I feel one of the biggest issues in modern medicine is that patients often don’t get the opportunity to establish a genuine relationship with their physician and hence often lack the critical voice necessary for a therapeutic doctor-patient relationship.
Because of this, my goal here was always to be able to correspond with everyone who reached out to me (e.g., through comments). Unfortunately, due to the unexpected reach of this publication (two hundred thousand readers), I don’t have the time to both do that and to write here. For that reason, I decided the best solution was to have monthly open threads where people could ask whatever they wanted on any topic and I would make a point to always reply to them.
In tandem with these open threads, I try to have them tie to a subject that I feel is important to cover, but isn’t enough to be the focus of an entire article. For this month’s post, since water is a foundation of our body’s health, I would like to share my perspectives on the healthiest types of water to drink.
Note: I am currently finishing up a month long project on an article on DMSO and hematoxylin (two easily accessible compounds) which when combined, have over the years been shown to be a remarkable cancer therapy but like many things unfortunately was stonewalled by the FDA and became another Forgotten Side of Medicine.
The Water Industry
Over the decades I’ve been in the holistic health field, I’ve noticed device after device hit the market which claims to produce the optimal source of water for you to drink, frequently has a lot of marketing behind it, briefly becomes popular and in many cases, then fades into obscurity and is forgotten. This in turn has led me to cynically conclude the primary reason why these products are created is because they are easy to market, not because they are necessarily helpful.
From having extensively studied the subject, presently, I believe the following:
•There are so many unhealthy things in the water that any filter that can remove some of them is better than nothing.
•Many of the things you want to take out (e.g., fluoride) can only be taken out by a reverse osmosis water system, so if at all possible you should use one of them.
•There are a variety of other decent water filtration methods that many people get invested in, and may have specific advantages (e.g., Berkey water filters are gravity fed so they can be operated without electricity or an existing water pressure) but they are simply not as good at filtering as a reverse osmosis system.
•I do not like alkaline water filters (as I believe it is not good to neutralize your stomach acid) and I believe many of the benefits attributed to alkaline water filters come from how alkalinity can somewhat improve zeta potential or the fact that alkaline water generators often produce molecular hydrogen in the water.
Note: as Dr. Mercola discusses here, it is fairly unlikely alkaline water devices will actually change your pH.
•There are a variety of products which “energize” or “structure” water. Some people (e.g., those belonging to the “sensitize constitutional archetype”) find they help, but having explored this for years, all I can say is that the results vary immensely depending upon the product and the person who uses it.
•The one (recent) innovation I’ve repeatedly seen provide some degree of benefit to users are the hydrogen water bottles (which electrolyzes water so it becomes full of dissolved hydrogen and oxygen—which may also provide some of the benefit of the water). Many of the devices that do this are fairly cheap, so I believe if you want to experiment with a water product to see if it benefits you (e.g., some athletes find drinking hydrogen water increases their endurance) it’s the one to try.
Note: these is a significant amount of scientific evidence demonstrating the benefits of hydrogen water for a variety of conditions. Much of it has been compiled by The Molecular Hydrogen Institute.
•I like fresh spring water, but the value of it again varies immensely depending on the spring (a few are very good, many however are not). Additionally, I find long term consumption of spring water frequently causes issues for people due to the dissolved (positively charged) minerals disrupting their physiologic zeta potential (e.g., I know a few people who went on prolonged spring water diets who then developed cardiac arrhythmias). Finally, I believe if you want to store spring water, it needs to be stored in glass, as otherwise it loses the life-giving quality many attribute to spring water.
Note: when I was younger I spent a lot more time exploring spring water, but now that I live in a part of the Midwest that doesn’t have any springs to drink from, I’ve stopped doing that. For those sincerely interested in the topic, people around the world have spent years compiling a list of springs around the world on this website.
•I believe one of the most important but least appreciated water filtration needs is for showers. This is because once water is heated, chlorine will off gas from water, which results in people frequently breathing it significant amounts of it in while showering. In turn, I and many others have found a subset of patients (e.g., singers or those with a sensitive throat) find certain chronic symptoms improve once they get a chlorine shower filter, and likewise that it feels much better for the skin and hair if they use a dechlorinated shower. Given that shower chlorine filters cost very little and last for a long time, I believe they are an excellent health investment.
•Generally speaking, I believe you should not have ice in the water you drink. This is partially because the ice often comes from very dirty sources (especially on airplanes) and partially because it adversely affects your digestion (which for instance is why Chinese Medicine they advise many patients to not have cold drinks with meals).
Lastly, there are a variety of water products I believe sometimes have merit (e.g., Quinton Water), but since there are so many of them out there, I feel going into those is beyond the scope of a monthly open thread.
Reverse Osmosis Water
Throughout my life, I’ve seen a variety of things suggesting reverse osmosis (RO) water is the ideal liquid to drink. I believe many of the benefits of RO water are a result of some combination of the following:
•As mentioned before, RO is the most reliable way to remove toxins from water (although this requires having good quality filters which proceed the RO step).
•RO breaks water into much smaller clusters, which in turn makes it easier for that water to enter the cells of the body.
•The water being deionized by RO improves the physiologic zeta potential.
Note: distilled water also deionizes water.
In turn, we frequently find RO water just “feels good” to drink, and I often see patients experience clear benefits when they start drinking RO water.
Conversely, since selling water is such a competitive business, each business will come up with a variety of reasons to attack competing products.
In the case of reverse osmosis (RO) water, some of the most common arguments I’ve see raised against it are that it depletes you of vital minerals, its production process wastes a lot of water and it leaches toxins from its containers.
In my own experience, the first point primarily holds true for magnesium. This is because:
•Our bodies are quite sensitive to lowered magnesium levels (e.g., this can cause heart arrhythmias or muscle pain).
•We often depend upon water for our daily magnesium intake
•Many foods are now magnesium deficient (due to modern agricultural practices having demineralized the soil and the herbicide Roundup binding many of the essential minerals that remain in the soil), and as a result widespread magnesium deficiencies already exist.
For these reasons, I often advise people who plan to drink RO water for a prolonged period to also take a magnesium supplement (preferably magnesium threonate, malate, orotate or citrate—magnesium oxide is not good).
I don’t really agree with the second point, because while extremely inefficient RO systems exist (e.g., ones that waste 95% of the water you put into them) most waste between 20%-75% of the water during the filtration process. Given that people drink 3 liters of water per day, this translates to around 10 liters of water being wasted per day, which is equivalent to 1-2 toilet flushes or someone spending about one minute in the shower (or about 2.6% of the average amount of water someone uses).
In regards to the leaching perspective, I think this can be a valid point (e.g., if RO water is stored in old plastic containers or tanks, it can develop a plastic taste). For this reason, I try to store RO water in glass containers and make sure I don’t use a poor quality RO system to store water.
Note: conversely some people argue that RO’s ability to “leach” substances makes it helpful for detoxification protocols.
Reverse Osmosis Water and Zeta Potential
One of the greatest challenges in medicine is determining how much something actually helps people, as frequently the “benefit” is small and takes a long time to manifest. In turn, one of the reasons I was so drawn to the zeta potential concept was that one would immediately notice significant differences once something was done to restore their physiologic zeta potential and conversely, I repeatedly saw serious complications immediately follow a disruption of one’s zeta potential (e.g., I’ve never forgotten a patient I met when I admitted her the hospital after she suffered a textbook zeta potential collapse from receiving a pneumococcal vaccine).
Zeta potential, briefly, quantifies the tendency of particles that are (colloidally) suspended in a solution to clump together or remain separated and dispersed from each other. The degree of clumping present, in turn, determines how freely a fluid will flow, so when individuals have an impaired zeta potential, it will cause fluid stagnation throughout the body.
This fluid stagnation is often immensely consequential as almost every part of the body depends upon a healthy fluid circulation (e.g., people’s legs swell when fluid gets stuck in them and can’t flow back out). The consequences of an impaired zeta potential are particularly apparent in the blood, as once blood cells begin to clump together, the circulation significantly diminishes and severe conditions like heart arrhythmias, blood clots or strokes can follow.
To illustrate: the therapeutic usage of improving the physiologic zeta potential was originally developed by a colloidal engineer in the 1960s (at a time when therapeutics for heart conditions were sorely lacking). He built upon (sadly forgotten) medical research that showed many illnesses resulted from blood cells sludging together and concluded the clumping he saw in colloidal systems was the cause of this sludging. He then theorized that clumped blood was harder for the heart pump, so that to treat arrhythmias, the blood needed to be unclumped.
This worked (treating his severe heart arrhythmia) and gradually caught on (initially for heart conditions and then a variety of other ailments like dementia and poor wound healing). In turn, while readers here have reported a variety of improvements from restoring their physiologic zeta potential (e.g., fatigue, neuropathies, cold fingers or tinnitus), the most common feedback I’ve received is that restoring their physiologic zeta potential fixed their atrial fibrillation.
Note: I also had a reader who reported drinking my favorite bottled water brand (which has zeta potential enhancing ingredients) greatly improved her heart palpitations along with a few other issues like waking up with extreme dryness in the middle of the night.
Since zeta potential is largely determined by the balance of positive and negative charges in the body, certain agents (particularly aluminum—which is present in most vaccines) have very strong positive charges which in tiny concentrations cause large amounts of fluid to clump together. For example the main method of purifying sewage (which is composed of small organic waste matter particulates suspended in water) is to mix it with a flocculating agent so those suspended particles clump together and then settle out to the bottom where a sludge exists that can be separated from the rest of the water.
As aluminum is highly effective at disrupting zeta potential, it (primarily Al₂(SO₄)₃ ) is commonly used to treat municipal water it is hence frequently found in drinking water. Unfortunately, while the EPA puts limits on how much aluminum can be there, unlike many other regulations, those limits are strictly voluntary and the EPA only discloses that higher levels of aluminum can create “colored water” (due to it causing colloids in the water to clump together and become visible). As such, I believe it is important to use a filtration system (e.g., reverse osmosis) that removes these aluminum particles from drinking water.
Because of this, we frequently observe individuals have severe consequences when exposed to a zeta potential reducing agent. For example, as I show here, many of the subtle neurological injuries that have been observed for over a century from vaccines (which contain typically contain aluminum adjuvants) occur concurrently with microstrokes that affect the cranial nerves (e.g., causing facial paralysis or eye changes), and as such, restoring the physiologic zeta potential is a critical component of rehabilitating vaccine injuries.
Similarly, the COVID-19 spike protein (due to its positive charge density) is also highly effective at impairing the physiologic zeta potential. This is why COVID-19 patients would often have issues like microclots, and what I believe underlies many of the highly unusual medical issues seen in those injured by the COVID vaccines. Likewise, beyond the severe injuries, many people I know who were vaccinated no longer have eyes that no longer move smoothly when they look to the side.
Furthermore, while not as common, we’ve seen quite a few cases of someone having a stroke after they ate something cooked in aluminum, and I’ve read of many cases where a human or animal (e.g., a parrot) gradually developed a severe illness which went away after it stopped drinking water which was stored or cooked in aluminum. This is particularly unfortunate because almost all non-stick cookware on the market either utilizes a toxic substance (e.g., teflon) or is comprised of a thin layer of the safe non-stick coating (e.g., ceramic) lining an aluminum pan which inevitably begins to peels off and expose you to the aluminum underneath.
Note: I believe many of the health “issues” people ascribe to consuming salt are actually due to the fact aluminum is frequently added to salt products.
Typically, the kidneys are responsible for maintaining the physiologic zeta potential, which they do by excreting the most problematic positive charges (e.g., aluminum) while retaining the beneficial negative charges. In turn, since renal function declines with age, zeta potential worsens as well, and I believe many of the complications of aging are ultimately a result of a gradual loss of the physiologic zeta potential (particularly since restoring it greatly improves those degenerative conditions).
Note: I adopted the initial RO unit I used after I found out a hospital was using it for patients with kidney failure because it was the only filtration system which effectively removed aluminum from water they used for dialysis (toxic levels of aluminum are a recurring issue for these patients).
A variety of approaches exist for improving zeta potential, but most of them essentially boil down to avoiding the problematic positive charges (e.g., reducing your aluminum exposure) and adding beneficial negative charges to the body. In turn, I have found that many of the holistic therapies which have a wide range of positive benefits attributed to them (e.g., Earthing) all share the common thread of improving zeta potential.
Drinking deionized water forms a critical part of the zeta potential protocols because it eliminates many of the positive charges from the water you ingest which the kidneys would otherwise need to eventually eliminate. This is particularly important because the kidneys function much more efficiently when they have a low workload on them (i.e., not having to work against as high of a positive ion concentration gradient in the blood).
In short, all of the pioneers of treating zeta potential found that while drinking deionized water or consuming the correct negative charges helped, both typically had to be done together for anyone with a significant zeta potential impairment. This, in turn, has matched my own clinical and personal experience (as I am more sensitive to zeta potential disruptions—e.g., I’ve experienced minor microstrokes from eating food that was stored in aluminum).
Note: I’ve had a few older patients who switched from drinking RO water to well water and then developed a variety of unusual illnesses I was ultimately able to attribute to a loss of zeta potential (as well water often contains a significant amount of positively charged minerals).
