The wild concept that all of us get vitamins from the air that we breathe

Around 10 years in the past, British tabloid newspaper The Sun ran a memorable article about a pair who claimed to be “breatharians”, in a position to live on on a bit water or even much less meals. Instead, they stated, they derived sustenance from air, daylight and the power of the universe. The tale was once picked up by means of media shops internationally and propelled the couple and their ordinary way of life to status – and no small quantity of ridicule.

Needless to mention, people – even self-described breatharians – can’t are living totally on air and daylight, as some practitioners tragically found out when they died making an attempt. But weirdly, the idea that seems to be extra considerable than it first turns out. According to a duo of Australian scientists, we will and do derive vitamins from the air – nowhere close to sufficient to survive, however possibly sufficient to profit our well being. Is it conceivable {that a} supply of diet has been underneath our noses all alongside?

“The evidence shows very clearly that we can absorb nutrients from the air we breathe,” says Flávia Fayet-Moore, a diet scientist on the University of Newcastle in Australia. Whether or no longer those “aeronutrients”, because the pair have dubbed them, make an important contribution to our well being isn’t but transparent, she says – however they might one day.

Every day, we breathe round 7000 to 8000 litres of air, a mix of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, water vapour and whiffs of different gases. Our lungs extract oxygen and exchange it with…