Hydration Is About More Than Just Drinking Water — How to Hydrate at the Cellular Level to Improve Health and Longevity by Dr. Mercola
Hydration Is About More Than Just Drinking Water — How to Hydrate at the Cellular Level to Improve Health and Longevity
May 06, 2018 • 135,205views
Edition: English
Story at-a-glance
Proper
hydration is not simply infusing your body with water. More
specifically, it’s about getting the water inside your cells. To do
that, you need to improve the electrical charges across your cellular
membranes
Water
is the ultimate mechanism by which you remove toxins and
naturally-produced oxidants from your body. Dehydration raises your risk
of disease and death, while being well-hydrated on a cellular level
slows down and even reverses biological aging
Strategies
that improve the electrical charge across your membranes include taking
terrahydrite humic compounds, reducing EMF exposure, increasing
electrolytes and boosting your fiber intake
In a
dehydrated state, you accumulate toxins due to a lack of electrical
energy flow. When you add in exposure to wireless technologies that
output high amounts of electrical resonance, your already disconnected
cells become prone to resonating to the wrong frequency
Virtually
everyone is dehydrated to some extent. Your hydration level can be
assessed by measuring your phase angle. A phase angle of 10 is
indicative of ideal health, while death occurs around 3.5
By Dr. Mercola
Dr. Zach Bush is a physician and researcher with a practice in
Charlottesville, Virginia. Bush is triple board-certified in internal
medicine, endocrinology and metabolism, as well as hospice and
palliative care, giving him an unusually broad range of expertise.
Before he switched his focus to nutrition and natural medicine, he was a
cancer researcher.
In our last interview, we discussed intracellular communication and the importance of soil microbes in the growing of food. Here, our focus is on hydration.
"A lot of our discussion last time was around the gut. There's
rising awareness in the medical industry, as well as in the lay public,
of the importance of gut health for human health.
However, even though this general correlation has now been
largely assumed, if not proven, there remains a disconnect between
understanding why gut health is so important and how it impacts so many
phases of health and disease. Hydration, this topic we're covering
today, is a huge piece of that puzzle," Bush says.
Redefining Hydration
Your gut is an important part of the hydration cycle. The question
is, how do you move water from the intestinal lining into your
bloodstream and, more importantly, into your cells? As noted by Bush,
when we talk about hydration, we're not simply talking about drinking enough water throughout the day but, more specifically, getting water inside your cells.
"That's two vastly different things," he says. A common
recommendation to ensure hydration is to drink water until your urine
runs clear. Unfortunately, even most medical professionals are stuck in
this simplified mindset. "It's not unusual to put 5 liters of water into
somebody's vein in a matter of hours in the operating room or the
emergency room,"
Bush says, "And so, we have this huge infusion into the bloodstream,
but unfortunately, that does not necessarily translate into water inside
the cell. That, as it turns out, is really a crux of what we call the
aging process."
About two-thirds of your body is composed of water, and a majority of
that water — about 66 to 70 percent — is within your cells and lymph
system. With age, your body tends to lose its ability to get water from
the vasculature, the extracellular environment, to the inside of your
cells. "If we could stay perfectly hydrated in the intracellular
environment, our aging would slow down if not reverse," Bush says. The
reason is because water is an important mechanism by which you remove
toxins and naturally-produced oxidants from your body.
Intracellular Hydration Is Key for Health
So, the crux is to hydrate your cells, and simply drinking water is
not typically the most effective strategy to achieve this. Oftentimes
the water you drink will simply be urinated out before it has a chance
to get into your cells. And, without proper intracellular hydration,
your health suffers. Bush explains:
"The obvious thing around hydration is the inflammatory
processes. Chronic inflammation is the accumulation of oxidative
compounds within our cells and then, ultimately, within the bloodstream.
That is largely the result of a lack of interaction of hydrogen that's
within the water system. Water is one of the main carriers of hydrogen.
This affects every signaling system in your body, and perhaps most
notable, beyond the [cleansing] part, is actual fuel production.
Your cells run on ATP, adenosine triphosphate. ATP is produced by the mitochondria,
which look like bacteria, but they live inside your cells. They're
about 100 times smaller than bacteria. These mitochondria take the sugar
and fat out of your food system and turn that into ATP. They do that
through a series of enzymes. The respiratory chain is a series of
enzymes in the wall of the mitochondria that is the one that will
ultimately result in the production of ATP.
Interestingly, the F1F0 [ATP synthase] pump, a tiny molecular
structure at the end of this enzyme pathway, is what will convert one
adenosine diphosphate to one molecule of ATP. That last step requires
four hydrogens, two oxygens and two electrons …
When you think about the structure of water, which is going to be
a combination of two hydrogen [molecules] for every oxygen [molecule],
you basically have two H2O molecules, and their concerted electrons are
going to be necessary for that last step of fuel production.
The clinical manifestation of aging and inflammation is
ultimately one of the loss of fuel production at the mitochondrial
level. As you get dehydrated, as you fail to get oxygen and hydrogen in
the form of water inside the cell, you lose the ability for those
mitochondria to be cranking out all of that energy … used for cellular
repair, replacement and the whole anti-aging effort."
Oxygen Derived From Intercellular Water
In aerobic respiration that occurs in the mitochondria, the ultimate
electron acceptor is oxygen. A common belief is that oxygen is derived
from the air we breathe. But Bush contends that oxygen is also derived
from hydrolysis of intercellular water into hydrogen (H2) and oxygen
(O), and that to consistently get the proper ratio of oxygen to
hydrogen, you need to liberate the oxygen from the water (H2O).
"[T]he H2 molecule is now recognized to be one of the best
selective antioxidants for the hydroxyl free radical. What that means is
that the hydroxyl free radical, which is the most noxious to the cell
membrane and our ability to do cell maintenance, can be scrubbed or
picked up by the H2.
In this way, the water you're drinking is a delivery of both
oxygen and hydrogen in a nice ratio where you can release the O's with
their electrons. They become O2. They release H's in the form of H2.
They become a scrubber of inflammation and substrate for the ATP pump."
According to Bush, all of his patients are dehydrated. Indeed, he
believes virtually everyone is dehydrated to some extent. In his clinic,
he measures hydration by measuring phase angle. Phase angle is measured
in a way similar to that of a whole body bioimpedance that is typically
done to measure body fat. It uses electrocardiograph leads placed on
your limbs and allows you to measure the electrical resistance to a
standardized current running through your body tissues.
How to Measure Your Hydration Level
For the phase angle, leads are placed on your wrist, finger, ankle
and toe. Lying flat, the resistance and reactions across your entire
body are measured. This measurement gives you a good ides of your cells'
ability to hold an electrical charge and there's a direct correlation
between the phase angle and an individual's hydration level.
As explained by Bush, "An electrical charge across the single cell
membrane is a very powerful measure of your capacity to intracellularly
hydrate, to get water inside of your cells … I've never seen somebody
coming in with a health complaint with a phase angle better than 7." In
the general public, the angle phase bell curve is between 3.5 and 10.
Death tends to happen around 3.5.
"Interestingly, all of our cancer patients tend to come in around
4.5 or below, which is interesting because it suggests, from a
hydration standpoint … cancer doesn't happen until you're so dry that
you're nearly dead. In this way, cancer is not a disease that pops out
of anywhere.
It's simply a lack of water within the cells. You get an
accumulation of oxidative damage, which will then do the DNA injury and
all of these other things that we think of as being the cancer process …
Ideal health is up around 10. Death is around 3.5. Most of us in the
U.S. are living between 6 and 8, and those are people in good health."
The Health of Your Cellular Membranes Influences Your Ability to Properly Hydrate
Bush has done a lot of work on tight junctions — Velcro-like proteins
that create macromembranes that hold the cells together. One of the
primary tools used to measure the health of these membranes is
transepithelial electrical resistance (TEER), an ohmmeter with
microscopic filament attachments that allows you to measure both the
inside and outside of the membrane, giving you an indication of the
resistance across the epithelial layer. Bush explains:
"That epithelial layer is acting as a resistor, if you will, just
like the rubber on a copper wire. That plastic or rubber coating on the
wire is insulating it so that the electricity stays inside the wire and
doesn't short out. In the same way, your macromembranes, the barrier
systems of your gut lining, of your blood vessel tree, the blood-brain
barrier, all of these create an electrical gradient across them at the
macrolevel.
What we've shown, with regard to hydration, is that the higher
that electrical charge across that membrane, the more likely you are to
pull water across … You've got over a billion cells forming your gut
lining. If you just take one of those cells … the electrical charge
across that [cell], when you're healthy, when you're up around the phase
angle of 10 to 12 … that charge is above 10,000 volts.
Imagine the electrical energy of a lightning bolt being held
across a barrier that's just a few microns in space. It defies our
normal understanding of Newtonian physics. It's absolutely down in the
quantum physics realm that a cell membrane that tiny is able to hold
that enormous electrical charge. What builds that electrical charge is
ultimately the mitochondria.
We talked about the mitochondria cranking out ATP. In the process
of taking glucose or fat and turning it into ATP, the electron
transport chain, Krebs cycle — all of these mechanisms of fuel
production — create electrons. You're creating this high electrical
force within the cell through mitochondrial energy production. That
leads to a gradient. A high electrical gradient is going to pull water
inside the cell …
[So,] you can't talk about mitochondrial health or mitochondrial
production or fuel production without talking about water. Those two are
absolutely inseparable …
If you start taking a bunch of supplements but you don't have
that electrical charge across the membrane, you can't get the [nutrient]
to transit into where it needs to be, because you're lacking all of
that intracellular commerce that's being driven primarily by the
electrical charge that's driving water that will pull the rest of it
with it."
Your Phase Angle Provides a Sense of Your Biological Age
About a year and a half ago I visited Bush's clinic and had a phase
angle test done. To locate a practitioner that can provide this service,
see RJL Systems' Locate a Practitioner page.1
At the time, my phase angle was about 5.6. I was quite annoyed because I
thought my healthy lifestyle would result in a better reading.
But it motivated me to make some changes and in about nine months I
got it up to about 6.4 and more recently it has climbed to 7.0. It's a
rather slow process, as it's not influenced by temporary situations but a
rather long-term reflection of your biology. According to Bush:
"The phase angle … is the best technique for really developing a
sense of biologic age. You went from a 5.6 to a 6.4 over about a
nine-month period … So, in just nine months on some very simple
interventions, you reversed your age by 10 to 15 years biologically by
getting that phase angle up. The chance of you developing a chronic
disease, something like cancer, just went dramatically down because
you're getting water inside the cell — you're scrubbing the whole system
out …
We're all very aware that we have toxin accumulation in our body …
But all of our detox efforts are ineffective if we're not getting water
inside the cell. With your phase angle going up, now all of your detox
efforts are going to be far more potent and effective.
Why is it so slow? It's slow because it's literally showing you
the mitochondrial potential in the reservoir of your ability to repair
in 70 trillion cells … It's mind-boggling huge numbers. It's one thing
to say, 'I improved kidney health today by hydrating,' or, 'I stopped
drinking alcohol, so now my liver is healthier.'
We're not talking about a single organ with the phase angle.
We're talking about the total global population in your body of 70
trillion cells. How do we affect that and what is it doing? That's where
the phase angle is a powerful tool."
Improving Hydration Does Not Require Drinking More Water
It's important to note that I was able to improve my phase angle
without increasing the amount of water I drink. Again, when we're
talking about hydration, it's not a matter of just drinking water,
because you're likely to just pee the extra water out if you don't have a
sufficiently high electrical charge. To actually improve the electrical
charge across your membranes, Bush recommends:
• Taking terrahydrite humic compounds such as Restore,2
which helps support your macromembranes, allowing for greater
intracellular hydration. Restore also works on the mitochondria to ramp
up the reactive oxygen species production in damaged cells, which takes
the stress off healthy cells. All of that helps shift the electrical
potential of your mitochondria to increase the electrical charge, which
allows more water to enter the cells. • Reducing electromagnetic field (EMF) toxicity.
"What is the relationship between hydration and EMF? This is a really
cool subject," Bush says. "The tight junction is actually helps maintain
… the integrity of the cell-to-cell adhesion, allowing maintenance of
the gap junctions that lay behind the tight junction barrier system."
As explained by Bush, you have tens of thousands of gap junctions
between one cell and the next cell — tubules that resemble fiber optic
cables when viewed under electron microscopy. These gap junctions pass
electrical light energy from one cell cytoplasm to the next cell without
ever exiting into the extracellular matrix. In other words, a healthy
cell population is one concurrent "mass of electrical energy" that can
pass through this virtual "electrical circuit board" of the cells.
A number of environmental stressors can damage your gap junction system, including pesticides and other chemicals, EMF, alcohol
and drugs such as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories. "These compounds
are very noxious to the tight junction systems," Bush warns. And, when
the gap junctions are disconnected, you end up with a decrease in
electrical energy coherence, and a reduction in the frequency resonance
between your cells.
In a dehydrated state, you end up accumulating toxins due to a lack
of electrical energy flow. When you add in exposure to cellphones, Wi-Fi
routers and other wireless technologies that output high amounts of
electrical resonance, your already disconnected cells become prone to
resonating to the wrong frequency.
"This is one of the critical realities. We cannot talk about tight
junction damage or dehydration without mentioning this third toxicity
that we're exposed to, which is environmental frequency resonance that's
nonhuman," Bush says.
The Importance of Water, Electrolytes and Fiber
According to Bush, a good rule of thumb for water intake is 1 ounce
of water per kilogram of body weight. "So, if you're a 75-kilogram,
i.e., about 150- or 165-pound individual, you should be drinking around
70 to 75 ounces of water a day," he says. However, as mentioned,
cellular hydration goes beyond the need for water.
You also need to address the electrical charge within your cells. Two
important measures were just discussed above (supporting your
macromembranes with Restore and reducing EMF exposure). Drinking
electrolyte-rich water is also important, as it too helps build
electrical charges.
"The classic electrolyte in our American diet is sodium chloride (table salt)" Bush says.
"Sodium chloride has a positive charge around the sodium and a negative
charge around the chloride. That chloride anion, or negative charge, is
one of the mega potentials there for hydration … Of course, there are
many other important sources.
For example, potassium chloride is a classic delivery system for
chloride. However, potassium chloride can stop the heart at a certain
dose. There's a fine line between dose and overdose when it comes to
just about anything in nature. But certainly, the electrolytes are one
of these … The easy way to titrate your electrolytes is by your bowel
movements. If you start to develop loose stools when you're adding
electrolytes, you're probably adding a little bit too much electrolyte.
You can get electrolyte powders at any natural food store. Some
of them are liquids. Some of them are powders. I don't have a brand
preference overall. I would say, think about mixing it up, and see what
your body tolerates. Some of the liquid ones are so concentrated that
they can cause nausea. A lot of people will get diarrhea or loose stools on them … Find
the dose at which your bowel is tolerating that electrolyte load. It's
important to note that you don't only want to drink electrolyte water.
You'd want to drink both free water and electrolyte water intermittently
throughout the day …
When I'm going through a hydration protocol with my patients, for
three days they'll do an intensive hydration protocol where they're
drinking 4 ounces every 30 minutes. They'll do that from about 7 a.m. to
7 p.m. Then they'll give their body a break. They can pee off what they
need to before they go to sleep at 9:30 or 10 p.m. In that 12 hours of
intense hydration every 30 minutes, every other [4-ounce dose] has
electrolyte in it."
Another important component is fiber. "Fiber is one of the most
important mechanisms by which your fruits, vegetables and, ultimately,
your body, are going to manage water," Bush says. Fruits and vegetables
also contain other valuable micronutrients, including silica, which not
only benefits your gut microbiome, but also helps improve hydration
inside your cells. An herbal supplement that provides high amounts of
organified silica is horsetail. Avoid mineral silica, as it actually
promotes oxidation and is very dehydrating.
Come and See Dr. Bush Speak in November in Orlando
I first met Dr. Bush at the Academy of Comprehensive and Integrative
Medicine (ACIM) in Orlando two years ago. It is by far my favorite
professional event to attend as there is just a stellar group of
clinicians sharing their insights on how to optimize health with natural
strategies that are typically ignored by conventional medicine.
Of course, I will also be speaking along with a list of many other
outstanding clinicians, such as Drs. Dietrich Klinghardt, Lee Cowden,
Daniel Amen and many others that you can see here. If you are a clinician, I could not encourage you more strongly to join me in Orlando November 8 through 11. If you are an interested lay person, there will be a two-day event for you that last year had 500 attendees, at which I will also be sharing my latest strategies on how to improve your health.
More Information
To learn more about Bush's work, products and educational events, see his website, ZachBushMD.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment