We are 60-90% water so you would think that our understanding of water in relation to health was deep and wide wouldn’t you?
Water is the basis of all life and that includes your body.
Your muscles that move your body are 75% water; your blood that transports nutrients is 82% water; your lungs that provide you with oxygen are 90% water; your brain that is the control centre of your body is 76% water; even your bones are 25% water.
Yet in mainstream nutrition the extent of advice in relation to water rarely goes beyond the standard; “drink 2 litres a day to avoid dehydration”.
Dehydration is, of course, important as; water facilitates nearly every process in the body. Dehydration can limit physical performance, cause tiredness and impact gut health and so much more. But there’s a lot more to water than its obvious physical impact on our health.
In this piece we are going to start to uncover the many facets of the element of water. This river runs deep so there will be much more to come.
First it is worth looking at where most of us obtain our water. The tap. Here lies the first potential issue!
Highlighted in the compelling film ‘Dark Water’s’ was the issue of a common group of toxins informally known as ‘forever chemicals’ due to their ability to persist in the environment long term without breaking down. Thousands – approximately 4700 in total – of these different grease proof chemicals are used in everything from cookware, clothes, furniture and car washes and are known collectively as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances).
When these chemicals enter the environment they accumulate in the soil, water, livestock, wildlife and of course us humans! Following a landmark legal case involving a huge epidemiological study that linked PFAS to high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, testicular cancer, kidney cancer and pregnancy-induced hypertension.
According to this recent article in the Guardian, the UK government is not testing drinking water for these chemicals all while in the rest of the world people are falling sick and suing water companies for hundreds of millions of dollars for the toxic and harmful substances in their tap water.
There are many other concerns with tap water too. How concerned we should be is still up for debate but it is certainly true that trace amounts of medications including hormones and antidepressants and recreational drugs are finding their way into our water supplies.
In the UK over a billion prescriptions are dispensed every year and ultimately these medications end up in our waste systems and water courses. This is undoubtedly having an impact on our health and it is certainly having a negative effect on wildlife.
At Brunel University, Prof Sumpter has been studying the effects of pharmaceuticals in our waterways ever since intersex fish – male fish exhibiting female traits such as egg production – were first spotted in UK rivers in the 1990s.
Our medications aren’t just fiddling with the sexual orientation of our fish either. In one study researchers found prozac was turning guppies into ‘zombies’ unable to fully function. Apparently unsuspecting starlings are getting a mood boost from their foraged insects in sewage treatment works and crayfish in rivers with water from treatment plants are behaving boldly leaving themselves vulnerable to predation! Yikes.
- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/15/crayfish-behave-more-boldly-after-exposure-to-antidepressants-study
- https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/prozac-turns-guppies-zombies
The possibility of our water impacting fertility and health is turning many towards collecting water from springs and has seen the sales of water filters boom in recent years.
Just as we have a growing ‘raw’ milk movement we too have a surge of interest in seeking ‘raw’ water; unfiltered, untreated and unsterilised.
So of course many many ‘wild’ water sources are contaminated nowadays. It is advised to have a spring tested if you find a reliable source.
My own personal rule for taking wild water is that I only take water where I know for sure there’s no houses, buildings or livestock gathering areas above it. I have the good fortune of working in wilderness areas (on our Wilderculture projects) and have felt first hand the benefits of drinking water straight from a crystal clear mountain burn or a limestone spring.
Spring water is also abundant in healthy minerals such as silica, magnesium and calcium and contains healthy microbes and probiotics – something we will talk about in our next article introducing the gut microbiome.
When we visit the Wilder Carna project on Isle of Carna to check on our livestock we always drink from the streams. Within one day the probiotic effects of the water kick in improving sluggish digestion – it’s like a tonic.
But there’s more to wild water than just good bugs and a taste better than the finest claret.
Another benefit of spring water is that it comes up from the earth structure which means the molecules are arranged in cohesive hexagonal form.
You can dive deep into the science by watching the video below but in short it seems that there is in fact a ‘fourth’ phase of water that is physically and chemically distinct from the solid, liquid and vapour phases that we are familiar with. This fourth phase offers an answer to some problems that science hasn’t yet explained such as how does the water get from the tree roots to the leaves without a pump, how on earth do red blood cells that are twice the size of a capillary successfully feed our tissues, and how on earth do clouds stay together?
Who knew! I had just assumed that clever scientists had worked this stuff out years ago – apparently not.
Proponents of structured water believe it offers many health benefits to humans.
1. Cell recovery
Restructured water can increase cell recovery through the net energy savings on cellular level. Our cells don’t have to process unstructured water for their use when it is already fully available in its resonant hexagonal structure. This can feel like an endurance and energy increase.
2. Increased detoxification
Water on a regular basis can help to dissipate harmful chemicals from the body and also dissonant frequencies which might create further disease. This way structured water workshelps as a preventative health care measure and supports our bodies to balance and remain in a healthy harmonic state.
3. Balancing of metabolism and stress response
Energized water can help to balance your cellular stress response. Increased organ activity and improved resilience can be some of the results. You may find yourself going to the bathroom a bit more frequently than before having structured water in your life.
4. Increased bioavailability
Water is most resonant in its hexagonal and structured state. This increases the efficacy of solved minerals due to enhanced vibrational and chemical transmissions. Less of everything is necessary to create the same results. Deep intracellular hydration and optimized mineral uptake can be the outcome.
The medicine laced, treated water that travels through long artificial pipelines and chemical processes loses its structure along with the many benefits of our wilder water.
Although still widely debated in the human health world, it has been well established in the scientific literature that livestock benefit greatly from having access to ‘wild’ or structured water. Proven benefits include increased rate of growth, reduced markers of oxidative stress, improved glycemic and insulinemic responses in diabetics, improved blood lipid profile, improved semen and spermatozoa quality, and increased tissue conductivity as measured using bioelectrical impedance analysis.
- https://www.healthline.com/health/structured-water
- https://academic.oup.com/jas/article/99/5/skab063/6152506
In my regenerative agriculture training the water cycle is one of the most important ecosystem processes to help farmers understand. All productivity and land health is tied to how effective their rainfall is captured and retained in the soil. In a soil that has lost its structure, is capped, bare and hard, the rainfall will run off and any moisture that is retained will quickly evaporate. This is the start of desertification.
In a healthy water cycle the rainfall hits tall vegetation and a mulch protects the surface of the soil preventing evaporation. Through capillary action the water seeps down the long roots into deep layers within the soil. The plants have an unlimited supply of moisture to grow throughout the year leading to higher yields and the continued sequestration of carbon into the soil. Every 1% increase in soil carbon allows the soil to hold an additional two buckets of water per square metre, further improving a farm’s resilience to drought and flood.
A healthy small water cycle compounds into creating a functional big water cycle that can even improve our climate. In her book ‘Water in plain sight’ Judith Shwartz beautifully explains the many mechanisms that contribute to desertification. And this is important because an area half the size of the European union is desertifying under our conventional management annually.
One such example is where large areas of arable land are left bare fallow in an attempt to preserve water and prevent weeds. The problem is that bare soil gets extremely hot which causes huge heat islands of high pressure that actually drive away the rain clouds!
We are causing our own droughts.
The negative impacts of bare soil don’t stop there either, the scorching temperatures kill the soil organisms leaving farmers more reliant on chemical inputs. The soil damage caused by high temperatures leads to an increasingly ineffective small water cycle and further loss of carbon into the atmosphere!
Through the adoption of regenerative agriculture we can reverse the trends of desertification and water cycle dysfunction creating resilient food production systems that sequester carbon and restore the cooling functions of the planet.
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