“The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”
~Albert Einstein
One of the most significant changes you can make in your health is actually quite simple: increase the amount of water you drink, and improve the quality of the water you drink. Can you remember those times when you drank water from a hose or played in water from fire hydrants with your friends? This same water now contains drugs, chemicals, and even fluoride. Our medicated water might be the best vaccine ever invented (I joke). We need pure water for survival and cannot ignore its benefit. It is essential to keeping our organs moist and functioning.
Fluoride is touted for its ability to prevent cavities, and is added to municipal water supplies. In actuality, cavities are the result of a biochemical imbalance and not a fluoride deficiency. Chlorine and fluorine displace iodine and create problems with the thyroid gland. Fluoride even contributes to infertility. The saddest part is that it is reaching our children!
Most tap water doesn’t taste very good, and so in an effort to hydrate themselves, people try to uses juices and other drinks. I know many people will argue in favor of drinking fruit and vegetable juices for improved health. It takes a great number of oranges to make a glass of fresh orange juice. Can you imagine eating eight oranges in one sitting? How would the body respond to this massive amount of fruit sugar going through its system? Don’t get me wrong, some people benefit from juice drinking, but these folks are drinking just-squeezed, non-pasteurized juices from their glasses. Others who don’t benefit from juicing need nutrients from other sources to meet their body’s needs. Even though many will say that anything liquid hydrates the body, this is just wrong.
Juices that are not consumed immediately after squeezing them oxidize and lose some of their nutritional benefits. When you cut an apple on the kitchen counter and come back in a minute, you see for yourself what oxidation is—it is the process of seeing a live food consume itself.
Drinking coffee is another good example of taking in fluid, but not effectively hydrating the body. Coffee actually dehydrates the body. I know it tastes good and the purer it is, the better. I have to say that coffee is something we drink because we like its taste or think we need the caffeine, but not because our body needs it. Most people are not ready to detoxify themselves from coffee by the time they go to bed at night, and thus they disrupt their hormonal cycle, contributing to sleep problems and making us suspect that we are getting the latest disease in town. I recommend that my clients drink coffee before 9 AM to give themselves some time to get it out of their system before bedtime. This works for some, but not for others. I am not saying that you need to quit drinking coffee, but investigate whether this tasty drink is suitable for you.
The consumption of coffee has been well adopted by our society and is also a great contributor to adrenal fatigue in many people. Adrenal fatigue welcomes allergies, arthritic pain, and a decrease in immune response. Most women that have low adrenal function have more premenstrual tension as well as an increase in difficulty during menopause. In others, it causes changes in carbohydrate, protein, and fat metabolism as well as fluid and electrolyte balance, changes in the heart and cardiovascular system, and even changes in sex drive.
If we will pay more attention to the adrenal glands and how to keep them healthy, it is almost guaranteed that our lives would be full of energy to spend playing with our children and connecting with nature.
I have seen many children drinking coffee, colas, and other sugary drinks full of colors that glow in the dark. I want to share this quote:
“ . . .one should remember that caffeine is similarly an addictive drug, the use of which has become ‘legal’. Children in particular become vulnerable to the addictive properties of these containing beverages. Stimulating the body at the early stages of the life of a child with pleasure-enhancing chemicals in beverages, in some will program these senses to use harder addictive drugs when they reach school age.
Thus, the long-term and constant use of sodas in general, and diet sodas in particular, should be assumed to be responsible for some of the most serious health problems of our society. Distorting the physical appearance of the body as a result of excess fat storage is the first step in this direction. Some manufactured beverages should only be used sparingly, if at all, by younger people, when the right programs for the future health of a child is the aim of the parents.” (Wilson)
Do you know that we are the only animal in the world that drinks someone else’s milk for “calcium” intake or because we think it is necessary for survival? My friends, we do not need milk to survive! It is a shame that our mainstream media shows famous people with the mustache of what is responsible for many breathing dysfunctions and inflammations in the body. Many times “quitting milk” alone helps people restore their breathing and eliminate snoring. I am pretty sure their partners appreciate this! Broccoli, for example, is just as rich in calcium as milk, if not more so. Milk is really just white sugar water after pasteurization, anyway. Pasteurization is a heating process which is supposed to kill bad bacteria. It also kills the beneficial bacteria in milk, leaving nothing behind but white sugar water. Louis Pasteur (a French chemist and microbiologist that developed this process) said himself before he died: “[it] is not the germ, the problem is the terrain”. He meant that our body is not ready to digest milk. If you decide to drink milk, make it raw milk from a good healthy cow, and go slowly. Make it whole milk, which has more fat and has been touched less by humans. I will discuss the benefits of fast as we keep moving along this year.
When we consider the oxidation of juice and the pasteurization of milk, we see that we are simply left with sugar to process. This sugar needs to be digested by our body with the help of water! The body will look for water in different places for if we have not taken in enough, and will pull it from the mucous membranes of our organs, from our joints, and even our brain. We can cause dehydration our colon and cause constipation. Imagine how much toxic material is not moving properly out of our bodies—it sits in the intestines and the blood stream. This causes lethargy, bad feelings, and contributes to being sick. This is called “autointoxication”—something we induce.
Water aids in breathing. I usually recommend adding a pinch of sea salt to our water, which increases the dissolved solids in our water. This helps our bronchioles to do their job better. Asthmatics, this might be your solution!
We should drink water at room temperature. In my years visiting the gym, I have experimented with this and many health professionals have done the same. While exercising, the body’s temperature increases. If we place ice cold water in our system, it “freezes ” the area and keeps the water in our stomachs longer, which is not where our body’s design wants it to stay. We want to use the water while we are moving. So, drinking water at room temperature will help the water go through our system as it should, and not sit in our stomachs making a sloshing noise every time we try to do some ab work!
Water is essential for the discs of our spine, our joints, and aids in regulating blood pressure. Our discs are the shock absorbers for our daily movement. Water can sometimes be the miracle cure for low back pain. Keep your spine hydrated and it will pay off! Water is also necessary to hydrate joints so that they glide smoothly and help us be pain free as we move. Water has been used in arthritis cases, healing with amazing results. It is an important part of regulating blood pressure because it assists the kidneys in detoxifying themselves. If any organ is under stress or not doing its job, blood pressure can increase.
Diseases, aches, and discomfort can be healed just by drinking plenty of water! So, here we are again. What are we doing to our children? We don’t have to become hippos, but I encourage you to rethink the quality of the water you drink, and how much water you are drinking.
Some tips to help you in your hydration:
1. Drink half of your body weight in ounces. If you weight 100lbs, then drink 50 ounces of water daily.
2. Add a pinch of sea salt to increase the dissolve solids in the water.
3. Drink water at room temperature so it is better absorbed. If our body temperature is 98.6 degrees, the water we consume should not be cold.
4. Drink water 15 minutes before eating. This will help your digestion.
5. Good brands of bottled water are: Fiji, Evian and Vittel.
6. Drink from stainless steel or glass. Glass is best!
7. Check the source of your bottled and household water. Many bottled waters are just from a city water supply that is not your own!
8. Bathe and shower in good, clean water to avoid chlorine consumption as chlorine kills good bacteria. http://www.ppnf.org/ carries shower heads that eliminate chlorine from water. Also www.isabellacatalog .com carries filters that you could place in the bathtub while bathing babies.
9. Whole house water filtration system is a good idea. Make sure your water is filtered with a carbon filter. Water softeners are not water filters!
10. If drinking coffee, buy an organic or certified organic blend as coffee is one of the most polluted seeds in the world. Make sure to drink coffee with food in your stomach to avoid a blood sugar crash.
11. If in need of rehydration after your sport, dilute your sport drink using water.
My intentions are that YOU become and expert on yourself. Have a great month!
Migdoel “Dio” Miranda
Wellness Coach
Advanced Exercise Kinesiologist
http://www.diofitness.com/
Email: dio@diofitness.com
512.820.9112
References:
Batmanghelidj, F. M.D. Your Body’s Many Cries for Water, 1997.
http://www.watercure.com/
Wilson, James L. Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome, 2001.
http://www.adrenalfatigue.org/
Wikipedia, “Fluorine” 2010.
