The premature babies who were blinded in the 1950s due to too much oxygen, and those who promote the wide use of anti-oxidants may disagree with the myth that more oxygen must be better.
Under normal circumstances, by breathing correctly through the nose, a more than adequate supply of oxygen is provided. In fact there is so much oxygen in the air that we can exhale enough to keep someone else alive. The air at sea level contains approximately 21% oxygen, and we ordinarily exhale air that contains 16% oxygen, which is how we can do Expired Air Resuscitation.
The air in the alveoli contains 14% oxygen, and so it would seem that we do not need more than this to stay healthy. The surface area of the alveoli is about the size of a small tennis court, and so movement of oxygen from the lungs into the blood is relatively easy. By keeping this bank of oxygen in the lungs, in a single heart beat each haemoglobin molecule passing through the lungs collects four molecules of oxygen. Even if we had 100% concentration in the lungs, the haemoglobin would still only collect four molecules of oxygen because this is all they can carry.
Breathing automatically increases when the body has more work to do so that the same amount of oxygen is kept in the lungs and blood, so there seems little evidence that doing anything more than normal breathing is going to provide the body with sufficient oxygen.
In fact, the opposite was discovered by Danish scientist, Christian Bohr in the 1890s.
Christian Bohr's research showed that breathing in excess of the body's need reduced the delivery of oxygen to the tissue cells (Bohr effect), and so paradoxically breathing too much air results in less available oxygen, rather than more. The more you breathe, the more breathless you are likely to feel.
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