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Professor Buteyko believes that genetic predisposition determines which illnesses people develop from overbreathing. The response of each individual to hyperventilation depends on inherited factors.

Various estimates exist regarding the extent of overbreathing among the general population, ranging from thirty per cent, according to Claude Lum, to Sasha Stalmatski’s ninety per cent. In Russia, the Buteyko Method is used in the treatment of up to one hundred diseases including hypertension, asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, diabetes and Raynaud’s Syndrome.

Carbon dioxide is so important for normal bodily functioning that it is logical to assume the body must have some way to prevent losing it. Narrowing of the airways is a natural defence mechanism present in people with asthma to help maintain carbon dioxide, and it’s activated when the level of the gas falls too low. Inflammation, by constriction of smooth muscle and by increased mucus secretion, causes narrowing of the airways.

This might seem a peculiar statement, but people with asthma are better off than the rest of the overbreathers because they are equipped with an instant mechanism to prevent the loss of carbon dioxide. People who do not have this mechanism suffer from many of the incurable diseases of civilisation.

At this point, it is worth noting that before the 1900s people who had asthma often lived longer than the rest of the population, and that death from asthma was unknown. As Professor Buteyko put it: “Having asthma generally meant having a long life free from many diseases, but nobody could explain why asthma prevented other diseases or why asthmatics lived longer than other people.”At the end of nineteenth century, Professor of Medicine at Oxford University Sir William Osler, in his textbook The Principles and Practice of Medicine noted:“We have no knowledge of the morbid anatomy of true asthma. Death during the attack is unknown.”

Overbreathing resulting from modern living is the cause of breathing-related diseases. Hyperventilation is not a result of asthma; it is the cause of asthma. Reducing hyperventilation leads to a corresponding reversal of asthma. This was confirmed during Professor Buteyko’s forty years of research and during independent trials at the Mater Hospital in Brisbane, Australia.

Buteyko believes that people genetically predisposed to asthma will develop asthma only if they are overbreathing. Years ago, people ate less processed food and more vegetation; they physically worked and played more; they were under less stress, and less chemicals and pesticides were used in food production. As a result, people produced more carbon dioxide from physical activity and retained it due to a more correct volume of breathing.