the water
secret
THE CELLULAR BREAKTHROUGH
TO LOOK AND FEEL
10 YEARS YOUNGER, By Dr. Howard Murad, M.D.
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Contents
Introduction One Doctor’s Crusade to Find the Secret
to Optimal Health, Page 1
1 How Well Are You, Really? 13
2 Three Kinds of Aging and a
Three-Pronged Approach to Care 35
3 Eat Your Water, Don’t Drink It 57
4 Ten Simple Steps to Living by the
Water Secret: Meal Plans and Recipes 87
5 It’s Not What You Eat, It’s What You Don’t Eat 131
6 What the Fittest People Know That You Don’t 159
7 Why Skin Care Is Health Care 179
8 Combat Cultural Stress 211
Epilogue Your Best Is Yet to Come 249
Acknowledgments 257
Index 261
Pop Quiz : Which car would you rather drive—a sedan with 200 horsepower
or a roadster with 600 horsepower? The roadster, right? But
what if it was missing two wheels and hadn’t had an oil change
in two years?
The Phase Angle test would tell you to pick the sedan.
The New Science of Age Reversal.
When I first conceived of the Water Secret, I was looking for
the most comprehensive approach to understanding health
and aging. Theories about chronic inflammation and free -
radical damage, among countless others, weren’t enough for
me (the last time I checked, there were more than three hundred
theories on aging). In 2009 the Nobel Prize for Physiology
or Medicine was awarded to three Americans whose experiments
were pivotal in our understanding of telomeres, the
protective coverings on the ends of chromosomes that impact
cell division. The amount of telomerase, the substance in the
body that builds telomeres, ultimately influences cell death
and, in the larger scheme of life, aging.
But none of these theories paints the whole picture for me.
Certainly these biological events and substances play a proven
role, but I sense that they do so within a much larger and universal
context.
So with every idea that has emerged on aging, in the back
of my mind I continued to hear the famous words of Nobel
Laureate in Medicine Albert Szent - Gyorgi von Nagyrapolt:
“ Discovery is seeing what everybody
has seen and thinking what nobody
else has thought. ”And even though
I've led plenty of pioneering studies
about the importance of quelling
inflammatory pathways and loading
up with antioxidants, I have always
felt that something was missing. Like
a house with a caved - in roof, it does
no good to replace it if you don’t take care of what damaged it
in the first place, such as termites that weakened the structure
before the latest storm hit.
Now before your imagination starts seeing termites invading
your body and poking holes in your cells (it ’ s not really
like that), let me briefl y take you back to the events that led
up to the Water Secret ’ s establishment. My discovery didn ’ t
happen in the lab or in a midsummer night ’ s dream. As with
many scientifi c breakthroughs, it evolved over time as I grew
to understand my patients and gather evidence from them.
It ’ s amazing what you can learn from patients when you delve
into their habits and their personal “ secrets ”to staying young,
especially when you witness tens of thousands pass through
your offi ce from all walks of life. Some seem to defy their age
as if by magic, while others show clear signs of having jumped
too far ahead before their time. Genetics and luck aside ( “ luck ”
means avoiding diseases of unknown origin and regardless of
lifestyle factors), there were clear patterns among those who
were aging exceptionally well and those who looked desperate
for a reboot.
One patient has always stood out in my mind. When Alfred
walked into my office more than a decade ago, he was in
supreme health for a man of eighty - eight. He never got sick.
He hiked every day, stayed active in community events and
organizations, had a positive outlook on life even though he ’ d
lost his wife a few years previously, and enjoyed a healthy
diet that included eggs every other day. Alfred may have had
good parents, but I knew that his chosen lifestyle more than anything else dictated how well he lived. He was just one of
thousands who offered me insights into aging well, and I took
his wisdom to heart. After all, I also was looking for the recipe
to feeling and looking as vibrant as possible. Patients such as
Alfred helped me to see where I could make improvements
and then share that knowledge with others.
One fact I consistently observed was that my healthiest
patients shared an ability to hold water without the classic
“ water retention ”in the wrong areas. In other words, they
were well hydrated (and looked healthy), yet they were not
bloated — and they did not lug around bottles of water all day
(which, by the way, was not a hip thing to do until recently;
some European countries that boast
incredibly low mortality rates wonder
why Americans seem to have to
have drink cups in their cars). My
own experience as an avid hiker
who continually felt dehydrated on
strenuous climbs inspired me to
think in this new way and experiment
with ways to encourage my
cells to hold more water. I theorized
that the water - conserving strength
of the cell ’ s membrane — its ability to
keep water inside the cell (hence the term cellular water) — was
the fundamental marker of health and youthful vitality. The
diets of my healthiest patients, including Alfred, were rife with
the very nutrients that make up cellular membranes, the outer
yet permeable boundary of a cell that envelopes its interior
and allows certain molecules to enter or exit the cell.
Eager to translate this theory into practice, I used my background
as a pharmacist and a physician to attack the problem
of cellular water loss. Of course, I naturally became my
first case study as I experimented by taking various nutrients
in the hopes of creating an ideal environment for maintaining
the building blocks of healthy cells. This included supplementing
my diet with antioxidant minerals, vitamins, and plant - based compounds; adding anti - inflammatory agents
to the mix to prevent free radicals from forming in the first
place; and finally, including some omega fats to draw more
water to the cells. (And, like Alfred, I started to eat eggs every
other day.) My weekly hikes afforded me the perfect testing
grounds.
Flash forward several years; by the mid - 1990s I was sufficiently convinced that my theory had been validated by my
own experience that I was eager to share it with a few hundred
patients whose health needed a boost. Not to my surprise,
I found that those who took advantage of my internal care
program felt better, slept better, and experienced a remarkable
reduction in the severity of common skin disorders such
as dryness, acne, and cellulite formation. I also found that
their skin had an apparent increase in structural strength and
resilience that made it appear firmer, plumper, and brighter —
more like young skin. And I knew, as every dermatologist does,
that outer appearances reflect what is going on inside.
With the help of Phase Angle (PA) technology, which was
emerging to measure both cellular integrity and the ratio of
water outside the body ’ s cells to water inside its cells, I further
validated my theory. All living things, animal or plant, have a
PA. The test that determines a PA involves passing a painless
electrical current through your body to ascertain its composition,
and from there to make certain calculations. Efficient,
healthy cells are the building blocks of a healthy body. The
higher your PA, the higher your cells are functioning and
the more likely that your cells ’membranes are intact (a good
thing); lower PAs are associated with cell death or compromised
cellular membranes (a bad thing). So when the PA goes
up, you ’ re healthy; when it goes down, you ’ re ill. The PA also
goes up when you ’ re calm and down when you ’ re stressed.
When you exercise more and increase your lean muscle mass,
your PA goes up.
PAs have given us a remarkable window into how the
body responds to changes in health — for better or worse. This
explains why people with illnesses such as HIV or cancer, or those who are nutritionally deficient,
routinely exhibit low PAs. As expected,
PAs also decrease with age as your
body loses its capacity to repair and
turn over new cells as quickly as it did
in its youth. The true age of a human
being can be determined by the changes
in the Phase Angle. In as few as four
weeks, I’ve watched patients turn back
their physical clocks by following my
program. An eighty - five - year - old can
have a PA age of someone of fifty; a fifty - five - year - old can have
a PA age of someone of thirty - five; and a thirty - year - old can
have a Phase Angle age of someone of twenty.
By 2000, I ’ d hired a research staff and put my theory through
more rigorous testing, both in the lab and in a clinical setting.
The addition of external and emotional care to my test subjects
enhanced their results, and my three - part program based on
the Water Secret was born. In the past eight years, we’ve treated
more than two thousand patients and witnessed incredible
transformations. Mary, thirty - eight, developed early - stage diabetes
as an adult and came to me with a persistent case of acne.
A month after following the Water Secret alongside a specific
treatment for her acne, Mary ’ s blood sugar stabilized and her
acne cleared. Jon, fifty - five, suffered from cysts and depression
because he was besieged with the pain of rheumatoid arthritis.
Three months after he adopted the strategies aligned with the
Water Secret, his arthritis pain was considerably reduced and his
depression was lifting. And there was Susan, sixty - six, who, like
many postmenopausal women, complained of general aging and
skin problems. After ten weeks on the program, her PA placed
her at fifty - five years old — more than ten years younger than her
chronological age. Each week took back a year of her life, which
was clearly visible in a measurable reduction of wrinkles, UV
damage, and body fat.
You’ll read more success stories in depth throughout this
book. There is no reason why you can’t become one of them.
