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Ed Martin
Ed Martin is owner of Healthy Choices, Inc. of Wichita. Ed has been involved in the energy and health fields for over 30 years, focusing on pioneering new technologies and bringing cutting-edge products and services to the marketplace. You can reach Ed at; 316-207-7343, or by e-mail at healthychoices1@cox.net
Health & Wellness
2011-09-27 16:56:08
Effects of dehydration
Q: In one of your past columns, you stated that up to 90% of Americans are dehydrated. What are the effects of dehydration? Since I drink a lot of liquids, can I still be dehydrated?
A: Your question is a good one, because dehydration is confusing to many people. They think that dehydration only applies to people lost in the desert without water, but it is actually common to a vast majority of our population. Some say it is up to 90% of Americans. Let’s start by looking at how dehydration affects the human body. Dehydration, or a less-than-ideal amount of water as a percentage of your body mass, impairs your ability to think, drive and perform crucial tasks. Dehydration is the number one trigger of daytime fatigue, nausea, headaches, lethargy and constipation. Just a 5% drop in body water will cause up to a 30% loss of energy in the average person. With age, dehydration can also contribute to weight gain for two reasons: (1) Many people confuse thirst with hunger and respond to dehydration by eating more, and (2) If the body does not have sufficient water to cleanse the cells of waste and carry it away, waste and toxins accumulate in fat tissue, adding pounds. It is common for people who drink lots of liquids and who don’t think they can possibly be dehydrated to experience these symptoms. Even people who try to be healthy and drink lots of water including filtered water and bottled water are experiencing the same symptoms. How can this be possible? The problem is in what they are drinking. Go into any supermarket or convenience store and look at the beverage section. What will you find? There will be lots of soft drinks, of course, some of which are diet and some of which are not. Also there will be numerous brands of bottled water, flavored water, and vitamin enriched water. You will see a broad range of energy drinks which will shock your adrenals and temporarily rev you up. You will also find the traditional caffeine drinks such as bottled tea, and in many cases, hot coffee. What do they have in common? In almost every case, they are acidic and contribute to dehydration. In many areas, tap water has the same problem. To understand why you are dehydrated, we need to look at the basics. It all comes down to the acid/alkaline balance and how that affects your body. For optimal health, your body is designed to maintain a pH of about 7.4 which is slightly alkaline. Yet most of the foods we enjoy are acidic, and virtually all of the beverages you can buy are also acidic. In fact, many are very highly acidic. As a result, our bodies must fight to maintain a healthy pH in the face of the massive onslaught of all the acidic products we consume. The human body protects itself from the daily bombardment of acidic foods and beverages in three fundamental ways. The first is to eliminate as much as possible while absorbing as little as possible. In the case of acidic beverages, they move quickly to the bladder for elimination. Some beverages even act as diuretics and accelerate dehydration by removing more water from the body than they supply. Acid foods can move through the body quickly as well. The body tries to neutralize some of the acid in foods, and one way of doing that is to steal calcium from the bones because it is alkaline and counters the acid. However, this can contribute to weaker bones. Another way is to store acidic waste from the cells in fat. The more dehydrated the body becomes, the less it is able to carry away the acidic waste, and the resulting weight gain can become a growing problem. The opposite of dehydration is to be properly hydrated by drinking and absorbing water. The mechanics of how water is absorbed, in addition to the issue of having a proper pH as we have discussed, relate to the physical size of the clusters of water molecules. Sitting in pipes and reservoirs, water molecules are constantly making and remaking bonds with other water molecules forming clusters. These clusters typically consist of 11 to 14 molecules and can become quite large Imagine me saying, “Put this apple in your mouth”, but you can’t do it because the apple is too big. However if I cut the apple into smaller pieces, you can put them in your mouth easily. Your cells operate the same way. Water is required to carry nutrients into your cells and to carry away the waste, but to do that, the water molecules must pass through the cell walls. When water is not being absorbed well, it is an indication that the water molecules are in clusters too big to penetrate the cells. This leaves the cells undernourished and polluted with accumulated waste. It leads to further dehydration and increasingly unhealthy cells. How do you break the cycle? You drink high pH alkaline ionized water which takes care of both the acidity issue and dehydration at the same time. When water is processed through a home water ionizer, one effect is that the water is broken into much smaller clusters of only five or six molecules, or micro-clusters. These micro-clusters enable ionized water to pass through cell walls much more easily. In fact, alkaline ionized water is about six times more readily absorbed than ordinary water. When you drink alkaline ionized water, your cells are much more efficiently fed and hydrated. The easily absorbed water starts to loosen the acidic wastes and toxins that have been stored in and around the cells so they can be carried away. In addition, your sense of thirst begins to function better, and you begin to realize just how dehydrated you have been. Your body will crave the smooth alkaline ionized water. At first you will be drinking more of the water than you are eliminating because your cells are rehydrating and soaking it up. Then you will gradually need to urinate more frequently because of all the water you are drinking. This enables the waste and toxins to be flushed from your body efficiently. As more and more of this toxic waste leaves your body, the fat cells where it has been stored begin to shrink. That is why, for many people, a side effect of their becoming hydrated by drinking alkaline ionized water is weight loss. What could be simpler? The amount of weight loss from drinking the water will vary from person to person. I personally lost 20 pounds within a couple of months after I began drinking it. I have known people who were fairly heavy who lost as much as 40 or 50 pounds in a few months with no significant change in their lifestyle, but others may lose much less. After all, we are drinking the alkaline ionized water for proper hydration and the health benefits that can come from being properly hydrated. Any weight loss that results is simply an additional benefit.
 
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