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If you or your doctor can hear wheezing, that means something’s constricting your bronchi (the smaller breathing tubes). One of the causes—asthma—can be triggered by an irritant like smoke, nervous impulses like stress, or an allergy. Allergies are exaggerated reactions of the immune system to substances that don’t cause symptoms in most people. Those reactions can come in the form of:
•skin rashes (typically from chemicals)
•runny and stuffy noses (from dust, pollen, etc.)
•itchy eyes (from dust, pollen, mascara, etc.)
•upset stomach or intestines (from food allergies)
•coughing, shortness of breath, wheezing, or any distress to the respiratory system (from any kind of allergen)
More than one-third of Americans have allergies, but most don’t have their symptoms under control. While the worst a rash or red eye will do is crimp your enjoyment of the 1980s flashback party, allergies that affect your lungs can be life threatening. This is called an anaphylactic reaction. If you’re allergic to a wasp sting, for instance, your blood vessels develop holes that leak fluid (you need blood inside the vessels, not outside) and you may get so short of breath that no air can move (the fluid constricts the bronchi so much no air can pass, and you cannot even hear your wheezing). And you’d need immediate help to open your airways.
The three basic ways to treat allergies are medication, allergy shots (also called immunotherapy), and avoidance. We recommend avoidance for allergens you know, but if you have an allergy that triggers a respiratory reaction, you might need to carry an EpiPen to inject yourself with epinephrine to help you open your airways enough to get to a hospital for further treatment.

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Take a look at the picture of lungs affected by asthma and imagine what happens if you take a deep breath and then clamp a vise on the bronchus that drains air from the lung. The air stays bottled up at the point of obstruction. You hear a whistling sound and the noise intensifies when the airflow has trouble making it through the ventilation system. That’s asthma. In patients with asthma, the trouble isn’t with getting air into the lungs; it’s with getting air out, and as Figure 5.1 shows, it feels like a vise is squeezing the bronchus. The clamps come in different sizes and strengths, so you can have different degrees of airway obstruction, some of which are dangerous. You can make many choices to
prevent and control asthma. Once the obstruction is cleared—often through medication—air is released and you can breathe smoothly.
More than 15 million Americans have asthma, and one-third of them are under eighteen. It can start anytime in your life. While asthma is not a disease that seems primarily associated with aging, its implications for aging are important. In some ways, the final pathway for many diseases is in the lungs (if you live long enough, eventually, it’s the lungs that will get you). Historically, in fact, pneumonia was called an old man’s best friend, because it would allow you to slip into a coma and die peacefully when lack of oxygen would cause an abnormal and lethal heart rhythm.

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The lifesaver of your body, your lungs need air to keep you afloat. With restricted airflow, they don’t have enough fuel to support the rest of your body. At best, labored breathing is uncomfortable. At worst, it’s life-threatening. No one wants to be at sea without a fully inflated life ring, and no one wants to live without fully inflated airways. These are the important aging-related conditions that can deflate—or destroy—the structures that help keep you alive. Sleep apnea and asthma are the most common lung abnormalities, so we discuss these two at length in this blog.

Sleep Apnea
We put this problem first it because it is caused by changes right at the start of your breathing passage, and is the most rapidly increasing airway problem. If you sleep—or try to sleep, shall we say—next to a snorer, you might compare the sound to a garbage disposal, maybe? Jet engine? The amplifiers from your teenager’s band? Without question, snoring is second only to karaoke as the most annoying thing that can come out of your mouth, and most of us know the roar all too well. Almost 50 percent of adults snore occasionally, while 25 percent snore regularly. Anatomically speaking, snoring occurs when there’s obstruction of the free flow of air through the passages in the back of your mouth. That obstruction forces air through a tiny hole and out your mouth; the air rubbing against the lining of your throat is what makes that sound If the jackhammer-like vibrations firing from your partner’s face aren’t enough to scare the sheets off you, this fact will: Snoring can reach up to 85 decibels—the sound level of a New York City subway (that’s actually enough to cause hearing damage over time).

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It has to do with how much air you take in with each breath—that’s enough air to fill 10 million balloons in a lifetime (you gotta feel for the poor graduate student who had to prove that theory). As you can imagine, there’s a lot of stuff going on in your lungs every few seconds; grab your flashlight so we can crawl up into your ducts and see what’s inside.
You probably have a good image of the way your lungs look on the outside. While you may think they function a little like balloons in that they expand when air is consumed, it’s probably better to think of your two lungs as large sponges. They’re light and fluffy when filled with air, but they get bogged down when they get wet (as they do in some diseases) and don’t exchange air very well in those cases.
To start, think of your respiratory system as an upside-down tree (see Figure 5.1). If we follow a breath of air, we’ll start with your mouth and nose. When air enters your body, it’ll go down your trachea. That’s your trunk—the one airway at the beginning of the process. Then it’ll quickly divide into two airways to feed into two lungs; those are your bronchial tubes. Then, like tree branches, those airways break off into four, then eight, then hundreds of thousands of little airways in each lung. Those airways are your
bronchi. At the end of each airway are tiny sacs called alveoli. Think of them like leaves at the end of the branches. Healthy lungs have hundreds of millions of alveoli. Each alveolus is covered with a thin layer of fluid that helps you breathe by keeping the alveoli open so oxygen is absorbed and carbon dioxide is excreted.

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Sometimes the smallest changes in your life can lead to the biggest results. Besides eating right and exercising, you can also maintain proper bone and joint health by making a few adjustments to the way you live.

STAND UP STRAIGHT One of the easiest ways to strengthen your abdominal muscles—and support your back—is through good posture. You may feel like you’re standing straight, but in reality, most of us stand like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Practice good posture by bringing your head and neck back. The key element is breathing in to tighten your gut. That’s the component that lifts your chest and will give you Marine-like posture. Sucking it in while you do crunches, or even when taking the elevator, helps your body look and stay younger.
WEAR WELL-CUSHIONED SHOES Your body is pretty good about providing its own natural shock absorbers—like the fluid between your joints and the cushioning between your vertebrae. But when we evolved from living on all fours to living on just two, we took advantage of it. We run marathons just because; we walk Wal-Mart Super Centers that are the size of entire counties; we spend summers hiking a trail that spans from Georgia to Maine. No matter where we’re walking, our feet take more of a beating than a carton of eggs in a baker’s kitchen. Sure, with twenty-six bones in our feet, we were designed to move. But our feet don’t have the natural shock absorbers other parts of the body have. To better protect them, always wear well-cushioned walking or running shoes when you’ll be on your feet for extended periods of time (even if you’re just standing). Running shoes are usually a good option, because they’re well cushioned in the back of the shoe—where your heel strikes the ground first and absorbs most of your body’s weight.

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