Aeronutrients: The wild idea that we all get nutrition from the air that we breathe

Around 10 years ago, British tabloid newspaper The Sun ran a memorable article about a couple who claimed to be “breatharians”, able to survive on a little water and even less food. Instead, they said, they derived sustenance from air, sunlight and the energy of the universe. The story was picked up by media outlets across the world and propelled the couple and their unusual lifestyle to fame – and no small amount of ridicule.

Needless to say, humans – even self-described breatharians – can’t live primarily on air and sunlight, as some practitioners tragically discovered when they died trying. But weirdly, the concept turns out to be more substantial than it first seems. According to a duo of Australian scientists, we can and do derive nutrients from the air – nowhere near enough to live on, but perhaps enough to benefit our health. Is it possible that a source of nutrition has been under our noses all along?

“The evidence shows very clearly that we can absorb nutrients from the air we breathe,” says Flávia Fayet-Moore, a nutrition scientist at the University of Newcastle in Australia. Whether or not these “aeronutrients”, as the pair have dubbed them, make a significant contribution to our health isn’t yet clear, she says – but they could in the future.

Every day, we breathe around 7000 to 8000 litres of air, a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, water vapour and whiffs of other gases. Our lungs extract oxygen and replace it with…