The Role of Water Intake and Nutrition In Healing

Most of us do not drink enough water. Generally speaking, adults should drink at least six to eight glasses of liquid daily; most of us can stand more. This may not apply in cases of certain kinds of bladder and kidney difficulties.

The vital need for water is not recognised by most people, yet most of the major systems of the body need water to function properly. Skin, the covering of the body, loses water every day through perspiration. The lungs require approximately, two glasses of water each day to function properly. The small intestines also need water to function properly; and the lack of it can be a factor in faulty elimination. Your kidneys, which are the most important organs in the body’s elimination system, utilise a large quantity of water daily to carry out wastes.

Many people use thirst as a criterion for determining the water intake; this is not a good indicator. Water should be drunk at regular intervals whether you have a desire for it or not. It is well to drink a glass of cool, but not iced, water when you get up in the morning. This should precede breakfast by some 10-15 minutes. This will greatly aid in activating the intestinal tract, establishing normal elimination, and preventing the accumulation of poisonous wastes.

The body is a complex and unique machine which needs water to function properly. Attention to water intake is a small price to pay for the benefits received

Physiological Dynamics

The final principle of nutrition you need to know is physiological dynamics. Unlike drugs, nutrients do not have rapid effects. No quick fix. The business of nutrition is to build a better body. That has to wait on Nature to turn over body cells. A blood cell lasts 60-120 days. In 3-4 months your whole blood supply is completely replaced. In 6 months almost all the proteins in your body die and are replaced, even the DNA of your genes. In a year all your bones and even the enamel of your teeth is replaced, constructed entirely out of the nutrients that you eat.

This time course is well illustrated by the course of deficiency diseases. If I remove all the vitamin C from your diet, within 4 weeks blood vitamin C will drop to zero. But you will see no symptoms of disease for at least 4 weeks. You have to wait until enough of the healthy cells have been replaced by unhealthy cells. It is another 12 weeks before symptoms of scurvy start to ravage your body.

So when you implement an optimum nutrition program, don’t expect rapid results. In one of our studies at the Colgan Institute, runners were supplemented to try to improve their haemoglobin, hematocrit, and red blood cell count. But after one month of supplementation, there was no improvement at all. After 6 months, however, all three indices were significantly increased.

Think of it this way. If you take a neglected houseplant and start feeding and watering it, the leaves may perk up a bit from the improved nutrition. But you have to wait for the old leaves to die off and new leaves to grow before you get a really healthy plant. It is the same with the human body. When you start feeding it better, you have to wait on the physiological dynamics of the body to grow new improved cells in the improved nutrient medium.

In the course of following a nutritional program for allergies or other problems, many people experience uncomfortable symptoms. This is known as a healing reaction.

The most common symptom my clients report is a temporary energy reduction. They may sleep longer, perhaps as much as 12 hours a night. Some people also report aches and pains, digestive symptom disturbances such as gas, constipation, diarrhoea or other miscellaneous complaints.

These symptoms may occur because the body is ridding itself of substances that have been making it ill – not only the materials that have built up in their individual cells, interfering with their Norman functioning. As these substances are ejected from the tissues, they are dumped into the system, making the body temporarily more toxic until they are excreted. This is partly what produces the symptoms of the healing reaction. This effect is accentuated by the body’s process of tearing apart defective tissue, repairing damaged cells, destroying parasites or infected agents and otherwise producing debris from the reconstruction.

I find that the more severe the individuals condition (the more toxic his/her body is), the stronger will be the healing reaction. Because the healing reaction is caused by flushing out of toxins out of the cells, the strength of the reaction also depends on how carefully the individual is following the recommended program, the more correctly the program is followed the stronger will be the healing reaction.

Of ten in the course of the healing process old symptoms temporarily reappear. Why should people have to go back through these old problems in the course of getting better? I believe that the specific symptoms that a person experiences depend on the various biochemical substances in the body. For example, when a person is perfectly healthy there is a certain ratio between Substance A and Substance B in the tissues. When this gets out of balance to a certain degree, the person may feel fatigue; when the imbalance is greater, a headache may occur; when it is even greater the person may develop insomnia, and so on.

One reason people must re-experience symptoms as they get healthier is that in order to progress from say 100:1 imbalance to a 1:1 balance they have to go back through 98:1, and so forth and as they go through each phase they experience the symptoms associated with that particular level of imbalance.

Biochemist John Eck has pursued a similar line of thought in his research on mineral nutrients. Using hair analysis Eck has suggested the optimal levels of some of the principal minerals in the body. On the basis of the ratios among these minerals, Eck is able to estimate how efficiently the thyroid and adrenal glands are functioning and hence to predict an individual’s metabolic energy level.

Of curse in actuality a person’s symptoms would not depend on the ratio between two substances amongst hundreds of different things. If a person gets stuck at some level he will get stuck with the symptoms for that level. This helps to explain the basis of the chronic illnesses from which so many people suffer.

I like to picture the healing process as going up a flight of stairs; energy is balanced, all the nutrients are present in their proper ratios, and the body is functioning properly. When someone’s health begins to deteriorate, he descends the stairs. At each step along the way he has a specific symptom – perhaps less energy at one step, headaches further down, an ulcer still further and so on.

Those who have no time for nutrition and exercise had better reserve a lot of time for disease.

Michael Colgan, Continuing Medical Education Lectures, 1998