Water: For Health, For Healing, For Life (27 page)
As much as salt is good for the body in asthma, excess potassium is bad for it. Too much orange juice, too many bananas, or any sports drink containing too much potassium might help precipitate an asthma attack, particularly if too much of the drink or too many bananas are taken before exercising. It can cause an exercise-induced asthma attack. To prevent such attacks, some salt intake before exercise will increase the lungs' capacity for air exchange. It will also decrease excess sweating.
It is a good policy to add some salt to orange juice to balance the actions of sodium and potassium in maintaining the required volume of water inside and outside the cells. In some cultures, salt is added to melon and other fruits to accentuate their sweetness. In effect, these fruits contain mostly potassium. By adding salt to them before eating, a balance between the intake of sodium and potassium results. The same should be done to other juices.
I received a call one day from one of my readers to tell me how he had unwittingly hurt his son. Knowing that orange juice was full of vitamin C, he forced his son to drink several glasses of it every day. The boy developed breathing problems and had a number of asthma attacks until he reached college and moved out of the sphere of influence of his father. His asthma then cleared and his breathing became normal. The father told me he had to call his son and apologize for having given him such a hard time when he was younger. The more the son had rebelled against orange juice, the more the father had insisted he should take it, convinced a large amount was good for him.
As a rough rule of thumb, you need about 3 to 4 grams of salt a day for every ten glasses of water you drink. Three grams is about a half teaspoon. An easier calculation is a quarter teaspoon of salt per quart of water (I know someone who takes more than a tea-spoon of salt every day to control his asthma). You should take salt throughout the day. If you exercise and sweat, you need more salt. In hot climates, when you lose water from the surface of the skin without realizing it, you need to take even more salt. In these climates, salt can make the difference between survival and better health and heat exhaustion and death.
Warning!
At the same time, you must not overdo salt. You must observe the ratio of salt and water needs of the body. Always make sure you drink enough water to wash the excess salt out of the body. If your weight suddenly goes up in one day when you have not consumed too much food, you have taken too much salt. Hold back on salt intake for one day and drink plenty of water to increase your urine output and get rid of your swelling. Consult your doctor to determine the correct balance of salt and water for your diet.
If you begin to drink water according to my protocol, you might also benefit from taking a one-a-day vitamin tablet daily, particularly if you do not exercise or eat hearty portions of vegetables and fruits. Meat and fish proteins are good sources of selenium and zinc. If you are under stress, and until it is over, you might consider adding some vitamin B
6
and zinc to your diet in addition to what is available in the vitamin tablets.
If you suffer from cold sores (herpes simplex virus on the lips and even in the eyes) or genital herpes, make sure you add zinc and vitamin B
6
to your diet. Your viral sores might very well be the result of zinc deficiency and its associated complications.
OTHER ESSENTIALS FOR HEALTH AND HEALING
While water, salt, and minerals are vital for optimal health, the nutrients we receive from the foods we eat are also important, as is the need to stay fit through regular exercise. In this chapter, I will give a brief overview of the other essentials—proteins, fats, fruits, vegetables, sunlight, and exercise—needed for optimal health and healing.
PROTEINS
Many experts are of the opinion that the body needs a minimum of between 1.1 and 1.4 grams of good-quality protein for every kilogram—2.2 pounds—of body weight per day. A 200-pound (90 kg) person thus needs about 4.5 ounces—120 grams—of protein a day to maintain muscle mass. At this level of protein intake, the body will retain its normal composition of protein reserves and will not break into them and deplete some of the amino acid reserves.
Children need a basic minimum of about 1 gram of protein for every pound of body weight.
You must bear in mind that the protein portion of high-protein foods varies from source to source. For example: An egg weighs about 50 grams and has only 6 grams of pure protein; meat contains 7 grams of pure protein in every ounce; hard cheeses contain about 7 grams of pure protein per ounce; soft cheeses contain about 3 grams of pure protein per ounce; tofu contains about 5 grams of pure protein per ounce. One ounce is 28.3 grams. In other words, not all the weight of the protein foods is pure protein.
In advanced societies that place high demands for increased productivity on their labor force and have no food shortages, the recommended regular intake of protein seems to be much higher. The more physically active you are, the more protein-containing food your body needs. The extra protein is needed for tissue repairs and the manufacture of enzymes and neurotransmitters. High-protein diets are now fashionable in weight-loss programs.
STRESS AND AMINO ACIDS
It is my published opinion that continued
submissive endurance of stress
depletes the body of certain absolutely essential amino acids—tryptophan, tyro-sine, cysteine, and methionine in particular. These amino acids must be present in correct proportions for the body's main functions to take place in a coordinated manner. This is a part of what I mean by the regulation of the body as an integrated system. Let us see some aspects of what these amino acids mean to the body. Then we may understand the impact of stress and be alert to its main signals in the body.
Before we get into the discussion of the individual amino acids, let me give you some basic information. There are twenty different amino acids from which proteins are made up. By selectively mixing the amino acids, some more than others, different proteins are manufactured. The manufactured proteins have different shapes and sizes, and are three-dimensional structures that twist and rotate all the time. During these twists and rotations they present different facets that become attractive to their chemically predetermined partners, and a desired response is generated when they unite or have an effect on each other. It is from the sum total of these desired responses that life and actions of all living matter come into being.
The food that we eat provides not only some of the energy needed to function, but also some of the basic amino acids as raw materials for protein production. In more dilute solutions, the proteins and enzymes of the body develop a greater movement and rotational freedom and become more efficient in finding and coupling with their chemical partners. Thus, dehydration can cause a slowing of these natural movements and could be responsible for the slowing of body reactions and loss of certain sensations as we grow older and become more dehydrated.
The human body can manufacture twelve of the twenty amino acids from other raw materials, but needs to import into the system eight of them to be able to manufacture the complete range of its protein and neurotransmitter needs. These “imports” are called essential amino acids. Without them, and in an exact sufficiency at that, the body will not function. I use the words
exact sufficiency
to indicate that more is not better. Just because these amino acids are essential does not mean we should load the body with them. This attitude is dangerous. The rate of assimilation of one amino acid depends on the presence of the others in proportionate amounts. The excess presence of one can have a disruptive effect and alter the metabolism rate of the others. So beware of buying amino acids that are manufactured and sold by the bottle.
The essential amino acids are
isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan,
and
valine.
Since tyrosine is manufactured from phenylalanine and cysteine is manufactured from methionine,
tyrosine
and
cysteine
should also be considered essential amino acids. There are limits to the rate of manufacture of
arginine
and
histidine
in the young and the old, so, in essence, these amino acids are also to be considered essential. In effect, there are twelve essential amino acids that the body needs to import at various stages of its development if its normal functions are to be guaranteed. I will deal with only a few of them to explain some aspects of the metabolism disturbance in chronic dehydration and stress.
Tryptophan is an essential amino acid that is highly sensitive to heat. It spins at a much faster rate when the temperature of the body rises even a few degrees. It seems to respond to the heat of activation produced by water. It performs certain functions more efficiently when there is more water in the body, particularly when water is essential to activate the hydroelectric pump units in the cell membrane and generate energy and heat. The mechanism involved in the passage of tryptophan through the wall of the blood vessels of the brain is complicated. However, the consistency of blood, on the dilute side, enormously helps the passage of tryptophan into the brain and the centers of its activity. Tryptophan gives rise to the neurotransmitter agent serotonin, along with its deputies tryptamine and melatonin.
Tryptophan also has a natural role in recognizing and repairing damaged, unnatural, and inexact DNA structures. DNA is the material at the center of re-creation of life from one living matter into another. The secrets of re-creation are held in the DNA con-tent of the body. Its correct representation is essential to give rise to the next generation, be it the daughter cell in an organ or the next-generation offspring. It is my view that cancer cells are daughter cells that have transformed into faulty new cells because the DNA-repair system has become inadequate due to a breakdown in the tryptophan-regulatory process. Dr. Jawed Iqbal, a world-recognized cancer researcher who lives in England, has studied the scientific explanations for the above statement. After much scrutiny, he has accepted the validity of the concept and has written a number of articles that can be viewed in the section on science on the Web site
www.watercure.com.
It has now been recognized that tryptophan forms a tripod team with two units of lysine, another amino acid, and forms an enzyme that acts as the quality controller on the DNA assembly line. It seems that tryptophan projection of the enzyme is responsible for cutting and repairing any damaged site in the DNA assembly.
As far as the brain is concerned, as soon as tryptophan reaches the brain side of the circulation it becomes converted into the various neurotransmitters. Research seems to indicate that almost all of the problems of the human body become established when the rate of entry of tryptophan to the brain centers that use the neurotransmitter derivatives of tryptophan is negatively affected.
My research indicates a direct relationship between the level of water in the body and the rate of tryptophan transfer across the blood-brain barrier. In dehydration, less tryptophan gets across. The level of tryptophan entry into the brain determines the intensity of the pain sensation. When there is less tryptophan, the pain sensation registers more intensely. With increased tryptophan getting into the brain, the pain sensation decreases until it disappears. The relationship of the thirst signal in the body to the feeling of pain associated with thirst seems to indicate a decrease in tryptophan entry into the brain. In this way the pain associated with a certain level of dehydration, beyond the threshold of rationing the available water and adaptation to chronic dehydration, explains the way pain registers when there is dehydration.
In stress dehydration, more tryptophan in its free form is released from the reserves of the body. The liver has a metering system for free tryptophan. When it reaches a certain level, the liver begins to recycle and destroy it and finally discard its by-products. This is a very drastic way of getting rid of an essential amino acid. It has to be done, however, because in its free form tryptophan is used in other capacities, such as in a substitute cleaning process when water is not available to wash away the toxic waste.
When used in this way, stress-initiated breakdown of tryptophan can deplete the reserves of this most essential amino acid in the body. It is to prevent this event that, in any form of stress, you should immediately begin to drink copious amounts of water. This is why dehydration causes stress—and stress precipitates so many disease conditions in the body. Tryptophan is involved in the formation of the color of the iris of the eye. It acts as filter to intense light and ultraviolet rays that might damage the retina.
Another important effect of tryptophan on proper metabolism is in muscle movement. Large muscles of the body demonstrate an avid metabolism for the branched chain amino acids
valine, leucine,
and
isoleucine,
three of the twenty amino acids in the body. During exercise and movement of the large muscle mass, these three amino acids are used up for their energy content. They also compete with tryptophan for passage across the blood-brain barrier and entry to the brain. Unless tryptophan enters into the brain tissue, a state of calm and peace will not prevail. The importance of exercise—walking at least one hour a day—cannot be stressed enough.
It is as a result of burning these competitors of tryptophan by the muscle tissue that a well-regulated physiology in the body can be established.