2010/06/30
Published
The purpose of this article is to give you guidelines about the importance of water to our health, what type is best for us and how much we should be drinking. Homeschooled children also need to have adequate water intake during the day to maintain mental clarity and energy. By the time we feel thirsty, we are already dehydrated! Even slight dehydration can slow our metabolism by as much as 15%!
I hope it surprises you to know that there are people out there that do not drink water! They drink tea, coffee, sodas or fruit juices and think that this is sufficient. Some justify their lack of affection for water because they don’t like the taste. Others complain that if they drink water they have to run to the bathroom all the time and find that a terrible nuisance!
I Don’t Like the Taste of Water
When you don’t like the taste of water, either your water is bad or you have a sweet tooth and have grown accustomed to drinking sodas and fruit juices. We can educate our taste buds to tone down our need for sweet tasting drinks by diluting our drinks with water or mineral water more and more until we are down to drinking water. We can also put lemon or lime or a slice of cucumber in our water to give it a slight refreshing taste. Lemon and lime help to make us less acidic and more alkaline.
Being more alkaline is a good thing, because bacteria, yeast, candida and virus love to grow in an acid environment. Immune Matrix has found that by having their patients focus on making their diet more alkaline promoting, chronic bacterial and viral infections commonly seen in lyme disease, chronic fatigue, irritable bowel, and those suffering from allergies show greater improvement than those that do not alkalinize their diet while taking their anti-microbial medications.
We can also add an EsterC packet to our water, powdered acai, or powdered greens to our water for the taste. The vitamins and minerals and anti-oxidants they provide are a fabulous addition to our otherwise deficient diets. These are all healthy alternatives to drinking artificially flavored drinks, sodas or heavily sugared fruit drinks.
Water Goes Straight Through Me
If when you drink a glass of water you find yourself needing to urinate within 30 minutes or sooner, then it’s highly likely that you do not have enough minerals in your system to use the water. Minerals help to transport water across the cell membrane. To find out if you are mineral deficient, a good baseline test to run is a hair analysis. Allergy Research Group has a modestly priced hair test kit available online at www.immunematrix.com. It provides a fabulous detailed written report and graph of essential minerals and trace minerals and some heavy metals. It compares their ratios and gives you recommendations on dietary guidelines and causes for such mineral imbalances. With this information you can determine if you need to focus on adding more magnesium, selenium, chromium, molybdenum to your broad spectrum mineral supplement. These minerals tend to be what we are most deficient in. It can take a few months to increase one’s mineral stores. During this time pay attention to how long it take before you need to urinate after drinking a glass of water. Soon you will find that drinking water does not cause you the same type of urinary stress it use to.
It is easy and safe to add minerals to one’s water. Many liquid minerals are completely tasteless. Immune Matrix gives its patients a product called HydraCell by RBC available online at www.immunematrix.com. This product contains trace minerals and changes the viscosity of water making it more absorbable into cells. It can be added to any liquid and improves the taste of all liquids from soups, orange juice, coffee, and water. Its minerals also alkalinize the liquid. Therefore, if you want to make your coffee less acidic, add a squirt of HydraCell, and add it to all water to increase its mineral content. It can be fun to do blind taste test on one’s family to see which liquid they find tastes better, the one with or without the HydraCell. This is an excellent homeschooling educational test to educate children about minerals and acid and alkaline foods.
What pH Should My Water Be?
If you have never heard about the subject of pH, make sure you read our articles about acids. Our blood maintains the ph of 7.4. When we eat high carbohydrate foods or animal protein, these foods make the fluid compartments more acid. Our body uses our mineral stores to neutralize the acid, consuming our precious minerals in the process. If we also drink acid pH fluids, such as sugary drinks, artificially sweetened drinks, and coffee, then our body has to neutralize the acidity that these drinks induce.
It may be confusing but drinking lemon water or lime water helps to alkalinize the body. However, you can and should also test your water to make sure it is not acid. This is also an excellent project for homeschooling. Take a pH test strip (available online at www.immunematrix.com) and have your child dip it quickly in and out of the water. Then have then look at the color and compare it to the chart. Your child will learn what neutral pH is and what acid pH is!
We have tested the water of area water companies and found their water to be as acid is 5.5pH! It’s best to drink water with a pH of 7 or higher. How do I do that? Adding minerals to your water increases the pH. HydraCell trace mineral drops alkalinize your water. You could then add a squirt of HydraCell to the water, stir and have your child retest the water with a new pH test strip and compare the difference. This will help to educate everyone in the family about how what we put into our bodies is important and how being too acid can give us more colds and infections.
Are Some Waters Bad for Us?
Avoid drinking distilled water! Distilled water has NO minerals. Drinking distilled water will pull minerals out of your tissues and cause you to become de-mineralized over time. The best water to drink is spring water, mineral water or ionized water. These waters have minerals essential for our health. In our toxic world we have a greater need for minerals than 100 years ago! Without sufficient minerals we are unable to detoxify efficiently. Therefore, it is essential to have alkaline mineral water to drink.
Drinking water stored in plastic bottles is to be discouraged. The plastics in these bottles foster elevated estrogens in the body. This is bad for women and growing children, and the environment. Having a reusable non-plastic drinking bottle will help you also to keep track of how much water you are drinking during the day.
When Should I Drink My Water?
Some individuals with low stomach acid or low digestive enzymes will do well not to drink water when they eat, as this dilutes their digestive enzymes, and alkaline water will counter the effect of one’s stomach acid. Therefore, drinking one’s alkaline water between meals is a better ideal. Homeschooling parents need to remember to give the children high mineral alkaline water before they become thirsty and have set times of the day that they are given water to be better able to keep track of their total water intake. This will improve mental clarity and reduce episodes of constipation common in growing children. For adults with hard stools or constipation, drinking a warm glass of water upon rising really helps to hydrate and relax the bowels in the morning.
In summary, drink water (half your weight in ounces: 100lb person drinks 50 ounces per day). Drink more for exercise or sweating. Make sure your water is neutral pH of 7 or higher. Add trace minerals to the water. If you have a high acid diet of carbohydrates and animal fats, you need more minerals to alkalinize. Have some lemon water during the day. Drink water between meals and avoid water stored in plastic bottles.
Please note:
Information on this site is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for the advice provided by your physician or other healthcare professional. You should not use the information on this site for diagnosing or treating a health problem or disease, or prescribing any medication or other treatment.
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