| We have been discussing the Bioenergetics Checklist which focuses on 6 components to “charge your battery” and help you increase your overall energy and life force. Those six components are:Movement and ExerciseFoodWaterLight GroundingOxygenThis week we focus on Water. When we consider “Closing the Gap” for human optimization, focusing on our water consumption can be some of the lowest hanging fruit. A general recommendation is to consume 1/2 your body weight in ounces of quality water each day and more on days when you are training and/or sweating more. This is a recommendation that may seem simple but one that is often neglected. It is one that I have found myself neglecting and now putting more conscious effort into. Here are a few benefits of consuming adequate amounts of quality water. Better energy Increased clarity of thought Clearer more luminous skin with more volume Joints that are more buoyant and glide easier Intervertebral discs with more volume which reduces risks of bulging disc and nerve root compression Less vulnerable to dental decay Better immune system function Better elimination of toxins through the lymphatic system, liver, and kidneys. The following is an excerpt from NES founder,Harry Massey’s book Restore Your Energy With BioenergeticsYou can download the entire book here. Most of us have probably had someone remind us to “get plenty of liquids” when we’re sick. Natural health advocates almost universally advise people to drink plenty of water. Scientists even look for water on other planets to see if they could sustain “life as we know it.” But why is water so important and how can it help to recharge our battery?Let’s start with the sheer magnitude of its role in life. Not only does it account for about 70% of our bodies by weight, but it makes up about 99% of the body’s molecules. (They are lighter than other molecules, so they don’t make 99% of our weight. So from a molecular standpoint, you are 99% water.) If you’re almost entirely water, then it makes sense that science and medicine should put enormous emphasis on understanding its role in human life. Instead, water remains a largely mysterious fluid that conventional science has struggled to explain.Consider some of these water conundrums:If water evaporates all across an ocean or lake, why don’t we just get a general mist? Why does it stick together as clouds?If water is just a flowing substance, why does it make sand stick together so you can build a sandcastle?If a gelatin dessert is almost entirely water, how can it hold its structure?Dr. Gerald Pollack of the University of Washington asks these and other questions in his powerful book The Fourth Phase of Water. More importantly, he puts together strong theories to answer these questions as he explains water’s ability to structure itself along water-loving surfaces. (Which includes most surfaces in the body, like cell membranes and all the organelles within a cell. Minerals can also provide these surfaces.) Instead of the familiar H2O of liquid water, the water molecules combine into a new, more rigid form as H3O2. While his answers challenge conventional viewpoints on water (viewpoints that don’t have good answers), it seems impossible that one could question his underlying point about water’s structure. Why?Because he gives visual evidence. You can actually see images of this structure, or better yet, find videos online that demonstrate it in real time. I encourage you to stop by his lab’s website at https://www.pollacklab.org/research.Dr. Pollack shows droplets of water, for instance, being dripped onto a water surface and literally floating as a droplet on top of the water surface for several seconds before the shell of the droplet breaks and the droplet merges with the rest of the water. He also shows a bridge of water – up to 4 cm (nearly 2 inches) long – spreading between two beakers of water that are being charged by electricity. That is, it’s a span of water in mid-air with literally no physical support beyond its own structure.Importantly, he shows how water next to a water-loving surface creates what he calls an “exclusion zone,” or “EZ layer,” of structured water, becoming a gel rather than a liquid. This layer expels all debris from itself and into the “bulk water” that isn’t structured. The EZ structure takes on a particular charge (usually a negative charge in the body), and the bulk water takes on an opposite charge, literally creating a battery with voltage that can power work in the body. This voltage is necessary for nerve transmission and cellular communication.The conventional view is that electrolytes – having positive and negative charges – create this voltage across cell membranes. But remember what I said last chapter, that when scientists measured inside cells, they weren’t expecting strong electric fields. Instead, they found fields five times the strength needed to produce lightning storms. This completely called into question what they thought about cells.But Pollack’s research shows how structured water solves the problem. It massively contributes to voltage, and therefore electric fields, both inside and outside the cell. In effect, it ought to create a monster lightning storm – even if on a tiny scale – throughout the body. And this is what we find with all the electrical activity of the body, both in the nervous system and within every cell. Pollack even suggests that this universal charge separation in the body could replace the need for ion pumps in the cell membrane (the conventional explanation), which would in turn explain why cells can often survive being sliced in half.[1]What’s more, this EZ layer and its battery effect increase in the presence of light, especially infrared light (heat). I mentioned before that living tissue continually emits light, and we know the body continually produces heat. So the body’s natural processes may already help to maintain these EZ layers and water’s battery effect. Even more powerful here would be the tremendous amount of light and heat we receive freely from the sun. While we’ll talk more about the importance of sunlight later, this is yet another reason why getting adequate sunlight is important. It can literally help to provide us with free energy from the water in our bodies!Pollack even shows how these EZ layers on the inside of a water-loving tube freely move bulk water through the tube, and this may tell us a great deal about how blood moves through the body’s blood vessels without relying entirely on the heart as its pump. This helps explain how a sticky fluid like blood (which would already be difficult for a pump to move) can travel through thousands of miles of blood vessels at different speeds in different parts of the body without the heart doing all the work. (I should point out here that, in the theory of biophysics, the heart plays other important roles as well.)Water also plays other critical roles in the body, which we’ll look into later, but as we talk here about charging the body battery, we’re focused on water’s ability to structure and therefore create a charge separation, setting up a body-wide battery system. |