Connecting to Wellness

What do Coffee, Tea, Alcohol and Soda have in common?  Anything you drink with caffeine or alcohol can dehydrate you by turning off antidiuretic hormone in your kidneys.  This hormone causes your kidneys to return water back to the body.  If it is shut off, you lose water.  When you take water out of your body, you dry up causing: fatigue, muscle aches, joint pain, headaches, toxicity, etc.  Staying hydrated is one of the most important things you can do to promote health!

I’m amazed with how many people “don’t like water.”  This is equivalent to saying, “I don’t like air.”  Our bodies are about 65% water by weight.  Water is one of the least forgiving of all the nutrients – you can only survive a couple days without it. It is responsible for the transport of nutrients, oxygen, and waste products, as well as regulating your body temperature and serving as the medium in which almost all of your body’s chemical reactions take place.  Drinking an adequate amount of clean water is one of the most overlooked but simple ways of keeping healthy.

Most agree that you should have around 8-10 (8 oz) glasses of water each and every day.  Others say you should take your weight in pounds and divide that number by ‘2’ and this number is the amount of water in ounces you should drink daily.  Regardless, it is my experience that most people could benefit from more water.

If you truly cannot learn to like the taste of water, I recommend mineral water, unsweetened green or black teas, water with lemon added or mixed with fruit juice.  You can substitute a couple glasses of unsweetened fruit juice each day.  However, you cannot count caffeinated tea, coffee, or soda as the water that is in these is lost through the kidneys as a result of caffeine.

I really had every intention to leave sugar alone for a while, but a recent article from the Journal of Experimental Medicine has changed my mind. If you thought the extra sugar you and your kids ate at Easter had little or only a short term effect, think again.  This latest research has shown that human genes remember a sugar hit for up to two weeks and change the way your body functions.  These authors concluded that all poor eating habits have what they referred to as “dramatic and long-lasting effects” on our cells.  Regular poor eating seems to amplify this effect. This research can be added to the long list of material that suggests that ‘nurture’ is a bigger factor in determining health than ‘nature.’  We used to be taught that we were victims of our genes and that health and sickness comes down to a matter of good or bad luck.  They now know that our genes are turned on or off based on our lifestyle choices and our environment – this is the determining factor of health over disease. The life lesson here is that all the lifestyle choices we make last a lot longer than we might think.  Furthermore, because lifestyle choices change the expression of our genes, we pass these tendencies to future generations.