How to Optimize Your Water Quality & Intake for Health | Huberman Lab Podcast

Andrew Huberman: Welcome to the Huberman
Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. [MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor
of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we're discussing water. Now, to some of you, water might seem
like a boring topic, but I assure you that water is anything but a boring topic. In fact, water as a substance is
incredibly interesting for a variety of reasons that I'll explain today. In fact, we are going to discuss the
physics and chemistry of water, and I promise to make it accessible to
anyone and everyone regardless of whether or not you have a physics
or chemistry background, and I will discuss how your body needs and
utilizes water depending on what type of water you drink, the temperature of
that water, when you drink the water, and indeed how you drink that water.

Now, water is actually a
pretty controversial topic. In fact, in preparing for this episode,
which took me several months, in fact, I ran into highly contradictory
information and had to go on some real deep dives in order to ferret out the
best and most accurate knowledge for you. I also found that there are generally
two camps of people out there in terms of how they think about
water and the consumption of water. One camp generally speaking, is of the
mind that tap water is completely safe.

Perhaps it needs a little bit of
filtering, but that in most areas of the world, if it runs out of the
tap, and unless there's a warning sign directly above the faucet,
that you can drink the tap water. The other camp seems to be the camp
that does not trust anything that comes out of the tap and is excited by and
in fact, relies on things like reverse osmosis, deuterium depleted, hydrogen
rich, or other forms of water that sometimes can be very expensive or at
least involve some substantial steps in order to clean, filter, alter the
chemistry of, or in some other way, adjust before they are willing to consume it. So today what we're going to try and do is
to address all the stances around water. For instance, we will discuss whether
or not tap water is indeed safe, and I will give you some tools that will allow
you to address whether or not the water coming out of your tap is safe, as well
as some tools that will allow you to address how to clean that water if indeed
it does need filtering and cleaning.

In particular for things like fluorides
and endocrine disruptors, which it turns out, are quite prominent in a lot, not
all, but a lot of tap water sources. I will also talk about the more
"esoteric forms of water" that I mentioned a few minutes ago. So I will go systematically through
the list of distilled reverse osmosis, spring water, deuterium depleted
water, high pH water, and for those of you that are already screaming out
as you hear this, oh no, he's going to tell us that pH water can alter
the pH of our body in helpful ways. I'm not going to tell you that, but I will
tell you that the alkalinity or acidity of the water that is the pH of the water that
you drink has a profound impact on your ability to absorb and utilize that water
and the impact that those water molecules have on specific biological systems. So it turns out pH is very important,
but not for the reasons that you've probably heard about previously.

I'll talk about how the temperature of
water that you drink does indeed turn out to be important for the rate of
absorption of that water and its impact on the cells, tissues, and organs of
your body, and thereby your health. And I will talk about various zero
cost and low cost tools that you can use in order to get the most
out of the water that you drink. And finally, I will talk about when
and how to hydrate your body best. Before we dive into today's topic,
I wanna share with you some very interesting results that were just
published on the use of deliberate cold exposure to benefit fat loss. Now, deliberate cold exposure is a topic
I've covered before on this podcast. We have an entire episode about that, that
I've linked in the show note captions. Deliberate cold exposure can be done
by way of cold showers or immersion in cold or ice water up to the neck. That's typically the ways that it's done.

It has been shown to reduce inflammation,
to increase metabolism, and I think some of the most exciting results that have
been published are the results certainly in humans showing that deliberate cold
exposure can increase the release of so-called catecholamines, which are
dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. And those increases in those three
molecules are quite long lasting and lead to substantial increases in
mood and focus throughout the day.

Now, many people out there hear about
deliberate cold exposure and cringe. Other people hear about it and cringe
because they've heard that deliberate cold exposure, especially by way of immersion
in water, can block the adaptation to strength or hypertrophy training. What I mean by that is yes, indeed there
are data showing that if one gets into very cold water up to the neck in the six
hours, anytime that is in the six hours after strength or hypertrophy training,
that some of the strength and hypertrophy increases that one would observe, are
blocked by that deliberate cold exposure.

However, after six hours does
not seem to be a problem. So it can be done on other days besides
the strength and hypertrophy training. It can be done before strength
and hypertrophy training. It can be done after endurance work. And I should mention that it does not
appear that cold showers disrupt the adaptations to strength and hypertrophy
training, even if they're done immediately after strength or hypertrophy training. Okay, with that said, many people do enjoy
the effects of deliberate cold exposure, in particular for those increases in mood
and alertness that are the consequence of those increases in the catecholamine,
dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. And again, those increases
are very long lasting. So it's not just during
the exposure to cold. It is for several hours up to
four, maybe even five or six hours, depending on how cold and how long the
deliberate cold exposure happens to be. Again, there's a lot to say and
explore about deliberate cold exposure. So again, I'll just refer you to the
episode on deliberate cold exposure. If you want to explore the mechanisms
and the positive health outcomes, some of the controversies within
the data, etc., within that episode.

Meanwhile, I definitely want to
share with you the results of this recent study that just came out. The title of this study is "Impact
of Cold Exposure on Life Satisfaction and Physical Composition of Soldiers". The reason this study is very interesting
is that it's one of the few studies that used, or I should say, explored
both deliberate cold exposure by immersion in cold water, as well as
deliberate cold exposure by way of cold showers as it relates to weight loss. Now, there's already data out there on
the effects of deliberate cold exposure and metabolism, and here I'm mainly
referring to the beautiful work of Dr.

Susanna Søberg and colleagues in
Scandinavia that showed that people that do 11 minutes total of deliberate cold
exposure by immersion and cold water up to the neck per week, so 11 minutes
per week total, spread out across some different sessions by way of getting into
water that's uncomfortably cold up to the neck, and then getting out and then doing
that several times per week to hit that 11 minutes or more threshold, and, this
is very important, we'll come up in a moment in the context of this new study,
and warming up not by getting into a warm shower, which is frankly what I do after
my cold showers or getting into the ice bath or cold water immersion, but rather
forcing their body to warm up naturally by using its own metabolic abilities. In those studies, they observed
substantial increases in brown fat stores, which are fat stores that you really want
around the heart, and clavicles increases in metabolism that were quite dramatic
in my opinion, and that could be very beneficial for allowing people to feel
more comfortable at cold temperatures when they're not in cold water and on and on.

So lots of benefits shown in that study. In this study, what I thought was
particularly interesting is, again, they explored both immersion in
cold water and cold showers, and the duration of cold exposure that they
found led to substantial fat loss, especially around the abdomen, was
very brief, deliberate cold exposure. Let me give you a few
details about this study. The study involved 49 subjects that
include both males and females. This is also really important. The beautiful work of Susanna
Søberg and colleagues, as far as I know, only looked at males.

This study looked at males and females. They were 19 to 30 years old, and there
basically were two groups, people who either were assigned to get deliberate
cold exposure, or they were not assigned to deliberate cold exposure. The form of deliberate cold exposure
involved one session per week of cold immersion in cold water up to the neck. And to just give you a sense of
how cold it was, it was 3 degrees Celsius, which translates to
about 37.5 degrees Fahrenheit. That's pretty darn cold, but
it was only for two minutes. Okay, so one session at 3 degrees Celsius,
otherwise known as 37.4 degrees Fahrenheit for two minutes every week, once a week. In addition, the same subjects did
five cold showers per week, or a minimum of five cold showers per week. And those cold showers were
slightly warmer than the immersion in cold water condition. So they were 10 degrees Celsius
approximately, or 50 degrees Fahrenheit, still pretty cold. And the duration of that cold
water exposure in the shower was just for 30 seconds.

Okay, so this is interesting to
me because many people don't have access to cold water immersion. They might not have an ice bath
or any place they can do that, but they, most people do have access
to a cold shower of some sort. Plus, I think most people could
do probably one ice bath per week or find a place where they
could get into cold water safely. Now, I should point out that some
people will not do well going into 37.5 degree Fahrenheit, aka 3
degrees Celsius water, having never done anything like this before. So if you're going to try and employ
these sorts of protocols that were used in the study, I do recommend that you
ease into it over the course of a week or so and become somewhat adapted to
the, the shock of cold water exposure. So maybe start at, you know, 50
degrees Fahrenheit, kind of ease your way back in terms of the
cold water immersion, especially. Now, another critical feature of
this study is, as with the beautiful work by Susanna Søberg, the subjects
were told to warm up naturally after the deliberate cold exposure.

So they basically hung out outside of
the cold water immersion or outside of the cold shower for 10 minutes after
they were exposed to the cold in their bathing suit, or I'm, I'm assuming they
were wearing something, but the point is that you are not going from deliberate
cold exposure directly into a hot shower or a sauna or something of that sort. So again, their bodies were forced to heat
up again naturally after the deliberate cold exposure, but after the 10 minute
period, they were able to do whatever they wanted, essentially, reclothe, take a warm
shower, and so on and go about their day.

Now the results of this deliberate
cold exposure protocol, again, 2 minutes in cold immersion at 3 degrees
Celsius, 37.5 degrees Fahrenheit, plus 5 cold showers per week of 2
minutes long, a little bit warmer, 10 degrees Celsius, 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, the deliberate cold exposure
used in this study caused many different statistically
significant positive changes. They had a very extensive questionnaire
that related to mood, everything from levels of anxiety to sexual
satisfaction, and on and on. In fact, they saw a statistically
significant improvement in sexual satisfaction in the subjects that were
exposed to deliberate cold exposure. Not in the control group, although they
didn't look at this, chances are those improvements in sexual satisfaction
were the downstream consequence of the known increases in testosterone
and free testosterone that occur in both men and women who do the
sorts of deliberate cold exposure. Again, testosterone being an important
hormone for libido in both men and women. They also saw improvements in regulation
of anxiety, which I think is very interesting given that the deliberate
cold exposure often causes people anxiety. But here and in other studies we've
seen it can lead to an better ability to buffer against anxiety in the
normal happenings of everyday life.

Perhaps the most interesting and
significant results that they found in the study however, were that in
particular in men, there was a reduction in waste circumference following 8
weeks of this deliberate cold exposure, as well as a 5.5% on average, 5.5%
reduction in abdominal fat, that was quite statistically significant
when compared to the other groups. Now, why there was no observed reduction
in abdominal fat or waist circumference in the female subjects isn't clear. Could have to do with just the
way that body fat is stored and metabolized in females versus males. That is going to be a topic
for future exploration. So I do think the study is very
interesting because when you look at the landscape of science and discussion
around deliberate cold exposure, I think there's a general consensus
now that deliberate cold exposure can change one's sense of mood and
wellbeing through this increases in catecholamines that I mentioned earlier. But the impact on metabolism itself has
been somewhat controversial because the overall changes in metabolism that are
observed while statistically significant in many studies, have not ever really been
shown to translate into weight loss or body fat loss in any kind of specific way.

And of course, a great advantage of this
study is that by exploring soldiers, they were able to really hold constant a
number of other features like the amount of daily activity that those soldiers
are exposed to, their diet, their living conditions, and so on and so forth. So at least insofar as human
studies are done, it's a, it's a very well controlled study. We'll provide a link to the
study in the show note captions. And for those of you that are thinking
about employing the protocol that's used in this particular paper, or
combining it with existing deliberate cold exposure protocols, to me it
seems pretty straightforward in of pretty minimal time investment. Just 2 minutes of deliberate cold
exposure by way of water immersion up to the neck, and 5 times a week
of 30 seconds each of deliberate cold exposure by way of cold shower. And just a quick mention
about cold showers. If you're going to use cold showers
to do deliberate cold exposure, you're going to want to stand
under the shower itself, right? And essentially have it hit your head,
the back of your neck and your upper back, which is where most of your
brown fat stores are concentrated.

And it turns out that cold exposure to
those regions of the body in particular, are going to trigger the adaptation of
increased brown fat stores, which involves increases in mitochondria in those fat. Again, this is not the
blubbery fat beneath the skin. This is the fat that acts as kind of
an oil in the furnace that is your thermogenic properties of your body to
generate heat and burn off so-called white adipose tissue elsewhere in the body. Now, anyone that understands the laws
of physics and thermodynamics will be saying, wait, in order to get fat loss,
you need to have a caloric deficit. Calories in, calories out still applies. And yes, that's absolutely true. We can only conclude on the basis of the
results of this study that the people that lost body fat were indeed in a caloric
deficit, presumably because all other factors were held more or less constant
in this group of soldiers, presumably because the deliberate cold exposure
itself elevated metabolism, thereby increasing the calories out component of
the calories in calories out equation, which of course, governs the rules of
weight loss and body fat loss as well.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize
this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and
effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science
related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to
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the library of those supplements is constantly expanding. Again, that's livemomentous.com/huberman. Let's talk about water, and
let's start off by answering the question, what is water? Water is of course H₂O, most everybody
knows that from an early age, but what H₂O means is that each molecule of water
consists of two hydrogens and one oxygen. Now, the physical arrangement of those
two hydrogens and one oxygen turns out to be really important for how water
functions in the body, and frankly, elsewhere in our world and life, if
you were to make a peace symbol, that is to put up your index finger and
your middle finger simultaneously.

In fact, I'm gonna recommend you do
that now, unless you're using your hands for something else important. In which case do it later. Well, if you make that piece symbol and
you look at your hand, you have a pretty good impression of what an individual
water molecule consists of, which is H₂O two hydrogens and an oxygen and,
with that piece symbol, the fingers or the tips of your fingers rather
are gonna represent the hydrogens. Your fingers, that is the length of each
of those fingers is going to represent the electron bonds to the oxygen and the
palm of your hand and the fingers that are down are going to represent the oxygen.

Okay? Now, what's important about
that visual impression or visual image of the individual water
molecule is that it is polarized. That is the hydrogen's over on one side. Both of them are over on one side
and the oxygen is over on another. And what's really important about
water molecules being polarized is that they can bind to one another
by way of that polarization. And this has to do with something that
we all kind of learned in chemistry at one point, but many of us forgot.

Maybe we didn't even understand it
the first time around, which is that positives and negatives attract. So when you have individual water
molecules, they have the opportunity to interact and essentially bind to
one another and they bind through what are called covalent bonds. Covalent bonds are relatively weak
bonds, and so as a consequence, water can change its confirmation. However, covalent bonds are strong enough
that water actually can maintain some structure and that structure will vary,
of course, depending on its temperature. So, what you need to know about
water is that indeed it consists of lots of individual H₂O , and
those H₂O can arrange themselves in different ways, and that temperature
is a strong determinant of the arrangement of those water molecules. That is, they're bonding to one another. And in fact, even they're
spacing between those bonds. So again, even if you don't have
any chemistry, stay with me because you'll definitely understand this.

Water can exist in at least
3 forms and maybe 4 forms. We know that it can be liquid, of course. That's really what normally what
we think of when we think of water. It can be gas, so we
think of steam, right? So if you heat it up, it takes on a not
a semi-solid or a semi-liquid form, it takes on this property of steam or gas.

Okay? So when you see steam or when you
breathe on a cold day through your mouth or through your nose and you see
your air, those are water molecules that are condensing, that is bonding
in certain ways, based on differences in temperature between the inside
of your body and the outside air. And of course it can be
a solid, it can be ice. Now, ice is fascinating and important
in understanding how water works, and this will become relevant later when
we think about how water works within the body as well, especially how
different temperatures of water impact the health and behavior of our cells. And the most important point to understand
about water in its solid state is that unlike most substances when water is
in its solid state, it is actually less dense than when it's in its liquid state. So just think about that. Most substances, like most metals,
for instance, when they are in a solid state, they're more dense
than when they're in a liquid state. So, for instance, if they're in a solid
state, they will sink in a container filled with their liquid form, not water.

Water is very interesting because
as you cool water and water transitions from a liquid to a solid. It still binds. That is, it can form bonds between those
different molecules of water, but the spacing between those H₂O , so again,
those peace symbols with hands, so if you had a bunch of those, so if you had, you
know, a thousand hands all making peace symbols, they can bond to one another. But when it's cold, those
bonds are actually made further apart from one another. And as a consequence, ice, as
we all know, floats in water. In other words, put very simply, water
is unusual and special in that, in its solid form ice, it is actually less
dense than when it's in its liquid form. And that's why ice floats in water.

Now this is important not just to
our biology, but to all of life. Because if you think about it, if it were
not the case that water is less dense in its solid form ice than it is in its
liquid form, the bottoms of our oceans would be covered with thick sheets of ice. And if that were the case, you can be
absolutely sure that life would not exist on our planet the way that it does. And there's a good chance that we would
not exist as a species because so much of what allows us to exist on this
planet and the other animals to exist on this planet, relies on photosynthesis
pathways in plants that are dependent on the sun and interactions with the oceans
and lakes and other bodies of water. And of course, the ice
caps are vitally important. That is the presence of ice,
especially at the poles. But elsewhere, in bodies of water as
well, so-called icebergs are a critical part of the ecosystem that allows
for everything from photosynthesis to the ability of certain animals
to extract food from each other and from their local resources.

Now, there's a whole discussion to be
had there, but the important point for now is that the physical properties of
the bonds between water that are made and changed depending on temperature, turn
out to be essential for us to be present on this planet at all and for our cells
to function in the ways that they do for sake of health and for sake of disease. And we'll explore this later when we
talk about the critical relationship between temperature pH, which is the
relationship between alkalinity, how basic or acidity, how acid a given
liquid, or in this case we're gonna be talking about water is and the ways
that our cells can or can't use water. So I realize that this is fairly in
depth for those of you that don't have much of a background in chemistry. I've tried to keep it really top contour,
but if you can make a piece symbol or if you can just imagine a piece symbol in
your mind and realize that that's a water molecule and that those water molecules
combine to one another through bonds that are relatively strong, but weak enough
that they can be broken if they need to, and that the temperature that those
water molecules are exposed to changes the distance between those bonds and
that's what allows ice to float in water, then you are gonna have no problem with
the remainder of the discussion today.

In fact, You will also have the ability
to understand things that you've observed many times over, but perhaps have never
thought about or really understood, which are, for instance, that water
has a certain level of surface tension. For instance, if you've ever been to
the ocean and the waves are coming in, what you'll notice is if you walk on
the dry sand or gravel, pebbles that is of the ocean, it's very easy, right? I mean, the pebbles move
down or the sand moves down. It depresses a little bit due
to the weight of your body. But as you get closer to the water,
you're gonna sink deeper because that sand is more saturated with water. But at some point, you won't be able to
actually walk on top of the water, right? It has been said that
Jesus walked on water.

There's the so-called Jesus Christ
lizard so named because it can actually walk on the surface of water. A leaf can float on the surface
of water under some conditions. A coin can float on the surface of water. If you make coffee in the morning, you
can actually take a spoonful of that hot coffee and pour a little bit on
the surface of your coffee, and you'll notice that it will bead up, and you'll
get little round spheres of water. Those are little water molecules bound
to one another that spin on top of the surface before they sink under. That has everything to do with
the bonding between water that's dependent on temperature, but
also as with the difficulty for essentially everybody, to walk on
water or for animals to walk on water.

The surface tension of water
allows certain things to float there or to stay at the surface. But there's a very thin layer of
water molecules at the surface of water that are more dense than the
water that resides at deeper depths. And that's why most things,
including us sink in water, we are more dense than water. Now, I did mention earlier that
there are 3 forms of water. Those are the ones that we all
are familiar with, the solid liquid and gas forms of water.

However, there are data mainly from
Gerald Pollack laboratory at the University of Washington that have
described the so-called fourth phase of water, which is structured water. And we'll get into this a little bit
later because structured water has really been a prominent topic in the, let's
call it the water health aficionados. It's a heavily debated topic as
to whether or not structured water is somehow better for ourselves
if it exists within our bodies. We'll get into that in full detail later. But the whole notion of structured
water is that in the presence of certain solids or certain liquids, the
confirmation of water that is the water molecules actually change somewhat. This has been demonstrated. Whether or not it has relevance
to the biological function of our body is a different issue. But we know that there is this fourth
phase of water called structured water. Structured water is a fairly complicated
topic, but we can make it very simple for sake of today's discussion.

I mentioned earlier that opposite
polls attract that is positives and negatives attract, and typically,
things that are negatively charged when presented with another negative
charge either repel or don't attract. Things that are positively
charged in the presence of another positive charge also tend to repel. This is the basis of magnets,
either sticking to one another or repelling from one another. There's also the idea that human
beings who are opposites attract, but that's a different episode
that we need to do in the future. The point here is that structured
water is a unique condition in which the local environment that these
water molecules happen to be in allows positive charges between different
water molecules to attract one another.

So again, whereas normally it's
positive and negatives that attract in the configuration
that we call structured water. Positives and positives attract
and form bonds that are stronger than the typical bonds that would
be formed between water molecules. And just as it kind of prelude to our
discussion about structured water, as it may or may not relate to health
later, there are a number of people that believe that within the body, because
of the presence of certain liquids and solids, that the water within our
cells, and in particular within the interactions with so-called organelles,
organelles are things like mitochondria. The Golgi apparatus,
they have fancy names. These are, these are the things
within cells that allow cells to do everything from make proteins to traffic
proteins out to the surface of cells. Things like neurotransmitters
and receptors and so on. A lot of people who are interested
in structured water as it relates to biological function, have I hypothesized
or like to debate rather whether or not in the body water is not just present
in its liquid form or gaseous form.

We know it's not present in its
solid form unless you gulp down some ice cubes, for instance. But, There is a cohort of people out
there, including some fairly accomplished scientists that believe that within the
body, the organelles of our cells act as a substrate for water to exist in this
fourth form, this structured water form. And that's led to this whole
niche industry of people, who are proponents of consuming so-called
structured water, and again, we'll get to that a little bit later. So now you know what individual water
molecules consist of when you hear H₂O hopefully you'll get that visual image
in your mind of an individual water molecule being the peace symbol and a
bunch of those binding to one another through these relatively weak bonds,
but strong enough that certain things can take place like surface tension.

Keep in mind that surface tension of
water may relate to either standard bonds between water or this fourth phase. That's heavily debated still, but we
certainly know that for instance, if you were to take a piece of wax paper
or glass and you were to pour some water on it, you would notice that
the water would beat up or kind of aggregate at particular locations. When you see that beating up
or the aggregation of water molecules on a particular
surface, you're seeing two things. This is actually kind of fun. The next time you see it, you'll know
that the, the aggregation, the beating up of water with itself, so individual
water molecules or many water molecules kind of aggregating at one location
and making a bead of water that's due to these bonds, these covalent bonds
occurring between water molecules.

Also, you'll notice that on a vertical
pane of glass, say in rain or on your windshield, that the water will look
almost like it's sticking to the glass. And that's because there are actually
bonds between the water molecules that have beat it up themselves and the glass. So water can not just bind to itself. It can also bind to certain surfaces. And the fact that perhaps if you drive
your car, if you were to tap the window, or if a big enough bead of water formed on
a window that it would start to drip down. And that's because those bonds with
the surface are strong, but they're not so strong that it stick at that
location quite different than water that is in its solid form ice that can
actually really adhere if you've ever had to scrape ice off a windshield.

So for you, those of you who live in
cold regions, you're familiar with this, scrape ice off a windshield, you realize
that the bonds between water in its solid form and different services is quite
a bit stronger than the bonds between different water molecules with each other. Or the bonds between water and
different surfaces when they're warmer. Okay, so I do realize that for a lot
of people listening, that's gonna be a pretty deep dive into the chemistry
and physical properties of water. But all you really need to know is that
these water molecules are incredibly versatile and can bind to each other,
and can bind to different surfaces, and can allow things to float or to
sink or even to move across surfaces of water based on the three, perhaps four
different, states that water can be in. And that versatility that you observe in
the natural world on window pans and rain and clouds and hail and ice and snow and
scraping ice off your windshield in the cold of winter and perspiration and so on.

All of that is fine and good, but
realize that almost all of those same sorts of properties of water become
extremely relevant when thinking about how your body actually utilizes water. And the key thing here is that temperature
and the so-called alkalinity or acidity that is the pH of water turn out to
be very important determinants of how water is used by the cells of your body. In fact, as I'll describe in a moment, we
have entire sets of biological mechanisms solely devoted to trying to get water into
our cells in very specific ways, including at specific rates and to use water in
different ways because as you've probably heard before, we are mostly water. What's kind of interesting to me and
what I found researching this episode is that the percentages of our cells
and bodies that are purported to be water is a pretty broad range.

Some people say we're 55% water. Other people will say We're 70% water. Some people will say We're 95% water. The exact percentage
doesn't matter so much. And really just boils down to whether
or not the person that's stating that percentage is talking about how much
water is present in our cells and body at a given moment versus how much water
was involved in the process of creating the sorts of proteins and other things
of our body that are required to have hair, cell skin cells, brain cells, etc. So if you really want a number out
there, I can't give you a single number if you wanna be accurate,
it's gonna have to be a range. And basically we are anywhere
from 70% to 90% water depending on how you define being water. That is whether or not you're talking
about water being present in cells in its liquid form or maybe in
this fourth structure water form. If you're, of the mind that that
exists within us and whether or not you're talking about water that was
used to create a given protein, like a receptor or a neurotransmitter, or
whether or not you're talking about the water, just being water as H₂O.

Okay, so again, it's very easy to go
down that rabbit hole, and this is part of the reason why there's such
a wide discrepancy of assertions as to how much of us is water. But let's be direct. Most of our body is water, and there
isn't a single other molecule in the universe that we can look to and say that
it has as important a role in our health and biology and frankly, our presence
of life on earth at all than water. I'd like to take a quick break
and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called Ag
One is a Vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your
foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking Athletic Greens
since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.

The reason I started taking Athletic
Greens, and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or usually twice
a day, is that it gets to me the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very important. It's populated by gut microbiota that
communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological
systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long-term health.

And those probiotics and
athletic greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, athletic Greens contains
a number of adaptogens, vitamins and minerals that make sure that
all of my foundational nutritional needs are met and it tastes great. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you
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car, on the plane, etc., and they'll give you a year supply of Vitamin D3 K2. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/huberman
to get the 5 free travel packs and the year supply of Vitamin D3 K2. Okay, so now at a minimum, everyone
out there should understand that water has a particular structure.

So when you hear H₂O, you can kind of
imagine that structure and that the water molecules can change their confirmation. That is they can bind to other water
molecules and it turns out they bind to other things and actually change
the confirmation of other things. A good example of that is something
we're all familiar with, which is water's ability to dissolve certain
substances like sugar or salt. And that is because salt
molecules or sugar molecules are what we call hydrophilic. They like water. And when we say they like water, it just
means that the chemical structure of salt, sodium, or the chemical structure
of say, sucrose like table sugar, can actually interact with the hydrogens
and oxygens of water and can change those salt molecules or sugar molecules,
turning them from solid into liquid.

Essentially creating what are called
solids, which is basically the dissolving of solids into liquid solutions. In fact, water is one of the
best solvents on the planet. In fact, water is better at
dissolving many solids than is acid. All right?
That's how incredible water is. And there are a number of reasons
related to the chemistry of water that can explain that. But as we transition from talking about
the physics and chemistry of water to how water actually behaves within our
body and contributes to our health or to disease depending on the case, it's
important to understand that molecules such as sugar and salt can be hydrophilic. Or as we know, oil and water don't mix. That's because oil's, lipids
are so-called hydrophobic. What's hydrophobic? We'll, just think "Ahh" phobic. Certain molecules such as lipids
don't dissolve well in water. And we all intuitively understand
that if you take some olive oil, for instance, and you put it into a little
glass of water, it'll likely float or beat up or form little spherical or
amoeba like shapes within the water.

And that's because oil
lipids are hydrophobic. So different substances out there are
either going to be more hydrophilic. That is they are going to have a greater
propensity to interact with water and bind with the different aspects of
the water molecules or hydrophobic to have less of a propensity to interact
with and bind with water molecules. And I've sort of been alluding to this
numerous times throughout this podcast already, the temperature of water and
the pH that is the alkalinity or acidity of water will have a strong impact
on whether or not a hydrophilic or hydrophobic substance will have a greater
or lesser tendency to interact with water.

You all know this intuitively as well. If you've ever tried to dissolve say
a big tablespoon of sugar in very cold water, you'll notice that the grains don't
dissolve as quickly as when you take that big tablespoon of sugar and put it into
a warm or hot cup of water, and that's because the temperature of water actually
changes how well that sugar molecule is able to change its confirmation
and interact with the water molecules. Likewise, if you want to get something
that's really hydrophilic into an aqueous, that is a water containing
solution, the temperature is also going to strongly impact that. Now, there are a near infinite
number of examples of how temperature in pH impact the tendency of
hydrophilic and hydrophobic substances to dissolve in water or not.

We're not gonna go into all those details,
but as we migrate from our discussion about the physics and chemistry of water
into how water behaves within our body, which is what we're gonna do now, and then
as we continue into the third part of our discussion, which is why and how certain
types of water that some of you are familiar with, like different pH water,
distilled water, reverse osmosis water, why those different types of water are
thought to and in some cases do in fact change the ways that our cells function,
for better or for worse, all of that will come together and make sense for you. Okay? So all the cells of your body, every cell,
even your bones, that is the osteoblasts and the other cells within your bones,
your bone marrow, your red blood cells, your white blood cells, your neurons,
your nerve cells, your liver cells, your kidney cells, all of them require water. In order to get the proper amount of water
into those cells, there are basically two ways that water can access those cells. Now, if we zoom out for a second
and ask ourselves, how does water actually get into the body? Most of us just think, oh, well,
we drink that water into our body.

Of course, that's the main way we
can also breathe water molecules into our body through humid air. When you hydrate your cells, that is when
you're bringing water into your cells, that water needs to move from your gut and
into the bloodstream and eventually into the individual cells, whatever cell type
that may be, and they're basically two ways that water can access those cells. The first way has been known
about for a very long time, and that is so-called diffusion. Now, the outside of most cells
is made up of fatty stuff, lipid.

So for instance, neurons, nerve
cells have a lipid bilayer. It's two layers of fat, and you already
know that fat lipid is very hydrophobic. Okay? Now that turns out to be not a
problem, but a solution for how water can get across that lipid barrier. Why? It is the fact that water can change its
confirmation and lipids can change their confirmation just enough so that the
bonds between water and the bonds between those hydrophobic lipids can interact,
allowing the water molecule to basically pass through the lipid because it can
bond very weakly or in some cases, not at all, but very weakly to those lipids and
then be pushed through to the other side. Really incredible. If you think about it, if there was too
much of a hydrophobic relationship between the lipid and the water, the water would
come up to the surface of that fatty outside of our cells, and then would
be repelled away from it, or it would just stay there right at the surface. And that would be no good because
we actually need that water to diffuse across the cell membranes, or
actually it's a double cell membrane, as I mentioned before, two layers.

So water and lipids of cells can
interact with just enough affinity that the water molecule can diffuse
across those cell membrane barriers. But, and this is an important but, the
diffusion of water molecules across those lipid barriers on the outsides of
cells is a fairly slow process compared to the other way that water accesses
cells and this other way that water accesses cells is really something that
was just discovered about 10 years ago. So this is a fairly recent discovery,
but turns out to be a fundamental discovery, which is the presence
of water called aquaporin channels. Aquaporin channels are basically portals
through the membrane that allow water molecules to move very quickly across cell
membranes at a rate of about 1 million H₂O, 1 million water molecules per second. And the way that water molecules move
across the cell membrane through those aquaporin channels is very interesting. The inside of those channels,
and the way you think of these is they're literally tubes stuck
through the membranes of cells. The insides of those channels are
very hydrophobic, allowing those water molecules to just jot really
quickly and almost as if in your mind, you can just imagine as if it
was sort of lubricated for the water.

Although it's not really lubricated,
the the water molecules can move through in single file a million per second. Now, why would you need two ways for
water to get across cell membranes? One fairly slow through basic diffusion,
and again, diffusion folks is the movement of things from a gradient of higher
concentration to lower concentration, which you just think about this as
things tend to run downhill from higher concentration to lower concentration.

They try and create
equilibrium across space. So, you know, if you had a bunch
of marbles on one side of a box, they're just imagine that these
were water molecules because of the charges between those hydrogens and
oxygens, there's a tendency for those marbles to spread out and essentially
take on a fairly even confirmation. That's basically just
diffusion across a space. Water molecules will also move
from higher concentration to lower concentration cross cell membranes,
and then you have these portals, these tubes or these channels as they're
called, these aquaporin channels where water molecules can move very quickly. Now, the reason why biology seems to
have created these aquaporin channels, and again, I wasn't consulted the design
phase, but the most logical explanation is that we have many tissues within our
body that often need water very quickly or need to release water very quickly. Let's think about a couple of these
and then let's look at what the actual distribution of aquaporin
channels is throughout the body.

What is an area of your body that
on occasion will need to move water very quickly out of it? You can use your imagination here, but
I'll just tell you that for instance, your tear glands or tear ducts
need to release tears very quickly. So you need to take water that's stored
in your body if there's an emotional experience or if you look at a very bright
light, for instance or you know, God forbid if you get some sort of irritant in
your eye, you're gonna start to tear up. And those tears are the release
of fluid from those tear ducts. And so it's gonna be the very rapid
release of water from those tear ducts through so-called aquaporin channels. And in fact, aquaporin
channels are heavily expressed.

There are many of them in the
cells of the so-called lacrimal glands that release tears. In addition, we need to
absorb water from the gut. And the gut has a lining, endothelial
lining and other cell lining and mucosal lining and water needs
often to move very quickly from our stomach into the rest of the body. And one way that is accomplished
is through aquaporin channels that are expressed all along your gut. So, the discovery of these aquaporin
channels is really highly significant in terms of understanding the different
ways that water can interact with and get into the cells of your body.

Now, there are aquaporin channels,
not just in the lacrimal glands that allow for tearing or within the gut,
but in many tissues within your body. And there even have different
distributions within those tissues. In fact, as one looks at the
expression of the different aquaporin channels, cause it turns out
there are different forms of them. Across all the cells
and tissues of the body. There's really no single tissue
within the body, except perhaps the bones of your body and perhaps
the ligaments to some extent, that don't have these aquaporin channels. Some of you out there may have
heard of the so-called fascia, fascia and sheath muscles. They're unique kind of connective
tissue that gives some pliability and yet some rigidity that allow
for a lot of the physical abilities of your musculoskeletal system.

It's incredible tissue. We'll do an entire episode
about fascia at some point. Fascinating, fascinating tissue fascia,
even contained aquaporin channels. So the role of aquaporin channels
in fascia probably relates to our specific needs to be able
to use specific muscle groups in particular ways at particular times. In other words, if you're sleeping
or lying down or sitting, you're not using your musculoskeletal system
as much as if you're running or performing some repetitive behavior. It turns out that the aquaporin channels
in certain tissues, like the fascia can be used when we transition from
low mobility states to high mobility states, allowing more perfusion
or access of water into particular cells of the body when we need it.

Such as fascinating, fascinating channels. These aquaporin channels, and again,
only discovered fairly recently, so we're still learning new things
about our biology all the time. Now, in a very important feature of
the Aquaporin channel is that the movement of water molecules across the
cell membrane through those aquaporin channels is strongly dependent on the
temperature of water and the pH of water. This becomes especially important in
our description and our deep dive into so-called alkaline water or higher
pH water a little bit later, but I'll just give you a little teaser for
now because I'm sure that a number of people are, are wondering about this. If you go into the store or even a
convenient store, you will see pH water. Now, every water has a pH, right? Lower numbers mean more acidic. Higher numbers mean more
alkaline, or more basic. You'll see pH water. That is 7.4. You'll see 7.8, you'll see 9.8. You'll see a huge range of these things,
and there are many, many different claims about how the pH of water is important
for regulating the pH of the body. Here's the real story.

The pH of your body, that is
the pH of the cells at different locations in your body, is strongly,
strongly homeostatically regulated. What do I mean by that? It means it doesn't change that much,
which means that you have very specific biological mechanisms that ensure the
pH is maintained, for instance, in the skin cells of your skin, in the retinal
cells of your eye, in your brain cells. Now, It is true that across the
body, different cells and tissues have fairly widely varying pH. You know, it has been said that
the pH of bodily tissues is generally between 7.2 and 7.4.

However, if you were to look at the
pH of your gut, and keep in mind that your gut is not just your stomach, your
gut is the entire pathway ranging from your throat all the way down to where
you excrete things out of your body. That entire pathway has different
pH levels depending on where you are along the gut and intestinal pathway. And in fact, having much lower that
is more acidic pH at certain locations along your gut pathway is what allows
those gut microbiota, those little microorganisms of which you have trillions
that are important for regulating everything from neurotransmitter
production to hormone production that allow them to flourish and do well. That said, except under conditions of
hemorrhage or changes in blood volume that are of a dangerous level that can
lead to seizure or even death, the pH of the rest of the cells of your body,
and also those gut cells doesn't change that much on a moment to moment basis.

So if somebody tells you that you
should drink alkaline water or alkalized water as it's sometimes called, In
order to keep your body more alkaline and less acidic, there is essentially
no basis for that at a macroscopic level or even at a local level. Now, what that does not mean is
that the pH of the water that you drink is not important. In fact, if the pH of the water that
you drink is too low, that is if the water that you consume is too acidic,
it will not move as quickly from your gut into the other regions of your
body, and therefore, the other cells of your body that require that water will
not be able to access it as readily.

You've probably experienced this if you've
consumed certain water and it feels like it's sloshing around in your stomach or
it feels like it's just somehow staying there, or you feel it, its presence
more, not just as volume, but it's almost as if you can feel the little waves
of water along the inside of your gut. Now, sometimes that can relate to
temperature, but oftentimes that can relate to the pH of that water,
and it turns out it is true that water that is more alkaline, that is
pHs of 7.4 or higher can move more readily across the Aquaporin channel. And in terms of absorption of water
from the endothelial lining and the other cell type lining of your
gut into the rest of your body. It is true that higher pH water provided
that pH isn't too high, is going to be absorbed more quickly, which partially
explains why some people have an affinity for this higher pH water.

Now, this is not to say that you
need to consume high pH water in order to hydrate your body properly. I want to be very clear about that. However, if you are interested
in what the value of elevated pH water is, it largely has to do
with this accelerated absorption. And as we'll talk about a little bit
later, there is also growing evidence that it can adjust the function of
certain cells that are within your immune system and thereby reduce
certain inflammatory responses. So I realize as I'm saying this, some
people out there will probably think, oh no, this guy's like a pH water proponent.

He's saying we have to drink alkaline
water or buy very fancy water. Now, I want to be clear that is not
what I'm saying, and I'm also not saying that you need to purchase very expensive
water in order to derive the maximum benefits from the water that you drank. It turns out there are a few things that
you can do by way of temperature and by way of filtering water and a few other
tricks that I'll tell you a little bit later that will allow you to increase
the absorption rate of water in the gut, which turns out to be a very interesting,
but also potentially important thing to do for not just reducing inflammation,
but also making sure that you're getting proper hydration of different cell types
in your body, including rapid hydration of your brain cells, which as we'll
also talk about in a few moments, can greatly enhance cognitive function.

Okay, so we've talked about
how water can get into cells. There are two ways, diffusion and
movement through these aquaporin channels. We've earmarked the discussion that
the temperature and the pH of water, that is the confirmation of water. And here I really want to embed this in
people's minds, that when we talk about temperature of water and pH of water,
we're really talking about the arrangement of those H₂O, those water molecules. So keep that in mind. We've covered how water can get
into cells through those two different ways, diffusion and
through the aquaporin channels. What we haven't talked about is what
happens to water once it's in cells, and this is very simple to explain. Once water is inside of cells, it's
going to be incorporated into the different proteins and organelles. Again, organelles are things like
mitochondria, the nucleus of the cells, which is contained to the DNA and so
forth in different ways, depending on which proteins are there and how
hydrophilic or hydrophobic those proteins are, or in some case aren't.

That's an entire landscape of protein
to water specific interactions, none of which we need to go into in any specific
detail now, but the one thing that we do need to realize and keep in mind as we
go forward is that many of the biological processes in our body that involve the
movement to molecules such as water and interactions with proteins, are going to
involve the bonding or lack of bonding between water molecules and proteins. And anytime we're talking about bonding
of one thing to the next at the level of chemistry or biology for that matter,
because they're really the same thing. We're talking about whether or not
there are electrons present or whether or not there are charges that are
opposite or the same and on and on. If you've ever heard of so-called
reactive oxygen species, what are ROS or reactive oxygen species or
so-called free radicals or antioxidants? All of that is really just
describing the presence or absence of charges that are bound or unbound.

So for instance, if you hear about free
radicals, sounds pretty wild, right? Free radicals. What are free radicals? Free radicals can damage cells. They don't always damage cells, but
they can damage cells because they are essentially free electrons. They are a charge that's sitting
out there not bound to anything and therefore can interact with
the molecular structure of certain proteins and change those structures
by binding to them or interfering with the normal binding processes of those
proteins to water or to other things. And in that way cause damage to those
proteins and potentially damage to cells.

Now fortunately, our cells have ways
to deal with those free radicals, and those are called antioxidants. Antioxidants are molecules that
can arrive in different forms. Sometimes we think of antioxidants as
vitamins, but they are also present in other things as well that essentially
bind up those free radicals or repair the bonds between cells so that the proteins
are no longer undergoing these, let's just call them bad confirmations, that
damage the functioning of our cells. So there are many different
theories of aging. There are many different theories of
disease, but there is not a single disease, either of brain or body that
doesn't in some way involve the generation of what are called reactive oxygen
species, these free radicals and the damaging of cells at the level of their
individual organelles and so forth.

Nor is there a single disease of brain or
body that has not been shown to benefit from having some antioxidant interference
get in the way of that oxidative process. So I realize today is pretty
thick with nomenclature. For those of you that haven't
already realized it, what you're learning here is organic chemistry. So you can feel pretty good about the
fact that if you can understand the water molecule and understand a little bit about
what free electron is, which is basically a charge that's out there that can
potentially do damage and the interactions of things like reactive oxygen species
and the ability of, of stable bonds to buffer against or repair certain damage
to cells as we're describing it here.

Well then what you're essentially
thinking about and what we're talking about is organic chemistry. Now, since this is a discussion about
chemistry as a service to try and understand the biological effects of
water, keep in mind that water itself, believe it or not, can act as an
antioxidant, provided that it's bonding to things in the proper way, which requires
that it get into cells in the proper amounts and rates, which requires that
the temperature and pH of that water be correct and provided that there's enough
water there and that that water isn't bound to other things, it's not containing
salutes that are damaging and potentially that it's carrying some of the good things
such as sodium or that there's potassium present again, the so-called electrolytes
that allow cells to function well.

Okay, so that's a bit of a trench of
information, and I don't want people to get overwhelmed or confused. What I'm trying to do here is paint
a picture of the biology of water, understanding that when you ingest
water, drinking it down, or when you breathe water vapors in the steam
room or on a humid day, that water is entering your system, it's accessing
your cells through these two mechanisms, diffusion across cell membranes or
movement through aquaporin channels. And then once inside those cells,
it's able to interact with and change the confirmation of different
proteins and accelerate or slow down different cellular reactions. Everything from normal metabolism to
blood pressure to damaged cells, depending on a number of different features of
that water, as well as what the cells happen to be doing at any given moment. So with that in mind, I'd like to turn our
attention to how water, depending on its temperature, its pH, how much we drink,
or how little we drink when we drink that water, etc., how that can impact the
health, disease and repair of different cells, tissues, and organs of our body.

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Let's talk about how much water, or more
generally speaking, how much fluid each and all of us should drink each day,
and how much fluid to drink depending on our specific activities and environment. Now, this is perhaps the most
commonly asked question when the topic of water comes up, how
much water do I need to drink? The other thing that comes up is
a question, which is, can't we just follow our natural thirst? That is, can't we just pay
attention to when we're thirsty? And then drink fluids? And then that leads to the other
question, which is, does the color of our urine provide any indication as to
whether or not we are under hydrated, over hydrated, or hydrating correctly? So let me answer each of
these things one at a time. And in the backdrop, I want to highlight
the fact that there are many, many, if not dozens, hundreds of studies pointing
to the fact that when we are dehydrated, our brain doesn't function as well
and our body doesn't function as well. So what I'm attempting to do in that
statement is throw a net around the enormous number of studies that have
shown that even a slight state of dehydration, even 2% dehydration, can
lead to a significant and meaningful impact, that is a negative impact
on our ability to, for instance, carry out endurance type behaviors.

So our ability to run on a
treadmill and stop at the point where we feel we can't continue is
going to be negatively impacted. That is we will be able to perform
less work for less period of time when we are even slightly dehydrated. Likewise, our strength is reduced
by even slight dehydration. Likewise, our cognitive performance,
including memory, focus, creative thinking, flexible thinking of different
kinds, are all significantly impaired when we are in states of dehydration. Now, that raises an additional question
that deserves attention, which is how do we actually measure dehydration? Now you hear different things like if you
pinch the skin on the top of your hand and it takes more than three seconds to lay
down again flat, then you're dehydrated.

You hear that, you hear, okay, if you
are to press on your fingernail and see a change in the color of the tissue,
just be below your fingernail, which indeed does happen, and it does not go
back to its original color within one to three seconds, then you're dehydrated. You hear things like this if your ankles
are swollen when you're wearing socks, you take off the socks and you can see
the imprint of the socks on your lower limbs, that means you're dehydrated. You hear this kind of stuff,
and you should probably be wondering, is any of that true? To some extent, it is true, although
it can vary quite a bit by how old you are, whether or not the
skin on the top of your hand tends to be looser or not depending on
whether or not you're leaner or not.

So in other words, those
are not absolutely objective measures of dehydration. Now, it is true that if normally you can
pinch the skin on the top of your hand and it returns to its normal flattened
position within about one to two or three seconds, and it does not do that within
five or more seconds, there's a decent probability that you're a little bit
dehydrated, that you need to ingest some fluid, or that if you press down on your
nail and you see the depression causes a transition from kind of a pink color to a
white color, and then you release and it doesn't go back to its original pinkish
color within a few seconds, well then there's a chance that you're dehydrated.

But again, these are not
perfect measures of dehydration. You may be surprised to learn, and I
was surprised to learn that most of the basis for these statements, like
even a 2% dehydration state, can lead to significant reductions in cognitive
or physical performance are based on not direct measures of hydration, but
rather on measures of reductions in water intake, which is a different thing, right? It's saying that ordinarily, a person
of a given body weight needs X amount of fluid per day, and when they get even
just 2% less than that amount of fluid than their cognitive and or physical
performance is impaired, rather than focusing on dehydration of tissues.

Okay? Now that might seem like a
subtle distinction, but it's actually a meaningful distinction
when you think about it. However, it's a meaningful
distinction that we can leverage toward understanding how much water
or fluid we need to drink each day. Now, there we can really point to some
solid numbers that, believe it or not, are fairly independent of body weight. Now, I say independent of body weight. I'm referring to the amount of fluid
that most healthy adults need at rest. What do I mean by at rest? I mean when not exercising and when
not in extremely hot environments. So I'm leaving aside you a desert
ultra marathoners or people that are doing any kind of movement or living in
environments that are very, very hot. Here, I'm mainly referring to people that
live most of their daily life in indoor environments, could be air conditioned or
not air conditioned, heated or not heated.

What we're trying to arrive at here are
some numbers that can work across the board, because of course there are an
infinite number of different conditions that each and all of you are existing in. So I'm not going to attempt to give you a
body weight by activity, by environment, by humidity formula calculation. In fact, no such calculation exists. However, there are formulas that can
put you into very stable frameworks.

That is levels of water intake for
periods of rest when you're not exercising and for when you are exercising, that
will ensure that you are hydrating with the one exception being if you
are exercising or if you are living in very, very hot conditions and you're
not heat adapted to those conditions. So what are those numbers? In other words, what is the
answer to the question of how much fluid do we need each day? And here I'm referring to fluid. I'm not distinguishing between
water, caffeinated beverages, soda, tea, and so on. I'll discuss that in a moment.

We can reasonably say that for every hour
that you are awake in the first 10 hours of your day, this is important, in the
first 10 hours of your day, you should consume on average, 8 ounces of fluid. Now, for those of you that are using
the metric system, not ounces, 8 ounces of fluid is approximately
236 milliliters of water. And for those of you that exist in
the metric system and aren't used to thinking about ounces and vice versa,
just think about a typical can of soda. In the United States, it's 12 ounces. In Europe, sometimes the cans of
soda are a little bit smaller, but that's a whole discussion unto itself. But 8 ounces of fluid, that is 236,
let's just say 240 milliliters because we don't need to be too precise here,
of fluid on average every hour for the first 10 hours of your day, which
translates to an average of 80 ounces of fluid for the first 10 hours of your
day, or 2,360 milliliters of water. In other words, approximately 2
liters of water plus a little bit more for the first 10 hours of your day. Now, I wanna be very clear that
this does not mean that you need to ingest 8 ounces or 236 milliliters
of fluid on the hour, every hour for the first 10 hours of your day.

I'm certainly not saying that. And in fact, most people are
going to find that they're going to ingest water in bolus. That is, they're gonna have perhaps
16 ounces of water, 500 milliliters of water at one portion of the day,
and then maybe a couple hours of later that they'll drink some more water or
some more coffee or soda or some other beverage and another portion of the day. I do think, however, it's important for
most of us to take a step back and ask ourselves whether or not independent
of any other activity or environmental conditions, whether or not we are in
fact ingesting 80 ounces or basically 2.4 liters of water for that 10 hours
of the day that spans from the time we wake up until 10 hours later.

Now, why am I setting
this 10 hour framework? The reason I'm setting this 10 hour
framework is that it turns out that your fluid requirements, even just
at rest, are vastly different in the time from when you wake up until
about 10 hours later, as compared to the later evening and nighttime. And here I'm referring to people
that are not doing night shifts. But if you are requesting a number of
how much fluid to drink independent of our needs for fluid for exercise,
that's going to be 8 ounces of fluid or 240 milliliters of fluid on average
for every hour from the time when we wake up until 10 hours later.

That's the simple formulation that
should basically ensure that you're getting sufficient baseline hydration
for the cells and tissues of your body. Now, if you are engaging in exercise,
whether or not it's endurance exercise or whether or not it's resistance training
exercise, you are going to need additional fluids in order to maximize the effects
of that exercise and to avoid dehydration. And there too, we have some excellent
numbers that we can look to. Excellent, because they
arrive from research. And this is largely peeled from
the episode that I did with Dr. Andy Galpin, professor of
Kinesiology at Cal State Fullerton. We did a six episode series all about
exercise, everything from strength training, hypertrophy, endurance,
nutrition, supplementation, recovery, everything related to exercise. You can find all of
that at hubermanlab.com. And one of the components of those
episodes that was discussed, but that some of you may have not heard, is
that there is a simple formula for how much fluid to ingest on average. Keep in mind, this is on average when
you are exercising, and I refer to this as the so-called Galpin equation.

The Galpin equation states that
you should take your body weight in pounds, divide that by 30, and that
will give you the number of ounces of fluid to ingest every 15 to 20
minutes on average while exercising. Okay, your body weight impounds divided by
30 equals the number of ounces of fluid to consume on average every 15 to 20 minutes. When I say on average, what I mean
is it is not the case that you need to stop every 15 or 20 minutes
and consume that volume of fluid.

You could sip it from moment to moment. You could wait half an hour or
an hour and then consume a larger bolus of fluid, a larger amount. Although it is recommended for
performance sake that you sip or consume beverages fairly
consistently throughout your training. One's ability to do that is going
to depend on a number of things like gastric emptying time, whether or
not the particular exercise you're doing, whether or not it's running
or jumping, is compatible with ingesting fluid on a regular basis. Or whether or not you need to
do it at different intervals than every 15, 20 minutes. Maybe it's every 5 minutes,
maybe it's every half hour. You have to adjust for you. But if you were to take the hour of
exercise or the half hour of exercise or the 3 hours of exercise and ask how
much fluid to ingest, it's going to be that Galpin equation of body weight and
pounds to buy it by 30 equals the number of ounces for every 15 or 20 minutes.

And of course, I can already
hear screaming from the back. What about for those of us
who follow the metric system? And there there's a simple translation
of the Galpin equation, which is that you need approximately 2
milliliters of water per kilogram of body weight, every 15 to 20 minutes. Again, the Galpin equation converted
into the metric system is going to be 2 milliliters of water per kilogram of body
weight every 15 to 20 minutes on average. I'm sure a number of you are asking
whether or not hydration prior to exercise is also important.

It absolutely is, and if you follow
the numbers that I talked about before, approximately 8 ounces or 240 milliliters
of fluid intake per hour in the first 10 hours of waking, that should establish a
good baseline of hydration heading into exercise, which then prompts the next
question I often get, which is, is the amount of water that needs to be consumed
according to the Galpin equation during exercise on top of, or separate from that? That is, does it replace the amount of
fluid that one needs at a basic level, that 8 ounces or 240 milliliters? And there the answer
sort of goes both ways. I think if you're going to
exercise, then obviously follow the Galpin equation in some way. Again, you don't need to be
ultra specific about this.

These are ballpark figures that will
ensure hydration, so we've set them a little bit higher perhaps than needed to
ensure more hydration rather than less. But basically the short answer is if
you're exercising for about an hour, most people are exercising for an hour
or two, probably not more than that. Most of my workouts are
certainly the resistant training workouts last about an hour. Well, then you can replace the 8
ounces or the 240 milliliters of water that's required at baseline with what
you consume according to the Galpin equation during that bout of exercise. A common question is if you are exercising
in a heated environment, indoor, outdoor, or you are somebody who tends to sweat
a lot, and by the way, we can all get better at sweating, by sweating more. Sweat is an adaptation. So if you sit in the sauna more,
you're gonna get better at sweating.

If you exercise more, especially if
you wear more layers, or if you do it in hotter temperatures or more
humid temperatures, you're gonna get better at sweating over time. And sweating is an adaptation
that helps cool your body. If you are sweating a lot or you're in
heat, how much fluid should you ingest? In general, I think it's safe to say that
you may want to increase the values on the Galpin equation by about 50 to a 100%.

So either increase by 50% or double
those numbers if you're in a very hot environment or sweating an awful lot. If you are sitting in the sauna, I highly
recommend consuming at least 8 ounces and probably more like 16 ounces of fluid. So that translates again to about 240
or about 480, let's just round up 500 milliliters of fluid for every 20 to
30 minutes that you are in a hot sauna. And then of course,
people ask, well, how hot? And it, okay, that starts getting
really detailed and we can't distinguish between dry saunas and wet saunas. And again, too many variables. But I would double your fluid intake
for that hot environment exercise or for that hot environment sauna sit. Also if you are feeling dehydrated,
okay, what does feeling dehydrated mean? That actually has a definition that
we can get into a little bit later. But what we're really talking about here
is if you are feeling as if your throat is dry, you are "parched", or you're very
thirsty, well then there's absolutely no problem with ingesting more fluids.

So 16 ounces of fluid or 500
milliliters of fluid per hour while you're feeling parched. My read of the literature is that
thirst is a reasonable guide for when we tend to be dehydrated. However, it is the case that our
thirst doesn't really keep up with our body's level of dehydration. And we know that based on some really
nice studies that have explored the amount of fluid intake compared to the
amount of urination, compared to the amount of physical output compared to the
environment that one happens to be in. And these are sort of older
studies in the realm of physiology. But here's the basic rule of thumb
that's gonna work for most people. If you are feeling parched, consume
fluids, ideally you consume fluids that don't contain caffeine or other diuretics. Diuretics being substances that cause
the release, the urination of fluid from the body and or if you are consuming
caffeine either prior to or after bouts of exercise or even just at work or you
work in a air conditioned or otherwise dry, cool or hot environment, that
you try and include some sodium and ideally sodium, potassium, magnesium,
the electrolytes in that beverage.

So it could be a little pinch
of sea salt with some lemon to adjust the taste a little bit. It could be an electrolyte drink,
an LMNT or some other sort, they're a lot of different types out there. For most people drinking pure water,
and I realize that many people do just like the taste of pure water. Chances are you're going to have enough
electrolytes unless you're sweating quite a bit or you're exercising quite
a lot, and under conditions where you are consuming very few carbohydrates,
you're going to excrete more fluid. If you are ingesting caffeine, whether
or not it's from tea or coffee, I highly recommend increasing your non
caffeine fluid intake about two to one for every volume of caffeine. So in other words, if you have a 6 ounces
or 8 ounces of coffee, you're gonna want 12 to 16 ounces of fluid, ideally fluid
with electrolytes, or a little pinch of salt in order to offset that dehydration.

So hopefully those will provide good
rules of thumb for what people want to do when they're just moving about their day. Again, underscored by the fact that
even slight levels of dehydration can really impair our cognitive and physical
performance largely by creating fatigue. But more often than not
by creating brain fog. You know, I get so many
questions about brain fog. Why do I have brain fog? Why do I have brain fog? There is a vast literature showing
that quality hydration, meaning hydration that matches the demands
of humidity and output as described in the equations that we went over a
little bit before, really can enhance clarity of focus and overall energy.

And we'll talk about why that is, but
I'll just allude to it a little bit here. The reason why ingesting sufficient
fluids can enhance our ability to focus, and in fact can reduce brain
fog and can increase physical vigor and output is not mysterious to us. We know that there are two mechanisms
by which fluid intake triggers elevated levels of alertness, and
it all has to do with the so-called sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous
system, which is a real mouthful.

But basically the sympathetic arm
of the autonomic nervous system, as many of you've heard me talk about
before, is the aspect of your nervous system that makes you more alert. Has nothing to do with emotional sympathy,
has to do with a bunch of neurons in the middle of your spinal cord called
the sympathetic chain ganglia, and some other related neural networks
in your body, as well as regions of your brain, like the locus coeruleus,
that release things like epinephrine and norepinephrine and make you more
alert and in a kind of magnificent arrangement, or I think magnificent
arrangement, when we have fluid in our gut and when our cells are well hydrated,
and believe it or not, when our bladder contains fluid within it, there is an
elevation in activity of the sympathetic nervous system by way of two pathways.

One is mechanical. In fact, we have so-called stretch
receptors in our bladder and in our gut, these stretch receptors have
fancy names like TRP trip channels as they're called, or piezo, which
are these stretch sensing channels. This is the beautiful work of many
laboratories, but in particular David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian. David Julius is at UC San Francisco,
Ardem is at the Scripps Institute. They've discovered a bunch of
channels in cells that sends things from cold to different mechanical
pressure, including expansion of tissues so-called Mechanosensation. And basically what it all boils down
to is that when our bladder has some fluid in it, when our stomach has
some fluid in it, and when our cells are sufficiently hydrated, they send
information about the mechanical presence of that distension even. And then here, I'm not talking
about being like overly full or, you know, full of chock-a-block, full
of fluid or your bladder feeling, you know, really, really full.

We'll talk about that in a moment. But when we are sufficiently hydrated,
there's a mechanical signature of that, which is the expansion of our
tissues because it has more fluid in it. And there are chemical signals as
well, which is the movement of water across those aquaporin channels is
actually understood at a biological level by ourselves and sends information
to the areas of the brain that are associated with so-called sympathetic
arousal and makes us more alert. This is actually what wakes us
up in the middle of the night.

If we have consumed too much
fluid prior to sleep and we need to urinate, we wake up. This is a mechanism that is not adequately
developed in babies and young children. This is why babies, young
children often will wet their bed. And believe it or not, in both
humans and in dogs, our ability to control urination voluntarily is
something that we actually learn.

Babies just pee in their diaper. Dogs just pee on the floor until
their house broken or until a child learns to hold onto their urine,
until they go to the bathroom, in the bathroom, or particularly appropriate
location outdoors or otherwise. The point is that hydration of the body
is signaled to the brain when we have enough fluid in the tissues of our body,
when we've consumed enough fluid, even if it hasn't already arrived to the cells
and tissues of our body, that is signaled to the brain in the form of alertness. And that alertness is what translates
to the enhanced cognitive abilities that we have when we are well hydrated.

It's also what translates to our
enhanced physical abilities when we are challenged with physical tasks. So when you look out on the landscape
of all these studies that have shown impairments in physical or
cognitive performance under conditions of even slight dehydration, that
all makes sense because our cells need fluid and we need water. But it also prompts the question
of, well, does being well hydrated actually make our brain and body
function better in the context of physical and cognitive performance? And indeed, the answer is yes. Now, earlier we were talking about
these equations that you can apply. And here again, I really want to emphasize
that these equations were not meant to be followed down to the decimal point. They were really meant and are meant
as crude, but sufficient guides for you to make sure that you're getting
enough hydration depending on your levels of activity and at rest.

If you recall when we talked about
those equations, I said, you need about 8 ounces or 240 milliliters
of fluid per hour for the first 10 hours of your day after waking. Now, why did I say for the first 10 hours? Well, it turns out that the filtration
of fluids from your body, which is accomplished of course, by your kidneys
and by way of your bladder, and the excretion of fluid out urethra, so-called
urination, is strongly, strongly circadian dependent, meaning the cells
of your kidney and the cells even of your gut, in fact, all the cells of
your body, but especially the cells of your kidney, which filter the fluid
that comes into your body, and that makes certain hormones like vasopressin,
which is antidiuretic hormone. All of that functioning of the kidney
is under strong regulation by so-called circadian clock genes, circadian clock
genes are genes that are expressed in every cell, but that in certain
cells of the body very strongly impact whether or not that organ, in
this case, the kidney is going to be activated, meaning functioning at a
very high level or at a reduced level.

And we can make all of this very simple
by simply stating what's contained in this beautiful review that I'll provide
a link to if you want to learn more called circadian rhythms in the kidney. And basically what is known is that
for the first 10 hours after waking, your kidney is filtering fluid within
your body at a very rapid rate. There are a number of different cell
types that do that, but they are basically taking that fluid, pulling
out any contaminants using hormones such as antidiuretic hormone, vasopressin
to adjust whether or not you're gonna hold onto fluid or release more fluid
from your body in the form of urine. Depending on the salt concentration,
depending on how much fluid you need, your work output, the
conditions you're in, all of that. However, at about 10 hours after waking
your kidney really starts to reduce its overall level of functioning.

Now that doesn't mean that your kidney
cannot filter fluid 11 or 12 or 16 hours after waking, but it becomes far
less efficient at doing so, and thank goodness it does because you do not
want your kidney filtering fluid at the same rate at midnight, assuming you
wake up at say, 7 or 8 or 9:00 AM that it was filtering fluid at 10:00 AM. In fact, we can say that if you want
to reduce your nighttime waking in order to urinate, which is a common,
common question and concern that many people have, how can I avoid waking up
in the middle of the night to urinate? And there I say it's perfectly normal
to wake up once, maybe twice each night to urinate, but if you want to reduce
the number of times that you wake up in order to urinate across the night,
maybe even make that number zero times. You will greatly benefit
by doing 3 things. First of all, make sure that you're
hydrating sufficiently during the daytime per the equations that we talked about
earlier, that will ensure that you are not excessively thirsty in the evening
and therefore consuming a lot more fluid.

Second, and related to that first point
is that you do want to reduce your fluid intake at night, provided you
hydrated sufficiently throughout the day. And believe it or not, the rate at
which fluid moves from your gut and into the cells and tissues of your body
and then from your bladder into urine is determined not just by the volume
of fluid you ingest, but also the rate at which you ingest that fluid and
you might be thinking, that's crazy. That makes no sense at all, right? If I drink a ton of fluid
slowly, doesn't it still mean that I'm going to urinate a ton? Yes and no. It also stands to reason that you
might ask, if I ingest very little fluid, but I do it very fast,
is it gonna be the case that I'm gonna urinate it out very quickly? Well, yes and no.

The point is that the fluid filtration
systems of your body that range from the gut to the bladder and include the
kidney, of course, depend not just on the volume, but on the rate of fluid that you
ingest because of those Mechanosensors that we talked about earlier. If you gulp down a bunch of fluids,
you are going to excrete those fluids more quickly than if you sip them
slowly, excuse me, sip them slowly. So here's what I recommend
throughout the day. When you're trying to get your adequate
yield of water or other beverages, feel free to gulp that fluid or sip it. I'm a gulper, not a sipper, but
many of you are gonna be sippers, not gulpers, consume fluid at the
rate that feels right to you, but feel comfortable gulping that fluid. However, in the evening, if you are
somebody who has challenges with waking up excessively in the middle
of the night, reduce your fluid intake provided you hydrate properly throughout
the day, and I suggest consuming no more than 5, maybe 8 ounces of fluid
between the time of 10 hours after waking and when you go to sleep.

Again, if you're very thirsty or you
under hydrate or it's very hot, feel free to ingest more fluid please. But most people will find that if they
reduce their fluid intake to about 5 ounces or less of fluid in that later
part of the day, after 10 hours of having woken up and before sleep, and they sip
those beverages as opposed to gulping them, that they will have fewer bouts
of waking up in the middle of the night to go to the restroom and ideally zero. Let's talk about tap water, and here
I have to take a deep breath, not a deep gulp, but a deep breath because in
researching tap water and what's contained in tap water in different regions, not
just in the US but around the world, I confess the picture is a pretty scary one.

I want to be clear, I'm not somebody
who naturally orients towards fear or conspiracy theories. However, in researching tap water for
this episode by way of looking at the peer reviewed research, meta-analysis
reviews, specific research articles where specific hypotheses were tested, and in
talking with experts in toxicology and so on, it's a pretty grim picture frankly. When one looks at what's contained in
most tap water and whether or not the compounds that are contained in tap water
are present in sufficient concentrations to negatively impact our health. And the bad news is that much, if not
all, tap water, believe it or not much if not all, tap water contains things that
are bad for the biology of our cells.

There is a silver lining, however, and
the silver lining is that very simple steps that are very inexpensive can
be used to adjust that tap water to make it not just safe to drink, but
that makes it perfectly fine to drink. So that's the good news, and
we'll get to that in a moment. If you are somebody who is interested
in whether or not tap water contains things like endocrine disruptors, hormone
disruptors that can negatively impact reproductive health in males or females,
or both, there is a wonderful review, wonderful, because it's so thorough. Although the news isn't great, it's
very thorough, which is great, which is entitled Endocrine Disruptors in Water and
Their Effects on the Reproductive System.

This is a review from 2020 that analyzes
water from a bunch of different sources within the world and essentially
focuses on a few key components. First of all, it focuses on
the concentration of minerals. That is magnesium and
calcium within water. Many people don't realize
this, but so-called hard water sounds terrible, right? But hard water is water that
contains magnesium and calcium, which turns out to be a good thing. Some water contains more
magnesium and calcium. Other water contains less. They looked at the presence of
magnesium and calcium because that is going to impact the pH of water. In general, the higher concentrations
of magnesium and calcium and water, the higher the pH that is, the more alkaline
that water is, and the lower levels of magnesium and calcium, the more acidic
or lower pH that water tends to be.

The other thing that this review addresses
is the concentration of so-called DBPs: dog bulldog, porcupines, DBPs. Which are disinfection
byproducts contained in water. So obviously local governments,
the government wants your drinking water to be clean. They don't want contaminants in,
they don't want sewage in that water. They don't want chemical contaminants
that are going to make people immediately sick, so they treat water. Water treatment plants, treat water
with disinfection products, and those disinfection products create things
called disinfection byproducts. And the presence of those DBPs
or disinfectant byproducts can strongly impact the pH of water by
way of changing the concentrations of magnesium and calcium. Put differently, I do believe that
governments are trying to provide people with clean water, but in doing
so, oftentimes we'll introduce things to that water that are not good for us. Now, it's very clear that DBPs can
cause endocrine disruption in ways that are not good for reproductive health.

I did a very long, in fact, 4 and a half
hour episode on fertility and vitality. That was male and female
fertility, by the way. And vitality that again, you can find
at hubermanlab.com that talks about all the biological processes involved
in the generation of healthy eggs and sperm and, and creating healthy embryos,
implantation embryos, and so forth. It's very clear that DBPs have been
shown to disrupt ovarian function, spermatogenesis and fertility outcomes. Even at concentrations of DBPs
that are present in drinking water that comes from the tap. Now, does that mean that you
shouldn't drink tap water? Well, the answer to that is it depends.

What does it depend on? Well, it depends on several things. First of all, I highly recommend
to everybody go online and put in your zip code and ask for a
water analysis of water that comes out of the tap in that zip code. This is something that is readily
available online, at least to my knowledge, and unfortunately, there's no
specific one site that I can send everyone to, to get an in-depth analysis of the
drinking water that comes out of your tap. However, I highly recommend that you
go online and put in your zip code or municipal area code and figure out
whether or not your water contains X amount of DBPs or Y amount of DBPs.

Now, of course, you're gonna get a
bunch of values back, and unless you're a toxicologist, You are probably not
gonna know what those values mean. But what you're really looking
for is whether or not there are high, low, or moderate levels of
fluoride in that drinking water. Why do I say that? Well, there are studies that show that
the concentration of fluoride in drinking water is of particular concern for the
thyroid hormone system of the body. Now, thyroid hormone has a lot
of different roles in brain and body, and thyroid hormone is very
important for everything from metabolism to levels of energy. When thyroid levels are disrupted
or thyroid receptors are disrupted, it can lead to depression. When thyroid hormones are
optimized, it can lead to optimal mood if there is such a thing. But in other words, it helps
keep your mood elevated. It relates to everything from sleep to
reproduction, thyroid hormones involved in many, many things including bone
health and tissue health generally.

So essentially, every biological
process in your body is impacted by thyroid hormone, and there's a study
that I'd like to highlight, which was published in 2018, and the title of
the study is Impact of Drinking Water Fluoride on Human Thyroid Hormones. This was a case control study
so this is not an extensive analysis of many individuals. However, what it shows is that fluoride
negatively impacts thyroid stimulating hormone and so-called T3 levels. So you have thyroid hormone, T3, and T4
even in the standard concentrations that are present of, and here's an important
number, 0.5 milligrams per liter. Okay? So if you can get ahold of the fluoride
concentrations in your tap water and find out whether or not the concentrations
are at below or exceed 0.5 milligrams per liter, what you'll find is that
even just 0.5 milligrams per liter of water can disrupt thyroid function. And this is going to be a particular
concern for people to have familial, so genetically related thyroid
issues, or that are concerned with keeping your thyroid hormone levels
healthy, which I think is everybody.

So I am telling you that you should
try and get ahold of some data about the water that comes out of your tap
if you intend on drinking tap water. And probably even if you don't
just know what's in your drinking water, your local government should
provide that information and or it should be readily available online. And in particular, I think it's
worthwhile to address how much fluoride is present in your drinking water. Again, I don't want to
create a lot of scare. I'm not trying to trigger fear here.

I do think, however, by way of reading
this review by way of reading the paper that I just referred to a moment ago,
again, links to these are going to be provided in the show note captions,
that there is extensive evidence that elevated levels of fluoride in drinking
water are simply not good for us. Now, that could open a whole discussion
of why fluoride is in our drinking water in the first place at all. But leaving that aside, it seems to me
that most everybody should know how much fluoride is in their drinking water. And ideally, everybody, yes, everybody
is filtering their drinking water. Now, that raises the question of
how best to filter drinking water. And that brings an answer of it
depends on a couple of things. First of all, how healthy or
unhealthy do you know yourself to be? Okay? So if you're somebody who has no health
issues, you have plenty of vigor, you're sleeping well at night, you have no
autoimmune disease, you're not aware of any health concern, minor or major,
well then perhaps you're somebody that doesn't want to filter your water.

I would argue that why wouldn't you
employ some very low or even zero cost approach to filtering your water? There are going to be other individuals
who are suffering particular ailments of brain or body, or both, that absolutely
should be filtering their drinking water, if they're getting their drinking the
water from their tap because it is pretty well established now that tap water
contains a lot of these disinfectant byproducts, as well as in most cases,
exceeding the threshold of fluoride that we know to be healthy for us. How should you filter your tap water? Well, you have everything ranging
from the so-called Brita type filters.

So these are gonna be carbon type filters
or other filters that you essentially put over a container or a compartment
where you can pour the water over it and goes into the compartment below. Will those work? Are they sufficient to filter
out the disinfectant byproducts? The general answer is yes, provided
you change the filters often enough. However, it is not thought,
unfortunately, not thought that they filter out sufficient fluoride. So what I highly recommend is depending
on your budget, that you go online and you search for at-home water
filters that can filter out fluoride. There are a number of straightforward
and inexpensive tools to do that. And here I don't have any relationship
to any of the water filters or things that I'm gonna mention. Now, I wanna be very clear about that
there's no brand code or affiliation here. I'm simply trying to direct you to
resources that will allow you to filter your tap water for it to be more safe for
you to consume in a way that meets your budget with the understanding that people
have very different disposable incomes.

So the range of costs here is
going to be pretty tremendous. I just wanna get that outta the way first. , you know, there are water filters
that you can use repeatedly. So these are what I'll refer
to as pitch filters that are less than a hundred dollars. Now keep in mind that that's a one-time
purchase except for the replacement of the filters, which fortunately
doesn't have to be done too often. So there are different filters. I'll provide a link to one that
I found that is at least by my read of the lowest possible cost. So this is the so-called clearly filtered
water pitcher with affinity filtration. So this is a filter that can
adequately remove fluoride, lead, BPAs, glyphosates, hormones, and
some of the other harmful things that are contained in most tap water. Again, I do realize that for
some people, even an 80 US dollar cost is going to be prohibitive. But do realize that what you're doing
here is you're purchasing a unit that can be used repeatedly, over and over. The reason why it's lower cost than
some of the different filtration approaches that I'll talk about in
a moment are that you can't really put all the drinking water that you
would use, say for an entire week or for an entire month in one pitcher.

You're gonna have to repeatedly pour water
into the pitcher in order to filter it. Now, as I mentioned before, the range
on water filter costs for filters that can adequately remove fluoride and
all the other things that you want out of your top water is immense. In fact, you can find you know,
whole house water filters that are, you know, $2,000 or more. Again, these are gonna be filters that
are gonna be in your garage or in a, a laundry room that are going to basically
pull from the, the piping system of your house and deliver purified water. I technically, it's not purified, but
that's removing these contaminants and fluoride from all the sinks in your house. So you could effectively drink from
any or all sinks in your house. That's what explains the higher cost. I think most people are probably not
going to have the disposable income or have the opportunity to include one
of these whole house filters, although if you do have the means and it's
important to you, you could do that. And then there are going to be what
I would call intermediate systems.

So systems that cost somewhere
between 200 and $500. Probably one of the more common
ones or popular ones is a so-called Berkey filter system. These are filter systems that, again,
remove the things that you want removed from your tap water, and
they can do it at higher volumes. And they're typically countertop units. They don't require any plugin typically,
or they only require brief plugin and electricity, and they're going to
filter out many, many liters or tens of liters of water so that you can always
have access to that clean filtered water time or day or night without
having to pour over into the pitcher. So I mentioned these different options
because again, I realize that people have different levels of disposable income. As far as I know, there's no tablet or
simple mechanism that can be purchased as a transportable, you know pill
that you can just simply throw in water and remove the contaminants.

If anyone is aware of one that
can adequately remove fluoride and other contaminants, please put in
the comment section on YouTube. That'd be the best place. So that I and everyone else can see
it, but hopefully the mention of the different filtration systems that I
mentioned we'll give you some choices that I would hope would fall within the
range that one could potentially afford. An important note about filtration. Just as in our body, there are mechanisms
to signal mechanical changes and chemical changes that occur in our
gut, in our brain, etc., elsewhere and in general, both mechanical and
chemical changes are signaled across the body to invoke different changes,
whether or not those are, you know, a response of the immune system or to
make us more alert or more asleep, etc.

So too filtration capitalizes on
mechanical and chemical filtration. What I mean by that is when you
run a fluid water or any other fluid through a filter, those
filters are doing two things. They are physically constraining which
molecules can go through by creating portals, pores that allow certain size
molecules to go through and not others. And almost always, they contain
certain chemicals themselves, right? Those filters have been treated
with certain chemicals that neutralize certain other chemicals. Okay? So you may be wondering how
when you filter water, you know, magnesium and calcium could get
through, but fluoride doesn't. And that's because these filters
have been very cleverly designed in order to neutralize fluoride or
to prevent large molecules, such as sediment and dirt, which is kind of
easy to imagine being filtered, but also to allow certain small molecule,
like calcium, which is small-ish, or magnesium, which is small-ish to still
pass through into our drinking water. And this is wonderful because what
it means is that by filtering our water, using any of the methods that
we talked about before, you're still going to get whatever magnesium and
calcium was present in that water while still adequately removing the fluoride
and other disinfectant byproducts.

Now, what if you can't
afford any of those options? Okay, well here you have an
interesting zero cost option. It's not as good as the other ones
of filtering that water, but it is an option, and I do think it's important
to give options to people who don't have any disposable income for the purpose
of filtering their water, which is to draw a gallon or 5 gallons or maybe even
more, tap water out of the tap and put it into some, some container, some vessel. So it could be one gallon, 5
gallon, 10 gallon container. And then to let that tap water sit for
some period of time to allow some of the sediment to drop to the bottom.

Now you might say, well, there's no
sediment, there's nothing contained in that tap water and it isn't
fluoride diluted in the water. And indeed the answer to that is yes. However, there is some evidence that
letting tap water sit out at room temperature and outside the pipes that
deliver that water can help remove some, not all of the contaminants in that water. If, however you are filtering the
water using any of the methods that I talked about a few moments
ago, you do not need to do this. Okay? I realize there's a whole world out there
of people who insist on putting their water in the sun or only keeping it in
certain containers and putting it out for a few days before they get ingested.

That to me, seems a bit extreme. If you wanna do that, be my guest, but I
don't think most people need to do that. However, I do believe that for people who
have zero disposable income to devote to paying for any kind of filtration system
for their tap water, they're taking that tap water and putting into some container
at room temperature and keeping it room temperature for a half day or a day
or more, and then pouring off the top two thirds of that water into another
container and consuming the water from that second container is going to remove
some, not all of the contaminants that one would need to be concerned about.

And here I should mention something that
I neglected to mention a few moments ago. If you were going to do this
zero cost option and, and let the water sit out for a bit, you would
want that water to sit uncapped. Sorry, I should have
mentioned that before. Uncapped, of course, trying to keep
things from falling into that water. In fact, you could even put a a little
bit of cloth above it, so you don't want things falling into that water,
but you want certain things to be able to evaporate off, and you also want
some of the sediment to drop down. And the reason why this process of letting
water sit out would work at all is because many of the contaminants contained within
water are not present because of the source of that water or even the treatment
of that water, but rather because of the pipes that that water arrives to your
glass or your, the pot that you have from. Okay? And here again, there is an
infinite number of variables.

So some people are living in
buildings for which the pipes are very, very old, but very, very clean. Believe it or not, some people are
living in newer buildings and structures. They have new pipes, but for which the
seals between those pipes contain things that are not good for you to consume. So by letting water sit out for a while,
you are able to remove some of the contaminants present within the pipes of
your home and the building and even the pipes that lead to your home or apartment. Now, some people get really obsessed
with this old tap water thing and really wanna find out all the details about the
pipes and what sorts of, you know, hard metals and how much magnesium and how
much calcium are present in their water. There are ways that you can test your
drinking water for those sorts of things. Most people, I realize, including
myself, are simply not going to do that.

If you want to know what I do, I tend
to drink water that is filtered through one of these lower cost filters. Or if I'm going to be consuming a lot
of fluid, I will drink certain kinds of fluid that later I'll tell you, I've
been doing an experiment for sake of this episode looking at so-called molecular
hydrogen water, which sounds very fancy and esoteric and almost a little wacky. But it turns out has largely to do
with the amount of magnesium and calcium and the pH of that water. So if you are somebody who has a very
low budget or simply just wants to spend a very small amount of money and
try and still drink tap water, there is absolutely a way to do that safely. But it does require a few of these steps. So, on the topic of magnesium and
calcium, this relates, as I mentioned earlier, to the "hardness" of water.

So what of the hardness of water, you
know, is it better to have more magnesium and calcium in your water or less? Some people don't like
the taste of hard water. They prefer the taste of water
that has less magnesium in calcium. However, there I would encourage
you to take a step back and consider some of the literature. In fact I'll mention a paper in particular
now, published in 2019, which describes the quote, regulations for calcium,
magnesium, or hardness in drinking water in the European Union member states. Turns out in Europe, they do very
detailed water analysis and that's present in a number of really high
quality scientific publications. This was a paper published in regulatory
toxicology and pharmacology, and they cite a number of different references
in the introduction that, for instance, in here I'm quoting statistically
significant inverse association between magnesium and cardiovascular mortality.

Now, again, that's a, an association,
this is not causal, but higher magnesium in water, lower cardiovascular mortality. They go on to say the highest exposure
category, which are people consuming drinking water with magnesium contents
of 8.3 to 19.4 milligrams per liter. Again, when you get your water analysis,
you can compare against some of these values was significantly associated with
decreased likelihood of cardiovascular mortality by 25% compared with
people consuming magnesium content of 2.5 to 8.2 milligrams per liter. Okay, so what this basically shows,
and, and by the way, the reference to that I'll also provide a link
to, in the show note caption.

What this basically states is that
higher magnesium containing water, and it turns out higher magnesium and
calcium containing water, so-called harder water may not taste as good to
you, but turns out to be better for you. Now, whether or not it can prevent
you from getting cardiovascular disease, I don't know. In fact, I would probably just
state no, it probably won't prevent you from cardiovascular disease. You still need to do all the other
things that are important for avoiding cardiovascular disease
and cerebral vascular disease. For that and what to do in order
to avoid cardiovascular disease. I strongly encourage you to
listen to the episode with Dr. Peter Attia, that's coming out in a
few weeks that gets deep into that topic and the actionable items for
avoiding cardiovascular disease. But basically, as this study quotes,
there is a growing consensus among epidemiologists and epidemiological
evidence along with clinical and nutritional evidence that's strong
enough to suggest that new guidance should be issued in terms of how these
different sources of tap water should enhance, not deplete the amount of
magnesium and calcium in that water.

Now, this ought to raise a very
important question in all of your minds, which is why is it that
magnesium and calcium concentrations are relevant to cardiovascular disease? Is it something about what magnesium does
in cells or what calcium does in cells? Are we all magnesium
and calcium deficient? Well, it turns out that's not the case. The major effect by which magnesium and
calcium in water are likely to impact things like blood pressure, cardiovascular
disease, and other aspects of cellular function turn out to be somewhat cryptic. But we can make that cryptic aspect
very clear by saying that when we have more magnesium in particular,
but also calcium present in our water, so-called hard water, you increase
the amount of hydrogen in that water. It becomes what we call hydrogen rich
and the pH of that water is increased. Now again, this does not mean that we are
trying to change the pH of the cells of our body in any kind of meaningful way.

In fact, we don't want to do that. We want the pH of the cells of our
body to stay in particular ranges as I mentioned earlier, but having more
magnesium and more calcium in our water that is increasing the hardness of our
water changes the pH of that water. And it turns out that the elevated pH
of water, that is pH of water that tends to be somewhere between high sevens. So we could say 7.9 up to even 9 or 9.2
is going to be more readily absorbed and is going to more favorably impact the
function of our cells than lower pH water. Again, I wanna restate this because
I'm a little bit concerned that maybe a clip of this is gonna be
taken and, and send elsewhere. And someone will get the impression
that I'm saying that we actually want to drink high pH water, that we all
need to buy expensive high pH water.

Turns out that's not the case. If you are consuming tap water from a
location where levels of a magnesium are sufficiently high in that tap water again,
where the level of magnesium is 8.3 to 19.4 milligrams per liter of water, that
is, if the water coming out of your tap is hard enough, well then chances are you
don't need to enhance the pH of that water or change its magnesium concentration. If, however, the water that you're
drinking from the tap filtered or not, I would hope filtered contains
less than 8.3 milligrams per liter of magnesium, well then chances are the
pH of that water is going to be low enough that it's not going to be lending
itself to some of the favorable health components that higher pH water can.

Notice, I did not say that lower pH
aka more acidic water is bad for you. I didn't say that. I said that higher pH
water can be good for you. So let's talk about how and why
higher pH water can be good for you. And some of the best, and in fact,
very inexpensive sources of higher pH magnesium enhanced or simply
tap water that contains sufficient magnesium can be used and accessed. Many of you are probably wondering whether
or not you can simply boil your tap water and thereby decontaminate the tap water. There I want to caution you,
it turns out that some of the contaminants present in water are
actually made worse by heating water. And again, I don't want to open up you
know, a whole catalog of different fears. I, like all of you, I presume, use
water to cook pasta, rice, because I'm an omnivore, I do consume those things. I confess if I make Yerba Matte or any
kind of tea or coffee, I tend to use a higher quality water source than tap
water, even if that tap water is filtered, because I like the taste far more if I use
a really good source of water, and again, because I'm not consuming those beverages
in enormous volumes, that becomes a, a relatively inexpensive endeavor.

But I would caution people against
using boiling or heating of water as the only method to decontaminate
their tap water and instead to also rely on some of the filtration
systems that I talked about before. And as long as we're talking about
the temperature of water, there is sort of an ongoing debate online. It's not a huge debate, but a number
of people engaged in this debate as to whether or not drinking really
cold water or room temperature water is better for you or worse for you.

This is a tough one to resolve. It turns out that if water is very, very
cold, that is if you drink it and you can feel that cold water making its way down
to your gut and you can actually feel it as cold within your gut, that's sort of a,
a you know, back of the envelope, , or I should say direct within the gut measure
of cold versus body temperature water, that it is going to be slower to absorb.

That is you're gonna feel it sloshing
around in your stomach for a bit longer than if you were to consume
water that is slightly warmer. Now, that is not to say that
you should ingest warm water or room temperature water. However, many people find that when
they drink very cold water or ice water, that indeed it can alter the kind of
sensation of the lining of their stomach in ways that at least to them feel
like it's altering their digestion.

And that makes sense. The cells that line the gut
are very temperature sensitive. You want this so for a number of
reasons, including not consuming food that is excessively hot
or cold or damaging your gut. But in general, most people know
the temperature of fluid that they want to ingest and ingest
that temperature of fluid. So most people, for instance, on a
cold day, want a warmer or hot fluid. Does that mean that you're not going
to absorb that warmer hot fluid? No, of course it doesn't. You're going to absorb that
fluid one way or the other.

So drink fluids at the temperatures
that are to your liking in that moment. In other words, what you desire in
that moment and don't worry so much about trying to avoid cold beverages
or trying to make sure that you're always consuming room temperature
water as opposed to cold water. So now with your understanding of
hard water, soft water, magnesium, the relationship between magnesium, calcium,
and the pH of water, and remember our earlier conversation where we talked
about how higher pH water is actually going to move out of the gut and into
the body a bit more readily, and across those aquaporin channels more readily
than lower pH, more acidic water. Well, that raises the question of
whether or not all these different forms of water that are out there, reverse
osmosis water, distilled water, double distilled water deuterium-depleted
water, alkaline water, as it's often called, whether or not any or all of
that has meaningful health outcomes.

Here we can address some of
those items pretty quickly. For instance, distilled water and
double distilled water is essentially distilled of that is it has magnesium
and calcium removed from it. So my recommendation would be
to not drink distilled water. There may be specific circumstances where
somebody has very high levels of blood magnesium or calcium or calcium stores
within the body that would necessitate them drinking only distilled water. But that seems like a very
isolated kind of niche case. So in general, consuming distilled
water is just simply not necessary. Now in terms of reverse osmosis
water, what is reverse osmosis water? Reverse osmosis water is water that
has been passed repeatedly through a series of filters that are designed
to remove the kinds of contaminants we were talking about earlier. So some of the basic contaminants like
disinfectant byproducts, fluoride, and some other large and small molecules
that leaves the water ideally still containing magnesium and calcium.

Although there's some evidence that
reverse osmosis water can deprive water of some of the magnesium and calcium. So if you are going to use reverse
osmosis filters and drink reverse osmosis water, you want to make
sure that you're still getting the magnesium concentrations present in
that water that we talked about earlier. But in general, reverse osmosis water
is considered safe, but, and for many people, this is gonna be an important
but but very expensive to access. The reverse osmosis filters require
a lot of changing of the filters. Purchasing reverse osmosis water in
its stable form within containers, these are typically glass containers,
is going to be pretty expensive and prohibitive for most people.

That said, there are a number of
people out there that really like the taste of reverse osmosis water. They report it as feeling more smooth. They think of reverse osmosis
water as "giving them energy". To be quite honest, there's no direct
studies of the subjective sensation of water in the mouth and in the
gut, and its relative health effects.

Again, the smoothness of water
as one drinks it and goes down. The gut really has no direct relationship
to the "hardness or softness" of water. I know that's going to
shock a number of you. You probably think, well, hard
water is gonna be hard to drink, and it turns out that's not the case. In fact, many people find that with
elevated levels of magnesium and calcium and water, it actually tastes
smoother or softer in their mouth. So hard water tastes smooth or soft. I know it's all very counterintuitive,
but I think it's important to point this out because a number of times you'll
hear or read about filtering water so that it tastes smoother and better. And oftentimes that's happening
because the "hardness" of water that is the concentrations of magnesium
and calcium are actually increasing. So if you're somebody who's curious about
reverse osmosis water and you can afford the filters or the reverse osmosis water
already pre-filtered please be my guest. You know, drink it. I'm certainly not trying to prevent
anyone from drinking it, but there's no peer reviewed evidence that I am
aware of that conclusively shows that drinking reverse osmosis water is far
better for us than drinking other types of water, provided the other types
of water are adequately filtered of fluoride and the sorts of disinfectant
byproducts that we talked about earlier.

So what about hydrogen water? You may have heard of this,
or hydrogen enriched water or electrolyzed reduced water as a way
to access hydrogen enriched water. All this might sound pretty
crazy to some of you. Now, fortunately, for sake of
today's discussion, we can take a number of the different categories
of, let's call it unique categories of water that have been described,
including deuterium-depleted water. And by the way, deuterium is
something that relates to the presence of hydrogen ions in water. And put very simply, water that is
extracted from sources that are closer to sea level tend to have more deuterium
in them than water that is extracted from sources further from sea level. So up in the mountains, for instance, and
from springs further away from oceans. As you get closer to sea level, the
sources water separate from seawater tend to have more deuterium, which
relates to the enrichment or lack of hydrogen within that water or
free hydrogen within that water. I warned you this was all gonna sound
pretty niche and that we were gonna get a little bit into the chemistry, but now
I'm gonna make it all very simple for you, at least for the non aficionado.

Electrolyzed reduced water, which is
a method of using electricity to alter the confirmation of the water molecules
and their rates of movement as well, as well as so-called hydrogen rich
water, or hydrogen enriched water or deuterium-depleted water, all have the
property of having higher levels of pH than other forms of water, such as
distilled water, reverse osmosis water, and generally higher pH than the kind
of water that comes out of your tap. Unless you live in a region where
your tap water has very high levels of magnesium in it, which does occur in
certain regions of the world, but is not that common more typically, the water
that comes out of your tap does not have enough magnesium, meaning not as
much magnesium in it as you would like.

And this, I believe, explains in a
fairly straightforward way why there is such an appeal of these pH enhanced or
alkaline waters or electrolyzed reduced water or deuterium-depleted water. There are a couple of reasons, but
first of all, anytime someone is consuming a specialized form of water,
chances are it's going to be filtered of the disinfectant byproducts,
fluoride, and the other things that you really don't want in water. So already the water is going
to be cleaner than would be coming out of the tap. So that's going to indirectly explain
a number of the so-called health benefits, both subjective and perhaps
even objective as we'll talk about that can result from consuming these
other let's say more esoteric forms of water, at least not of simple tap water. However, if you look at hydrogen or
hydrogen enriched water, you really need to take a step back and ask, what is that? You know, what are we
really talking about? Because it turns out that you can create
hydrogen enriched water by putting tablets of magnesium itself, small amounts of
magnesium dissolving those in water.

It will give off a kind
of gaseous solution. You'll see a bunch of bubbling in there. You certainly want to dilute that
tablet and then consume the water. And yes, it's true what you've heard about
and read from these commercial sources. You do want to consume that water within
about, you know, five to 15 minutes after that tablet completes dissolving. Now, why would you do this? And I should say that I have now started
doing this not because I necessarily think that it's so necessary or so beneficial. I'll talk about my experience in a moment. I did it in anticipation of this
episode because I was researching water and hydrogen enrich water
and all these alkaline waters. And what became very clear to me
based on reading a fantastic two-part review, it's a very extensive review
entitled, or at least the first part is entitled: Electrolyzed Reduced Water
Molecular Hydrogen is the Exclusive Agent Responsible for the Therapeutic Effects.

And then there's a second
part to this review. This is how extensive it is, entitled:
Electrolyzed Reduced Water number two, safety Concerns and Effectiveness
as a source of Hydrogen Water. What this review, which we've linked
to in the show notes, points to is that all of the health benefits of these
different forms of water that you hear about out there, deuterium-depleted,
hydrogen enrich, etc., all seem to boil down, no pun intended, no
boiling included, I should say, to the elevation in hydrogen that translates
into, and here's the really meaningful change, the elevation in pH that
occurs when you hydrogen enrich water.

Now, there are not a lot of
clinical studies looking at hydrogen enriched water, but there are
starting to be more than a few. And one that I'd like to point out
and that we'll link to, was published fairly recently, which is entitled
Hydrogen-rich water reduces inflammatory responses and prevents apoptosis. Apoptosis is a naturally occurring cell
death during development and is generally used to describe cell death of the body. Sometimes this can be good cell
death, by the way, removing cells that need to be removed. Again, the title of the paper is:
Hydrogen-Rich water reduces inflammatory responses and prevents apoptosis of
peripheral blood cells in healthy Adults. A randomized double
blind controlled trial. Now this paper looked at the effects of
drinking 1.5 liters per day of hydrogen enriched water for a period of four weeks.

They did find significant positive
benefits of reduced inflammation, and they found these changes by way of
analyzing things like interleukin 6 and some of the other interleukins,
which are markers of inflammation. They controlled very nicely for the
fact that people were still consuming other forms of water and liquid and
coffee, etc., although they made sure that they weren't consuming
too much coffee and soda in addition to this hydrogen enriched water. But what this paper shows is that
indeed, increasing the free hydrogen in water can improve certain
health metrics in these cells. And this is in keeping with some of the
subjective reports that people have stated out there, and that I myself experience,
I have to say that by drinking hydrogen rich water, which I'll tell you how to
do fairly inexpensively in a moment, you do get the subjective experience of
having more energy, of "feeling better".

Now, keep in mind, of course, the placebo
effect is a very real and powerful effect, so it could just be placebo,
although in this paper they did of course include a placebo group, so people
didn't know if they were getting hydrogen rich water or non hydrogen rich water. I should also mention that the
improvements in health metrics that they observed in this study were only observed
for individuals older than 30 years old. Why that is, I don't know, the conclusions
these authors came to in terms of how these individuals older than 30 achieved
lower levels, or I should say reduced levels of inflammation and improved
markers of other aspects of biological function is that the hydrogen water
improved the biological antioxidant potential of certain cell types.

And again, the cell types that they
mainly focus on were these peripheral blood cells in this particular study. Now, how could this be? Why would this be? Well, this goes back to our earlier
discussion about reduction in reactive oxygen species, so-called
ROSs, and reductions in free radicals that can damage cells. So if all of this is sounding very
convoluted, I can understand why. However, what I like about this
study and the two reviews that I mentioned a moment ago is that
these studies don't really say that hydrogen-rich water is what's essential.

What these studies really point to is
that the changes in pH of water that enhancing the hydrogen in water can
create, is what leads to the enhanced either absorption and or ability of
cells to utilize that higher pH water. Again, not by changing the pH of the body
or of cells, but simply because higher pH water or we could perhaps more accurately
state less acidic water, that is harder water that contains more magnesium and
calcium, seems to be more readily used by the cells of the body and therefore
it's very likely that the individuals in this study were achieving higher
or more efficient levels of hydration. Okay, so if any of this is
confusing, let me be very clear. I do not believe that we all need to
drink deuterium-depleted water or that we all need to drink electrolyzed reduced
water, nor do I necessarily believe that we all need to drink hydrogen rich water. However, it's very clear to me that
all these different forms of water are better absorbed and therefore lead to
better and more efficient hydration, and therefore can reduce inflammation, blood
pressure, and improve a number of other health metrics because of the elevated pH
that all of these different purification or water treatment methods achieve.

And that elevated pH, again, is not
changing the pH of the cells and tissues and organs of your body. You actually don't want that, rather that
elevated pH is simply making the water less acidic than it would be otherwise. So the simple takeaway is this, if
your tap water contains sufficient magnesium per the values that we
talked about earlier, I don't think you need to hydrogen enrich your water. I do however, suggest that you at least
analyze your water or look at some of the professional analysis of water that
you can achieve online and filter out disinfectant byproducts and fluorides,
etc., from that magnesium, or I should say sufficiently magnesium containing water. Okay? Put simply, if your tap water has
enough magnesium, filter it, but drink it and I think you're doing just fine.

If, however, the levels of magnesium in
your tap water are not above that value that we talked about earlier in that
case, I do think, and I can completely understand why enriching the amount of
hydrogen in that water can make that water not only more palatable, right? Give you the sensation that it's
softer or smoother or more enjoyable to drink than more acidic water would be. But also that that water is going
to be far more effective in being absorbed and hydrating in the cells and
tissues of your body, which turns out to be very important for an enormous
range, perhaps every biological function within your brain and body.

So how can you hydrogen enrich your water? That actually can be done
fairly inexpensively. I've been doing that as I mentioned
earlier, as part of an experiment in preparation for this episode, because
it turns out that the water that comes out of my tap has very little magnesium
in it and very little calcium as well. The way to create hydrogen-rich water
is you can simply purchase molecular hydrogen tablets, which in reality are
just magnesium tablets that dissolve in water and create a free hydrogen that can
interact with the other water molecules. Now, the chemistry behind it has
been substantiated, and I'll provide a link in the show note captions to
a paper that gets into some fairly extensive detail about the way that
having an additional hydrogen in your water can adjust the flow of electrons
and the adjustment of free radicals.

But keep in mind, again, this is all
through increases in the pH of your water, and please keep in mind that you can't
simply take any other or any old magnesium tablet or capsule and put it into water. The configuration of the magnesium
in these capsules and tablets is such that it allows a rapid dissolving
of the tablet and the activation of the free hydrogen that can
interact with the water molecules. Again, there are only a few
scientific studies exploring the real biological effects of
these activated hydrogen waters. The dissolvable tablets are the far
less expensive way to go than purchasing pre-packaged and sealed hydrogen water. In fact, I don't recommend those brands
because they are quite expensive and it's not clear how stable the activated
or free hydrogen is in those waters. In any case, this is certainly not
something that everyone needs to do. I mention it because I have had
a good experience with it myself. I also will mention again that I
have no business or affiliation to any of these products. I'll provide a link to a few of them
in the show note captions for those of you that want to experiment.

And indeed, that's why I'm telling
you this, for those of you that want to experiment with raising the pH of
your water without having to purchase what is ordinarily quite expensive,
higher pH water, you can do this with these dissolvable magnesium tablet. My experience with them
has been quite good. In fact, I plan to continue to
use them once or twice a day. This is not the sort of thing
that you need to do in all the water that you drink. I want to repeat, even if you go down
this path and you find that you really like the activated hydrogen tablet
approach, it is not the case that you want to put these in all of your water,
and you certainly don't want to put them in carbonated waters of any kind.

That will lead to a lot of gastric
discomfort, nor do you want to put them into hot liquids of any kind. So again, this is the sort of thing
that you do once or twice, maybe three times a day, and you can find out for
yourself and sort of measure subjectively whether or not you like the experience
and whether or not you "feel better". Now, earlier in the episode we
were discussing structured water or this fourth phase of water. I know a number of people out there are
curious as to whether or not ingesting structured water is somehow better for
us than ingesting non-structured water. All I can say about this is that it is
a very controversial thing to suggest that structured water is somehow
more biologically effective or better for us than non-structured water. There are a number of different ways
that one can create structured water. They involve some pretty extensive and
expensive at-home systems ranging anywhere from a couple of hundred dollars to
a couple of thousand dollars or more. To be quite direct, when one goes into
the peer reviewed scientific literature, one will not find that is there is
essentially no real evidence that ingesting structured water leads to any
specific desired biological outcomes.

Now, as I say that, I'm sure there
are people out there who have still had tremendous experiences ingesting
structured water, whether or not that's due to a placebo effect or a real effect
of ingesting structured water isn't clear. Just to give you a sense of what my
stance is on things like structured water, I think that they are interesting
and intriguing, but as a scientist, in the absence of any quality peer review
data at present, I can't really suggest that people go out and start ingesting
structured water nor that they adhere to the claims that structured water
is going to be really, really good for them compared to other forms of water.

That said, I do think that there's
an interesting and open space for further exploration of the biological
effects of structured water given the fact that structured water does exist. I don't think anyone debates that,
and the fact that the different structures of water in this fourth
phase of water as we're calling it, has been shown to interface with solids
and other aspects of liquids and can do so within organelles of cells. So different components of
cells that control different functions, including mitochondria. I think there's a potential there,
whether or not there's a promise there, is a another question entirely. So I don't wanna shut the
door on structured water. I think this is an open question
that I hope there will be more data to answer those questions
in the not too distant future. And meanwhile, if any of you are aware
of good clinical studies exploring the biological effects of structured
water in either animal models or humans, please put those references
in the comments on YouTube because I'm very curious as to how this area of
biological effects of structured water is evolving and continues to evolve.

So today we discussed water, and
admittedly we went into a lot of detail about the physics and chemistry
of water in its various forms. And we talked about hydration because
I think that's the main reason why many of you are interested
in or concerned about water. We also talked about contaminants
and tap water, which unfortunately do exist and are very prominent in
essentially all regions of the world. So please do get some information
about what's coming out of your tap. I also wanna throw in one other piece of
information that's really critical that I learned about when researching this
episode, which is the quality of water that comes out of your tap is not just
dictated by the source that it comes from external to your home or apartment,
your pipes are also important, and that filter, or that little mesh that sits at
the faucet head is also very important.

Most people don't pay attention to that,
but it turns out that a lot of debris and contaminants can be derived from
that little filter that most people just simply aren't cleaning often enough. So here, I'm not trying to tell you
that the metal or the plastic that that filter is made of is a problem. More often than not, contaminants are
showing up in water because people aren't cleaning those filters often enough. And in fact, prior to researching
this episode, I didn't ever think to clean that filter. I looked underneath my faucet and while
that filter didn't look particularly filled with debris, I did find that when
I took it off and I looked at the other sign, there was quite a lot of debris.

So if you are going to consume tap
water, you definitely want to consider the source, the pipes in your building
or apartment, the ones that lead right up to your glass or jug that you would
put that water into, and also that mesh that that water passes through
as it goes into that glass or jug. We also talked about
how much water to drink. I hope that we finally
resolve that question. For those of you that have
been wondering about that. The Galpin equation is a wonderful
approach to how much water to consume during exercise. And by providing these other formulas
of about 8 ounces or 240 milliliters of water per hour for the 10 hours
from waking until post waking on average, remember it's averages. You don't have to consume them every hour
on the hour, and no need to be neurotic. Hopefully you can achieve better
levels of hydration, which we know can lead to reductions in blood pressure
improvements in appetite, mood, and focus. And I really think that it's the
improvements in cognitive focus and physical ability, both endurance strength
and other forms of kind of readiness in the body, readiness to perform
work in the body that really are best supported by the hydration literature.

And then of course, we went through the
different forms of water that you hear about out there and addressed which ones
are going to be beneficial or not and perhaps more importantly, why any of
them would be beneficial thinking about that from the perspective of biologists
and the chemistry of water, and I do hope that by arriving at this point in
the episode, now that you have a much better understanding of the chemistry
and physics of water and the way that water can powerfully impact your biology.

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Again, that's hubermanlab.com. Thank you once again for joining me
for today's discussion all about the science, including the chemistry,
physics, and biology of water, and how your body utilizes water. And last but certainly not least,
thank you for your interest in science. [MUSIC PLAYING].

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