Gina is an anthropologist.
Sitting in the dusty, archival, basement library in New York City at Columbia University, she was doing what anthropologists do.
In fact, she was researching indigenous tribes from desert regions.
More precisely, searching for evidence about how desert communities and desert dwellers could hydrate—without water.
For a long time the accepted wisdom in the West has been that optimal hydration for health means drinking eight glasses of water a day.
These communities don’t drink anything like that—why aren’t they dead?
She was struggling to find answers.
At the same time she was struggling to care for her 92 year old mother in a nursing home 700 miles away.
Gina eventually recognized that her mother was suffering from chronic dehydration—a common health issue for people in her age group.
The Dehydrating Effects Of Indoor Living
Like many people today, Gina’s mom was subject to the dehydrating effects of indoor living in a sealed environment with everything that that entails; artificial lighting, lack of exercise, processed foods, meds and a basic lack of fresh air and sunlight.
Gina needed to figure out how to get her mother the hydration she desperately needed.
Then the answer came from the arid communities, desert communities around the globe she was researching.
Instead of searching for water in their arid environments what if optimum hydration for health meant something completely different.
They practiced what many of us today have forgotten—how to use the water locked in plants to hydrate.
In each desert region, each plant is different. But what all these desert communities had in common was they were eating plants that contained a jelly-like substance in their roots or in their leaves.
Think cactus or aloe, you immediately understand what I’m talking about.
Gina became convinced that these foods were the answer to their eight glasses a day hydration.
She went searching to find out what that gel was.
She ended up calling only one person to ask that question.
It turned out to be a University of Washington professor who is the world’s foremost water scientist today.
The Fourth Phase of Water
Dr. Gerald Pollack author of The Fourth Phase of Water.
This led Gina to a whole new understanding of what water is, what we are and an encounter with Manhattan based integrative physician Dr. Dana Cohen.
Dr. Cohen’s holistic approach to health was tethered to the latest science in nutrition, which she was offering to her patients as an innovative way to promote health.
She’d been asked to write a book to share her approach but didn’t want to write yet another generic health book that focused on one aspect of wellness.
Mutual professional acquaintances insisted that Gina and Dr. Cohen meet and from this encounter was born:
Quench: Beat Fatigue, Drop Weight, and Heal Your Body Through the New Science of Optimum Hydration,
It’s an engaging new book which set’s out to explain why 8 glasses of water is not the way and to share a universal message to improve the health and well-being of all of us that are now living in such challenging environments.
Yes our homes, our offices with computers and so on, and our fancy cars have become challenging environments.
We now live in desert environments.
It sounds difficult to believe but Gina is right.
Modern environments are deeply dehydrating, far more dehydrating than when we lived in say, 20 years ago or 15 years ago. Even five years ago.
Why?
I believe EMFs are a big factor.
Gina says when you “add electronic devices we use in the kind of interior environment we live in, plus the travel that we do, plus the food we eat, plus the pharmaceuticals that we take, all of those have ended up being percentage hits on our hydration. Hydration now becomes an urgent issue.”
