Hydration Underpins Every Priority
and Every Priority
You Want to Underpin
Before we get to water: First appreciate, what is Stuff?
YOU know already that all things are comprised of atoms, which we might call “super tiny things” around us which look like bigger things when they group together. They are the pixels in a computer image or more like the pixel-particles, which we could say make up a single pixel, or we could call it the essence of pixelness, which creates the total picture of our reality we look at, and then call it stuff.
When you get down to these tiny atoms, what physicists have discovered is that atoms are mostly place-holders for taking up space. There’s a YouTube video that shows how small the Empire State Building would be if you could remove all the space around the atoms and just clump the solid atomic particles together. The actual stuff of the building condensed would be the size of a large pea, which would weigh the same as the entire building. But then if you looked really closely at the pea, it’s more of a vibration than a thing, more of a tone than compressed solid brick and mortar and steel.
Watery Stuff = Finger-Snapping Stuff
There are YouTube videos also of people telling us the importance of water and that we need to drink more of it. But you could be the sort of person that does not like to be told what to do, because drinking water is common sense, like brushing your teeth. The thing about water is that it too is comprised of atoms and it’s at this level we want to appreciate.
Even if I said, “Drink more water,” you’d probably imagine yourself standing somewhere with a bottled water in your hand. We don’t picture ourselves drinking more water at some kind of a natural spring or lapping at a rushing Rocky Mountain river or standing in a rain storm with your tongue out. We just want to recognize that we live at a time where we generally think of water as something that comes in a plastic bottle and not that it’s natural or molecular or ubiquitous.
Water is all around, even if you imagine that inside your house, or wherever you live, is relatively dry. But even your couch, if you have a couch, is relatively wet, because water is a part of what it is. If we were able to extract all the water from your couch, and then sat down together on it, it might collapse under us into a pile of dust.
We want to better understand what reality is because we are part of it. Plus, we want to generally follow in the direction of reality because nature tends to support us in particular ways and then “not so much” in other ways. When other people tell us to drink more water, what they really mean is: “Be real. Add water to yourself because what’s real is what’s wet.”
Even a TREE, which a huge one can stand-up to a car ramming into it at 45 mph, is roughly 50 percent water. Plus, a tree is a kind of fountain spouting water out the top of itself, like sometimes 100 gallons per day, but that’s nothing anybody can SEE. In fact, you’re giving off water too. You sweat, you exhale, you excrete things. The average person loses about two quarts of water per day and if that water wasn’t replaced within three or four days, you’ll shrivel up and die.
Humans are delivered into this world out of a sack of water. What do people ask when a woman is in labor? “Did your water break?” A woman in labor has been lugging around a kind of aquarium tank inside there. Then that shatters and all of what’s in there spills out. The baby itself enters the world with an internal water content at about 90 percent. Then it has to keep drinking fluids every day to live, so the entire planet we know as home, beginning from birth, although much of it appears dry, is extremely wet.
Perspective is important because it can illustrate things. In the previous illustration about removing all the space between the atoms comprising the Empire State Building, we probably imagined the whole thing as dry. But the Empire State Building is part wetness too, so between all the atoms of anything are water molecules and these tend to add strength into stuff. Some people who die are cremated and their ashes might sit on a mantel and we might think of that person as ultimately dry, you know: ashes to ashes and dust to dust. But the truth is that everything living on this planet is designed to be wet. Water is continually moving, up through trees, across the sky, in and out of our lungs, into our mouths and out other places. What’s really going on is that everything is constantly leaking and one thing leaks into another.
Side note: On a totally different level, as already stated, reality is mostly space and what’s solid is not solid at all. Some believe that SOUND is what underpins atoms: music! If that’s the case, we are not just atoms plus space plus water, but part of a greater melody, and the larger picture is that we want to stay somewhat attuned to that, which is feeling good all day long, like snapping your fingers, which would be the goal.
Pockets of water helps make us feel good.
So a tree isn’t just 50 percent wet, but tiny pockets of wetness held together by stuff. A baby isn’t just 90 percent water, but tiny pockets of water mixed with additional more-solid stuff, too. And this matters, which is why we are reminding ourselves about how things are at the tiniest levels, and which we don’t normally consider, but could.
Water flows in and water flows out. Water flows between each tiny pocket of water comprising the thing, which also tends to be watery. The image of an aquarium is a good one because the little baby leaves “the aquarium” only to BE the aquarium. And that’s really what humans are: aquariums which have sprouted arms and legs with a head at the top. Trees are the same thing, aquariums which have sprouted leaves and roots which all day long move water from here to there.
People have quite a lot in common with trees. People are just trees with roots which have grown inward, so the water we drink is just like the water in the soil, thus taking of sip of anything is like watering a plant, because the water must get to the roots. People’s roots are in their guts, and in the gut is food, which is just like soil is food, for a tree.
We eat what comes from the soil, but then we turn it back into another form of soil. We don’t own the food in our pantry. We are just borrowing it before we pay it back.
You can’t just EAT nutrients, but suck them up as wet.
Rarely appreciated is that the roots of plants don’t just suck-up nutrients from the soil. With the case of humans, that would be like grinding frozen fruit in a blender and then sticking a straw down in there to drink it up, but none of it will fit through the straw. A person could use a spoon to dig down in there, but plants don’t have spoons, just straws. The human gut doesn’t have spoons either, just straws.
So what happens, is that some important things occur on a really small level, which the bigger things, like people, can’t see going on. You could look at a tree and say nothing is going on inside the tree or look at the ground and it appears to be just sitting there or look at a person without seeing what’s taking place under their skin. And we don’t want to be fooled by all that or forget that something isn’t going on just because we can’t see it.
What is dirt, really? Dirt is all the stuff, which used to be living, which died and decomposed before you came on the scene. We see leaves gather on the ground in the fall, but where are they in the spring? They don’t just disappear. Dead leaves get eaten. By whom? Around every tree there is a huge micro-city like a Tokyo or Los Angeles, except rather than built upward, it’s been built downward. When a leaf falls onto that, the residents of that “flat city” utilize the leaf material to expand their city and build it downwards, which is the soil. Some of the residents start eating at the top and a set of completely different residents eat it at the bottom, which is under the soil.
A seed comes along and sticks its roots down into THAT. We tend to believe that trees grow by consuming the soil, but if that were the case, then you’d see the soil start to disappear around every tree. That doesn’t happen, so what is the tree actually consuming? Dead leaves?
The tree is consuming THE WASTES of the residents of the micro-giant flat city, which is amist the soil. Again, trees drink-up micro-flora wastes. The soil itself, comprised partly from dead leaves, is too chunky for the tree to eat. Even the nutrients, which a tree might like to eat directly, are too chunky, so these things must be BROKEN DOWN and what’s broken down is what the tree consumes. And it’s wet, what the tree consumes.
People are the exact same. When a person eats a handful of blueberries, we imagine that the STOMACH just dissolves the blueberries and sucks that in. But no, the stomach cannot dissolve a single blueberry exactly like a tree doesn’t dissolve the soil around it.
Somebody might say, Oh, it’s the enzymes the human body produces which break down the blueberry! No, that would be the specific enzyme cellulase, which is required to break down plants for digestion. If you Google: Does the human body make cellulase, what you discover is that the human does not produce it.
Humanity breaks down blueberries the same way that a leaf is converted into soil, which is by being CONSUMED by microorganisms and it’s the WASTE of the residents within the digestive tract which supplies much of the nutrition, aside from the blueberry’s juice-parts. Otherwise, to the human body, the blueberry cellular structures would provide the same nutrition as if it were made of plastic. It can’t be thoroughly digested and of maximum benefit without the assistance of microorganisms.
What this means is that a significant purpose of eating is to feed the MICROORGANISMS within. Then, they feed the person. Just like you can’t chop a hole in a tree trunk, stuff in dirt, and say, “Eat up!” There is a proper sequence and it is: Organic material + microorganisms + enzymes + water + roots = nutrition/growth.
Variety is your spice of life.
What’s special about microorganisms living within the human body is that they are like fish in the sea. They come in many varieties and shapes. And not just fish, but microorganisms are like all the crawly things on the bottom of the ocean too. Some like shallow spots and some like deep places. So if you took a knife blade and scraped some of these off your skin, they’d appear completely different than if you spit and looked closely at that or stuck your finger in your ear, pulled it out, and looked closely at that.
These are the drivers of a person’s health. If you cut out a small section of your flesh and looked at it under a microscope, you could see that it’s not just tissue made from cells, but it’s an entire culture of other very tiny creatures living there. Each cell of the human flesh is somebody else’s apartment. And each apartment unit has a connecting hallway and some little creatures are living there too. But the whole thing is WET, so keep that in mind. We are talking about the human body as an aquarium, not about some kind of a hollow dry hallway.
Thus the human body is more like a Dr. Seuss children’s book than a medical science textbook. It’s an aquarium inside of an aquarium inside of an aquarium inside of an aquarium which has sprouted arms and legs with a head on top, and wiggles about, across a mostly wet terrarium planet.
Why Aging is Relative per the Individual
As the human body ages, it loses water. Not just that, but the tiniest aquariums get pinched off with aging and now water can’t get in that aquarium and any waste inside the aquarium can’t get out. The whole idea of “hydration” is that it does two things: 1) it can be helpful to prevent the tiniest aquariums from getting pinched off and 2) it keeps the aquariums full of water and self-cleaning of waste because cells are designed for water to flow through them. Plus, the residents of the cells, the microorganisms, are constantly cleaning everything up.
The microorganism which are not synergistic do the opposite. They mess everything up worse.
The problem with “people telling other people” to drink more water is that they rarely explain how water works inside of the human body in relation to digestion, assimilation of nutrients, support of the microflora and the elimination of wastes. Again, imagining an aquarium is helpful because the water inside of people is exactly like a goldfish bowl. If the water in the bowl doesn’t get changed, it grows increasingly foul and nasty.
A goldfish can live a long time in foul and nasty water. But eventually, what’s foul and nasty about the water will overcome the goldfish, plug it up, and kill it. Thus, the health of a goldfish is less about how OLD it is, compared to how sustaining and clean its water has been.
Protect your internal waters.
Likewise, a human’s internal fluids can turn foul. Humans don’t live in water, but carry around water inside. Imagine a goldfish swimming in nasty water, but make it get bigger in the tank by absorbing the water. Now it’s so big that the fish fills the bowl and all the water that was in the tank is now inside the fish. This is the picture of what’s happening to people because people are just bloated “goldfish” which have absorbed all the water in their tank.
First, we are drinking and exposed to water that has been fouled before it reaches the mouth. Secondly, the water must flow into the human cells, then flow-out concentrated-nasty, then flow out of the body. We think of the kidneys performing that function, but each individual cell must self-cleanse, and on a larger level, so must all the tissues and organs self-cleanse. There’s water in the spine, so that must self-cleanse too or else a person will have filthy goldfish tank water lubricating the spine and if that were the case, the spine will lose flexibility and likely cause chronic pain.
Spinal subluxations are often caused by poor “lubrication quality” preventing the spine from self-correcting. Yeah, the disks might be out of place, but they’ve also lost their natural slip.
Now, an aquarium will stay clean longer if the tank has a filter and the human body has filters built-in throughout. The latest fad illness these days is LEAKY GUT (and it should be because it’s epidemic), so the gut itself is a kind of filter and if it springs holes in it, the gut’s filtration function is broken.
The human liver filters the blood so the blood stays clean, but if the liver plugs up, then the blood has a problem. The colon is a filter too, while we don’t think of it like that, but what passes down the small intestine is like diarrhea (very soggy poop) and to conserve water, the colon extracts and filters the water from that, which turns watery fecal waste into what plops (less wet) into the toilet.
Knowing how this works, helps us to realize that every part of the body is connected through WATER.
So, clean water goes in the mouth and then gets put to a thousand uses and is recycled from head to toe, just like a whole body aquarium filtration unit. Plug-up the human’s lymphatic drainage, which assists the cells to stay continually flushing, and the water in the cells starts turning filthy. Plug up the liver, and the water in the digestive tract and the water in the blood begins to grow tainted. Plug up the colon and the recycled water from the colon is then putrid. Now, take a vitamin pill, and that ain’t going to improve any of this situation, which is exactly like tossing a vitamin pill into a filthy fish tank and expect it to do the fish any good.
What a medicine will do is to suppress the symptoms of the bodily PARTS, while the systemic water continues to turn filthy, and honestly, I don’t know why people are forgetting about the critical water-part as indicative of the whole.
Get beyond chasing symptoms.
As pointed out earlier, a goldfish can live a long time in a filthy tank and so can the human with filthy waters flowing within. But the person isn’t going to feel very good in all sorts of places. If that person goes to a chiropractor for an adjustment, the improvement will be temporary. Acupuncture will do wonders, but not for very long. Medicines will be able to address the symptoms (headaches, nausea, depression, plaque, bacterial infections), while ignoring the restricted flow of water and lowered immunity that’s occurred from head to toe. Massage will feel awesome, but doesn’t address broader internal toxicities afflicting tissues with knots. On and on, blah, blah, blah: the various social fixes we employ which miss the point.
Turning all that around is simple if one applies LEVERAGE upon the broken PRIORITY. This strategy has been famously referred to as “working in reverse from where the symptoms first appeared.”
For example, unplugging THE SYSTEM at the colon UNWINDS the deeper issues, by adding clean water up the rear. This releases waste and colon hygienists understand that there is a lot of it; it’s VISIBLE and excessive. This assists the liver to self-cleanse out the digestive tract. This improves the filtration of the blood, which in turn better absorbs acids from tissues and organs, which facilitates improved cellular self-cleansing, lymphatic drainage, which supports the microflora residing everywhere. This is how one “works in reverse.”
For example: working from reverse, starting at the butt, the rash behind the ear disappears.
Strategy for Mid-life Crisis
Now you can look at an old person who is 90 years old with a water-content in their tissues at below 50 percent, while they once began life as a baby with a 90-percent water content. If somebody suggested that the 90 year-old drink more water, what commonly happens? The water can’t get inside of the cells because the cell membranes have oxidized and thickened, thus gravity pulls the water to their feet.
Common problem.
We could divide the difference and take a 45 year-old, for example, with an approximate 70 percent tissue-water content HEADED towards 90 years old with the exact same slide into dehydration, and what’s the 45 year-old to do?
Drink more water starting today?
Again, what are the variables? Clean water beginning at the mouth. Recycled water within the body, from head to toe. Microorganism tenants residing at every micro-level. Then, bodily-system filters throughout.
The aging strategy for the 45 year-old will NOT be just “clean water beginning at the mouth,” but the cleanest water possible recycled within, plus doing everything possible to support the microorganisms within, which assist the cleansing of internal filters, plus microflora provide the assimilation of nutrients, plus twenty, thirty, forty other benefits which will be addressed under the “flora priority.” And, the 45 year-old will want to assist the liver to self-cleanse, which will be addressed under the “liver priority.” So there’s some things to know and things to do, which should be easy and which nobody can pay somebody else to do for them because all this stuff is happening fast all day long and you don’t want to wait until others see you going down because you messed up your own game from age 45 (or even from age fourteen).
And most people can’t see what’s going on with you, whether you have rashes under your clothes, whether you’ve been on antibiotics off and on all year long, how often you’ve been requiring spinal adjustments, whether you’ve been feeling chronically sad or can barely crawl out of bed or having headaches for three days straight. If everything has been going utterly fantastic, everybody is excited for you and that’s awesome and you won’t need to consider any of this and just go and thrive yourself!
If you take something meaningful away from this, just be aware that everything at this tiniest of levels MATTERS. And that’s what we are going for here. If you didn’t know that you really are a whole bunch of aquariums within an aquarium that has sprouted arms and legs and a head at the top, now you do, and you can act accordingly and change whatever’s been going on until now, or not. And that’s about it. Super simple: unwind your insides backwards, from where you’ve been to what’s next, which is where you want to go.
Below is something I pulled together for my clients years ago concerning hydration and here it is:
Water as the body’s PRIORITY
About two-thirds of the body’s fluids should be INSIDE the cells making up organs and tissues. The first sign of declining health is a shift of fluid to the outside of the body’s cells. When there is more water outside the cells than inside, it compresses blood vessels and reduces the oxygen and nutrition delivered into the cells. When cells lose the energy necessary to maintain membrane pumps balancing water, they begin to die.
The human body loses about two quarts of water per day through perspiration, urination, and exhalation. The average person’s body weight is about 70 percent water, but that can vary widely depending on age and habits.
Something as simple as drinking the right kind of water can help to restore vitality to the cells.
Your bodily systems smartly manage the water received. The skin, the gastrointestinal tract, and joints are less critical to survival, so symptoms of chronic dehydration usually show up in those places first.
Here are some signs that you could be suffering from internal dehydration:
Joint pains and arthritis
Cartilage is made up of 80 percent water that is five times slicker than ice. If robbed of fluid, joints will dehydrate, creak, crack, and hurt. The increased friction causes them to degenerate quicker. The disks in your spine support three-quarters of the weight in the body. When the disks lack water, back pain becomes a chronic issue, plus pain may be due to the fact that spinal fluid requires clean replacement water to continue lubricating properly.
Reference: http://www.foodmatters.com/article/are-you-chronically-dehydrated
High blood pressure
When the body is mildly dehydrated, it may restrict the flow of blood and concentrate all available water on the vital organs. Cells deflated of water can systemically cause the heart to work harder to circulate blood flow, just like driving a car on flat tires would cause the engine to run at a higher RPM to move the same distance.
Reference: http://optimum-health.org/Dehydration_High_Blood_Pressure/
Digestion Issues
Water is the basis of every fluid required for digestion and elimination, including saliva, bile, stomach acid, pancreatic juices and the mucus that lines the GI tract. Without adequate water, the system goes into emergency mode, which can result in heartburn, indigestion, constipation, hemorrhoids, and ulcers. One theory is that dehydration thins the stomach’s mucus lining (98 percent water), making it more vulnerable to attacks by the bacterium H. pylori. With adequate water, that layer is thick, otherwise a person may feel a chronic burning sensation.
Reference: http://www.freedrinkingwater.com/water_health/health3/dehydration-peptic-ulcers.htm
Asthma
Your bronchial tubes require hydration. Studies have shown that histamine production goes down as water intake increases. The same goes for allergies; water helps.
Reference: http://alisonvickery.com.au/are-you-sick-or-thirsty-histamines-and-hydration/
Weight Gain, etc.
Water keeps skin supple, eyes bright and the body spry. Consider this: Remove water from plums and you get prunes. The skin is designed to hold in moisture, to be elastic.
Recent research indicates that dehydration may cause body fat to increase. Dehydration can affect body temperature and leads to a sluggish metabolism. If normal temperature drops slightly, it causes the body to store fat.
Resource: https://www.livestrong.com/article/422596-can-dehydration-cause-belly-fat/
Without adequate hydration, mental ability can slow down. Some of the benefits from maintaining proper hydration include:
- Preventing back pain.
- Highest efficiency of the immune system.
- Reduces risk of heart attack and stroke.
- Manufacturing of neurotransmitters including serotonin and for the production of hormones.
- Improves attention span.
- Reducing risk for many degenerative diseases.
Free book-download to study lots more:
https://www.sonnewald.org/assets/pdf/literature/the-healing-power-of-water.pdf
The Rap on Tap Water (not drinkable).
Just several decades ago across America, pure water came right out of the ground. But today, even wells 200 feet deep may not yield pure water. Wells have been contaminated by the widespread use of man-made chemicals used in industry, agriculture, and yes, fracking. Over half a million new chemicals have been developed since 1965; many are water soluble, and toxic to the human body. According to the Environmental Defense Group, more than four billion pounds of toxic chemicals are released into our environment annually, with over 2,000 chemicals identifiable in tap water.
Now I drink tap water because sometimes I’ll order ice tea at a restaurant and sometimes I can taste the chlorine. I still drink it because it’s just one glass. Sometimes I forget to bring my own water to exercise class, maybe once every two months I’ll forget, and I’ll catch a few swigs at the drinking fountain. But I wouldn’t suggest drinking much more tap water than that.
Municipal water treatment plants are ill-equipped to remove many chemicals from their water sources. This has lagged woefully behind the technical invention of chemicals such that our water reflects our environment. Underground aquifers that feed city water supplies catch runoff from dump sites, landfills, and underground storage tanks. Chemicals we pump into the air settles onto the land and anything we spray, bury, emit or flush finds its way into our drinking water. This includes two billion pounds of pesticides used annually. In many Midwestern farming towns, children receive their lifetime dose of the herbicide atrazine in their first four months of life, not including their time inside the womb.
Pharmaceutical products also end up in drinking water. Humans and pets expel it in their waste and sometimes people just flush their medications. Antibiotics, hormones, painkillers and dozens of drugs are found in public drinking water samples. Fish have been found to contain chemicals from popular drugs including Zoloft and birth control pills.
Fish taken downstream from a DuPont chemical plant will test positive for Teflon. Researchers estimate that pharmaceutical and personal care products entering the water supply may be equal to pesticides, millions of pounds annually. The man-made chemicals which the average person absorbs into their own tissues annually is measured in POUNDS. And it’s daily. The entire body must juggle these things because if a year’s worth of man-made chemicals entered a person’s body at one time, they are done, dead.
Cities add chlorine to public water to kill microorganisms, while it itself is not entirely safe. Chlorine can combine with organic materials to form trihalomethanes – a carcinogenic. It is also linked to birth defects and spina bifida. Chlorinated water can also destroy nutrients: vitamins A, B, C, and E, and fatty acids. Most cities add fluoride to water, despite that it comes from a byproduct of industrial waste. It too can interfere with vitamin and mineral functions in the body, linked to calcium deposits and arthritis. Dr. Charles Gordon Heyd, past president of the American Medical Association, stated, “Fluoride is a corrosive poison with serious side effects.”
Resource: http://www.fluoridedebate.com/conclusion.html
Aluminum is also used to remove organic material, so traces of aluminum remain in the drinking water. Some people wonder if boiling water removes these chemicals and the answer is no. To check your city’s water supply, go to www.ewg.org and click on “Tap Water Database.”
One supplement that removes aluminum from the body is diatomaceous earth. Increasing one’s bowel transit time helps remove heavy metals in the body too, as does chlorophyll, such as found in juiced parsley, sun chlorella supplements, alfalfa greens and cilantro.
You WILL be exposed to all the stuff in tap water and I think, just get the harmful stuff out, no big deal.
Is Bottled Water Better?
Bottled water is the second-most popular beverage in the U.S., behind soft drinks. Bottled water is actually less regulated than tap water and can be equally toxic. One study of 100 brands revealed one-third contained arsenic, trihalomethanes, bacteria, and chemical residues. According to industry estimates, one-fourth of bottled water is plain tap water.
The major issue with most bottled water is that it is bottled in plastic. The very worst plastic, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), emits carcinogenic pollutants beginning the moment it is created. PVC leaches, disrupting hormonal balances, causing fertility problems, damaging human cells, organs, and tissues. Another common ingredient in some plastics leaches at room temperature, bisphenol A, is linked to obesity and affects fetal development. Most water bottles are made from PET and considered safer, but can leach chemicals called phthalates into the water, which can disrupt the production of fatty acids.
What I do is to pour the water I drink into a glass bottle, which formerly held tea or commercial kombucha. Reuse that glass for a while, then recycle it, get a new “bottle”.
The thing to note is that plastic is used everywhere and one can’t avoid plastic exposure and we live in a civilized society, so consider doing a few things that help to get plastic out of the body. Certain internal microbes have the ability to eat plastic inside the body and so supplementing broad spectrum probiotics is helpful, as is consuming fermented foods like miso and sauerkraut.
Reference: https://www.activistpost.com/2013/12/7-ways-to-drain-bpa-from-body.html
Filtered Water, Not Bad!
Carbon filters, the kind often used on faucets and plastic pitchers, are not effective at removing heavy metals, fluoride, viruses or pharmaceuticals in tap water. The drawback to distilled water is that there are no minerals left in it, making it more absorbent, meaning it absorbs carbon dioxide, causing cells to become more acidic. Like distilled water, reverse osmosis creates “acidic water” which can be aggressive due to pulling out minerals anywhere it comes into contact.
You can learn more about filtered water here (more than you probably want to know):
http://waterfilters.mercola.com/drinking-water-filter.aspx
Alkaline Water, Not Bad.
One’s opinion on this topic rides the twin horns of a dilemma. If you endorse alkaline water, those on the other side of the argument immediately write you off as stupid. And, a person could spend days researching the topic and still come up scratching.
As far as bottled alkaline water sold in stores, I’ve never tried it and don’t have an opinion on it because the methods of creating and filtering it are different than the machines that make it directly at the tap, which is preferable, not just because of the change in pH, but in the measureable negative ion content.
Some will suggest that alkaline water is neutralized by acids in the stomach, so an 8.0 pH water hits stomach acids, which are in the 3.0 range, which is thousands of times different in pH. Does this affect normal digestion? One side says yes, that drinking alkaline water may affect stomach acidity, while the other side states that the stomach is designed to handle all levels of pH and will adjust accordingly, perhaps even benefit the body by passing alkaline water into the intestines where it helps to alkalinize other bodily fluids.
One thing we know for sure is that Americans tend to test between ten to one hundred times more acidic than they should be. Cells typically cannot detoxify as effectively under an acidic environment, so THE IDEA of drinking water to assist cellular detoxification has some appeal. The human body has many different levels of pH, for example, the skin is typically 5.5, which is about one hundred times more acidic than the blood and a protection against microbial attack. The stomach can produce acids at a level 1.8, while closer to 3.0 inside the stomach. Coke would measure near 2.5.
The thing about pH is that it’s one of those things the body regulates without having to think about it. The water our ancestors drank was likely between 7.0 and 9.0, so that’s what I’d shoot for, based on historical precedent.
Negative Ion Water, Why Not?
The other factor: our ancestors were more exposed to a greater negative ion content in natural and free-flowing water. The electrical shock of lightning can improve the molecular structure of water, as does freezing it as snow, and then bouncing melted snow down and over rocks. If you have access to that, then that’s the stuff to drink.
Japanese scientists invented a way to SIMULATE Mother Nature in this respect and that is by restructuring water with a machine by “electrifying it” such that some of the hydrogen molecules “split free,” leaving the negative electron, which may be beneficial to drink in terms of reducing “positive charges” in the body. Inflammation has a positive charge on the molecular level, so getting negative ions to the inflammation source may be beneficial. Studies conducted in the U.S. on the topic are few, but Japan has conducted substantial research where these negative ion machines are popular.
What’s interesting about Japan is that as a nation, its people have the highest longevity above other developed nations: 82.6 average years in Japan compared to 78.1 for the U.S. The idea for the younger person, “of living to be really old,” is less relevant; just appreciate that hidden in this statistic is that you also had a greater capacity for more fun all along the way.
Free radicals in the body have a positive charge, which can oxidize cellular membranes causing them to thicken and resist water, thereby retaining more wastes, which further increases oxidation. If negative ion water can reduce oxidation levels as an antioxidant, improving cell permeability, I’m all for it.
Plus, water with minerals is magnetic and when it sits, the H2O molecules can attract together. You can’t see this with the naked eye, but sometimes can taste this with water that has been sitting for a long time versus fresh flowing water. These negative ion machines are purported to break-up the water so that it is more readily absorbed, which would aid in cellular waste removal too.
The jury is out on the topic, but I myself purchased a negative ion “Kangen water machine” over ten years ago and so did many of my friends, my parents, and my siblings. They can be on the expensive side ($1,000-$4,000), but they rarely wear out, so you would need to factor the upfront cost by dividing it into years of service, then compare that to what a person typically spends annually on bottled water and I believe these machines provide water cheaper by the gallon. There are all kinds of water filtration devices coming out that are excellent and worth looking into, if you are dead set against negative ion water-making machines.
If you have questions about negative ion water, feel free to email me and I’ll try to answer them: [email protected].
How Much Water Should I Drink?
Typically divide your body weight by two and that’s the number of ounces of water to drink daily (two to three quarts). Eating lots of raw fruits and vegetables can be factored as water intake. Consuming starches like bread and pasta requires additional water intake.
Meals are not the best times to drink water. It’s better to drink between meals and here is an article about ways to enhance the taste of water, like with lemon or cucumbers:
https://www.rebootwithjoe.com/enhance-the-taste-of-your-water-naturally-recipe-of-the-week/
There is also an article on this website about coconut water and water that has been filtered through maple trees!
As far as coffee, tea, beer, wine, spirits, much of that is dehydrating, but that’s really a matter of choice. If you drink coffee, it’s relevant to consider where the water came from, and the additives, and even the kind of cup you typically drink it from because heat plus plastic is not a healthy combination.
Now I just read a long article about the stupidity of juicing fruits and vegetables, but I myself have long been a fan of Jay Kordich, “The Juiceman.” Fruits are typically made from water filtered through a tree, which makes it very pure, as far as water goes. Vegetables are likewise another good source of filtered water (organic only, my friend) and I highly recommend it, plus the pH tends to lean towards alkaline and does not form acids in the body via its digestion and assimilation. All the experts who advise, “do not juice fruit in a juicer” due to the sugar, tell us that, while eating a cookie.
Underpin Your World as a Happy Place
Finally, hydration isn’t a PRIORITY because it’s a common life or death immediate issue. Why we would care about it here is because hydration underpins other priorities of the human body. Drinking clean water supports proper pH, assists the liver to detoxify, and takes stress off the colon from needing to extract as much water as possible from the feces on its way out. A better-hydrated body runs CLEANER and a cleaner body better supports the right kinds of microflora living within, which in turn consume the food we eat and expel bio-available nutrients which the body uses for energy, to grow, rebuild, heal, and regenerate.
Our paradigm of water is that it’s a “down the gullet thing,” but surely that could be expanded upon to see it as an extremely beneficial “up the butt” thing. The people who don’t access both ends say never to do it, while most of the people who do, swear by it, and we say, “Get over it: do it!” Clean water in at both ends; filthy water out the back.
It’s extreme l-e-v-e-r-a-g-e, baby!
The next priority is proper pH. Given you have learned more about hydration and how it works at the tiniest levels inside the human body, pH will be almost a no-brainer. As far as PARASITE REMOVAL as a health priority, yeah, one of the best ways to remove them is with water because we are going to FLUSH them OUT! Out the back-end. That is, if you have caught-on to what’s truly going on under the skin, which is like an opaque glass surrounding an aquarium tank. We don’t think that our body might be an attractive residence for other smaller things to live.
Pretty on the outside, you are, we know!
