Water

By Dan Bosy, RPT

March 28, 2019

Water is considered to be one of the most important substances on Earth. Without water, there is no life. Our bodies are made of approximately 70% water and we can only live for a day or two without it. What is it about water that makes it so important?

All living things on Earth depend on water to be the transporter of food, nutrients, and chemicals. The membrane of a cell senses the environment around it and responds by taking some items into the cell and keeps others out. It can also make proteins to help it live longer and may also send signals in the form of chemicals to other cells around it. It does not matter whether the cell is a single cell organism or one that is part of a more complex organism like a human.

In humans and other mammals, water is present in great quantities both inside and outside of our cells. The water outside of the cells is part of our extracellular matrix which is also known as Fascia. It is composed of fibres like collagen and elastin, and a ground substance made of water and proteoglycans. Proteoglycans are made of a protein core and starch-like glycosaminoglycans. Their role is to help connect the cells around it together, while the water helps with fluidity and movement. 

So what happens when we have not been drinking enough water?

The water outside of the cells is often affected first. It is collected and pulled into the cells because they need it to survive. This reduces the amount of fluid outside of the cells making the fascia fluid stickier kind of like maple syrup. If the water is pulled into the cells very fast or driven from the fascia quickly like what can happen in trauma, the ground substance can become as hard as concrete.

What effect does this have on how we move?

Imagine an elastic band, it can stretch very well and spring back to its original shape. No take an elastic band that has dried out, when it stretches you can feel the fibers let go a little and it will no longer spring back or it may even break. Now take a collagen fiber and dry it out. It will tend to get harder along with the ground substance. Together with the loss of the elastic fibers, the collagen fibers being more dominant, and the ground substance being as hard as concrete, this dry area will not be able to stretch. If you try to stretch it, the whole section will move as a block and you will feel the pull in a different muscle than expected.  An assessment will help identify these areas and treatment will help to loosen and rehydrate the tissues so that you can start to feel a stretch in the expected muscle.

Does the quality of water affect us?

Modern societies provide water to their communities by filtering, cleaning and treating it, before sending it in pipes for distribution. Spring water, by contrast, has not undergone this process. Which is cleaner and safer to drink? Depending on the source of the spring water and the community water, in North America both are clean and safe to drink. (There are exceptions: for example the community of Flint, Michigan which has been having a water crisis since 2014. There is still concern over whether the water is safe to drink there.)

How do we know if the water is good for us. One way is to look at the ability of water to form crystals.  Masaru Emoto, a Japanese scientist, and author of Messages from Water, and The Hidden Messages in Water took photographs of water crystals from many different sources. Emoto photographed the water taken from a tap in Tokyo and from a fresh-water spring outside of the city.  The city water made a partial crystal while the spring water made a complete one. Struck by this discrepancy, he proposed that water that was “polluted” could not form full crystals while “pure” water would form complete ones. Emoto suggested that chlorine was responsible for the poor crystal formation in the city water.

Emoto when on to photograph water crystals after the water had been subjected to positive and negative messages, electromagnetic waves and UV light.  The photographs suggest that crystals fully form with positive input and were fragmented or non-existent. While his critics say his work is unscientific and there were no controls for his hypothesis, the message is the same. Treat yourself and the water around you well and the water will make nice beautiful crystals that suggest that it is clean and safe to drink.

If this message is true, then the water in your body also responds to positive messages. Feelings of love and gratitude as well as other positive thoughts will help your body heal and recover.