Written by Ron Kosloff.

It is a fact that 95% of all people in the U.S. are dehydrated. As you age, you literally begin to dry out. A person could eliminate 50% of all diseases by just being hydrated and drinking enough water throughout the day.

It's a little-known fact that water and minerals work together as a team. Add essential fats and you have a fantastic combination for your body's hydration.

When you stop to think about it, water constitutes 65% to 70% of the human body. A person can abstain from food for months, but can only last a couple of days without water (and only 6 minutes without oxygen!)

14 Detrimental Things That Can Happen If You Don't Get Enough Water

The following list explains the many detrimental things that can happen to your body if you don't ingest enough water:

1) Constipation

If you don’t drink enough water, you can become constipated. When the body receives too little water, it will rob what it needs from other sources (primarily the glands). The colon is one primary source, hence constipation.

Drinking water can relieve this condition.

2) Loss of Muscle Tone

Water maintains proper muscle tone by giving muscles their ability to contract by preventing dehydration

3) Saggy skin

Water, along with the essential fats and minerals, prevents sagging skin and returns health and resiliency. (Potassium is paramount for sagging skin).

4) Waste Build-Up

Water rids the body of waste, which accumulates from improper care and nutrition

5) Loss of Energy

Water is an instant energy pick-me-up, but don't drink water just to drink it, only drink it when you need it, as in the body telling you when you're thirsty or after you have exercised and you need hydration. Another example is that you should eat when you are hungry. Listen to your body. What could be more natural?

6) Increase Body Fat Deposits

Water naturally suppresses the appetite and helps the body metabolize stored fat. Decreases in water consumption will actually increase fat deposits and an increase in water will decrease fat deposits.

7) Impaired Kidney Function

The kidneys cannot properly function without water, and, when they don't function, their load is dumped back into the liver. This causes fatigue and liver toxicity.

Be sure that you don't have any kidney problems, as excess water can be harmful. Be sure to see a nutritional doctor concerning this, because, if you consult a medical doctor, there is a higher chance that you will be prescribed a diuretic or drug that will only make the problem worse.

Water is the finest cure for fluid retention. When the body receives less water, it perceives this as a threat and will retain every drop that it can. Diuretics flush essential minerals right out of the body and the body's release mechanism of water will shut down.

I always laugh to myself when medical doctors tell people who are dehydrated that they simply need to drink more water, but the doctor doesn't tell them that their body won't hold water without minerals, because he was never educated on this. (During their education, medical doctors are taught not more than 40 hours about nutrition and in most cases, a lot less!)

8) Mineral Loss

Reduce unnatural salt in concentrated forms. Salt is natural to food when it's of a plant or animal source. I'm speaking of reducing, for example, Morton's Salt, commercial salt which is crystallized, stripped of its minerals, and bleached.

Salt is not white and pretty, salt is an ecru or brown color. The more unnatural salt that you consume, the more the body will retain fluids to dilute it.

Since our soil is mineral-depleted, use Celtic Sea Salt daily or a colloidal mineral that is mined. These both contain every known trace and rare earth mineral in the world, about 92 minerals total.

Another great alternative is Redmond Sea Salt, available in the NSP store.

9) Impaired Metabolism 

The overweight person, with no kidney dysfunction, needs more water because of the larger metabolic load. Water is the key to ridding the body of fat through increased metabolic function.

But, always be cautious on over-hydrating your body because kidney damage is possible.

10) Toxin Build-Up

Pure water will eliminate many impurities and toxins from the body through urine and stool. A normal amount of water will decrease colon cancer, breast cancer, and bladder cancer by 70%!

11) Correct Temperature

Water should be consumed cool, rather than warm, for quick absorption. Also, only consume water between meals and on an empty stomach.

12) Impaired Digestion

Never drink excess water with meals as this impairs digestion. It's alright to drink 4 ounces of a liquid with a meal but never ½ hour before or ½ hour after you eat.

It would dilute your hydrochloric acid, you won't digest your food properly, your food floats around in your stomach resulting in a lot of digestive problems and you could be labelled with acid reflux disease, which is a bogus diagnosis. Remember, don't invoke "if some is good, then more must be better."

Excess water consumption will flush water-soluble vitamins B and C right out of the body and this could directly lead to problems and illness.

13) Loss of Definition

The biggest myth in bodybuilding is that you must drastically reduce your water intake to define. This may sound great and be seemingly logical but nothing could be farther from the truth!

When you reduce your water intake, the body will not release a drop and this will actually cause ones' physique to smooth out. Fifty-five years ago, the great Vince Gironda taught that on a contest day you should use an enema to clean out your colon and shrink your stomach.

During the contest day, drink normal amounts of water and use free-form singular amino acids all day long to keep energy levels up. Don't do anything during the day except rest, drink water and take aminos.


One other thing that Vince taught was never to pump up before a contest. This sounds crazy, but, if you do pump before the contest, as so many do, you will lose your pump.

Then, when you get on stage, you can't pump your muscles twice and you will smooth out.

Remember, posing and tensing will actually pump you up. I have seen people lose contests because of curtailing water and pumping up with weights prior to a contest. If you have any questions about this, please call me.

14) Hydrating Foods

Last but not least, I also was taken in by the 8 to 10 glasses of water per day advocated by many authorities. Common belief was that herb tea, juices, milk, sport drinks, etc. were not water, but food, so in fact, you must drink just plain water.

I now realize that this is just a myth! Every piece of food that you eat contains water and is utilized by the body as water - period! But the food that you eat must be natural food, not processed and refined food, which is the typical American diet of white flour, white rice, white sugar, and white processed salt, which are in cookies, pies, cakes, pop, candy and all of our fast food, which is dead food, not electrical food.

Electric H2O?

All-natural foods are electrical and all of the processed and refined foods are dead foods because the minerals have been removed during processing.

To further explain, when we look at history we see that the most knowledgeable people concerning nutrition were the Chinese. 5000 years ago they knew that the earth was encircled by meridian lines (electricity).

They also knew that all-natural food was electrical and they taught that one must have minerals and essential fats to absorb water from food. They didn't walk around drinking a water bottle all day!

Natural teas were, and still are, a large part of their daily regimen, which they drink throughout the day. They just didn't drink plain water. Of course, the water that they made their tea with was pure, not like our polluted water today!

Their teas contained minerals, which, I must say, are referred to as electrolytes. Remember, your heart, brain, and body function and beat by electricity!


Many books have been written about water and I recall one talk show on television featuring a writer talking about drinking 8 to 10 glasses per day but saying that he had no idea of how it got started or its origin. I'd like to know where the research is!

A good idea is to always carry some water with you in your car and add to it 5% to 10% of any good natural juice or herb tea to get your minerals and to be electrical. Remember, all purified water today, if it's purified by ozonation, reverse osmosis, etc., is devoid of most minerals.

Is Soda The Enemy?

Stay away from soda pop, an almost lethal poison. Listed below are several reasons why:

• To clean a toilet, pour a can of cola into the toilet bowl and let it sit for one hour, and then flush clean.

• The carbonic and phosphoric acid in cola removes stains from vitreous china. To remove rust spots from chrome car bumpers, rub the bumper with a rumpled-up piece of aluminum foil dipped in cola.

• To clean corrosion from car battery terminals, pour a can of cola over the terminals to bubble away the corrosion. (One at a time, though - don't electrocute yourself!)

• To loosen a rusted bolt, apply a cloth soaked in cola to the rusted bolt for several minutes.

• To remove grease from clothes, empty a can of cola into a load of greasy clothes, add detergent and run through the regular cycle. The cola will help loosen the grease stains. It will also clean the road haze from your windshield.

• 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 and arthritis.

• To carry cola syrup (the concentrate), commercial trucks must use hazardous material placards reserved for highly corrosive materials.

• The distributors of cola products have been using it to clean the engines of their trucks for about 20 years!

• In many states in the U.S., the highway patrol carries two gallons of cola in their vehicle to remove blood from the highway after a car accident.

• You can put a T-bone steak in a bowl of cola and it will be gone in two days.

What's In Our Drinking Water?

Dr. Kurt Donsbach, who is one of my teachers on my trek through nutrition, is a great chiropractor, homeopathic and holistic doctor in California and he shared with me, many years ago, that half of the heart attacks and cancers in America are caused by our drinking water.

Drinking water contains toxic levels of chlorine and fluoride. Chlorine attacks organic matter.

What are you made of? Organic matter. Our drinking water is so polluted, it's scary. Dioxins, E.coli, PCBs, DDT, human waste, trihalomethanes, just to name a few, are in our drinking water. Then add to that the conglomeration of our industrial pollutants.

It's a fact that all of our oceans are polluted today. When PCBs and dioxins are found in the fat cells of walruses in Antarctica and the South Pole, we must realize that the whole world is now polluted.

Our lakes are polluted and are loaded with Methyl Mercury, which is a very toxic poison, so it's not very funny that they put it in your teeth fillings. The American Dental Association continues to tell us that this is not true, but metal poisoning, we now know, causes diseases.


The main reason that chlorine is added to our drinking water is to kill bacteria and it ends up killing us! In Europe, they never use chlorine, they use oxygen purification and deionization or they use ozone purification.

Some years back, a myth was created that adding fluoride to the water would prevent tooth decay. Fluoride is a toxic chemical that is painted on children's teeth, and, among other things, is responsible for causing cancer. The man who heavily promoted fluoride when it became law, Dr. Faulkes, passed away a few years ago. On his deathbed, he expressed great regret and said that he was sorry he ever told people to use fluoride.

Both he and Dr. Hardy Limeback from Canada had been significant promoters of fluoride and have both issued apologies concerning their support of fluoride. They stated that they did not accurately check the opposing scientific data before speaking out on behalf of fluoride. They were just not properly informed. So why do we use it?

When aluminum is produced, the by-product is tremendous amounts of synthetic fluoride. Since chemical and aluminum companies were spending thousands of dollars to dispose of it, why not market it to municipalities to put in the water? So, they ended up selling a poison, and at a profit.

I was born with a low thyroid function and I spent a lot of time swimming at the local high school with a pool that was loaded with chlorine.

This lowered my thyroid function even more. If it weren't for nutritional doctors, supplementation, glandular therapy and purging heavy metals from my body, I probably would have had to have my thyroid removed. Never take synthetic hormones for your thyroid!

When you do this, it displaces the natural nutrients that nourish the thyroid, for example: tyrosine, Vitamin E, essential fatty acids, protein, and manganese. Synthetic hormones actually destroy the thyroid. Chlorine and fluoride are called halogens and act as synthetic hormones.

Iodine is the number one nutrient for your thyroid. What halogens do is displace iodine in your thyroid and push it out and then mimic it in your thyroid.
Therefore, you end up with chlorine and fluoride deposits in your thyroid and you can become very unhealthy. I am affiliated with a clinic here in Michigan and the Naturopathic doctor there says that people routinely come to him with poor thyroid function. My friend, Dr. David Jantz, using CRA, will diagnose their health issue as poor thyroid and they'll say, "No, I went to a medical doctor and he did a blood test and my hormone levels are normal."

That's due to the fact that chlorine and fluoride have displaced the hormones and they're floating around in your bloodstream so the medical doctor and the chemist will read that your levels are appropriate when, in fact, the hormones are not in the thyroid to do the job that they were meant to do. Look around at the obesity and the hair loss and the problems we're having today with low thyroid function.

Is Anything Safe To Drink?

The question becomes, what should we drink? Never drink distilled water. Distilled water is cooked water, it's depolarized and all the minerals are removed. So when you drink distilled water, it acts as a vacuum and, while it will pull out toxins, it will pull out everything good too.

Drink good reverse osmosis water or deionized water or good spring water that's tested as pollutant-free. You should add either colloidal minerals or Celtic sea salt to your regimen every day. As I mentioned before, our soil is depleted of half the minerals.

There are 92 minerals in the world, micro, macro, trace, and rare earth, and they are gone due to factory farming, so you have to put minerals back into your own body. Mineral depletion in the United States is paramount. Everyone suffers from a lack of minerals. The people that don't are the people that supplement.

Remember that in 1936 the government told us that we were missing over 22 minerals in our soil; today it's over 45. You must take a complete mineral-like colloidals or Celtic/Redmond Sea Salt.

People ask me how much water to drink daily. Ah, that is the question of the day, which you and only you might answer.

A decent rule of thumb is that you should drink when you are thirsty, how's that? The same goes for food, eat when you are hungry. Your body is extremely smart, isn't it? When you do drink, just sip small amounts throughout the day, between meals, of course. Don't drink large amounts at one time or you will just urinate it out, like big beer drinkers do.

Overhydrating is extremely taxing on your body. If you participate in sports, your perspiration and mineral loss will dictate the amount, but sip it slowly. A decent, accurate test for dehydration is when you take the thumb and index finger of one hand and you pinch a portion of the skin on the top of your other hand, pull up, and then let go. If the skin snaps back to a flat position, you are well hydrated. If your skin is very slow to return to a flat position, you are dehydrated.

Always remember how important your thyroid is and have a holistic doctor check it! If you wake in the middle of the night, drink a small amount (8 oz) of good, healthy water. Remember to consume water throughout the day.

When you are in the hospital for dehydration, you are given minerals and water for hydration, but you aren't told that.

Some medical doctors will tell you that, if you are dehydrated, you should drink 8 to 10 glasses of water a day, but they don't tell you to take macro and micro minerals. We now know that if you don't have the 92 minerals found in the world, you won't have hydration of the tissue.

Minerals are what allow your body to become and maintain hydration. Here are some dehydrators to avoid:

• Commercial tea
• Coffee
• Beer
• Wine
• Distilled spirits
• Soda pop
• White sugar
• White rice
• White flour
• Hydrogenated oils
• Antibiotics
• Most prescription drugs
• Chlorinated water, etc.

Thanks,
Ron Kosloff