As summer is quickly approaching you might be wondering…
Q: Am I drinking the right kind of water for my health?
Lemon Water, Alkaline Water, Hydrogen Water…. What kind of water should I be drinking?
A: Dramatic drum roll and build up to an earth shattering revelation on the absolute best type of water in the world. In a word: clean. In two words: clean water. We take for granted that we can safely drink the water coming out of our faucets most of the time. Here is a breakdown of some of the most popular “special” waters.
Lemon 
water:
· Claims: causes weight loss, alkalizes the body, fights cancer, etc.
· Truth: all BS.
o Weight loss: the juice of 1 lemon adds 10-20 calories to your water, which isn’t much, however, nothing that adds calories will ever help anyone lose weight.
o Alkalizing:
Our body maintains tight controls of it’s pH (acidity vs alkalinity). We need to stay between 7.35 and 7.45 to stay alive. If we stray too far in either direction (below 6.8 or above 7.8) death soon follows.
Thankfully there are NO foods or beverages that can actually move your pH in either direction because you’d need to check your blood pH and calculate the acid or alkaline load of the food or beverage you were about to consume to ensure this wasn’t your last meal… the fact that we humans survive is proof that no alkalizing products actually work.
o Fights cancer: Only someone who has never lost anyone to cancer would tell someone “if only they had drank more lemon water…”. Not worth dignifying this claim with a reply.
Bottom line: lemon certainly makes your water less boring, and has a good punch of vitamin C. However, your tooth enamel can only handle so much.
Okra water:
· Claims: soaking okra in your water overnight will help improve blood sugar management, help you lose weight, and improve your digestion.
· Truth: a mix of BS and misleading
o Blood sugar:
There is ZERO research on okra water. None.
There is research on eating okra, but eating okra is not at all the same as drinking the water where okra has festered overnight.
Okra is a vegetable, and like most vegetables it is high in fiber and low in calories. Any food that displaces higher calorie foods and boosts fiber intake will help with weight loss, blood sugar management, and constipation…. Fried okra doesn’t help with weight loss because fried.
o Weight loss:
Same as above – no research at all.
If I’m being very generous I could concede that if you replaced soda, juice, or some other calorie containing beverage with okra water then your total calories consumed would go down since you’re not drinking okra juice.
o Digestion:
Same. No research. No reasonable explanation for how water that has touched okra might have any positive impact.
However, eating more vegetables is usually a good thing for being regular. But you’ve got to eat the fruit or the vegetable to get the fiber not just rub water on it.
o Bottom line: drinking okra water is the same as drinking water (which is a positive thing), with the only exception being if the okra wasn’t very well cleaned or had some sort of contamination that will be in (and grow) in your water. Try washing, cooking and eating your okra instead.
Alkaline water:
o Claims: similar claims as the other waters – weight loss, improved digestion, slowed aging, etc.
o Truth
Weight loss:
· It’s water without added calories, so it does not add any calories, which is something, but not something unique.
· Alkalizing the water doesn’t make it negative calories, so it makes no sense how it would lead to weight loss. The only way to make water have negative calories is to make it cold because it costs calories to heat the water up to body temperature.
Improved digestion:
· There is no research to support this claim, and there’s no reasonable mechanism offered.
· The mechanism offered is that it “alkalizes” your body or neutralizes excess acidity, but, as we discussed with lemon water the idea that a food or beverage is going to change the pH of your blood is false. Completely false. If a food or beverage were able to shift the pH (acid-base balance) of your blood, then you and I would already be dead. We can’t live outside of a very narrow pH, and our bodies keep us in that range regardless of what we eat or drink, or we die.
Slowed aging:
· The only mechanism offered is the BS about “alkalizing” your body.
· In reality, it is true that drinking enough water will help you age better and be healthier overall, but this is a benefit of all water. Alkaline water has the same exact benefits that tap water or spring water have.
o Bottom line: Charlotte tap water is already quite alkaline (between 8.0 and 9.2) because of the application of lime in the treatment process. Expensive alkaline water also has a pH of between 8 and 9… so, even if alkaline water delivered any of the benefits its marketers claim your tap water already meets or exceeds the pH of super expensive “alkaline water.”
Hydrogen water?
I’m not going to do bullet points because all of these “special” waters make the same claims, and have zero evidence for the claims. All water is already one molecule of oxygen and two molecules of hydrogen, so selling water with hydrogen is not at all special. Yes, marketer’s will claim that they have added extra hydrogen gas to the water, but this isn’t really true.
Adding hydrogen to a sealed bottle of water does add hydrogen to the bottle, but as soon as you open the bottle the “excess” hydrogen begins escaping because the extra pressure inside the bottle dissipates when you open it. In other words there is no way to keep extra hydrogen in any water. Also, if you look at a periodic table the very first letter is H for hydrogen. Being the first element on the periodic table makes it the smallest molecule – so tiny that it can pass through glass, plastic and metal in storage.
Distilled water
Nobody markets distilled water, so there’s a not a lot of hype about it. The short version is: don’t use distilled water as your primary water source because it is too pure. You make distilled water by capturing the water vapor of boiling water, which means it leaves behind all of the minerals that are normally present in water. Our bodies adapted to drink water with minerals in it, so if you rely exclusively on distilled water your body will need to supply the calcium, magnesium, etc that the distilled water lacks. Distilled water is still great for netti pots, ironing clothes, etc.
Bottom Line
You and I are blessed to live in a country where you can nearly always drink the water straight out the tap. I am a little bit snooty, so I like using some sort of filtration system because I think it tastes better that way.