Is it possible to make universal recommendations about health?

Focus these days tends to be on individuality. Especially in this age of genetic testing. The fact is, however, that ahead of individual differences, we are all human. Not only that, but as far as we know today, with the latest studies of mitochondrial gene evolution and transmission, we are all descendants of the same group of homo sapiens from the south western coast of Africa. Hence the question: can we make universal recommendations?

Imagine we could examine every human being on the planet, and assess organ function. For example, examine function of the kidneys, liver, pancreas, gall bladder, stomach, small intestine, and large intestine. Would we find differences in how these are working from one person to another? Of course we would! That’s obvious. But does that have to do with inherent individual differences, or does it have to do with acquired differences that have developed over time for a range of different reasons? What if we were to ask this question instead: is there a difference, from one person to another, in how these organs are meant to work, a difference in how these organs should be working?

If that were the question, we would most certainly agree, together with probably all anatomists and physiologists, that all of these organs, and the rest of the internal organs of our organism, are meant to work in the same way. That all these organs, no matter in which person they happen to be, and no matter how they are currently working, are nevertheless meant to work in precisely the same way to perform precisely the same functions. And this not only in humans, but also in most animals with whom we share these fundamental anatomical and physiological characteristics. This naturally points not to individual differences but to inherent similarities as the fundamentally essential.

It is however quite easy to understand why there is so much emphasis on individuality. Aren’t we all unique and different? Aren’t we all so special in this uniqueness? Don’t we all have to learn to listen to our inner voice and pursue what we need to feel fulfilled in our own unique way? And how cool it is to be able to know our genetic profile, our own, completely unique, personal, and individual genetic profile? How special does it make us feel to know that there isn’t a single other person that has the same genetic profile as us?

What if everyone was brought to believe that each type of cancer is different, not superficially but fundamentally, and that in addition, each type is expressed differently in each individual because of the different interactions with their unique genetic makeup? That it is necessary to treat each individual cancer and each individual person with a drug that is genetically tailored just for them in their particular situation? What if we were brought to believe that this was the case for most illnesses and chronic diseases: that what is needed are specific drugs for specific conditions that are genetically tailored to each person? What endless possibilities! What awesome growth potential! What amazing investment opportunities! And what astronomical potential for returns on investments!

Contrast this with a position holding that cancer is a metabolic disease, and that no matter what kind it is, fundamentally cancer is always caused by a mitochondrial dysfunction that leads to excessive fermentation of glucose for fueling accelerated reproduction and a cellular activity that has become undifferentiated, and that therefore, all cancers can be prevented and even reversed by effectively starving the cancer cells of fuel by maintaining very low glucose and very low insulin levels in the bloodstream to ensure that healthy cells derive their energy from fatty acids and ketones, while the weakened and dysfunctional cancer cells starve and die. What growth potential? What investment opportunities? What returns on investments?

Contrast this with a position holding that all chronic diseases are also rooted in metabolic dysfunctions, and arise, simply and naturally, in a rather predictable manner, from things like chronic dehydration, chronic dysfunctions in digestion, absorption, and elimination, chronic nutritional deficiencies, biochemical imbalances, accumulation of metabolic acids and wastes, and result from all the consequences brought on by these dysfunctions and imbalances over years and decades that grow in severity in time until we are really quite sick, but all of them very simply prevented and treated with proper self care, hydration, and nutrition. Again we can ask, what growth potential, what investment opportunities, what returns on investments?

Whatever your personal inclination about any of this, it’s definitely something to keep in mind when evaluating statements concerning the general applicability versus the individual tailoring of treatments for ailments and approaches to health.

My position is simple:

  • as living organisms and complex animals, all humans are basically the same in anatomy and physiology;
  • there are obvious differences from one person to another that must be taken into account when considering each person individually; but
  • on the whole similarities are many and fundamental, while differences are fewer and generally superficial.

This is not to say that differences can be dismissed or even overlooked. Of course not. There are important differences in the expression of fundamental genes like the MTHRF gene that regulates methylation in the body, and which hence directly affects the body’s biochemistry and state of health. Similarly, there are important differences in response to sunlight and vitamin D metabolism from one person to another, even people from the same general gene pool. But these are nevertheless superficial compared to the totally fundamental considerations of how cells, organs, systems, and hormones work.

With all of this in mind, let’s come to the main point: what recommendations I would make with confidence to any adult not suffering from a major disorder, younger or older, weaker or stronger, more fragile or more robust, knowing that these recommendations would in no way be harmful, and would instead be helpful to improve health. They are presented in order of importance.

  1. Drink plenty of water and eat plenty of unrefined salt with meals. This is essential for proper hydration on which every cell relies, and proper kidney function on which the organism as a whole relies.
  2. Get at least 8 hours of quality sleep per night, on a regular schedule, somewhere between 21:00 and 8:00 the next day. Nothing is more important for health than sleep, and there is no way in which we can make up for a lack of it.
  3. Practice intermittent fasting. Nothing offers a more effective way to cleanse, repair, heal, and optimise cells, tissues, organs and metabolic function than fasting.
  4. Eat only nutrient dense whole foods. Ideally organic and pasture raised, focusing on high quality animal protein and fats, and micronutrient dense plant foods, avoiding all processed carbohydrates, lectins from grains and nightshades, and any foods to which you may be intolerant (e.g., dairy, eggs, nuts, etc).
  5. Take vitamins A, D3, and K2. These are fundamentally important fat-soluble vitamins, essential for healthy gene expression, calcium metabolism, healthy bones and teeth, and healthy arteries and soft tissues throughout the body.
  6. Take baking soda. Start the day with half to three quarters of a teaspoon of baking soda dissolved in a large glass of water on a completely empty stomach. This is the easiest way to supply the most important alkaline compound used by the body, and offset the acid load and potential accumulation in tissues of metabolic acids.
  7. Take iodine. This is essential for healthy thyroid, mammary, and glandular function in general. But iodine is needed in every cell, and basically everyone is iodine deficient. Unless you live by the sea and eat fish and seafood regularly, you need extra iodine (either in pills or by eating sea vegetables).
  8. Take magnesium. This mineral is also needed by all cells, but especially muscle cells that need and use up magnesium in order to relax, and our soils are globally deficient in it. Thus, naturally, so are we. Contraction of muscle requires calcium, which is quite abundant in our diet; relaxation requires magnesium, which is, on the contrary, rather scare in our food supply.
  9. Practice resistance training. Focus on large compound exercises like the deadlift, squat, benchpress, and standing overhead press. There is no way more effective to maintain a strong and healthy balanced musculature, nervous system, skeletal structure, and hormonal system than whole body exertion through complex lifts with sufficient resistance.
  10. Find purpose and fulfillment in your life. This is fundamental. Without a sense of purpose we feel useless, unneeded, unwanted. Without a sense of fulfillment from what we do, we feel hollow, empty, worthless. It is therefore essential to find and to actively seek to maintain a strong sense of purpose, and a feeling of fulfillment in life. Do not take this lightly. Look into it and find it.

Here you have it: ten simple recommendations for a healthy life. And, from the perspective presented here, ten universal recommendations for any adult without a major disorder requiring specific considerations, which are sure to not cause harm, and instead sure to bring about improvements and benefits to metabolic, hormonal, muscular, skeletal, and physiological functions of the organism as a whole. Therefore, in conclusion, I would say that yes, it is possible to make universal recommendations about health.

 

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A simple 10-step arthritis treatment plan

What are the most important things we can do to stop and reverse the degeneration, and alleviate the stiffness and pain of arthritis? You can be sure that no matter how bad things are, there are many things that will help, and they don’t involve pharmaceuticals.

We looked in some detail at how to treat arthritis in Treating Arthritis I and II, and have at least one of our readers, an artist, Catherine Bath, who has been able to alleviate a great deal of her stiffness and pain, and recover a good amount of mobility and ease of movement by following the various recommendations we made there and throughout this blog.

Here, prompted by a request from a good friend who needs it, we present a simple treatment plan with the most important elements, and just the essential details needed to understand why the interventions are useful, and how to put them into practice right away.

what-arthritis-pain-feels-like-722x406

Illustration of painful, inflamed, arthritic joints. (Image taken from Everyday Health)

1. Hydrate and alkalise

This is the most important point of all. Without it nothing will work, really. Every joint works thanks to the cartilage that allows the bones to move within it without rubbing against one another. Arthritis is always characterised by the degradation of this cartilage and the pain associated with the inflammation caused by the bones not moving properly or rubbing inside the joints. Cartilage is water (85% by weight) held together in a matrix made mostly of collagen, and chronic dehydration is the first cause of cartilage breakdown (details in Your Body’s Many Cries for Water).

Metabolic acids (mostly uric acid) can only be excreted efficiently by the kidneys when there is an excess of both water in which to dilute the acid, and salt to help carry it out in the urine. Without excess water, the kidneys will prioritise retaining as much of it as they can. Without excess salt, the uric acid will be recycled instead of being excreted in order to to maintain the concentration gradient in the medulla of the kidney that ensures its ability to reabsorb as much water as possible. Chronic dehydration and avoidance of salt, coupled with the drinking of acidic liquids and eating of acid-forming foods inevitably leads to chronic acidosis.

To maintain the pH of the blood at 7.365 in spite of the continuous flow of acids into it from the muscles and digestive system, two main coping strategies are available: 1) The body’s main acid buffering mechanism using the reserves of alkalising minerals stored in the bones and teeth to counterbalance the acid load. If you don’t quite understand the implication here, this means erosion of the bones and teeth to put into the blood some of the alkalising calcium, phosphate and magnesium as acid-buffering minerals. 2) The crystallisation of the uric acid to pull it out of circulation, but then storing it into tissues, of which the joints, regrettably for arthritis sufferers, seem to be used preferentially, even though all tissues can be used for this to a certain extent.

The strategy is simple: drink alkaline water (either naturally so, or made to be with pH drops) on an empty stomach, and allow at least 30 minutes before eating. Aim for 3 litres per day. One litre before each meal, drank over a period of one to two hours, is a simple rule of thumb and easy schedule to remember. And aim for 2 full teaspoons of unrefined salt with your meals.

2. Magnesium chloride and sodium bicarbonate baths

Magnesium is at the very top of the list of supplements for anyone in any circumstance. We explored and explained why in Why you should start taking magnesium today.

Transdermal magnesium and bicarbonate therapy is the best way to simultaneously replenish magnesium stores in the cells, while alkalising the tissues directly by transdermal absorption of magnesium and sodium bicarbonate. If you have a bath tub, do this once or twice per week, or more if you can or need it. Add two cups of each magnesium chloride and baking soda, and soak for 45 to 60 minutes.

I also recommend that in addition to this—but crucially if you don’t have a bath—you take magnesium supplements. I take a fat-bound magnesium supplement called L-Threonate. Another alternative is the amino acid-bound supplement called magnesium glycinate (using glycine). Both of these form maximise absorption. Take it with meals.

3. Silicic acid, collagen, hyaluronic acid, and proteolytic enzymes

An essential constituent of hair, skin, and cartilage. Absorption is poor and slow. This means you need to take small amounts every day for long periods of time. Every morning, first thing, with your first glass of water. You will need to do this in cycles of three months on, three month off. I take Silicea, a concentrated water-soluble silicic acid gel by the German brand Huebner.

Collagen and hyaluronic acid will help greatly in rebuilding the damaged cartilage. Look for type II collagen for better absorption. Now Foods has good products at good prices. Also, glucosamine, chondroitin, MSM have all been shown to be useful for joints.

Proteolytic enzymes are responsible for breaking down, building, and repairing tissues. They can be amazing in accelerating a healing process, no matter what it is. Therefore, this is an essential supplement to take in treating arthritis.

4. Vitamin D3 and K2

These are the two vitamins that control and regulate the availability and deposition of calcium. Vitamin D3 makes it available, and vitamin K2 directs it to the bones and teeth.  Lots of vitamin D3 without K2 will lead to calcification with calcium being deposited all over the place in the arteries and soft tissues. Lots of K2 without D3 will lead to a depletion of available calcium in the bloodstream because it will be stored away in the bones and teeth. K2 is also used to decalcify soft tissues by pulling out and redirecting the deposited calcium from the tissues to the bones.

Vitamin D deficiency is universal in the west, and so is vitamin K2 deficiency. Arthritis sufferers need large doses of both for extended periods of time (at least a year). I recommend taking a combo supplement containing both in an optimal ratio, and take as many capsules as needed to bring vitamin D intake to 20 000 – 50 000 IU per day with breakfast and lunch. For years I took DaVinci’s ADK combo, which I think is one of the best. Now I take Life Extension’s D and K combo, without vitamin A, because its presence dampens the activity of vitamin D3. However, vitamin A promotes the healing of tissues. You can take both, alternating between the two.

Another of our readers who had his entire adult life an arthritic wrist that caused him pain and trouble whenever he used his hand for anything at all, followed my suggestion of taking 50 000 IU of vitamin D3 per day, together with the appropriate amount of vitamin K2 to match in the D3 intake, for six months. Within the first month, he found incredible improvement, something he had never been able to achieve using all the methods and drugs that had been proposed to him by MDs. After three months, his wrist was completely healed. He continued for the entire 6 months just to be sure, and now, his painful, debilitating, arthritic wrist that he was living with for more than 20 years, is a thing of past, a bad memory.

5. Vitamin C

Whole food vitamin C is essential for healing and keeping tissues and cells healthy. And there is definitely a difference between whole food C and ascorbic acid. We discussed this in Vitamin C is not vitamin C. This is not specific to arthritis, but everyone with arthritis should be loading up on it. I take The Synergy Company’s Pure Radiance C. You should take at least three capsules, but better 6 capsules per day, split evenly with each meal.

6. Turmeric extract

Turmeric is one of if not the most powerful natural anti-inflammatory. And inflammation is a hallmark of arthritis. You should take an extract that concentrates the curcuminoids, but you should also think of making yourself hot turmeric drinks, adding as much turmeric to your soups and curries as the flavours and combinations of foods will allow. It always needs to be taken with a lot of fat to maximise assimilation.

7. Food

Naturally, you will have guessed that my recommendations for food are the same as always, but even more important in this case when we are trying to bring inflammation as low as possible, and maximise healing:

  • no simple or starchy carbs because they cause inflammation, tissue damage, and metabolic disorder, except for berries once in a while;
  • unlimited unprocessed saturated fats from coconut oil, butter, and animal sources;
  • enough high quality protein from healthy animals including organ meats, especially liver; and
  • as many green veggies as you like, especially leafy like spinach, kale and lettuces, watery like cucumbers, fibrous like celery and broccoli.
  • Avocados are fantastic to eat as often as you want. Walnuts and hazelnuts are excellent health-promoting nuts (either roasted, or raw and soaked, subsequently dehydrated or not).

8. Sunshine, fresh Air, exercise and sauna

Go out in the sun, go for long hike, expose your skin, breath deeply, run up the hills, work your muscles at the gym if you can, go to Pilates and yoga classes, do lots of stretching whenever you can, and go to the sauna when you can. Make sure you stay 15 minutes to get really hot and for the heat to penetrate into the tissues and joints.

9. Iodine

Iodine is the universal medicine. Everyone needs it, and everyone should be supplementing with it. You can read for yourself why in Orthoiodosupplementation. Start at 12.5 mg and work your way up to 50 mg per day. Increment by 12.5 mg each week. Take the supplements on weekdays and give the kidneys a break on weekends. I take Iodoral, and recommend that. Using the generic Lugol’s solution is as good but less convenient.

10. Melatonin and good sleep

Good sleep is absolutely essential for repair and healing. Make sure you get plenty every day. Melatonin has, in addition to its effects in helping you sleep, many other amazingly health-promoting effects that we will explore in another article sometime soon, I hope.

Last words

Are there more supplements you can take? Of course there are. I personally take all of the above and several others. I wanted to stick to the things which I believe most essential. If I were to recommend additional supplements, I would say to take

  • omega-3’s, which are useful for lowering inflammation, as well as tissue healing and repair. I take Life Extension’s Mega EPA/DHA. Don’t take more than the recommended dose. Omega-3’s are very easily oxidised, and should always be taken in very small quantities.
  • Niacin in the form of niacinamide is also a universally useful supplement because it provides molecular building blocks needed by every single cell to produce energy. I take 500-1000 mg/day, but you could take 3000 mg (1000 mg with each meal). Niacin supplements will also do wonders for your mood (see No more bipolar disorder?).
  • Ubiquinol, the active form of Co-enzyme Q10, is also essential in cellular energy. I would recommend at least 50 mg per day, but more (like 100 or even 200 mg) would probably be better.
  • Vitamin B12 is crucially important for health. And the older we get, the more critical it becomes. I get an injection of 5 mg every month, and recommend that for everyone (see B12: your life depends on it).

Keep in mind that the timescale for improvements is long: on the scale of months. If you think that is too slow, ask yourself how old you are, and how long it took to get to the state you’re in. Now, with the answers in mind, remind yourself to be patient. You need to be determined to get better, consistent with your new regimen, and patient. But I assure you that you will get better. And please, keep me posted on your progress.

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Case study: old man can’t walk

Some time ago, a childhood friend of mine sent me this message:

I want to help this man. He has a problem with his tendons in both legs. In the morning, he can’ t stand up. Can you recommend some minerals and vitamins? Maybe some exercises that can help? Your advice is important.

oldMan

The old man that can’t walk from the pain in his legs.

That’s all he wrote. So, I replied:

How can I give any advice? I don’t know anything about him. I help/treat people with a complete eating and drinking programme. Vitamins and mineral supplements are only used as adjuncts to correct deficiencies. So, before saying anything, I need to know some basic things:

How old is he? What work does he do or did? How long has this problem been developing for? Does he drink water and how much? What does he drink? What does he eat every day? Does he have other complaints? How is his digestion? How is his skin (any rashes or dry skin or eczema)? What kind of other problems has he had in his life? And anything else about this health that could be useful?

Here’s what I got back:

  • How old is he? What work does he do or did?  He’s 81. He was a manager.
  • How long has this problem been developing for?  The problem started when he was around 65. It has gotten much worse in the past 2 years.
  • Does he drink water and how much?  He drinks little water, 0.5 litres a day.
  • What does he eat every day?  He eats meat, potatoes, tomatoes, some cheese, and a lot of bread.
  • Does he have other complaints?  Heart, kidneys.
  • How is his digestion?  He has problems going to the bathroom every day. He goes once every three days.
  • How is his skin (any rashes or dry skin or eczema)? His skin is fine.
His doctor told him to exercise, but he can’t even stand up or move properly.

With this info, I was able to get a better idea, and did my analysis of the situation.  This is what I replied:

Here is my diagnosis:
This man has been chronically dehydrated for most of his life. Being chronically dehydrated is one of the most health-damaging situation we can be in, but because it is not acute, the consequences are manifested over long periods of time. 
The lack of water first leads to a deterioration of the digestive system and digestive function: of the stomach (poor digestion and ulcers), and of the intestines (damaging of the lining, ulcers, and leaky gut), constipation and from it toxins and pathogenic bacteria going back from the colon into the bloodstream. 
Second, it leads to deterioration of the kidneys and the nephrons (little filters in the kidneys), because the only way to get the acids out of the blood is to dilute them in water, but if there is a lack of water, then the kidneys do everything they can to keep this water, because water is more important to keep than to get rid of acid. Therefore, not only do the kidneys get destroyed little by little, but the body accumulates the uric acid everywhere in the soft tissues, starting in the joints, and then in the tendons, ligaments and muscles. This leads to incredible stiffness, pain, and eventually to not being able to move.
Third, because our diet is usually rich in calcium but very poor in magnesium, everyone tends to be over-calcified and to accumulate calcium everywhere in the blood vessels, soft tissues of the joints, and in the muscles. This is made much worse by over-acidification and chronic dehydration. Calcification also leads to stiffness, pain, and eventually, to not being able to move properly.
Therefore, the most important things to do in order or priority are the following:
  1. Drink a lot more water (at least 3 litres per day), on an empty stomach (at least 20 minutes before eating), and making sure it is alkaline water (high pH 9-10).
  2. Take baths with 2 cups (500 g) of sodium bicarbonate and 1 cup of magnesium chloride (or magnesium sulphate). The bicarbonate and magnesium will be absorbed into the body through the skin, and will dissolve uric acid and calcium deposits throughout the body. 
  3. Drink juice of green vegetables to remove acid buildup in the body, and clean out the intestines.
  4. Take supplements of magnesium (the best form is L-Threonate, because it is bound to fat and is 100% absorbed) in order to help remove build-up of calcium.
  5. Take supplements of vitamins A-D-K2 (I recommend DaVinci’s combo supplement because of the high concentration of K2), as these are the most important fat-soluble vitamins, and K2 is the only nutrient that can effectively de-calcify blood vessels and soft tissues.
  6. Take supplements of vitamin C and collagen to help rebuild the cartilage and heal the damaged soft tissues, especially the blood vessels and the joints. It is essential to take whole-food vitamin C, and high quality collagen.
  7. Stop eating sugar, bread, cheese, yogurt, and eat basically very big salads and fatty meats like lamb, veal and porc (only outdoor-living animals).
Good luck, and make sure to let me know how things evolve. If you don’t understand something, just ask.

 

Three weeks later, I got his note from him:

Today I called the old man’s wife. She told to me that since yesterday he has no pain, and can move his arms and legs a lot better.  He drinks more than 2 litres of water per day, eats and takes the supplements as you prescribed. His grandson translated your message for him. I am very impressed. Thank you so much for you help. Your method works.

It’s a nice feel-good story, isn’t it? Here’s the thing, though. How many millions of people do you think are in the same situation as the one in which this man was? Suffering like he did, for decades growing older, stiffer, less mobile, and in more pain, until the end, which by that point comes as a relief from this difficult and painful life. And from what? Dehydration. Simple dehydration. Long-standing, chronic dehydration.

How much water do you drink each day? What’s the pH of the water you drink? How much salt do you eat each day? How much bread and potatoes do you eat? How is your digestion? How often do you go to the bathroom, and how is the wipe? Such simple things, so crucial to health.
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You have cancer, and there’s lots you can do

Everybody knows that cancer rates are rising everywhere and every year. Everybody also knows that the words, “You have cancer. I am sorry.”, fall upon us like a death sentence. Everybody knows this, because we see it all around us, everywhere we look, and we hear about it every day, everywhere we turn.

If a doctor has, indeed, said these words to us, then we are probably scared, probably very scared. We know that basically everyone we have ever heard of who were diagnosed with cancer, died. Sometimes they died really quickly, like, within a few weeks. Sometimes they died within a few months. Sometimes it wasn’t so quick. Maybe it took a year of two, or three, or even five. They went through rounds of chemo. They were on sick leave at home for months on end. They sometimes appeared to recover at some point, maybe a bit, for a little while, but in the end, they died. And they died of cancer.

We also know that not even the most famous and richest people, like Steve Jobs, for example, can escape this kiss of death that the diagnosis of cancer delivers. Wealth and power are irrelevant when it comes to our prognosis as cancer patients: it is always bad. Of course, how bad it is depends on the kind of cancer, but why is it that so many different people, in so many different places, die of cancer every day?

I won’t venture into formulating an answer to this question, and I won’t dwell on cancer survival statistics. I don’t think it’s useful for us right now. I want to hurry and move to the good news. And the good news is that there many things you can do to help your body rid itself of cancer, which is usually the result of a long-standing disease process that has evolved over a lifetime, and has finally manifested itself in this way. This presentation of the question at hand is definitely not exhaustive, nor attempting to be. But this is what I consider to be some of the essential elements.

whitebloodcellsattackingcancercells

White blood cells (shown in blue) attacking cancer cells (shown in red).

 

Understanding cancer

To understand cancer, we have to understand the origin of cancer cells. Cells become cancerous due to a defect in energy production, a mitochondrial dysfunction, an inability to manufacture enough ATP (adenosine triphosphate) through oxidation of glucose or fatty acids to sustain the cell’s functions. This forces the cell to fall back on anaerobic (without oxygen) fermentation of glucose to supplement the deficient energy production from the dysfunctional or reduced number of mitochondria. Fermentation produces an increase in lactic acid in and around the cell. This decreases the availability of oxygen to the mitochondria, which further impedes their ability to produce ATP through oxidation of nutrients, and creates a negative feedback loop that pushes towards further mitochondrial stress and dysfunction, less oxidation, more fermentation, more acid, and less available oxygen.

Because energy production through fermentation is so very inefficient, the cell needs far more glucose, and naturally develops more insulin receptors in order to be ever more sensitive to, and able to capture circulating glucose more effectively. Cancer cells often have 10 times more insulin receptors than healthy cells. What should be clear is that it doesn’t matter where the cancer is, and it doesn’t matter how it evolved, whether it was due to a gradual evolution from an environment too high in glucose, lacking in oxygen, and saturated with acid, or whether it was due to exposure to a toxin or mitochondrial poison, of which there are many and increasingly more in our environment. In the final analysis, this is how cancer cells become how they are, and this is how they survive.

As to their multiplication and proliferation from a single or small group of microscopic cells to large macroscopic tumours in one spot or all over the place, this can be understood by considering that the cell that is devolving from its normal function to that of cell whose only function is to ferment glucose at the fastest possible rate, loses, little by little, the ability to do whatever it was doing before, by losing the ability to produce ATP that can be used by its different specialised parts and constituents to perform their specialised functions, the cell becomes less and less specialised, less and less differentiated and therefore more and more general and more and more primitive, to the point where the essential ability of the cell to destroy itself, when something in its workings has gone wrong, is lost. Having lost this safeguard, the primitive, the undifferentiated, but also necessarily abnormal and weakened cell, just ferments and multiplies, limited only by its ability to fuel itself and sustain this most basic activity of survival without other purpose but this survival in and of itself.

Removing cancer

Having recognised and understood this, the strategy by which we can help the body rid itself of the cancer cells, and regain its healthy physiological functions becomes clear. We have to 1) do all we can to cut off the source of fuel to the cancer cells, 2) clear out the accumulated acids and transform the acidic environment into one that is alkaline and oxygen-rich, 3) help restore the cells’ mechanism of apoptosis—their ability to self-destruct, and 4) do everything else we can to further weaken and destroy cancer cells by means that simultaneously strengthen healthy cells. It’s a simple strategy that is also simple to put into practice, as we will see in a moment.

1) Starve the cancer cells

The first point is to cut off the fuel to the cancer cells. The source of fuel is glucose, because cancer cells can only ferment and cannot oxidise, and the way the glucose is supplied to the cell is by the action of insulin that moves it across the cell membrane. Therefore, what has to be done to is minimise the availability of glucose, and, more important still, minimise the availability of insulin to shuttle the glucose into the cells. The lower the glucose, the less potential fuel there will be. The lower the insulin, the less glucose will actually be able to enter cells. There is no real lower limit. Without ingesting any carbohydrates, the body maintains and regulates blood sugar according to the stress levels and kinds of activities we engage in, independently of how low insulin levels are. And so, the focus should be to have the lowest possible insulin levels naturally.

The fastest way to lower blood sugar, but especially insulin, is to fast, to stop eating altogether, and just drink water and herbal tea, remembering to eat enough salt to match the water intake. The second best way of doing this is in form very similar, but turns out to be much easier to do, is also a kind of water fasting, but with the addition of fat from coconut oil and butter, melted in the herbal teas. Both of these forms of fasting will most effectively deprive the body of anything that can easily be made into glucose, and of anything that will stimulate the secretion of insulin, thereby will allow glucose to drop as low as possible, but more importantly, insulin to drop and stay at an absolute minimum, and therefore most effectively starving cancer cells, no matter where they are in the body and bodily fluids, in the tissues and organs. The first form of the classic water fast is harder, but many people do it without hesitation nor difficulty. The second form is much easier, and may even be more effective in inducing a deep state of ketosis given the additional intake of medium chain fatty acids.

We can easily imagine doing such a fat “fast” for days, or even weeks, depending on the severity of the situation, our resolve to suffocate and starve the cancer cells as quickly as possible, and, of course, the state and circumstances in which we find ourselves. In addition, we can do this as much as possible on any given day, independently of what else we eat. The more fat and the less carbohydrate we ingest, the lower the insulin and the more effective the anti-cancer healing protocol will be.

The third option is to eat and drink to keep insulin levels as low as possible. Here again, because fat is the macronutrient that stimulates the least secretion of insulin, truly minimal, it should be the main source of calories. Simple carbohydrates and starches are most insulinogenic, and protein is about half as insulinogenic as are carbs. Indigestible fibre does not stimulate insulin. Therefore, in the extreme, we would eat only fat, pure fat. The best ones being the most natural and least processed, most saturated and least unsaturated: coconut fat, butter, animal fat and, the best of the vegetable oils, cold pressed olive oil.

It’s important to understand the difference between having low blood sugar, and having low insulin levels. The first is like the amount of food in the kitchens of the restaurant, the second is like the waiter bringing it to the table. It is far, far more important in our efforts to stop the supply to cancer cells that we keep insulin levels as low as possible, than it is to try to keep glucose levels low. And to push the point further, it doesn’t really matter what the amount of glucose actually is, because as long as insulin is low, it will not be brought into the cell, into the cancer cells. The reason I emphasise this is because lack of sleep, emotional or psychological stress, intense physical exercise will all raise blood sugar levels temporarily, in some instances, to high levels. But as long as insulin is as low as it can be, the sugar will not be readily transported into the cells.

Naturally, we cannot have zero insulin, because we would die: our cells would literally starve to death, no matter how much we ate. Babies with a genetic defect that makes their pancreas not able to produce insulin always died of emancipation before the discovery and subsequent commercialisation of insulin as medicine. Similarly, if at any point in a child’s or adult person’s life, insulin stops being produced, incredible weakness and emancipation will follow, before it is tested and identified as the cause of their problem, hopefully in time before permanent damage ensues. Therefore, there is always some insulin in circulation, and therefore, sugar will eventually make its way into at least some cancer cells. This is why it is important to keep it as low as we possibly can naturally, and this is how we can appreciate the essential difference between the effects of high glucose and high insulin.

In a less extreme form than the fat-fast, we maintain low sugar and low insulin by getting and deriving most of our energy from fat. Eating cucumber or celery with almond butter or tahini, for example, or a green leafy salad with lots of olive oil, walnuts, and avocado, provides basically all calories from the fat, given that cucumber, celery and lettuce greens, are basically just water and indigestible fibre, while almond butter and tahini are 80\% fat by calories, and walnuts are 84\%. So is coconut milk, for example, at nearly 90\%, and dark 85\% chocolate, at 84\% fat based on calories. Focusing on feeding the body with these kinds of healthful, high-fat foods, will nourish, stimulate healing, and keep insulin and glucose levels as low as we can without either water fasting, or consuming only fat.

2) Alkalise to remove and excrete accumulated acids

The second point is just as important as the first, because it is the environment in which the cells live that actually has the most direct effect on their function. We have looked at the importance of achieving and maintaining an alkaline environment in the body in several other places. The essence is excellent hydration with alkaline water (pH>8) combined with the intake of proportional amounts of unrefined salt to promote the release of acids from the tissues, and its excretion through the urine by the kidneys. Without proper hydration, the cells will retain the acid with the little water they have to hold on to. Without proper amounts of salt, the kidneys will also retain the acid in order to maintain the concentration gradient that allows the nephron to function when it re-absorbs water.

Naturally, alkaline water will work infinitely more effectively. But the most important detail is the controlled balance between water and salt intake, and what we want is a lot of water and a lot of salt. We cannot take in large amounts of salt water without getting loose stools. So, it has to be smoothly distributed throughout the day, except in the morning, when we get up, because we are dehydrated, and need to drink about 1 litre of water over the course of one to two hours, before we start taking salt.

If you buy mineral or spring water, find the one that has the highest pH value. It should be greater than at least 8. If you have a water filter at home, then add alkalising drops to it before drinking it. I use Dr. Young’s PuripHy drops.

As acidity decreases, and the environment becomes more alkaline, oxygen will flow more freely, and become more available to mitochondria for oxidising fatty acids in producing energy. Remember that cancer cells do not use oxygen, and cannot use fatty acids to fuel themselves, whereas normal, healthy cells, not only can, but function much more efficiently on fat rather than glucose as their primary fuel. Adding chlorophyll and fresh juice of green vegetables to the alkaline water is an excellent way to further boost alkalisation, neutralisation, and elimination of accumulated metabolic acids. Unlike the first step, which is to lower insulin and glucose levels, and that can be done, to a great extent, literally overnight under fasting conditions, alkalising to eliminate accumulated acids is something that takes time. But in both cases, what matters most is consistency. Hour by hour, and day after day, the body will do what it needs to do as best is can, and improve in these functions with time.

Beyond this fundamental necessity to hydrate with alkaline water throughout the day, and day after day, the most therapeutic way to alkalise the tissues, and detoxify the body, is by taking medicinal baths in which we add two cups of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), and two cups of magnesium chloride (nigari), or magnesium sulphate (epsom salts), if nigari is not available. This is easy, relaxing, extremely medicinal, and very effective in neutralising and eliminating acids and toxins from the body. In fighting cancer, you should be soaking in this kind of hot bath for 45-60 minutes three times per week. The benefits of this ultra simple trans-dermal therapy with sodium bicarbonate and magnesium are incredible. You can read a lot more about this from the baking soda, magnesium and iodine doctor, Dr Sircus.

3) Restore cellular self-destruct function

The third line of action is also essential, and it only requires you to take a few key supplements. The most important of these in the fight agains cancer is iodine, because of its fundamental role both in the structure and architecture of cells, but also in the regulation of apoptosis, the process by which a damaged cell will self-destruct when things have gone wrong somewhere. The importance of iodine cannot be overemphasised. And in healing cancer, or any serious disease condition, we will want to take high doses daily. Doses of at least 50 mg, but preferably 100 mg.

However, because of its very strong detoxification effects, as it pushes out all accumulated toxic halogens out of the cells to replace these by iodine in its proper place, we must work up to these high doses gradually, starting with 12.5 mg, and increasing the dosage as quickly as possible given the body’s response to it. Some people , maybe most, will experience headaches and possible nausea when starting on iodine. This is perfectly normal. The stronger the reaction, the more indicative of the body’s level of toxicity. Therefore, you should always view this as something good, in that toxins are being excreted out of your cells. It is important to support the detoxification process by taking chlorella and spirulina, probiotics and psyllium husks every day as well, while always drinking a lot of alkaline water with added chlorophyll for extra cleansing, if possible.

What I take and consider to be the best supplement is Iodoral by Optimox. Optimox recommends taking the iodine on an empty stomach for faster absorption, but it can also be taken with food for slower and possibly better assimilation. In addition, although iodine can easily be taken on an empty stomach, the co-factors, which include B vitamins, are much better taken with food to avoid potential nausea or queasiness. Moreover, taking it with food will slow down the absorption, and thereby decrease the negative sensations from the detoxification effects. The only thing is that iodine, given its stimulation of thyroid function, will energise the body. Therefore, it should be taken before midday. I take it either first thing in the morning or at lunch (or both).

You can read about the importance and functions of iodine in the following three books: Iodine, Why You Need It, Why You Can’t Live Without It by Dr. Brownstein; What Doctors Fail to Tell You About Iodine and Your Thyroid by Dr. Thompson; and The iodine crisis: what you don’t know about iodine can wreck your life by L. Farrow. There are also many web resources and highly informative forums about iodine and cancer. You can search for the words iodine and cancer to see for yourself.

Other fundamentally important micronutrients are vitamins B12 and D, both of which are needed for proper cellular function, and DNA transcription and replication, because of their roles in the nucleus of cells, activating and de-activating, switching on and off genes, to ensure everything in the cell works as it should. For best and fastest results—and that’s definitely what we need in our fighting cancer—B12 should be injected weekly in the amount of 1 mg, and in the form of methylcobalamin. (For optimal health in normal circumstances, it can be injected once a month in the amount of 5 mg.) Vitamin D should be taken with its sister vitamins, A and K2, for synergistic effects and biochemical balance in their functions. Each of these have complimentary roles, and should generally be taken together, unless there is a reason not to. You can read these two articles published by Chris Masterjohn from the Weston A. Price Foundation to learn why and how: On the trail of the elusive X-factor: a sixty two year old mystery finally solved, and Update on vitamins A and D.

It is by supporting proper cellular function, especially in the nucleus, with iodine, B12 and D, that cells will regain, little by little, the ability to recognise that they are damaged and need to self-destruct. There will always be millions or even billions of cells involved in the disease process we call cancer, but they will be distributed along a wide spectrum of dysfunction, from having very mildly impaired mitochondrial function from a light oxygen deficit cause by a little too much acid in the environment surrounding the cell, to full cancer cells that derive 100% of their energy needs from anaerobic fermentation without using any oxygen at all, and thriving in extremely acidic conditions.

Hence, many cells will die from being starved of glucose, because that’s the only fuel they can use; many cells will recover enough of their normal regulatory mechanisms to know its time to self-destruct; and many cells will actually regain their healthy function, repair their damaged parts, and replace their dysfunctional mitochondria with new ones. Nothing is ever black and white when it comes to cells and cellular function. Instead, everything is grey. But it is a million different shades of grey.

4) Do everything else that can help

The fact is that there are many, many more things you can do. Many therapies, many treatments, many supplements and herbal formulas, that have all proved highly effective against cancer. There are so many that many books have been written about them: About Raymond Rife, you can read The Cancer Cure That Worked by Barry Lynes; about Gaston Naessens, you can read The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens: The True Story of the Efforts to Suppress an Alternative Treatment for Cancer, AIDS, and Other Immunologically Based Diseases by Christopher Bird; about Rene Caisse and the Essiac tonic, you can read Essiac: The Secrets of Rene Caisse’s Herbal Pharmacy; about Johanna Budwig, you can read Cancer – The Problem and the Solution; and the list goes on. There are websites devoted to these people and their approach to cancer, and this is just a few of them that I know about. One book that compiles a lot, maybe most, of the information on non-toxic treatments for cancer, is Ty Bollinger’s Cancer: Step Outside the Box.

Maybe you find it hard to believe that our governmental and medical authorities would have gone—and continue to this day—to go through such extreme measures in order to suppress treatments that work so effectively to help and heal people of their illnesses and of cancer, without negative side effects, and at very low costs. But this is a simple fact. And it is quite easy to understand if we consider that anyone, or any institution, that has commercial investments and interests in a particular endeavour, will go to great lengths to maintain and strengthen, as much as they can and for as long as they can, the conditions that make them successful. There’s nothing more to it than that. Let’s look at a few of those therapies and supplements which are easy to implement, and highly effective against cancer: hyperthermia, flax seed oil, enzymes, and turmeric.

Hyperthermia, or heat therapy, is a very well studied and effective therapy against cancer, both preventatively and curatively. The idea or principle is very simple: healthy cells can withstand high temperatures without damage. The reason why this is so, and why we know it for sure, is that the body produces fevers as a defence mechanism to destroy invading viruses and bacteria that, unlike our own cells, cannot withstand the heat. Similarly, cancer, and other compromised and damaged cells, are unable to cope with high heat. Hence, it was hypothesised, tested, verified and demonstrated that hyperthermia is really very effective at destroying cancer, while simultaneously cleansing and strengthening healthy cells and tissues. Infrared saunas are ideal in heating the tissues more deeply, but any sauna, steam room, or even bath that induces hyperthermia by raising the temperature in the body, will help kill cancer cells, cleanse, and restore health.

Enzyme therapy has also been used for many decades in the treatment of cancer patients extremely successfully. The late Nicolas Gonzalez who passed away last year, was its most recent champion, following in the footsteps of his mentor, Dr William Kelley. The treatment protocols are more complicated, and are always highly individualised, but the main element is the supplementation with large doses of enzymes, combined with the colon cleansing to eliminate the dead tumour tissues from the body. Large quantities of fresh vegetable juice are also often included in his recommendations. You can read about it here: http://www.dr-gonzalez.com/index.htm, but whether you decide to throw yourself completely into it or not, I strongly recommend taking proteolytic enzymes three times per day, always on an empty stomach at least 30 minutes before eating, and support cleansing by taking a colon cleanser before going to bed. This site, http://www.losethebackpain.com, has good quality enzymes and cleansing supplements that we’ve used, but you can also do your own research.

Flax seed oil, organic and cold pressed, combined with fresh organic quark or cottage cheese is, based on Johanna Budwig’s extensive, lifelong research, as well as practical clinical experience with patients, is another one of the most effective and simple cancer treatments. And although the biochemistry of it, and biochemical pathways through which the cancer is weakened and destroyed may be complicated, the implementation is very easy and simple, costs very little, and cannot in any way bring about harm, unless one is severely allergic to milk proteins (in which case the dairy can be replaced with another source of protein that will work as the carrier). Here is a good article that has links to other excellent articles about this: https://www.cancertutor.com/make_budwig/

Turmeric, an ancient, bright yellow, Indian spice, which is a powder made from drying the ginger-like root that is turmeric, is one of the most researched natural substances in modern times, and is surely one of the most powerful natural anti-cancer supplements. Since it has tons of wide-ranging health benefits, and carries no risks at all, it’s clear that everyone can benefit from it. You can read about it from Mercola here. You should take it three times per day, but with your meals, because the more fat there is in the gut, the better the absorption will be, as is true for most antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals.

I feel it is important to emphasise the point just made about the risk-free nature of supplementing with turmeric, because it is a crucial point that applies to everything we have discussed here, and everything we have discussed in all the natural healing protocols and nutritional approaches we have presented in the past. Food-based nutritional healing is, in general, risk-free, because it doesn’t involve ingestion of or exposure to toxic substances, and instead involves correcting deficiencies, boosting nutritional status, and optimising the biochemical and hormonal environment of the body in order to promote healing.

Of course, we can object by referring to examples of people dying from drinking too much water too quickly. But we are not talking about such extremes. Nonetheless, we could, for example, eat coconut oil or butter all day, and other than the possible nausea from taking in so much fat, you wouldn’t get anything more than loose stools. Moreover, the body’s own hormonal responses would naturally prevent overconsumption through a feeling of extreme satiety that would basically make it impossible to willingly eat more.

Another example is that of using baking soda or iodine. So simple, and yet so powerful, they stand as the perfect examples of the benign nature but extreme effectiveness of natural healing. We find written in the most recent edition of the Manual for the Medical Management of Radiological Casualties of the US Military Medical Operations, Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, that sodium bicarbonate will “prevent deposition of uranium carbonate complexes in the renal tubules”, and that we should, “within 4 hours of exposure, administer potassium iodide (KI) to block uptake of radioactive iodine by the thyroid”, because they are the best known ways to protect the kidneys and thyroid from being destroyed by the radioactive elements that would—without the use of sodium bicarbonate and potassium iodide—migrate to these organs and destroy them.

But why wait for a chemical spill or a nuclear power station meltdown in order to rid the body of accumulated chemicals and toxins, and to replenish every cell with a plentiful supply of iodine to ensure that all cells and all glands function at their best, now and every day? We don’t have to wait. The same goes for turmeric, for enzymes, for B12, for A-D-K2, for hydration, for alkalisation, for minimal glucose and minimal insulin loads, for maximum nutrition and maximum health. Why don’t we start doing this preventatively right now?

Summary and Wrap up

Maybe you know all of this stuff already, or maybe you don’t and you are blown away and overwhelmed by the amount of information and range of topics we have covered. Maybe you are reading this because you are interested and curious to learn and be as well-informed as you can about health topics, or maybe you are desperately looking for relevant information that can help you or a loved one. No matter in which camp you find yourself, here is the summary and wrap up I can offer to bring all of what we have discussed down to a simple set of recommendations that anyone faced with a diagnosis of cancer, and fearful of, or skeptical about, or doubtful that the current standard of care in the cancer industry will help them, can understand and follow, knowing that none of these food choices, supplements, and therapies will bring them harm in any way, and that all will only do good, regardless how dire or hopeless their situation may appear to be.

  • Keep low insulin levels, as low as possible, by not having insulin-stimulating carbohydrates, and by keeping protein intake reasonably low. Focus on consuming natural, unprocessed fats as much as possible to supply the largest proportion of your daily calories. Consider a water or a tea-with-fat fast for a few days when it is suitable, or even as an intermittent fasting strategy on a daily basis. Consider also doing a green juice “fast” (only green vegetables) with added fat from blending in melted coconut oil or milk.
  • Drink alkaline water, always on an empty stomach, considering the day as divided between hydration periods, and feeding and digestion periods. The first hydration period is from the time you get up until you have your first meal. It is good to extend that period if you can to allow plenty of time for proper hydration after a long night of dehydration, with at least 1 to 1.5 litres over a period of at least 2 hours. Drink slowly to improve absorption and not pee everything out. Always allow 30 minutes without drinking before meals, and 2-3 hours after meals, depending on their size. The cycles of hydration and feeding during the day (for 3 meals) should be as follows: drink, wait, eat, wait, drink, wait, eat, wait, drink, wait, eat. For only two meals, which I recommend, then periods of drinking are extended and allow for even better hydration, cleaning of the blood, and better digestion.
  • Take iodine supplements with the co-factors and with food to maximise absorption and effectiveness. Start with 12.5 mg per day, and work your way up to 100 mg. Do this as quickly as your body allows you to. Take the iodine every weekday, and stop on weekends; five days on, two days off. (My wife and I take 50 mg per day.)
  • Take hot baths with sodium bicarbonate and magnesium chloride (or sulphate; 2 cups of each). Soak for 40 to 60 minutes. Do this three times per week. Always take your baths on an empty stomach, and drink at least one litre of alkaline water during the length of the bath. (Once per week is what I aim for as preventative medicine.)
  • Get B12 injections of methylcobalamin, 1 mg on a weekly basis. (My wife and I get a 5 mg injection once per month.)
  • Take proteolytic enzymes and Essiac tonic three times per day, always on an empty stomach, always at least 30 minutes before meals. (We take it once, first thing in the morning.)
  • Take turmeric and turmeric extract, as well as A-D-K2 with every meal or fatty snack, three times per day during recovery. (Once daily in normal circumstances.)
  • Take infrared or regular saunas, every day if possible, or even in the morning and at night if you have or decide to buy your own little sauna. I would definitely do this given how effective hyperthermia is at destroying cancer cells.
  • Eat Budwig cream.
  • Eat and drink greens.
  • Spend time outdoors, as much time as you can, moving, breathing fresh air, exposing your skin to the sunlight.
  • Keep low stress levels, as low as possible. Take tulsi, ashwagandha, and HTP-5 to keep stress hormone levels low, and mood high.
  • Take probiotics, chlorella and spirulina in the morning, and a colon cleansing supplement before bed.
  • Sleep well, long restful nights. Melatonin is very useful for this, and has many additional health benefits.

Cancer is very easy to prevent, but somewhat harder to dislodge once it has taken hold somewhere within the body. But no matter what type of cancer, how localised or generalised it is, or at what stage it finds itself, there is always hope. Hope of getting better and more comfortable, and hope for a complete recovery.

We have to remember that cancer cells are degenerate and weak. By making the environment as health-promoting to normally functioning cells, and simultaneously as hostile as possible to cancer cells, they will perish and be cleared out from the body as the waste that they are. The body heals itself, often miraculously quickly, when impediments are removed, and the elements needed for healing are provided. With all my heart, I hope this can help you and your loved ones.

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Keto-adaptation for optimal physical performance

A young man I know recently started to play rugby at a higher level, and thus more seriously than he ever has in the past. Being a smart guy, he wants to get his nutrition “on point”, as he writes, in order to perform at his best. He started reading about nutrition on the internet, and found it to be like “a snake oil convention”, which it most certainly is. So, he contacted me to get my opinion on the subject. I’ve been meaning to start writing about training and performance for a while, and balance out all my writings about disease and overcoming disease conditions, and so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to start.

The first thing that needs to be said is that there are common aspects as well as differences in the way training and nutrition should be optimised for different disciplines and goals. In common to all disciplines, are that we always want to perform at our best, and recover as fast as possible. Those are the basic and most fundamental drivers.

Differences are much greater in number and far wider ranging in kind, but they can include core aspects like the duration of the event: speed and power versus endurance and stamina (think of the 100 meter dash versus the marathon, or the velodrome cyclist versus the Tour de France rider); the kind of effort required: sustained versus bursty (think of rowing versus tennis); the medium and nature of the forces against which we are working: water or air, with an intervening machine or without (think of swimming versus jumping towards the rim to slam dunk the basketball, skying versus bobsledding, wrestling or judo versus Formula 1 racing).

In every case, there are preferred and optimal skills and trained reactions, fitness and body composition, as well as morphology and muscular development. For now, let’s just look at the basics in the sense of what every athlete would want and would benefit from no matter what kind of activity they do: best performance and fastest recovery.

The most fundamental point is mitochondrial energy production

At the root of all activity of the body, and at all levels, is the generation of ATP by mitochondria. This is really the bottom line for everything, because this is what cells use to function and do what is required of them in every instant. Mitochondria, small organelles thought to have migrated into a cellular membrane early in the history of evolution of life on the planet, are present in every cell in different amounts, and are essential for life. They can oxidise or burn any macronutrient—glucose, amino acids, or fat—to produce ATP, but the bulk is derived either from glucose or fat. In the process, they produce byproducts of different kinds and in different amounts based on the nature of macronutrient used for fuel, and on the energy demands. Therefore, for optimal performance with a fixed number of mitochondria, we want:

  1. the maximum efficiency in ATP energy production, and
  2. the minimum amount of metabolically taxing byproducts.

These question of deriving the most amount of ATP in the most efficient way with the least amount of byproducts that ultimately impede physiological function, has been considered in On the origin of cancer cells (1 and 2)To summarise in very few words: fatty acids are the most efficient way to store energy, on a gram-per-gram basis they produce the most ATP when oxidised by the mitochondria in an oxygen-rich environment, and their oxidation result in the least amount of acidic and physiologically costly byproducts. Therefore, the inevitable and obvious conclusion, is that for optimal physical performance, we want maximum metabolic efficiency, and for maximum metabolic efficiency, we need to provide the conditions that allow our cells to use fatty acids as their primary source of fuel.

The key is efficient fat utilisation

Efficient fat utilisation is achieved in three stages, which are really just two, because the second and third blend into one another seamlessly. The first step is making sure cells can use fat as fuel. Because insulin signals cells to store energy, it prevents fat utilisation (lipolysis). Inhibiting lipolysis is one of insulin’s main functions. To allow cells to burn fat, insulin must be low. To lower insulin levels, we must either fast, or restrict carbohydrates (and to a lesser extent protein). In fasting conditions, most people will reach insulin levels low enough to start fat-burning after 12 to 16 hours. With severe carbohydrate and protein restriction, that means getting all or almost all of your calories from fat, the timescale is probably similar.This first step is therefore achieved within 24 to 48 hours.

The second step is basic adaptation to deriving cellular energy needs from fatty acids, those that we eat, and those that are stored within the body’s fat cells (adipocytes). This is achieved over the course of about 4 weeks by maintaining a very low carbohydrate, low to moderate protein, and high fat diet.

The third and last step is full keto-adaptation, achieved within two to four months of consistent carbohydrate restriction. The word keto in the term keto-adaptation refers to the fact that, from the breakdown of fats, the liver manufactures ketones, the one we measure as a marker is usually beta-hydroxybutyrate, used primarily to fuel brain cells that can only use glucose and ketones. This stands in contrast to most other cells that can use fatty acids directly. An exception to this—the only one, as far as I know—are red blood cells that can only use glucose.

A point that needs to be appreciated relates to the potency of insulin to stop fat-burning. As soon as glucose spikes, insulin will spike, and will stop fat-burning. This is particularly important if we are aiming to burn as much fat as possible or become as efficient fat-burners as possible. Consequently, the very worst thing we can do is to have sugar in the morning, just before or just after training. Even a small piece of fruit will do it. This will generally always stop fat burning in its tracks. And not just for a few minutes, but for hours, all the hours necessary for insulin levels to drop back down low enough to allow lipolysis to start again.

Maximally efficient fat utilisation is where an athlete wants to be, because this will ensure that they always use as much fat and as little glucose as possible, maximising endurance potential while minimising production and accumulation of lactic acid in the muscles. The most important benefits this brings are to be able to sustain long hours of exercise without “hitting a wall” from the exhaustion of glycogen stores, and having muscle fibres that can function smoothly unimpeded by the presence of large amounts of lactic acid, something which also significantly accelerates recovery, as very little time is needed to clear out the small amounts that remain in the muscle after the event or training session.

Fat stores are, for practical purposes, inexhaustible. Even in very lean athletes (below 10% body fat), there will be between 5 and 10 kg of fat reserves to draw on during that ironman, that ultra-marathon, or that mountain-bike-around-the-clock event. Each gram of these 5-10 kg provides 9 kcal of fuel. And so, that endurance event lasting 12 hours during which you burn 7500 kcal could be fuelled with just 830 g of body fat. Naturally, this would not happen, because glycogen from the liver and the muscles will always be used in greater or lesser amounts depending on the level of stress (physiological and psychological), and intensity of the exercise. Nonetheless, this is a good illustration of the massive reservoir of fuel we have at our disposal if we train the body to utilise fat efficiently.

montBlanc-ultraMarathon

The Mont Blanc ultra-marathon. All long distance runners should be keto-adapted.

To get to this point, the muscle cells need to be trained to use fat, first at very low intensity to make sure that they can fuel the activity using mostly fat, and then gradually increasing the level of intensity to force adaptation in continuing to burn fat as the primary fuel. Best way to achieved this, is by doing low intensity endurance work in a fasted state. And over time, gradually extending duration and increasing intensity.

Moreover, doing intense, muscularly demanding, resistance training in the fasted state, is beneficial in many additional ways, including the secretion of greater amounts of growth hormone and testosterone for better growth and repair of tissues, as well as more effective fat utilisation, and protein recycling, which involves the breakdown of damaged, scarred, and otherwise unused tissues in order to maintain, feed and rebuild the muscle tissues that are being used. The same mechanisms involved in protein recycling, act to preserve muscles that are active, while facilitating the breakdown of other tissues, and in particular fat stores, that are not.

There are many benefits to training in a fasted state, and doing both low intensity endurance, as well as high intensity resistance training. This is especially true over the long term, as the body becomes increasingly more efficient at fat utilisation, increasingly better at preserving active muscle mass, and increasingly more effective in repairing damaged tissues and cleaning out metabolic wastes. Such conditions are naturally highly favourable for building strong, healthy, lean muscle mass.

Fast recovery requires minimising inflammation

Whenever we do anything physical, some level of micro tears, fractures, and injuries to the muscle and bone tissues take place. The body’s repair mechanisms involve an inflammatory response. Without a healthy inflammatory response, we would not be able to recover from injuries, recover from training, or build bone or muscle mass. In fact, we would not be able to survive. What we want, is a fast and effective inflammatory response to heal, repair, or build whatever needs fixing as quickly as possible. What we do not want is a low-level of chronic inflammation that cripples the body from functioning at its best.

One of the greatest advantages of running on a fat-based metabolism with maximally efficient fat utilisation, is the fact that the muscle cells are fuelled by burning fatty acids without producing lactic acid. This is in stark contrast to a glucose-based metabolism, where most of the energy is derived from burning glucose, and this always produces lactic acid. As intensity increases, the amount of lactic acid produced will depend first on the intensity, and second on the level of keto-adaptation. The better the keto-adaptation, the more fat will be used to fuel the cells at higher levels of intensity. But, no matter what, the keto-adapted individual, and the athlete in particular, will always, and in all circumstances, produce less lactic acid than the one running a glucose-fuelled metabolism.

All acidic metabolic waste products need to be eliminated from the body. This is the role of the kidneys, whose function we have explored in The kidney: evolutionary marvel. For lactic acid that accumulates in the muscles, the first stage is to get it out of the muscle, and this usually takes quite a while. It can take from hours up to several days. The process of clearing it out can be accelerated using massage, stretching, and very low intensity exercise. Alkalising baths are a fantastic therapy for accelerating recovery, and lowering inflammation. Magnesium chloride and sodium bicarbonate baths are therefore an absolute must for the serious athlete. We have detailed the importance, roles and functions of magnesium in Why you should start taking magnesium today, and discussed inflammation and the importance of alkalisation in Treating arthritis (1 and 2). 

In the end, all metabolic acids lead to increased inflammation, and, when they accumulate in joints and tendons, inevitably to injury. Insulin-stimulating carbohydrates also cause inflammation. They trigger hundreds of inflammatory pathways. And so, by eliminating them from our diet, and allowing the metabolism to run on fat, we have done as much as we could ever do with our food to minimise inflammation in the body. This is what an athlete wants for the fastest possible recovery time, with best training performance, and the smallest risk of injury.

The final and most important element for fast recovery and low inflammation is optimal hydration. This is the most important because all of the body’s cleaning mechanisms, and especially the function of the kidneys, depend intimately on water and salt. Drink alkaline water on an empty stomach—at least 3.5 litres per day. Eat plenty of salt with all your food—at least a full teaspoon. The more you sweat, the more water, and the more salt you need. We looked in detail at how much of each is optimal in How much salt, how much water, and our amazing kidneys.

When do we eat?

If we train in a fasted state, the best is to train in the first part of the day, taking advantage of the fact that the fast has already lasted 12 hours or so. We can rather easily extend that further, and train around noon, following about 16 hours of fasting. Either way, we will want to eat between one to two hours after training, allowing a good amount of time to make sure the body is well hydrated, and stress levels have dropped. This will bring us to having our first meal of the day somewhere between 12:00 and 15:00. Different people have different schedules and preferences depending on the rhythm of their work and personal life. There are no hard rules, and things have to remain flexible, as irregularity is also an important part of training the body to be more adaptable. In fact, you should be somewhat irregular with your schedule for just this reason.

We can have only one meal per day, or we can have two, or we can have one big meal and some snacks, or, best of all, we can sometimes have one meal, sometimes two meals, sometimes have snacks, and sometimes not. The main point in training the body for optimal metabolic efficiency, is to be a significant amount of time, somewhere between 12 and 20 hours, without eating, and to train in a fasted state, in conditions of low blood sugar and low insulin levels. We discussed intermittent fasting in The crux of intermittent fasting, concluding that one of the most important points for successful and effective intermittent fasting is that the body be fuelled by fat and not by glucose. As you will have gathered by this point, our context here relies on the fact that the body is keto-adapted, and therefore, fuelled by fat.

What do we eat?

That was the original question my friend wanted answered, and it is, in a way, very simple to answer: we eat only the least contaminated, least processed, and least insulinogenic, the most natural, most nutrient dense, and most digestible.

Least contaminated means minimising our body’s exposure to toxic substances, heavy metals, hormone disruptors, pesticides, herbicides, chemical additives, anything that is toxic in one way or another. Least processed means minimising manufactured foods, of which we don’t need any. Least insulinogenic means minimising foods that stimulate the secretion of insulin from the pancreas, and this means minimising intake of simple sugars and starches, and not over-eating protein which is about half as insulinogenic as carbohydrates.

Most natural echoes least contaminated and least processed, but additionally implies a freshness, a wholesomeness, an absence of adulterations and manipulations. That’s what we want. Most nutrient dense means maximising mineral content, vitamin content, optimising amino and fatty acid profiles, and overall micronutrient content for a given amount of calories. Most digestible means minimising digestive stress, maximising enzyme content and nutrient absorption.

Digestion, the function and health of the digestive system, is essential. Everything from the food we eat is made available and usable—or not—by and through the digestive system. We have written about digestion on many occasions, but most specifically in Understanding digestion, Intensive natural healing, and Why we should drink water before meals.

But in practice, what do we eat? No junk of any kind. No polyunsaturated oils. No sweet things. No starches. Excellent animal foods and excellent plant-based foods: grass-fed, full-fat meats and organ meats like liver; nutrient dense and non-toxic fish like sardines, herring, anchovies, seafood and wild fish (avoid tuna, swordfish and any other large predatory fish, because they contain large amounts of mercury and other heavy metals); fatty nuts and seeds, especially coconut products, but also walnuts, macadamia, almonds, hazelnuts; dark leafy greens, both in salads (mixed baby greens, baby spinach, arugula, lamb’s lettuce, lettuces of all kinds) and steamed (chard, spinach, and anything similar); green vegetables like celery, cucumbers, broccoli, asparagus, and string beens; colourful vegetables like purple cabbage, red and yellow peppers. You can eat pretty much anything you can think of that is not processed, nutrient poor, or highly insulinogenic.

What should you have for breakfast? We already solved that problem! You do not eat breakfast anymore, remember?

What do you have for lunch after training? You’re in a rush or just lazy? Well, make yourself a coconut milk smoothy. You can put some protein powder (whey or plant-based, but never soy!), some superfood powders, some hemp or chia seeds. You prefer it sweet-tasting? Put some raspberries or blueberries, and stevia extract. You prefer it green and salty? Put some spinach and salt. In both cases, you can add avocado whenever you want. You can make it with cacao powder, with vanilla extract, or with almond extract. You can add raw or roasted almond or hazelnut butter, sunflower seed butter or tahini. Anything you want that is wholesome and healthful. You’ll need to experiment to find combinations you like. Start simple with few ingredients, and add things bit by bit to keep on top of the process and the blends of flavours.

If you’re not in a rush, or don’t want to have a smoothie? In this case you eat exactly as described above: healthy, nutrient dense animal and plant-based foods. This can be as simple as a can of sardines with a bag of organic baby greens. And for supper, the same as for lunch, really. The same simple and basic principles apply to everything you eat at all times, with these two additional points to keep in mind:

The first is that because we do not eat for a significant part of the day, and also because we eat either just one or two meals, it is crucial to get enough calories and fat, nutrition and protein. Otherwise, we will quickly find ourselves in calorie deficit, and this means that if we keep it up for a long time, we will first burn through our fat reserves, and then burn through our muscles. As athletes, we definitely do not want this. So, it is very important to get all the calories we need, especially if we train a hard or long hours on a daily basis.

The second is that for good, deep and comfortable, restful and restorative sleep, we shouldn’t go to bed on a full stomach, and most importantly, not on a stomach full of protein. Digestion is energy intensive. In the case of protein, it is also highly thermogenic, which means that it generates heat. Therefore, going to bed after a large protein meal will  lead to a restless, tossing, turning, hot and uncomfortable sleep. For a deep and restful sleep, we want the opposite: little digestive activity, a slow heartbeat, and a low body temperature. This means that large protein meals should be had several hours before bedtime, in the afternoon or early evening, allowing a good three to five hours for full digestion before going to bed. If you can’t avoid eating late at night, then eat light: a salad is perfect. For a snack instead of a light meal, have a couple of tablespoons of almond butter on cucumber slices or with celery sticks, for example. Because sleep is really the most important part of the body’s recovery process, it is imperative to optimise sleep.

Closing thoughts

With all of what we have discussed mind, is it really any surprise that more and more professional athletes are opting for this metabolic advantage? A number of years ago, the tennis champion Novak Djokovic divulged one of his secrets. What was it? It was exactly this. This year, the third time winner of the Tour de France, Chris Froome, also divulged one of his secrets. What was it? It was exactly this. Are you curious, say, about Froome’s standard first meal of the day? Four poached eggs, smoked Alaskan salmon, and steamed spinach. Surprising breakfast? Not in the least. Indeed, an excellent breakfast!

We are seeing more and more runners, swimmers, triathletes, but also power lifters and body builders making the switch. It is to their advantage, and when they themselves feel the difference it makes, they know it to be true, at which point there is no turning back. Obviously! Who in their right mind would give up such a metabolic advantage? I suspect that eventually, this will be the standard.

And it’s not surprising at athletes from various disciplines have made these changes to their diets and lifestyles. What is surprising is that so few have actually done this. The change is low, but there is a clear shift in this direction. This is attested by witnessing training specialists promoting these principles, training athletes in this way, and demonstrating the immense advantages that it brings to them in their performances. Vespa Power discussing fat utilisation on their website is a good example.

Is all this stuff new? Of course not! Medical doctors, nutrition researchers , diabetes and metabolic medicine specialists have been talking about this for many decades. Some pioneers include Atkins, Rosedale, Volek and Phinney. And the tradition has continued and expanded, especially in the last decade.

Is this the whole story? Of course not! It never is. But it covers the basics. I plan to explore different aspects of what we started discussing here. You can read more about all these things on blogs and websites. Here are three I have read: the athletic MD Peter Attia had a good blog with many informative articles (especially in the beginning) about physical performance at different stages of his own keto adaptation process. The professional ironman triathlete Ben Greenfield also has written about his experience going form fuelling his body with glucose to using fat instead. I point to these because they have articles specifically about the process of keto adaptation we describe above as foundational for optimal sports performance, and also because they were both meticulous in quantifying the physiological changes and writing about them.

Marty Kendall has a very good blog on optimising nutrition in the sense that we have discussed here, and have been writing about for five years, starting with our very first post, What to eat: four basic rules. But what Marty has done is to actually quantify the value of foods, using the USDA nutritional database, assigning to each food an insulin index derived from its insulinogenic potential, and a nutrient density score based on its macro and micro nutrient content. The associated Facebook group is a great resource for information on this and related topics.

Now that we’ve reached the end, I hope this was useful, and that I have managed to show that, whatever the reason or motivation, whatever the sport or skill set required, there is really no other option other than this when you are serious about optimal physical performance.

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Treating arthritis I: super-hydration, alkalisation and magnesium

This is entitled Treating arthritis I, because I want to highlight that it is the first phase of what I think is of the most fundamental importance for people suffering from any form of arthritis. It should really be entitled Treating and preventing any and all disease conditions in everyone I, because these measures are truly fundamental to optimal health in all respects and for everyone throughout life. So even if you don’t have arthritis, you should read on.

This first phase should be viewed as one during which you train yourself to acquire new habits. It is not a treatment per se, but rather a prescription for the basis of a new daily rhythm where hydrating and cleansing the body are of the most fundamental importance. In the end, it is really very easy and very simple. It’s just that we need to get used to it.

Arthritis is a word that means joint (arthro) inflammation (itis). There are tons of different types of arthritis (in the hundreds), but all of them are manifestations of the same thing in different joints and somewhat different ways. And the symptoms: the stiffness, the breakdown of cartilage and other tissues, the ossification or rather calcification, the crippling pain, are all related to the inflammation. But what if there were no inflammation? Would there be no arthritis?

what-arthritis-pain-feels-like-722x406

Illustration of painful, inflamed, arthritic joints. (Image taken from Everyday Health)

Without inflammation there is no tendonitis where a tendon gets inflamed like in the well known tennis elbow. Without inflammation of the lining of the arteries there is no plaque and no atherosclerosis, and thus no heart disease and no stroke. Without inflammation there is no Multiple Sclerosis (MS), the inflammation of the myelin sheath that covers nerves, and no Crohn’s disease either, inflammation in the gut. We could go on and on like this because inflammation is at the heart of almost every single ailment from which we suffer. The reason is simple: inflammation is the body’s way of responding to injury in our tissues.

We sprain an ankle and it swells up by the inflammation that follows the partial tearing of ligament and tendon: this is essential for bringing plenty of blood carrying all the specialised molecules and nutrients necessary to repair the injured tissues. What is the best course of action? Just rest and allow the ankle to heal. The more we use it, the slower the healing will be, the longer the inflammation will last, and the more we will increase the chances of causing some more serious or even permanent damage to these fragile tissues. Without the body’s inflammatory response mechanisms, healing would be impossible.

In fact, repair and growth would also be impossible; muscle growth would be impossible. The process is rather simple: stress and tear (injury) followed by inflammation and repair or growth. This applies to body builders who develop enormous muscle mass over years of intense daily workouts, but it also applies to a baby’s legs kicking and tiny hands squeezing your index finger tightly. It applies to their learning to hold their head up and pulling themselves to their feet with the edge of the sofa to then take those first few steps. It applies to me, to you and to every animal. So, once again: repair and growth of tissue depends on the body’s inflammatory response mechanisms. In a well-functioning metabolism, this process takes place continuously in a daily cycle regulated by activity during the day and rest during the night: stress, tear and injury to tissues during activity; repair, growth and cleaning during the night.

Difficulties arise when inflammation becomes chronic. Either a low-grade inflammation that we can ignore completely and go about our business until it manifests in the form of a serious health concern, or a sustained,  sub-acute state of inflammation that does indeed make it difficult to go about our business, but that we can nonetheless learn to ignore or cope with hoping that it will eventually disappear. Unfortunately, this is how it is for most of us to a greater or lesser extent, whether we are aware of it or not. If it weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be hundreds of millions of people suffering from arthritis the world over, and atherosclerosis-caused heart attacks and strokes would not be claiming the lives of more than one quarter of the population of industrialised countries.

As an aside, for those of you who are interested in measurements and quantifiable effects, among the best markers of chronic inflammation are C-Reactive Protein (hsCRP) and Interleukin-6 (IL-6). The number of white blood cells relate to immune response, and if elevated mean the body is fighting something. Elevated concentrations of Ferritin and Homocysteine (HcY) are also associated with chronic inflammation much elevated risks of heart attack and stroke. You can easily get a blood test to check those numbers among other important ones (see Blood analysis: important numbers).

So what is it that causes a person to develop arthritis at 50 or even 40 years of age, while another person only begins to have mild signs of it at 80? What is it that causes a teenager to develop the crippling Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) at 16, while none of her friends do? Why does only 1 in 400 develop Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS) or bamboo spine, characterised by the chronic inflammation of the spine, the ossification and gradual fusion of the vertebrae? Who knows?

But, for example, approximately 90% of AS patients express the HLA-B27 genotype and exhibit the HLA-B27 antigen, which is also expressed by Klebsiella bacteria. Could it be the bacteria that causes the damage and injury to spinal tissues and structure, which then follows by inflammation that over time becomes chronic, and since the bacteria remains and continues its damaging activities, the inflammation continues to grow together with all the awful symptoms? Maybe. The debilitating effects of certain bacteria and viruses such as Epstein Barr or HPV for example, that persist in the bloodstream over years and decades, are well known. And the chronic inflammation that results of the activity of infectious agents such as these is also a well established effect, even claimed by some to be among the primary causes of arterial disease (see Fat and Cholesterol are Good for You in the Bibliography page.

But whether it is AS or arterial disease, MS or tendonitis, what is common to all is inflammation, and what needs to be addressed are the causes of the inflammation, not the inflammation itself, which is what we do with anti-inflammatory medication. The inflammation is the body’s response to the injury. What we need to do is find and stop the process causing damage and injury to our tissues, and once the tissues have healed, the inflammation will disappear of itself.

There are many things that cause injury to our tissues, and we will look at all the most important ones in greater detail in subsequent posts, but it is fundamental to address first order issues first. Among the most fundamental issues of all are therefore those with which we concern ourselves in the first phase of treatment:  super-hydration, alkalisation and magnesium. But the truth is that these fundamental elements are what everyone concerned with optimising their health should actually concern themselves with first, before everything else.

Super-hydration

Chronic dehydration is at the root of so many health problems that it is hard to know where to begin. I’ve written a few posts on the importance of water that you can identify by their title. If you’ve read them and want to know more, you should read Your Body’s Many Cries for Water (see Bibliography). In relation to arthritis, however, water is not only the primary means to reduce inflammation of stressed cells and tissues, but it is also what gives our cartilage suppleness and flexibility.

Cartilage a very simple tissue. It is water, 85% in healthy cartilage, down to 70% or less in compromised cartilage and in most older people, held within a matrix of collagen and other proteins that consists of a single type of cell called chondrocyte. These cells have very special electrical properties that give cartilage its amazing resistance to friction and pressure. Without sufficient water, however, the chondrocytes cannot work correctly, cartilage dries out and breaks down, and calcification grows.

What is totally under-appreciated is that because cartilage does not have a blood supply, nerves or lymphatic system, water makes it into the cartilage through the porous end of the bone to which it is stuck, and the only way water can make it into the bone in order to get to that porous end to which the cartilage is attached is through the blood that makes it into the bone.

Since there is, within the body’s functions, a definite hierarchy in water usage in which the digestive system is naturally the first served since it is through it that water enters, even the mildest dehydration can be felt in the function of the most water-sensitive tissues like those of the lungs (90% water) and muscles (85% water), (something any athlete who has drank alcohol the night before a race or even training run or ride will have noticed), it is unfortunately often the cartilage that suffer the most.

Dehydration will make it such that the soft conjunctive tissues at the ends of our bones, in every joint, and that allow us to move will not get the water supply they need to remain well hydrated, supple and flexible. This is really the most important point to remember. What is also highly under-appreciated is the vital importance of silica in the form of silicic acid in the growth, maintenance, repair and regeneration of all connective tissues, including and maybe especially bones and cartilage (here is a good article about it). Silicic acid should therefore be included in all arthritis treatment programmes.

How do we super-hydrate? By drinking more, as much as possible on an empty stomach, and balancing water with salt intake. You should read How much salt, how much water, and our amazing kidneys, and make sure you understand the importance of a plentiful intake of water, an adequate intake of salt, and the crucial balance of these for optimal cellular hydration and function. Detailed recommendations are given below.

Alkalisation

Chronic acidosis, some would argue, is not only at the root of innumerable health complaints and problems, but that it actually is the root of all health disorders. The reading of Sick and Tired, The pH Miracle and Alkalise or Die is, I  believe, enough to convince most readers that that premise is in fact true. Not surprisingly though, it is not possible to alkalise bodily tissues without optimal hydration. And so we immediately understand that chronic dehydration is the primary cause of chronic and ever increasing tissue acidosis. Therefore we address both simultaneously, and in fact, cannot do otherwise.

Briefly, what is essential to understand is that healthy cells thrive in an alkaline environment, and indeed require an alkaline environment to thrive. Conversely, pathogens such as moulds, yeasts, fungi, viruses and bacteria thrive in acidic environments. Healthy cells thrive in well oxygenated aerobic environments, whereas pathogens thrive in anaerobic environments deprived of oxygen. Since this is so, we can say, crudely speaking, that if the tissues and inner environment of the body—its terrain—is alkaline, then pathogens cannot take hold nor develop nor evolve nor survive in it. On the other hand, if the body’s terrain is acidic, then they thrive, proliferate, and overtake it, sometimes slowly and gradually, but sometimes quickly and suddenly, causing sickness and disease.

Everything that we eat and drink has an effect that is either alkalising, acidifying or neutral. This is after digestion, and has little to do with taste. All sweet tasting foods or drinks that contain sugars, for instance, are acidifying. I will write quite a lot more about pH and alkalisation in future posts. For now, we are concerned with alkalising through super-hydration, and this involves drinking alkaline water and green drinks. By the end of phase I, drinking your 2 litres of alkaline water and 2 litres of super-alkalizing green juice should be as second nature to you as brushing the teeth before bed.

Magnesium

As I attempted to express and make evident the importance of magnesium for every cell and cellular process in the body in Why you should start taking magnesium today, and thus show that we all need to take plenty of magnesium daily in order to both attain and maintain optimal health, for someone suffering from arthritis it is extremely important, it is crucial. And the reason is very simple: arthritis is characterised by inflammation, stiffening and calcification. They come together, of course, and it is useless to even wonder if one comes before another. Regardless, the best, most effective, most proven treatment or antidote for inflammation, stiffening and calcification is magnesium.

Magnesium, injected directly into the bloodstream, can almost miraculously stop spasms and convulsions of muscle fibres, and release, practically instantaneously, even the most extreme muscular contraction associated with shock, heart attack and stroke. This is used routinely and very effectively in birthing wards and surgery rooms. Magnesium is the only ion that can prevent calcium from entering and flooding a cell, thereby causing it to die, and magnesium is the best at dissolving non-ionic calcium—the one that deposits throughout the body in tissues and arteries, and over bone, cartilage, tendons and ligaments—and allowing all this excess calcium to be excreted: precisely what we must do in treating arthritis.

In addition, magnesium is very effective at chelating (pulling out) both toxic heavy metals like mercury and persistent chemicals that bio-accumulate in blood, brain and other tissues. For too many unfortunately unsuspecting people, heavy metal toxicity is the cause of a plethora of various symptoms, wide-ranging in nature, hard to understand or associate with some known and easily identifiable condition, but that cause them often immense discomfort up to complete disability.

Putting all of this into practice

When you get up in the morning, you go to the bathroom, undress and spray or spread on your legs, arms chest and belly, neck and shoulders, the 20% magnesium chloride solution (4 teaspoons of nigari with 80 ml of water for a total of 20 g in 100 ml of solution). You wash your hands and face well, put your PJs back on, and head to the kitchen to prepare your water and green drinks for the day.

Line up three wide-mouth 1 litre Nalgene bottles. In each one put: 5 drops of alkalising and purifying concentrate (e.g. Dr. Young’s puripHy) and 10 drops of concentrated liquid trace minerals (e.g. Concentrace).

In the first bottle, add 50 ml of the 2% solution of magnesium chloride (made with 4 teaspoons of nigari dissolved in 1 litre of water), 50 ml of aloe vera juice, 20 ml of liquid silicic acid, fill it up with high quality filtered water, shake well to mix, and take your first glass with 1 capsule of Mercola’s Complete Probiotics. You should drink this first litre over the course of about 30 minutes, taking the third or fourth glass with an added 1-2 teaspoons of psyllium husks. (The aloe vera and psyllium husks are to help cleanse the intestines over time.)

In the second and third bottles, add a heaping teaspoon of green juice powder (e.g., Vitamineral Green by HealthForce), 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of fine, grey, unrefined sea salt, 1/4 teaspoon of finely ground Ceylon cinnamon, a heaping mini-spoonful of stevia extract powder and a single drop of either orange, lemon or grapefruit high quality, organic, food-grade essential oil. Shake well. One of them you will drink between about 10:00 and 12:00, the other between 15:30 and 17:30. Shake every time you serve yourself a glass or drink directly from the bottle to stir up the solutes in the water. You should take these two bottles with you to work and/or keep them in the fridge until needed: the drink is really nice when it’s cool.

Now that the magnesium has been absorbed through the skin—this takes around 30 minutes, you can go have a shower to rinse off the slight salty residue that feels like when you let sea water dry on your skin without rinsing it off. You should wait at least 30 minutes after you have finished your first litre of water before you eat anything.

By about 10 or 10:30, depending on when you finished breakfast, you should start to drink your first litre of green drink and continue until about 12:00 or 12:30. Make sure you finish drinking 30-45 minutes before you eat. Wait at least couple of hours after eating. Then start drinking the second litre of green drink by about 15:30 or 16:00 until about 17:30 or 18:00. Again, make sure you stop drinking always at least 30 minutes before eating. Depending on when you eat dinner, you should drink a half litre of plain water 30 minutes before the meal. The general rules for drinking you should follow are: 1) always drink at least 500 ml up to 30 minutes before eating, and 2) do not drink during or within 2 hours after the meal.

Before going to bed, take a small glass of water with 50 ml of 2% magnesium chloride solution. And that’s it for the day. And tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, keeping to this schedule, until it becomes perfectly natural and customary. After four weeks, you should do another blood test and see how the numbers compare to those before starting. In addition, if you are interested in this from the scientific standpoint, or just curious, or both, you should get Doppler imaging of your coronary and cerebral arteries, as well as an MRI of the joints in your body, including the spine, before you start and at then end of every phase. It will also be extremely informative to test and record the pH of at least your first urine every morning; any additional urine pH readings will be very useful and tracing the progress of the gradual de-acidification of your tissues and the days and the weeks progress. And finally, the transdermal magnesium therapy (putting the 20% solution on your skin), should last 6-8 weeks. By that time, you intracellular magnesium stores should have been replenished. We continue taking the 2% solution indefinitely, and use transdermal magnesium once in a while (once or twice per week).

The great advantage of the transdermal magnesium is that almost all of it is absorbed into your tissues and bloodstream. The oral magnesium is absorbed a level between 25 and 50%, and this depends primarily on the amount of magnesium in the blood when you take it. This is why it is very important to take it first thing in the morning when magnesium is at its lowest, and then in the latter half of the afternoon and before bed, those times when concentrations are lowest. You don’t have to worry about too much magnesium because any excess will be excrete in the urine and faeces.

You should just worry about not enough: that’s the real problem. Incidentally, the fact that almost all the magnesium that you put on your skin is absorbed underlines the importance of carefully choosing what we put on our skin. Because in the same way, anything we put on it will be absorbed into our system. So putting coconut and almond oil is just as good for our skin and our health, as it is bad to put on creams and lotions with synthetic chemicals and compounds that all make their way into our blood. General rule: if you cannot eat it, don’t put it on your skin.

Update: read these Updated recommendations for magnesium supplementation.

That’s it for the first phase: mostly drinking a lot more than you used to, with a few special tweaks to what and when you drink. I haven’t mentioned anything about food even though you can obviously know from the rest of the articles on the blog that this will come in time: in the second phase. We first deal with the first order terms, then the second order terms, and after that with the third and fourth order terms. That’s very important to grasp: what has the most and what has the least impact and thus importance.

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How much salt, how much water, and our amazing kidneys

Salt, the one we put on food, is composed almost exclusively of sodium chloride (NaCl) that very easily dissolves in water into positively charged sodium (Na+) and negatively charged chloride (Cl-) ions. And there is something very special and unique about these ions: in our blood, Na+ and Cl- are present in the highest concentrations and maintained in the narrowest of ranges. This is very revealing, and means, quite plainly, that sodium and chloride are the most important  extracellular electrolytes. This is a simple fact. Now, forget everything you’ve heard, been told, or read about salt being bad for you, and consider this:

Our blood is made of red blood cells (45%) and white blood cells and platelets (0.7%) floating in blood plasma (54.3%). Blood plasma shuttles nutrients to cells around the body and transports wastes out. It consists of 92% water, 8% specialised mostly transporter proteins, and trace amounts of solutes (things dissolved or floating in it). And although circulating in trace amounts, the solutes—especially sodium—are vital. The concentration of solutes in blood plasma is around 300 mmol/l (don’t worry about the units for now). In the highest concentration of all is sodium at 140 mmol/l. In the second highest concentration of all is chloride at 100 mmol/l. The sum of these is 240 mmol/l. So, from these numbers alone, we see that blood plasma is more or less just salty water.

glass-of-water

Pure alkaline water

Don’t you find this amazing? Don’t you find it amazing that nobody has ever told you this straight out in this way? And isn’t it amazing that we have been and continue to be told to avoid eating salt because it is bad for us: that it causes hypertension that predisposes us to heart disease? It really is completely amazing and ridiculous and also rather sad. But misunderstandings of this kind are unfortunately much more common than they should, as you may remember from What about cholesterol and Six eggs per day for six days: cholesterol?, but also from Minerals and bones, calcium and heart attacks and A diabetic’s meal on Air France. As you will understand for yourself in a few moments, the problem is not too much salt; the problem is not enough water:

Hypertension is not caused by excessive salt consumption. It is caused primarily by chronic dehydration, magnesium deficiency, and calcification.

Taking a look at the other electrolytes, bicarbonate (HCO3-), the primary pH regulator, is the third most highly concentrated molecule in plasma at 20 mmol/l. Potassium (K+) is the fourth at 4-5 mmol/l, then calcium (Ca 2+) and magnesium (Mg 2+) both at about 1 mmol/l. Therefore, the concentration of sodium in the blood is 7 times higher than that of bicarbonate, 40 times higher than that of potassium, and about 140 times higher than that of calcium and magnesium. And as with everything else in our body’s exquisite physiology, there are very good reasons for this:

Every cell in every tissue and in every organ of our body relies on an electrical potential difference between the fluid inside the cell membrane and the fluid outside of it in order to function: produce energy and transport things in and out. This is particularly important in active “electrical” tissues such as muscles and nerves, including neurones, that simply cannot work—cannot contract and relax in the case of muscle fibres, and cannot fire off electrical pulses in the case of nerve fibres and neurones—without a well-maintained and stable potential across the cellular membrane.

This resting potential across the membrane results from the delicate balance of the equilibrium potential and relative permeability through the cellular membrane of the three most important ions: Na+, K+ and Cl-. The potential is maintained by the sodium-potassium pump: a specialised protein structure in the membrane that ensures the concentration of potassium (K+) stays low outside the cell and high inside the cell, and conversely, the concentration of sodium (Na+) stays high outside the cell and low inside. This is the main reason sodium is so important and why it is so carefully monitored and scrupulously reabsorbed by the kidneys, but there are plenty more.

Obviously, this is not an accident. Nothing about the way our body functions is an accident, and no matter how well a particular physiological function or mechanism is understood or not, we can be confident that it is as perfect and finely tuned as it can be because each and every bodily function is the result of adaptations and refinements over billions of years of evolution. This is not a typo: I really did mean to write billions of years. Because every single cell of which we are made has evolved from all of its predecessors as far back as the very first organic molecules that eventually organised in the very first cell: a group of more or less self-organising organelles that developed a symbiotic relationship with one another just because it benefitted them in some way, and found it safer to cluster together behind a fatty membrane through which they could interact with the outside on their own terms.

The aim of every single self-organising entity, from the simplest virus, bacterium or organelle like the mitochondria (our cellular energy-production furnaces), to highly specialised cells in the brain, in the liver or lining a part of the microscopic nephron tubule of one of the millions of these specialised filtering units in our kidneys, to largest groupings of cells in tissues, organs and systems of organs, has always been and always will be the same: survival. Therefore, to understand living systems objectively we have to understand them from the fundamental perspective of the cell itself, the tissue, the organ and the system of organs itself because every adaptation it undergoes is always aimed at improving its own odds of survival. It is very important to keep this in mind and know that everything that happens in a living system always does so in relation to something else and always for good reason, even when we don’t understand the reason, which in itself is also very important to remember.

I use this opportunity to whole-heartedly recommend Lewis Dartnell’s book Life in the universe. Almost every page for me was a delightful discovery of things I was unaware of and found the book truly illuminating.

Coming back to salt, even though we look mostly at sodium and chloride that are the principal constituents of any kind of salt we put on our food, I very strongly recommend always and exclusively using a real salt: any kind of unrefined sea salt (French, cold water, Atlantic salt is particularly clean and rich in trace minerals), Himalayan salt, Smart Salt or Real Salt (the last two are registered trade marks and very rich in trace minerals). On the contrary, I strongly discourage eating chemically manufactured table salt or even refined sea salt, which are not only stripped of trace minerals found in natural, unrefined salts, but contain varying amounts of chemical additives such as whitening agents, for instance.

Sel-gris_prod

Unrefined sea salt from the Atlantic coast – Sel de Guerande.

Now, without regard for polemical disputes, pseudo-scientific discussions and debates, or otherwise unfounded views and opinions about salt, can we answer the simple question: how much salt should we generally eat? I believe we can, but although it may seem so, it is not that simple a question. So let’s first ask a simpler one:

How do we make a solution with the same concentration of sodium and chloride as our blood plasma?

To answer this our approach is simple: use the mean concentrations of sodium and chloride in the blood to calculate how much salt we need to match these such that drinking our salt water solution will neither increase nor decrease their concentration. It might seem a little technical at first, but bear with me, it is in fact quite simple.

This approach is rather well motivated physiologically because the kidneys’ primary function is to maintain blood pressure and concentration of electrolytes—sodium above all others, and each within its typically narrow range of optimal concentration—while excreting metabolic wastes. The kidneys do this by efficiently reabsorbing most of the water and electrolytes from the large volume of blood that goes through them continuously throughout the day and night, getting rid of as much as possible of the metabolic wastes, and carefully adjusting the elimination of ‘excessive’ amounts of water and electrolytes. (You will soon understand why I placed quotation marks around the word excessive.) Let’s start.

You already know that the mean concentration of sodium in the blood is 140 mmol/l. What we haven’t mentioned is that it must be maintained in the range between 135 to 145 mmol/l. You also know that the mean concentration of chloride is 100 mmol/l, and it must be maintained between 95 and 105 mmol/l. The atomic mass of Na is 23, hence one mole (abbreviated mol) is 23 g, and thus one millimole (abbreviated mmol) is 23 mg. The atomic mass of Cl is 35.5, hence one mole is 35.5 g, and therefore one millimole is 35.5 mg. The molecular mass of NaCl is the sum of the atomic masses of Na and Cl, which implies that one mole of NaCl is 58.5 g, and a millimole is 58.5 mg. (A mole is the amount of substance that contains 6×10^23, Avogadro’s number, elementary entities, in this case, atoms. The molar mass is the same as the atomic or molecular mass.)

Multiplying the concentrations in mmol/l by the molar mass in mg/mmol we get the concentration in mg/l. For Na this equals 140 x 23 = 3220 mg/l or 3.22 g/l, and for Cl it is 100 x 35.5 = 3550 mg/l or 3.55 g/l. This is the mean concentration of sodium and chloride there is in our blood. For a small person like me, weighing, say, 56 kg, there are 4 litres of blood that contain a total of 13 g of Na and 14 g of Cl. This is equivalent to about 2 tablespoons of salt.

It is important to note that this is truly quite a lot in comparison to other ions or molecules in our blood. Glucose, for example, which many—probably most people—mistakenly think as the ‘energy of life’, giving it such great importance, is ideally maintained around 80 mg/dl or 0.8 g/l. This is, therefore, also the amount we would need to add to our salt and water solution to make it have, in addition to that of the salt, the same concentration of glucose as that of our blood. And 0.8 g/l for 4 litres of blood makes a total of 3.2 g of glucose in that (my) entire blood supply. This is about 10 times less than the amount of salt!  What does this tell you about their relative importance in our system?

Now, given that Cl (35.5) is heavier than Na (23), NaCl will have a higher mass fraction of Cl: its mass will be 60% chloride (35.5/58.5) and 40% sodium (23/58.5). This just means that 10 g of NaCl or salt has 6 g of Cl and 4 g of Na. So to get 3.22 g of sodium, we need 8 g of sodium chloride, which provides 4.8 g of chloride.

The simple conclusion we draw from this calculation is that dissolving a somewhat heaping teaspoon of salt in one litre of water gives a solution that has the same concentration of sodium as that of our blood (with a little extra chloride).

Does this mean that we should generally drink such a salt and water solution? No, I don’t think so. Are there times when we should? Yes, I believe there are. But say we drink 4 litres per day, 8 g of salt per litre adds up to 32 g of salt just in the water we drink! If we add even half of this amount to our food, we are looking at about 50 g of salt per day! Isn’t this utterly excessive, especially since we are told by the medical authorities to avoid salt as much as possible, with some people today consuming nearly no salt at all? (This article here takes a sobering look at the evidence—actually, the lack thereof—of the claimed benefits of salt reduction.) And more questions arise: What happens when we eat less salt? What happens when we eat more? What happens when we drink less water? What happens when we drink more?

Eating more or less salt. Drinking more or less water.

Remember that the kidneys try very hard to maintain the concentration of solutes in blood plasma—to maintain plasma osmolarity. Also remember that sodium is by far the most important in regulating kidney function, and it is also in the highest concentration. It is nonetheless total osmolarity that the kidneys try to keep constant, and besides sodium, the other important molecule used to monitor and maintain osmolarity by the kidneys is ureathe primary metabolic waste they are trying to eliminate.

As an aside to put things in perspective about the importance of sodium, plasma osmolarity is typically estimated by medical professionals using the sum of twice the concentration of sodium with that of urea and glucose: calculated osmolarity = 2 Na + urea + glucose (all in mmol/l). Since sodium is typically around 140 mmol/l whereas glucose is less than 5 mmol/l and urea about 2.5 mmol/l, it’s obvious that we could just forget about the latter two whose contribution is less than 3% of the total, and look exclusively at sodium concentration (2 Na = 280; glucose + urea = 7.5, so their contribution is 7.5/(280+7.5) = 2.6%).

Eating anything at all, but especially salt or salty foods, raises plasma osmolarity. In response—to maintain constant osmolarity—the kidneys very efficiently reabsorb water and concentrate the urine. Drinking water dilutes the blood and therefore lowers its osmolarity. In response, the kidneys very scrupulously reabsorb solutes and eliminate water, hence diluting the urine.

If we eat nothing and just drink plain water, beyond the body’s minimum water needs, every glass will dilute the blood further and thus cause the kidneys to try to retain more of the sodium while eliminating more of the water. We are drinking quite a lot, but as the day progresses, we are growing more thirsty. We drink more but go to the bathroom more frequently, our urine grows more diluted, and by the end of the day we find ourselves visibly dehydrated, with chapped lips and dry skin. This seems paradoxical in that while drinking water, we are getting increasingly dehydrated. But it is not paradoxical. It is simply the consequence of the kidneys doing their work in trying to maintain constant blood plasma concentrations of sodium (and solutes). For those of you who have fasted on plain water for at least one day, you mostly likely know exactly what I’m talking about. For those who have not, you should try it and experience this first hand for yourselves. Avoiding dehydration in this case is simple: eat salt to match water intake.

If, on the other hand, we do not drink, then the blood gets more and more concentrated, the concentration of sodium and other ions, urea, and everything else for that matter, rises with time, and the kidneys keep trying, harder and harder with time, to maintain the osmolarity constant by retaining as much as they possibly can of the water that is present in the blood. You might think: why not just eliminate some of the solutes to lower their excessively high concentration? But eliminating solutes can only be done through the urine, which means getting rid of water that, in this state of increasing dehydration, is far too precious, and the kidneys therefore try to retain as much of it as possible, hence concentrating the urine as much and for as long as possible to make full use of the scarce amount of water that is available for performing their functions. But here is a crucial point to understand and remember:

In order to reabsorb water, the kidneys rely on a high concentration of solutes—hyperosmolarity—in the interstitial medium through which passes the tubule carrying the filtrate that will eventually be excreted as urine. This is how water can be reabsorbed from the filtrate: the higher the difference in concentration, the more efficient the reabsorption. If there is plenty of excess salt—sodium and chloride ions—then these solutes is what the kidneys prefers to use to drive up and maintain the hyperosmolarity of the interstitial medium, and urea can be excreted freely. If, however, there is a scarcity of sodium and chloride ions, then the kidneys will do everything to reabsorb as much of the precious ions that are in circulation to maintain adequate concentrations of these in the bloodstream, and at the slightest sign of water shortage and dehydration—to ensure the hyperosmolarity of the interstitial medium for maximum water reabsorption—the kidneys will begin to recycle urea, excreting progressively less of it as dehydration increases.

Most of you will have experienced a long day walking around, maybe while on a trip visiting a city, during which you did not drink for several hours. You might have also noticed that you probably didn’t go to the bathroom either, which you may have found unusual compared to the frequency with which you usually go pee when you’re at home or at work. You will have noticed that your mouth was drier and drier as the hours passed, but also that you felt more and more tired, heavy-footed and without energy.  Eventually it struck you just how thirsty you were, or you were finally able to find water to drink, and drank to your heart’s content. As you drank, you might have felt a surge of energy within as little as a minute or two or even immediately following the first few sips. Soon after, you finally did go to the bathroom, and noticed how incredibly dark and strong smelling your urine was. Now you understand what was happening in your kidneys, why you didn’t go pee for these long hours, why your urine was so dark and smelled so strong. However,  the reason why you felt your energy dwindle as the hours passed, and then return when you drank is still unclear.

Water in the blood regulates its volume. And volume in a closed system determines internal pressure. Our circulatory system is a closed system in the sense that there are no holes where blood either goes in or comes out. Yet at the same time it is not a closed system because water enters and leaves the system: it enters the bloodstream through the wall of the intestines, and leaves it through the kidneys and out into the urine. All physiological functions depend intimately on blood pressure: whether it is shooting up through the roof as we face a huge brown bear towering over us and growling at the top of its lungs, and priming us in this extremely stressful fight-or-flight situation for some kind of high-energy reaction in response, or whether it is as low as it can be during our most soothing and restful sleep deep into the night, when the body is repairing and rebuilding itself. And what is the primary regulator of blood pressure? The kidneys.

I will address the details of how the kidneys function and regulate pressure and osmolarity in another post. For now, what is relevant to understand why your energy faded as the hours passed or, more precisely, as the body got progressively more dehydrated, is straight forward:

As water content decreases, blood volume decreases. As the volume decreases, blood pressure drops. And as blood pressure drops, energy levels go down. It’s as simple as that.

It does not help that as soon as the kidneys detect dehydration and drop in pressure, they release hormones to provoke the contraction of the blood vessels in order to counter the pressure drop. This works to a great extent, but since the arteries and veins are constricted, blood flow throughout the body decreases, which in turn contributes significantly to our feeling increasingly heavy-footed and sleepy. With every passing minute, dehydration increases, pressure decreases, blood vessels contract more and our energy level drops further, to the point where we just want to sit down, or even better, lie down, right here on this park bench, and have a long nap.

Interesting, isn’t it? And here again there is nothing strange or paradoxical in this self-regulating mechanism that eventually puts us to sleep as we get increasingly dehydrated. It is simply the consequence of the kidneys doing their work in trying to maintain constant osmolarity and blood pressure. Avoiding dehydration in this case is even simpler: drink water.

If you’ve read this far, you know that both solutions to prevent dehydration are intimately linked: if we don’t drink enough water we get dehydrated, but if we drink too much water without eating salt we also get dehydrated. So let’s now ask another question:

Precisely how much water?

An adult human being needs on average a minimum of 3 litres of water per day to survive for more than a few days (Ref). This depends on climate and level of activity and a bunch of other factors, but in general the range is well established to be between 2 litres in cooler and 5 litres per day in the hottest climates. As suggested from our previous considerations, minimum water intake is also related to salt and food intake. And although this was obvious to me from my own experience of fasting rather regularly between 1 and 3 days at a time, I had not read about it. But as it turns out, the NRC and NAS both (independently) estimated minimum water intake as a function of food intake to be between 1 and 1.5 ml per calorie. For a diet of 2000 calories this would amount to between 2 and 3 litres. But this obviously does not mean that if we don’t eat anything, we don’t need any water! So, what is the very strict minimum amount of water the body needs before physiological functions break down? The short answer is 1.1 litres. For the slightly longer answer, here is a excerpt from page 45 of The Biology of Human Survival:

If obligatory losses are reduced to an absolute minimum and added up, the amounts are 600 milliliters of urine, 400 milliliters of insensible skin loss, and 200 milliliters of respiratory water loss, a total of 1.2 liters. Because maximum urine osmolarity is 1200 milliosmoles/liter, if diet is adjusted to provide the minimum solute excretion per day (about 600 mOsmol), minimum urine output may fall, in theory, to 500 milliliters per day and maitain solute balance. Hence, the absolute minimum water intake amounts to just more than 1 liter (1.1) per day.

(This is also taught in renal physiology lectures such as this one. If you are interested, you will learn a lot from this longer series of 13 segments on urine concentration and dilution here, as well as from this series of 7 segments on the renin-angiotension-aldosterone system here. I found all of them very instructive.)

Keep in mind that 1100 ml of water per day is the very bare minimum for survival, and that there are absolutely no other water losses: basically, you have to be lying, perfectly calm and unmoving at an ideal room temperature where you are neither hot nor cold, not even in the slightest. That’s not particularly realistic unless you’re in a coma. And to show just how extreme it is, let’s see how much of the water the kidneys need to reabsorb to make this happen:

For someone like me weighing 57 kg, the mass of blood is 57*7% = 4 kg. Since the density is almost equal to that of water, 4 kg corresponds to 4 litres. Of this, we know that plasma accounts for a little more than half (54.7%) by volume which makes 2.2 litres, and since plasma is 92% water, the volume of free water in the blood supply is almost exactly half: 2 litres. Blood flow through the kidneys is, on average, around 1.2 l/min. This amounts to more than 1700 litres per day, and means that for 4 litres of blood in the body, every drop of blood goes through the kidneys 425 times in 24 hours, each and every day.

In the kidneys the first step in filtration is the “mechanical”, particle-size-based separation of the blood’s solids from its liquid component. Water makes up half the blood volume, and therefore represents half the flow through the kidneys: 0.6 l or 600 ml/min (850 litres per day). But only 20% of the total flow goes through nephron filtration, which makes 120 ml/min. In the extreme case we are considering, urine output is taken to be 500 ml in 24 hours, equivalent to 20.83 ml/hour or 0.35 ml/min (500 ml/24 h/60 min). Therefore, to achieve this, the kidneys must reabsorb 119.65 ml of the 120 ml flowing through them every minute. This translates to an astounding 99.7% reabsorption efficiency! I’m very skeptical that your average person’s (generally compromised) kidneys could achieve this, but the point was to quantify how extreme this situation at the limit of human survival really is, and as you can see, it is indeed as extreme can be.

Also, keeping in mind that these minimum vital physiological water losses in these circumstances would occur at a more or less uniform rate throughout the day, it would probably be much better to drink a little at regular intervals during our walking hours than to drink everything at once and nothing else during the remaining 24 hours. But what would be the ideal rate at which we should replenish our water in these extreme circumstances?

Assuming the theoretically minimum combined water losses of 1100 ml are lost evenly over the course of the 24 hours, this corresponds to a water loss rate of 0.76 ml/min (1100 ml/24 h/60 min). This is therefore the ideal rate at which to replenishing it. In practice, we may not have an IV system to do this for us, and we will probably be sleeping long nights as our heart rate and blood pressure will have hit rock bottom. Drinking 1100 ml in 11 hours (to work with round numbers) could be done by taking 100 ml, (half a small glass), every hour. This would be the simplest and most reasonable way to maintain solute balance as best we can.

Naturally, with such a minimal water intake, the kidneys are struggling to maintain osmolarity by retaining as much water as possible. Any additional intake of salt (or food) would make things worse in the sense that it would raise the concentration of sodium (and solutes) in the blood whose balance the kidneys will not be able to maintain without additional water. But remember that eating a 200 g cucumber, for example, supplies nearly no calories as it contains virtually no sugar, fat or protein, while proving almost 200 g (ml) of water. And that, conversely, any drink containing caffeine or alcohol will actually dehydrate as those substances are diuretic and cause the excretion of free water.

A somewhat more realistic scenario is one in which we are not eating, but very moderately active at comfortable temperatures. In this case, most experts would agree that the minimum water requirements would be around 2 litres per day. Since we are fasting, these additional water needs are due to greater water losses through evaporation and physiological activity; not to offsetting increased water needs due to food consumption. Consequently, we should ideally drink about 10 glasses of 200 ml, one approximately every hour from 7h to 19h, and we should not eat any salt.

More realistic but still not so common, is that you are doing a 24 hour fast. The purpose of the fast is to give a break to the digestive system, rehydrate bodily tissues, stimulate more fat burning and flush toxins out of the system. Say we drink 4 litres instead of the minimum of 2. In this case we should, in fact, eat some salt in order to ensure good hydration of tissues by supplying plenty of water through a well hydrated bloodstream without diluting the sodium and thus causing the kidneys to excrete more water. And this brings us back to the basic question that set us on this rather long  investigation:

Precisely how much salt?

But you already know the answer to this question: 1 teaspoon per litre in 2 of the 4 litres. Because we don’t drink during the night for about 12 hours, the body inevitably gets dehydrated. Therefore, the best strategy is to start with plain water to rehydrate the concentrated blood and bodily tissues dehydrated from the night, and end with a litre of plain water in preparation for the dry night coming. You should take the equivalent of 1 generous teaspoon of salt with each of the additional litres of water during the day. This will ensure proper hydration of tissues by preventing excessive dilution of blood sodium levels, and maximum urea excretion. Excess sodium, chloride and any other electrolyte will be readily excreted in the urine.

Finally, the far more realistic scenario and, in fact, the one that for most of us is the everyday, is that we are normally active and eating around 2000 calories a day, typically over the course of about 12 hours. In this case we need the basic 2 litres to offset minimum evaporation and physiological losses, and between 2 and 3 litres to offset the 2000 calories. This makes between 4 and 5 litres, 2 of which must be plain water, and 2 or 3 of which must be matched by a good teaspoon of salt per litre that will most naturally, and maybe also preferably, be taken with the food.

Keep in mind that this is the total salt requirements and many prepared foods contain quite a lot already. The hotter or drier the climate, the more water we need. The more we exercise, the more water and the more salt we need. The more we sweat, the more water and the more salt we need. The more stress we experience, the more water and the more salt we need. And in all of these cases, we also need a lot more magnesium.

By the way, it is interesting but not surprising that this conclusion on the amount of salt per day: about 10-15 g, is also the recommendation of the late Dr Batmanghelidj, the “Water doctor”, as well as that of Drs Volek and Phinney, the “Low-Carb doctors” (see References  for details), although the former emphasises the importance of an abundant water intake, while the latter hardly mention it if at all.

So this is it. We know how much water we should generally drink, and we know how much salt we should generally eat:

We should always drink the bare minimum of 2 litres per day. Ideally we should drink 4-5 litres every day. If for some reason we drink 2 litres or less, we should not take any salt (or food for that matter!). If we drink more than 2 litres, we should match each additional litre of water with 1 teaspoon of salt, taking into account the salt contained in the food we eat. It is always better physiologically to drink more than to drink less. And remember that we hydrate most effectively on an empty stomach by drinking 30 minutes before meals.

Probiotics, chlorella and psyllium husks

Essential for building and maintaining a healthy digestive system, it is best to take probiotics and chlorella on an empty stomach, once to several times per day, to maximise the bacterial flora replenishing from the probiotics, and the prebiotic as well as cleansing and heavy metal chelating effects of the chlorella. This way, there is minimal potential damage to the probiotics by acidic gastric juices secreted into the stomach when protein is present.

Psyllium are also good to take on an empty stomach or with foods that are not mineral-rich (as in a coconut milk pudding, for example), in order to maximise their intestinal cleaning and minimise their possible interference with mineral absorption. It is most important for the psyllium husks to be completely saturated with water before taking them to avoid causing cork-like condensations of psyllium husks in the gut.

All supplements should be of the highest quality. I buy probiotics from Prescript-Assist, chlorella from Dr. Mercola, and psyllium husks either whole or powdered but organically grown without pesticides or herbicides from Frontier.

If you have not taken these supplements, then your digestive system will be in dire need of them. It would be best, in addition to the morning probiotics, chlorella and psyllium husks, to take probiotics and chlorella with 500 ml about 30-45 minutes before eating at lunchtime, and again before dinner. After even 1 week, you will feel much better. After about 1 month, you can reduce the frequency to twice per day, and eventually you can take your probiotic only in the morning.

For the chlorella,  it’s important to not take too much at first because the detox could be too fast, and this would stress the body unnecessarily and make you feel unwell as well as make your stools runny. Once you have past the initial detox phase, you can and should take chlorella as often and as much as you want depending both on the circumstances and on your needs.

I, for example, sometimes take at 15 little pellets (3 grams) per day in two or three doses, 30 minutes before meals. But on my weekly, 24-hour fast, (usually on Mondays), during which I only take water and herbal teas, unrefined sea salt and chlorella from Sunday evening after dinner, until Monday evening before dinner, I take at least 30 little pellets (6 grams) of chlorella over the course of the day, and sometimes more. This not only gives the body easily digestible essential amino acids, but also supplies a lot of essential minerals, chlorophyl, and detox power, which is, after all, the main purpose of the fast.

The quantity of the psyllium husks should be 1 teaspoon per day for the first week. Then 2 teaspoons, and eventually 3 teaspoons per day, but not more: it’s not necessary and this much fibre may stress your digestive system, which is obviously not what you are trying to do. After a month, you should reduce the quantity of psyllium to one teaspoon per day, and see if you can reduce it further to every other day, depending on the effects on your digestion. I personally usually take 1 teaspoon almost every day to maintain perfect intestinal transit and  stools (regular, easy to pass, and almost nothing to wipe). In any case, you can not do yourself harm by taking psyllium husks with plenty of water on a regular basis (unless you are allergic to it, which is very rare); instead it will be of great benefit.

The best way to know how much and how often you need to take is by carefully monitoring the smell of your breath—it should be fresh and odourless throughout the day and night; the smell of your sweat—it should also be light, not acidic smelling, and basically odourless, even if you don’t shower for a couple of days without using deodorant or perfume; and finally, the regularity, consistency and smell of your solid eliminations—they should not be too hard nor too soft, voluminous, easy to pass, and easy to wipe. Ideal stools pass easily and do not need any wiping. This is what we should strive for by making adjustment to our water intake, cooked versus raw food intake, psyllium and vegetable fibre intake, paying particular attention to the timing of these with respect to one another.

Doing these simple things you will very quickly feel much better, and also begin to notice and understand much more about the natural detox functions of your own body, with its daily cycles as well as with its particularities. In physiological function, we are all basically the same with small individual differences that must be first identified and then tended to with care, patience and attention, being especially mindful of their evolution in time and depending on the changing circumstances. Only we ourselves can really learn how to do this, and so we must if we want to achieve and then maintain optimal health throughout our life, as we age and mature.

When you eliminate insulin-stimulating carbohydrates

Eliminating insulin-stimulating carbohydrates will have a profound effect on your health. What are insulin-stimualing carbohydrates? All simple sugars: white sugar, brown sugar, unrefined sugar, dehydrated cane sugar juice, coconut sugar, honey, molasses, corn syrup, agave syrup, fructose, and also fruit whose calories are typically half glucose half fructose. And all starchy carbohydrates: potatoes, rice, bread, pasta, all grain products and whole grains alike. That’s quite a lot of things we tend to eat, isn’t it? But the truth is that We were never meant to eat simple or starchy carbohydrates in the first place. And the fact that we do is enough to explain why we are all so fat and so sick.

The first and most noticeable immediate effect will be deep detoxification by starving off and killing of the colonies of pathogenic bacteria and fungi in the intestines, all of which live off simple sugars supplied either by your eating of refined carbohydrates or the breakdown of starches to glucose. All these bad bacteria will starve and die, which will temporarily increase the toxins that need to be eliminated from the body. For this reason it is very important to drink plenty of water (see Water, ageing and disease), on an empty stomach, and preferably about 30 minutes before meals (see Why we should drink water before meals) together with probiotics and chlorella supplements, as well as plenty of unrefined sea or rock salt because the body excretes more sodium when it is burning fat. You may very well not feel so good for the first few days or maybe even the first couple of weeks depending on the state of toxicity of your body and its ability to detoxify. But once past this initial detox phase, you will feel great—really great.

The second most noticeable effect will be the transition from using glucose as the primary cellular fuel to using fat instead. As glucose concentrations will fall, so will insulin concentrations. At the beginning, your body is unable to burn fat because it hasn’t had to for a long time. Instead, it will try to manufacture more glucose in the liver to sustain its energy needs. When this source runs dry, the body, now desperate for sugar because still unable to tap into the plentiful fat stores throughout, will turn to muscle tissue, and break down the proteins to manufacture glucose. This is what insulin resistance, even in the mildest of forms, leads to: more fat storage, less fat burning, and breakdown of muscle tissue whenever glucose concentrations drop. What varies depending on the level of insulin resistance is the pace at which fat is stored, the relative difficulty with which fat is burnt, and the speed at which muscle tissue is broken down.

Fortunately, the body is truly amazing, and although you will have periods, some short and some longer, during which you feel weak, tired and sleepy, within days the metabolism will begin to make the switch to fat-burning as the main source of cellular fuel and energy. Then, you will start to melt all of the excess fat that has been accumulating both on the surface of your body (the visible bulges under your skin), as well as the fat that has been accumulating internally between and around all of your organs, especially in the abdominal cavity, but also around tendons and ligaments, and even within the tissues or your liver and heart, and in between muscle fibres—we all know the difference between lean meat and fatty meat, and will have had or at least heard of the french delicatessen “foie gras” (fat liver).

I, for example, a lean 35 year-old athlete who had always exercised extensively through a typically quite intense training programme in endurance, speed and strength since I was 12 (first running, then cycling, then both), with a peak during the university years, when I competed quite seriously first in cycling (road), then in duathlon (run, bike, run), and then cycling off-road, and another during my PhD, when I trained and competed running, with the most worthy achievements being the running of the Mont Saint-Michel marathon in 2:58, but training more or less steadily throughout my life, found the transition from glucose to fat-burning very quick and easy. That was about 4 years ago, and small details of momentary sensations tend to slip out of memory over such periods, but of course I had a few headaches and foul smelling stools. But within days, I had more energy, more endurance and better, longer-sustained concentration, and it’s been getting better ever since! None of my body measurements changed significantly: I was always pretty lean and my clothes didn’t fit differently. However, I lost 4 kilos (9 pounds): my weight went from of 61 to 57 kg, and has remained thus ever since, without any effort, and without hunger. Consequently, most of these 4 kg were surely in part sub-cutaneous, but necessarily in great part internal fat stores: intra-abdominal (between organs), visceral (within organs like the liver and heart), and intra-muscular.

Averagely overweight people typically lose a lot more fat than this. Like a friend who followed my advice closely, and lost more than 25 kilos (55 pounds) in about a year, without hunger. And she is still melting fat reserves that had been accumulating and that she had been carrying around for years. Beyond a certain threshold, as the body gets closer to its ideal weight and composition, the fat reserves naturally begin to melt a little slower every day. Nonetheless, it will continue until there is only the necessary reserves for optimal metabolic function—and that’s not very much fat.

There are thousands of examples such as this one, but this is not the point I want to make. The loss of fat is a trivial consequence of the body’s hormonal and metabolic recovery. It is everything else that happens to the glands, the hormones, the brain, the digestive system, the immune system, the cardio-vascular system, and all other systems, allowing more efficiently and better functioning, that is really important. You should always keep that in mind: it is not about getting thin, it is about getting healthy.

When fat-burning kicks in and especially when it kicks into high gear, all the toxins—heavy metals like mercury and chemicals of various kinds—that have been accumulating in your tissues will be released as the fat cells open up to free these energy reserves. It is crucial to drink a lot of water, especially first thing in the morning, to take plenty of unrefined sea salt to balance the increased need for and usage of electrolytes in elimination through the urine, and take plenty of chlorella throughout the day for it to bind to the metals and toxins, and excrete them from the body.

The third most noticeable effect of eliminating insulin-stimuating carbohydrates will be the gradual extraction and excretion of uric acid from all the soft tissues and organs. Since metabolising simple and starchy carbohydrates leads to acid formation, and that our kidneys—our primary blood filtration and thus acid-removing organ—never developed to handle the huge quantities of acid produced by a diet based on carbohydrates, it tries to filter it out of the blood, but simply cannot take it all out. To make matters worse, 90% of us are chronically dehydrated (see Water, ageing and disease). This not only prevents the proper dilution of the uric acid from the blood and its transfer to the urine, but it also severally stresses the kidneys that are continuously trying to filter this and other metabolic wastes from the poorly hydrated, and thus excessively thick and viscous blood, extracting what liquid they can from it to actually produce enough urine to excrete the wastes out of the body.

To make matter even worse, for years we have been told to avoid salt, and supplement with calcium. As a consequence, 90% of us are not only deficient in most essential minerals (see Minerals, bones, calcium and heart attacks), but also in sodium—probably the most important element for proper health and kidney function, and on the contrary, we are totally over-calcified. All of this makes both calcium and acid accumulate not just in our kidneys to the point of forming “stones” (about 80% of them are calcium deposits with crystallised uric acid seeds and 10% pure uric acid), but everywhere in our body, making all tissues gradually stiffer, from arteries and veins to muscles, tendons and ligaments. What a nightmare! And what a sad state of affairs it is when we realise that this is a highly accurate description of what happens to most of us, day after day, and year after year until our untimely and inevitably premature death.

The last straw is that we are all terribly deficient in magnesium, scarcely found in our soils and therefore in our foods, and this leads to severe problems over time. If you didn’t know or need convincing, read Why you should start taking magnesium today.

What do we eat when we eliminate what currently constitutes between 50 and 70 percent of our daily calories? I’ve written up some general guidelines with brief explanations in What to eat: Four basic rules. And here are some examples of daily meal plans: A simple meal plan for my friend Cristian and Vibrant health and long life.

What about concentration

Concentration is a complex topic. As with many other things, because we use a single word for it, we can be tricked into believing that it is, in fact, one thing even though it is not. In addition to that, different people will likely mean different things when they use the term “concentration”.

For me, “concentration” means focusing attention onto something, and in the process, excluding as much as we can of everything else that is going on in the field of present experience, deeming them distractions. To concentrate on trying to hear a particular sound, for example, a very faint sound way off in the distance, implies directing our attention towards it with all our mental might. And somehow by doing this it is implied that we have to exclude everything else that is happening, and the better we can exclude everything else the more concentrated we can be.

But focused attention tends to be very fast moving, spontaneously jumping from this thing to that thing to the other thing, continuously and restlessly. This happens so quickly and so continuously that most of us hardly notice it at all. Therefore concentrating requires a great deal of effort and energy. This is why it is so exhausting, and this is also why it cannot possibly be sustained for very long. In fact, there may come a time when we notice that concentrating is becoming harder and harder, or even that we are simply unable to do it for any length of time. And then we start to worry because we feel that we cannot get anything done as we are totally distracted and scattered, continuously and incessantly.

Naturally, our first strategy should be to minimise our own stimulating of this jumping from one thing to another by restricting ourselves to doing the task we have at hand whole heartedly, without interrupting ourselves every few minutes or even seconds to check this last email that just came in to our inbox, or lookup something with Google. For most of us, this kind of scattered multi-tasking will only exacerbate the scattering of attention and gradually prevent us from doing any one thing for longer than a few minutes, if that. To minimise mental jumpiness we should minimise jumpiness in the way we work and function. Just turn off that email notifier, close your inbox, close your web browser, and work on your document or the problem you are trying to solve.

Beyond this basic strategy of minimising scattering behaviours, what if instead of concentrating we simply paid attention. The essential difference is that although paying attention does require a certain kind of effort, it does not require excluding anything at all, it does not require the straining effort of continuously pushing things away to re-focus attention. In fact, the more facets of our immediate experience we include in paying attention—the more we open our attention—the more we can indeed pay close attention to what we are attending to. Since we tend to focus on the thoughts, images, memories and run-on stories and commentaries that we continuously tell ourselves throughout the day and night, since we tend to live in our head, looking out through the eyes as if they were our windows onto this world outside that surrounds and often threatens us in various ways, the means to bring in balance is to spread attention to the body.

Feel the breath in the belly filling our inner cavity with air and keeping us alive in this very moment, and feel it in the belly with the belly, not just once, but breath after breath after breath. Feel the feet on the floor with the feet and toes, whether we are sitting, standing or walking: feeling the weight of the body rolling from the heel to the front of the foot, first on the right foot, then on the left, step after step. Feel the hands holding a cold glass of water, holding a hot cut of tea, holding a book, holding a baby: feeling the weight, the texture, the temperature. Feeling the water running on the skin when we wash the hands over the sink, the body in the shower. Really feel the body with the body. Don’t talk about it to yourself, don’t comment: just feel it.

Doing this—feeling the life of this body with this living body—will gradually and naturally bring our attention into balance, allowing us to function more freely, more easily, and more efficiently, no matter what we are doing. However, on the most basic level, our emotions, moods, tendencies, states and thus the general configurations of attention, are regulated by hormones: messengers coursing through the blood carrying all sorts of signals to organs and tissues. And as it cannot possibly be otherwise because the same blood circulates everywhere, all of these hormones have some influence on our brain. Therefore, for the brain to function properly, and our moods to be stable, and our attitude positive, there is no other way than to re-establish and maintain proper hormonal balance. Hormones, in turn, are primarily regulated by what we eat and what we drink: hormonal balance is rooted in our diet.

One of, if not the most important hormone—the one that has both the greatest direct and indirect influence on the other hormones—is insulin. For this reason, the only way to establish and maintain proper hormonal balance is to make sure that insulin is balanced—that it is by natural means as low as possible.  When insulin is low, everything else naturally falls into place: appetite, energy levels, mood, mental function and sleep. Naturally, it should be needless to say that all chemical stimulants, be it coffee, alcohol, cigarettes or drugs (prescription or not) should be eliminated, as these are all potent hormonal disruptors.

Fortunately, it is very easy to lower insulin levels and keep them low: as insulin levels mirror blood glucose levels, we need simply eliminate refined and starchy carbohydrates from your diet. Unfortunately, for most of us today this is not so easy because we are plainly addicted to carbohydrates.

I use “addicted” with the same strong, negative connotation as it is used in the context of drug use, because it really is so in the sense that our entire hormonal system is regulated by glucose levels and insulin, and although we may think somewhat differently of the powerful urge to smoke a cigarette or have a cup of coffee, an intense craving for chocolate or plain old hunger, all of these are regulated by our hormones whose overall profile is shaped, (distorted rather), by the presence of sugar and insulin. So, we do need to get over our addition to carbohydrates in order to function smoothly and efficiently as stable and balanced individuals. This is done by gradually reducing refined and starchy carbs as much as possible. And there is no minimum: the less of them we consume, the better off we’ll be.

Eliminating these carbohydrates from our diet will most likely lead to the elimination of at least half, if not three quarters of our daily calories. Considering the multitude of detrimental effects carbs have on our health—on our body and mind—this is indeed quite sad, but for most of us it is true. So what do we replace these empty calories with? Fats, and mineral and enzyme rich foods.

Fat is not only the constituent of every membrane of every cell in our body, but it is also the cellular fuel of choice. Therefore, fat should rightly be our main source of calories—at least 50% of them (I personally aim for 70% of my calories from fat). What kinds of fats? Lots of natural, unprocessed, chemically stable saturated fats from coconut oil, butter, eggs and cheese—preferably all organic to minimise the ingestion of toxic substances; monounsaturated fats from olive oil for salad dressings—choose a flavourful, unfiltered, fresh and cold pressed oil; polyunsaturated plant-based omega-3, omega-6 and omega-9 fats with Vitamin E complex from many different kinds of whole, raw nuts and seeds every day—buy only the best and freshest organic or wild harvested nuts and seeds; and polyunsaturated animal-based omega-3 fats with the vital Vitamins A and D from eggs, fish (for those who eat some), and krill oil supplements—these are absolutely essential for optimal health. Omega-3 fats are really important but needed only in small amounts. They should also be consumed in small amounts because they are very easily oxidised into free radicals. The animal omega-3 fats are particularly important for proper brain function.

Cholesterol is essential, especially for optimal brain and nerve function because synapses—the connections that allow electrical impulses to travel from one nerve cell to another—are almost entirely made of cholesterol. Moreover, most hormones are also made from it as cholesterol is used as their building block. Therefore, we must consume plenty of cholesterol-rich foods such as eggs, as well as plenty of cholesterol synthesis-promoting foods such as the good saturated fats mentioned above.

Minerals basically make up the solids of the body, and in this respect, it is vital to replenish them on a daily basis through the foods we eat: nuts, seeds and vegetables, (sea vegetable are the richest of all). And for vegetables, the greener and darker the better. Furthermore, eaten raw these nuts, seeds and vegetables provide plenty of enzymes and anti-oxidants that offer a wide spectrum of remarkable health benefits. It is crucial to keep in mind that all minerals and anti-oxidants are much better absorbed from the small intestine into the bloodstream when there is plenty of fat in the digestive system. In fact, in some cases, the absence of fat prevents the absorption of both minerals and anti-oxidants. I have not included fruit in this discussion because fruits are basically just simple sugars: glucose and fructose, and offer very little in terms of minerals, and phytonutrients compared to most vegetables. All berries, however, fresh or dried, are excellent as they are usually low in sugar, and often very high in anti-oxidant and healthful compounds.

Sometimes, allergies and toxicities such as heavy metal accumulation in the tissues, are at the root of what may appear to be either a mood or neurological disorder. The best way to detoxify and cleanse the body of heavy metals such as mercury is to take chlorella and spirulina supplements on a daily basis, on an empty stomach with plenty of water at least 30 minutes before meals. These have the ability to bind to heavy metals and flush them out of the body through the stools. And as for allergenic compounds, this needs to be investigated be each person individually.

Finally, water is vital for life and health. We must therefore have plenty of it, and drink on an empty stomach first thing in the morning and before meals.

There is no way to address what we may call “concentration problems” without addressing everything about what we eat and drink. Everything relating to brain function is also related to bodily functions and vice versa. Whether we like it or not, and whether we recognise it or not, this bodymind is whole, and mind and body are seamless. This is therefore how it must be taken care of and treated.

Water, ageing, and disease

Thinning skin, drying hair, wrinkles, brown spots here and there, patches of discolouration. Sagging eye lids, sagging cheeks, sagging skin all over the body. Loss of bone mass, loss of muscle mass. Stiffening joints, stiffening muscles, stiffening tendons and ligaments, stiffening veins and arteries. Weakness, tiredness, aching. Loss of memory, loss of concentration, loss of intellectual capacity, dullness. Metabolic syndrome, diabetes, senility, dementia, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, elevated cholesterol, atherosclerosis, stroke, kidney failure, liver failure, heart failure, cancer.

Are all these symptoms, these conditions, independent from one another? Are they different? Do they arise spontaneously and develop on their own? Do they just fall upon us unpredictably as rain does? Or are they consequences of more basic factors that elude most of us.

If we could ask the late Dr. Batmanghelidj (1931-2004), M.D., about ageing and disease, he would surely say that its primary cause is the cumulative effects of chronic dehydration on the body, and the plethora of consequences that this brings about. This chronic dehydration that only increases in severity with time, gives rise to so many problems.

But independently of anyone’s opinion, it is an observational fact is that when we are born, the body is 90% water, but when we die, it is only 50% water. Doesn’t this tell us something? Doesn’t this tell us that ageing and dying could be considered as a process of gradual dehydration?

The main way in which we provide water to the body is by drinking. And all of the nutrients required to sustain the body come from the foods we eat. Therefore, the digestive system is truly at the root of it all. As I explained in this previous post on the important of water in the digestive system, the direct consequences of not drinking adequately on an empty stomach long enough before eating, are the poor digestion of food, and the damage caused to the lining of the stomach and intestines that eventually lead to ulcers and leaky gut syndrome.

But poor digestion of food means improper break down of protein into amino acids, and the deficiency in the full range of these essential compounds necessary for so many functions in the brain and in every cell of the body. Poor digestion of food means improper break down of fats into their constituent fatty acids that provide not only the primary source of energy, but also the very building blocks of the membrane of every single cell in the body. Poor digestion of food means improper absorption of minerals and the complex molecules we call vitamins, that together with the proteins and fats are used not only in building all the tissues in the body, but also in every single chemical reaction, transport and communication between cells and tissues. Over time, poor digestion and damage to the digestive organs leads to the permanent loss of the ability to absorb certain minerals and vitamins. There is no doubt that this leads to complications that will manifest in various complex ways.

The lack of water in the digestive system leads to a lack of water in the bloodstream. The blood gradually thickens, its volume decreases, and its viscosity increases. This increases the friction between the blood and the walls of the blood vessels, and therefore the resistance in the flow. The heart is now under severe stress as it attempts to pump this thick, viscous, sticky blood to all parts of the body, and through all the vessels from the largest arteries to the narrowest almost microscopic veins. But this intense efforts by the heart also stressed the vessels themselves. Stress on the vessels leads to lesions. Lesions lead to plaques whose purpose is to patch up and heal the damaged tissues. The accumulation of such plaques, whose spontaneous bursting causes strokes, leads to atherosclerosis that eventually leads to heart failure. Pretty grim picture, isn’t it? But far from being complete yet.

The lack of sufficient amounts of water in the bloodstream obviously means that every organ and every cell of the body gradually becomes more and more dehydrated over time. For the cell, water is by far the most important substance, it is the context in which absolutely everything takes place, and on which everything depends. In order to maintain as much of this precious water as is possible, every single cell starts to produce more cholesterol to seal its membrane a well as possible and keep and protect its water. This is why dehydration leads to the appearance of excessive amounts of cholesterol, which in this case is the cell’s essential water preservation mechanism.

The lack of sufficient amounts of water in the bloodstream is particularly detrimental to the articulations. The joints of the body, all those areas where out limbs bend, are a complex assemblage of tissues whose primary component is cartilage. Cartilage is a kind of a simple matrix that holds water. It is the water content of the cartilage that gives it its suppleness and flexibility, allowing it to protect the bones from rubbing against each other in the joints when we move. It is well known that as we age, all of our joints and cartilage dries out, and we develop what we call arthritis. But is this because we are getting older, or is it because we are getting more and more dehydrated with every passing day? Is arthritis a disease of ageing or is it a consequence of chronic dehydration?

The amazing thing is that the only way to bring water to the cartilage in the joints to maintain their flexibility and prevent their degradation is through the porous ends of the bones to which the cartilage is attached. And the only way to bring water to the end of the bone is through its marrow. And the only way to bring water to the marrow is by way of the blood. Therefore, to prevent the gradual dehydration and subsequent breaking down of the cartilage in the joints, the blood must be well hydrated: thin, easy flowing and full of water.

And what does all this mean for the rest of the body? By weight, the muscles are 75% water; the blood is 82% water; the lungs are 90% water; the brain, the primary element of the central nervous system, is 78% water; even the bones are 25% water. So, it’s pretty simple: as dehydration increases over time, all organs, all tissues and all cells suffer, shrink, weaken, and succumb ever more easily to disease, whatever form it may take.

Dr. Batmanghelidj presents a convincing line of arguments linking breathing and lung disorders like asthma and allergies to chronic dehydration, and also believes that the dehydration of brain and nerve cells whose composition is also mostly water, leads to disorders of the central nervous system such as Alzheimer’s disease.

And the skin? Think about any fruit or vegetable that you place on a shelf in the fridge, like an apple, a carrot or a radish, and leave there for a long time. It will gradually soften, then start to wrinkle, and with time continue to soften and wrinkle more and more until it is nothing but a tiny dried out little thing. Moreover, you may also have noticed that if you take a partly dehydrated carrot, radish, or celery stick, for example, cut them and place them in water for a while, they will re-hydrate by refilling the cells with water, and in so doing become hard and crunchy once again. But if you wait too long, then no matter how much time you leave them in water, the cells will not re-hydrate. Logically, since our water content is similar to a fruit or vegetable, what happens to the body is probably very similar, and hence gradual the softening, wrinkling, weakening, and overall degradation of the bodymind at the days and years go by.

Obviously, this does not mean that by drinking enough pure water—no other liquids can be substituted for water—to ensure that the bodymind is well hydrated, we will not age. Of course not. But at least, we will ensure that ageing and all the consequences associated with ageing are not accelerated by dehydration. The last thing we want is to accelerate our rate of ageing and our susceptibility to disease.

The truth is that for most living beings on Earth, water is life. There is no question about this. We and most terrestrial animals are constituted of about 60-70% water and 30-40% minerals—by mass. But in fact, in terms of the number of molecules in our bodies, we are 99% water! Can we grasp the significance of this? Can we now realise what dire consequences the slightest dehydration can cause to every cell, every tissue, every organ, and every system of the body? It is hard to quantify, but it is huge. And coming back to our initial question: are ageing and disease different? Are they related? What do you think?

Although chronic dehydration is so common that it is generalised, avoiding dehydration is very simple: drink water, unsweetened herbal teas, and light green tea. Don’t drink sweet drinks, juices or sodas: these are full of sugar, including large amounts of fructose, that totally disrupt both the hormonal system and the metabolism, promoting hormonal imbalances and insulin resistance. Don’t drink milk: this is a food that contains fats, proteins and carbohydrates, and trigger all the required digestive processes that further exacerbate the problems associates with chronic dehydration. Just drink water.

At the very least, drink half a litre when you get up in the morning (7:00), half a litre mid-morning (10:30), half a litre 30 minutes before lunch (12:30), half a litre in the late afternoon (16:30), and half a litre 30 minutes before dinner (18:30). And make sure you have plenty of unrefined sea salt with your meals. If you are fasting, take a pinch of salt on at least some of the occasions when you drink to reach a total of 1 to 2 teaspoons over the course of the day (including the salt eaten with meals). In this way, you will provide your body a good amount of water and salt to ensure proper hydration and excretion of acids through the urine.

Why we should drink water before meals

We all need to drink at least about two litres of water every day. Not juice, not sodas, not coffee, not tea: plain water. None of these other liquids have the properties of water, nor do they have the desirable effects of water on the body. Most of us don’t however, and so we are chronically dehydrated. Whether it is 75% or as high as 90%, it is evident that a very large portion of the population is chronically dehydrated.

The digestive system can be viewed as the most fundamental because everything used to sustain life in the body goes through it. In a very real sense, we are a digestive system, supplemented by a central nervous system and refined sense organs to allow us to devise ways to get food (and avoid being eaten), coupled to a refined locomotor system to allow us to gather the food (and run away when it is needed). Since every component of every cell in the body is made from the nutrients in our food, it is obvious that everything in the body depends on the digestive system. And for the digestive system, the single-most important element is the presence of ample amounts of water.

cropped-glass-of-water

As soon as we even think about eating, the digestive system starts to get ready. The pancreas secretes a little jolt of insulin just in case carbohydrates come in, and the stomach starts to produce the highly acidic digestive gastric juice (pH of 1-2). This gastric juice is composed of only a little bit (0.5%) of hydrochloric acid (HCl) and a lot of salt, both sodium chloride (NaCl) and potassium chloride (KCl). The stomach has sensor cells to know exactly how much protein, fat and carbohydrates are present at any given time, and thus can adjust the production and composition of the gastric juice.

Although present in very small amounts, the hydrochloric acid is the essential compound for activating the enzymes responsible for breaking down protein, which is its main purpose because both fats and carbohydrates are mostly broken down in the intestine. But to make it to the stomach without causing any damage along the way, the two constituents of this highly corrosive acid, the hydrogen (H) and the chlorine ions (Cl), are produced separately and transported to the inside of the stomach where they combine to form the acid.

The delicate lining of the stomach with all its different kinds of highly specialised cells, is protected from the acidic gastric juice by an alkaline layer of mucus. This mucus is between 90 and 98% water, with some binding molecules and a few other components. It can be regarded as a blanket of water whose primary role in the stomach is to protect its lining from the gastric acid. The very thin mucosa that produces and maintains the mucus layer, also secretes sodium bicarbonate that sits in it, and neutralises the acid upon contact when it penetrates the layer, leaving only sodium chloride (salt), water and carbon dioxide. The neutralisation reaction is simple: HCl + NaHCO3 -> NaCl + H2O + CO2.

As we get progressively more dehydrated, not only are the stomach cells incapable of releasing adequate amounts of water into the stomach in order to allow for the proper mixing of the food and acid into chyme with the optimal consistency, but the thickness of the protective mucus layer decreases, thus allowing the acidic contents to damage the fragile lining. This is what eventually leads to stomach ulcers, according to a well known specialist in the matter, Dr Batmanghelidj, author of Your Body’s Many Cries for Water.

The contents of the stomach are churned and blended between one and three hours depending on the amount and composition, until the chyme is liquified and smooth, at which point it is poured into the duodenum, the first part of the small intestine. It is in the small intestine that the real work of the break down and absorption of nutrients into the bloodstream takes place over a period of about 24 hours. The sensor cells in the duodenum will immediately determine the pH and composition of the chyme in order to send the messenger hormones to the pancreas to secrete the right amount of the alkaline, watery sodium bicarbonate solution necessary to neutralize the acid, and to the liver to secrete the right amount of bile needed for the breakdown of fats.

And even though the pancreas is known primarily for its role in producing and secreting insulin needed to clear the bloodstream of sugar, it is arguably its role in secreting this alkaline solution that is the most important. Indeed, as the duodenum does not have a protective layer of mucus as the stomach, it is this sodium bicarbonate solution that protects it and the rest of the small intestine from the devastating effects that the highly acidic chyme can have on it.

However, just as even partial dehydration causes the protective mucus layer in the stomach to dry out and shrink, making it permeable to the gastric acid that eats away at the delicate soft tissues, dehydration also causes the pancreas to be unable to secrete as much of the watery sodium bicarbonate solution as is required to fully neutralise the acidic chyme that, therefore, also damages the intestine. In fact, that there are several times more cases of duodenal as there are stomach ulcers attests to the reality that the lining of the intestine is all that much more fragile as it is unprotected and thus directly exposed to the excessively acidic chyme.

Therefore, water is of the utmost importance in protecting the lining of the stomach and intestine from the acid required for the break down of proteins into amino acids. Water is of the utmost importance for proper digestion and absorption of the nutrients in the food. And hence, water is of the utmost importance in maintaining a healthy digestive system meal after meal, day after day, and year after year throughout our life.

We must make sure that the body and digestive system are properly hydrated before eating. And for this, all we need to do is drink half a litre of plain water 30 minutes before meals, and not drink during nor after the meal for two to four hours.

Drinking during or soon after a meal will only dilute the chyme, making it excessively watery. This will not lower the pH, because water does not neutralise acid. It is best to ensure proper hydration prior to the start of the digestive process, providing the water necessary for the mucosa and pancreas to function optimally, and allow the stomach to adjust the water content of the chyme on its own. I personally usually wait two hours after a snack or small meal, and at least three to four hours after a large meal.

The time needed for the chyme to leave the stomach through the pyloric sphincter and enter the duodenum depends on its amount and composition. For example, fruit or any other food consisting mostly of simple sugars eaten on an empty stomach will make it into the intestine, and the sugar into the blood, in a matter of minutes: Since there is no protein, no acid is required for its breakdown in the stomach; and since there is no fat, no bile is required to break it down in the intestine.

Naturally, the time needed for the stomach to process a small meal will be less than that needed to process a large meal of more or less equal composition. In fact, given that our stomach is a very small pouch with an empty volume of about 50 ml, and a full volume of about 1 litre (up to a max of 2-3 litres when it is really extended),  the time needed for large meals increases substantially and disproportionately compared to smaller meals.