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Drink, Drink, Drink - on doctor's orders
The key to good health is lots of water and a pinch of salt.
The HUMAN being and the boiled pea have an essential property in common. Both are made up of about 75% water. But just as a shriveled pea has little to commend it, so dehydration damages the body and eventually, human life itself.
Adults lose nearly six pints of water every day: a pint in perspiration, two pints in breathing out and three pints in urine. It does not take a degree in higher mathematics to work out that this water needs to be replaced.
Harder to swallow are the theories of Dr Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, an Iranian born doctor now living in America, who believes unshakably that many of the most common serious ailments are caused by our reluctance to drink water.
Asthma, high blood pressure, stomach ulcers, angina, headaches, back pain, colitis, stress, arthritis, diabetes and obesity are, he argues both scientifically and beguilingly, all based on dehydration and its knock-on effects.
Thirsty cells do not work at their best and trigger all manner of inappropriate bodily responses as a result. He also believes that we have forgotten how to read our thirst signals and often confuse them with hunger. Instead of drinking a glass of water, we eat a tasty snack.
Dr Batmanghelidg’s view arose when he was under sentence of death during the Iranian revolution. Incarcerated for more than two and a half years, he acted as a medical officer for 3,000 prisoners with almost no medicines. When a man arrived in desperate pain from a peptic ulcer, he gave him two glasses of water and the pain stopped after eight minutes. His success so impressed the fundamentalist authorities that they spared his life.
Tea, coffee and colas do not count in measuring fluid intake. In fact, they make things worse. They contain caffeine, which is a diuretic that reduces the body’s water content. For each cup of coffee, you should drink a compensating cup of water, he says. Fruit juices are no good either, according to Dr Batmanghelidj. If you drank the equivalent amount in orange juice, you would take in too much potassium which would throw you off balance.
His work is based on the theory that it is the water content of cells that regulates all our body functions, and not the body chemicals that are dissolved in it. If the water content is insufficient, then the body chemicals cannot work properly.
Asthma is the condition for which Dr Batmanghelidj makes some of his most confident claims. “We could cure asthma in two weeks if we followed my regime. His scientific explanation is based on the activity of histamine, one of the brain’s messenger chemicals. Histamine plays a key role in regulating the way the body uses and distributes water. It also has a role in controlling the body’s defence mechanisms.
In asthmatics, he says histamine can be found in increased quantities in the lungs. When water levels are normal, histamine activity is appropriate to the body’s needs. When dehydrated, the action of histamine is exaggerated and one defence for the body is to close down the airways.
When there is insufficient water, the lungs also produce mucus, and salt is needed to make mucus watery. Dr Batmanghelidj argues that asthmatics should slightly increase their salt intake, so that when they feel an attack coming on, the salt on the tongue will fool the brain into thinking it has arrived in the body. The brain then instructs the mucus to dissolve, and the tightened airways to relax.
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