Come with me and you’ll see we’re in a world of chronic dehydration. According to the lay press and somebody I spoke to this morning, 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. And the important thing for you to know is that the quality of the water you are drinking really is what’s important to the quality of your hydration levels. In fact, you may not make a more important decision for your health every day than the water that you’re drinking, second only to maybe the air that you’re breathing.
There’s something called the consumption concept. The consumption concept looks at the world and says the things that are the most abundantly available are probably the most important for your health. In fact, you would die the fastest if you did not have air to breathe, which is the most abundantly available. The second most abundantly available thing is water, and you would die second fastest without water. You could go for days and days and days without food, but you cannot go that many days without water.
So let’s take a clear look at the quality of the water that you’re drinking, and we can do that thanks to the ewg.org. I’m going to share with you the local tap water quality where I live and why I drink only mineral water, and I’ll show you more about that in a second. This is the city of Mansfield, Texas, where we have our clinic. You’ll see here that it goes through and examines the water, and you can put in your zip code up here and find your tap water quality anywhere in the country. It shows that we have 12 contaminants that exceed the EWG’s health guidelines.
Now I don’t want to cause anybody panic, but I want you to have awareness and know that these chemicals that are in here have consequences. In fact, it’ll tell you what these consequences are when you go down here. And here’s the piece that you should probably know if you are trying to stay healthy as long as possible—the potential effect. It’ll show you here: could be cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer. Multiples of these show the potential effect of that.
Now you want to learn more about this, but the point being this is not how water should have been available to us in nature. There’s obviously things that have happened to the water that make it unnatural. So my advice is to look for natural sources of water, and my favorite is going to be spring water. In fact, I’m fortunate enough to be very near a place called Mineral Wells, Texas, that has mineral water in the form of Crazy Water. I think this is a fun website to share with you as well because they have little bubbles coming up on it, and it says very clearly here “infused by Mother Nature.”
Why is that important? Well, when we’re thinking about water, we want things that are going to be giving us health instead of taking health away from us. Because a lot of times people think, well, I’ll just distill my water and then I’m just getting straight H2O. And that actually is not a good way to go about this, because nature abhors a vacuum, and water that’s been distilled without minerals is a vacuum. So when you put this vacuum into your body, it takes minerals from your body to balance it out.
Much wiser and much more in sync with nature would be to drink mineral water. And if you look at this mineral water—you can look it on the website there—it does contain calcium and potassium and bicarbonate and magnesium. So this is actually a way that you can be getting a lot of the micronutrient minerals that people need every day. Instead of having to take a supplement, you could be getting it in the water that you’re drinking every day. And I find that very important because we do need to drink water.
You’ll hear people say, well, people who drink a lot more water actually become dehydrated. And that depends on the quality of the water—if it doesn’t have minerals—because we have to make sure that we have those in there.
So very briefly, if you are going to pick one thing to focus on to improve your health as much as possible, think about the quality of the water that you’re drinking. The quality of the water that you’re using to make your coffee, to make your tea, to do anything that you are going to be putting into your body—be mindful of the quality of the water, and that could be all the difference.
Stay healthy.
Reposted with permission from Dustin Strong, Strong On Health.
Image from iStock/Denis Shevchuk.
