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When it comes to breathing, your body is actually more efficient than we thought, says University of Auckland researcher Dr. David Gervais.
Theoretically, he says, the body’s metabolic rate should be higher, but it’s actually much lower.
The best way to achieve that would be to eat less calories and eat fewer calories per meal, he said.
And that’s exactly what Gervares’ lab has been doing with a new study that examined how oxygen consumption correlates with blood pressure in healthy people.
A common misconception that oxygen consumption is low is that this is a function of lack of oxygen, Gervas says.
But his lab found that people who consume the most oxygen tend to have the lowest blood pressure.
This is one of the reasons why people who take more oxygen are more likely to survive heart attacks, he adds.
The reason for this, Gavares says, is that people with high blood pressure tend to metabolize oxygen differently.
They burn off energy by burning more glucose and releasing more CO2 in the process, but this energy is stored in the muscles.
This means that the more muscle mass a person has, the less oxygen they can burn off, so they tend to lose blood pressure more quickly, Gendron says.
The next step is to figure out how the body is able to maintain its metabolic rate while burning off more oxygen.
The study found that a lot of the work was done in the blood.
When researchers analyzed the blood of people with low oxygen consumption, they found that there was a very high correlation between oxygen consumption and blood pressure, says Dr. Christopher Norenzayan, a professor of medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
People who had the lowest oxygen consumption had significantly lower blood pressure than those who had a high oxygen consumption.
This indicates that the metabolism is more efficient at producing oxygen, Norezayan says.
Another factor to consider is how the person is breathing, he notes.
If you are inhaling, the lungs can absorb more oxygen, which means you’re getting more oxygen to the tissues.
This helps reduce the risk of developing oxygen-related complications, like chest and lung disease, Nosgavas says, noting that the current data does not show that this mechanism is beneficial.
This research was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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