Your Breath Is the Most Overlooked Lever in Your Health

If we understand that this is a two-way street, then we can actively change the way we breathe to create the response in the body that we desire. So for example, there's actually something called laughing yoga, where you go to a class and you start going through the process of laughing.

And just by moving your diaphragm in that way, it sends a signal to your body of happiness and joy and fulfillment. Then you're laughing and feel happy because The way you're breathing, aka laughing, change the chemistry inside of you.

Welcome to the TBD Fit podcast on Dr. Talks. I'm your host, Daniel Keeley, and I will be guiding you through this wellness journey in terms of optimizing health and longevity, where we unpack the science, the do's, and everything in between.

Come join us. Look forward to seeing you inside. is doing best in their category and bring that conversation to light. Today's guest and story is no different because we are going to be diving into perhaps the most overlooked and most powerful system in the human body, which is breathing.

Our guest today is someone I deeply respect who I saw in person not long back, Dr. Sachin Patel, the founder of the Living Proof Institute and a globally recognized leader in functional and lifestyle medicine.

His personal healing journey ignited his mission and since then he's been delivered hundreds of workshops, reached millions through his videos and online teaching and has become a passionate visionary for transforming the healthcare paradigm.

He believes the human body contains an inner healer, which I completely stand in accord with and that mastering breath is perhaps the most profound way to unlock it.

Today's conversation Beyond Breathing will challenge what you think you know about the breath, your nervous system, and your physiology and achieving your potential.

So let's settle in, breathe in through our noses, slow down a little bit and get started. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Daniel. It's a profound honor.

I appreciate the opportunity and Here's to better breathing for everyone who's listening. And I want people to listen to this conversation, not just for themselves, but their future self and also their family and the people that they deeply care about.

Because my goal today, and I know your goal is to unpack this in such a way that learning how to breathe, it becomes one of the most obvious next steps for most people.

The beautiful thing about it is you're already doing it. I don't have to take anything away from you. I'm going to give you more, right? And that's a lot of health strategies, take things away.

Like sometimes your favorite foods or, you know, your, favorite things in the world. However, we're going give something back. And what I love to do is help people through the lens of a precision wellness practitioner.

You know, let's take the things that people are already doing, do them with awareness and precision. And if we can do that, then it's so much easier to be healthy and there's literally with breathing 23,000 opportunities in each day to make.

a choice to breathe better and to breath really in alignment with whatever task is at hand. So I'm again, honored and very excited. And I want to also mention that I must forever student.

I am always learning, I always picking up new strategies, new modalities, having new experiences, hosting experiences and learning from other people. So I know a year from now, I'll have a lot more to share, but certainly over the last few years, that can be very beneficial to practitioners who might be listening or anyone else who's listening because we all deserve to know and learn how to breathe because it is truly our life force.

And many cultures have stated that for thousands and thousands of years. I want to remain a student for life. I look forward to doing a round two as you continue to evolve and science continues to change and there's so much that can drive our physiology and something as simple as breath and how I love opening every conversation is understanding someone's origin story.

What led you to do? to find your purpose, to fine your mission. Yeah. Well, thank you. There's been a lot of experiences along the way. You know, my original story, if we kind of look at titles, right?

My original title starts off as graduating as a chiropractor and chiropractic then led me into functional medicine. So I've been practicing functional medicines since 2006. I feel like a dinosaur in that regard, but I've seen functional medicine turn into what it is today.

And then a few years ago, I started shifting gears and focusing a lot more on lifestyle and precision wellness. So teaching people how to live into their potential.

All of us have this dormant potential that we don't really get to experience unless we're actively seeking it. For example, when we were all born, we didn't have a name even.

Right? When we're born, we don't even know that this is our hand in front of our face and we can barely see. So we are actually the most connected with our environment and experience true oneness, right?

We have no ego when we were born. But then we've given all these labels, were given a name. We're told we' re smart. Were told were dumb. Were told are smart, where, you know, beautiful were told, or ugly.

Like we hear so many different stories about ourselves. And then these titles become our story. So for me, I started off as a chiropractor, worked with elite athletes and then moved into functional medicine, still kept working with lead athletes.

And then translated into precision wellness. So really teaching people how to be well and use wearables, you know, smart devices such as an aura ring, to use genetics, use lab testing to create an informed decision for the client and empower the clients as well.

Then in 2005, also really stumbled across breathwork. and I had my own profound breathwork experience that took me back to my first breath. And I got to relive that moment with all the consciousness and awareness that I have now and just watch my parents holding me in their arms in admiration and felt that pure love that, I'm sure you remember holding your child for the first time, but they don't get to experience it.

So I've got relived that experience because of the breath work journey that I was on, and that made me want to do it for others. So as I started learning about facilitating breath work, I went deep down the rabbit hole to understand how breath affects our chemistry, our physiology, or emotions or spirituality.

And then I start a facilitating breadth work for practitioners, primarily through the events I would host and they would have life-changing experiences.

and so what I've done over the years is I have kind of with my background, have connected the anatomy, the physiology that chemistry the. spirituality, you know, the anatomy and kind of put it all together and learn breathwork through the multiple lenses, my, labels, if you will.

So I looked at it through a lens of a chiropractor. I look at through lens a functional medicine practitioner. Looked at the lens precision wellness practitioner and through lense of breath work facilitator and really now I'm carrying this message on the shoulders of many giants like Patrick McEwen, James Nestor and others I've encountered along the way.

My main mentors Giovanni Bartolomeo And I'm really just trying to pass this information on because it has such a profound shift in my life, my son's life and my wife's.

And so that's what makes me really excited to share this with people. In terms of breath and breathing, it was interesting because our patients teach us a lot, I think, and in general, we go through life experiences and that too will have a profound effect.

But I had a patient some time ago and he made a comment that it wasn't his, where he felt he finally took the first breath, a healthy breath. And before then he was just stuck in this very.

sympathetic driven, shallow state breath, chronically ill, had asthma. And so that led me down a path to do mole testing and to uncover a very huge fungal burden, but I didn't realize how much we take breath for granted.

So what are maybe some of the biggest misunderstanding people have about breathing and how does that sabotage our health and energy? That's a great question.

You know, I've poo-pooed breath for a long time because it was, in my immature years, it, was too simple. And, you know Da Vinci is probably one of my greatest favorite inventors and probably the greatest inventor and he has a famous quote and it's all over Italy.

If you ever, if maybe you've been to Italy or listeners have been there, You'll see it everywhere that, sophistication or simplicity rather, is the ultimate sophistication.

And so, you know, one of the things that you kind of learn being a functional medicine practitioner is that the body is actually very complicated, right?

It's beautiful, but to match its complexity through our treatment protocols would be very cumbersome. and what's also interesting about, the, body, Every year we're doing more and more research, which means every year, we know less and less, right?

If we knew more, or we'd be doing less research every. But research grows exponentially just to kind of demonstrate to us how little we actually know.

So if the body's the most complex thing we can think of, the more complex structure and takes us, you know, all this research to figure out what it's actually doing and how to make it work better.

Then the solution, according to this principle should be very simple. And in fact, the simpler the solution, The more likely it is the Solution and everyone wants something simple.

And so for years, I kind of brushed it off. and I think it's because nobody explained it to me through the lens that I now see it through. So when I understood how it affected our anatomy, our facial structure, Our oral health, which we know is tied to brain health and heart health.

You know, how our breathing is Tied to our lymphatic system, How it tied To our emotional systems in our body. It just became so clear as day and I was then scratching my head.

Why isn't, why aren't more people talking about this? And then I realized it's because nobody has the background that I do and nobody the lenses to look at this problem through that.

So there's people that facilitate that have no science training and there is. pulmonologists who know everything about the lungs, but don't know how it's all connected to other systems in the body.

And they may not focus on the spiritual elements of it. So, and the anatomical elements breathing. My unique background really brought me to have this awareness and understanding and really deep appreciation.

It came to me, I think, at the right time in my life. as well. So that's also important for people to kind of know, not to get too esoterical, but when the student is ready, the master appears.

And so I was ready at that stage in my life to receive the message. Then now it's been beautiful because just speaking about breathing has opened up so many doors for me.

It's one of those things that I know that when you work with clients and you go pretty deep with them and it might take weeks or months, sometimes quarters or years for people to feel, you know, restored and healed.

And what I realized through breath work, when I facilitate it for. There's so much pain that is alleviated from their bodies because of how breath affects the myofascial system, which is our emotional hard drive.

stress and tension and, you know, old stories that don't serve them anymore. And here we are trying to put our protocol on top of it, right? And it's trying like write on a chalkboard.

You could have the best lesson and you could write it on chalk board, but if there's already writing on the chalk, it just gets more confusing. So what Breathwork allows us to do is kind of erase the chalkboard so that our protocols even work better for the client, right?

Everything works better when the clients is in a parasympathetic state, when they feel whole and ready to receive all the goodness that you and I both have to offer them.

how can we make that shift? How can I quickly transform the nervous system? Because ultimately that's the speed of which we heal. So breath to me really unlocks that path fast.

I make this reference all the time that if when you look at a baby breathe, they don't know how to chest breathe. They don' understand the concept of vertical breath.

It's all kind of horizontal belly diaphragmatic breath, which some of your biggest lymph nodes are right behind the diaphragm, right? is kind of that gentle massage that allows you to eliminate toxin and waste, but also just to maintain that level of repair when you're in that parasympathetic state.

Where does someone start ultimately? What are the tools that we can use to shift our physiological state to induce a state of healing and repair? Yeah, great question.

So I want to draw people's attention to what breath work is. Maybe we can even define that because, you know, there's a spectrum of breathwork, right?

So it could be as subtle as how you're going to breathe for the rest of this conversation to having a full out spiritual, life-changing experience. Right?

What I like to do is I'd like teach people how to get their breath to work for them. And so our breath serves as an ally, just like our steering wheel is an alloy when we're trying to drive our car.

So the breath is essentially, I view it as the steering-wheel of the nervous system. Instead of being bounced around, In your day, like a car without a steering wheel, you're just bouncing off the curbs and hopefully you find your way to where you want to go.

Your breath allows you to take control of your nervous system and send it a message. Now I want, to draw people's attention to the fact that we're already using our breath to express our emotional state.

So for example, laughing is breath work. Crying is breath work. Sighing is breathe work, right? So we express our emotions through our breath, which means that the body slash the nervous system is using the breath to reflect an outward state and to create a physiological shift in the person.

Whereas if we understand that this is a two-way street, then we can actively change the way we breathe to create the response in the body that we desire.

So for example, there's actually something called laughing yoga, where you go to a class and you start going through the process of laughing and Just by moving your diaphragm in that way, it sends a signal to your body of happiness and joy and fulfillment.

And then you're laughing and you feel happy because the way you are breathing, AKA laughing, change the chemistry inside of you. You can also do something called a physiologic sigh.

A physiologically sigh, think about it, when we feel a sense of relief, we sigh right? You may not realize that that's breath work, but that again, your emotional expression coming through your breath.

So a simple exercise that people can do, and this has been found to be more effective than meditation at relaxing you is called a physiologic sigh. There's different ways to do it, but the way I like to it is, is really simple.

So we can sit up in a nice comfortable position. You know, you don't want to this while you're driving or operating heavy equipment, But what you are going to is you going take a deep breath in through the nose.

Your tongue is gently placed at the roof of your mouth. And you'll take a nice deep breath into the belly, just filling up your belly and then your lungs and just all the way to the apex to top.

So a full breath and holding that at the top, now squeeze your pelvic floor like you're doing a Kegel exercise and you can squeeze all of the muscles in your body if you choose to and on the count of three just drop your tongue and exhale with a loud audible sigh.

One to releasing your pelvic floor, releasing that muscle tension that you created, and just really melting into the seat or into ground where you are.

You can do this in the car when you're not driving. Before you bring your stress into your home, doing this three to five minutes or depending on whatever your current state is, even just three or five times is a great place to start.

And then you're going in reset. It's like erasing the chalkboard of stress. If you had a stressful day at home and you don't want to bring it onto a call, or let's say you are back to back with patients or clients, you know, as practitioners, we can actually do this with our clients.

through that process. So physiologic sigh is an excellent way to just, you know, wipe the slate clean and reset your nervous system. And then from there, You want to breathe for a count of four to six in and a account of 4 to 6 out.

When you go into this state of breathing, it's called coherence breathing. Coherence breathing balances the nervous system. So this is where we're in a more balanced state.

When we were in state of coherence, breathing, we get 20% more oxygen to the brain. Our nervous is much more regulated and we connect our heart and our brain to one another, right?

And I feel like that's what most of us need. We need to be in our hearts and in your heads to do the best work and do our best thinking. So coherence breathing is the way I normally breathe when I'm listening to you speak, if I am driving in the car, checking my emails, reading a book.

I bring my awareness to the ways I breathe because coherance breathing brings me into that present moment. If you're breathing at this pace and you are not used to it, you will feel something called air hunger.

You will not feel like you breathe enough. And that's actually a good sign because when we experience air hunger, we actually get more oxygenation of our tissue.

So it seems counterintuitive. However, that air, hunger increases CO2 levels, which then increases oxygenations. This is how we get. Oxygenation. Because we're changing the internal chemistry of the body.

Now, if you want to feel more relaxed. and shift into a more parasympathetic state. This is where all of our healing, repair, regeneration, rejuvenation, all the things that you want as a patient, everything happens on the parisympathy side of the fence.

What you can do to get into more relaxed state is you lengthen your exhale. So you could breathe in for four and then out for six. In for four, out for six.

And it doesn't have to be six exact seconds. It could be a pace that's comfortable for you. Okay. So don't, you know, don' get obsessed with counting and timing yourself.

Just kind of get a sense of four in and then lengthen the exhale out. This will help you feel even more relaxed in your body. So there's, you know, those are two examples of things that you can do or three examples rather of, things you that can you do to reset your nervous system, to balance your system and then to shift into a more parasympathetic state.

What about a hold, right? Box breathing as an example, four in, for hold four out, or hold. How does that play into this? Yep. So that would be, you know, You could think of that as four in and then 12 out, right?

So you're taking a four second inhale and you are kind of holding and exhaling and holding. It's taking you 12 seconds to go through that exhalation process.

And so that's going to get you into again, a more very much more parasympathetic state. how many repetitions, what's the duration? That's a great question.

So I think it truly depends on the starting point of somebody, right? So if somebody's having a really stressful day versus a calm day, that delta is going to be much greater on a stressful days.

It might take them a little bit longer. Ways to measure this. This is where the precision part comes in is if someone really wants to know if they're getting into a state of coherence and what their optimal respiratory rate is to get into coherency, they can get something called a heart math device.

So a heart math plugs into their ear and it tracks in real time, uh, your HRV. Your HRRV is your heart rate variability, which is the variability between each individual heartbeat.

The higher our HRD, the more relaxed and parasympathetic our body is. And that's when, you know, it's, a good way to quantify if that four to six second breath, what is that right you know, cadence for you.

Is it four? Is a five? is it six? Some people eight. So there are ways to challenge your respiratory system. There's something called a bolt test. And then there's a prolonged exhale test to kind of get a sense of where your metabolic and respiratory systems are at.

It's like a very inexpensive way to assess the system, maybe we can talk about that briefly because everyone's different, right? And that's the thing, like your breathing signature is as unique as your fingerprint.

Your breathing signature represents all of your cumulative life experiences. The moments that took your breath away, the moments where you were crying, and the moment where your were suppressing.

Every moment you've had in your life, your breathe was a witness to it. And so all those experiences, good and bad, are stored in our diaphragm and in myofascial system.

So knowing this about ourselves, that our breathing signature is unique, we can assess where we're at. And so one test that we encourage clients to do, something called a Bolt Test.

A Bolt test is a blood oxygen level test. The way you do this is primarily best done when you wake up in the morning or when your at rest and you essentially take a A few cleansing breaths, so that means you take a deep breath in, deep, breath out, and just cleanse your lungs and wake up that diaphragm a little bit.

And then you'll take deep deep breaths and then do a relaxed exhale. So a relax exhale means that you're not pushing the air out. You're just letting the airflow out of your lung so your diaphragms kind of sits in a neutral position.

Okay. Then you plug your nose and you turn on your stopwatch. What you want to know is how long it takes you to have your first sense of urgency to take a breath.

So it's not a breathe hold, it is an urgency detection hold. Whenever you feel like, okay I need to breathe now, that's when the test is over. Most people won't be able to hold their breath for 20 seconds, which means they have poor metabolic function.

So this is a non-invasive way to test how efficient somebody's mitochondria is. And it's a very effective way over time to see if their energy systems are moving in the right direction.

The goal is to get above 40 to 45 seconds. Okay. Elite athletes, most of them are less than 20. So they're incredibly gifted physically, but one of the greatest opportunities for even the most elite athletes is to improve their blood oxygen level test.

And so they can go from 20 to 45 once they know what to work on. So that's a really simple test, the next test that you can do is a prolonged exhale. So this is where you take a deep breath in and then you fully exhale through your nose with a slip stream of air, just a small stream air coming out through nose for as long as you possibly can, all the way to empty.

Okay. So whenever you feel like you can't. You can't do that anymore and you have to take a breath, the test is over. The goal for that is for you to get to above 60 seconds, okay?

So that's something that we want to be able to exhale slowly for at least 60 second. Most people, they won't last 30, right? Again, a way to gauge where the opportunity is, for them to improve.

Now, one thing people also need to know, like, why should I care about this? Right? Well, The oxygen that We breathe in, The only place we use that oxygen is in our mitochondria.

And so if we can't get that into the mitochondrion to create respiratory function or energy, then we're not going to have all the things that we seek, right?

Everything that requires energy requires breath first, requires oxygen first. So we want to make sure that that delivery system is working properly. The prolonged exhale allows us to increase CO2 levels and it allows to test the state of somebody's CO 2 tolerance.

One of the most impactful things that you'll learn a lot more about this in the coming years, if you're hearing it here for the first time, you can mark my words, is something called carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide is actually a very important molecule in the body and we vilified it, but it's one of the most important molecules in our own body as well.

In fact, the urge that we get to breathe doesn't come from needing more oxygen. The urge to breath comes from an intolerance to CO2. So the higher tolerance that you can build up to CO2, the more you could actually get oxygen to your tissues because higher CO two concentrations increase oxygen delivery.

So you. In theory, breathe less and have more oxygen delivered to tissues. Because of the, something called the bore effect. so less is more when it comes to breathing.

And then the third test that people can do is they can get a incentive spirometer. An incentive sprometer is typically given to people when they're covering from pneumonia or some sort of fluid accumulation in the lungs or infection in their lungs.

But you can buy one on Amazon and it will measure your ability to, you know, how much volume you have in your lungs. And you want to work on increasing your lung capacity because the more we can expand our lungs, the More effectively we Can do that, The more We can support our heart and the The More we pump our lymph and The better we Oxygenate our tissues.

So think of every breath you take. When you Take a breath, your Lungs are expanding and contracting. and it's essentially squeezing the heart, assisting it in pumping blood.

When your diaphragm's moving up and down, it creating pressure, right? And it supporting the hear. In fact, about 40% of our blood pressure comes from the diaphragms function.

So if our breathing is short and shallow, then our heart has to work harder to pump that oxygen. But if her breathing as normal and fluid, Then we rhythmically assist the heart through the lungs and the diaphragm in pumping blood.

So we take a lot of strain off of that system by simply breathing normally or, you know, in a functional way. First, the last point, when you say normal in fluid define normal, what should breath cadence look like in terms of the norm?

Yeah, so your normal breathing should be almost like circular instead of like sharp inhales and sharp exhales, right? It should feel like a very circular type of breathing pattern.

The way you breathe should primarily through your nose. Breathing in through the nose, out through nose tongue place gently at the roof of the mouth. When we put the tongue at the roof of a mouth, there is a mudra, which is like an energy center and a circuit that gets closed.

This is why children will suck their thumb to soothe themselves. They'll use a pacifier to suit themselves or they'll latch onto the mother's breast and the nipple will hit the back of the, roof-of-the-mouth.

or the front of the roof of mouth, because that energy circuit gets closed and it causes a soothing effect on the nervous system. So when our tongue is in the root of our mouth it closes that circuit.

It also hermetically seals the mouth. If your tongue in in right position, you can't breathe through your mouth so it allows us to breathe in and out through our nose.

When we breathe though our noses, it slows down the air, temperature regulates the pressure regulate the, air it cleanses the and also increases the amount of oxygen that's delivered.

to the little alveoli, which are little sacs at the bottom of our lungs. So breathing through our nose is optimal because it actually perfects the air before it goes into our lung.

And so that's why breathing though the nose, is crucial versus breathing, through the mouth. When we breathe through, our mouth, we're also breathing in all the bacteria that lives in our, mouth as well.

and that creates a lot of stress and taxing on the lungs as, well, so we want our breathing to be, you know, nice and fluid. so circular, We want to, be breathing.

through our nose, we want to be breathing with the tongue at the roof of the mouth, and we wanna breathe at a pace that we have with just a little bit of air hunger, okay?

That four to six seconds in, four, to, six, seconds out. That's the kind of normal breathing pattern that I want people to lean into. that's how I breathe pretty much 90% to 95% of day.

And then under other circumstances, I'll breathe differently. So if I'm exercising or if, you know, if need some energy or boost of energy, then there's different ways that we can breathe, but normal breathing is just gentle.

The person sitting next to you shouldn't be able to perceive that you're breathing. You're, breathing into your belly versus into our chest. And it's slow, rhythmic and circular breathing Yeah, so respiratory rate is something that's going to be individual, just like, you know, that part of our breathing signature, kind of less is more in this regard.

So, my respiratory rates are usually about 12.9. And so I try to shoot, right in that reference range, somewhere between 10 and 15 breaths per minute.

Anything that is, more than that, or if I see a shift in the regard, then I'm going to pay closer attention. So I had a client, for example, and his respiratory rate was 18, which was, you know, a red flag for me.

And so it turns out he had mold. When we started digging a little bit deeper, I think a lot of his, respiratory challenges were coming from the mold and that red, flag was what allowed us to, deepen the investigation to figure out what's taxing that system for him.

Somewhere between 10 and 15 is what I would consider ideal or optimal. Then if we're doing, and this is, so this our passive breathing. So this how we breathe at night or at rest when we are unconscious.

Active breathing, I'm going for five to six breaths per minute. The bolt test is a couple of cleansing breaths, deep breath in. Okay. And then relaxed exhale.

We're not pushing the air out, just letting it out. Then you plug your nose. No CO2 escape. Close your mouth and then you're using the stopwatch to time yourself.

You want to try to shoot for 40 plus, but don't beat yourself up if it's less than 20. That's where a lot of people start. It's just an area that they don' have any awareness of.

And if you've never worked out, for example, and you pick up weights for the first time, you're not going to be the strongest you have ever been. But within a short period of time your whole system starts to adapt.

So one thing that I noticed is that when people take on the task of, you know, paying more attention to the way they breathe, the body reciprocates, right?

Your body's not resisting. It's like, oh my God, where have you been my whole life? Like, let's go, so it actually wants you to breathe this way. Because when you breathe efficiently and correctly, it creates efficiencies in so many different systems in your body.

There's efficiencies in the oral microbiome, there's efficiency in lung microbiomes because you're cleansing the air now. Your heart is having to work less, your lymphatic system is getting pumped, you digestive organs are getting pump properly, right?

Your CSF is being pumped. So there are so many efficencies that are produced by. learning how to breathe correctly. It's like the one domino that knocks down so many other dominos.

And so if all you did was that one thing, if I didn't teach anyone anything else except how do breathe and when to breath a certain way or how breathe in different circumstances, they would have extraordinary levels of health because they'd become just so much more resilient to their environment and they will be assisting their body 23,000 times just by breathing correctly and with awareness.

So the bolt test, we take a few cleansing breaths, then take deep inhale, relax, no, not yet. Don't plug your nose yet, relaxed exhale. So we want to get that diaphragm to neutral and then we plug our nose and you start the stopwatch and the goal is, you know, let's call it 40 seconds plus.

The test is over when you have your first sense and urgency to breathe. If you swallow, the test, is if you're like, try to hold your breath, then the, test does over.

So it's not a breath hole challenge. It's a, when do you need to feel like you, have to take your, first breath challenge? That's like with your clients, right?

You could do it over zoom. You can do, it is a great way for them to check in every week. Here's my score so they can see and track improvement. And there's no better way to measure function than in situ.

So it's a really easy way for you to how everything in their protocol is coming together. Deep inhalation and a slow exhalation, empty out as much as you can.

And the goal is to get up to 60 seconds. 60 plus, yep. Then you want to slowly exhale a continuous stream out through the nose. An unbroken stream. The goal was 60-plus seconds measuring CO2 tolerance.

So as we exhale, right, there's less volume in our lungs and CO two is accumulating. We're building up that CO 2. And just to reiterate, CO-2 is what creates the urgency for us to breathe.

The more we can increase our tolerance to CO, the more, we really push our respiratory system to deliver more oxygen to our body. It's interesting you mentioned 10 to 15, I'm looking for 10-12 ideally.

To me it's kind of that really optimal sweet spot. I know you said yours is closer to the upper 12s, but needless to say red flags begin as the numbers elevate.

And again, some of these early red flag detectable just from something so simplistic. Looking at the CO2, that's something that we look at when we do lab analysis and in terms of CO2, when I see that number low, I think mycotoxin and I also think thiamine deficiency, but often people are not making that connection.

Like there's just so much more in labs that we can correlate in term of what would require further examination, further testing, or would warrant at the minimum, okay, why are we not in a specific range and how can we improve that?

And so, as you said, the ability to withstand or to bolster your carbon dioxide tolerance helps oxygenate the body even better still. There's people might be wondering how to increase CO2 tolerance.

The third test is an incentive spirometer. So we're just looking at where your lung capacity is and then working on increasing lung, capacity by having an awareness.

When we look at numbers, it kind of gives us an idea of where we are at. You see quick improvements in people's respiratory volume. Like people might be blowing just four liters and then next thing you know, a few days later, they're up to five plus.

So our body adapts pretty quickly, but it's a great way to assess where you're at. CO2 level tolerance building is really simple. Next time you're out for a walk, you can do the bolt.

Essentially you are going to do a bolt test and this time your not testing, your pushing yourself and you take a few cleansing breaths, then a full inhale, a relaxed exhale, and then plug your nose and keep walking.

And so what you now do is you count how many steps you can take and you really push yourself. I mean, do this within reason, like check with your doctor if you need to, but you're going to try to take as many.

And you are going push yourselves until you have a strong urge to breathe. Right? So now the exercise is going increase CO2 levels and then you obviously going build more tolerance because you forcing yourself to hold the breath.

So that's going increased tolerance for people. So I'm a former athlete, played soccer, requires quite a tremendous aerobic capacity. But how I used to challenge myself is when I would be driving, I will try to elongate my breath holes in between stop signs or stop lights or if I was on a highway.

I don't necessarily suggest this for everyone, but in-between exit signs. I would further try to challenge to hold my breath as long as possible. Lungs are a muscle, much like most organs in the body.

There are different devices that I keep in my car that you breathe into to try and challenge your lungs. It would force this exercise in terms of your lung.

I don't know if you have any recommendations. Think of it almost like increasing resistance. where you're blowing into the device and the greater the resistance, the more challenging the, more that you are strengthening your lungs and lung capacity.

Are there specific devices that like? You know, people can start off with something as simple as a straw, right? By sipping or breathing in through a really forcing yourself to breathe in harder because it's a smaller amount of air that you're able to take in.

And that could be a great way to strengthen. Another great to way strengthen your diaphragm in this case in particular is just by doing something called crocodile pose where you are laying on your abdomen and breathing into your belly.

So your weight is going to create some resistance and that can also strengthen you diaphragms. Those can be great. It basically creates resistance. So it makes it a little bit more challenging for you to take that breath in, but you know, again, strengthening the system along the way, because that's the diaphragm has to work harder to drop and pull that air in.

And so you're again strengthening that, that major, major important muscle that we have that. doesn't really get the light of day, right? Diaphragm needs to get more attention, I think.

In terms of the breathwork, you already expressed proper cadence, where the goal is four to six seconds, circular breath, kind of slow everything down.

Should everything start from the diaphragm? Should that horizontal breath? You know, I think that's a great place for people to focus. In fact, one of the things that I suggest, and we do this in our workshops, is releasing the diaphragm.

So the diaphram is a very interesting muscle and it actually has a few different purposes. Of course, clearly it helps us with breathing. It also pumps our lymphatic system and its the main kind of conduit for our myofascial system.

The myofascial system is like a web-like system, the newly discovered organ that wraps around all of our connective tissue and connects all the nucleuses of all our cells together in our entire body simultaneously.

So it's like our own like internal internet, a hardwired internet that we have in your body. And the diaphragm actually works on the myofascial system.

So it's kind of like a, think of a spider on its web. Whenever you, whenever anything flies into the web, no matter where the spider is, it gets a sense of something's happening.

So when we experience emotions, we can either release those emotions or if we suppress them, the diaphragm has to push them down into the myofascial system.

That pressure has go somewhere. Okay. So think of a child crying and think about all the times that child was told to stop crying or think all of the time that we wanted to cry, but we didn't.

right? Or wanted to laugh and we didn't, right. So we don't get to express that emotion. That emotion then gets buried and it gets burried into the myofascial system.

When we wake up the diaphragm, when we do this with intensive breathing practices, for example, like our breath work experiences, it's kind of like shaking a tree.

when you shake a three, two things are going to happen. All the dead branches are gonna fall off and if it is a fruit tree, all the ripe fruit is going fall of, or rotten fruit.

And so when we start waking up this myofascial system through the breath work that you can do, all of our emotions start bubbling to the surface as well.

Just like all the dead branches falling off, emotions come to surface and now we're able to use the breathe to release them. So when a child is told to stop crying, you have to then ask yourself, well, how do you stop?

And the only way to stop crying is to start breathing. So when we stop trying, we have to hold our diaphragm really still, right? And that pressure builds up and the diaphragme can then develop trigger points.

And these trigger point, just like in your hamstrings, if your handstrings are riddled with triggerpoints, that muscle doesn't lengthen and function the way it's supposed to.

It's weaker and it is going to be distorted in the ways it works. The same thing happens in diaphragms. It's not uncommon and a great starting point for a lot of people is to work on diaphragm trigger points.

So just by laying on your back, keeping your abdomen nice and soft, knees bent, you can exhale to kind of, and relax your, abdomen and just hook your fingers like this and start digging underneath your rib cage.

You're almost guaranteed to find some trigger, points and some tender points in there. It is not, uncommon for people to, find those trigger point and have emotions come up.

or even specific stories or times in their life start to come to their conscious awareness. And a lot of times people will be moved by it and they're able to then release it, and cry it out or laugh it whatever the case may be.

But they use their breath to express that emotion and then released it. So now it's not buried in that system anymore. So over time, when we experience different traumas, remember our breath was our witness for every life event that we've had, conscious and unconscious.

And so when our breathing changes because of our experiences, usually that means people's diaphragms get shorter in their translation, like how much they move.

So now the breath becomes short and shallow instead of normal and fluid. And that short, shallow breath is how I would tell someone to breathe if I wanted them to initiate a sympathetic dominant state.

So think of how you breathe when you're stressed out and that's an extreme example. If I'm running away from a lion, I'll be breathing as fast as I can and usually through my mouth.

So somewhere, if breath is a spectrum where one end of the spectrum is, you know, forceful breathing in and out through your mouth, because you're running away from something.

And the other end, of this spectrum, is tongue at the roof of their mouth breathing, in-and-out through their nose, six in, and six out. Right? Somewhere in between is where most people will find themselves.

So are they skewing more towards fight or flight, right? Short, shallow breathing perhaps even through the mouth as they move further along the scale, or are the breathing with their tongue, at their roof, their circular breaths with consciousness and awareness, that person's nervous system is in a totally different state.

So again, kind of helping people identify where they are in that spectrum and then shifting them towards a direction that You know, aligns with their health goals is important.

And when I discuss this with my patients, layer one, in terms of helping them heal is focusing on correcting circulation, perfusion, which ultimately means oxygenation throughout the body.

The body to deliver oxygen to the tissue and nutrients in order to help the bodies heal. It's like the slower you breathe, the slow we age. Right. And one of the greatest predictors, I think, of lifespan is lung capacity.

We see that in a lot of these longevity tests now looking at VO2 max. 8.4 pounds out of every 10 pounds of fat loss, for example, is through our lungs.

So when we exhale, the air is a little bit heavier than when you inhale. That's where the majority of our fatloss, if you will, goes. Yeah, I want to also shift them into mouth breathing and what that does for our oral microbiome and how mouth reading can be the number one cause of cavities.

When we make that shift from, from mouth, breathing to nasal or nose breathing, we don't require the same amount of sugar. Uh, as once was, is that correct?

Yeah, I found that really fascinating. And it, and it just goes to show you how breath is, how we breathe while it's so subtle is connected to so many different aspects of health.

You bring up a good point, you know, that the breath, we have two holes in our face that we can breathe from and one is our nose, which is primarily what it is designed to do.

is of course for chewing and swallowing and talking and it, you know, of, course we can breathe through our mouth as well. And it's more of a secondary breathing apparatus when we need to move large volumes of air.

Okay. So when you're running from a lion, You want to be breathing in and out as fast as you can and moving a lot of volume of error, because what happens again, the breath is mechanical, not just you know, chemical, when our lungs expand and contract rapidly because we're taking fast breaths, we are now increasing blood pressure and heart rate because the heart needs more pressure to pump blood to our arms and legs.

Okay. So there's a physical reason we want to be breathing like that. And so that's usually pretty short-lived, right? Fight or flight breathing should be pretty, short lived.

Now, for some people, based on how their skull formed as a child, which is heavily based, on they were breathing as child. Which can be heavily, whether they have allergies or mold or other things, can change the way our face is shaped.

And so some people will as adults be habitual mouth-breathers because it feels very restrictive for them to be able to breathe through their noses. And that could be because they grew up as mouth breathers through no fault of their own.

It just, nobody brought that awareness to them. In fact, this was where part of my journey started with my son. is we went to the dentist and the first time we had to dentists, he had a ton of cavities.

And we're like, what the heck? Like he doesn't eat sugar. Like, What are we doing wrong here? And then I learned that mouth breathing is the number one cause of cavity.

One of the signs of mouth-breathing in children, especially is that they drool on their pillow at night. So it's super cute. We have the pictures to prove it and we didn't know any different, but if you're mouth, breathing, you are going to likely be droolling on your pillow.

Right? So if have young children pay attention to that. And so what happens when somebody is a mouth breather, automatically we know that their tongue isn't in the right position because when you position your tongue in your mouth, it seals your mouths.

You can't breathe through your own mouth anymore. Now the importance of tongue position and posture is that the tongue doesn't just seal the mouth but it actually acts as a spacer.

So when our tongue is positioned in the roof of our mouth, it actually allows our hard palate to expand. So that hard bone that you feel at the root for your mouth.

It expands outwards. And what that floor is or that ceiling is, is the floor of your sinuses. It prevents the face from collapsing inwards and it creates a nice, beautiful dental arch.

And it create a beautiful open sinus passage on both sides so that it's easier to breathe through the nose. The children who are habitual mouth breathers, who were never taught about tongue posture, they're going to not have that tongue positioning holding their face and pushing their faces outwards so they end up with a small upper palate.

What this results in is a narrowed airway. So my son used to complain about not being able to breathe and it can lead to a smaller dental arch, which then leads to overcrowding.

And it's very common these days for children to have overcrowning of their teeth. When we got this note from my doctor, the second dentist appointment we went to is like, Oh, Mr.

Patel, we have good news and bad news. The news is your son's jaw isn't big enough to receive his teeth. The good news is, is we can just pull those teeth out and it's no big deal." And I'm like, that doesn't make sense to me.

This is where my chiropractic hat went on. And my God doesn' make any junk. Like there's not such thing as too many teeth, right? He has too little face.

So we found an airway dentist and an Airway Dentist put an expander in his jaw. We started mouth taping him. He's been mouth tapping for the last six years now and he never had to have any of his tooth pulled.

Now his breathing is so much better. He's got all of his teeth came in. He has got a beautiful dental arch and beautiful smile. And guess what? He gets to keep that for the rest of life.

But if we took those teeth out and listened to the dentist, he would have a narrow airway for his entire life and it would make it very difficult for him to breathe through his nose as an adult.

So he'd be a habitual mouth breather, which later on in life would lead to anxiety, low-grade chronic anxiety. cavities, you know, dry mouth when our mouth dries out, our saliva dries our, saliva protects our teeth.

So then it starts damaging our. The pH in our mouths changes when we are mouth breathers, which then creates the environment for, uh, the wrong type of bacteria to grow in.

When our bacteria shift, it also changes the amount of nitric oxide that we produce, an important molecule for helping us It acts as a disinfectant, acts a vasodilator, it acts has a tool to increase microcirculation.

And so we lose that capacity and then most people probably know this by now, but pretty much all heart disease can be traced back to oral bacteria. So when they look at plaques in people's arteries and they dissect them and do microbial studies on them, they discover that pretty 80 to 90% of them have oral, bacteria in the plaque itself.

So anything that's going on in the mouth doesn't stay in mouth, right? The mouth is the beginning of the digestive system. It's also where we have very intimate access to our cardiovascular system through the microcapillaries and small blood vessels in our mouth.

And we all know that We can take things sublingually, right? So you can vitamin B12 sub-linguely. So anything that's in our mouth has instant access to the rest of our bloodstream.

Breathing through our mouths is very, very detrimental to our health for a variety of different reasons. For heart health, for immune health. for brain health For tasting our food, For our immune defenses.

That's what nitric oxide does. And it also plays a role in chronic dental caries as well. When our patients come in office, we, I give them a nitric oxide strip because again, there's so much that's being overlooked foundationally that drives systemic inflammation.

So the conversion of nitrates, nitrites, and nitrous oxide, which is dependent on your oral microbiome and our oral microbes. I specialized in the GI and we see a lot of oral.

now seeding the gut microbiome, which otherwise shouldn't be there and prevalence of SIBO and then underpinning of co-infections or predominantly, as you said before, a fungal burden or mold exposure.

And so how all this is correlated, but then again, we're missing the foundational components of healing, Which is proper breathing, nasal breathing. Making sure that nitric oxide production is adequate and how that's impacting now the development of our children, as you just so beautifully connected those dots and alluded to, is indicative of how we're setting up either long-term success in terms of her health or setting a kind of a prevalence for disease as we age.

I think that you provided a lot of, well, certainly tools in term of we can correct things. One of the other correlations that, that you had made beyond the fact of mouth breathing is behavioral disorders in children with poor, poor breathing and the prevalence of ADD.

But that connection to me was, was very profound. Yeah. Thank you. You're a great note taker. I love it. You're paying attention. And I could tell you're really passionate about helping people, which I loved hearing.

It comes through in everything that you are sharing. So the thing about adults and children were very similar, right? So if I forced you, Daniel, or anyone listening to this, to breathe through your mouth and plug your nose like James Nestor did in his book, Breath, you would immediately start to feel anxious.

It would be impossible for somebody who's a habitual nose breather to start breathing through their mouth. They would instantly feel anxious and they would feel how any other mouth breathar would.

But to most people who are habitual mouth breathers, that's just their norm. they don't know any different. because that's the only body that they've lived in.

And if they'd been mouth breathing their whole life, then they never truly kind of straddle that parasympathetic, sympathetic fence. They've always been living in a slightly sympathetic dominant state.

So it could take some You know, it obviously takes awareness to bring people back to center. But the beautiful thing is that it's never too late. In fact, even as adults, you can see an airway specialist.

So I went to go see and airways specialist in Reno, my friend, John Bakke, and they have an Airway-centric practice. He's a dentist and he's anairway specialists.

So you may have to see somebody who can do like a proper cone bean scan of your skull to kind of get a sense of, you know, what the geometry of their faces and what their measurements are to know what they best interventions are.

And for some people that expansion, even just a few millimeters of expansion is going to feel like whole new life for them because it's going change something that they do 23,000 times.

And, you know, if we think about it, our immune system starts in our nose, right? We breathe 30 pounds of air a day. So we consume more air in a days than food in week.

And so our noses eat 30 lbs or our mouth eats 30lbs of food each day through the form of breath. Everything before it goes into our body has to ideally go through our nose, which is the border control and our initial defense against the outside world.

You know, one simple tip I give people who travel a lot or who are in crowds, the best defense for your immune system, and without getting too like, you know controversial, but the defense of your system is just not breathe things in.

So if somebody coughs around you, exhale, create a positive pressure, blow the air out of your lungs so nothing's coming in. If somebody sneezes next to you or you're walking through a crowd or somebody's smoking and you have to walk by them, well, inhale where the area is clean and exhale where there is dirty.

So nothing gets into your body. That's one way it's better to not have the defend yourself against a pathogen or whatever it might be, a toxin. Just don't let it in.

So we can, you know, use our breath as a safeguard to decide what we want to let in our body and what don t want let into our bodies. I think the EPA just came out that our home air quality is two to five times more toxic than outdoors.

We don' t realize we're kind of setting us up for failure when we' re not opening our windows where we don''t have plants inside or just by creating these homes, right, that are that's sealing the air in and not recirculating kind healthy air.

from the outdoors. One of the interesting anecdotes you provided in person was tongue tie, pun intended. I'll use her case study to illustrate the point.

So my wife had something called a tongue-tie and a Tongue-Tie is when the little frenulum, that little part right under your tongue is too tight. And so what happens is it makes it very difficult for, it did for her to put her tongue at the roof of her mouth.

because that frenulum is so tight it's just keeping it down. And so what happens in many children who have tongue ties usually suck their thumb because they want to self-soothe and they can push that magic mudra button at the roof of their mouth with their thumbs or with a pacifier.

Now the problem with that, when you have a pacifier or when your putting your thumb there, is that you essentially push the top of the mouth, which is the floor of your sinuses, upwards.

So instead of having a nice, you know, somewhat flat roof of you mouth there's a dent that looks like your thumbs in the roof your mouth and that volume is taken away from your sinus.

So for her, she was a habitual mouth breather. She has an amazing oral care routine, but she would always have cavities. What is going on here? Like you go to the dentist, like 10 times more than I do.

You like, you have this whole routine that you do and I've never had a cavity. And you just, every time you got to a dentist you, have a. Turns out because she was a mouth breathing.

So she had low grade anxiety. She was always mouth-breathing and she's had braces three times because her, her teeth, just everything just keeps shifting.

I'm like, I don't know anyone who's had braces three times. I was like your mouth is like you have a beautiful smile, but it's literally a million dollar smile.

You know, we've like… you've invested so much energy into this. And so what we realized when we went to see an airway dentist originally for my son and then for her is that she had a tongue tie.

So the bottom of your tongue, that little stringy part, for example, is because we're a fascial suit, the spiderweb we talked about, it is holding that spider web up for the rest of the body.

And so it's, it acts as like a pinch point. So if you ever have a shirt that gets snagged somewhere, that's kind of what's happening. It's restricting the motion in her fascia.

And, so she had the laser procedure done, takes like 30 seconds that snips the, you know, the frenulum, and then you do a series of tongue exercises to retrain your tongue.

Cause now it going to go in positions it has never been in before and have range of motion it never had before. And instantly this chronic neck and shoulder pain that she had disappeared.

She was able to touch her toes for the first time without really feeling like she has to stretch so hard. And that happened instantly. So it's like the whole fascial system was snagged up because of that.

Once we released it, the system had a sense of relief. Her nervous system and her body felt so much different from that one tiny microprocedure. When I see patients often enough, I will look in the mouth and see kind of what's going on there and how things can be implicated in this cervicals or in that kind upper thoracic.

And given what your wife was going through, that absolutely makes sense. How things are kind connected. Most people aren't recognizing that the myofascial system connects the nucleus of every cell by this, you know, this hydrostatic system and it influences So much of our existence, especially when you mentioned, you know, the diaphragm and lungs and memory and emotion and how that's stored.

It's this kind of a wound up nervous system, uh, that wasn't designed to be wound-up all the time. Yeah, I always say, great summary. I would say that our nervous system isn't meant to be nervous all the time.

So we need to rename it something else because the word nervous in and of itself implies like you've got to on edge, but you really don't. And especially once you know what to do.

Like my wife, for example, had every sign. Every telltale sign of having a tongue tie, like she had a hard time latching, she sucked her thumb, that changed her facial structure.

She also, when you suck your thumb especially until you're a certain age, you get bullied, right? So then there's trauma around that. So it's like this downhill spiral for a lot of people and they may not even tie it back to something as simple as the position of their tongue in their mouth.

The first one is yawning. Is it a component of not enough sleep? Is that a components of us being deoxygenated? Are there any tools that we can shift ourselves to re-oxigenate quickly?

It's a good question. I think it's like a Forever mystery, right? Like, why do we yawn? My understanding is that we yawn because we need more oxygen. And it's just a way for our body to get our attention.

It kind of stretches our face. You know, it kind wakes up our bodies in many ways, and it is a great way to improve alertness as well. When we're feeling a little Tired, it's going to do a few things for us.

It's gonna stretch us, its going awaken us its gonna increase oxygen intake and oxygenate us and also improve circulation. And then it is a parasympathetic activator because when you yawn you're usually lengthening the exhale.

So it can be a great way to help people shift in the right direction if they need to. Sometimes our body will use compensatory breath. So as an example, you know, one thing I encourage people to do, and this is another whole other rabbit hole, but how we connect with other people should be how they connect their breath.

So for example if I ask my wife a question and she exhales before she responds, then I know she doesn't want to have this conversation because what she's doing without realizing it, what her nervous system is doing, without realising it It's trying to calm her down.

Right. So she's right. She's lengthening that exhale. Her nervous system is trying. Calm her. Down. That tells me, okay, this is not a conversation for us to have right now.

But if I ask her a question and she is excited, she going to open her mouth, right? She is going breathe in and get ready to express herself. Yawning could be.

a clue or a way for us to look into our body that we need to do something to stimulate ourselves. And so it could be that, you know, that's why when something's boring or not catching our attention or we're losing focus, the yawn kind of gets our intention, right?

It gets kind everyone's attention around us and it just wakes up our face again, it wakes our lungs again. So I think it does a variety of things for.

Yeah. So that's part of the physiologic side, right? So it's a, and some people do it as a three-stage breath, depending on, on who you talk to, but he'll do a two-step inhale.

I don't know the exact science behind it, it allows you, I feel like it allow you to take a deeper breath when you do that way. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, there's again, holding your breath is breath work, right?

Because you're taking that car by the steering wheel, so to speak. And so, when we do these breath holds, for example, and most people, they couldn't just do it right now, Right?

You have to kind of set the stage for you to be able to hold your breathe that long. And one of the ways we do that is by having people do what we call elemental rhythm, which is the breathing technique that we facilitate.

And after just a few rounds of breathing that people go through, almost everyone in the room can hold their breath for more than three minutes. In fact, it's kind of interesting.

I tell people, if you want to know how long a minute is, hold your breath. And that'll remind you how long 60 seconds are. But when you're in that state where you've done the breath work and you done a few rounds of it, you are able to hold your breath for anywhere from three to four minutes without even realizing you were doing it.

Because we've again created the physiological state for that to be possible for people. So that's one that a little bit trickier, right? Well, it depends on their baseline health status, Right?

So if somebody's pretty fit, like someone like yourself, you probably already can do that, but it wouldn't be, if you've never even tried it, You'd be surprised at how long you could hold your breath for.

If you're already have a pretty good baseline to work. But somebody who's bolt score is less than, let's call it 15, it's probably going to take them addressing other metabolic factors until they can hold their breath that long.

But here's what I would say is that we all start somewhere, right? So even if you're able to do it for 30 seconds, do for it 30, then a minute, and then 90, work yourself up to it.

And then hire a coach who can help you to identify where the roadblocks are or hire someone like yourself who can help you identify the sticking points are in the metabolic system and work on correcting those.

Because breath doesn't eat your food for you, breath does not get your vitamins and minerals for, you still need to make sure you're providing all the cofactors that you need, to function properly.

This has been absolutely extraordinary. Thank you for helping us see that breathing isn't just a biological process, but it's a doorway into a more resilient life.

And I know you mentioned hire a coach. Where can listeners learn more about you and work with you? Yeah, certainly happy to help those people who want it.

We have a lot of free tools and resources. They say the best things in life are free. And so I give away all my Breathwork assets, keynotes, presentations, worksheets, PDFs.

You can go to www.breathworkwithsatchin.com and you'll get on my list and I'll send you every tool that I already have and every new one that they create so that you can, you know, experience it for yourself.

You know, there's resources in there, like my notes from James Nestor's retreat, some keynotes that I've done, breathe like this, not like that guide, a stop snoring guide.

If somebody snores at night, There's a, whole formula that we've put together that can help people. Yeah. So that's, those are some great tools and assets that they can get access to at breathworkwithsatchin.com.

So definitely I encourage everyone to check out your work. What you do is nothing short of remarkable, but also so foundational, so essential and so overlooked and.

So free. The last question I end up every episode with is if you could have one superpower, what would it be? Boy. I think my superpower would be to, that's a good question, to make complex ideas easy for people to understand and inspire them to take action.

Going back to DaVinci Simplicity is Beauty. Thank you so much for your time today. Everyone that is listening, please like, review, subscribe, share this with someone who can improve their breath work.

which in turn will improve their life. Until next time, stay healthy, Stay wealthy, my friends. Thank you for tuning in to the TBD Fit podcast on Dr. Talks, where we unpack all things health and longevity.

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