xeno-oestrogens in the environment and food production, our hormones have never been under greater threat. Phytochemicals, derived from natural plant substances such as soya, help rebalance hormones that have gone haywire. They act as adaptogens, preventing, for example, too much oestrogen from locking on to receptor sites in the body, and, conversely, boosting levels when they fall lower than normal. Foods containing these substances include soya, citrus fruits, vegetables, cereals, onions, garlic, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower.

Boosting Brainpower: Folic acid is crucial for proper brain function, yet surveys show it is one of the nutrients most deficient in our diets. Food sources include spinach, asparagus, turnip, greens, root vegetables, brewer’s yeast and brussels sprouts. Vitamin B₁₂ improves memory and concentration. Cheese, eggs, fish, clams and dairy products are all good sources. The amino acid Lysine will also boost brain power. Eat fish, soya products, cheese, yeast and lima beans when you need to be sharp and alert.

Aiding Digestion: Magnesium is crucial for proper bowel function, but is the second most common mineral deficiency in both sexes. Good natural sources include seafood, whole grains, dark leafy green vegetables and nuts. Add fibre-rich ground psyllium seeds to your food; avoid mucus-forming dairy products and keep caffeine down to a minimum.

Elimination is as important as digestion; the best way to flush toxins from the body is to drink a cup of warm water and lemon juice every morning and to fast one day a week. The herb Pau d’arco will also help restore the pH balance of the colon and promote healing. It tastes very planty but has excellent detoxifying properties, so make it an acquired taste. Bananas also help repopulate the good bacteria in the gut, which aid digestion – so make lots of banana smoothies.

Revitalising Your Skin: Intestinal health is crucial for glowing skin, so follow all the above to help regulate the bowels and keep the colon healthy. The skin is not just the body’s protective wrapping – it’s your largest organ too. Vitamin A is important for it’s maintenance, so eat lots of those yellow fruits and vegetables which are rich in carotenoids. Zinc, which is plentiful in oysters, pumpkin seeds, herring, eggs, crabmeat, turkey and seafood, will also help. Eat broccoli, tofu, green leafy vegetables and organic dairy produce too.

Revving Up Your Sex Life: Most people are surprised to learn that nutrition plays any role at all in sexual function and performance, but the sex hormones are controlled by the glands of the endocrine system, all of which can themselves be specifically nourished by certain nutrients. The B vitamins, for example, enter the cells of the thyroid gland to act as energisers and increase the hormonal flow. One way to boost the hormones responsible for libido is to mix 2 tablespoons of Brewer’s yeast with 2 tablespoons of wheat germ in a glass of organic vegetable juice. Drink this with your evening meal and the nutrients will be assimilated by bedtime.

The pituitary gland controls the sex hormones, and needs vitamin E and zinc, as well as the B vitamins, to function at optimum levels. Eat the same foods as above for zinc, and peanuts, almonds, pecans and brazil nuts for vitamin E.

Functional Foods

Back to that laboratory at the UK’s Institute of Food Research, where one of the most exciting projects being pioneered is the development of prebiotics. Many people have now heard of probiotics – foods or supplements which replenish levels of good bacteria in the gut – but prebiotics are an even more clever and natural concept. They take the biochemical process a stage back from probiotics.

What prebiotics do is work to rebuild the remaining levels of good bacteria by feeding them up to make them strong and dominant again. (See Fructo-oligosaccharides, known as FOS, page 100). As with probiotics, which are now common in yoghurts and other health drinks, prebiotics can easily be incorporated into everyday foods such as biscuits and breakfast cereals.

But among the more ingenious ideas currently being researched by Professor of Microbiology Glenn Gibson and his team is that of a ‘designer’ prebiotic which is combined with free-floating receptor chemicals that attract and then bind the toxic and possible cancer-causing bacteria strains. This would stop them from binding to the gut wall and, instead, flush them swiftly out of the colon before they can cause any serious or irreversible damage.

Professor Gibson, who co-built the first artificial colon in the UK, says:

It takes, on average, 70 hours for residual foodstuffs to pass through the colon where several hundred different species of bacteria are present. One important development and our real challenge now is that of synbiotics – where prebiotics and probiotics are combined in the same supplement.

Air

Deprive the body of oxygen and, within minutes, you will die. Without the breath, there is no life.

If you weren’t breathing you’d be dead. Right? Of course. So why do you need to read anything about how to breathe? A newborn baby can do it without a self-help manual, so why devote an entire chapter of a book to something that should be so instinctive?

The reason is that somewhere between that first gasp of oxygen into our tiny infant lungs, growing up and becoming adults who barely have time to catch their breath between one task and the next, most of us have forgotten how to breathe properly.

During an average day, you will take 12 breaths a minute. That adds up to 17,280 breaths each and every day of your life. In a healthy person, the diagphragm is responsible for up to 70% of respiration, leaving the rest to the chest and other respiratory muscles. That means, if I ask you to take a deep breath and you puff out your chest, you are not breathing as nature intended, using the full and generous capacity of your lungs which, if spread over a flat surface, would cover an area roughly the size of a tennis court.

One theory which tries to explain the growing number of degenerative diseases people suffer in the West is that many of them are caused by insufficient oxygen reaching the body’s tissues and organs. In recent years, cosmetic and alternative therapies based on oxygen-therapies have mushroomed.

If you stop, right now, and simply become aware of your own breathing you will see how just by paying attention to something you normally do subconsciously, it automatically changes. Once you start to concentrate on your breath, it will probably slow down, which is what happens in deep relaxation and meditation. You may have a strong urge to sigh and release a build-up of tension that you have now only just become aware of, even though it has been there throughout the time you have been reading this.

Let go of this deep sigh but keep your mouth closed so that the air escapes down through the nose. Lots of people teach breathing techniques where you breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. In yoga, which is where I re-learned how to breathe properly, we never let air in or out through the mouth but always rely on the nose, which has special filters or microvillae (minute hairs) to filter out pollutants and prevent the worst of them from getting into the lungs. It also means the air must travel further to reach the lungs and so gives it the chance to warm up to body temperature and humidity en route.

The fact is, we pay scant regard to our pattern of breathing throughout our normal daily activities, and it is only when someone brings it to our attention that we realise many of us ‘shallow breathe’ our way through life most of the time. Try to take that deeper breath and the chances are your shoulders will rise, you will puff out your chest and draw the air from somewhere in the region of the back of your throat.

This is because you are only using the upper regions of the lungs. What you should be doing is breathing in from the diaphragm. Unless you are a musician, you probably won’t know where this is, let alone how to use it, and because of this you will probably be using less than a third of your entire lung capacity.

Learning how to breathe properly again not only helps calm and quieten the mind but has also been shown to strengthen the immune system and improve the cardiovascular supply so that more oxygen is delivered around the body. People who run regularly, and so breathe deeply, also suffer all the usual age-related complaints at a much slower rate than non-runners.

Healthy lungs use only 3% of the body’s total energy. Diseased lungs will suck up more than a third of your energy reserves. Thankfully, learning to breathe properly is both enjoyable, since it is so soothing, and easy. As well as nourishing all our body’s tissues and fuelling it’s different systems, air keeps the mind sharp. The brain uses three times more oxygen than other organs, so if you are feeling sluggish, get breathing.

How to Breathe

A true breath starts by expanding the muscles of the diaphragm down and out. Then pushes them up and in again. This enables the lungs to expand to their full capacity, allows air to rush into them and helps it to be vigorously expelled. Breathing this way, even for a short while, is very re-energising.

Few forms of Western exercise attach any importance at all to how you breathe, but in yoga the breath and a rhythmic pattern of breathing is so important that a whole discipline is devoted to it: Pranayama. Prana means life and yama means it’s cessation.

The average volume of air you take in with a single breath is about 328 cubic centimetres. This can vary, of course, depending on your size, sex, posture, emotional and physical state and your environment. What the pranayama yogi teachers believe is that by re-learning how to breathe, you can increase this volume to 1640 cubic centimetres – a five-fold rise.

The lung tissues grow less elastic with age, but deep yogic breathing can reverse this deterioration and boost the body’s overall metabolism. It is so effective that there are now specialised Pranic healers who do nothing but teach the value of proper breathing to cleanse and strengthen the physical and spiritual body. The yogis believe that prana is a special, almost spiritual force which circulates with the oxygen and which travels through the body via a series of complex energy channels called the nadis. These are similar, in pattern, to our physical nerves and blood vessels but are governed by the chakras (see Chapter 10).

Yogic Breathing

In yoga, practitioners say that where the breath is, you’ll find the mind. What they mean is that if you can begin to control the breath, you can also begin to marshall the mind and free it from the stresses and strains of everyday life and it’s demands.

One of my favourite breathing exercises comes from the Sivananda discipline, one of the yoga schools which treat prana – the breath of life – with as much, if not more respect as the asanas or positions which are also practised to tone the body, cleanse the mind and massage the internal organs.

One of the simplest of these is called Anuloma Viloma, or alternate nostril breathing. It is very calming and helps rebalance energy throughout the body. There is no substitute here for experience, so try it and see how quickly you begin to feel back in tune with your body and, even better, re-energised.

Prepare by sitting comfortably on the floor. Try and keep the spine straight and, if you can sit in the lotus, half-lotus or cross-legged position, then do so. The important thing is to feel comfortable (sit on a chair if you like) so you can concentrate on the breathing instead of worrying, say, about that pain in your knee.

You must be careful how you seal off the right-hand nostril to start this breathing exercise. The yogis believe that different parts of the nostrils link subtly but directly with the chakras or energy centres in the body, and that clamping the nostril without regard for this can have an adverse effect.

Use the thumb and third finger of one hand to seal the nostril gently and remind yourself, before you start, there is no need for any force to be used. Now try it yourself.

To begin, gently seal the right-hand nostril with your thumb and breathe in through the left-hand nostril to a slow count of four. Hold the breath in the lungs while you switch to close the left-hand nostril with the third finger of your right hand, then release the air to a slow and controlled count of eight. Keep the left-hand nostril closed and breathe in through the right-hand side to a slow count of four. Hold the breath again as you switch nostrils and seal the right-hand side while you slowly release the air to a count of eight. If you cannot keep the breath controlled for a count of eight, cut back to four or six counts and build back up to eight. The breath control and quality are more important than the number you can count to.

To begin with, try and build up to 10 rounds of this breathing practice. You will feel the benefits immediately. As well as calming your mind and clearing blockages, both energetic and physical, this breathing exercise seems to reassure the body that everything is functioning as it should be.

Deep Breathing

In their excellent book Breathe Free (see Bibliography), the herbalist and nutritionist (respectively) Daniel Gagnon and Amadea Morningstar say that even the simplest forms of deep breathing help to ventilate the lungs and stimulate lymphatic drainage to speed up healing.

There are methods, particularly the Russian technique devised by Professor Konstantin Buteyko, which recommend the opposite. He argues that the root cause of some 200 conditions, especially asthma, is hyperventilation, where we take in too much air and breathe out too much carbon dioxide. It is true that some asthmatics who have embarked on the Buteyko programme have reported relief through shallow breathing exercises but as a non-sufferer and a keen student of yoga I am happier myself to practise techniques that have been tried and tested for thousands of years. Each day, whatever I am doing, I make a point of trying to remember to take three or four deep breaths every hour as recommended by Gagnon and Morningstar.

Dolphin Breathing

I used to swim every weekday morning before going on to my desk at the Sunday Times where I edited the Lifestyle health and fitness section of the popular Style magazine. Before too long, I twigged that whenever I was under particular stress, the nature of my swimming would change. I would forget about lengths or laps and find myself concentrating, instead, solely on the breath. It was as if I found a great release of tension by moving my swimming body in a rhythm with my breath. It might not look pretty to anyone dawdling about at the side of the pool, but what I found was that I gained even more relaxation, almost meditative benefits when I exaggerated this breathing pattern and spouted air, at the surface of the water, like a dolphin.

Imagine my surprise then when I stumbled across confirmation that there is no better way to release tension and relieve stress than breathing like a dolphin in water. In his book Animal-Speak, the animal expert and shamanic healer, Ted Andrews, confirms what I had discovered by accident, that breathing like a dolphin can bring great benefits. In a description of the power of dolphin medicine, he says the breath holds the key.

It can also, apparently, do wonders for your sex life. ‘Water is essential for life but so is breath,’ Andrews reminds us. ‘There are many different techniques for breathing and learning to breathe like a dolphin can not only help you become more passionate and sexual, it will also heal your body, mind and spirit.’

For the release of tension and stress, Andrews recommends you simply imitate the spouting breath the dolphin uses as it surfaces from the deep.

Keeping Lungs Healthy

Once you have improved the quality of your breathing, you can begin to investigate how diet and supplements can help keep strong lungs healthy. As well as vitamin C, another of the nutrients that is key to protecting all the membrane surfaces inside the body is vitamin A, which stimulates the immune system and which can be used in high doses – 30,000-100,000 international units (iu) – for no more than five days to beat a cold. For prevention, though, take just 10,000 iu a day.

An alkalizing nutrient which accelerates healing, vitamin A also has soothing properties that will ease an irritated throat. This is because it works to rebuild the mucosal lining of the lungs, promotes the lubrication of tissues and strengthens epithelial cells. Good food sources include carrots, dark leafy greens and sweet potatoes. In Ayurvedic medicine, pungent foods such as onions, garlic, leeks, ginger and chilli peppers are often used to help decongest the lungs.

How Minerals and Fish Oils Can Help

Minerals now being investigated by scientists who want to work out how nutrition can help prevent respiratory problems, especially asthma, include magnesium, selenium, sodium, copper, zinc and manganese. There is now a well-established link between a high sodium diet and an increase in asthma attacks. One of the jobs sodium does in the body is to help maintain nerve and muscle function. When there is a dietary sodium overload, the lungs of asthmatics have been shown to become supersensitive to the allergens that can trigger an attack. What researchers have also found is that a low sodium diet can improve healthy bronchial activity 1.5 times in men. (The same has not yet been shown with women, but then there are still only a small number of these studies.)

Magnesium is closely linked with sodium in the body. Raise the levels of one and the other will drop to compensate. In acute asthma, clinicians have found magnesium, which is destroyed by processing foods, has a dramatic effect; the scientific literature is now starting to catch up with this experiential evidence. For example, when a patient is admitted to casualty in the throes of an asthmatic attack, there is no difference in recovery rates when either magnesium or ventalin are given. In other words, this mineral can confer the same brochodilatory benefits as the normal prescription drug.

Blood serum levels of selenium, a powerful antioxidant which is believed to help protect the lungs, have been found to be low in asthmatics and, according to new research, taking paracetamol can decrease levels of another natural antioxidant called glutathione, which protects the lungs.

Researchers who compared aspirin and paracetamol in 664 asthmatics against it’s use in 910 people with no asthma found that those who took paracetamol every week were 80% more likely to have asthma than those who never touched it. They concluded that the paracetamol acts in some way to decrease levels of glutathione, resulting in less protection for the lungs. If you have any kind of breathing difficulties, then alcohol, which is a bronchcoconstrictor, will also be unhelpful.

A less well-known but highly promising mineral that can help keep lungs healthy is germanium, which not only helps deliver more oxygen to the body’s tissues but actually works to generate oxygen production inside the cells. It boosts the immune system, which supports lung function, helps the body get rid of debilitating toxins and is now being used in cancer therapy, since if there is one thing cancer cells hate it is a rich supply of oxygen. They need an anaerobic, or oxygen-free, environment to multiply, which means germanium has the potential to starve a malignancy to death.

You can find germanium in garlic, chlorella and the immune-boosting Reishi and Maitake mushrooms, but if you decide to investigate a more reliable supplement source, practitioners say you must make sure you buy the purest form, which is called germanium bis-carboxyethyl sesquioxide-132 (thankfully shortened to Ge-132.) Cheaper versions may be tempting, but less pure forms have caused two fatalities and have been linked with kidney damage. As a result, germanium has been voluntarily withdrawn in the UK. You can, though, find it in cosmetics including face creams and bath oils (see Resources); it is also available in homoeopathic form.

The role of fish oils in keeping lung function good boils down to the fact that they inhibit the synthesis of leukotrienes, which the body needs to heal wounds and injuries but which, in excess, are believed to cause inflammations in conditions ranging from asthma to arthritis and lupus. Low levels of vitamin E have also been linked with high leukotriene production, so taking a good antioxidant that includes vitamins A,C, E and selenium, plus fish oils from an unpolluted source, should help keep the lungs in good working order.

Finally, if you suffer recurring respiratory infections, a supplement called Oralmat will help, especially if the transition between climates when travelling causes problems for you. It contains extract of rye grass, which is very effective for a range of breathing complaints, including sneezing, bronchitis and asthma. One patient, who knew her attacks were being triggered by environmental pollutants whenever she travelled by plane, described the remedy, which has been tested by researchers in Melbourne, as ‘miraculous’.

As well as rye, which is said to clean and renew arteries and which is used in Traditional Chinese Medicine to reduce damp, watery conditions in the body, Oralmat also contains energy-giving co-enzyme Q10, which is found in every cell in the body, and an immune-supporting substance called squalene which, in Oralmat, is taken from shark’s liver but which is also present in olive oil.

Dirty Air

The air you breathe in contains about 21% oxygen and 0.04% carbon dioxide. The air you breathe out contains a fifth less oxygen and ten times more of the waste gas, carbon dioxide. If the air you breathe in is dirty, then the inside of your lungs will be dirty too. Pollution, which is now being blamed for the dramatic increase in asthma (in some regions, as many as one in four children now suffers), has also been linked to heart conditions and lung problems. And it is not just a problem of the traffic-clogged inner cities.

In the UK, for example, families who have deliberately left those smog-filled towns to find cleaner air for their young children to breathe were shocked recently to learn that even outside urban areas, air quality has dropped sharply. The environment charity Friends of the Earth has described the findings of increased pollution in rural areas as devastating – especially since, in Britain for example, some of the worst figures recorded and analysed were sadly taken from a popular nature reserve.

In your lifetime, your lungs will filter billions of litres of air. Tiny hairs in the nose are the first line of defence, but microparticles such as benzene and hydrocarbons can slip through, and any form of exercise in a polluted environment will exacerbate the problem. Cycle in the city, for instance, and much of the air you are breathing in (at the rate of 50 litres a minute if you are cycling fast) will actually bypass the nose filters and go straight to the lungs.

The lungs do have their own protective and cleaning mechanisms, but fine particles deep inside are difficult to flush out. Once lodged in the fibres of the lungs, these pollutants have been linked to cancer, bronchitis, emphysema, general breathing difficulties and a range of other health problems. Lung cancer is now the biggest cancer killer in the United Kingdom, and pollutants – mostly tobacco but including air pollutants – are to blame for an estimated 95% of all cases.

There is no real scientific evidence that trendy pollution masks will protect you unless you are exercising vigorously, and you may laugh at those who wear them to hoover the house or jog around the block, but if you are exercising in a polluted environment then anecdotal evidence from users suggests that they can help filter out some of the worst of these particles. (For suppliers of pollution masks, see the Resources chapter.)

Easy Air Pollutants Guide

Benzene/hydrocarbons: Hydrocarbons, including benzene, are emitted by car engines, but are also present in cigarette smoke. They have been linked with cancer.

Carbon monoxide: A potentially lethal gas produced by incomplete combustion, it disables oxygen-carrying red blood cells.

Lead: Effects build up over time and may hit the central nervous system. Some research suggests it can have an adverse effect on children’s IQ.

Nitrogen oxides: Both nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide are the products of fossil-fuel combustion. Sources range from cars and lorries to power stations. Both are constituents of that horrid inner city petrochemical smog and dissolve in water to make strong acids which corrode tissues. Effects include sore throats and runny noses.

Ozone: We may worry about the holes in the earth’s atmosphere that leave us unprotected from the worst of the sun’s harmful rays, but on the ground ozone itself counts as a pollutant which forms when nitric acid from nitrogen dioxide reacts with hydrocarbons. A reaction encouraged by sunlight, the effects range from a runny nose and sore throat to lung disease.

Sulphur dioxide: A nasty, acidic gas produced when coal or oil is burnt and which is part of the winter smog cocktail. Effects of high levels, particularly in asthmatics, include coughing and a feeling of chest tightening. Bronchitis, emphysema, lung inflammation and blood clotting have also been linked to this pollutant.

Suspended particles: Tiny solids found in diesel and coal smoke. The bigger bits get trapped by the body’s defences, but tiny particles penetrate the lungs. Can be carcinogenic.

PCBs/dioxins: Generated by widespread incineration of solid waste. May be carcinogenic and may also have an effect on the central nervous system.

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