The Benefits of Hydration

By Ron Cusson, PhD

From panel questions and answers
at the Green Earth Expo, Orlando Convention Center, May 16-18, 2008.

What is "hydration"?

In order to give an answer to this in the proper context, I would like to give a short review of the development of life on the planet Earth. Our scientists estimate that life on Earth originated some 400 million years ago as single cell organisms in the ocean. These organisms were single cells with a nucleus inside the cell. These cells had the unique ability to reproduce themselves using the information included in some complex way in the DNA contained in the nucleus of this single cell organism.

For these organisms, hydration was automatic, for they simply swam in the mineral rich ocean water that contained just about every known mineral in the periodic table of elements. These single cell organisms had a cell wall and, through it they took in mineral nutrients from the ocean, in the form of mineral-rich sea water. In turn, they would put back into the vast ocean their spent bodily fluids, rich in organic minerals. Over time, the ocean water acquired a vast complex of organic minerals coming from these effluents. To this day, millions of years later, our oceans still contain such single or few cell organisms, often called marine phytoplankton and zooplankton and they still operate in a way that still gives the ocean the composition very similar to what it was in the ancient oceans.

We need to take into account that we are not single cell organisms and we need to understand that evolution did not stop at the single cell level. Cells started to organize into multi-cell clumps launching the mechanism of cellular differentiation. We should be aware that cells in the interior of the organism, much farther from the ocean, separated from it by layers of other cells must deal with hydration indirectly. It involves receiving nutrients from the ocean with the help of other cells and finding ways to excrete the effluent in ways that would not suffocate the other cells that lie between them and the open ocean.

As these organisms became more evolved, the complexity of cellular hydration rose tremendously, with the advent of blood circulation system to nourish every cell and carry away their effluents. In a way that honors the origin of the cells, blood became a 2-component system where the blood plasma that resembles to this day the mineral rich ocean water with the added red blood cells that carry oxygen to the cells. In a complex organism, oxygen is carried from the lungs (or the gills, in the case of fish) to the individual cells.

In the next most dramatic step of evolution, the organism came out of the ocean and started living on dry ground. These would be our mammalian ancestors who learned to quench their thirst on a mixture of i) sweet water that flowed into the ocean from rain-fed and mountain-spring-fed rivers and ii) whole sea water, as a source of the precious 90 or so minerals that had been used from the very beginnings to construct single-cell life.

To this day, then, our physical bodies expect a mixture of sweet water and ocean water for perfect hydration. Further, Mother Nature has seen to it that the sweet water that flows down our rivers from mountain springs has a cluster structure similar to that of the water inside our cells.

For example, it is known that when sweet water ponds and aquariums acquire 1% of their water as ocean water, all the fish and plants in that aquarium or pond live that much better and healthier. There are even manufacturers of spirulina, a sweet water single-cell algae, who will put 1% sea water in their culture water for the spirulina, as a way to greatly increase the nutritional value of their spirulina product.

What is the cluster structure of intracellular (inside the cell) water?

The water inside our living cells is not made up of single loose water molecules. It is a grouping of water molecules, often in the general shape of a hexagon made of 6 water molecules, not too different from the pattern seen in snow flakes. These are often called "living water clusters", in part because one can do MRI studies of the water inside a living cell to discover that when the cell is killed, say, by a poison, the MRI signature of these living water clusters disappears and is replaced by the signature of much larger water clusters, containing up to 25 water molecules.

It turns out that by some synchronistic magical divine coincidence that when "dead" water (water made up of big clusters) flows inside rocks that contain quartz (silica) crystals, the contact with and motion around the quartz will break up these large clusters and help restore the hexagonal structure of the water. Thus sweet water from mountain springs that flows in many vortices in creeks and rivers ends up having a cluster structure that is very much like that of blood plasma and lacks only the ocean trace minerals to be very much like living blood plasma.

How could we create "living water" as our ancestors experienced it?

Well, one would find a mountain spring that discharges water into a river that flows into the ocean without touching any refined metals and one would go to tidal pools where this fresh, clustered, oxygenated water begins to mix with ocean water. One would select a point in these pools where there is approximately 1% sea water mixed in with the sweet water. One would fill earthen/clay jars with this water and cover them. Under such conditions, this water would stay "alive" for weeks and could be transported to consumer points and used to hydrate the body and its many cells and that would close the loop of hydration. You might say that this would be the "Perfectly Natural Way to Full Hydration".

Besides the "Perfectly Natural Way" how does one implement that in a practical way?

Various technologies have become available to produce Naturally Hydrating water. There is a class of existing water technologies that will reduce the "dead-cluster" size of 25 molecules to around 5-7 molecules:
1) Stir Wands or Plates that convert one glass of water or other water rich items at a time.
2) Water Ionizers convert tap water through an alkalizing process that also reduces the cluster size.
3) Water vortexers such as the VOLIXER or the Vitalizer+ that decrease the cluster size.

In all these technologies, one can improve the final result by adding sea water or sea minerals to the water before using the technology.

We use the term Naturally Hydrating (NH) water, water that has both the correct cluster structure and the right natural ocean trace mineral balance. As we said, NH water can be made by a number of different technologies.

Is adding sea minerals to make NH water the same as adding Sea Salt?

No, unfortunately. Around the turn of the twentieth century a salt evaporation-basin technique was developed that allowed people to produce "purified" salt out of sea water. This was called sea salt, although it was 99% sodium chloride, whereas if one evaporates sea water and one retains all of the minerals resulting from this evaporation, the resulting mix is around 75% sodium chloride and 25% all the other known minerals on Earth. Salt suppliers do not like to produce this kind of evaporated sea water as it is also extremely hygroscopic (it attracts humidity) and becomes sticky and wet.

When pure sodium chloride (table salt) or nearly pure sodium chloride (most Sea salt) is ingested, our digestive system lacks the rest of the minerals that it would need to metabolize this excess sodium chloride and our physiology eventually develops sodium overload with serious consequences for our health. Especially hydration is adversely affected because our cells rely on the balance of sodium and potassium to manage to flow of water across the cell membranes. Natural Sea water has this perfect natural balance, but sodium chloride, and therefore, most "Sea Salt" only contributes to creating dis-ease in the cellular hydration mechanisms of our body.

How do we obtain the right balance of sea minerals?

There are companies that will supply sea water "brine". Brine is a saturated solution of sea water minerals where as much pure water as possible has been removed without causing crystallization that would separate the sodium chloride from the other minerals. It is a thick oily liquid that feels good on the skin. This concentrate is too strong to put in the eyes.

Some companies will even remove most of the sodium chloride from these oily solutions and sell these products as magnesium oil from the ocean. They use this name because the biggest component is magnesium, accompanied by the proper trace mineral balance needed for the difficult task of metabolizing the magnesium.

What are the benefits of hydrating our bodies with Naturally Hydrating (NH) water?

Let us review the components of "Maximized Living" (www.maximizedlivingdryachter.com):
1: Minimize Your Exposure to Toxins
2: Maximize Nerve Supply
3: Maximize the Quality of Your Nutrition
4: Maximize Oxygen and Lean Muscle Through Exercise
5: Maximize Peace and Loving Relationships

As you might expect, NH water is important to all 5 of these headings, with some explanation:

We begin with the first point: minimizing our exposure to toxins. There are many toxins in our environment and over time our bodies take in and accumulate these toxins. Therefore our first step must be removing as much of these accumulated toxins as possible. While this is going on we want to get into the habit of making sure that everything that touches or enters our body contains as few as possible of these toxins. We must focus on building healthy housing and design living spaces that contribute to clean air.

We focus on hydration and detoxification technologies. When we drink, or bathe in, the kind of Naturally Hydrating water that we have described earlier, our cells will be predisposed to releasing much of the toxins accumulated over the years.

The simple act of drinking as much as possible of Naturally Hydrating water will stimulate our cells to take in this water because it resembles the kind of water that it had first contact with, over the eons of evolution. When the cell does this, it will be stimulated to release the old contaminated water that it has known up till then.

Are there cost effective ways to produce Naturally Hydrating water for bathing?

We can produce a bathtub full, around 30 gallons, of Naturally Hydrating water rapidly and cost effectively. It needs to have the correct cluster structure and the correct trace mineral composition. People can open their eyes underwater and snort this lukewarm NH bath water to greatly enhance the natural hydration of their eyes, nose and their skin. Wrinkles diminish after a few weeks of such bathing. Even eye health will substantially improve after a few months of such eye bathing. Snorting the water will tend to substantially reduce the frequency and intensity of colds as the mucous membranes of the nose and throat recover their natural strength and resilience. As always, children and older folks will be the first to experience such miracles of health and fitness.

Beyond this, we have the technology to create, over the span of a few weeks, a pool full of Naturally Hydrating water. The costs of this technology are substantially lower than that of installing a new pool and the maintenance costs are no higher than those of a regular pool. Of course such "Naturally Hydrating pools" as we call them contain no toxins and even contribute to removing toxins from the body. For example, older folks who are often afflicted with arthritis will find that, by swimming daily in such a Naturally Hydrating pool, joint pains will begin to decrease substantially. That is indeed a major benefit of "Natural Hydration".

How does Naturally Hydrating water contribute to detoxification?

Consider using an Ionic foot bath enhanced with sea mineral concentrate so that this foot bath water becomes Naturally Hydrating water. As the system applies a current through the water that will strengthen this NH water and stimulate it to penetrate the skin of the feet more readily and permeate the lymph of the body over the half hour that the bath lasts.

This will tend to displace toxins into the bath out of the cells and the body's elimination channels.

There is an indirect way that NH water can contribute to detoxification. There is technology to make plant fertilizers that are high in NH water. When plants are grown with such fertilizer, especially the herbs that are sometimes recommended to make organ detoxification potions, their ability to draw toxins out of the body is greatly increased, again by virtue of the fact that these potions will penetrate the cells of the organs much more easily, with the consequence that they will displace the toxins in the organs for recycling during the natural bodily elimination functions.

How does NH water help us maximize the nerve supply?

Our life experiences are dependent on the quality of communication between our brain and the various organs in our body. The bulk of the communication path lies in the spinal column and the nerves that emerge at most points around the vertebrae and then go to the organs for giving them directions on how to operate for optimum health. The spinal column is filled with spinal fluid that resembles the lymph fluid in which all our organs bathe.

When NH water is drunk liberally, the lymph and spinal fluids will evolve over time to become more like NH water and bring them back to the ancestral times when the spinal column was bathed in what was essentially ocean water. When chiropractic adjustments are made to the vertebra alignments, the NH-water-irrigated spine will much more quickly learn to recognize these adjustments as returning to nature and the spinal column will that much more quickly return to its optimum alignment that will allow the nerve impulse to properly reach the organs to keep them in peak performance.

How does NH water contribute to maximizing the quality of our nutrition?

Good nutrition does mean that we take in quality nutrients through our digestive system and they are supposed to find their way into our cells to improve and optimize their function. This however, is a complex process with many steps and stages.

As it happens, when we put nutrients in NH water, this water will form layers of hexagonal clusters around the nutrient molecules and these layers will contain the mineral profiles that are typical of the ocean mineral profile. Under such circumstances these nutrients will make their way so much more efficiently through the digestive system and ultimately into the cells that they are intended to nourish.

A second consideration is that much of our nutrition comes to us dehydrated. Although the plants and animals where these nutrients come from were originally rich in water, the foods we eat are not. The dehydration process can seriously damage the nutritional value of dried foods, and this fact is often ignored by food processors.

Let me give you a simple example: Dry seeds can be germinated in tap water or in NH water. Anyone can demonstrate that seeds germinated in NH water will grow stronger, healthier plants. Considering that our bodies are around 50% vegetable in nature, we should understand that what is good for plants is good for our bodies also. In this context, a plant that is watered with NH water will grow faster, healthier (fewer bugs and diseases), will be more drought resistant and will be more nutritious than plants grown in tap water. A shining, if sad, example of this was observed after the Tsunami in SouthEast Asia. The land that was flooded by ocean water was found to be far more fertile after the flood than before the flood. This increase in fertility will hold for several years until the trace minerals have been depleted.

Another reason to use NH water with our nutrients is that our digestive system expects to see all the trace minerals of the ocean present in our food, as this is the way that food was being grown for many millennia prior to our modern agriculture. When modern food, organic or not, is presented to our digestive system, the trace minerals are most often missing. This happens even for organic foods as they are being grown in soil that has been depleted in trace minerals over the years of cultivation. Short of redefining agriculture as containing natural fertilizers that have all the trace minerals of the ocean (something that is being done with the yet sparsely used AgVol fertilizer technology), the inclusion of NH water in our food, soups, gravies and juices will help our digestive system to process these foods much more efficiently.

There is another extremely simple way to greatly improve the quality of our nutrition and that is to completely remove all table salt (and so-called Sea Salt) from the food preparation process. At the moment of consumption, one can spray the food portion with a complex sea mineral solution that has half the sodium and, not coincidentally, twice the flavor of table salt. This is available commercially as "VOLAMIN flavoring concentrate". In this seasoning mix, ½ of the sodium of table salt is replaced by a mixture of ocean magnesium together with all the additional trace minerals needed to metabolize this difficult mineral. The seasoning mix is also strongly clustered and this can reduce the cluster size of all the waters in the foods that are being flavored.

As a result, over time, the chronic magnesium deficiency that affects the bulk of our population will be reduced and people will experience much lower levels of inflammation as well as reduced levels of joint and other pains.

How can Natural Hydration contribute to maximizing Oxygen and Lean Muscle Through Exercise?

One of the many functions of exercise is to increase the oxygen supply to our muscles, nerves and organs. However, in a poorly hydrated body, the oxygen content of the lymph that surrounds our tissues can be severely depleted, as a measurement of the pH of the lymph reveals. The natural pH of the lymph is around 7.4, but the national average pH of Americans is more like 6.2. Because the pH is a logarithmic measurement, one can derive that close to 94% of the oxygen carrying capacity is lost when the lymph pH level reaches 6.0.

Our immune system operates by using oxygen to "burn" undesirable molecules present in our body. No wonder we are experiencing epidemic levels of infectious diseases in our general population, when close to 94% of the lymph system operations have been shut down. The increased levels of health problems after major holidays and after cruise ship vacations is caused by increased acidity levels from excess food intake and decreased exercise levels.

When the oxygen carrying capacity is gone from the lymph, the added oxygen that could come from exercise never arrives at its intended target. Acid lymph cannot carry oxygen, making it more difficult for a person to carry out physical activities. Our exercise becomes more tiring than refreshing, as many have noticed.

By contrast, when one drinks plenty of NH water, one of the early observations is that the pH of the lymph begins to drift back up towards the natural value of 7.4. This happens because our digestive and circulatory system has a natural ability to distribute oxygen to the lymph, provided that the trace minerals and the water clustering are appropriate. As the lymph becomes more oxygenated, its pH rises up to it natural value of around 7.4. This process unfolds over several months.

A well hydrated body with healthy lymph will receive wonderful benefits from short burst interval training exercises. Only a few minutes per week of short, intense exercise bouts, will be sufficient - something that even our busy lifestyle can easily accommodate.

Can Natural Hydration help us maximize Peace and Loving relationships?

Not directly of course, as Peace and Loving Relationships are emotional and spiritual responses that we develop over time as we engage our world, right? Let me use this analogy: as above, so below.

Surely it is true that when we have emotional peace and loving relationships, we are predisposed to creating life situations where events flow naturally and elegantly. Similarly, when we have attained a state of bodily harmony where our physiology operates smoothly and in a balanced fashion, as when we have a Naturally Hydrated body, it becomes that much easier to find the solutions to our emotional turmoil and add love to our relationships in our world.

So, we would like to end this discussion with a message from Galexis (www.galexisspirit.com) aimed at helping us expand our self-image and remembering who we really are:
"You are a spark of consciousness, a piece of the Divine.
You are divine, by your very nature.
You are a powerful light being and reality creator, here to do your personal and global work.
You are loved by God/Goddess/All That Is and never forgotten.
You are a being of infinite value and worth.
You are worthy of all great things.
You are loved, accepted and appreciated by many on this side and the other.
Claim your divine reality creatorship.
Own your Love, and radiate your Light to your world."