80. The body heat fiasco – Paul J Scanlan

For a human being life on earth begins when she takes her first breath. There are reasons why ancient traditions always emphasize the importance of breathing and posture. ”If breathing were only a matter of getting oxygen, then the best way would be to breathe in and out as quickly as possible”, says Paul J Scanlan, author of the book The Body Heat Fiasco. Or to pick it up through gills, receptors or some other kind of bodily process, one might add. We all know that quick breathing is bad. We feel better when we breathe calmly and deeply. But western medical science doesn't understand why. So why else do we breathe then? In his book, independent researcher Paul Scanlan compellingly (and partly funnily) explains how breathing heats our bodies. ”Warming air is a defining feature of being alive”, Paul says. The mechanism is amazingly straight-forward: squeezing air in the respiratory system. That a gas heats up when compressed is basic physics. For instance, a diesel engine doesn't have spark plugs. Instead, the piston squeezes the fuel mixture to ignition. It is strange, when you think about it, how vague our knowledge about body heat generation is. And yet, we wouldn’t be able to live on this planet if our body temperature weren’t somehow kept at around 36.9 degrees Celsius. According to the standard view, in warm-blooded animals like mammals and birds body heat is generated by a chemical burning, primarily within a fatty tissue called BAT. Thus, the reason why the air we exhale has body temperature is because it has been heated by the body. According to Scanlan there are numerous gaps in the century-old standard model. One example: Pigs and birds are warmblooded, but they don't have BAT. Another example: If chemical reactions generated body heat, a chick in an egg close to hatching would be able to heat its own body, but it can’t, it is wholly dependent on its parents to keep warm (thus being ”coldblooded” until the moment it comes out of the egg and can breathe). And when it comes to heating inhaled air, it actually works the other way around, says Paul: ”The warm body is assumed to warm 7.5 liters of air from, say, 2 degrees Celsius to 36.9 degrees Celsius every minute. If you had a tube through which the same amount of air flowed, known physics would say the tube needs to be pretty hot for the air to heat up that much by somehow just touching the sides of the tube. How hot? Let’s just say it has to be hotter than 36.9 degrees. But there is nothing between the nostrils and the lungs that is hotter than that!” Some of the more compelling pieces of evidence in Scanlan’s book are about humans who are able to endure extreme cold. A case in point is ”the iceman”, Wim Hof. ”Hof does special things with his breathing. He can compress the air very well. But to get to that point he focuses on his alignment and meditation. The classic for meditation and yoga is concentrating on breathing.” Paul Scanlan’s model doesn’t dismiss that some heat is generated by way of chemical processes, which is relevant in some contexts. He has presented a couple of papers about his controversial findings and also had one published in a peer-reviewed journal. He has received polite response from the mainstream, but nothing more than that. Actually, the golden thread in The Body Heat Fiasco, as well as in the two or three books Scanlan plans to write, is not breathing so much as tension. Or rather tensional integrity, for which breathing plays a pivotal part. His next book will explain how our vision works (he has been able to eliminate his own dependence on glasses). And after that he will take on cancer. Book Paper Paul on Twitter