Rule #2: Stay Hydrated. Drink Clean Water!
Hydration: One thing we all do every day is drink water. Our body is 70 to 90 percent water. Thus, staying hydrated is critical for your metabolic health. Indeed, Dr. Richard Johnson, a professor at the Univeristy of Colorado, says that even “mild dehydration stimulates the development of obesity.”1
Tip 1: To stay hydrated, drink a half an ounce to one ounce of water for every pound you weigh depending on what you are doing that day. Obviously, if you are engaged in strenuous activity or in a hot climate, you will need more.2
Tip 2: Andrew Huberman (Stanford Prof and PHD with great podcast) says you should aim to drink most of the water you need in the first 10 hours of the day.3 Why? Because God is amazing and he made our kidneys slow down later in the day so we could sleep without having to get up and use the restroom multiple times. (If you have to get up during the night to go to the restroom, try to stop drinking after 6 pm—meaning get all your ounces before 6).
Contamination: Studies indicate that most drinking water contains contaminants harmful to your health and even to a woman’s reproductive health.4 Unfortunately, “the source of chemical contamination in water is diverse, originating from byproducts formed during water disinfection processes, release from industry and livestock activity, or therapeutic drugs released into sewage.”5
Casey and Calley Means say in their great book Good Energy that tap water is contaminated with PFAS for over two hundred million Americans.6 A recent study found that “PFAS in drinking water was associated with increased cancer incidence in the digestive, endocrine, oral cavity/pharynx, and respiratory systems.”7
If you want to know what contaminants are in your tap water, there are websites where you put in the zip code and they give you the contaminants.8
What should I do? Get a filter. As Dhru Purhoit, a great podcaster, says, “Either you have a filter, or you become a filter.”
There are two types of water filters you can get — either a carbon filter (like Brita) or a Reverse Osmosis Filter. Both have advantages and disadvantages.
Carbon filters are great for removing chlorine and some other harmful chemicals including lead, but they don’t remove all the contaminants.
Reverse osmosis filters remove many more contaminants including healthy ones like “magnesium, calcium and iron.”9 Most reverse osmosis filters also have a carbon filtration stage. If you decide on a reverse osmosis filter, get one that remineralizes the water.
Both are affordable but the carbon filter ones are definitely cheaper. I have an on-the-counter reverse osmosis filter that cost about $250 and am thrilled with it. I love the taste of the water. My system remineralizes the water and the filters only need to be replaced once a year of so. Some leading experts say reverse osmosis is the only way to ensure you remove things like PFAS and lead.10
What about when I go out to eat? Don’t worry about it. Make your body strong and fit at home. The goal is to drink clean water where you drink it the most—at home. If you do the right thing at home, enjoy life when you go out. Socialization is important!
https://www.levels.com/blog/dr-richard-johnson-on-fructose-and-how-we-store-fat; Casey and Calley Means, Good Energy, at 141. Dr. Johnson says this in his book Nature Wants Us to Be Fat.
Andrew Huberman recommends that when you exercise, you calculate how much you should drink as follows. Body weight/30 gives you number of ounces you should drink every 15 minutes. So if I weigh 180 pounds, I would consume 6 ounces for every 15 minutes I exercise.
Andrew Huberman talks about this about 1 hour and five minutes into this podcast.
https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/21/6/1929
Id.
Casey and Calley Means, Good Energy, at 234.
https://rdcu.be/d79ph; see also https://dceg.cancer.gov/research/what-we-study/pfas; https://keck.usc.edu/news/study-links-pfas-contamination-of-drinking-water-to-a-range-of-rare-cancers/;
You can also buy an at home test if you want to know exactly what is coming out of your tap. One of the websites where you put in your zip code and it lists the contaminants is: https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/reverse-osmosis-water-filters-when-are-they-good-choice
On this podcast, Dr. “Aly Cohen emphasizes the importance of investing in a high-quality reverse osmosis (RO) water filter to remove harmful contaminants like PFAS and lead. She highlights the effectiveness of RO systems, noting that they are federally regulated for dialysis patients due to their ability to filter out viruses, bacteria, and thousands of toxic chemicals.” https://dexa.ai/d/9be2e716-d1bb-11ef-a74d-c308b2f5d071?t=1-Water+Filtration
Here is the podcast: