This page is long and doesn’t yet explain how to solve this situation or what the best route is. Long story short, alkaline water most likely has amazing health benefits, but costs $10 per day per person for a quality source. Otherwise there are some larger investments that can save money if someone is serious about this. Contact me if you need more info.
If we dehydrated ourselves, we’d weigh about 30% of our original body weight. As I continued to dig deeper into the functionality of the human body, I continued to realize how important this ratio of water vs other nutrients can be.
On average, we consume twice as much water as food by weight each day. So as we navigate the complex recipe of balanced nutrition, we may still be consuming an incorrect version of 70% of our mass.
Researching the topic of water and health is difficult. Water may influence so many different aspects of life and health. And many areas still lack solid understanding and information. Although there is a good amount of data on water, it is very complex and still has not been compared to information we need in order to investigate it’s health properties easily.
My three day experiment with 8.4 pH water
After some initial research, I decided to head to the local supermarket and stock up on the most natural looking spring water, without any signs of RO filtration etc, and the highest pH. I spent about $30 on a brand called Icelandic Glacial water with a pH of 8.4. I’ve had this a few times in the past and noticed I felt more hydrated when I drank it vs other quality bottled waters. NSF water test for Icelandic
I wasn’t forcing myself to chug water, but I kept a bottle in my hand or by my side, and drank about 1 liter every 2 hours or so. About 2-3 liters in, I started getting a sore throat and wondering if I was starting to get the flu. Then I needed to blow my nose a bunch and started thinking about how odd the timing of this was. Usually if I start feeling ill, it’s as I’m laying down to sleep, or as I wake. But this was happening around 6pm. So I started wondering if it was the water, and slowed down for the evening. My sore throat was gone by the time I laid down for bed.
The next morning I woke up with more energy than I’d had recently, and my joints were a little sore. I’ve noticed several times when I find a supplement my body needed, or have a good meal loaded with a nutrient I needed, I’ll wake up the next morning with a little joint pain, as if something were repaired. The morning after the new water, I also woke up blowing a bunch of stuff out of my nose and clearing my throat. Not always, but some mornings I’ll blow my nose once or twice, but nothing consistent since starting to eat better years ago. But if I find a good nutrient or anything that helps my body detox, I’ll tend to have to blow my nose a lot when I wake up and as I get a few glasses of water down. After the new water, I spent the first half of the day blowing my nose and coughing a bit to clear my throat. Just from drinking a different type of water. And this is after 4-5 years of detox and almost 10 years of eating cleaner. I knew something was going on here with water pH, I had to figure out how.
This is where things get difficult. I quickly realized we don’t understand much about water, and we don’t understand much about it’s direct impact on our cells. But I’ve noticed this water quench my thirst better several times. And now I’ve felt it give me energy and cause a few common healing reactions after only a few hours and days. Maybe natural water with a high pH is able to hold more energy of some sort?..
We don’t understand much about this, which causes this subject to end up in the “taboo” section. But I’m going to explain what I figured out and how I understand it for anyone that likes to think outside the profit-generation-box for a few minutes. If we search for benefits of alkaline water, we’ll find a handful of articles pointing out what a waste it is, because there are no solid studies on direct health benefits. This is almost like saying pure air doesn’t have solid evidence of being beneficial, even though there is tons of data showing polluted air causing many deaths around the globe.
I started by testing the situation with an investment of $10 per day, for 3 days. Some people try alkaline water for 2-4 weeks and notice many benefits. After feeling the benefits myself, I looked into why, and I think I see what’s going on.
Looking at the pH aspect, we can find some interesting connections. In this paper from Yale in 1981, I found:
Normal operation of metabolism in most cells and tissues results in net production of hydrogen ions.. ..The requirement that intracellular pH (pH1) be maintained within relatively narrow limits therefore necessitates constant removal of free protons from the cytoplasm. Although protein buffering can accomplish this task for small loads or over the short term, over the long term, protons must actually be expelled across cell plasma membranes.
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/78/9/5903.full.pdf
What this says, is that normal cell operation produces hydrogen atoms, and although proteins can buffer this extra charge for a short term, eventually they need to be expelled from the cell. This is important because when our cells have to do anything, like export exhaust, it costs energy.
Do you know what hydrogen ions are? They are what we measure when we look at the pH of something. Guess which type of water is low in hydrogen ions? Alkaline!
It’s very likely that consuming alkaline water is like consuming a large hydrogen ion sponge that slowly fills up with our cell’s exhaust. Where as otherwise if we consume water already loaded with hydrogen ions, our body will have to expend more energy to get the cell exhaust out, and keep things in balance.
The further I dig into the science of water, the more it appears as though nobody understands it very well, especially when it comes to how it functions in our body. I’ve come across marketing information that claims alkaline water has it’s molecules held further apart in a smaller shape. But I can only find just barely enough info to make a weak connection.
Water is much smaller than almost all other molecules.
One liter of water contains about 33 million million million million molecules.
A story of someone’s experience with 9.5 pH water https://www.foodnetwork.com/healthyeats/diets/2019/08/i-switched-to-alkaline-water
Water dissociation and pH (extremely advanced info)
http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_dissociation.html
The physical nature and the correct definition of hydrogen bond (advanced)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.00295.pdf