 Tap water. Is it really safe to drink? Well, a lot of times it depends on where you live and the filtration system that's used in your municipality and, quite frankly, the amount of fluoride and the amount of chloride that's being put into your water. Also, the hardness of the water can have a huge effect. And fun fact, the amount of lithium in your local water may have a positive benefit on your brain health through the years. People who live in hard water areas, interestingly enough, have better heart health than people who live in soft water areas. And if you use a soft water system in your house, please, please, please make sure it's a potassium chloride soft water system, not a sodium chloride soft water system. Potassium chloride softeners may actually have some health benefits, but absolutely not the traditional sodium chloride soft water system. So the answer is check with your local municipality. The other worrisome thing about tap water is most of the filtration systems used in municipalities do not get rid of antibiotics in water, and I can guarantee you that they are in almost all of our commercial water systems. So personally, my wife and I drink bottled water at home from glass, but both of our homes in Santa Barbara and Palm Springs have a reverse osmosis whole house water system as well. There are very reasonable price ones available. There are really ridiculously priced ones available. The other option is get yourself a disposable pitcher. Many are on the market. Many are actually very reasonable to use, but check with your local municipality before you say, well, I've got great tap water. Also, we're going to talk about alkaline water, but the alkalinity of your water varies greatly by municipalities. So some will have actually very high pHs. Desert hot springs, which is the community next to Palm Springs, is always voted as the best water in the United States. That's because their water comes from an underground aquifer that drips off a 10,000 foot mountain and it's filtered water and always wins the best taste award and highest quality water in the annual water competition. I've talked about water fasting on this podcast before, but I keep getting questions about it. So let me set the record straight. Water fasting has been around since recorded history and certainly it's been around since pre-recorded history. Quite frankly, we often did not have food, but thank goodness we had water. We can go without food for months and months and months. There's been human experiments and human beings who have gone over six months without eating, but you can only go without water for approximately seven days. That's how important water is. Now, water fasting because of its long historical significance and because fasting is associated with all the great religions, people assume that water fasting is natural and it's safe. Whereas if this was 100 years ago and I'm doing this podcast, probably from a soap box in the town square, water fasting would be very different than it is now. That's because in our modern environment we take heavy metals and organo-pesticides and other toxins which are now ubiquitous in our environment and in our food and we store them in our fat cells. And believe it or not, when they're stored in our fat cells they don't have a huge effect on us. That's why as I use the example, a giant tuna or a giant swordfish which is full of energy and full of life may have toxic amounts of mercury in their flesh, in their fat, but it's not affecting them. So you eat that mercury and you store that mercury in your fat. So when we do a water fast, we virtually immediately start using up our fat for energy because we're not eating. The problem is as we use that fat, the heavy metals, the pesticides, all the other toxins are released into our blood stream. Now our liver is appointed to detoxify these compounds and we have phase one and we have phase two detoxification enzymes that do a pretty reasonable job. But the liver actually has no ability to detoxify heavy metals. So it says I'm going to spit these heavy metals out into bile and the bile will be squirted into the intestines and I'm rid of it and everything's fine. Unfortunately, we reabsorb those heavy metals from our intestines so that many of us doing a detox are actually increasing the level of toxins in our bloodstream because they come out into our bloodstream and we immediately recycle them back into our bloodstream. And so many people, including Dr. Joseph Merkola, who was a big fan of water detox, have really stepped back and said wait a minute, that's probably not what we should be doing in the modern age. And as many of you know, I developed a product that I use on myself to deal with this issue and I've written about if you want to detox heavy metals properly, here's the steps to do. Is there a safe way to waterfest? Yes. And just in the longevity paradox, I show you how to do this. You need to complex heavy metals and the best way to do that is the use of chlorella and the use of activated charcoal. I also think you need to rev up your liver enzymes, melt thistle is a great way, a compound called D-lemonine is a great way, dandelion greens are a great way, and this is all in the longevity paradox. So please don't just say I think I'm going to do a seven-day waterfest. Peter Atia has backed off on his seven-day waterfest and is now this year only going to do three-day waterfest, which I think is a much more reasonable approach. Okay, time for a lightning round of quick questions and answers. Let's go. Is alkaline water healthy? So we've had one of the world's experts on alkaline water on my podcast and I do suggest you listen to it. Here's the hilarious thing about alkaline water. Everyone thinks that we need to have an alkaline environment to be healthy. In fact, where capillaries deliver blood and nutrients to the cells, it's actually a slightly acid environment and that's how things actually happen. Alkaline water has actually less ability to alkaline you than, for instance, baking soda. So if you really want to have a benefit of an alkaline environment, you're much better off dissolving a teaspoon of baking soda in some water and drinking it rather than having alkaline water. Alkaline water will not change your pH one bit. There aren't enough ions dissolved to change your pH. And as you know, my colleagues at the Medical College of Georgia, where I went to medical school, recently published a paper that having a teaspoon of baking soda a couple of times a day improves athletic performance. It's actually an old hack of professional athletes and actually may protect kidneys from inflammation. So no, alkaline water, if you want to have an alkaline water machine, knock your socks off. A lot of the reverse osmosis machines will give you alkaline water. I have one, but don't be confused by what benefit you're going to get from that alkaline water. It's actually the reverse osmosis that's probably doing the trick. Is there anything wrong with ice water? Well, first of all, it depends on where the ice is being made. Number two, ice water is incredibly good for you. Think about this. You have to cool the ice water down to normal temperature and in doing so, you use heat from your body and that heat requires energy. So interestingly enough, the more ice water you drink, the more energy you use up to cool off or heat up that ice water. So you actually can have a benefit by drinking ice water rather than warm water. How healthy is hydrogen infused water? Well, we've had a podcast about this and I can tell you, I think that the discovery of the benefits of molecular hydrogen is going to be one of those ground shaking changes in how we understand how hydrogen works in our body for health. Just a little teaser from my next book, The Energy Paradox, which will be out in the fall of this year. People with Parkinson's disease have been discovered that their gut microbiome does not make hydrogen out of the food they eat, whereas normal people's gut microbiome makes hydrogen gas out of the food they eat. And I'll leave that teaser because there's more on hydrogen to come. So I think hydrogen water, and I drink it daily, is really one of the game changers if you're interested in brain health and if you're interested in longevity. Should I drink water with a meal? Why and why not? So you need gastric acid to digest protein. We use acid for one purpose and one purpose only in terms of the food we eat, and that is to digest protein. If you dilute the gastric acid with water, you'll actually slow the protein digestion. Now that may be, believe it or not, a good thing if it slows gastric emptying. But here's a crazy fact. There's a little valve at the end of your stomach called the pyloric valve, the pylorus, that senses when gastric acid goes away and that means that your protein has been digested and it's ready to empty the protein or the stomach contents into the small intestine for further digestion and absorption. If you dilute out the acid with too much water, you inadvertently open the gates too soon and your stomach contents empty into the small intestine too soon. This can do two things. Number one, it can actually spike your blood sugar inadvertently and it can lead to protein that's not fully digested and that protein will actually undergo fermentation and you may actually get the gas and bloating that you associate with irritable bowel syndrome, but it may be because you had too much water with your meal and you started the process that way. Can I drink sparkling water as a replacement? Yes, here's the proviso. Most sparkling waters merely bubble up carbon dioxide into the water and that actually makes for an extremely low pH in those waters. They also can increase the phosphorus content. So Italian law requires that all Italian sparkling waters, which quite frankly are in glass, have to be pH balance. It has to be neutralized. San Pellegrino, by the way, has the most neutral pH of any of the sparkling waters. On the other hand, if you guys are sitting around drinking Lacroix or something like that as a wonderful sparkling water, you may be getting a pretty impressive acid load if you're having several of these a day. So and please make sure your can is BPA free. Make sure you found a can that doesn't have a liner that has BPA in it. Glass has no BPA. Are there any people who should avoid sparkling water? Yeah, if you can't burp, it's probably a good idea to avoid sparkling water because that gas has got to go someplace. And if it doesn't come out the top end, I guarantee it'll come out the back end. Are there chemicals in water we should worry about? You bet you there are. Aurora really kind of talked about this. I'm very suspicious, as are many others, particularly Dr. McCullough, about the fluoride content in water. Most of the good quality water filters that you can purchase will get fluoride and chlorine out of your water as well as some of the other chemicals in addition to getting the antibiotics out of your water. That's one of my big fears. I don't have any data to share with you yet. I'm trying to find it on whether these filters filter out glyphosate, the ingredient in Roundup, which quite frankly is in most of the things we eat and probably in our groundwater as well. What do you think about testing your water? What pH should it be at? Well, again, that's going to vary from municipality to municipality. It's not a big deal to check the pH of your water, but for fun, check the pH of your sparkling water and you'll probably be pretty shocked about what you're drinking. More amazing episodes just like this one. Watch now. Plants are probably the best filtration system that's ever been designed to filter your water. So if you're eating organic vegetables, that plant is filled with filtered water.