The Water We Drink

Ensuring your drinking water is safe

We all know that water is important but I've never seen it written down like this before. 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. In 37% of Americans, the thirst mechanism is so weak that it is often mistaken for hunger. Even MILD dehydration will slow down one's metabolism as much as 3%. One glass of water shuts down midnight hunger pangs for almost 100% of the dieters studied in a U-Washington study. Lack of water is the #1 trigger of daytime fatigue.

Preliminary research indicates that 8-10 glasses of water a day could significantly ease back and joint pain for up to 80% of sufferers. A mere 2% drop in body water can trigger fuzzy short-term memory, trouble with basic math, and difficulty focusing on the computer screen or on a printed page.

Drinking 5 glasses of water daily decreases the risk of colon cancer by 45%, plus it can slash the risk of breast cancer by 79%, and one is 50% less likely to develop bladder cancer. Are you drinking the amount of water you should every day?

Water, like the air we breathe, is essential for life and we can not live long without it. Approximately 70% of our body weight is made up of water (ideally) and as the body dehydrates a lot of health problems occur. In his book, "Your Body's Many Cries for Water," Dr. F. Batmanghelidj, M.D., discusses the challenges of chronic dehydration and how it often is part of a chronic disease process.

Your body has a truly remarkable and complicated water regulating system that rations water when it is in short supply until it receives unmistakable signals that it has access to an adequate supply. The problem is that some organs are higher on the priority list for water (the brain is 1/50th of body weight but receives 20% or more of blood and water) than others and some organs suffer quickly as a result. Symptoms are this organs method of stating that they are short on water. This is much the same type of signal your car would give if the cooling system were overheating while climbing a steep hill. In both cases if proper measures are not taken a breakdown can occur.

Let me quote a few paragraphs from Dr. Batmanghelidjs book. He states, "The human body is composed of 25% solid matter (the solute) and 75% water (the solvent). The brain tissue is said to consist of 85% water. When the phase of inquiry into the workings of the body began, because the scientific parameters and a very broad knowledge of chemistry had already become well-established, it automatically became the assumption that the same understandings that were developed within the discipline of chemistry applied to the body's solute composition."

"It was therefore assumed that the solute composition is the reactive regulator of all functions of the body. Accordingly, at the early phase of research into the human body, the water content of the body was assumed to act only as a solvent, a space filler, and a means of transport the same views that were generated from the test-tube experiments in chemistry. No other functional properties were attributed to the solvent material. Thus, the basic understanding in today's "scientific" medicine- which has been inherited from an established educational program of yesteryears-regard the solutes as the regulators and the water as only a solvent and a means of transport in the body. The human body has been regarded as a large "test tube" full of solids of different nature and the water in the body as a chemically insignificant "packing material"."

"It is presumed that because water is freely available and one does not have to pay for it, that the body has no business in falling short of something that is available. Under this erroneous assumption, all the human applied research has been directed toward identification of any one "particular" substance that can be held responsible for causing a disease. Therefore, all the suspected possible fluctuations and variation of elemental changes have been tested without a clear-cut solution to a single disease problem. Accordingly, all treatments are palliative and none seems to be curative (except for bacterial infections and the use of antibiotics). Hypertension is not generally cured; it is treated during the lifetime of the person. Asthma is not cured; inhalers are the constant companion of the afflicted. Peptic ulcer is not cured; antacids have to be nearby all the time. Allergy is not cured; the victim is always dependent on medication, and so on."

Dr. Batmanghelidj goes on to say that one should not look for the signal of dehydration as dry mouth or thirst (signals of extreme or chronic dehydration), but for any symptom that shows an imbalance. He has successfully treated over 3,000 peptic ulcer sufferers with water alone.

Whenever you have any signal from your body it makes sense to increase your water intake and see if that will "fix" the problem. You'll be amazed at how often it does.

Drinking 1/4 to 1/2 ounce of water per pound of body weight per day works well for most people. However, those who are working in excessive conditions need to increase that accordingly. Anyone suffering from health conditions will find that drinking the 1/2 ounce per pound will make some difference over a few weeks time. (Example: a person weighing 160 pounds would drink 80 oz. of water daily. 160 x 1/2=80)

A Rockefeller University study found that only 34% of Americans drink 64 ounces of water per day. Most average less than 6 glasses, and 10% drink no water at all! Americans drink 41 gallons of soda each per year! Soda, along with coffee, tea and alcohol, can be diuretic and actually increase water losses. Most expert agree that for each glass of one of these beverages you drink you should add an extra 8 ounces of water to your daily intake.

Once we recognize the importance of drinking plenty of water, getting clean, pure water is the next concern. In today's high-tech society it is amazing that the odds that your drinking water is contaminated is probably greater now than at any other time in history. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that between 1,000 and 1,200 people in the US die each year from "approved" water that has become tainted in some way. As many as 27 million are expected to become ill from drinking contaminated water. The majority of us may actually learn some day that the water we've been drinking for the last several decades could be causing a lot of needless suffering.

The guidelines for our Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the agency responsible for setting the drinking water standards, allow for "acceptable" amounts of chemicals like chlorine by-products, lead, arsenic, aluminum and dozens of other toxins in your drinking water. Chlorine by-products cause cancer. Lead causes permanent neurological damage (the EPA estimates that 1 in 6 American children under the age of 6 has elevated levels of lead in their blood). Arsenic causes heart and vascular disease as well as skin cancer. Aluminum has been linked to Alzheimer's disease. The list goes on and on.

Over the past few years you may have heard about the discovery of deformed frogs in the US, Canada, Japan and several other countries. These deformities range from frogs with 6 legs to no legs and from eyes growing from the throat to several heads. Scientists in St. Paul, Minnesota recently took embryos from healthy frogs, grew them in plain tap water, and wound up with deformed frogs. As one authority at the National Institute of Health put it, "We know that something in the water, including groundwater used by human residents for drinking water, is extraordinarily potent in malforming frogs." (Washington Post, Oct. 1, 19997 Pg. A12)

In 1992 the EPA tested 8100 municipal water systems and found 819 of them were distributing water that was unsafe. These 819 systems supplied water to over 30 million people. Another 1100 of these systems didn't have adequate monitoring systems and weren't even figured into the reports.

Even those systems that do meet the state and federal standards have problems. In 1993, over 400,000 people in Milwaukee became sick from drinking contaminated tap water, and 104 people died as a result, even though the water met all the standards.

One of the problems is that the water systems are very outdated and contaminants are entering through old supply or distribution pipes. Washington, D.C., for example, has had to have citizens boil the water during several periods over the last few years because of chlorine-resistant nematodes that entered through old water supply pipes. This is the home of the EPA, where workers pitch in to purchase bottled water rather than drink the cities water! Think about it!

We could go on and on about water quality problems as thousands are reported every year. Let's just say that officials from the EPA and Federal Centers for Disease Control have publicly acknowledged that all measures put in place to ensure pure drinking water are unreliable and unenforceable. They estimate that it would take $220 Billion just to upgrade our water plants and another $200 billion to replace aging water pipes that distribute the water. When it comes to ensuring that your water supply is safe you're pretty much on your own!

The above information was supplied by: Dave Carpenter, N.D., L. Ac.

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