No more bipolar disorder?

Our world is replete with diseases of all sorts, illnesses of all kinds, ailments countless in numbers. Modern medicine views these in isolation, and therefore also attempts to treat them in isolation: we have a headache, we take an aspirin; we have high blood sugar, we take insulin injections; we have high cholesterol, we take statin drugs to disrupt the manufacturing of cholesterol in the liver; we have cancer, we are given toxic poisons that kill our cells and hope the cancer will be weakened; we have arthritis or multiple sclerosis, and we are given immune suppressants because it is thought that our own immune system has turned against us, attacking the very body it is intended to protect. We have no idea why, but this is what we do, and this is also what we believe we should be doing.

In psychiatry, we treat so-called mental illnesses. But because we are even more clueless in this realm of the subtle functioning of the brain and mind than we are of the subtle functioning of the body and its organs, we look for drugs that suppress the behaviours which are symptomatic of the “illness” we have been diagnosed with. It’s very simple: we take uppers and stimulants when we are down and low, and downers and sleeping pills when we are high and excited. Because we all do it, we think it’s perfectly normal.

When we take a close look, we see that there are no diseases, no illnesses, no ailments that are not caused by biochemical imbalances; we see that all of our health problems are rooted in problems in the biochemistry; and we see that the functioning of the body and the functioning of the mind cannot be considered independently, because they are both nothing other than the functioning of the whole body-mind.

Surely a most striking example of this is the now almost forgotten disease condition called pellagra. The name comes from the contraction of the Italian pelle (skin) and agra (sour), and was first used by Francesco Frapolli treating people in the 1880’s in Italy where more than 100 thousand suffered from it. But this wasn’t unique to Italy. The same was true in Spain and in France in the late 19th century. In the US, it reached epidemic proportions in the American south where it was estimated that between 1906 and 1940, more than 3 million were affected, and more than 100 thousand actually died from it.

Can you image that? This many people—millions of people—in quite a restricted region, walking around in manic states, delusional states, paranoid states, seeing and hearing things, talking or even yelling to themselves and others around them, completely incoherent and, in addition, covered in red, sore, flaking and bleeding skin on the arms, neck, and face? What a nightmare it must have been.

In all countries and all cases, pellagra was associated with poor nutrition, and more specifically, associated with corn-based diets in which the maize was not treated with lime in the traditional way. Similarly, in all countries and all cases, it was found that a nutritious diet based on fresh animal foods very quickly resolved the problems that afflicted the sufferers of this disease. So, even in the late nineteenth century, they had figured out how to treat and prevent it. The thing is, though, they didn’t know why if they replaced the corn and starches with meats and vegetables, people got better.

Pellagra would usually first manifest as skin problems: eczema and psoriasis-like irritations and lesions. Then, it brought about anxiety, depression, irritability and anger. And eventually, periods of full blown mania, visual and auditory hallucinations, extreme fear, paranoia, bipolar and schizophrenic behaviours.


Now, if you know someone, if you have been close to someone diagnosed with bipolar disorder, with schizophrenia, with anxiety disorders, depression, or paranoia, you will immediately recognise in this list of symptoms those you saw in this person, surely to different degrees, and surely in the most extreme during a full blown crisis. Without a doubt, at least for bipolar disorder, these symptoms are all present, often simultaneously, and sometimes in close succession.

And do you know what pellagra is? It’s vitamin B3 deficiency.

Yes, pellagra, this terrible disease that caused such awful skin conditions and straight out madness in people, this disease that made these poor people act in ways indistinguishable from those of manic-depressives and schizophrenics, was a simple vitamin B3 deficiency.

When this was understood, niacin fortification was mandated, and the epidemic affecting millions of people in the southern United States was resolved almost instantly. After decades of rampant “mental illness” among so many—so much fear, so much anxiety, so much terror within families and communities, so much pain and suffering, and tens of thousands of deaths—a little added niacin ended this national disaster that was the pellagra epidemic almost overnight. The fact that you have most likely never heard of pellagra goes to show how effective niacin fortification has been in preventing it. But something else happened.

Following the introduction of niacin fortification, half the patients held in psychiatric wards were discharged. Just like that, they got better, and went home. There was at least one psychiatrist who noticed this remarkable coincidence: his name was Abram Hoffer. He wondered why so many got better, but also why only half. What about the other half? Could it be that they just need a little more niacin? Hoffer was an MD, a board-certified psychiatrist, and a biochemistry PhD. He was also the Director of Psychiatric Research for the province of Saskatchewan in Canada, a position he held from 1950, when he was hired and appointed by the department of public health, until 1967, when he opened a private practice.

What he did to check this hypothesis—that maybe more of the psychiatric patients were not mentally ill at all, but just in need of greater amounts of niacin—was to conduct a study. He chose schizophrenics because they are among the most difficult to treat, and also because together with bipolar patients, they have many of the symptoms associated with pellagra. The results were stunning: 80% of the schizophrenics given B3 supplementation recovered. And these results aren’t anecdotal—the word often used in a pejorative or derogatory manner to dismiss important observations or evidence that fall outside the narrow realm of the conventionally accepted. These were the results of the first double-blind placebo-controlled nutrition study in the history of  psychiatry.

What double-blind placebo-controlled means is that he took two equally sized groups of people diagnosed with schizophrenia, and then randomly and blindly, both on the patient’s end as well as on his end, gave half of them 3000 mg of flush-less niacin per day in three doses. (Niacin has a flushing effect that would be noticed, but either inositol hexanicotinate or niacinamide can be used instead.) He gave the other half a placebo, which would have been a pill that looked identical, but contained no niacin or anything else that could have any significant effect on them, (like powdered sugar or a starch of some kind). And at the end of the trial, when they looked at which patient got what, they found that 80% of niacin-treated recovered, whereas none in the placebo group showed significant improvements.

Over the years, Hoffer treated thousands of people with remarkable success. With simple vitamin B3 supplementation he continued to successfully treat people suffering from schizophrenia, but also people suffering from attention deficit disorder (ADD), general psychosis, anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and bipolar disorder. In fact, he considered pellagra, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia to be the manifestation of niacin deficiency on different scales, and the sufferers to be niacin-dependent to different extents. Obviously, this is the only natural conclusion he could have drawn given how effectively niacin resolved psychiatric symptoms in these people, but also in light of the fact that each individual seemed to need somewhat different amounts to have these positive effects.

The expression niacin-dependent was used to emphasise that they needed to take it on a daily basis. Naturally, an essential vitamin is not only essential in the sense that it is absolutely needed, but also in the sense that it needs to be consumed regularly because it is not manufactured within the body. Deficiencies develop when the diet lacks in these essential nutrients, and grow more severe as time goes on. When the nutrients are then reintroduced, the deficiencies can be corrected. Some nutrients are abundant, some are rare. Some are easily absorbed, some are not. Some are more easily stored, and some cannot really be stored at all.

In addition, besides the fact that in any given population there is always—for the very same essential nutrient—a range of nutritional needs that vary between individuals based both on their genetic predispositions and on what they do, countless other factors influence and affect the amounts of essential nutrients that each one of us needs to be healthy. These include various kinds of injuries to the body-mind, and in particular to the gut where absorption of nutrients take place, that may have incurred at one point or another from an infection, a virus, a bacteria, a bad diarrhoea we had when we were babies, a childhood disease we don’t even remember, and really anything that could have damaged a specific part of the intestine where a specific family of nutrients are absorbed.

Any such injury could result in a greatly increased need for a particular nutrient that, without knowing about it, could not be supplied in adequate amounts from diet alone, and would inevitably develop into a progressively more severe deficiency whose effects on the body-mind would eventually appear as dysfunctions that would, without a doubt, have physical as well as psychological or psychiatric manifestations. Why? Because there is no body that functions independently of the mind, and there is no mind that functions independently of the body. There is only this single body-mind.

Niacin and B vitamins in general are water-soluble. This means that we pee most of them out, and that we therefore need to have them every day, or nearly, in order to prevent the development of deficiencies. The experience from the last decades of the nineteenth and the first five decades of the twentieth century in Spain, Italy, France, and  in the US, showed that a single vitamin deficiency, a simple niacin deficiency, could cause extreme symptoms that included severe psychiatric dysfunctions. It also showed that even very small amounts of B3 added to the otherwise nutrition-less white bread that was eaten as a staple could cure millions of pellagra sufferers, and prevent the disease from developing in the bulk of the population.

Unexpectedly, niacin-fortification coincided with a large number of the psychiatric ward patients getting well enough to go home. This observation prompted a study with niacin supplementation which showed that in 80% of the schizophrenia patients treated with niacin, symptoms disappeared in the same way they had in pellagra sufferers, but with higher doses of niacin. It was also shown that a similarly high cure rate was seen in people suffering from ADD, psychosis, anxiety, depression, OCD, and, in the point we wanted to emphasise in this article, bipolar disorder. In almost all cases, niacin supplementation resolved the dysfunctional behaviours and psychiatric symptoms. What varied were the amounts of vitamin B3 needed to achieve recovery, and the speed with which symptoms would come back upon interruption of the supplementation.

Therefore, whether you are among the lucky people who never were niacin deficient, among the lucky people who need little niacin, or among the less lucky ones who are deficient, who do need more of it than most, or who are suffering from anxiety or depression, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, doesn’t it make sense to just start taking a little bit of extra B3 each day? Doesn’t it make sense to give your body-mind the amount of vitamin B3 it needs, recognising that for each one of us this amount may be different, that for some it will be a lot more than for others, but resting in complete assurance that no ill effects will come from it, because niacin supplementation is harmless, and that the only disadvantage of it being harmless, even in large doses, is that we need to take it daily?

Given how inexpensive any form of niacin is, shouldn’t we be giving it in large amounts to every patient in every hospital, psychiatric ward, and medical institution? We should, but this will probably never happen. What we can do is take care of ourselves, of those people closest to us like our children and spouses, siblings and parents; of those people we care about like our friends and colleagues; and even of those people who are simple acquaintances who come to us for advice or just to share their concerns about a health issue. And one of the simplest and most effective things we can do to improve our own health and the health of those around us is by taking a little B3 supplement every day. It could just make you feel more relaxed, more focused, calm and at ease, as it does for me, or it could completely transform your world, bringing you from a state of hyper-anxious, paranoid, delusional and hallucinatory mania, back to a relaxed, helpful and trusting, conscientious and reasonable self, giving you the gift of your own life back to yourself.

Could it really be this simple and this amazingly miraculous? No more pellagra, no more schizophrenia, no more bipolar disorder, just with a little B3 supplementation? Well, maybe. You try it, and let us know.

Healthy and lucid from childhood to old age

So you’ve been around for 70 years, and you’re still well enough to read this. Have you actually made it past 75, 80 or even 85? This is really great! Through a combination of different factors, various reasons, personal habits and choices, you have made this far.

Maybe because of your genetic makeup: Your parents and grand-parents all lived well into their 80’s or 90’s by following a kind of innate, traditional wisdom based on the understanding that we really are what we eat, in a very real sense, and you’ve done more or less the same, following in their footsteps.

Maybe because you have always been moderate in your eating habits: You’ve never been overweight; you’ve never eaten much sweets or deserts; you’ve never eaten much preserved meats and canned foods; you’ve never drank much alcohol; you’ve never drank sweetened soft drinks, juice or milk—mostly just water, always paying attention not to drink too much coffee or strongly caffeinated tea.

Maybe you have made it this far because you have also been moderately active throughout your life, never exercising too much or too intensely, but always quite regularly: Walking; doing light exercises for your joints (rotations of the arms for your shoulders, stretches for your neck and back, and exercises for your knees); riding a bike a couple times a week in the good season, not getting off the bike but instead riding up those hills; maybe you went skiing a week or two most years; went for long walks or even hikes in the mountains during holidays; or did a little swimming in the sea or in lakes when the occasion presented itself.

The golden middleas my grand-father called it: everything is moderation. And he almost made it to 90 years of age! But no matter what the reason is, it is truly wonderful that you have indeed made it this far. Then again, you might be young or middle aged, but interested—maybe somewhat, maybe highly, but nonetheless interested—in being healthy and lucid for as long as possible, and hopefully well into your old age.

Either way, young or old, you live in this modern world like most of us. You live in a city, you drive a car, you work in an office, you fly or flew often on business trips, maybe even several times per week. You eat meat and fish; bread, potatoes, rice and pasta; fruits and vegetables, all from the supermarket.  And so you have, throughout your life, been continuously exposed to increasing amounts of chemicals, heavy metals and various other toxins in our environment, most of which have been accumulating in your tissues. You live in the modern world like most of us, and so you have taken medication on various occasions during your life: antibiotics a few times, maybe some pain killers, maybe some sleeping pills, maybe simple anti-histamines when you had a cold. Maybe you are and have even been taking medication on a daily basis for some “minor” but “chronic” condition.

You live in this modern world and so you have been told to drink plenty of fluids and that salt is bad and should be avoided. You’ve been told that fat in general, but especially saturated fats and cholesterol, are bad because they cause heart disease: they cause your arteries to clog up with fatty plaques that eventually block them to give you a heart attack. You’ve been told to avoid them as much as you can, and instead to consume polyunsaturated vegetable oils, plenty of whole grains and cereal products, legumes, plenty of fruits and vegetables, and so you have done that: you have decreased or almost eliminated your intake of butter, eggs, fatty cheese, fatty yoghurt, red meat—never ever eating the fatty trimmings, and also of the fatty skin on chicken or fish.

Consequently, you have increased your intake of morning cereal—but only sugar-free whole grain cereal like muesli; increased your intake of bread—but usually whole grain bread; increased your intake of rice—but usually brown rice; increased your intake of pasta—but usually also whole grain pasta; and increased you intake of potatoes—but never fried, only baked, steamed or boiled potatoes.

Maybe your total lipoprotein levels are around 220 or 240 mg/dl, and you have been told that this is too high, and for this reason you have tried to further reduce your fat intake, and are even taking statins or other cholesterol-lowering drugs, every day, just like hundreds of millions of other people in this modern world.

Unfortunately, you have not been told that you should be drinking water; not fluids in general, and that there are many reasons water, ageing and disease are intimately connected—the lack of water, that is. In addition to that, you have not been told that it is not enough to drink some water sometimes: it is essential to drink water before meals. Unfortunately, you have not been told that sodium is one of the most important minerals for health: why else would the kidneys, without which we cannot live for more than a few days, go to such great lengths to prevent its excretion in the urine, and keep it in the blood if it wasn’t? But even more unfortunately, you have not been told that minerals in general, are essential for health, and that unrefined sea salt contains all naturally occurring trace minerals is proportions that closely match those of several of our bodily fluids. And that furthermore, proper bodily function depends intimately on the balance of the minerals available, and that our salt-phobic and calcium-phillic society has led to most of us becoming completely over-calcified while growing more and more deficient in the rest of the trace minerals, and in particular magnesium. The link between generalised magnesium deficiency and minerals, ageing and disease are now everywhere painfully obvious.

Unfortunately—and indeed very sadly—you have not been told that cholesterol is absolutely vital for life and good health: that it forms the membrane of every single cell in your body and in that of every animal, that your entire nervous system and especially your brain are built using cholesterol and depend intimately on the availability of plenty of cholesterol, that your hormonal system relies completely on cholesterol for building hormones, and that your best defences against infectious and inflammatory pathogens are in fact the lipoproteins carrying around the precious cholesterol throughout your body. You have not been told that cholesterol is so important that it is manufactured continuously by our liver to keep up with the body’s needs, and that therefore, the cholesterol we eat does not in any ways raise lipoprotein concentrations. You have not been told that in addition to cholesterol, fat is also essential for building hormones, essential for absorbing minerals from the intestines into our bloodstream, essential for the binding of these minerals into the bones and teeth, essential for energy production in every cell of our body.

Furthermore, you have not been told that saturated fats like those found in animal products and coconut oil are molecularly stable, whereas unsaturated and particularly polyunsaturated oils such as those that make up all vegetable oils are molecularly unstable, some more than others, for the double bonds between carbon atoms in the chain that forms the fat molecule are weak and readily broken to permit some other unstable molecule seeking a free electron to attach in order to make the final molecular configuration stable. But that those unstable compounds are actually scavenging around for any electron to bind to, and unfortunately most of the time if not always, these free-radicals will attach themselves to healthy tissue without proper enzymatic action to guide them in the proper place and position, thus damaging our tissues.

In fact, you have not been told that all large studies that have been conducted to evaluate the “health-promoting” properties of polyunsaturated fats have not only failed to do so, but instead have shown that the more polyunsaturated oils we consume, the more atherosclerotic plaques develop in our arteries, and therefore the more likely we are to suffer a heart attack or stroke. And that on the contrary, the more saturated fats we consume, the less plaques we have, and consequently, the less likely we are to have a heart attack or a stroke (see any of the books about cholesterol in Further readings).

You have not been told, that for millions of years our species has evolved consuming most of its calories in the form of saturated fats from meat and animal products—in some cases exclusively from these, from coconut and palm oil (where these grow), and to a much lesser extent from polyunsaturated fats, and this only in whole foods such as fish, nuts and seeds—never concentrated into vegetable oils.

Unfortunately—and indeed very sadly—you have not been told that we were never meant to eat simple or starchy carbohydrates: that eating such carbohydrates always triggers the pancreas to secrete insulin in order to clear the bloodstream of the damaging glucose in circulation, that chronically elevated glucose levels lead to chronically elevated insulin levels that in turn lead to insulin resistance—first in our muscles, then in our liver, and finally in our fat cells—which leads to type II diabetes, to heart disease from the buildup of plaque in the coronary arteries and vessels, and to Alzheimer’s and cognitive degradation from the buildup of plaque in the cerebral arteries and vessels.

Unfortunately—and indeed very sadly—you have not been told and have not considered that all the multitude of chemicals and heavy metals that we are exposed to in the medications we take, in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the food we eat, in the soaps and shampoos we use, and in the household products we employ to keep our house sparkling clean and bacteria-free, accumulate in our bodies. They accumulate in our fat cells, in our tissues, in our organs, in our brains. They burden, disrupt and damage our digestive system, our immune system, our hormonal system, our organs, tissues and cells. Sometimes they reach such concentrations that we become gravely ill, but none of the doctors we visit in seeking a solution and relief understand why. Most often, however, we don’t get gravely ill but instead start developing different kinds of little problems: we get colds more often and take longer to recover, we get mild but regular digestive upsets that we can’t explain and that seem to get worse with time, we get headaches and have trouble sleeping, we feel depressed, tired, alone, helpless, not acutely but enough to disturb us enough that we notice it.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, you have not been told how truly essential vitamin B12 really is, but how, for a variety of different reasons, blood concentrations B12 decrease with age, and eventually dwindle to very low levels. That B12 is essential most crucially to preserve the myelin sheath that covers all of our nerves healthy, and thus crucially important for everything that takes place throughout the nervous system, which means, everything in the body and brain. Levels of B12 should never go below 450 pg/ml, and ideally should be maintained at 800 pg/ml throughout life, from childhood to old age hood.

Can we do anything about all this?

The most fundamental point to understand is that everything about your health depends on the state of health of your digestive system. All absorption of nutrients and elimination of waste happens in the digestive system. Since our health depends on proper absorption and efficient elimination, the digestive system should be our first as well as our main concern.

The first step is to rebuild and establish a healthy intestinal flora of beneficial bacteria (breakdown and absorption), and at the same time begin to detoxify the body and clean out the intestines (elimination). This is done by taking high quality probiotics to supply beneficial bacteria on a daily basis, high quality chlorella to both supply a lot of micronutrients and pull out heavy metals, and water-soluble fibre like psyllium husks to clean out the intestines by pushing out toxins and waste products. If you are not already taking these, read Probiotics, chlorella and psyllium husks.

The second step is by far the most important, and in fact, crucial dietary change necessary to achieve optimal metabolic health. It is to eliminate simple and starchy carbohydrates from you diet, and replace them with more raw vegetables—especially green and leafy salads and colourful vegetables such as red and yellow peppers, more nuts and seeds—especially raw and soaked, more good and efficiently absorbed protein—especially eggs, fish and raw cheeses, and much more saturated fats—especially coconut oil (at least 3 tablespoons per day) and butter. Doing this is  essential for the systemic detoxification, rebuilding and then maintaining a healthy digestive system. Everything should be organic: you obviously don’t want to be adding to your toxic load while trying to detoxify.

And the third step is to supplement our now-excellent, health-promoting diet with a few essential and very important nutrients that are, for most of us, difficult to obtain. The only such supplements that I believe to be essential, and that my family and I take daily, are: Vitamin B12 and vitamin D3—the most important supplements to take for overall health, but in which we are almost all deficient; Krill oil—a high-quality, animal-based omega-3 fat with its own natural anti-oxidants, highly absorbable, and particularly important for proper brain function; Ubiquinol—the reduced and thus useable form of coenzyme Q10, critical for cellular energy production, and a powerful lipid-soluble anti-oxidant that protects our cells from oxidative damage, but both of whose synthesis as CoQ10 and conversion from CoQ10 to ubiquinol drop dramatically after about age 30-40; Vitamin K2—essential for healthy bones but very hard to get other than from fermented foods, which we typically eat little of.

In addition to these, we usually always take Astaxanthin and turmeric—very powerful antioxidants with amazing general and specific anti-ageing health benefits, and also sometimes take a whole-foods-multi—basically dehydrated vegetables and berries made into a powder and compressed into a pill for extra micronutrients. (You can read about all of these supplements on Wikipedia or any other page you will find by doing an internet search.)

I tend to buy our supplements from Dr Joseph Mercola, (whose website also provides a lot of info about these and other supplements, as well as about a multitude of other health-related issues and conditions), because I trust that his are among if not the best on the market: there’s really no point in buying cheap supplements at the pharmacy, and risking doing yourself more harm than good, as would happen with a rancid omega-3 supplement, or a synthetic Vitamin D, for example.

Staying healthy and lucid is, in reality, quite easy and simple. Unfortunately, most of us, including, and maybe especially our medical doctors, just don’t know how. And so, medical diagnostic and high-tech treatment technologies continue to improve and develop, and medical expenditures continue to rise throughout the modern world, but we are sicker than ever: more obesity, more diabetes, more strokes, more heart attacks, more cancers, more Alzheimer’s, more leaky guts, more ulcers, more liver failures, more kidney failures, and on and on. There is more disease, more pain, more suffering and more premature deaths. And all of it is completely unnecessary and avoidable by such simple and inexpensive means as those outlined herein. The only critical point is that only you can do it; nobody else can do it for you.

Water, ageing, and disease

Thinning skin, drying hair, wrinkles, brown spots here and there, patches of discolouration. Sagging eye lids, sagging cheeks, sagging skin all over the body. Loss of bone mass, loss of muscle mass. Stiffening joints, stiffening muscles, stiffening tendons and ligaments, stiffening veins and arteries. Weakness, tiredness, aching. Loss of memory, loss of concentration, loss of intellectual capacity, dullness. Metabolic syndrome, diabetes, senility, dementia, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, elevated cholesterol, atherosclerosis, stroke, kidney failure, liver failure, heart failure, cancer.

Are all these symptoms, these conditions, independent from one another? Are they different? Do they arise spontaneously and develop on their own? Do they just fall upon us unpredictably as rain does? Or are they consequences of more basic factors that elude most of us.

If we could ask the late Dr. Batmanghelidj (1931-2004), M.D., about ageing and disease, he would surely say that its primary cause is the cumulative effects of chronic dehydration on the body, and the plethora of consequences that this brings about. This chronic dehydration that only increases in severity with time, gives rise to so many problems.

But independently of anyone’s opinion, it is an observational fact is that when we are born, the body is 90% water, but when we die, it is only 50% water. Doesn’t this tell us something? Doesn’t this tell us that ageing and dying could be considered as a process of gradual dehydration?

The main way in which we provide water to the body is by drinking. And all of the nutrients required to sustain the body come from the foods we eat. Therefore, the digestive system is truly at the root of it all. As I explained in this previous post on the important of water in the digestive system, the direct consequences of not drinking adequately on an empty stomach long enough before eating, are the poor digestion of food, and the damage caused to the lining of the stomach and intestines that eventually lead to ulcers and leaky gut syndrome.

But poor digestion of food means improper break down of protein into amino acids, and the deficiency in the full range of these essential compounds necessary for so many functions in the brain and in every cell of the body. Poor digestion of food means improper break down of fats into their constituent fatty acids that provide not only the primary source of energy, but also the very building blocks of the membrane of every single cell in the body. Poor digestion of food means improper absorption of minerals and the complex molecules we call vitamins, that together with the proteins and fats are used not only in building all the tissues in the body, but also in every single chemical reaction, transport and communication between cells and tissues. Over time, poor digestion and damage to the digestive organs leads to the permanent loss of the ability to absorb certain minerals and vitamins. There is no doubt that this leads to complications that will manifest in various complex ways.

The lack of water in the digestive system leads to a lack of water in the bloodstream. The blood gradually thickens, its volume decreases, and its viscosity increases. This increases the friction between the blood and the walls of the blood vessels, and therefore the resistance in the flow. The heart is now under severe stress as it attempts to pump this thick, viscous, sticky blood to all parts of the body, and through all the vessels from the largest arteries to the narrowest almost microscopic veins. But this intense efforts by the heart also stressed the vessels themselves. Stress on the vessels leads to lesions. Lesions lead to plaques whose purpose is to patch up and heal the damaged tissues. The accumulation of such plaques, whose spontaneous bursting causes strokes, leads to atherosclerosis that eventually leads to heart failure. Pretty grim picture, isn’t it? But far from being complete yet.

The lack of sufficient amounts of water in the bloodstream obviously means that every organ and every cell of the body gradually becomes more and more dehydrated over time. For the cell, water is by far the most important substance, it is the context in which absolutely everything takes place, and on which everything depends. In order to maintain as much of this precious water as is possible, every single cell starts to produce more cholesterol to seal its membrane a well as possible and keep and protect its water. This is why dehydration leads to the appearance of excessive amounts of cholesterol, which in this case is the cell’s essential water preservation mechanism.

The lack of sufficient amounts of water in the bloodstream is particularly detrimental to the articulations. The joints of the body, all those areas where out limbs bend, are a complex assemblage of tissues whose primary component is cartilage. Cartilage is a kind of a simple matrix that holds water. It is the water content of the cartilage that gives it its suppleness and flexibility, allowing it to protect the bones from rubbing against each other in the joints when we move. It is well known that as we age, all of our joints and cartilage dries out, and we develop what we call arthritis. But is this because we are getting older, or is it because we are getting more and more dehydrated with every passing day? Is arthritis a disease of ageing or is it a consequence of chronic dehydration?

The amazing thing is that the only way to bring water to the cartilage in the joints to maintain their flexibility and prevent their degradation is through the porous ends of the bones to which the cartilage is attached. And the only way to bring water to the end of the bone is through its marrow. And the only way to bring water to the marrow is by way of the blood. Therefore, to prevent the gradual dehydration and subsequent breaking down of the cartilage in the joints, the blood must be well hydrated: thin, easy flowing and full of water.

And what does all this mean for the rest of the body? By weight, the muscles are 75% water; the blood is 82% water; the lungs are 90% water; the brain, the primary element of the central nervous system, is 78% water; even the bones are 25% water. So, it’s pretty simple: as dehydration increases over time, all organs, all tissues and all cells suffer, shrink, weaken, and succumb ever more easily to disease, whatever form it may take.

Dr. Batmanghelidj presents a convincing line of arguments linking breathing and lung disorders like asthma and allergies to chronic dehydration, and also believes that the dehydration of brain and nerve cells whose composition is also mostly water, leads to disorders of the central nervous system such as Alzheimer’s disease.

And the skin? Think about any fruit or vegetable that you place on a shelf in the fridge, like an apple, a carrot or a radish, and leave there for a long time. It will gradually soften, then start to wrinkle, and with time continue to soften and wrinkle more and more until it is nothing but a tiny dried out little thing. Moreover, you may also have noticed that if you take a partly dehydrated carrot, radish, or celery stick, for example, cut them and place them in water for a while, they will re-hydrate by refilling the cells with water, and in so doing become hard and crunchy once again. But if you wait too long, then no matter how much time you leave them in water, the cells will not re-hydrate. Logically, since our water content is similar to a fruit or vegetable, what happens to the body is probably very similar, and hence gradual the softening, wrinkling, weakening, and overall degradation of the bodymind at the days and years go by.

Obviously, this does not mean that by drinking enough pure water—no other liquids can be substituted for water—to ensure that the bodymind is well hydrated, we will not age. Of course not. But at least, we will ensure that ageing and all the consequences associated with ageing are not accelerated by dehydration. The last thing we want is to accelerate our rate of ageing and our susceptibility to disease.

The truth is that for most living beings on Earth, water is life. There is no question about this. We and most terrestrial animals are constituted of about 60-70% water and 30-40% minerals—by mass. But in fact, in terms of the number of molecules in our bodies, we are 99% water! Can we grasp the significance of this? Can we now realise what dire consequences the slightest dehydration can cause to every cell, every tissue, every organ, and every system of the body? It is hard to quantify, but it is huge. And coming back to our initial question: are ageing and disease different? Are they related? What do you think?

Although chronic dehydration is so common that it is generalised, avoiding dehydration is very simple: drink water, unsweetened herbal teas, and light green tea. Don’t drink sweet drinks, juices or sodas: these are full of sugar, including large amounts of fructose, that totally disrupt both the hormonal system and the metabolism, promoting hormonal imbalances and insulin resistance. Don’t drink milk: this is a food that contains fats, proteins and carbohydrates, and trigger all the required digestive processes that further exacerbate the problems associates with chronic dehydration. Just drink water.

At the very least, drink half a litre when you get up in the morning (7:00), half a litre mid-morning (10:30), half a litre 30 minutes before lunch (12:30), half a litre in the late afternoon (16:30), and half a litre 30 minutes before dinner (18:30). And make sure you have plenty of unrefined sea salt with your meals. If you are fasting, take a pinch of salt on at least some of the occasions when you drink to reach a total of 1 to 2 teaspoons over the course of the day (including the salt eaten with meals). In this way, you will provide your body a good amount of water and salt to ensure proper hydration and excretion of acids through the urine.