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Health & Wellness

2012-11-01 15:11:25

The importance of water for good health

A- If scientists want to determine if life can exist on another planet, their first priority is to determine whether or not water is present. Why? Because life on earth totally depends on water. A high percentage of all living things, both plants and animals, live in water, and all life on earth is thought to have arisen from water. About 70 to 90 percent of all organic matter is water. The chemical reactions in all plants and animals that support life take place in a water medium. Water not only provides the medium to make these life sustaining reactions possible, but water is often an important reactant or product of these reactions. What does all this mean? In short, the very chemistry of life is water chemistry. When we talk about the benefits of drinking ionized water, we are talking about benefits to your body based on the chemistry that is happening within your body. After all, your body is mostly water, and understanding some of your body’s water chemistry will help you understand how your body works. Some people question the validity of drinking high pH ionized water. People with some knowledge of the human body, including medical doctors, will ask, “What happens to the high pH alkaline water once it reaches my stomach, which is highly acidic?” Allow me to answer that question once and for all. In order to digest food and kill the bacteria and viruses that come with food, the inside of your stomach is highly acidic. It maintains a pH of around 4. When you eat food and drink water, especially high pH alkaline water, the pH value inside your stomach goes up. This causes a feedback mechanism to tell your stomach walls to produce more hydrochloric acid to bring your stomach’s pH back to 4, and make it more acidic again. If drinking alkaline water causes the stomach to secrete more hydrochloric acid to maintain a pH of 4, it sounds like a losing battle. Right? Well, when you understand how your stomach makes hydrochloric acid, your concerns disappear. You see, there is no hydrochloric acid pouch in your body, because if there were, it would burn a hole in your body. The cells in your stomach wall must produce it instantly on an as-needed basis. How do they do it? By combining the ingredients carbon dioxide, water, and either sodium chloride or potassium chloride. I was never very good at chemistry, so I am not going to bore you with trying to explain the chemical formulas. However, the byproduct of your stomach making hydrochloric acid is either sodium bicarbonate or potassium bicarbonate, both of which go into your blood stream. These bicarbonates are the alkaline buffers that dissolve solid wastes into liquid form and that neutralize excess acids in the blood, helping to maintain the blood’s pH at 7.4 as we have discussed in previous columns. As your body gets old, your levels of these alkaline buffers tend to get low, creating a condition known as acidosis. This happens naturally as more acid wastes accumulate. There is, therefore, a relationship between the aging process and the accumulation of acids. The older we are, the more we need to be drinking alkaline water. By looking at the pH value of your stomach alone, it would appear that the value of alkaline water never reaches your body. However when you look at your body as a whole, there is a net gain in alkalinity from drinking alkaline water. By nature, the cells of your body are slightly alkaline. In order to maintain balance, your cells cannot produce acid without also producing alkaline, and vice versa. This is similar to the operation of a water ionizer which cannot produce alkaline water without also producing a stream of acid water. When the pH of your stomach gets higher than 4, your stomach knows what to do to lower it. However, if the pH of your stomach goes below 4 for any reason, your stomach does not know what to do. That’s why people take Alka-Seltzer, which is alkaline, to relieve acidic stomach gas pain. In this case, hydrochloric acid is not produced by the stomach wall, and therefore, no alkaline buffer is being added to the blood stream. I will give you another example of a body organ that produces acid in order to produce alkaline. After the food in the stomach is digested, it must pass through into the small intestine. The food at this point is so acidic that it will damage the intestinal wall. In order to avoid this problem, the pancreas produces an alkaline fluid known as pancreatic juice. This juice is sodium bicarbonate, and it mixes with the acidic food coming from the stomach to create a more neutral pH. From chemical formulas we can prove that in order to produce bicarbonates, the pancreas must also make hydrochloric acid, which goes into the blood stream. We often experience sleepiness after a big meal which occurs when the digested food is passing from the stomach into the small intestine. That’s also the time when hydrochloric acid is being produced and entering the blood stream. Hydrochloric acid is the main ingredient in antihistamines that causes drowsiness. Any alkaline or acid produced by the body must have an equal and opposite acid or alkaline also produced by the body. Therefore there is no net gain. However, alkalinity supplied from outside the body, such as by drinking high pH alkaline water from a home water ionizer, results in a net gain of alkalinity in your body chemistry. Maintaining good health means keeping your blood’s pH as close to 7.4 as possible, even though age, many dietary factors and environmental factors tend to push most people’s pH downward. As your body’s pH moves lower, it creates an environment that is more inviting to disease. Drinking high pH alkaline ionized water helps raise your body’s pH back to more normal and healthier levels. That is why drinking alkaline water from a home water ionizer is so important. Your health may depend on it.