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Water

You’re not sick, You are thirsty. It is chronic water shortage that causes most of the disease in the body.

Dr F. Batmanghelidj, author of Your Body’s Many Cries for Water

Dying for a Drink?

Dehydration is being hailed as one of the biggest causes of illness in men, women and children worldwide. You don’t have to be stranded in the hot desert, parched with an agonising thirst and dragging yourself Lawrence-of-Arabia-style towards a shimmering mirage to be suffering this hidden health risk. You simply have to be one of the millions who fail to come even close to drinking the eight glasses of pure water that your body needs, each and every day to replace the water it loses, to protect itself against disease and keep all your organs in optimum working order.

One clue to the importance of water to life is the fact that it is everywhere. Three-quarters of our planet is covered in water (all but 3% of the total volume is held in the oceans). This figure is then mirrored by your own body which is also 75% water if you are an adult, and even higher, closer to 97%, for newborns. As a fully-developed human being, your 15 billion brain cells are mostly water (estimates range from 74.5-85%) and even your teeth are 10% moisture. You can survive for days without food, but just a 2% loss of the water surrounding your cells will result in a 20% drop in your energy levels.

A healthy cell absorbs nutrients from the water outside the cell, and the inner and outer water levels and contents are balanced by osmosis via the membrane of the cell. In simple terms, osmosis is the passage of a solvent (in this case, water) through a semi-permeable membrane which acts like a sieve between a less concentrated (weaker) solution to a more concentrated (stronger) one. Unless some outside force or pressure is exerted to alter the flow, osmosis continues until both solutions are the same strength.

In the body, then, the cell membranes are semi-permeable and allow water, salts, simple sugars such as glucose, and amino acids – but not whole proteins – through.

The Real Thing?

The pure genius of humble water as the key to good health first hit me when, several years ago, I chanced upon an article in a magazine called Colors, published by the Italian clothing company Benetton. In a special issue devoted to Fat, there were two photographs – one of a glass of water, the other of a darker liquid, a well-known brand of cola.

The headline was simple but carried a powerful message:

‘You’re thirsty, do you reach for the real thing?’

Which of these drinks, it asked, is the perfect nutrient to replace the eight glasses of water your body loses every day through sweating, urinating, defecating and exhaling? And which one contains the equivalent of eight cubes of sugar, makes you burp and rots your teeth? The caption explained how soft drinks are packed with so-called ‘empty calories’ – once you’ve burned up the sugar in them, there are no nutrients left – and how this trick sweetens the palate and sets up cravings in the body for high-fat, high-sugar junk foods.

About 16% of the total amount of water in your system right now is being stored in your muscles, which will become soft and flabby if you become dehydrated. When you realise that just the glands in your mouth, which work to keep it moist, use up to three pints of water per day, you can see how easily dehydration can happen.

The solution is simple enough – you need to increase the amount of fluids you are drinking. The trouble is, your preferred drinks – tea, coffee, cola drinks and even alcohol – are just not the right kinds of fluids. Alcohol, for example, is a natural diuretic. That means it forces water out of the body, causing the dehydration that is responsible for the worst hangovers (see Hangover Cures, page 162). In fact, for every alcoholic drink you take, you will lose the same volume of water from your body. Tea and coffee, too, are dehydrating.

Both the blood and the immune-supporting and cancer-fighting lymphatic system need pure, not contaminated, water to transport nutrients to cells and, just as importantly, to flush out toxins and waste.

So what should you be drinking?

According to natural health practitioners, the very best type of water for optimum health is distilled water. There are only three sources:

1 fresh organic vegetable and fruit juices.

2 water that has been distilled and purified by steam. You can buy the equipment to do this (see Resources for suppliers).

3 rain water that has passed through clean, unpolluted air.

Other practitioners will recommend that you install a water purification system.

Mineral versus Tap Water

You may already be drinking as much water as you can each day and you may have swapped your tea and coffee for herbal drinks and mineral water. Sadly, you may still not be drinking the right kind of water to keep your body healthy.

Over 800 chemicals have been found in drinking water supplies, including pesticides and antibiotics. There may be bacteria, nitrates – which will react with other chemicals to form potentially carcinogenic compounds in the digestive tract – and aluminium, high levels of which have been clearly linked with Alzheimer’s Disease.

Simple, you say. I’ll only drink bottled water. If only it were that simple! Some bottled waters pose more health hazards than some tap waters. Some are just tap water that has been filtered to remove the tell-tale taste of chlorine, and then given a fancy name. Even true spa waters may have been polluted. Tap water must pass 57 different tests for contaminants; mineral water can scrape by with just 15 assays. And, according to Anna Selby, author of H20 – Healing Water for Mind and Body, European standards for factory-bottled water are actually lower than those set for tap water supplies. If you think this is bad, you will be even more alarmed to learn there are no tests at all for waters which are sold as ‘Sprin’g or ‘Table’ brands.

Common contaminants include calcium, high levels of which are linked with a higher risk of kidney stones, and sodium, which most people now know can lead to increased blood pressure and a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.

In my house, we use a carbon water filter and a sophisticated water purifying system which works by combined reverse osmosis and de-ionisation to remove heavy metals, bacteria, nitrates and other chemicals from our drinking supply. With this system, our tap water is forced under high pressure through a semi-permeable membrane which prevents the passage of these contaminants into the tank from which we then draw a drinking water supply which meets the medical definition of pure water as containing less than 10 parts per million of total dissolved solids. Before I had this system installed, my supply was tested and shown to contain 400 parts per million of solids and other contaminants.

It often surprises guests when I drop to my knees and start filling their glasses from an extra tap hidden under the sink, but they invariably comment on the improved taste of the water they then get. It also means I am no longer drinking water from plastic bottles, which contain chemicals, including xeno-oestrogens, that are residual from the manufacturing process of the plastic itself and which have been shown to mimic oestrogen in the body and disrupt hormonal balances (see page 14).

Another common mistake is to think that eight glasses of a sparkling mineral water will bring you all the health benefits this chapter is promising. Sadly, there is a good biochemical reason to avoid carbonated waters: They contain carbon dioxide, which through a complex chemical pathway, actually works in the body to raise the pH of the stomach – making it less acidic and, therefore, less able to digest the protein foods you eat. This in turn can lead to malabsorption of the nutrients in your food.

The Big Fluoride Debate

Whenever I write about fluoride, my postbag doubles with irate letters from angry researchers and health authority administrators. I cannot understand why when research has shown the same rate of decline in dental decay between fluoridated and non-fluoridated regions, we are even having this debate.

Fluoride is a cumulative poison, and while the body excretes about 50% of the fluoride we ingest, the rest is stored, mainly in the bones. Less than 2% of Europe’s population now has fluoridated water, which was banned by Sweden and West Germany in 1971; Norway in 1975; Holland in 1976 and Denmark in 1977. France rejected fluoridation in 1980 – yet in the UK, over six million people still drink fluoridated water.

In the US, that figure rockets up to 135 million, despite the fact that groups as powerful as The American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association and The Society of Toxicology all stopped endorsing water fluoridation in the mid-1990s. These august bodies withdrew support following numerous large-scale studies reporting a link between fluoride intake and hip fractures, with some research showing an 87% increase among elderly populations. Skeletal fluorosis is now said to be a serious risk in people who have ingested 10–20mg of fluoride per day for between 10 and 20 years.

In the UK, an independent investigation of all the research into fluoridation by scientists at York University reviewed all the papers for and against fluoridation and concluded that the majority of those papers ‘proving’ it was beneficial did not meet the strict criteria of the peer review.

By the way, the US genius who first came up with the idea of dissolving sodium fluoride in drinking water in 1939 had no medical background and did not conduct any clinical trials to investigate the effect of this compound in the human body. Sodium fluoride waste, produced by the aluminium foundries at that time, was causing a problem on land and many of the country’s biggest corporations were worried by the threat of expensive litigation and damage suits by disgruntled crop farmers and livestock producers. How they must have clapped and cheered when it was discovered that the children in a small Texas town where the water was naturally fluoridated appeared to suffer from fewer dental cavities. What better way to sell this toxic waste product as the new health hope?

You might know by now that tooth decay is the result of poor nutrition, bad oral hygiene and excessive consumption of sugary sweets and drinks, but as the US naturopath, Patricia Bragg, writes in her must-read book Water – The Shocking Truth, back then people were only too willing to believe that scientists had stumbled across a miracle cure to prevent all dental decay.

Ironically, some 60 years later, researchers at the University of Arizona caused a stir when they conducted a study which found that ‘the more fluoride a child drinks, the more cavities appear in the teeth.’

Losing Weight

Drinking water before you eat will also help you lose weight. This is because the brain can generate energy from water and food. We eat to supply the brain with food and in response to a sensation that we are hungry, yet only 20% of that food ever reaches the brain. The rest, unless we exercise regularly is stored as fat. When we use pure water instead of food, this storage does not happen. Excess water passes out of the body as urine and no weight is gained. The biochemistry behind the idea of water as an energy source may be complex, but try drinking pure water throughout the day (especially before meals) and watch the excess weight drop off. If you are not hungry, don’t eat. Drink a glass of water instead.

Sacred Water

The Cherokee see and treat water as the earth’s life blood. The Greeks revered water as the highest of all the elements, and in Traditional Chinese Medicine, where water is seen as the source of vital chi or energy, it is also said to link the five levels of human existence – physical, vital, emotional, mental and spiritual. Many indigenous cultures shared the belief that to look into running water was to gaze upon your soul and the face of God, and many authors have predicted that in this new century, water will become the most important cure-all in medicine and healing.

Most people feel physically and spiritually renewed and uplifted when given the opportunity to immerse themselves in water, and natural healers believe you can cleanse and re-energise your own domestic water supply, especially in preparation for bathing, by stirring the water in spirals as it flows from the tap.

In the 1960s, the Canadian researcher Bernard Grad experimented with water that had been treated by a healer and found it not only accelerated the growth of plant seeds but had an anti-depressant effect on patients suffering a negative outlook. Water also plays an increasingly important role in what many are calling the new medicine of the 21st century – Vibrational Healing – and in one of the oldest natural therapies, homeopathy. With techniques such as the Bach Flower Remedies and other flower essences, the energetic and healing essence of the plant is transferred, through the power of sunlight, to the medium of water.

Water has always played a role in spiritual rituals and meditation. When you meditate, sit facing North and place a small bowl of pure water to the West. This is an ancient Celtic shamanic and Native American healing tradition where the water signifies the emotions.

A Simple Cleansing Ritual

The Indian yogis, who live for years and who all look much younger than their biological age, use cleansing rituals to purify both the physical body and the mind. One of the more extreme is to use fasting and pure water only to purify the body and soul. One simple cleansing technique that you can easily incorporate into your everyday life, however busy you are, is called Jala Netti. It works fantastically well to relieve respiratory problems and prevent asthma attacks, and is very effective if you are prone to a build-up of mucus in the body, especially after eating dairy products. On an emotional level, it is said by the yogis to help you let go of deep-rooted anger and to release those energy blocks that may be holding you back in your life.

The first time I tried it, it made me cry – which I later learned is not unusual. It is also an excellent way to keep the nasal passages in tip-top condition, to resist infection and keep your immune system strong. Many people, once they get the hang of it, practise Jala Netti every day. Others only use it when they feel a blockage threatening or when, for example, they have spent the day in a polluted city centre.

Jala Netti – How to Do It

You will need a small Jala Netti pot. These are not expensive and can be bought from shops and suppliers which specialise in yoga accesories (see Resources). Find a screw-top glass jar (an old, sterilised jam jar will work) and carefully pour a tablespoon of natural salt into the bottom. Boil the kettle and, when cooled so that it is just warm to the touch, pour the water into this jar, over the salt. Watch the salt dissolve and stop, for a moment, to think about the amazing qualities of water as a solvent. (To liquify salt without water, you would need to heat it in a furnace to 800 degrees C.)

Now, pour this solution into your Jala Netti pot until the liquid comes close to the top. Take this, together with a pack of soft tissues, to the bathroom, where you are going to perform your Jala Netti cleansing over the sink. The idea is to cleanse both nasal passages by gently pouring the water into one nostril and allowing it to pass out through the other. To do this, you insert the spout of the Jala Netti pot into the nostril itself and tip your head to one side. If you are cleansing the right-hand nostril, tip the head to the left. Repeat on the other side.

Don’t worry if it feels odd at first. You will soon get used to this sensation. Don’t worry either if this ritual, which stimulates the vagus nerve that runs from the brainstem to the abdomen, with branches to almost all the major organs, makes you feel emotional. This is perfectly normal and is an excellent sign of the deep inner cleansing that is taking place and boosting your health and well-being.