I feel one of the biggest issues in modern medicine is that patients often don’t get the opportunity to establish a genuine relationship with their physician and hence often lack the critical voice necessary for a therapeutic doctor-patient relationship. Because of this, my goal here was always to be able to correspond with everyone who reached out to me (e.g., through comments). Unfortunately, due to the unexpected reach of this publication (two hundred thousand readers), I don’t have the time to both do that and to write here. For that reason, I decided the best solution was to have monthly open threads where people could ask whatever they wanted on any topic and I would make a point to always reply to them. In
tandem with these open threads, I try to have them tie to a subject
that I feel is important to cover, but isn’t enough to be the focus of
an entire article. For this month’s post, since water is a foundation of
our body’s health, I would like to share my perspectives on the
healthiest types of water to drink. The Water IndustryOver the decades I’ve been in the holistic health field, I’ve noticed device after device hit the market which claims to produce the optimal source of water for you to drink, frequently has a lot of marketing behind it, briefly becomes popular and in many cases, then fades into obscurity and is forgotten. This in turn has led me to cynically conclude the primary reason why these products are created is because they are easy to market, not because they are necessarily helpful. From having extensively studied the subject, presently, I believe the following: •Many of the things you want to take out (e.g., fluoride) can only be taken out by a reverse osmosis water system, so if at all possible you should use one of them. •There
are a variety of other decent water filtration methods that many people
get invested in, and may have specific advantages (e.g., Berkey water
filters are gravity fed so they can be operated without electricity or
an existing water pressure) but they are simply not as good at filtering
as a reverse osmosis system. •There are a variety of products which “energize” or “structure” water. Some people (e.g., those belonging to the “sensitize constitutional archetype”) find they help, but having explored this for years, all I can say is that the results vary immensely depending upon the product and the person who uses it. •The
one (recent) innovation I’ve repeatedly seen provide some degree of
benefit to users are the hydrogen water bottles (which electrolyzes
water so it becomes full of dissolved hydrogen and oxygen—which may also
provide some of the benefit of the water). Many of the devices that do
this are fairly cheap, so I believe if you want to experiment with a
water product to see if it benefits you (e.g., some athletes find
drinking hydrogen water increases their endurance) it’s the one to try. •I
like fresh spring water, but the value of it again varies immensely
depending on the spring (a few are very good, many however are not).
Additionally, I find long term consumption of spring water frequently
causes issues for people due to the dissolved (positively charged)
minerals disrupting their physiologic zeta potential
(e.g., I know a few people who went on prolonged spring water diets who
then developed cardiac arrhythmias). Finally, I believe if you want to
store spring water, it needs to be stored in glass, as otherwise it
loses the life-giving quality many attribute to spring water. •I believe one of the most important but least appreciated water filtration needs is for showers. This is because once water is heated, chlorine will off gas from water, which results in people frequently breathing it significant amounts of it in while showering. In turn, I and many others have found a subset of patients (e.g., singers or those with a sensitive throat) find certain chronic symptoms improve once they get a chlorine shower filter, and likewise that it feels much better for the skin and hair if they use a dechlorinated shower. Given that shower chlorine filters cost very little and last for a long time, I believe they are an excellent health investment. •Generally speaking, I believe you should not have ice in the water you drink. This is partially because the ice often comes from very dirty sources (especially on airplanes) and partially because it adversely affects your digestion (which for instance is why Chinese Medicine they advise many patients to not have cold drinks with meals). Lastly, there are a variety of water products I believe sometimes have merit (e.g., Quinton Water), but since there are so many of them out there, I feel going into those is beyond the scope of a monthly open thread. Reverse Osmosis WaterThroughout
my life, I’ve seen a variety of things suggesting reverse osmosis (RO)
water is the ideal liquid to drink. I believe many of the benefits of RO
water are a result of some combination of the following: Conversely, since selling water is such a competitive business, each business will come up with a variety of reasons to attack competing products. In the case of reverse osmosis (RO) water, some of the most common arguments I’ve see raised against it are that it depletes you of vital minerals, its production process wastes a lot of water and it leaches toxins from its containers. In my own experience, the first point primarily holds true for magnesium. This is because: For these reasons, I often advise people who plan to drink RO water for a prolonged period to also take a magnesium supplement (preferably magnesium threonate, malate, orotate or citrate—magnesium oxide is not good). I don’t really agree with the second point, because while extremely inefficient RO systems exist (e.g., ones that waste 95% of the water you put into them) most waste between 20%-75% of the water during the filtration process. Given that people drink 3 liters of water per day, this translates to around 10 liters of water being wasted per day, which is equivalent to 1-2 toilet flushes or someone spending about one minute in the shower (or about 2.6% of the average amount of water someone uses). In
regards to the leaching perspective, I think this can be a valid point
(e.g., if RO water is stored in old plastic containers or tanks, it can
develop a plastic taste). For this reason, I try to store RO water in
glass containers and make sure I don’t use a poor quality RO system to
store water. Reverse Osmosis Water and Zeta PotentialOne of the greatest challenges in medicine is determining how much something actually helps people, as frequently the “benefit” is small and takes a long time to manifest. In turn, one of the reasons I was so drawn to the zeta potential concept was that one would immediately notice significant differences once something was done to restore their physiologic zeta potential and conversely, I repeatedly saw serious complications immediately follow a disruption of one’s zeta potential (e.g., I’ve never forgotten a patient I met when I admitted her the hospital after she suffered a textbook zeta potential collapse from receiving a pneumococcal vaccine). Zeta potential, briefly, quantifies the tendency of particles that are (colloidally) suspended in a solution to clump together or remain separated and dispersed from each other. The degree of clumping present, in turn, determines how freely a fluid will flow, so when individuals have an impaired zeta potential, it will cause fluid stagnation throughout the body. This fluid stagnation is often immensely consequential as almost every part of the body depends upon a healthy fluid circulation (e.g., people’s legs swell when fluid gets stuck in them and can’t flow back out). The consequences of an impaired zeta potential are particularly apparent in the blood, as once blood cells begin to clump together, the circulation significantly diminishes and severe conditions like heart arrhythmias, blood clots or strokes can follow. To illustrate: the therapeutic usage of improving the physiologic zeta potential was originally developed by a colloidal engineer in the 1960s (at a time when therapeutics for heart conditions were sorely lacking). He built upon (sadly forgotten) medical research that showed many illnesses resulted from blood cells sludging together and concluded the clumping he saw in colloidal systems was the cause of this sludging. He then theorized that clumped blood was harder for the heart pump, so that to treat arrhythmias, the blood needed to be unclumped. This
worked (treating his severe heart arrhythmia) and gradually caught on
(initially for heart conditions and then a variety of other ailments
like dementia and poor wound healing). In turn, while readers here have
reported a variety of improvements from restoring their physiologic zeta
potential (e.g., fatigue, neuropathies, cold fingers or tinnitus), the
most common feedback I’ve received is that restoring their physiologic zeta potential fixed their atrial fibrillation. Since zeta potential is largely determined by the balance of positive and negative charges in the body, certain agents (particularly aluminum—which is present in most vaccines) have very strong positive charges which in tiny concentrations cause large amounts of fluid to clump together. For example the main method of purifying sewage (which is composed of small organic waste matter particulates suspended in water) is to mix it with a flocculating agent so those suspended particles clump together and then settle out to the bottom where a sludge exists that can be separated from the rest of the water. As aluminum is highly effective at disrupting zeta potential, it (primarily Al₂(SO₄)₃ ) is commonly used to treat municipal water it is hence frequently found in drinking water. Unfortunately, while the EPA puts limits on how much aluminum can be there, unlike many other regulations, those limits are strictly voluntary and the EPA only discloses that higher levels of aluminum can create “colored water” (due to it causing colloids in the water to clump together and become visible). As such, I believe it is important to use a filtration system (e.g., reverse osmosis) that removes these aluminum particles from drinking water. Because of this, we frequently observe individuals have severe consequences when exposed to a zeta potential reducing agent. For example, as I show here, many of the subtle neurological injuries that have been observed for over a century from vaccines (which contain typically contain aluminum adjuvants) occur concurrently with microstrokes that affect the cranial nerves (e.g., causing facial paralysis or eye changes), and as such, restoring the physiologic zeta potential is a critical component of rehabilitating vaccine injuries. Similarly, the COVID-19 spike protein (due to its positive charge density) is also highly effective at impairing the physiologic zeta potential. This is why COVID-19 patients would often have issues like microclots, and what I believe underlies many of the highly unusual medical issues seen in those injured by the COVID vaccines. Likewise, beyond the severe injuries, many people I know who were vaccinated no longer have eyes that no longer move smoothly when they look to the side. Furthermore, while not as common, we’ve seen quite a few cases of someone having a stroke after they ate something cooked in aluminum, and I’ve read of many cases where a human or animal (e.g., a parrot) gradually developed a severe illness which went away after it stopped drinking water which was stored or cooked in aluminum. This is particularly unfortunate because almost all non-stick cookware on the market either utilizes a toxic substance (e.g., teflon) or is comprised of a thin layer of the safe non-stick coating (e.g., ceramic) lining an aluminum pan which inevitably begins to peels off and expose you to the aluminum underneath. Note: I believe many of the health “issues” people ascribe to consuming salt are actually due to the fact aluminum is frequently added to salt products. Note: I adopted the initial RO unit I used after I found out a hospital was using it for patients with kidney failure because it was the only filtration system which effectively removed aluminum from water they used for dialysis (toxic levels of aluminum are a recurring issue for these patients). A variety of approaches exist for improving zeta potential, but most of them essentially boil down to avoiding the problematic positive charges (e.g., reducing your aluminum exposure) and adding beneficial negative charges to the body. In turn, I have found that many of the holistic therapies which have a wide range of positive benefits attributed to them (e.g., Earthing) all share the common thread of improving zeta potential. Drinking deionized water forms a critical part of the zeta potential protocols because it eliminates many of the positive charges from the water you ingest which the kidneys would otherwise need to eventually eliminate. This is particularly important because the kidneys function much more efficiently when they have a low workload on them (i.e., not having to work against as high of a positive ion concentration gradient in the blood). In short, all of the pioneers of treating zeta potential found that while drinking deionized water or consuming the correct negative charges helped, both typically had to be done together for anyone with a significant zeta potential impairment. This, in turn, has matched my own clinical and personal experience (as I am more sensitive to zeta potential disruptions—e.g., I’ve experienced minor microstrokes from eating food that was stored in aluminum). Note: I’ve had a few older patients who switched from drinking RO water to well water and then developed a variety of unusual illnesses I was ultimately able to attribute to a loss of zeta potential (as well water often contains a significant amount of positively charged minerals). Water ContainersA key thing which prompted me to write this article has been the recent health fad of aluminum containing bottled water, which I believe was done in response to people being concerned about plastic from both a health and environmental standpoint and it being possible to make more trendy looking “luxury” water bottles people would buy purely based on their appearance.
Note: technologies the industry wants to adopt are often initially marketed as specialty luxury products. For example, soy (which is often anything but healthy) was introduced to America first by having it be strategically placed in health food cook books to generate a “grass roots” demand for it. I find this push we are seeing for aluminum containers (many celebrities and companies are now endorsing it) to be immensely frustrating as its proponents are frequently only seeing half of the picture. While in general it is still quite feasible to avoid these products, I find the proliferation of these products to be particularly frustrating in areas with captive markets where you need access to clean water. For example, in many airports (particularly those in the more progressive areas) all the bottled water is gradually being switched to aluminum ones, and likewise certain airlines (e.g., Southwest) now exclusively offer water to passengers which was stored in aluminum cans. Note: the original rationale for banning liquids from airports arose from a team of terrorists who allegedly plotted to bring liquid materials with them that were necessary to manufacture a solid bomb on the plane. Since actually making the alleged explosive on a plane was almost impossible, this led me to believe there was an entirely different reason for banning the liquids (e.g., to have another activity that increased compliance with the War on Terror, increasing drink sales in the airport or preventing passengers from making messes on the planes). Sadly, this lie went unchallenged, and almost twenty years later, liquids being banned from airports has been normalized to the point almost no one questions it. Navigating the MarketplaceSince I have looked at this issue for decades, I’ve explored more products than I can count that effectively address the needs mentioned above. At this point, while I do believe some excellent ones exist, they are unfortunately quite rare as this industry does not select for things that work well—rather it selects for things that are easy to sell (e.g., the visually appealing aluminum water bottles shown above). Since I’ve managed to find a few ones I and my colleagues endorse (and I’ve received quite a few questions over the last year as to what they are) I’d like to share them. In the final part of this article (which exists as an open thread for you to ask any unresolved questions from the last month) I will list the things I’ve had the best luck with over the years (e.g., which bottled water brands I believe are ideal, which RO filters produce the best results, and which cooking pans are functional and safe)... Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
|
No comments:
Post a Comment