We Are All Ghosts (made of connective tissue)

"Doris Taylor doesn't take it as an insult when people call her Dr Frankenstein. “It was actually one of the bigger compliments I've gotten,” she says — an affirmation that her research is pushing the boundaries of the possible. Given the nature of her work as director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, Taylor has to admit that the comparison is apt. She regularly harvests organs such as hearts and lungs from the newly dead, re-engineers them starting from the cells and attempts to bring them back to life in the hope that they might beat or breathe again in the living. Taylor is in the vanguard of researchers looking to engineer entire new organs, to enable transplants without the risk of rejection by the recipient's immune system. The strategy is simple enough in principle. First remove all the cells from a dead organ — it does not even have to be from a human — then take the protein scaffold left behind and repopulate it with stem cells immunologically matched to the patient in need. Voilà! The crippling shortage of transplantable organs around the world is solved."

Nature.com

Above is a "ghost heart," a pig heart that has been stripped down to its protein scaffolding. The reason that it's white is because that protein scaffolding is called connective tissue, and connective tissue is white. There is more connective tissue in the human body than any other type, period: bone, fat, blood, tendons, ligaments, the inner and outer lining of all our organs/nerves/muscles…ALL of that is connective tissue. Theoretically if you de-cellularized the entire body we would still hold our shape, just like this pig heart has done.

This is why, as a massage therapist, I emphasize care of connective tissue so much when I talk to my clients, and the number one thing you need to do to take care of your connective tissue is: drink water. CT is made up of ground substance (basically water + protein molecules) and a matrix of protein fiber strands.

Think of it like a pot of soup. When the body is dehydrated, the soup thickens and gets too sticky and we get fascial adhesions between our muscles; the same happens if the body gets too cold or if the body has been inactive for too long (cold, unstirred soup tends to clump and so does unmoved CT). That's why your body gets stiff when it's cold outside or if you've been sitting or lying in one position for a while. That's also why it’s so important to warm up before you stretch and to stretch before you work out: soup that has been warmed up and stirred is much easier to move than soup that has been cold and still.

Take care of your soup!

Drink Water

Seriously. Drink water. Right now. The most abundant tissue in the human body is this stuff called connective tissue; the main component of connective tissue is something called “ground substance,” which is mostly just water with some proteins floating in it. When we’re dehydrated the ground substance gets sticky and thick, much like soup with too little water. Because connective tissue (CT) is everywhere in the body, that impedes our movements (tendons and ligaments are CT), our organ function (the outer lining of our organs is CT), and even our mental cognition (the axons of each nerve are wrapped in a myelin sheath made out of–you guessed it–CT).

Keep a full water bottle near you at all times and take periodic sips; keep one in the car, at your workspace, beside your bed; set alarms for yourself if you must. Do whatever it takes, but drink more water. The Mayo Clinic says that female-sized people should be drinking 9 cups of water* and male-sized people should be drinking 13 cups a day.

(And no, coffee doesn’t count. Caffeine dehydrates us, so that cancels out the liquid portion of the coffee and gives us a zero sum. Alcohol is worse: for every alcoholic drink, you need to drink a glass of water in order to balance out.)

Keep your soup runny, my friends!

Why Breathing Is Important (besides the obvious)

Lemme talk to you for a second about breathing, y'all. 1. Venal return pump: you know how the heart pumps blood away from the heart to the arteries? Well, when it’s time to make the return trip through the venioles to the veins back to the heart to get re-oxygenated, that no longer gets the job done. The blood slows down so much in the capillary beds in order for oxygen exchange to happen with body tissues that once it reaches the veins it can’t get the speed back up on its own. (Heart–>arteries–>capillary beds–>veins–>heart is how blood circulates.)

So the body relies on other pumps. In the limbs, muscle movements contribute to venal return–but that only gets it into the vena cava, a giant blood vessel in the torso. (It's the blue guy on the left below.)

From there, one of the main ways that de-oxygenated blood gets back to the heart is through what we call “belly breathing.” You see that thing in the top of the abdomen that looks kinda like a church ceiling? That’s the diaphragm muscle. When you breathe into your belly, you’re not actually breathing into your belly: you’re contracting your diaphragm, which a) allows the bottom portions of your lungs to expand and fill all the way, and b) presses down on your stomach, intestines, liver, and the rest of your guts, causing them to swell outwards.

This also presses on the inferior vena cava, which squishes blood towards the heart like toothpaste out of a tube.

tl;dr: breathing improves blood circulation.

2. Lymphatic pump: there’s this thing called the lymph system (also called the immune system). It’s kinda like the circulatory system in shape, except it functions to filter toxins out of our bodies. You know lymph nodes, right? Those little bumps in your neck, armpits, and groin that get swollen when you’re sick? Well, they’re swollen because they’re working to fight off whatever pathogen you’ve got in you. There’s a whole network of vessels that carry crap to the nodes in order to be filtered.

Lymph is a gooey mess of proteins and pathogens that are sorta hanging out in the body tissue and eventually gets picked up by the lymph vessels, a delicate network that acts as a kind of sewage system for the body, moving the lymph through various cleaning points (the lymph nodes) that are full of white blood cells that attack and kill the pathogens before it dumps the filtered and (hopefully) purified result back into our heart. Unfortunately the lymph system doesn’t have its own pump either, so it, too, relies heavily on breathing to return filtered and clean lymph fluid back to the circulatory system. This improves the lymph system’s ability to fight off pathogens.

tl;dr: breathing improves the function of your immune system and overall ability to fight diseases.

3. Improved sleep and relaxation: deep breathing has been shown to trigger the parasympathetic nervous system.

The parasympathetic nervous system is part of the autonomic nervous system, which controls all the automatic or involuntary things that happen in our body like organ movements, hormone releases, etc. The parasympathetic side controls things like rest, relaxation, digestion, and sleep; the sympathetic side controls fight-or-flight response. We tend to live our lives on the sympathetic side, with lots of stress and work. Unfortunately that leads to the release of tons of a vicious little hormone called cortisol that SCREWS. UP. EVERYTHING. Like, if you’re running from a tiger it’s great, it does all sorts of things to the body to make it more efficient at fight-or-flight, but it also does awful things to pretty much every body system in the process. This is why stressed-out people get sick, can’t sleep, develop heart problems, have higher rates of neurological and mental disorders, get cancer, get diabetes…Google practically any disease + “cortisol” and there’s a link. I’m serious.

Breathing can change that. The way and amount that we breathe has been shone to drop us out of fight-or-flight and into rest-and-relax. This is why deep breathing helps with anxiety: when you’re anxious you’re locked in the sympathetic nervous system response, but deep breathing drops you into parasympathetic response and tells your body, hey, it’s all cool, man.

tl;dr: breathing improves everything.