Is Dehydration Affecting the Life of Your Skin? A Glowing Report on the Oldest Miracle Cure: Water!

In our search for younger, healthier skin, we often overlook the oldest medicine in the world: water! According to a book by Dr. Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, entitled Your Body’s Many Cries for Water, the fountain of youth may literally be found at the drinking fountain.

As if environmental stress doesn’t do enough damage to the skin from the outside, other stress takes its toll from the inside by dehydrating cells, even killing them. Since graying, wrinkled skin is a sign of stress and dehydration, drinking plenty of water will result in both a rosier complexion and a rosier outlook.
 

Drought Management at the Fountain of Youth

Although water quality has been a major concern in recent years, quantity is the issue in keeping the body’s water supply adequate to rehydrate the skin from the inside and keep it glowing. Our body is 75% water. Without this 75% water quota, cells will not even reproduce.

How does the body determine priorities when its water supply is insufficient? The answer is a water distribution system, which assures an adequate amount of water along with the hormones, chemical messengers and nutrients that water carries to the most vital organs (such as the brain) first.

The skin is one of the major organs of the body and water is essential to the working of its cells. But if the body’s overall water supply falls short, the skin may have to wait until other organs receive their ration first. The brain, for instance, is 85% water. While constituting only 1/50th the weight of our body, the brain gets 20% of all the blood that the heart pumps. In fact, the brain is the final governor of water rationing to every cell and organ of our body. Each organ monitors its own supply and release, but only according to constantly changing quotas set by the brain.

There are other factors in skin dehydration. The surface skin is a thicker tissue than the interior tissues of the body. Circulation comes to the base of the skin, and the water has to seep upwards through all the strata of the skin to reach the outer layer. It’s not unlike a flowering plant that must receive adequate water through its roots or the supply will fall short of reaching the budding flowers. Of course, the exposed surface of the skin is also constantly losing water due to environmental factors such as sun, wind, hard water, and chemicals, to name a few examples, creating a kind of double jeopardy.

When the body is dehydrated, circulation to the base of the outer skin may be shut down as an emergency measure by the body’s drought management program so that water is not lost through evaporation from the skin’s surface. If circulation to the base of the skin is shut down, we develop gray skin. Next, the cells of the skin gradually lose structure and go from a plum-like state into a prune-like state. Chronic dehydration shows in the face with wrinkles, lines, and furrows.

Proper water intake on a regular basis can prevent or reverse this process of dehydration. When the skin is fully hydrated, the circulation to the skin also increases. The result is a rosy complexion.
 

Missing the Signs of Dehydration

Failure to recognize the body’s many signals of dehydration may trick us into thinking there is no problem. Thirst or dry mouth is not the only way to determine if you are dehydrated. In fact, saliva will flow even if the body is dehydrated because the system of rationing water is based on priorities, with certain areas shutting down and other areas allowed their rations.

Remember: there is no storage reservoir for water. What you drink throughout the day is what you get. The body’s emergency mechanisms simply shift the water from one place to another.

With stressful, fast-paced lifestyles, we may opt for beverages such as coffee, soft drinks, and alcohol instead of water and we may think we are quenching our thirst; but these substances force water out of the body, creating an even greater need to compensate with more water. Excess insulin that is released to respond to sugary drinks and snacks also dries the body. Even certain medications, especially diuretics, contribute to dehydration.

The body adapts to this continual shortage by rationing in survival mode. A little at a time, many seniors become habituated to being chronically dehydrated. The brain may respond to the stress by producing endorphins, the body’s opiate-like substance, to make a person endure the hardships while the underlying problem goes unattended.

Modern medicine labels symptoms related to a state of dehydration as disease conditions. Up to 60% of current maladies could be avoided by proper intake of water and the appropriate amount of salt, says Dr. Batmanghelidj in his landmark book. The long list of diseases and symptoms caused by dehydration includes angina, morning sickness, rheumatoid arthritis, painful colitis, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and multiple sclerosis. Among other things, when you use salt and water in the proper proportion, he suggests, wrinkles will begin to lessen.
 

Allergies and pain also can indicate water shortage. The neurotransmitter histamine has a major role in regulating water retention and redistributing the amount of water in circulation or determining when it can be drawn away from other areas. As such, histamine can create signs such as swelling, allergies, asthma, and chronic pains in different parts of the body. It’s better to heed histamine’s red flags rather than block them continuously with medications such as antihistamines.

Ironically, edema or puffiness can appear when there is severe dehydration. When water is not available to get into the cells freely, it is filtered from the salty supply outside the cells and injected into overworked cells resulting in an edema.

Other water intake and distribution regulators, such as prostaglandins, kinins, and PAF (another histamine-associated agent) can cause pain when they come across pain-sensing nerves in the body. Therefore pain other than that caused by injury can also be a crisis signal of water shortage in the body.

Another unseen problem lies in the membrane that covers all cells, including skin cells. There are two distinct membrane layers. In a well-hydrated membrane, water serves both as adhesive material and passageway between the layers for enzyme activity. In a dehydrated membrane, cholesterol takes over to prevent further loss of water, and obstructs the waterway and its potential to deliver chemicals and nutrients.
 

Water is Life

As the regulator of all physiological functions, water is equated with life. Water is the main source of energy for every cell of the body, generating electrical and magnetic energy literally, the power to live through its breakdown, or hydrolysis. Water aligns microscopic solid particulates en route to our cells, just as a magnet aligns metal filings.

Water activates all the nerve endings and sensors in the skin. Facial skin has many photosensitive and energy-sensitive nerve endings that receive and transmit signals. Water energizes the nerve endings so that they are more responsive, thus enhancing the skin’s natural vitality.

Water also acts as an antioxidant by flushing free radicals out through the kidneys. This is the basic way the brain cells get rid of the excess hydrogen ions produced by hydrolysis and maintain an alkaline environment. Under normal conditions, with enough water to wash out free radicals, antioxidant supplements might not even be necessary. Of course, the environmental stress to the skin, including too much exposure to ultraviolet radiation and to computers, increases its exposure to free radical damage another reason your skin demands plenty of water to reverse such damage.

The average person needs eight to ten glasses of water consumed in small amounts throughout the day. Additional water is needed if you consume coffee, alcohol or caffeine products, or eat heavy meats. Exercise is one of the keys to good health because it helps redistribute water, but you’ll also need to drink more to compensate for water loss through sweat.

A balance between the water held inside the cells and that held outside the cells is achieved by the proper amount of salt. Sodium helps push hydrogen ions out of the cells. Dr. Batmanghelidj suggests a teaspoon of salt a day with food to hold the water inside the body. Salt is vital for extracting excess acidity from the cells and maintaining the pH of the brain, for balancing blood sugar levels, generating hydroelectric energy, and for nerve cell communication.

Many of us were taught that drinking water with our meals dilutes the hydrochloric acid content and therefore harms our digestive powers. But new research in Israel shows that proteins and enzymes function well in the diluted, liquid environment while retaining their proper pH. So drink up!

Source:
Your Body’s Many Cries for Water: You are Not Sick, You Are Thirsty!, by Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, Global Health Solutions/ISBN 0962994235.

Contact:

Claudio Dario is an herbologist and organic chemist. Born in Venice, Italy, he began herbal studies at an early age. As a fragrance specialist, he realized that synthetic substances were not the answer to true skin health and specialized in organic, natural cosmetics, incorporating the newest discoveries in biotechnology for his line of skincare products. E-mail claudio@ claudiodario .com or call 800-252-8346.