In a time of a public health crisis, we each need to ask ourselves first and foremost how can we be better stewards of our daily health habits.
Are we managing the basics like drinking enough water, choosing a sugar-light diet, moving/stretching and doing deep breathing? After all, the best health care insurance policy is to stay healthy in the first place! To that end, we need to learn how to optimize the wellness tactics that we have control over and learn new ways to maximize their effects on our bodies.
Let’s take water for instance. Did you know:
• A healthy pH balance is essential for your body to maintain its health. “The most overlooked aspect of the coronavirus pandemic,” says Dr. Mark Sircus, L.Ac., OMD, DM, “is the fact that most viruses are pH sensitive, and pH medicine offers us a key to treating viral infections that is easy, safe and inexpensive…. Raising pH (to an alkaline state) increases the immune system’s ability to kill microbes. The Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine in London concluded that the viruses and bacteria that cause bronchitis and colds thrive in an acidic environment. Keeping our pH in the slightly alkaline range of 6.8-7.2 can reduce the risk and lessen the severity of colds, sore throats and bouts of influenza. Viruses infect host cells by fusion with cellular membranes at low pH. Thus, they are classified as pH-dependent viruses. Whenever the body becomes acidic, systemic electrical voltage drops, as do tissue oxygen levels.”
Simple ways to become more alkaline include refraining from drinking acidic sodas and bottled waters, both still and carbonated. This is one fundamental step in keeping out of the zone of unhealthy pH levels. Drinking plenty of water is another. Eighty percent of Americans are in a chronic state of sub-clinical dehydration. But not just any water will do: ionized, alkaline water is one of the easiest ways to bring your pH to an optimal level. After all, our bodies are made up of 70 percent water, and the right kind of pure water can make a profound difference in maintaining good health and reducing susceptibility to illness.
Dr. F. Batmanghelidj, author of Your Body’s Many Cries For Water, wrote that proper cellular hydration is not only necessary for regulating your body functions, but it is also vital for the prevention and/or resolution of many degenerative diseases.
• Dehydration is an underlying cause of an array of ailments. Health conditions including asthma, high blood pressure, allergies, constipation and fatigue all are correlated to lack of water in your body.
By the time we feel thirsty, we are already dehydrated! Our blood is 90 percent water, our brain is 80 percent. Overall, our body composition is literally made of water! But yet, Americans typically drink half our body weight in ounces in a week when it should be every DAY. Would you fill a fish tank with soda or coffee and expect your fish to survive? Then why would you fill your body, which functions on water, with such liquid substitutes? Drink more water and you will notice a significant difference.
Who is particularly at risk for dehydration? We sometimes lose our sense of thirst as we age, so older adults don’t always recognize the need to drink more fluids. Others are people with chronic illnesses that cause them to urinate or sweat more often, such as diabetes, kidney disease, cystic fibrosis and high blood pressure. Others are people who take medicines that cause them to urinate or sweat more.
It may seem counterintuitive, for example, but chronic dehydration is a significant causative factor in high blood pressure. Dehydration reduces blood volume, so your body compensates by retaining more sodium in the blood. High blood-sodium concentrations cause your body to close small blood vessels. As more capillaries close, the pressure in major blood vessels rises and overall blood pressure increases. Because the blood has become more concentrated and thicker, it is more difficult to effectively circulate. Your body compensates by squeezing blood vessels to help move the blood along, which in turn raises blood pressure.
During the coronavirus outbreak, it has been found that people with high blood pressure are more likely to get Covid-19, experience worse symptoms or not survive. Age is a factor with the disease, and nearly two-thirds of people over 60 have high blood pressure. Another possible influencer is that the higher risk comes not from high blood pressure itself but also from several drugs used to treat it, such as ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs).
Data from China and Italy — countries hit early by the virus — show higher risk of Covid-19 infections and complications in people with high blood pressure. In China, 25-50 percent of people who came to hospitals with coronavirus had high blood pressure or another chronic health condition. In Italy, more than 99 percent of people who died from the virus had a pre-existing condition — and 76 percent of them had high blood pressure.
It is imperative during this time to focus on getting plenty of pure water to keep your bodily system working properly!
• Alkalization of the blood reduces your cells’ susceptibility to the coronavirus. According to Dr. Mark Sircus, coronavirus infectivity is very sensitive to pH levels in your body. The MHV-A59 strain of coronavirus is quite stable at pH 6.0 (acidic) but becomes rapidly and irreversibly inactivated by brief treatment at pH 8.0 (alkaline). Human coronavirus strain 229E is maximally infective at pH 6.0. Infection of cells by coronavirus A59 at pH 6.0 (acidic) rather than pH 7.0 (neutral) yields a tenfold increase in the infectivity of the virus.
Pure water is essential to our health, particularly now, because it can help prevent the accumulation of acid wastes in our body. This acidosis is a major underlying cause of degenerative diseases according to research by Japanese scientists and medical studies in the United States.
Alkaline, ionized water has three very important differences from ordinary tap water: It provides pH buffers to help balance the pH levels in your body, contains natural, healing antioxidants, and it instills positive filtration for the water.
• Ionized water can be used as a sanitizer. Varying pH waters can be used as chemical-free alternatives to alcohol-based hand sanitizers, bleach, window sprays and laundry detergents that potentially irritate the skin and lungs and definitely do no favors to the environment. A recent study on professional housekeepers who had done cleaning for 20 years found that they had lungs akin to a pack-a-day smokers because of inhaling cleaning chemicals on an ongoing basis.
Few people have heard of Hypochlorous Acid, also known as 2.5 pH water. This highly oxygenated water is non-toxic, as well as safe for the environment. When salt water is electrolyzed, it produces an anolyte solution that consists of 99.3 percent water, chloride salt and Hypochlorous Acid (HOCl). HOCl is a naturally occurring chemical produced by our white blood cells to fight bacteria and inflammation after an infection, wound or trauma. HOCl offers a unique power to eradicate dangerous organisms while not causing harm to our cells. HOCl is one of the only agents that is both non-toxic and also lethal to almost all known dangerous bacteria and viruses that threaten our health. This water can be used as a hand sanitizer, a mouthwash to prevent periodontal disease, on cuts and scrapes, for skin disorders like eczema and acne. Fish, chicken and produce can be soaked in HOCI to eliminate bacteria and pesticides. It is proven to kill MRSA, Staph, E. Coli and Salmonella.
Instead of overpaying for products like Purell or disinfecting your home with odorous bleach products, get back to basics by considering an all-natural alternative: pure, electrolyzed oxidizing water. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.
As the world faces trying times with a new viral pandemic, we all need to master fundamental health tactics such as leveraging the medicinal benefits of pure water. Inflammation, dehydration, acidosis and oxidation are primary root causes or significant contributors for many of the diseases we experience today. When we address these underlying issues by meeting basic needs like pure water, the body can better defend itself from illness as it is innately designed to do.
