Drink Your Water!

Hey y'all!

As promised in the video, I want to share a few links to some blog posts I write earlier this year on the importance of drinking water.

This post has a great tool for finding out the toxins in your city's water supply. This is a 2007 article, so hopefully some cities have cleaned up their water supply by now: http://bluebonnetnaturalhealingtherapy.blogspot.com/2012/01/water-water-everywhere-but-nary-drop-to.html

This post gives some great information on fluoride in our drinking water and why it is so important to get fluoride out out of your life:

http://bluebonnetnaturalhealingtherapy.blogspot.com/2012/02/just-how-bad-is-fluoride-in-drinking.html

And here is a post on fluoride in bottled water for babies- the news just about blew my mind:

http://bluebonnetnaturalhealingtherapy.blogspot.com/2012/02/nursery-water-fluoride-laced-bottled.html

How much water should we be drinking?

My favorite source for the health benefits of water is a book called Your Body's Many Cries for Water by the late Dr. Fereydoon Batmanghelidj. This may have been the first book on natural healing that I ever read. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how many illnesses can be reversed simply by drinking more water. 

You may download a free copy of Your Body's Many Cries for Water by clicking the link. It's a pdf file.

"Dr. Batman," as he was lovingly called, among any number of professional athletes and health professionals, will state that we should drink a minimum of half our body weight in ounces of water. So if we weigh 120 pounds, we should drink 60 ounces of water, or roughly a half gallon (2 liters). If we weigh 240 pounds, we should drink a whole gallon of water as a minimum (4 liter).

This is pure water, not the equivalent liquid in coffee, sodas, tea, energy drinks, or sports drinks.

As I said in the video, I knock out 16 ounces (a half liter) first thing in the morning, and I have already lost a pound by doing it. The water gets into the colon and kidneys, and starts loosening up toxic waste. It plumps up every cell in the body, so each one can do a better job. 

Hopefully by continuing this habit I will lose more weight, have more energy, and improve the texture of my skin.

Please leave a comment and let me know what positive changes you experience by drinking more water.

Just How Bad is Fluoride in Drinking Water?: Fluorosis in Teeth

Before I get into the body of this post, I want to give a warm welcome to all of my new subscribers! I am thrilled and honored to have you aboard and hope I can provide you with meaty content that you can take home and use in your real lives.

I got a wonderful response to my post called "Water, Water Everywhere, But Nary a Drop to Drink... From Your Tap, That Is!" People from all over the U.S. made comments on Facebook and Google+ telling me all the "gross stuff" they were finding in their city's tap water. I got into an insightful discussion with an environmental scientist in Iowa who told me how the EPA slaps nasty fines and legal action against cities who do not comply with the federal guidelines for safe drinking water. Then he said, "... but their idea of safe and our idea of safe may not be the same thing."  He said clean water doesn't come cheap, and it is up to the voters within each city to bring pressure to bear on their city officials to ensure the cleanest tap water possible. They can and will do it, if the voters are willing to pay for it. I'd like to challenge the readers of Bluebonnet Natural Healing Therapy to lead in taking civic action to clean up our water supply.

On to today's post...

One of the ways many of us can lobby for clean water is to get our city leaders to take the fluoride out of our drinking water supply. Today I want to give you just one reason to remove fluoride from your drinking water: fluorosis in teeth.

Dental fluorosis has become a widespread problem in children due to consuming too much fluoride- image by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Haven't we all been taught to believe that fluoride reduces or prevents tooth decay? Good parents who are concerned about their children's dental health dutifully purchase toothpastes which contain fluoride, dental rinses and gels containing fluoride, and even prescription fluoride tablets which are supposed to help prevent tooth decay and cavities (caries). On top of this, fluoride is added to city drinking water because it was once believed that doing so reduced the risk of dental caries and tooth decay. The practice of over-using fluoride products has lead to an alarming occurrence of dental fluorosis in children under eight years old.

When children consume too much fluoride while their permanent teeth are developing under their gums, the fluoride actually eats away at the enamel of the teeth. Very mild fluorosis looks like this:

It may be hard to detect very mild cases of fluorosis, but the vertical ridges and the white spots near the edge of the teeth are there. It may be easier to see fluorosis when it looks like this, which is still considered a mild case:

Here the mottled, white edges are quite visible, along with a small amount of enamel erosion. Have you seen children with teeth like this?

While most people would believe that fluorosis is caused by fluoride toothpaste and rinses, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention says that 75% of fluoride comes from tap water consumption. To quote the CDC: "In the United States, water and processed beverages (e.g., soft drinks and [commercially prepared] fruit juices) can provide approximately 75% of a person's fluoride intake."

Here I must ask a question: If fluoride can dissolve children's teeth while the teeth are inside the gums, what is it doing to other tissues, such as bones? The Fluoride Action Network certainly thinks fluoride is dissolving bone tissue, in a fascinating article called "Fluoride and Bone Fracture." In the article, the author gives clear evidence, supported by both animal and human clinical studies, that long-term consumption of fluoridated water causes an increase in bone fractures in all populations.

Do you agree that we need not only to get fluoride out of our drinking water, we also need to stop drinking soft drinks and commercially-prepared juices, energy drinks, and even vitamin waters, because they may contain fluoridated water?