Water - 032

SPEAKER A The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalized, professional care. The opinions and ideas expressed are those of the speakers. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the information presented. Welcome to healthy living. I'm your host, Margot Marshall. Our ability to live and function is directly related to the amount of water we drink. Every body function requires water. Prepare to be amazed at the incredible benefits of this basic commodity. SPEAKER B Healthy Living is a production of 3ABN Australia television focusing on the health of the whole person body, mind and spirit. You'll learn natural lifestyle principles with practical health solutions for overall good healthy. SPEAKER A My guest today will be sharing a range of positive outcomes people have experienced as a result of adequate hydration. I think you'll be very surprised. Welcome, Dr. Clark. Do Australians have problems with hydration? SPEAKER C They sure do. In fact, 80% show signs that they aren't drinking enough water. SPEAKER A Is that right? SPEAKER C That's a lot, isn't it? SPEAKER A That's a lot. What about office workers? Would they be less prone because they're not out in the sun and they're not moving around? SPEAKER C Actually, they don't drink enough water either. Maybe they're a little bit too dependent upon their office environment. But 80% of Australians don't drink enough water, and they show the signs and symptoms of that lethargy poor mental performance. SPEAKER A So, speaking of having enough, most of the recommendations you tend to hear would be eight glasses or six to eight glasses a day. What's your take on that? SPEAKER C They've done studies on this that help to show how much water a person really does need. Actually the US. Military has done some of the biggest studies. One of their studies showed that for a man, they should drink just to maintain 3.7 liters a day. SPEAKER A 3.7? That's a lot more than you ever hear recommended. SPEAKER C It sure is. And a lot of people feel like they've had enough water to drink when they've satisfied their thirst. Yes, but this really isn't a good indicator. By the time you're thirsty, you're about 30% low on water. And you really don't want to be low because this mental performance thing is big. It's almost like you think that instead of policemen pulling somebody over for drink driving, they should pull them over for dehydrated driving. SPEAKER A Oh, wow. Is that right? Look, what about athletes? Athletes obviously need more. So what about athletes? How does it affect their performance? How much should they have? SPEAKER C They have to sort of keep track of how much activity they are in and what the temperatures are outside. A good indication whether you're well hydrated or not is what color your urine is. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER C If your urine is pale in color, then you're probably getting plenty of water. That is, if you're not taking a bunch of supplements that artificially cloud your urine. But if a person is drinking plenty of water, their urine will be relatively clear. Now, they've done studies on this where they took people and put them on a treadmill. They checked their body temperature. They wanted to see whether or not their temperature, their body would go up. Their cutoff point was at 100 degrees Fahrenheit. If the runner's temperature went up that high, then they would stop the experiment. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER C The first group of runners were not given any water. They ran on their treadmill and within 3 hours they had to quit because their temperature went up. SPEAKER A All right. SPEAKER C The next group of runners on the treadmill were allowed to drink as much water as they were thirsty for, and they drank the water as they felt they needed it. They ended up going between five and 6 hours, and then they had to quit. The third group of runners were given 30% more water than what they originally had been thirsty for. And when they had them drinking that much water, they never had to stop due to temperature. SPEAKER A Are they still going? SPEAKER C Well, they stopped it after 9 hours. SPEAKER A 9 hours. Very fit people to be running that long. SPEAKER C Yes. SPEAKER A Isn't that a remarkable thing? So anyone who wants athletic performance needs to really be thinking about their water intake. That's huge. SPEAKER C That's right. And if you're low on water, you're less efficient. The muscles aren't getting rid of toxins, the brain isn't getting rid of toxins. The blood starts getting thicker. When the blood gets thicker, you're more likely to clot. When you clot, then you're in big trouble, heart attacks, strokes and that kind of thing. It's very important to keep well hydrated for removing inflammation out of the body. Any dehydration means everything is more concentrated, more concentrated sugar, higher blood sugars, more concentrated cholesterol, higher blood cholesterols, more concentrated inflammatory mediators, more inflammation, more autoimmune disease, more pain, more suffering. SPEAKER A Well, that makes sense, doesn't it? So it dilutes all of the dilutes the blood, and then those things are diluted as well. Good sense. That's really good. I think you had a story about Everest as well. SPEAKER C Sir Edmund Hillary is our big famous guy for Everest. Previous groups had tried to climb Everest without much success, and then he decided he would take it on. One of the things he did that has been commented on as probably the reason why he had so much better success was that he made sure everybody drank their quota of water every day, so they were well hydrated, so that in climbing the mountain they would have good water in their blood. But it also means they can carry oxygen better. And so they made it to the top. SPEAKER A Yes. So that's fantastic. Just amazing. I suppose in that really cold environment, you're less inclined to want to be drinking, although I suppose they heat their water. But that doesn't usually make you want to drink a lot, does it? When you're in a very cold I think it's pretty cool up there. SPEAKER C Oh, yeah. Cold and the air is very thin. We had a friend decide to climb Mount Everest and came back and did a travel log and showed all the pictures. And it's no easy task. SPEAKER A No, absolutely not. What about some of the common illnesses? Is water helpful for those? SPEAKER C Yes, it sure is. People don't drink enough water, and that's one of the reasons they do get sick. High blood pressure. When people don't drink enough water, the blood gets thick, it gets low in volume, and so the blood vessels have to tighten up. When the blood vessels tighten up, that usually means high blood pressure. Then the heart will go faster. That'll increase the blood pressure just because they didn't drink enough water. And then their brains aren't functioning well as a result of this and poor mental performance. Is the result. Also diabetes. If people just drink more water, they can reduce their risk of diabetes pretty dramatically. And it has to do not only with thinning out the sugar in the blood, but it also has to do with how the body handles digestion. If your intestines are all dried out, then you're going to have trouble working the food and getting the nutrients out of it. So hydration is very important. We're about 70% water, at least we're supposed to be. There's a few people that are a very small fraction thereof, and maybe we can pick them out of a crowd. Well, maybe not. You might look well hydrated. One of the ways you can tell if you're well hydrated is you take the skin on the back of your hand and you pinch it and pull it up. And if it doesn't just bounce right back down, then you're probably dehydrated. We do that on patients in the nursing home just to check their hydration status. SPEAKER A Well, that's a nice simple test, isn't it? Maybe we should get everyone at home to do that. SPEAKER C Yeah. Okay, everybody pinch it up. There you go. I think it's pretty good. SPEAKER A I expected it would be, but it was. It's good. SPEAKER C Another challenge with dehydration is your stools. Now, a lot of people think, well, if I have hard stools, I'll eat prunes. But if they eat prunes, they don't drink any water. They'll just have hard prunes for stools. Because actually eating lots of dried fruit will dehydrate you because you have to put the water back into it before you can digest it. So if you're going to eat that dried fruit, drink as much water as the original fruit would have had to get the most out of it. But people who are constipated then get other diseases. Other diseases associated with constipation are low back pain. Pain from the intestines will refer back to the spine, and sometimes it's hard to figure out where the pain is coming from. Another one that people don't realize is that when you get constipated, a disease that comes up is Parkinson's disease. Classically parkinson's disease patients are dehydrated and constipated as much as ten years before they come down with their symptoms. SPEAKER A So they've been constipated for ten years. SPEAKER C And dehydrated and dehydrated. SPEAKER A And so do they think that's a causative factor of that? SPEAKER C Well, there's something related there. Whether it's cause or effect, it certainly plays into it. And we can certainly see from the effects of dehydration that it would play a role, because the brain doesn't function as well on low hydration. Alzheimer's disease is more common with dehydration. SPEAKER A Yes, you were mentioning that in the Alzheimer's talk, which we showing too. So talk about that. SPEAKER C If I have a brain that's totally dried out, then the neurotransmitters aren't moving around very fast. And when the neurotransmitters don't move around very fast, then I appear sort of slow and don't get things set or done very quickly. So if your neighbor is going slow, you might bring a glass of water over to them. It's interesting, people will end up with mental performance declines and also feel fatigued. And if you bring them water, they'll pick up. And the Bible even comments on this. In Isaiah 40 412, it says he drinks no water and is faint. SPEAKER A Well, I guess the good Lord knows all these things. Look, what about diet? Are there any things in the diet that can actually play a role with dehydration? SPEAKER C Yes, there certainly are. It's interesting if you eat sugar, one study, they put people on less sugar than the average Australian would eat in a day, and it cut their water consumption by about half. In other words, they drank half as much water by thirst when they ate sugar as they would otherwise have. Drunken. SPEAKER A Never would have guessed that. SPEAKER C Yes, it's a fascinating finding. Also, the type of food you eat affects the amount of water you get. Just take, for example, if you ate a watermelon, you get lots of water, but if you're eating chips, fried potatoes, there's not much water in there. A lot of it's been already removed by the heating process, and you're going to be more likely to dehydrate. SPEAKER A Any other benefits of good hydration? SPEAKER C Yes, especially for things like cholesterol. People who have too much cholesterol would do well to drink more water. You can raise your blood volume and it dilutes out the cholesterol. What's more, the water will make it so the cholesterol is less likely to go oxidized. Cholesterol is oxidized sometimes in your liver by bad diet, like eating high fructose foods. SPEAKER A Okay, what about would it help with detoxification water? SPEAKER C Yes, that's for sure. When people end up drinking water, you end up urinating. The urine is getting rid of toxins. If you're low on water, you won't urinate as much. On the other hand, drinking more water will increase your urine for two reasons. One, yes, you've increased the volume of your blood, but two, water is somewhat of a diuretic. So for our kidney failure patients, we tend to push more water than the average patient is told they should take, because water itself is a diuretic and increases water output, urine output. SPEAKER A Oh, that's fantastic. Are there any treatments you can use with water? SPEAKER C We use water in a lot of treatments that are very beneficial for folks. We call it hydro. For water therapy, as in treatment hydrotherapy. And we can use it first of all, just as a way of hydrating people taking a good bath can get water into you. But other things that are helpful about water is it changes your pattern of blood circulation. So we would use it like for a sore inflamed hurt ankle, for example. And the way we would use hydrotherapy is we would contrast hot water and cold water. Typically for a hurt ankle, we might put a bucket of hot water and the water would be as hot as you can stand, or maybe about 45, 46 degrees Celsius. Then we'd have a bucket of cold water into which we might even put a few ice cubes. We like the contrast. Then we'd have the person put their ankle into the hot water for three minutes. During that three minutes, they can move it around if it's comfortable. And this helps to bring blood to the area. The blood vessels all get bigger. You know how it is in the summer. You look at the blood vessels on the back of your hands when it's hot outside and they're sort of standing out it's because in hot temperatures, the blood vessels expand and more blood reaches that area. Well, that's what we're capitalizing on. By putting the foot in hot water. We want the blood to flow to the hurt ankle. It'll bring in the healing properties, it'll wash out the inflammation, it'll stir up the white blood cells to get to work and help the body heal. Then after three minutes in the hot, we take and put it in the cold. In the cold, the surface vessels close down first. When the surface vessels close down, that forces the extra blood coming down to that ankle in deep where the tenons ligaments, bones, joint are. And it helps to get the circulation down where the inflammation is. Then we take it back out of the cold and put it back in hot. And we basically are pumping the blood vessels. We'll get the inflammation out, we'll get swelling out extra fluid that's down there. And then when we go back and forth, the white blood cells, they wake up. This can raise your white blood count, incidentally. SPEAKER A Okay? SPEAKER C And the white blood cells are involved in fighting infection. We could also use this for an infection in any part of the body. Hot and cold treatments, they also help to wash out crystals like in gout. Helps get rid of those. So you can treat gout that way. The hot and cold also will tend to stir up the blood so it doesn't stagnate, a lot of stagnated blood will raise inflammation, and then we end with cold. And that's the end of the treatment. Dry off. When the limb comes out of the cold, then it sort of is calling for a warm up. And the body sends extra warming down. There extra blood down, there, extra nervous energy, and this makes it more metabolically active. So it'll heal faster, get rid of inflammation faster, get rid of pain faster. So hydrotherapy is hot and cold. Heat brings blood in, cold drives it out. Going back and forth tends to pump the blood in and out. SPEAKER A And you do that how many repeats did you say you do that? SPEAKER C I would do it five times. SPEAKER A Five times. Five times. SPEAKER C Cold ending with the cold, ending with the cold. It doesn't necessarily mean that I have to only do five. I could do it only three. I could do it ten. And some people have, especially if they're really hurting. And we've seen people get over arthritis doing this, back pain injuries. I used to work in the Veterans Administration Hospital out in California, where we had a lot of ex veterans who had drug problems, IV, needle injections. They would use heroin. They'd come in with an infected hand, with blood vessels all full of pus and so forth. And they'd come in and we'd say, okay, well, this is surgery service, so we'd be taking the surgery the next day. But I'd tell them now, if you'll go to the sink in the corner of the room and you'll do this hot and cold regimen, you might save yourself a surgery, say, do it. And if they would do that, usually by the next day it looks so much better, we would just say, okay, you're just going to sit and we'll watch it for a couple of days and you'll be fine. Because the hot and cold would bring the white cells in to clean up the pus. It would bring in the healing factors to clean up the ulcers and so forth, and they would get better. SPEAKER A It's such a simple thing to do, isn't it? And it's such a simple product. You can hardly imagine that anything as basic as water could do all the things that it does. But that's really good. And I think medical fees are pretty high in the US. SPEAKER C Very high, yes. That's the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States in 62% of cases, yes, even with people who have insurance, truly, they can still go bankrupt because it doesn't cover 75% of people going bankrupt due to medical bills, have insurance, are middle class, have good jobs, own their homes. SPEAKER A So how useful to know some of the things that you've been talking about in this program and in other programs. And there's something repetitive in this, because whatever's good for the brain is good for the body, is good for healing. And all of these nodalities are just across the board. But wouldn't you expect that it wouldn't it be a terrible thing if what was good for our brain was bad for our body or so on? So it shouldn't really come as a big surprise when you think that we have been created and the good Lord has got it all worked out. But that's really good. Do you have other treatments you do with water? SPEAKER C Certainly for the average person who isn't necessarily fighting with the disease but is fighting getting out of bed in the morning. SPEAKER A Well, throw a bucket of cold water on them. SPEAKER C If you take a trip to the bathroom and you get a face washer and you dip it in cold water and you scrub yourself from head to toe, you will be wide awake. It's better than a cup of coffee and you'll be prepared for the day. I did that this morning, actually. I got in the shower and turned it just on cold scrubbed myself from head to toe and wide awake. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER C So that I could face the day. When you do that, it actually prepares you to be able to fight colds. It boosts the immune system. It also gets your nervous system going so that you're wide awake so you don't have trouble waking up as opposed to coffee. When you drink a cup of coffee, it shuts down the blood flow to your brain by 30%. SPEAKER A It also dehydrates, doesn't it? SPEAKER C It sure does. How's that tendency? SPEAKER A It's working against exactly what you're trying to do. And I think it'd be really hard if you were drinking caffeine drinks to also drink the water and then the water that you've lost because of the caffeine drinks. And I don't think people can really that would be hard to do. I can't imagine that they would be able to compensate. SPEAKER C It'd be very challenging. SPEAKER A I think there's some places in the US. That have found that providing water for their employees is a good investment. SPEAKER C I worked at a hospital for a while where a lot of the employees were going to see the doctor. Too often the CEO of the hospital was concerned it costs the hospital a lot of money. And so he came to the wellness department and he said, what are we going to do? See, hospital employees see disease all the time, so they're worried they have it and they know what tests can be run and so they ask for them. So it's a very expensive group to keep on top of. And so he said, what can we do to reduce the amount of expenditures that we're having to do for health care for our employees? And so they started thinking and the health department said, okay, we got an idea. We have a plan. Let's put free bottles of water in all the break rooms. And so they decided to do that. Free bottled water. Every Thursday, the man from Central Supply would come around with a forklift dropping off pallets of water. We'd put them away in the break rooms. And then during the week, the employees, instead of going down to the soda machine, instead of going off to the cafeteria for a coffee, they would grab a bottle of water. We would sit around after surgery in the break room, and we'd all grab our water and drink away. It cost the hospital $25,000 for that year to keep water in all the break rooms. SPEAKER A That's a lot of money for water, isn't it? SPEAKER C That's a lot of money. SPEAKER A Wow. SPEAKER C But then at the end of the year, when they calculated how much they had saved on insurance utilization, they had reduced insurance utilization by $240,000 just from the extra water. SPEAKER A That was a good investment. That was an amazing investment. So clearly they were beginning to see the importance of water. It's good to think that a hospital facility would actually understand that and implement it at considerable cost. They must have actually understood. Were you there telling them all this? Were you, John? Was that your idea? SPEAKER C Wasn't my idea. It was my wellness nurse's idea. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER C And so this meant less time in the doctor's office for these people, less time off work, more time to go spend with family and friends. SPEAKER A And I suppose if we translated that into a family situation, not that you have to spend huge amounts of money on bottles of water. I mean, you can have your own bottle, as we do, and just fill it up. So it doesn't even have to really cost anything remarkable. SPEAKER C Right. SPEAKER A And what a saving to families in terms of medical bills. And it's not just that. I mean, it's not much fun being sick. It really isn't, is it? So the quality of life just goes down and so on. So what a great idea. What else can you tell us about water? SPEAKER C Bathing is indispensable. I mean, we all know when we need to take a bath. But sometimes taking a bath regularly, whether you think you need it or not, is very effective. You see, your skin is like your second lung. Each of those pores in your skin can take on oxygen and let off waste products. But if the skin pores become clogged, you can't get rid of waste products. And so you end up putting extra burden on your lungs, which are involved in getting rid of waste products, your kidneys, which are involved in getting rid of waste products, and your liver. And so you end up with more liver disease, more lung disease, more kidney disease. So taking a bath is very important. And in taking a bath, one of the important parts is scrubbing the skin thoroughly. I like to use bathing gloves or shower gloves. You can get them at most big W's or whatever shops, and they're really good. And when you scrub your skin good, then it makes it more healthy, makes it more likely to get rid of toxins. It also stimulates the blood flow of the skin. It helps get rid of spots in the skin that are starting to develop due to the skin not having good circulation. And so there's a lot of benefit to bathing. SPEAKER A So that's a very simple thing to do too. You wouldn't really think about that being such an important you just think of getting clean. That's why we usually take a bath. But you don't really think about all those other benefits that come with it just from a simple bath or a shower. So those little gloves I've got some, you can just pick them up at a chemist or anywhere. Well, how often would you suggest doing that? Every time you bath or shower or once a week? Or how often? SPEAKER C Doing the scrubbing? You could do it every time you bath or shower. And some people bathe or shower more often than others. Sort of depends on the temperature outside and how active you've been. But it's good to take a bath or shower several times a week. SPEAKER A Oh, yes, it would. Very good. Well, that's been quite a lineup of benefits of something that you could hardly imagine could be so beneficial in just so many ways. Is there anything else, or should we just recap and think about go over some of the things that you already talked about? SPEAKER C I think recapping is very good and thinking about what we've talked about because water I'll just let you in on a secret in our family. I might get in trouble for this. No, not really. My mom doesn't drink a lot of water. We're always sort of getting on her to drink water, but she says, I just don't feel thirsty for it. And this is the excuse that a lot of Australians give. We just don't feel thirsty for it. And that's why 80% of Australians are dehydrated. And so if you drink more water than you figure you need, you'll be better off. I tell people when you get up in the morning, drink a liter, then mid morning, between breakfast and lunch, I say at least 2 hours after meal, so you don't dilute the digestive juices that are trying to digest the meal, and at least a half hour before the next meal, so the same thing doesn't happen. So one when you get up one liter midmorning and then one liter mid afternoon and then whatever water you feel like drinking. And that usually keeps people well hydrated. I tend to make the last large water drinking a little while before bedtime. SPEAKER A That's a good idea. SPEAKER C And so that would be three liters. This helps with mental performance, it helps with physical stamina, and it also helps with people who are having trouble with urinary tract infections, which they need to have enough water flowing through them to keep washing those bacteria out of them. SPEAKER A Yes, all of those things. So what else is there yeah. SPEAKER C Sorry. If I got sick with a cold or a flu or thought I was coming down with it, I would head for the shower to do a hydrotherapy treatment. SPEAKER A Is that right? SPEAKER C And what I would do is I get in the shower and I turn it as hot as I can stand. Now, my usual procedure is to leave it on hot until I feel like I'm getting hot. In other words, my temperature is going up a bit. First time I did it, I did stick a thermometer in my mouth and sort of got the feeling for how I felt when my temperature was going up. And then when my temperature goes up a little bit, then I switch to cold for 1 minute, then I'll go back to hot for at least three minutes, or until I feel warm again, and then back to cold. And then I'll have the cold for 1 minute and then I'll go to bed, maybe for the night or at least a half hour. When I do that, I'll usually get in bed and I'll sweat a bit. But if I do that at the onset of a cold or a flu and maybe drink a little charcoal, as we talked about in a previous talk, then I'll pretty much be assured that my cold will be gone by the next day and I won't be continuing. SPEAKER A By the next day. That is fantastic. Well, thank you so much for all that great information. If you'd like to watch our programs on demand, just go to our website at 3abnaustralia.org.au , and click on the watch button. And I think now would be a very good time to have a drink of water. So here's to your health. SPEAKER B You’ve been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia Television.