Articles by Donna DiMarco

By Donna DiMarco, BS,CN,LNC.

One important requirement to achieve good health is often overlooked, that’s water. We all know that water is necessary for every creature to survive, but do you realize just how important water is to maintain good health? The body is composed of mostly water and is necessary to bathe each of the millions of cells of your body. Water dilutes and removes toxins and metabolic wastes from the body. It helps the kidneys work to capacity to avoid these toxins from being dumped back into the liver.

Water is the simplest way to prevent constipation. One of the most important functions of the large intestines is to absorb water into the body. If we don’t consume a significant amount, the intestines absorb whatever is available in the gastrointestinal tract, leaving the fecal matter hard and dry, and more difficult to pass. The longer it remains in the intestinal tract, the more toxins get absorbed, which then makes passing them become increasingly more difficult.

A simple reduction of 4-5 % of water in the body will reduce the work performance by 20-30%. That means a decrease in energy. All you ladies who complain of being tired, try drinking lots of good water. When you consider that we lose 2 cups of water in respiration, 2 cups through perspiration during normal daily activities (not exercising), and approximately 6 cups through intestinal and kidney excretion, we come up with a total loss of 10 cups of water per day. This must be replaced. Athletic activity can cause an additional water loss of as much as 4-5 quarts per day. This is why we can go weeks without food, but only a few days without water.

We typically take in 31/2 cups of water from our foods. The body actually produces an additional 1/2 cup of water as a by-product of metabolism. Simple mathematics concludes that we, therefore, need at least 8 cups of water per day.

Room temperature water, consumed in large amounts prior to a meal, can stimulate the production of digestive enzymes. Water can act as an appetite suppressor and actually can help the body metabolize stored fats into usable energy.

Many people suffer from water retention and think that drinking water will make matters worse. Actually, the opposite is true. The more water we consume, the more we excrete. The body retains water when we are not consuming a sufficient amount. To insure survival, it holds on to what it has by suppressing anti-diuretic hormone (ADH). We can rectify the problem by simply drinking more water. The body identifies an abundant supply then allows some to be released.

My massage therapist hands each and every one of his clients a large glass of water after every massage to insure excretion of the lactic acid and metabolites released in the course of a massage. He instructs them to continue to drink copious amounts throughout the next day to facilitate a thorough flushing of these toxins.

I usually recommend my clients to drink at least 1/2 gallon of pure water daily. I suggest that they fill up a half-gallon container, refrigerate it so it can be carried to work throughout the following day. They are not to retire for the night until all the water in the container is consumed. This helps them become more conscious of how much they need to drink and whether they are truly drinking the right amount.

Remember to always drink good quality water, never from the tap. I recommend spring waters from out of your own state so more stringent testing procedures apply. At home I use a reverse osmosis filtration system but I add liquid minerals back in so as not to promote acidity in the body.

This is a little comparative list between water and coke that was sent to me. I CANNOT attest to its accuracy but I thought it was interesting.

Read this, then make your choice.

“Water”1. 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. (Likely applies to half world population)

2. In 37% of Americans, the thirst mechanism is so weak that it is often mistaken for hunger. 3. Even MILD dehydration will slow down one’s metabolism as much as 3%.

4. One glass of water will shut down midnight hunger pangs for almost 100% of the dieters studied in a U-Washington study. 5. Lack of water, the #1 trigger of daytime fatigue.

6. Preliminary research indicates that 8-10 glasses of water a day could significantly ease back and joint pain for up to 80% of sufferers. 7. A mere 2% drop in body water can trigger fuzzy short-term memory, trouble with basic math, and difficulty focusing on the computer screen or on a printed page.

8. Drinking 5 glasses of water daily decreases the risk of colon cancer by 45%, plus it can slash the risk of breast cancer by 79%, and one is 50% less likely to develop bladder cancer. Are you drinking the amount of water you should every day?

COLA 1. In many states (in the USA) the highway patrol carries two gallons of Cola in the truck to remove blood from the highway after a car accident.

2. You can put a T-bone steak in a bowl of cola and it will be gone in two days. 3. To clean a toilet: Pour a can of Cola into the toilet bowl and let the Coke sit for one hour, then flush clean. The citric acid in Cola removes stains from vitreous china.

4. To remove rust spots from chrome car bumpers: Rub the bumper with a rumpled-up piece of Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil dipped in Cola. 5. To clean corrosion from car battery terminals: Pour a can of Cola over the terminals! to bubble away the corrosion.

6. To loosen a rusted bolt: Applying a cloth soaked in Cola to the rusted bolt for several minutes. 7. To bake a moist ham: Empty a can of cola into the baking pan, wrap the ham in aluminum foil, and bake.  Thirty minutes before the ham is finished, remove the foil, allowing the drippings to mix with the cola for a sumptuous brown gravy.

8. To remove grease from clothes: Empty a can of coke into a load of greasy clothes, add detergent, and run through a regular cycle. The Cola will help loosen grease stains. It will also clean road haze from your windshield. This is very interesting. Check it out. For Your Info

1. The active ingredient in cola is phosphoric acid. Its pH is 2.8. It will dissolve a nail in about 4 days.  Phosphoric acid also leaches calcium from bones and is a major contributor to the rising increase in osteoporosis. 2. To carry Cola syrup (the concentrate) the commercial truck must use the hazardous material place cards reserved for highly corrosive materials.

3. The distributors of cola have been using it to clean the engines of their trucks for about 20 years! Now the question is, would you like a glass of water or cola?”

Think about it. Until next time…Donna

By Donna DiMarco, CN, LNC

I previously suggested you keep a food diary and eliminated the foods you found yourself consuming on a daily basis.  If you kept track of your symptom improvement and are ready for the next step.

This month we will talk about drinking with our meals. No, I’m not talking about alcohol in particular, but that can fall into this category; I’m talking about that large glass of soda, the iced tea or that cold brew with your slice of pizza.

Let’s start with the fact that we all have digestive juices that are produced to help break down the food into a useable form. One of those juices, hydrochloric acid (HCl), is just as strong as the muriatic acid that your pool service uses and is powerful enough to eat through concrete. Its job is to help ready protein (denaturing) for other enzymes to break it down. HCl doesn’t hurt us because we have a thick mucous lining to protect the stomach. We get into trouble when that lining gets thin or the acid levels get too high and the acid eats a small sore into the stomach. We call that an ulcer. Women who are bulimic actually damage not only their esophagus, which lacks the thick protective coating, but their teeth as well, due to the stomach acid frequently coming up into the mouth. Think about it, if it can eat concrete, it can eat through your teeth!

And although Madison Avenue tells us that many of us suffer from too much acid, most people have too little. We’ll talk about that at a later time. If this acid and other digestive juices are needed to make food useable, and many people have too little digestive juices in the first place, why do we dilute them with liquids? Every time you drink with your meals you are diluting the natural juices needed to break down your food. Consider this, did you ever see an animal eat some food, take a little water between mouthfuls, then eat some more food? Why don’t they need to “wash it down”? Drinking with our meals is a learned habit.

Here’s an example of what drinking with meals does. Imagine that you have this awful grease stain on the floor and you are asked to get it up as quickly and completely as possible. You’d run to the cabinet and pull out your most powerful cleaning liquid. For a heavy grease stain you use it FULL STRENGTH to get the job done best. It is the same with our digestive juices, we need them to work efficiently, so why water it down with all that liquid? In fact, one of our digestive enzymes produced further past the stomach (lipase) acts just like soap, which breaks the bonds in grease (fat).

Here’s something else to think about. Did you ever see chicken soup that has been stored in the refrigerator? It gets a thick layer of solidified fat on the surface. Many of us skim it off before we reheat the soup. That layer is a liquid fat that has been turned into a solid by lowering the temperature. If we consume an iced drink with a meal, we lower the temperature in our stomach and turn liquid saturated fats into solids. Our body temperature is normally 98.6 degrees. It takes a considerable amount of time to raise the temperature of the chyme (chewed up food) to restore it back into a liquid form so that the fat-digesting enzymes will to work.

Well, if that’s not reason enough to not drink with your meals, how about this. Consider the fact that carbonated sodas are loaded with phosphorus, and phosphorus needs calcium to stabilize it, so the body pulls calcium from the bones to meet the need. If soda consumption is high and frequent, it can dangerously weaken the bones. In fact, there are known cases of people who have become bedridden with severe osteoporosis (softening of the bones) due to high soda consumption. Also, sodas change the pH (power of Hydrogen) of the body so drastically that it takes 5 glasses of water to restore the pH after 1 glass of soda. The body needs a proper pH balance to function as it should. If the pH is out of balance, digestion will be hindered and nutrients not absorbed.

If you must drink anything, consider room temperature distilled or spring water, broth or consomme and herbal teas. Avoid things that are cold. Drink a couple of glasses of water about a half hour before your meals. This will help hydrate your body, cleanse your liver, fill you up so that you don’t eat as much (WEIGHT LOSS!), dilute the toxins for removal, aid your kidneys, prevent joint diseases (some practitioners believe that disk degeneration and arthritic problems are the result of the cartilage not being supple due to dehydration.), and help your skin. My clients must drink one half gallon of pure water a day, but not with their meals. It can be done.

I’m sure there are some of you thinking that you retain water and are bloated so you should not drink any more water. The opposite is true. When the body is water deficient it produces more anti-diuretic hormone (ADH) to hold on to whatever water it has. Drinking more water tells the body that it can release what it has because it is confident that more is coming in a steady supply.

Try it for a while. Restoring health is more than taking a pill. My goal is to teach you lifestyle changes that will help your body function at its optimum level. Once we get the basics down, I will discuss particular problems and specific supplements. Try to implement what you’ve learned; any effort will help. It takes time to break old habits so be patient.

Until next time, stay with it. You are worth it!

Donna