leaky gut

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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Water and Hydration:

• I’ll explain what water is and what it does in your body
• I’ll talk about how not getting enough water affects your health and the importance of water quality
• Finally, I’ll give some simple tips on how to know if you’re dehydrated and how to improve your hydration and overall health

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You cannot survive a week without water making H2O one the most important nutrients for your body. Water covers around 70% of planet Earth. Your body is about 30% solid and 70% water. Also, your blood has a similar amount of salinity as ocean water. Isn’t it amazing how similar your physical body is to that of the Earth? I mean it’s as if you and Mother Nature are intimately connected and ultimately come from the same place. Well I think it’s an awesome idea.

Anyhoo…

Water comes in three well-known forms or phases — liquid, solid, and gas — but there is also a fourth phase of water called Exclusion Zone, EZ water, or living water. If you’d like to learn more about EZ water I recommend the book The Fourth Phase Of Water by Gerald Pollack. It’s a beast of a book too nerdy for me believe it or not, but was still a very profound read for me personally.

Water is a solvent meaning it dissolves other substances creating a solution, a mix of water and whatever is in the water. The best quality drinking water is not naked water meaning it’s not just H2O. Health affirming water also has minerals, trace minerals, electrolytes and other stuff inside of it. The measurement of these inorganic and organic substances found within water is called Total Dissolved Solids or TDS. I’ll come back to this later.

When you look at water in its frozen phase you can see crystals within the ice. In its liquid state water still has these crystal-like structures. So water is a liquid crystal and just as LCD technology makes use of these liquid crystals to store and transmit energy and information in LCD televisions your body uses water in much the same way.

Energy, nutrition, hormones, neurotransmitters, and waste products are stored, transmitted and transported around your body and eliminated in your sweat, in your urine, and in your poo all thanks to water. Water!

Your blood is mostly water. The lymph found in your lymphatic system your sewage system is mostly water. The cerebral spinal fluid that surrounds your brain and spine is made up of water. Synovial fluid, which provides lubrication for your joints and the discs in your spine, again water. About 80% of your brain is water.

Water also provides stability and integrity to the cells in your body giving them proper structure and form as it makes up part of the cytoplasm, which is the thick solution or gel inside each cell.

If your body is too acidic due to high sugar consumption and chronic stress for example it will retain water in order to buffer and stabilise your pH levels leading to additional weight gain. Also, for every gram of carbohydrate you eat your body will hold onto 4 grams of water. Meaning if you’re eating too many carbo-HYDRATES your body will be heavier on the scale and look softer in the mirror. So unless you like feeling bloated and looking so fluffy dropping a lot of processed and refined sugars from your diet may be action step number one in your ‘improve body composition’ plan.

So without the right amount of hydration all of these different areas of your body will begin to slowly, but surely breakdown and as a plum becomes a prune your body will become a flat wrinkled empty skin-bag of puny muscles and porous bones. It’s crucial to keep yourself hydrated with high quality water.

According to internationally renowned researcher, author, and advocate of the natural healing power of water Dr F Batmanghelidj in his book Your Body’s Many Cries For Water (which I highly recommend) the Doc says:

“… even 1% dehydration of the central nervous system can cause significant psychological disorders. “

Other symptoms of dehydration include:

• Weight gain as mentioned earlier
• Thirst and hunger
• Low energy
• Lower fat-burning
• Infrequent urination and dark coloured urine
• Constipation — your poo is about 70% water
• Headaches, back pain, other aches and pain in general
• Reduced sweating
• Arthritis
• Asthma
• Irregular blood pressure
• Poor digestion
• Dry eyes
• Dry mouth — actually the last thing to occur when your body is dehydrated is when you get dry mouth

Water water everywhere yet why are we so sick? Water quality is crucial to proper hydration and functioning of your body and mind.

Municipal tap water or town and city water is probably the lowest quality water available today. Due to the water source and the fact that water has to travel through a system of pipes decades old local governments add a few chemicals to treat tap water in order to make it safe to drink. Unfortunately this so-called safety comes at a cost.

One of those chemicals is chlorine, which is a bleach and it definitely works and does the job of killing the bad bugs in the water. However, drinking chlorine kills the good bugs in your gastrointestinal tract. Your gut is filled with billions of different colonies and species of microorganisms called your gut microbiota. In fact there are more microorganism cells than human cells in the human body meaning your body actually isn’t your body at all! These microorganisms provide many beneficial functions such as:

• Improving digestion
• Producing vitamins
• Boosting the immune system
• Keeping the bad bugs in line

 
I’ll talk more about your microbiome in another show, but taking antibiotics, which includes drinking chlorinated water destroys the balance of your microbiota and basically wipes out your microbiome leaving behind a wasteland in your gut similar to that seen in post-apocalyptic futuristic movies like Mad Max. Now just as a city with no law enforcement ends up with rioters and looters first on the scene ransacking the place guess who are the first to show up in your gut after antibiotic exposure? The bad bacteria.

So being exposed to chlorine and antibiotics are bad for your health.

Another chemical used in tap water is a known neurotoxin called fluoride. Authorities say ‘fluoridated water is required for dental health’. So they’re basically telling you ‘we’re going to medicate you because you have no clue how to look after your own teeth’. They are literally treating us with a chemical they call medicine and last time I checked I never gave them permission to drug me with this crap. I mean where does this end? Why not put statins or beta-blockers in the water or how about vitamin C and omega-3s.

Fluoride is an ingredient used in pesticides and is also an industrial waste product. It has no health benefits and has been shown to contribute to many diseases:

• Cancer
• Hip fractures
• Dental Fluorosis (even though it’s meant to improve dental health)
• Neurological impairment
• Learning disorders
• Lower IQ in children

 
All of this has been researched and proven, but because governments and big industry are so intertwined and in bed with each other of course they’re going to want to recycle their waste products and want to make more money at the expense of their fellow man. They did it with genetically modified corn and soy so why not toxic chemicals as well. Soy protein isolate is a waste product of soybean oil production, but instead of dumping the stuff they market all forms of soy as healthy tricking you the consumer into consuming that toxic rubbish. Soy protein isolate is found in health bars, protein powders, and worst of all baby formula!

Man! I just get so frustrated with the fact that you put your trust in the authorities to do what’s right, but it’s blind faith and it’s misplaced and you need to do your own research and not trust anything anyone says. Including me! Always try out for yourself what I recommend. It’s not true, it’s not real until you give it a go and see if it works for you.

Dr Robert Carlton a former US Environmental Protection Agency scientist himself said that fluoridation is the greatest case of scientific fraud of the century.

Okay another thing when you eat something it has to go through your liver first before it’s allowed into your bloodstream. Now 60% of anything you put on your skin gets absorbed directly into your bloodstream and anything you inhale also goes directly into your bloodstream as both of these pathways bypass  the liver. When you’re having a hot shower not only are you absorbing chlorine and fluoride via your skin the heat vaporises the water turning it into a gas and you’re breathing this stuff in. So you’re getting a double whammy of toxic exposure! Ouch!

Oh it gets worse.

Effluent water (water that’s drained from sewage waste) is allowed to be dumped as natural waste leaving it to penetrate groundwater (water in the soil), streams, rivers, and oceans with a lot of it ending up in aquifers (underground lakes of pure clean water). Also, effluent water is recycled in water treatment plants allowing it to be reused as tap water. Finally, effluent water is used for irrigation of crops. Problem is sewage water is full of pharmaceutical drug, pain-killer, antipsychotic, antidepressant, birth-control, hormone, antibiotic, and other prescription drug chemicals due to them being pirssed and pooped out of sick people and flushed down the toilet. So the tap water you’re drinking, bathing in, and gardening with and any food that you eat that’s been grown with recycled city sewage water could be overdosing you with medications, making you infertile, disrupting your hormone levels, and killing the microbiome on your skin and in your gut.

But wait there’s more. Listen to this extract from a book called Under the Veil of Deception by Paul Chek:

“Today we drink water that is heavily contaminated with nitrates, heavy metals, and synthetic chemicals, including pesticides and medical drugs. No commercial sewage system or water treatment purification plants can entirely remove all these contaminants and some barely remove any.”

So now you can add even more toxins to the list of bad things for your health that are in your tap water and the fact that water treatment plants don’t remove 100% of those toxic chemicals from the water.

Bottled water isn’t the ideal solution for your dilution requirements as well. Specifically water in plastic bottles. The reason plastic bottles are bad are due to the fact that they contain xenoestrogens. A xenoestrogen is a foreign chemical compound found in the environment that when it enters your body acts in a similar way to your own estrogen hormones. Plastics are one big xenoestrogen bomb. Overtime and especially when exposed to heat say a plastic bottle left inside a car on a hot summer’s day the chemicals in the plastic start to leach into the water. Remember water is a solvent so it’ll dissolve those compounds right into itself. Now I remember the taste of water from a plastic water bottle left in the heat or even the taste from a frozen plastic bottle of water that I’d leave to thaw overnight or during the day. They had a very distinct and interesting flavours. No doubt about it. Now I know why.

Once consumed these xenoestrogens get picked up by the cells in your body and can affect your body in many different ways. Once your cells have picked up these xenoestrogens your own natural estrogen hormones have no place to go so are eliminated. Overtime this will tax your liver and elimination pathways causing them to overwork and this will eventually lead to an imbalance in your hormonal profile due to the fact that your cells think they have what they need and are telling your brain ‘hey, we got plenty of estrogen, no need to make so much’ and so your body produces less estrogen and has to deal with eliminating both your natural estrogen and the foreign estrogen-like compound. Problem is the xenoestrogens have massive hormonal impacts on your cells. In some people it makes your body estrogen dominant meaning too much estrogen leading to cancer in women and man boobs or moobs in men. For others it can make you deficient in estrogen making you testosterone dominant leading to cancer in guys and excess facial hair growth in women. So yeah eventually you will get illness and disease showing up due to a lack of your own estrogen and because of the ill effects of those xenoestrogens in your cells.

Now how do you go about getting the highest quality water available to you?

One thing you can do at home is install a water filtration system. Home, tap, and shower head filters are ways you can treat the municipal water entering your home. You want to make sure that your filter gets rid of chlorine (the chemical itself, not just the odour and taste) as well as fluoride if you have fluoride in your local city water. There are a few filtration systems to choose from.

Reverse osmosis systems can be expensive not just for the equipment, but also due to the fact that it takes three parts water to produce just one part of drinking water. Now RO water does filter out the toxins, but the problem is RO also filters out the minerals in the water leaving you with naked, hungry, unstructured water. Hungry water when drunk will leach minerals from your body so daily drinking of this type of water will cause mineral deficiencies in your body overtime leading to, you guessed it, illness and disease. Short-term use of hungry water is fine for detoxification purposes, but I would not go more than a week personally of drinking hungry demineralised water. You can fix this issue by restructuring and remineralising hungry water by adding pinches of real sea salt or juice from a lemon.

Distilled filtering systems actually do a much better job of removing all material from water compared to RO systems making distilled water the hungriest water of them all, basically dead water. Even adding sea salt and lemon juice won’t be enough to feed this water and to make it living water again so use sparingly for detox purposes only.

Carbon and charcoal filtration systems are a cheaper option and keep the minerals in the water.

You can filter just your drinking tap or your showerhead or if you’re able to you can install a whole house water filtration system. Right now in the house I’m living in there is a whole house filter for chlorine and a drinking tap filter that removes both chlorine and fluoride. It cost about a grand to install and $250 a year for replacement cartridges. Not a bad investment I think. No need to go running out for bottled water and definitely notice the health improvements from no longer drinking chemicals with the water. It has also improved the flavour of stews and other meals cooked with the water. I’ve also noticed after a shower my skin isn’t as dry and my eyes aren’t as red.

Filtered water isn’t the best water though with spring and artesian well water being the best two choices of living, structured, mineral water. Spring water is the purest form of water that has bubbled up from aquifers (underground lakes) picking up minerals as it travels through the rocks giving it a high mineral content, a high total dissolved solids count, and a neutral pH. Artesian well water comes from the same aquifers, but hasn’t matured so to speak and sprung up out of the earth hence having to dig a well for it. Still very pure with a neutral pH, and good TDS reading, but not as high a mineral count as spring water.

If you don’t have access to a local spring look for bottled spring or well water with a neutral pH between seven and eight and a TDS of 200 minimum with 300 or greater recommended.

When going for plastic bottled water make sure to buy the most popular brand in that area as these bottles are not going to be sitting around for long periods of time meaning there’ll be less chance of plastic chemicals leaching into the water.

What you really want in terms of bottled water is glass. Glass bottled water will remove the issue of foreign chemicals leaching into your drinking water entirely.

Also again with bottled water whether it be plastic or glass you really need to check the source of the water. Most bottled water is just tap water remarketed so be cautious and make sure the source of the water is from a spring or artesian well. As an example Coke Cola has a few different brands of bottled water out there and they have been shown to be acidic malnourishing liquid leechers. I’ll put a link to a YouTube video showing fellow holistic health practitioner Angie Lustrick testing the pH of different brands of bottled water to prove that point.

Side note if you’re an athlete in need of quick rehydration with electrolytes get rid of those Gatorades and Powerades, which are full of sugar and artificial sweeteners. Stick to coconut water. Coconut water is Mother Nature’s electrolyte elixir that will both fuel and rehydrate you to the finish line without any negative side-effects.

Alright how do you know if you’re drinking enough water? A few things you can look at. Check the colour of your piss. Your urine should be a light pale yellow colour. Not completely clear as this is a sign of either over-hydration or your body trying to get rid of toxins and irritants (such as those found in teas and coffee). Your piss shouldn’t be a dark colour it shouldn’t be orange or brown. If it is you’re dehydrated.

Next tip is actually one of the best at-home medical tests you can do to figure out not just your hydration status, but also how healthy you are overall and it’s free. Examine your poo. Yes you need to turn around and expect the results of your bowel movements and yes I do this every time. Saves going to the doctor when I can just read the cues in my poos and change how I’m living accordingly. You should be expressing from your bottom pooping easily without strain nice smooth fluffy non-foul smelling sausage like poos. There is a chart of different types of poos called the Bristol Stool Chart (BSC) (I like poos better than stool) that you can look at and ideally you want type three and four poos. I’ll put a link to the chart in the show notes. If you’re constipated and pooping out little sheep pellets (types one and two on the BSC) then you need more water. If you have diarrhea (the last three types on the chart) you also need to increase your water intake as your body is quickly removing toxins from the system and this process uses up a lot of water.

Another simple thing you can do to check your hydration levels is to use the pinch test. So on the back of your wrist grab a pinch of skin for a few seconds — go on do it now — let go and it should return to normal in less than a second. The longer it takes to return to normal the more dehydrated you are.

Some bonus tips to help you with digestion.

Drink water at room temperature. If you’re drinking icy cold water it’s just going to hang out in your stomach. Your intestines don’t like the shock of extreme cold so the water will stick around until it’s warm enough to be released in your gut.

Also drink a big glass of water 20-30 minutes before your meals. This helps lubricate your gut and helps with the production of stomach acid and digestive enzymes getting your digestive juices primed and ready for action. Don’t drink a lot during your meal as this will actually dilute the acid in your stomach causing the food to hang out there longer than it should. If you need to drink take small sips throughout the meal. Don’t skull it down.

Last tip is to chew your water! Take a sip, swirl the water around your mouth for 1-2 seconds and then swallow. By doing so you are infusing the digestive enzymes in your saliva into the water meaning when it does reach your stomach your body recognises the fact that you’ve purposefully ingested this liquid and will begin to take it in. Water that you skull down that doesn’t have your salivary enzymes in it goes in and out your body in one fell swoop. So to stop wasting the water you’re drinking and to reduce the number of visits to the toilet — chew your water.

Finally, how much water should you be drinking? A good rule of them, remember this is a general guideline it is not law and it depends on what you’ve been doing that day, your activity level, the stress in your life, the temperature of your environment. It’s a guideline a place for you to start from, okay. So a general guideline multiply your body weight in kgs by 0.033 and that’s how much water in litres you should be drinking daily or if you’re still in the dark ages and measure your body weight in lbs then drink half your body weight in ounces of water a day, okay.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Dr Batmanghelidj:

“You’re not sick, you’re thirsty. Don’t treat thirst with medication.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself Doc. Next round of spring water is on me!

Links and Resources

• The Fourth Phase Of Water — Gerald Pollack
• Your Body’s Many Cries For Water — F Batmanghelidj MD
• Under the Veil of Deception –Paul Chek
• YouTube Video — Is Your Water Making You SICK?
• Bristol Stool Chart

 
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