Water (Transcript)

Now everyone who knows me knows that, pretty well, the first prescription that I make for anybody is to drink water, and you may be wondering why, so I'll tell you. About seven years ago I read this book Your body's many cries for water by Dr F Batmanhelidg. And this book is amazing, I recommend anybody to read this book. Because you haven't, I'm going to tell you about it. I'm going to tell you the story about Dr Batman - he allows us to call him Dr Batman because his name is a bit difficult to pronounce.

Dr Batman trained in the UK as a doctor, a conventional medical doctor. In fact, he was one of the last students of Sir Alexander Fleming. When he finished his training he went back to Iran and he set up a successful medical practice there. Unfortunately for him, or maybe fortunately for him, and certainly fortunately for us, he was there when they had the revolution and people were dispossessed and thrown into jail. Some of them were killed, fortunately Dr Batman wasn't. He was kept in prison so that he could treat the prisoners when they got ill.

The first time Dr Batman was called out to treat someone it was about eleven o'clock at night and he went into their cell and they were rolling around on the floor in agony, couldn't stand up. And he said "What's wrong?" and the man said "It's my ulcer, it's really killing me, it's really painful I can't move, I'm in agony." And the guards said to Dr Batman, "Well, treat him." And Dr Batman said "Yes, fine, where are your drugs?" and the guards said "well we haven't got drugs, you're a doctor, treat him." So the only thing Dr Batman could do was to give the man water. So he gave the man two half pints of water and then he was called off to treat someone else. And when he came back, about fifteen minutes later, the man was standing up, so much more comfortable than he had been. He said he still had a bit of pain, so Dr Batman gave him another glad of water and in another ten minutes, the man was absolutely fine.

Now Dr Batman spent two years seven months in the prison and he says when he came out of prison, he had cured three thousand cases of peptic ulcer with just water. Now being a conventionally trained doctor, he was as surprised by that as anyone else would be and he dedicated the rest of his life to researching the effects of water on the body.

Dr Batman says that all the diseases of unknown origin in the Western World are due to Chronic Unintentional Dehydration. I like the "unintentional" bit because it's not like we mean to dehydrate ourselves. One of the reasons that we do dehydrate ourselves is because the thirst reflex and the hunger reflex are very similar and so we don't necessarily recognise when we are thirsty. And so instead of drinking water, we eat. Now, the process of digestion requires water, so the body puts out more signals for water, which we again interpret as hunger and again we eat, and this is the start of obesity.

So, how much water should you drink? Well, your body is 75% water and your brain is 85% water so you should drink a fair amount of water to maintain that. Every single day, every single one of us loses between three and four pints of water. We lose water obviously through going to the toilet, we lose water through perspiring and we lose water through breathing. And we know we lose water through breathing in the winter because we can see it, because the breath freezes in the air and then you can actually see the water coming out. That happens all the time, it happens even more when you're exercising. So as a minimum, really we need to be drinking between three and four pints of water a day.

If you want to know specifically for yourself how much water to drink, just work out your body weight in pounds, then divide that by two, then divide that by twenty and that's the number of pints per day you need to be drinking.

The other thing that's really important is that, once you are drinking the right amount of water, you need to take in salt - half a teaspoon of salt, across the day, added to your daily diet. And that's because water washes salt out of your body but it doesn't wash potassium out of your body. And the sodium potassium balance in your body is really important for maintaining the water in the right places.

So that's why I prescribe water to everybody when they first come and see me. So you could save yourself that prescription by starting to drink water now.

---oooOOOooo---