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What You Don't Know About Water Could Save Your Life
by Dr. Leroy R. Perry

As the late Dr. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the discoverer of Vitamin C, said: "There is no life without water. water is part and parcel of the living machinery." Without water, we'd be poisoned to death by our own waste products and toxins resulting from metabolism.

When the kidneys remove wastes such as uric acid, urea and lactic acid, those wastes must be dissolved in water. So if there isn't enough water, wastes are not removed as effectively, and it may be damaging to the kidneys. Water also is vital to digestion and metabolism, acting as a medium for various enzymatic and chemical reactions in the body. It carries nutrients and oxygen to the cells through the blood. Water helps to regulate our body temperature through perspiration, which dissipates excess heat and cools the body. Water also lubricates our joints. This is particularly important if you're arthritic, have chronic musculoskeletal problems or are athletically active.

We even need water to breathe. Our lungs must be moistened by water to facilitate the intake of oxygen and excretion of carbon dioxide. We lose approximately a pint of liquid each day just exhaling!

So, if you don't drink enough water to be in "fluid balance", as doctors call it, you can impair every aspect of your body's physiological function. And the more you exercise, the more water you need to keep your body in fluid balance. Dr. Howard Flaks is a bariatric physician in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Bariatrics is the branch of medicine dealing with obesity.) He says, "As a result of not drinking enough water, many people encounter such problems as excess body fat, poor muscle tone and size, decreased digestive efficiency and organ function, increased toxicity in the body, joint and muscle soreness (particularly after exercise) and water retention."

Water retention? If you're not drinking enough, your body starts retaining water to compensate for this shortage. So, paradoxical as it may seem, the way to eliminate fluid retention is to drink more water, not less.

"Proper water intake is the key to weight loss," says Dr. Donald Robertson, director of the Southwest Bariatric Nutrition Center in Scottsdale, Ariz. "If people who are trying to lose weight don't drink enough water, the body can't metabolize the fat, they retain fluid, which keeps weight up, and the whole procedure that we're trying to set up falls apart."

There is a difference between pure water and other beverages that contain water. Biochemically, water is water, obviously you can get it consuming such beverages as fruit juice, soft drinks, beer, coffee and tea. Unfortunately, while such drinks contain water, they also may contain substances that are not healthy - and actually contradict some of the positive effects of the added water. As Dr. Jerzy Meduski, a medical doctor and biochemist in Los Angeles, says: "Beer contains water, but it also contains alcohol, which is a toxic substance." And caffeinated beverages like coffee stimulate the adrenal glands, while fruit juices contain a lot of sugar and stimulate the pancreas. Soda contains sodium. Such drinks may tax the body more than they cleanse it.

Another problem with these beverages is that you lose your taste for water.

The way to interpret all this, therefore, is that the recommended daily water intake means just that. water!

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