A Hairy Bag Of Water*
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Even your bones are a quarter water. The muscles that drive your performance are three-quarters water. The brain that steers your limbs is 76% water. The blood that carries your nutrients is 82% water. And the lungs that provide your oxygen are near 90% watery These basic facts of biochemistry emphasize the first nutrient in your quest for optimum performance. The most important nutrient in your body is plain water.

The quality of your tissues, their performance, and their resistance to injury, is absolutely dependent on the quality and quantity of the water you drink. And you have to drink it constantly. Light exercise in a temperate climate uses half a gallon of water a day in breath, sweat, and urine. Athletes in heavy training use over two gallons a day. A 165 lb athlete (75 kg) is mainly composed of 50 quarts of water. In heavy training, he has to replace all of it every six days.

You can replace your body water with any beverage. They are all mainly water, including milk, fruit juices, coffee, tea, even the thickest soup, even whole fruits and vegetables. But if you fail to do so, performance suffers immediately. Dehydrate a muscle by only 3% and you cause about a 10% loss of contractile strength, and an 8% loss of speed. Performance literally dries up.

At the famous Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University, Indiana, Dr David Costill and colleagues dehydrated athletes by just 2-3%. That's 3-5 lb for a 165 lb man. Many athletes consider such a loss no big deal, because losses of 7-10 lb are common during marathons, evenwith regular drinking along the way. But when these lightly dehydrated athletes were made to run time trials at 1,500 meters, 5K, and 10K, their performance bombed. Even at the 1,500, a distance not usually thought to be affected by body water, they were 3% slower.

In the 10K, performance declined by a whopping 7%. For an elite athlete who can do this distance in under 30 minutes, that adds a huge 2 minutes to his time. At national level 10K competition, that would move you from winning to dead last. So if you want optimum performance, the unbreakable rule is. Continually top up your water.

And Not A Drop To Drink

But, and it's a big but, you have to drink it clean. Clean water is a scarce commodity. Most faucet water in America is badly polluted. Yet many athletes who are very careful what food they put into their bodies, are careless about water. They will drink from public water fountains, from faucets at home and gym, or from gym coolers filtered only through a cheap carbon filter to make the water taste better.

Biochemical analyses of some of these athletes, done at the Colgan Institute, show they have been ingesting polluted fluids, thereby polluting muscles, organs, and brain. If you do the same, don't expect to reach your potential. No high performance machine can operate at optimum with dirty lubricants.

Think I'm exaggerating? Today we tested the San Diego faucet water from our lab faucet (we test it each week). It registered 562 parts per million of contaminants. That's about average. Some cities are a bit cleaner, some a lot dirtier. Environmental Protection Agency figures show that about 85% of faucet water in America is now contaminated.

This contamination is beyond help. More than 55,000 of the regulated chemical dumps across the nation are leaking into the ground water. Even the best of these regulated damps are leaking. At Los Alamos, for example, with every type of control you can think of, radioactive wastes have now migrated into the ground water, and have spread two miles from their dump.

If that's the best that regulation can achieve, imagine the state of the estimated 200,000 illegal, unregulated dumps. Each year the EPA regulates disposal of 50-60 million tons of toxic wastes. Yet the federal watchdog, the Office of Technology Assessment, reports that over 250 million tons are generated annually. Where do you think the bulk of that toxic waste is going?

No secret. You can't incinerate it or dump it at sea -- too visible. You can't fire it into space -- too expensive. Most of it is dumped illegally in pits, holes, and hollows, where it leaks deep into the aquifers to pollute the ground water for hundreds of miles around. If you drink any of it, don't expect to excel at sports.

They Can't Clean The Water

Don't believe that water treatment authorities can protect you. In response to a critical article by the Colgan Institute that got wide publicity, our local authority sent us a thick wad of computer readouts showing negligible levels of 35 different chemicals that they tested for. I hated to remind them that there are more than 60,000 chemical contaminants of water. Any municipal water supply is likely to harbor at least a thousand. The Office of Technology Assessment reports a test of the water supplies of 954 cities, showing that almost 30% of them are "seriously contaminated".

Water authorities do what they can, but it is far too expensive to make our tap water healthy enough to drink. Only a tiny fraction is drunk in any case. Most goes down the plug in bathroom, laundry, and kitchen.

So our tap water is treated only to minimum standards, by sedimentation, filtration, chemical conditioning, and disinfection with chlorine. The toxic metals, pesticides, industrial chemicals, they are all still in there when it comes out of your tap. So are the 50 or so chemicals used in the water treatment. So are the dead bacteria killed by the chlorine. So are the carcinogenic trihalomethanes from the chlorine itself, that are known to cause liver and colorectal cancers. Oh, tap water will not kill you, or even make you obviously sick, but there is no way your body can function properly on poisons.

One telling example is a runner we were training for the last Olympics. After good training progress all winter in San Diego, in spring he moved to the altitude of Denver, to gain those extra oxygen carrying blood cells that come from training above 4,000 feet. After a couple months, training bombed.

His health was good and all blood tests were normal. But his hair showed arsenic levels of 11.4 ppm. Normal arsenic levels in hair run less than 2 ppm. We finally traced it to the tap water which came from a local "deep, pure" well. The well was slightly polluted with arsenic, probably from weedkiller runoff from adjacent farm land.

His daily dose of arsenic was tiny, but effects on performance were profound. We switched him to bottled distilled water and he slowly returned to top form. But not in time for the Olympic Trials. By dint of dirty water, he missed his shot. Don't let it happen to you.

Buying Clean Water

Bottled water is booming, with 350 American companies producing 425 brands. Imports add another 35 brands. Most people believe that the Food and Drug Administration carefully regulates this industry because it sells the most important nutrient in the human body. No way! Beyond simple hygiene, the bottled water industry is almost entirely self-regulated.

Why? Because most bottled water is simply tap water put through minimal conditioning filters to make it taste better. That's why it's so profitable. Brands called "Mineral Waters" may have a modicum of minerals added. And "Sparkling Mineral Waters", seltzers, and club sodas also have carbonation added. But they are all just tap water with most of its contaminants still in there. Brands labelled "Spring Water" legally have to be from a spring, unless the words are a brand name, or part of a brand name. Then they are just tap water.

There is nothing intrinsically wonderful about springs anyway. They are never pure water. Springs contain all kinds of organic matter and often some very toxic minerals. I know several springs in the Grand Canyon National Park that look as pure as new snow, but contain enough natural arsenic to kill you outright. Not a far-fetched example. Dr Joseph Weissman at UCLA Medical School reports a test of bottled Appollinaris water imported from West Germany, showing excessive levels of selenium and cobalt, and a level of arsenic that exceeded the EPA standards by 6000%.

FDA regulations do not require water bottlers to test their wares for many minerals, or for the huge variety of other toxic contaminants likely to be present. Remember the Perrier fiasco? Perrier voluntarily withdrew its whole American stock, 72 million bottles, because traces of benzene got into one batch from a faulty filter. The company acted very responsibly, but the public was appalled. Benzene in drinking water!

I have news for you. The FDA does not require bottled water companies even to test for benzene, or for a variety of other solvent hydrocarbons that may be in the water. One bottling plant I toured two years ago, began each morning bottling cycle without any testing to see whether the solvents used to clean the system the night before had been properly flushed out. That company has since been cited for selling contaminated water.

Bottled distilled waters are the only clean bottled source. Virtually everything is removed from the water by steam distillation. Seven brands we have tested run from 2-12 ppm contaminants. That's about as clean as you can get.

Contrast those figures with typical faucet water at 350 - 1000 ppm contaminants. Whenever you drink the usual run of bottled water (essentially faucet water), these contaminants build into every cell of your body. If you aim to achieve top performance, stick to distilled.

*from Micheal Colgan's "Optimum Sports Nutrition", ISBN 0-9624840-5-9, Advanced Research Press, New York, 1993