CO2 is good for you

Buteyko understood: CO2 is good

Imagine a world where CO2 was not a deadly poison in need of urgent regulation by the European Union and the Environmental Protection Agency but a hugely beneficial trace gas which helped plants to thrive…

If you've read Watermelons – or indeed hung around this column for any length of time – you'll know that that world already exists. What you might not know, as I certainly didn't until a few months back, is that CO2 can also make you healthier. I learned this from reader Christopher Drake wrote in to ask whether I'd heard of the Buteyko Method.

Konstantin Buteyko was a high-level Soviet physician who came up with the novel theory that what he called "Diseases of Civilisation" – by which he meant everything from asthma to depression to emphysema and Crohn's Disease – were the result of an insufficiency in our bodies of CO2. So he developed some simple but astonishingly effective breathing exercises to deal with them.

It's deeply counterintuitive. Indeed, I'm quite sure that one of the reasons that the climate alarmists have been so successful in rebranding CO2 as a deadly threat is because of the popular misconception that carbon dioxide, being stuff we exhale, must perforce be a bad thing. But as Buteyko well understood, it's a bit more complicated than that.

Does it work? Well it has certainly done wonders for me and now's your chance to find out. Christopher Drake – who has been teaching me via Skype from his home in Bangkok – is on a flying visit to Britain this week and hosting a couple of Buteyko workshops where you can try it for yourself for free. There's one in Hove, this weekend; another next week at St James's Piccadilly, in London.

Some of you probably think it sounds like voodoo medicine and that's fine by me, no one's forcing you to try it. But I'll bet that those of you who do give it a go will be seriously glad I recommended it. And I must say, in these dark, terrible almost overwhelmingly depressing times, it does make a nice change to find something about which one can be unreservedly positive.