CHAPTER 2 (Water: for Health, for Healing, for Life)
Water, water everywhere, yet not enough did we drink.
Water, water everywhere, still our bodies did shriek and shrink.
WATER—THE BIZARRE AND THE SIMPLE
The human body is about 75 percent water and 25 percent solid matter. The brain is said to be 85 percent water and is extremely sensitive to any dehydration or depletion of its water content. The brain is bathed constantly in salty cerebrospinal fluid. The water content of the body is called the solvent, and the solid matter that is dissolved in the water is called the solute. The chemical understanding of the human body brought about an almost total concentration of research into the detailed molecular composition and minute fluctuations of the solid matter in the body. Thus a chemical-pharmaceutical perception of the human body took shape, resulting in the development of the “medical-industrial system.” Adherence to the understanding that it is primarily the body's solid composition that governs all its functions has produced much misinformation and has contributed to the present chaotic status of medicine.
The flaw in the above approach to understanding the body lies in the fact that, even with all our amassed knowledge, the human body is still an almost unknown structure. We know no more than 10 percent of how the body functions and is integrated chemically.
The practice of clinical medicine today benefits the manufacturing and commercial arms of the healthcare system. The ignorance-promoting and money-making solutes focus is strictly guarded and forcefully dispensed—it is good for selling drugs. Although the knowledge of the physiology of the human body is advanced, the practice of clinical medicine does not benefit from the advancement of this discipline of science.
WE ARE STILL WATER-DEPENDENT
The role of water in the bodies of all living species, humans included, has not changed since the earliest creation of life in water.
When life on land became an objective—the stressful adventure beyond known boundaries and the immediate vicinity of water supply—a gradually refined body-water-preservation system and drought-management system had to be created. In other words, the body began to adapt to transient dehydration. Over time, this
drought-management process became permanent—and currently exists in the body of modern humans.
Even now, when humans are under stress or confronting situations that may be perceived as stressful, the physiological translation of that stress reflects a water-regulation process. It is as if nothing has changed from the first time water-dwelling species ventured beyond their water supply. A similar process for rationing water reserves and an anticipated limited future supply becomes the responsibility of a complex system in the body. This multi-system water-distribution process remains in operation until the body receives unmistakable signals that it has once more gained access to an adequate water supply.
One of the unavoidable processes in the body-water rationing phase is the ruthlessness with which the body functions are monitored. No structure receives more than its predetermined share of water, based on its functional importance. The brain takes absolute priority over all the other systems.
Thinking that tea, coffee, alcohol, and manufactured beverages can substitute for the pure natural water needs of the body is an elementary mistake, particularly in a body that is stressed by confronting daily problems. It is true that these beverages contain water, but most of them also contain dehydrating substances, such as caffeine. These substances rid the body of the water they are dissolved in, plus additional water from the body's reserves. When you drink coffee, tea, or even a beer, your body gets rid of more water than is contained in the drink. If you measure your urine volume after the beverage is taken, you will see that you have passed more urine than the volume of the drink. Another way the body loses water after drinking hot beverages is through perspiration from the pores of the skin to cool the body that has been warmed from the inside.
The economic principles are the same in the body as they are in society. The law of supply and demand rules absolutely. When there is a comparative shortage of a needed substance, a strict rationing system rules the marketplace of the body with an iron fist.
When the human body is dehydrated, it redistributes and regulates the amount of available water. Within the body, alarms signal to show that areas in question are in short supply, much like the light signal that goes on when a car is running low on gas or oil. The available water is rationed and used where needed. The presence
of water will ultimately regulate the production mechanisms in a drought-stricken area of the body.
When chronic dehydration begins to set in, up to a certain level the shutdown of water-dependent functions is silent because there is a reserve capacity for endurance. As time passes and the body becomes more and more dehydrated, however, a threshold is reached where the system becomes inadequate for the responsibilities thrust on one or another function of the body. Depending on the type of demand, the organ or organs in the firing line of activity begin to indicate their particular signal of inadequacy.
While the various signals produced by the water distributors and drought managers indicate regional body thirst and drought, and can naturally and simply be relieved by an increased intake of water, they are, instead, often improperly and ignorantly dealt with by highly potent chemical products. Because many doctors are not
educated about the symptoms of dehydration and the importance of the fluid in the body, they often diagnose the problem incorrectly. Many physicians mistake dehydration for one or another disease and treat the symptoms with medication rather than water. The result: Pharmaceutical companies get rich, patients are not cured, and doctors are helpless in dealing with often recurring disease states of the body.
Silencing the different signal systems of water shortage in the body with chemical products can be immediately detrimental to the patient's body cells, including the genetic apparatus. Chronic dehydration can have a permanently damaging impact on a person's descendants. While the human body is entirely dependent on the many complicated functions of water for its survival, it has not developed a water-storage system in the same way it stores fat. The dehydration-produced loss of body efficiency and resulting loss of chemical know-how and function in one generation can be projected onto the next generation. If the root cause of a disease state is dehydration, the same malfunctioning sensor systems that permit dehydration to establish in an individual can eventually be inherited by some of the off-spring. This is why asthma, allergies, and heartburn are very serious conditions that should be prevented by full hydration at all times. It is essential to become educated about the functions of water in the body at all ages. This is how disease can be prevented in individuals and the next-generation descendants.
We must learn to recognize the symptoms of dehydration and understand that the treatment is simple: water. It's vital to our health.
In an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, September 20, 1984, Dr. Paddy Phillips and seven associates showed that elderly men were far less able to recognize their body thirst than younger men in the same experimental setting. When the elderly were dehydrated, they seemed not to feel thirsty. Even when blood tests showed an obvious water shortage in the body, and even when water was within reach, some of the persons tested did not seem to want to drink. They remained dehydrated. An editorial in The Lancet of November 3, 1984, discussed the experimental results of Phillips and his associates and mentioned other findings to support the conclusion that in the elderly, the thirst mechanism is gradually lost. Steen, Lundgren, and Isaksson reported in The Lancet of January 12, 1985, that, in their long-term observation, they had discovered significant body-water loss in the elderly—about 3.5 to 6 liters over ten years. This is a large loss from the fluid content of the body—mostly from inside the cells.
To give further scientific support to the new paradigm, let us briefly mention the single most important point of a scientific paper by Ephraim Katchalski-Katzir of the Weizmann Institute. The far-reaching significance of the finding is that proteins and enzymes function more efficiently in solutions of lower viscosity. They need
adequate water in their immediate environment to “diffuse” and work efficiently. In other words, in solutions of higher viscosity—produced by the loss of water from the cell content—the enzyme system within the cell becomes less efficient. As an analogy, could a competitive swimmer have room to practice in a pool full of kids? Obviously not. The same logic seems to apply to the enzymes in the cells of the body that “swim in cell water” to contact their chemical partners and to produce a desirable outcome.
A gradual loss of sensations in the body should be assumed to involve all aspects of the sensory mechanisms. As we grow older, we gradually lose sharpness of vision and become dependent on glasses. We lose sexual appetite. Our ability to hear some ranges of sound is gradually lost. Our feelings become less tender and lose alertness; our emotional stimulation becomes dull and less satisfying, and so on. These are the apparent outward manifestations of a gradual loss of the ability to differentiate and respond to the stimulation of the senses at some time or another in the life of any individual.
Although we do not know how and when the dulling of senses in the body begins, logical interpretation from the above scientific experiments, in addition to my personal observations, has led me to believe that reliance on our sense of thirst, and waiting to feel thirsty before we drink water, is the basic problem. The most
significant and major complication of dehydration is the loss of a number of essential amino acids that are used to manufacture neurotransmitters.
A major hidden advantage to adequate hydration seems to be the increased efficiency of the many thousands of proteins and enzymes whose physiological responsibilities are not yet recognized. They, too, will be more efficiently integrated due to the fact that they are obedient to the influence of free water in their environment. Thus, adequate hydration of the body might be the best insurance against premature aging and an early loss of our different sensory systems.
MY ONGOING BATTLE WITH THE MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT
It is the dawn of the twenty-first century, and yet I feel that the practice of medicine is becoming more and more regressive. Yes, people have learned that they are better off if they don't wait to get thirsty, and are taking measures to prevent their bodies from becoming dehydrated. They have learned that they feel better and are more energetic. They carry their water with them when they go out of the house; they take their water when they exercise; a vast majority are drinking water in preference to manufactured beverages and alcoholic drinks; schools are now getting wise to the
harmful effect of sodas on children and are throwing out the vending machines. This has become a mandate in California, and other states are beginning to follow. Some researchers have found that children's scholastic performance dramatically improves when they drink water instead of the sodas they used to drink.
Yet all of a sudden an emeritus professor from Dartmouth Medical School publishes an article in the American Journal of Physiology saying he has not found any scientific reason why people should drink unless they are thirsty. The interesting part of all this is that this article was first posted on the Internet and released to the
news agencies for its fast-track distribution before the paper version of the journal was published later in the year. The media from all over the world went to town on this orchestrated public-relations issue.
Realizing that this view, if allowed to stand, could potentially harm millions of trusting people from all over the world who might be influenced by the source of information, I wrote a brief scientific rebuttal to the published views and started disseminating the rebuttal. I have published the article on the Internet and it is now available for review by others. I am waiting for some reaction from the medical journals that received my rebuttal. I daresay, since my position is contrary to commercial interests of the sick-care system, no official reaction would be forthcoming. The article is presented below for those who might be interested in my logic; it is based on the new findings of molecular physiology of dehydration that you now understand.
You see why the information on water in this book is something you need to cherish. I don't believe you will get its benefits from the medical establishment in this country anytime soon.
Waiting to Get Thirsty Is to Die Prematurely and Very Painfully
Heinz Valtin, M.D., an emeritus professor at Dartmouth Medical School, has ventured the opinion that there is no scientific merit in drinking eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day and not waiting to get thirsty before correcting dehydration. This view, published in the American Journal of Physiology, August 2002, is the very foundation of all that is wrong with modern medicine, which is costing this nation $1.7 trillion a year, rising at the rate of 12 percent every year. Dr. Valtin's view, in my opinion, is as absurd as waiting for the final stages of a killer infection before giving the patient the appropriate antibiotics. His views are based on the erroneous assumption that dry mouth is an accurate sign of dehydration.
Like the colleagues he says he has consulted, Dr. Valtin does not seem to be aware of an important paradigm shift in medicine. All past views in medicine were based on the wrong assumption that it is the solutes in the body that regulate all functions and that the solvent has no direct role in any of the body's physiological
functions. In medical schools it is taught that water is only a solvent, a packing material and a means of transport, that water has no metabolic function of its own. I have come across this level of ignorance about the primary physiological role of water at another Ivy League medical school from another eminent professor of physiology who, like Dr. Valtin, researched and taught the water-regulatory mechanisms of the kidney to medical students and doctors. Only when I asked him what “hydrolysis” is, did the penny drop and he admit the scientific fact that
water is a nutrient and does indeed possess a dominant metabolic role in all physiological functions of the body.
Dr. Valtin's emphasis on the water-regulatory role of the kidneys limits his
knowledge to the body's mechanisms of “deficit management” of the water needs of the body. He seems to base his views of thirst management of the body on the vital roles of vasopressin, the antidiuretic hormone, and the reninangiotensin system, the elements that get engaged in the drought-management programs of the body, when the body has already become dehydrated. Indeed, he thinks dehydration is a state of the body when it loses 5 percent of its water content; and that one should wait until at some level of such water loss the urge to drink some kind of “fluid” will correct the water deficit in the body. This view might have seemed plausible twenty-five years ago. Today it exposes the tragic limitations of knowledge of the human physiology that is available to a prestigious medical school in America.
In his recently published and widely reported assertions, Dr. Valtin does not take into consideration the fact that water is a nutrient. Its vital “hydrolytic” role would be lost to all the physiological functions that would be affected by its shortage in its osmotically “free state.” Another oversight is the fact that it is the interior of the cells of the body that would become drastically dehydrated. In dehydration, 66 percent of the water loss is from the interior of the cells, 26 percent of the loss is from extracellular fluid volume, and only 8 percent of the loss is borne by the blood tissue in the vascular system, which constricts within its network of capillaries and maintains the integrity of the circulation system.
Philippa M. Wiggin has shown that the mechanism that controls or brings about the effective function of the cation pumps utilizes the energy-transforming property of water, the solvent: “The source of energy for cation transport or ATP synthesis lies in increases in chemical potentials with increasing hydration of small cations
and polyphosphate anions in the highly structured interfacial aqueous phase of the two phosphorylated intermediates.” Waiting to get thirsty, when the body fluids become concentrated before thirst is induced, one loses the energy-generating properties of water in the dehydrated cells of the body. This is a major reason why we should prevent dehydration, rather than wait to correct it. This new understanding of the role of water in cation exchange is enough justification to let the body engage in prudent surplus-water management rather than forcing it into drought and deficit-water management, which is what Dr. Valtin is recommending people do.
In his research on the “conformational change in biological macromolecules,” Ephraim Katchalski-Katzir of the Weizmann Institute of Science has shown that the “proteins and enzymes of the body function more efficiently in solutions of lower viscosity.” Thus, water loss from the interior of the cells would adversely affect their efficiency of function. This finding alone negates Dr. Valtin's view that we should let dehydration get established before drinking water. Since it is desirable that all cells of the body should function efficiently within their physiological roles, it would be more prudent to optimally hydrate the body rather than wait for the
drought-management programs of the body to induce thirst. Furthermore, it is much easier for the body to deal with a slight surplus of water than to suffer from its shortfall and have to ration and allocate water to vital organs at the expense of less vital functions of the body. The outcome of constantly circulating concentrated blood in the vascular system is truly an invitation to catastrophe.
The tragedy of waiting to get thirsty hits home when it is realized that the sharpness of thirst perception is gradually lost as we get older. Phillips and associates have shown that after twenty-four hours of water deprivation, the elderly still do not recognize they are thirsty: “The important finding is that despite their obvious
physiologic need, the elderly subjects were not markedly thirsty.” Bruce and associates have shown that between the ages of twenty and seventy, the ratio of water inside the cells to the amount of water outside the cells drastically changes from 1.1 to 0.8. Undoubtedly this marked change in the intracellular water balance would not take place if the osmotic push and pull of life could favor water diffusion through the cell membranes everywhere in the body—at the rate of 10 to the power of -3 ( i.e.,0.001) centimeters per second. Only by relying on the reverse osmotic process of expanding the extracellular water content of the body, so as to filter and inject “load-free” water into vital cells by the actions of vasopressin and the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone systems—when the body physiology is constantly forced to rely on its drought-management programs—could such a drastic change in the water balance of the body result.
Two other scientific discoveries are disregarded when Dr. Valtin recommends people should wait until they get thirsty before they drink water. One, the initiation of the thirst mechanisms is not triggered by vasopressin and the reninangiotensin systems—these systems are involved only in water conservation and forced hydra-
tion of the cells. Thirst is initiated when the Na+-K+ -ATPase pump is inadequately hydrated. It is water that generates voltage gradient by adequately hydrating the pump proteins in the neurotransmission systems of the body. This is the reason the brain tissue is 85 percent water and cannot endure the level of “thirst-inducing” dehydration that is considered safe in the article published by Dr. Valtin.
Two, the missing piece of the scientific puzzle in the water-regulatory mechanisms of the body, which has been exposed since 1987, and which Dr. Valtin and his colleagues need to know, is the coupled activity of the neurotransmitter histamine to the efficiency of the cation exchange, its role in the initiation of the drought- management programs, and its role in the catabolic processes when the body is becoming more and more dehydrated. Based on the primary water-regulatory functions of histamine, and the active role of water in all physiologic and metabolic functions of the body—as the hydrolytic initiator of all solute functions—the symptoms of thirst are those produced by excess histamine activity and its subordinate mechanisms, which get engaged in the drought-management programs of the body. They include asthma, allergies, and the major pains of the body, such as heartburn, colitis pain, rheumatoid joint pain, back pain, migraine headaches, fibromyalgic pains, and even anginal pain. And since vasopressin and the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone activity in the body are subordinates to the activation of histamine, their role in raising the blood pressure is a part of the drought-management programs of the body. Their purpose of forced delivery of water into vital cells demands a greater injection pressure to counteract the direction of osmotic pull of water from inside the cells of the body when it is dehydrated.
From the new perspective of my twenty-two years of clinical and scientific research into molecular physiology of dehydration, and the peer-reviewed introduction of a paradigm shift in medical science, recognizing histamine as a neuro-transmitter in charge of the water regulation of the body, I can safely say that the sixty million Americans with hypertension, the one hundred ten million with chronic pains, the fifteen million with diabetes, the seventeen million with asthma, the fifty million with allergies, the nearly one hundred million obese people in America, and more, all did exactly as Dr. Valtin recommends. They all waited to get thirsty. Had they realized water is a natural antihistamine and a more effective diuretic, I believe these people would have been saved the agony of their health problems.
References:
Batmanghelidj, F., M.D., “Pain: A Need for Paradigm Change,” Anticancer Research 7, no. 5B (Sept.-Oct. 1987): 971-990. Full article posted on www.water-cure.com.
———. “Neurotransmitter Histamine: An Alternative View,” Book of Abstracts, Third Interscience World Conference on Inflammation, Analgesics and Immunomodulators, Monte-Carlo (March 1989): 37. The Abstract and the full article are posted on www.watercure.com.
———. Your Body's Many Cries for Water. Vienna, Va.: Global Health Solutions, Inc., 1995.
———. ABC of Asthma, Allergies and Lupus. Vienna, Va.: Global Health Solutions, Inc., 2000.
Bruce A., M. Anderson, B. Arvidsson, and B. Isacksson., “Body Composition, Predictions of Normal Body Potassium, Body Water and Body Fat in Adults on the Basis of Body Height, Body Weight and Age,” Scand. J Clin. Lab. Invest 40 (1980): 461-473.
Katchalski-Katzir, Ephraim, “Conformational Changes in Biological Macro-molecules.” Biorheology 21 (1984): 57-74.
Phillips, P. A., B. J. Rolls, J. G. G. Ledingham, M. L. Forsling, J. J. Morton, M. J. Crowe, and L. Wollner, “Reduced Thirst After Water Deprivation in Healthy Elderly Men,” The New England Journal of Medicine 311, no. 12 (September 1985): 753-759.
Wiggins, P. M., “A Mechanism of ATP-Driven Cation Pumps,” in Biophysics of Water, edited by Felix Franks and Sheila F Mathis. West Sussex: John Wiley and
Sons, Ltd., 1982.
CHAPTER 3 (click here)
BASICS OF NEW MEDICINE FOR THE NEXT FEW THOUSAND YEARS
(click here)
Water, water everywhere, yet not enough did we drink.
Water, water everywhere, still our bodies did shriek and shrink.
WATER—THE BIZARRE AND THE SIMPLE
The human body is about 75 percent water and 25 percent solid matter. The brain is said to be 85 percent water and is extremely sensitive to any dehydration or depletion of its water content. The brain is bathed constantly in salty cerebrospinal fluid. The water content of the body is called the solvent, and the solid matter that is dissolved in the water is called the solute. The chemical understanding of the human body brought about an almost total concentration of research into the detailed molecular composition and minute fluctuations of the solid matter in the body. Thus a chemical-pharmaceutical perception of the human body took shape, resulting in the development of the “medical-industrial system.” Adherence to the understanding that it is primarily the body's solid composition that governs all its functions has produced much misinformation and has contributed to the present chaotic status of medicine.
The flaw in the above approach to understanding the body lies in the fact that, even with all our amassed knowledge, the human body is still an almost unknown structure. We know no more than 10 percent of how the body functions and is integrated chemically.
The practice of clinical medicine today benefits the manufacturing and commercial arms of the healthcare system. The ignorance-promoting and money-making solutes focus is strictly guarded and forcefully dispensed—it is good for selling drugs. Although the knowledge of the physiology of the human body is advanced, the practice of clinical medicine does not benefit from the advancement of this discipline of science.
WE ARE STILL WATER-DEPENDENT
The role of water in the bodies of all living species, humans included, has not changed since the earliest creation of life in water.
When life on land became an objective—the stressful adventure beyond known boundaries and the immediate vicinity of water supply—a gradually refined body-water-preservation system and drought-management system had to be created. In other words, the body began to adapt to transient dehydration. Over time, this
drought-management process became permanent—and currently exists in the body of modern humans.
Even now, when humans are under stress or confronting situations that may be perceived as stressful, the physiological translation of that stress reflects a water-regulation process. It is as if nothing has changed from the first time water-dwelling species ventured beyond their water supply. A similar process for rationing water reserves and an anticipated limited future supply becomes the responsibility of a complex system in the body. This multi-system water-distribution process remains in operation until the body receives unmistakable signals that it has once more gained access to an adequate water supply.
One of the unavoidable processes in the body-water rationing phase is the ruthlessness with which the body functions are monitored. No structure receives more than its predetermined share of water, based on its functional importance. The brain takes absolute priority over all the other systems.
Thinking that tea, coffee, alcohol, and manufactured beverages can substitute for the pure natural water needs of the body is an elementary mistake, particularly in a body that is stressed by confronting daily problems. It is true that these beverages contain water, but most of them also contain dehydrating substances, such as caffeine. These substances rid the body of the water they are dissolved in, plus additional water from the body's reserves. When you drink coffee, tea, or even a beer, your body gets rid of more water than is contained in the drink. If you measure your urine volume after the beverage is taken, you will see that you have passed more urine than the volume of the drink. Another way the body loses water after drinking hot beverages is through perspiration from the pores of the skin to cool the body that has been warmed from the inside.
The economic principles are the same in the body as they are in society. The law of supply and demand rules absolutely. When there is a comparative shortage of a needed substance, a strict rationing system rules the marketplace of the body with an iron fist.
When the human body is dehydrated, it redistributes and regulates the amount of available water. Within the body, alarms signal to show that areas in question are in short supply, much like the light signal that goes on when a car is running low on gas or oil. The available water is rationed and used where needed. The presence
of water will ultimately regulate the production mechanisms in a drought-stricken area of the body.
When chronic dehydration begins to set in, up to a certain level the shutdown of water-dependent functions is silent because there is a reserve capacity for endurance. As time passes and the body becomes more and more dehydrated, however, a threshold is reached where the system becomes inadequate for the responsibilities thrust on one or another function of the body. Depending on the type of demand, the organ or organs in the firing line of activity begin to indicate their particular signal of inadequacy.
While the various signals produced by the water distributors and drought managers indicate regional body thirst and drought, and can naturally and simply be relieved by an increased intake of water, they are, instead, often improperly and ignorantly dealt with by highly potent chemical products. Because many doctors are not
educated about the symptoms of dehydration and the importance of the fluid in the body, they often diagnose the problem incorrectly. Many physicians mistake dehydration for one or another disease and treat the symptoms with medication rather than water. The result: Pharmaceutical companies get rich, patients are not cured, and doctors are helpless in dealing with often recurring disease states of the body.
Silencing the different signal systems of water shortage in the body with chemical products can be immediately detrimental to the patient's body cells, including the genetic apparatus. Chronic dehydration can have a permanently damaging impact on a person's descendants. While the human body is entirely dependent on the many complicated functions of water for its survival, it has not developed a water-storage system in the same way it stores fat. The dehydration-produced loss of body efficiency and resulting loss of chemical know-how and function in one generation can be projected onto the next generation. If the root cause of a disease state is dehydration, the same malfunctioning sensor systems that permit dehydration to establish in an individual can eventually be inherited by some of the off-spring. This is why asthma, allergies, and heartburn are very serious conditions that should be prevented by full hydration at all times. It is essential to become educated about the functions of water in the body at all ages. This is how disease can be prevented in individuals and the next-generation descendants.
We must learn to recognize the symptoms of dehydration and understand that the treatment is simple: water. It's vital to our health.
In an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, September 20, 1984, Dr. Paddy Phillips and seven associates showed that elderly men were far less able to recognize their body thirst than younger men in the same experimental setting. When the elderly were dehydrated, they seemed not to feel thirsty. Even when blood tests showed an obvious water shortage in the body, and even when water was within reach, some of the persons tested did not seem to want to drink. They remained dehydrated. An editorial in The Lancet of November 3, 1984, discussed the experimental results of Phillips and his associates and mentioned other findings to support the conclusion that in the elderly, the thirst mechanism is gradually lost. Steen, Lundgren, and Isaksson reported in The Lancet of January 12, 1985, that, in their long-term observation, they had discovered significant body-water loss in the elderly—about 3.5 to 6 liters over ten years. This is a large loss from the fluid content of the body—mostly from inside the cells.
To give further scientific support to the new paradigm, let us briefly mention the single most important point of a scientific paper by Ephraim Katchalski-Katzir of the Weizmann Institute. The far-reaching significance of the finding is that proteins and enzymes function more efficiently in solutions of lower viscosity. They need
adequate water in their immediate environment to “diffuse” and work efficiently. In other words, in solutions of higher viscosity—produced by the loss of water from the cell content—the enzyme system within the cell becomes less efficient. As an analogy, could a competitive swimmer have room to practice in a pool full of kids? Obviously not. The same logic seems to apply to the enzymes in the cells of the body that “swim in cell water” to contact their chemical partners and to produce a desirable outcome.
A gradual loss of sensations in the body should be assumed to involve all aspects of the sensory mechanisms. As we grow older, we gradually lose sharpness of vision and become dependent on glasses. We lose sexual appetite. Our ability to hear some ranges of sound is gradually lost. Our feelings become less tender and lose alertness; our emotional stimulation becomes dull and less satisfying, and so on. These are the apparent outward manifestations of a gradual loss of the ability to differentiate and respond to the stimulation of the senses at some time or another in the life of any individual.
Although we do not know how and when the dulling of senses in the body begins, logical interpretation from the above scientific experiments, in addition to my personal observations, has led me to believe that reliance on our sense of thirst, and waiting to feel thirsty before we drink water, is the basic problem. The most
significant and major complication of dehydration is the loss of a number of essential amino acids that are used to manufacture neurotransmitters.
A major hidden advantage to adequate hydration seems to be the increased efficiency of the many thousands of proteins and enzymes whose physiological responsibilities are not yet recognized. They, too, will be more efficiently integrated due to the fact that they are obedient to the influence of free water in their environment. Thus, adequate hydration of the body might be the best insurance against premature aging and an early loss of our different sensory systems.
MY ONGOING BATTLE WITH THE MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT
It is the dawn of the twenty-first century, and yet I feel that the practice of medicine is becoming more and more regressive. Yes, people have learned that they are better off if they don't wait to get thirsty, and are taking measures to prevent their bodies from becoming dehydrated. They have learned that they feel better and are more energetic. They carry their water with them when they go out of the house; they take their water when they exercise; a vast majority are drinking water in preference to manufactured beverages and alcoholic drinks; schools are now getting wise to the
harmful effect of sodas on children and are throwing out the vending machines. This has become a mandate in California, and other states are beginning to follow. Some researchers have found that children's scholastic performance dramatically improves when they drink water instead of the sodas they used to drink.
Yet all of a sudden an emeritus professor from Dartmouth Medical School publishes an article in the American Journal of Physiology saying he has not found any scientific reason why people should drink unless they are thirsty. The interesting part of all this is that this article was first posted on the Internet and released to the
news agencies for its fast-track distribution before the paper version of the journal was published later in the year. The media from all over the world went to town on this orchestrated public-relations issue.
Realizing that this view, if allowed to stand, could potentially harm millions of trusting people from all over the world who might be influenced by the source of information, I wrote a brief scientific rebuttal to the published views and started disseminating the rebuttal. I have published the article on the Internet and it is now available for review by others. I am waiting for some reaction from the medical journals that received my rebuttal. I daresay, since my position is contrary to commercial interests of the sick-care system, no official reaction would be forthcoming. The article is presented below for those who might be interested in my logic; it is based on the new findings of molecular physiology of dehydration that you now understand.
You see why the information on water in this book is something you need to cherish. I don't believe you will get its benefits from the medical establishment in this country anytime soon.
Waiting to Get Thirsty Is to Die Prematurely and Very Painfully
Heinz Valtin, M.D., an emeritus professor at Dartmouth Medical School, has ventured the opinion that there is no scientific merit in drinking eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day and not waiting to get thirsty before correcting dehydration. This view, published in the American Journal of Physiology, August 2002, is the very foundation of all that is wrong with modern medicine, which is costing this nation $1.7 trillion a year, rising at the rate of 12 percent every year. Dr. Valtin's view, in my opinion, is as absurd as waiting for the final stages of a killer infection before giving the patient the appropriate antibiotics. His views are based on the erroneous assumption that dry mouth is an accurate sign of dehydration.
Like the colleagues he says he has consulted, Dr. Valtin does not seem to be aware of an important paradigm shift in medicine. All past views in medicine were based on the wrong assumption that it is the solutes in the body that regulate all functions and that the solvent has no direct role in any of the body's physiological
functions. In medical schools it is taught that water is only a solvent, a packing material and a means of transport, that water has no metabolic function of its own. I have come across this level of ignorance about the primary physiological role of water at another Ivy League medical school from another eminent professor of physiology who, like Dr. Valtin, researched and taught the water-regulatory mechanisms of the kidney to medical students and doctors. Only when I asked him what “hydrolysis” is, did the penny drop and he admit the scientific fact that
water is a nutrient and does indeed possess a dominant metabolic role in all physiological functions of the body.
Dr. Valtin's emphasis on the water-regulatory role of the kidneys limits his
knowledge to the body's mechanisms of “deficit management” of the water needs of the body. He seems to base his views of thirst management of the body on the vital roles of vasopressin, the antidiuretic hormone, and the reninangiotensin system, the elements that get engaged in the drought-management programs of the body, when the body has already become dehydrated. Indeed, he thinks dehydration is a state of the body when it loses 5 percent of its water content; and that one should wait until at some level of such water loss the urge to drink some kind of “fluid” will correct the water deficit in the body. This view might have seemed plausible twenty-five years ago. Today it exposes the tragic limitations of knowledge of the human physiology that is available to a prestigious medical school in America.
In his recently published and widely reported assertions, Dr. Valtin does not take into consideration the fact that water is a nutrient. Its vital “hydrolytic” role would be lost to all the physiological functions that would be affected by its shortage in its osmotically “free state.” Another oversight is the fact that it is the interior of the cells of the body that would become drastically dehydrated. In dehydration, 66 percent of the water loss is from the interior of the cells, 26 percent of the loss is from extracellular fluid volume, and only 8 percent of the loss is borne by the blood tissue in the vascular system, which constricts within its network of capillaries and maintains the integrity of the circulation system.
Philippa M. Wiggin has shown that the mechanism that controls or brings about the effective function of the cation pumps utilizes the energy-transforming property of water, the solvent: “The source of energy for cation transport or ATP synthesis lies in increases in chemical potentials with increasing hydration of small cations
and polyphosphate anions in the highly structured interfacial aqueous phase of the two phosphorylated intermediates.” Waiting to get thirsty, when the body fluids become concentrated before thirst is induced, one loses the energy-generating properties of water in the dehydrated cells of the body. This is a major reason why we should prevent dehydration, rather than wait to correct it. This new understanding of the role of water in cation exchange is enough justification to let the body engage in prudent surplus-water management rather than forcing it into drought and deficit-water management, which is what Dr. Valtin is recommending people do.
In his research on the “conformational change in biological macromolecules,” Ephraim Katchalski-Katzir of the Weizmann Institute of Science has shown that the “proteins and enzymes of the body function more efficiently in solutions of lower viscosity.” Thus, water loss from the interior of the cells would adversely affect their efficiency of function. This finding alone negates Dr. Valtin's view that we should let dehydration get established before drinking water. Since it is desirable that all cells of the body should function efficiently within their physiological roles, it would be more prudent to optimally hydrate the body rather than wait for the
drought-management programs of the body to induce thirst. Furthermore, it is much easier for the body to deal with a slight surplus of water than to suffer from its shortfall and have to ration and allocate water to vital organs at the expense of less vital functions of the body. The outcome of constantly circulating concentrated blood in the vascular system is truly an invitation to catastrophe.
The tragedy of waiting to get thirsty hits home when it is realized that the sharpness of thirst perception is gradually lost as we get older. Phillips and associates have shown that after twenty-four hours of water deprivation, the elderly still do not recognize they are thirsty: “The important finding is that despite their obvious
physiologic need, the elderly subjects were not markedly thirsty.” Bruce and associates have shown that between the ages of twenty and seventy, the ratio of water inside the cells to the amount of water outside the cells drastically changes from 1.1 to 0.8. Undoubtedly this marked change in the intracellular water balance would not take place if the osmotic push and pull of life could favor water diffusion through the cell membranes everywhere in the body—at the rate of 10 to the power of -3 ( i.e.,0.001) centimeters per second. Only by relying on the reverse osmotic process of expanding the extracellular water content of the body, so as to filter and inject “load-free” water into vital cells by the actions of vasopressin and the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone systems—when the body physiology is constantly forced to rely on its drought-management programs—could such a drastic change in the water balance of the body result.
Two other scientific discoveries are disregarded when Dr. Valtin recommends people should wait until they get thirsty before they drink water. One, the initiation of the thirst mechanisms is not triggered by vasopressin and the reninangiotensin systems—these systems are involved only in water conservation and forced hydra-
tion of the cells. Thirst is initiated when the Na+-K+ -ATPase pump is inadequately hydrated. It is water that generates voltage gradient by adequately hydrating the pump proteins in the neurotransmission systems of the body. This is the reason the brain tissue is 85 percent water and cannot endure the level of “thirst-inducing” dehydration that is considered safe in the article published by Dr. Valtin.
Two, the missing piece of the scientific puzzle in the water-regulatory mechanisms of the body, which has been exposed since 1987, and which Dr. Valtin and his colleagues need to know, is the coupled activity of the neurotransmitter histamine to the efficiency of the cation exchange, its role in the initiation of the drought- management programs, and its role in the catabolic processes when the body is becoming more and more dehydrated. Based on the primary water-regulatory functions of histamine, and the active role of water in all physiologic and metabolic functions of the body—as the hydrolytic initiator of all solute functions—the symptoms of thirst are those produced by excess histamine activity and its subordinate mechanisms, which get engaged in the drought-management programs of the body. They include asthma, allergies, and the major pains of the body, such as heartburn, colitis pain, rheumatoid joint pain, back pain, migraine headaches, fibromyalgic pains, and even anginal pain. And since vasopressin and the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone activity in the body are subordinates to the activation of histamine, their role in raising the blood pressure is a part of the drought-management programs of the body. Their purpose of forced delivery of water into vital cells demands a greater injection pressure to counteract the direction of osmotic pull of water from inside the cells of the body when it is dehydrated.
From the new perspective of my twenty-two years of clinical and scientific research into molecular physiology of dehydration, and the peer-reviewed introduction of a paradigm shift in medical science, recognizing histamine as a neuro-transmitter in charge of the water regulation of the body, I can safely say that the sixty million Americans with hypertension, the one hundred ten million with chronic pains, the fifteen million with diabetes, the seventeen million with asthma, the fifty million with allergies, the nearly one hundred million obese people in America, and more, all did exactly as Dr. Valtin recommends. They all waited to get thirsty. Had they realized water is a natural antihistamine and a more effective diuretic, I believe these people would have been saved the agony of their health problems.
References:
Batmanghelidj, F., M.D., “Pain: A Need for Paradigm Change,” Anticancer Research 7, no. 5B (Sept.-Oct. 1987): 971-990. Full article posted on www.water-cure.com.
———. “Neurotransmitter Histamine: An Alternative View,” Book of Abstracts, Third Interscience World Conference on Inflammation, Analgesics and Immunomodulators, Monte-Carlo (March 1989): 37. The Abstract and the full article are posted on www.watercure.com.
———. Your Body's Many Cries for Water. Vienna, Va.: Global Health Solutions, Inc., 1995.
———. ABC of Asthma, Allergies and Lupus. Vienna, Va.: Global Health Solutions, Inc., 2000.
Bruce A., M. Anderson, B. Arvidsson, and B. Isacksson., “Body Composition, Predictions of Normal Body Potassium, Body Water and Body Fat in Adults on the Basis of Body Height, Body Weight and Age,” Scand. J Clin. Lab. Invest 40 (1980): 461-473.
Katchalski-Katzir, Ephraim, “Conformational Changes in Biological Macro-molecules.” Biorheology 21 (1984): 57-74.
Phillips, P. A., B. J. Rolls, J. G. G. Ledingham, M. L. Forsling, J. J. Morton, M. J. Crowe, and L. Wollner, “Reduced Thirst After Water Deprivation in Healthy Elderly Men,” The New England Journal of Medicine 311, no. 12 (September 1985): 753-759.
Wiggins, P. M., “A Mechanism of ATP-Driven Cation Pumps,” in Biophysics of Water, edited by Felix Franks and Sheila F Mathis. West Sussex: John Wiley and
Sons, Ltd., 1982.
CHAPTER 3 (click here)
BASICS OF NEW MEDICINE FOR THE NEXT FEW THOUSAND YEARS
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