CONNECTIONS THE MAY FLOWERS IISSUE MAY 2016

My Connections Magazine
CONNECTIONS May 2016
Health and Fitness
Why Water Is Key for Anti-
Aging
To me, water is a gift from above, a living,
nourishing substance important not just for life
but for quality of life as well. Yet water is so
taken for granted that people don’t tend to think
of it in health or anti-aging terms. They should.
Don’t Forget Nutrient # 1 −
Water
“Water contributes much towards health.” −
Hippocrates, On Airs, Waters, and Places
unwatered house plants. They hardly drank
water. They drank coffee and sodas, and, not
unfrequently, too much alcohol. But not
what their body needed: water. They were
unwell and they were dehydrated. To what
degree dehydration contributed to their
conditions, I couldn’t precisely say, but I
always had a hunch it was a contributing
factor. I used to ask patients about how
much water they drank on a daily basis. It
wasn’t much. Maybe a glass. Two at the
most. Maybe nothing.
I always told them to drink more.
In his writings on public hygiene,
Hippocrates (460-354 B.C.), considered the
Father of Medicine, emphasized the
importance of water in the maintenance of
health. In our modern age, twenty-five
centuries later, no one doubts the validity of
the wise Greek’s words.
In a review article (Popkin) on the role of
water in health, nutrition researchers at the
University of North Carolina summed it up
succinctly: “Water is essential to life. Water
represents a critical nutrient whose absence
will be lethal within days.”
How important is water? Just look at a house
plant when you forget to water it, and look
again after you do.
In my medical practice, I used to see many
patients who were dried-up like those
Unfortunately, for many years I didn’t
practice what I personally preached. I recall
visiting a doctor friend one time and he
checked me out and said I was extremely
dehydrated. My joints were rather stiff at the
time, and lack of hydration could have been
partly to blame. Since that time, I’ve made it
a point to put water into my daily routine.
Water and Heart Disease
You’d never imagine it, but plain old water
is probably one of the most overlooked tools
against heart disease. Researchers from
Loma Linda University in California
confirmed this some years ago by checking
the water intake of about twenty thousand
well-educated men and women (ages 38 to
100) as a possible risk factor for fatal
coronary artery disease (heart attacks). In a
2002 study (Chan), they concluded that
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