Eventually I realized that all I or anyone really needed was a postage-stamp-size piece of tape at the center of the lips—a Charlie Chaplin mustache moved down an inch. That’s it. This approach felt less claustrophobic and allowed a little space on the sides of the mouth if I needed to cough or talk. After much trial and error, I settled on 3M

Fears weren’t just a mental problem, and they couldn’t be treated by simply getting patients to think differently. Fears and anxiety had a physical manifestation, too.

This was another thing that kept happening to me. Mouthbreathing causes the body to lose 40 percent more water.20 I felt this all night, every night, waking up constantly parched and dry. You’d think this moisture loss would decrease the need to urinate, but, oddly, the opposite was true.

In colder climates, our noses would grow narrower and longer to more efficiently heat up air before it entered our lungs; our skin would grow lighter to take in more sunshine for production of vitamin D. In sunny and warm environments, we adapted wider and flatter noses, which were more efficient at inhaling hot and humid air; our skin would grow

They gathered two decades of data from 5,200 subjects, crunched the numbers, and discovered that the greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity. The smaller and less efficient lungs became, the

Vitamins and minerals, he discovered, work in symbiosis; one needs the others to be effective. This explained why supplements could be useless unless they’re in the presence of other supplements. We needed all these nutrients to develop strong bones throughout the body,

Inhaling through the left nostril has the opposite effect: it works as a kind of brake system to the right nostril’s accelerator. The left nostril is more deeply connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-relax side that lowers blood pressure, cools the body, and reduces anxiety.14 Left-nostril breathing shifts blood flow to the

The phenomenon, called nasal cycles,

“Since we have known for a long time that savages have excellent teeth and that civilized men have terrible teeth, it seems to me that we have been extraordinarily stupid in concentrating all of our attention upon the task of finding out why all our teeth are so poor, without ever bothering to learn why the savage’s teeth are good,” wrote Earnest