Day 33: Water 1: Safe & Healthy Public Water
“Safe and Healthy Public Water” by Gabriel Cousens, M.D.; “Water” by Tim O’Shea; Fluoride; Perchlorate; Bottled Water; Water Wars Worldwide; Water and Juice Feasting
Welcome to Day 33!
Over the next few days we are going to address the subject of water—a simple, and yet fascinating topic with multiple implications for our health. There are two persons in the field of health which have done an excellent job at organizing this profound topic: Dr. Gabriel Cousens, M.D. and Tim O’Shea, so we will consider their writings today.
Also of note, if you would like to see a fascinating four-part documentary on the industrial use of our natural water resources, check out Cadillac Desert in the Media & Documentaries Section on today’s page, and consider reading the book Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. Both are breathtaking in their depictions of earth’s natural beauty and abundance, and our sometimes horrific industrial overuse and misuse of our natural resources. Truly one of the best documentary series I have ever seen.
Safe and Healthy Public Water
First we have Dr. Gabriel Cousens introducing the subject in “Safe and Healthy Public Water: A Nostalgic Wish” from his book, Conscious Eating:
Safe and healthy public water is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain because of the high degree of water pollution throughout the world. In this chapter we discuss this issue and the ways we can create healthy water for ourselves. You will also get a chance to play biochemist again as we consider a new biological energy associated with water colloid systems. It is called zeta potential. Are you ready to consider the seriousness of our water problem? Are you ready to do something to protect yourself and your family?
I. How did all of this water pollution begin?
A. The origins of our tainted water supply
B. Cancer increase related to water consumption
II. Finding or making healthy water
A. Bottled, mineral, filtered, distilled water advantages and disadvantages
B. Charcoal filtering
C. Reverse osmosis
D. Water distillers
III. Structured water and zeta potential
A. Liquid crystals in water—what they do
B. Surface tension of water
C. Our blood’s colloid system and water
IV. Factors that decrease zeta potential
JUST AS CONSUMING ORGANIC FOODS IS A WAY to avoid ingesting toxins, becoming aware of the quality of water one drinks and uses is increasingly essential in today’s polluted world, since water can be a major source of toxins. According to Diet for a Poisoned Planet, less than 1% of the Earth’s surface water is safe to drink. In some places in the United States and other countries, the term “drinking water” for tap water should be considered nothing more than a nostalgic euphemism. In order to best understand which water is safe to drink, bathe in, and prepare food with, one needs to know more about water pollution, how to purify water to make it safer for use, and also what form of water is healthiest to drink.
Second to oxygen, water is our most important nutrient. Without it, we would not be able to survive. Water comprises 90% of a baby’s body and around 65-70% of an adult’s. According to Patrick and Gael Crystal Flanagan, authors of Elixir of the Ageless, our muscles are composed of 75% water, our brain is composed of 90% water, our liver is 69% water, and even our bones are 22% water. They point out that in a lifetime people drink an average of 7,000 gallons, or 58,333 pounds of water. Water is a major component of all our foods.
Water by Tim O’Shea
An odd little book was published in 1994 that made quite a stir: Your Body’s Many Cries for Water, by an MD named Batmanghelidj. A claim is made by this doctor that the cause of most diseases is simply dehydration. Dr. B provides the reasoning as well as dozens of case studies to support the cure of a variety of illnesses by simply drinking between two and three liters of water per day. . . Doubting such a theory because of its overwhelming simplicity, the reader is shown that physiologically, it makes perfect sense. As Dr B points out, dry mouth is a late sign of thirst. Saliva is produced even in chronic dehydration, because it is a digestive enzyme. Thirst, or the need for water on the cellular level is something entirely different. Chronic dehydration brings its own symptoms, which we have been conditioned to cover up, either with food or with drugs. Read on in the download!
A Relevant Preview Cartoon to Day 44: Biological Dentistry
Water and Juice Feasting
Conducting a Juice Feast is hydrating–as is eating a diet with plenty of Raw/Live Foods–we have not dehydrated the food through the cooking process, and as the food is less processed, less water is required to metabolize the food. The water that comes through our food is an important component of our hydration.
Next in line is distilled water with some lemon juice added to it. The advantage of using distilled water is that there are no inorganic minerals in it–minerals which have not come through plants and that our bodies cannot use, and therefore create calcification in our bodies. However, distilled water is a tabula rasa—it is not “dead” but does need something to enliven and structure it. Lemon juice or a little Celtic Sea Salt will provide “structure” to the water–a subject which Dr. Cousens addresses in greater detail in the reading today.
Please remember when you are Juice Feasting that even though you are drinking 1-plus gallons of hydrating juices, you still need 2 or more quarts of water during the day, depending on your activity level.
If you have not been starting your day with 1 quart of Morning Water with the juice of a lemon and 1/2 to 1 Tablespoon of MSM in it, please begin doing this now as a Life Practice. Hydrating at the opening of the day like this will make every cell in your body happy, and help with the elimination of matter that your body has processed during the night.
Remember the Four Main Goals of Juice Feasting: CLEANSE – REBUILD – REHYDRATE – ALKALIZE
Enjoy! See you in The Green Room!
Theme Music: “Black Water” by The Doobie Brothers
The Story of Bottled Water, released World Water Day employs the Story of Stuff style to tell the story of manufactured demand-how you get Americans to buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week when it already flows from the tap.
The Great Culling: Our Water. This documentary shows how additives to our drinking water, such as fluoride, supposedly to combat tooth decay, in reality are covert doses of death. It also shows how you can protect yourself and your family.
Tapped (Trailer) is a film that examines the role of the bottled water industry and its effects on our health, climate change, pollution, and our reliance on oil.
Fluoride: The Hard to Swallow Truth Documentary
Today’s Downloads
safe and healthy public water
Enjoy this tremendous overview of water resources and their importance for human health and vitality. Chock-full of information sources that will provide you a depth on this subject that few people have, including how to generate your own pristine water at home.
chlorine
by David Rainoshek, M.A.
Extensive Chlorine File from JuiceFeasting.com! You will never want chlorinated water in your drinking, food preparation, shower, or swimming water again! The research in this file was originally done for an Olympic Athlete that I coached years ago, who had thyroid issues relating to her years of training in chlorinated water. To your health!
“Cancer risk among people drinking chlorinated water is 93% higher than among those whose water does not contain chlorine.” - Saginaw Hospital, Dr JM Price MD
flouride
by David Rainoshek, M.A.
From the file: “If after reading this anyone decides to have chemotherapy, suggest that this person has been drinking too much water containing sodium fluoride. There is evidence that sodium fluoride, which is extreme toxic, is used as rat poison, and is being added to many municipal water systems in the U.S. has an effect upon the brain that dulls the mind a makes the victim susceptible to suggestion.
Prior to World War II, Nazi Germany added fluoride to the drinking water of German people.425 Could that have been the reason that Hitler was able to pull the wool over the eyes of his gullible countrymen? Is this the reason that Communist Russia began to use it?
Why is it happening in America? To stop tooth decay? No! Definitely not for dental reasons, for it has been proven that sodium fluoride in drinking water has increased dental decay as well as many other problems.”
50 reasons to oppose water flouridation
by Dr. Paul Connett
Dr. Paul Connett of St. Lawrence University in New York has put together a compelling paper for the elimination of fluoride from the water supply. Abstract Water fluoridation is the practice of adding compounds containing fluoride to the water supply to produce a final concentration of fluoride of 1 part per million in an effort to prevent tooth decay. Trials first began in the US in 1945, but before any of these trials were complete, the practice was endorsed by the US Public Health Service in 1950.
Since then fluoridation has been enthusiastically and universally promoted by US health officials as being a “safe and effective” for fighting tooth decay. However, even though most countries worldwide have not succumbed to America’s enthusiasm for this practice, their teeth are just as good, if not better, than those countries that have.
The “50 Reasons” offered in this article for opposing fluoridation are based on a thorough review of the scientific literature as regards both the risks and benefits of being exposed to the fluoride ion. Documentation is offered which indicates that the benefits of ingested fluoride have been exaggerated, while the numerous risks have been downplayed or ignored.
water
by Tim o’Shea
Without food, most humans will die in a month, if they have water. Without water, 10 days is about it. Water makes up 75% of the body, 90% of the blood, and 85% of the brain. . . An odd little book was published in 1994 that made quite a stir: Your Body’s Many Cries for Water, by an MD named Batmanghelidj. A claim is made by this doctor that the cause of most diseases is simply dehydration.
Dr. B provides the reasoning as well as dozens of case studies to support the cure of a variety of illnesses by simply drinking between two and three liters of water per day. . . Doubting such a theory because of its overwhelming simplicity, the reader is shown that physiologically, it makes perfect sense.
As Dr B points out, dry mouth is a late sign of thirst. Saliva is produced even in chronic dehydration, because it is a digestive enzyme. Thirst, or the need for water on the cellular level is something entirely different. Chronic dehydration brings its own symptoms, which we have been conditioned to cover up, either with food or with drugs. READ ON IN THE FILE!
perchlorate
by David Rainoshek, M.A.
Perchlorate is both a naturally occurring and manmade contaminant increasingly found in groundwater, surface water and soil. Most perchlorate manufactured in the U.S. is used as an ingredient in solid fuel for rockets and missiles.
In addition, perchlorate-based chemicals are also used in the construction of highway safety flares, fireworks, pyrotechnics, explosives, common batteries, and automobile restraint systems. Perchlorate contamination has been reported in at least 20 states. Perchlorate greatly impacts human health by interfering with iodide uptake into the thyroid gland. In adults, the thyroid gland helps regulate the metabolism by releasing hormones, while in children, the thyroid helps in proper development. Perchlorate is becoming a serious threat to human health and water resources.
facet checking documents from the story of bottled water
The Story of Bottled Water, released on March 22, 2010 (World Water Day) employs the Story of Stuff style to tell the story of manufactured demand—how you get Americans to buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week when it already flows from the tap. Over five minutes, the film explores the bottled water industrys attacks on tap water and its use of seductive, environmental-themed advertising to cover up the mountains of plastic waste it produces. The film concludes with a call to take back the tap, not only by making a personal commitment to avoid bottled water, but by supporting investments in clean, available tap water for all.
Production partners on the bottled water film include five leading sustainability groups: Corporate Accountability International, Environmental Working Group, Food & Water Watch, Pacific Institute, and Polaris Institute.
a little rocket fuel with your salad?
by The WorldWatch Institute
On December 16, 2003, The Wall Street Journal published an article by investigative reporter Peter Waldman on the history of California’s experience with a chemical called perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel dating back to the first solid-fuel rockets of World War II. Perchlorates are actually a group of salts—ammonium perchlorate, potassium perchlorate, sodium perchlorate, cobalt perchlorate, and a score of others. They were developed mainly as oxidizer components for propellants and other explosive materials.
Nineteen recent studies tracked by the Washington-based Environmental Working Group (EWG) between 1997 and 2002 have associated perchlorates with thyroid damage ranging from metabolic and hormone disruption to cancer in adults, and with impaired neurological and bone development in fetuses. They have linked the chemical to reduced IQs, mental retardation, loss of hearing or speech, deficits in motor skills, and (surprise, surprise) learning disorders and ADD in children. Studies in rats have found tumors developing at extremely early stages.
And these studies only focus on the apparent effects of perchlorates in water.
Online Articles
A Deeper Look At Drugs In Our Tap Water by Cathy Sherman
Picture this: Three guys go into a bar. The batender asks, “What’ll you have?” “A beer”, says the first guy. Second one says, “Whiskey” and turning to the third guy asks, “what about you?” “Oh me, I really need a good strong kick, one with lots of punch to it… Yep, I think this day calls for a big one on tap! Hey bartender, how about some of your tap water!”
It was hard not to hear about the mess our water supply is in; the March AP (Associated Press) story was picked up by almost every media outlet imaginable. Members of a “National Investigative Team” reviewed reports and talked to over 200 officials and scientists for a five-month period. The AP writers’ conclusions struck fear into many a thirsty American, who was suddenly told he was drinking urine. Not any urine either, but drug-filled urine, possibly from their neighbor up the road.
Medication Pollution Spreads: Water Supply of 24 U.S. Cities Found Contaminated with Pharmaceuticals by Mike Adams
Analysis of tap water supplies in major metropolitan areas conducted by the Associated Press has revealed that the water supply in 24 major U.S. cities — serving over 40 million people — are contaminated with trace amounts of pharmaceuticals including antibiotics, anti-seizure medications, anti-inflammatory drugs, psychotropic drugs, pain medications and even caffeine. The upshot of the report is that tens of millions of Americans are unwittingly being subjected to a bizarre medical experiment with unpredictable results. No scientist can say for certain whether long-term exposure to micro doses of multiple pharmaceuticals is safe because such an experiment has never before been conducted on any population.
One of the most startling realizations of the study is that Americans are now using so many medications that their own biological waste products are becoming large-scale environmental pollutants.
Pepsi admits Aquafina comes from tap water by Mike Adams
It’s a great marketing gimmick: A bottle of water with a clean, blue label showing images of snow-capped mountains and the claim, “Pure water, perfect taste.” That’s the image created by Pepsico’s Aquafina brand of water, and many consumers leap to the incorrect conclusion that Aquafina is sourced from mountain spring water.
In reality, Aquafina comes from tap water. Yes, the same water you get when you turn on your kitchen faucet. Of course, Aquafina is filtered, purified and perhaps even enhanced with trace amounts of added minerals, but it’s certainly not mountain spring water. It’s just processed tap water — the same stuff that fills your toilet bowl when you flush.
Oregon criminalizes permaculture; claims state ownership over all rainwater – ponds and swales restricted – jail time for violators by Mike Adams
There’s nothing more refreshing than standing in a cool, summertime rain shower. Or bathing in the warm sunlight on a crisp spring day. Or inhaling the cool autumn air, fresh with the scent of turning leaves and pine needles. These things — rainwater, sunlight, air — have long been assumed to be not only free, but un-claimable. You can’t claim to own the sunlight that falls on my front yard, for example. A corporation can’t claim intellectual property ownership over the air that you breathe and demand you pay a royalty for inhaling.
But today, Jackson County, Oregon says it owns YOUR rainwater, and the county has sentenced a man to 30 days in jail and fined him over $1500, for the supposed “crime” of collecting rainwater on his own property.
Great Books
By Vandava Shiva
While draught and desertification are intensifying around the world, corporations are aggressively converting free-flowing water into bottled profits. The water wars of the twenty-first century may match—or even surpass—the oil wars of the twentieth. In Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit, Vandana Shiva, “the world’s most prominent radical scientist” (the Guardian), shines a light on activists who are fighting corporate maneuvers to convert this life-sustaining resource into more gold for the elites.
In Water Wars, Shiva uses her remarkable knowledge of science and society to outline the emergence of corporate culture and the historical erosion of communal water rights. Using the international water trade and industrial activities such as damming, mining, and aquafarming as her lens, Shiva exposes the destruction of the earth and the disenfranchisement of the world’s poor as they are stripped of rights to a precious common good.
In her passionate, feminist style, Shiva celebrates the spiritual and traditional role water has played in communities throughout history, and warns that water privatization threatens cultures and livelihoods worldwide. Shiva calls for a movement to preserve water access for all, and offers a blueprint for global resistance based on examples of successful campaigns.
Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and recipient of the 1993 Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award). She is author of several books, including Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (South End Press, 2000); Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1997); and Staying Alive (St. Martin’s Press, 1989). Shiva is a leader, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin, in the International Forum on Globalization. Before becoming an activist, Shiva was one of India’s leading physicists.
By Maude Barlow
The internationally acclaimed story of the corporate takeover of our most basic resource and the inevitable global water crisis.
In this “chilling, in-depth examination of a rapidly emerging global crisis” (In These Times), Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, two of the most active opponents to the privatization of water show how, contrary to received wisdom, water mainly flows uphill to the wealthy. Our most basic resource may one day be limited: our consumption doubles every twenty years—twice the rate of population increase. At the same time, increasingly transnational corporations are plotting to control the world’s dwindling water supply. In England and France, where water has already been privatized, rates have soared, and water shortages have been severe. The major bottled-water producers—Perrier, Evian, Naya, and now Coca-Cola and PepsiCo—are part of one of the fastest-growing and least-regulated industries, buying up freshwater rights and drying up crucial supplies.
A truly shocking exposé that is a call to arms to people around the world, Blue Goldshows in frightening detail why, as the vice president of the World Bank has pronounced, “The wars of the next century will be about water.”
By Marc Reisner
Briefly, the history of water development contains the whole story of the West, from start to present. Early modern irrigation worked miracles and opened to the plow land previously unavailable for agriculture — land that now feeds the nation and much of the world. If it were not for these early, massive hydro-projects, not one of the great cities of the West would be even conceivable, millions upon millions of people would and could never have considered settling the western half of the continent. Of course, there was a massive cost accompanying all of these benefits, measurable in human as well as environmental terms, but in those days the cost-benefit analysis was easy.
Building upon early irrigation successes, two government agencies — the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, may they both live forever in infamy — garnered unto themselves massive power and independence, which they used to keep on building dam after dam after dam. The problem was not so much (at the time the dams were built) that the environmental costs were higher with every dam, until there now remains no wild river beyond the hundredth meridian of any significance whatsoever, precious little habitat for migratory birds, mass extinctions, etc., etc., tragically etc.; the real problem (at the time the dams were built) was that the new dams brought no benefits whatsoever to stack up against their costs. Each new dam represented gratuitous environmental catastrophe, effected simply because water projects became the currency of pork barrel Congressional politics.
And that’s not the worst of it. Except for the Egyptian (the Nile River being a very special case), every civilization founded upon irrigation has always ended — abruptly — almost certainly due to the sudden and permanent despoliation of irrigated agricultural soil through concentration of salts, which is the inevitable result of irrigation. No previous irrigation civilization has ever worked on such a grand scale, or with soil already so alkaline, as ours. Death by salinity is happening with alarming rapidity in the American West even now. The end of agriculture as we know it in the West is coming, and coming soon; all the experts know it; nothing is being done.
Reisner doesn’t suggest much in the way of solutions. But as history — explaining patterns of human settlement, the effects of that settlement on the region’s geography, the patterns of flow and accumulation of wealth in the West, and what may be the greatest crisis our whole nation is facing and ignoring today — Cadillac Desert can’t be beat.
By Steven Solomon
Far more than oil, the control of water wealth throughout history has been pivotal to the rise and fall of great powers, the achievements of civilization, the transformations of society’s vital habitats, and the quality of ordinary daily lives. Today, freshwater scarcity is one of the twenty-first century’s decisive, looming challenges, driving new political, economic, and environmental realities across the globe.
In Water, Steven Solomon offers the first-ever narrative portrait of the power struggles, personalities, and breakthroughs that have shaped humanity from antiquity’s earliest civilizations through the steam-powered Industrial Revolution and America’s century. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Water is a groundbreaking account of man’s most critical resource in shaping human destinies, from ancient times to our dawning age of water scarcity.
By Fred Pearce
In this groundbreaking book, veteran science correspondent Fred Pearce travels to more than thirty countries to examine the current state of crucial water sources. Deftly weaving together the complicated scientific, economic, and historic dimensions of the world water crisis, he provides our most complete portrait yet of this growing danger and its ramifications for us all.
Named as one of the Top 50 Sustainability Books by University of Cambridges Programme for Sustainability Leadership and Greenleaf Publishing.
By Dr. Joseph M. Price, M.D.
The Sensational link between Deadly Heart Disease and Chlorinated drinking water! Don’t drink anther drop until you read this book! Dr. Joseph M. Price has long held that the chlorine in our drinking water – not the cholesterol in our food – is the major cause of coronary disease. In his courageous book he challenges the medical establishment with his own well documented theory directly linking deadly heart disease with the deadly poison chlorine.
After reading this book, you’ll never drink ‘tap water’ again. Dr. Price demonstrates, with fact after fact, proof after proof, that you can eat the foods you want to eat, and avoid heart disease by simply following his guidelines for avoiding chlorinated drinking water. “One of the top ten nutrition books of the 20th Century…an amazingly original toxicology book vital to every living soul on this planet” Dr. William Campbell Douglass II, M.D. www.drdouglass.com
Media, Films, & Documentaries
[Documentary] Tapped (2010)
Is access to clean drinking water a basic human right, or a commodity that should be bought and sold like any other article of commerce? Stephanie Soechtig’s debut feature is an unflinching examination of the big business of bottled water.
From the producers of ‘Who Killed the Electric Car’ and ‘I.O.U.S.A.,’ this timely documentary is a behind-the-scenes look into the unregulated and unseen world of an industry that aims to privatize and sell back the one resource that ought never to become a commodity: our water. From the plastic production to the ocean in which so many of these bottles end up, this inspiring documentary trails the path of the bottled water industry and the communities which were the unwitting chips on the table.
[Documentary] Flow (2008)
There’s a battle going on for the source of life, water. Our corporate media isn’t saying much about it, but across the globe citizens are struggling against transnational corporations like Nestle and Vivendi which are seizing the dwindling fresh water supplies. It’s an absolutely critical topic that this film explains in an informative and inspiring fashion. “Flow” takes us to Bolivia Cochabamba!: Water War in Bolivia, South Africa, India Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, Michigan and beyond; and introduces us to the people who are being harmed by corporate tyrannies that are claiming the water of their land. Big businesses are making a fortune as they pollute or divert water supplies, or bottle it for sale at prices that the world’s poor cannot afford.
People in the wealthy nations may feel they are immune from this crisis, but they too are being ripped off by the bottled water racket and poisoned by the continuing toxification of water with synthetic chemicals Toxic Legacy: Synthetic Toxins in the Food, Water and Air of American Cities.
“Flow” features many heroes we don’t yet know the names of, like Vandana Shiva and Maude Barlow; but we are fortunate they have been slowing the march of the corporate fundamentalists The Corporation. People concerned about health and justice will want to contribute to the cause of water rights for humans, not for CEOs. Buying and sharing this film is a great first step. Subscribing to magazines like Onearth also helps, as the Natural Resources Defense Council is featured in this film due to the research and litigation they’ve been advancing on this and so many other pressing environmental issues.
Parts of this film will anger the viewer, but that mood is a natural and necessary part of the process toward social change.
[Documentary] Cadillac Desert (A Must-See!)
David Rainoshek: The American Southwest has been my spiritual home my whole life.
This is a fascinating look at the industrial development of the Southwest from a water usage perspective. One of the most insightful documentaries I have ever seen on the human drive to engineer the environment for human well-being, even at the price of the very environment we rely on for our very existence.
Based on the book Cadillac Desert.
[Documentary] Blue Gold: World Water Wars (2009)
We can’t live without water. You may have thought it was a human right. But certain corporations have been plotting to control the water supply on this planet for a while now, and have been moving into place around the globe.
Now the World Bank has required certain governments to privatize their precious water supply — make it a corporate commodity answerable only to stockholders — as a condition to getting a loan. In some places it is now illegal to catch rainwater, because rain is being considered private property, including the United States. The evil of this worldwide corporate grab for control of your most precious resource is practically inconceivable, but it is happening.
Blue Gold: World Water Wars is a landmark documentary that every school, library and church should own and show. Do you want the cost of your water to be controlled by private corporations and stockholders only interested in their bottom line? Do you want to give up your right to the water around you, including rain? It is time to get educated and get active.