Gina:          The Hydration Foundation welcomes Dr. Christian Northrup, MD. May I say Dr. Joy?

Christiane: Yes.

Gina:          You are renowned for your championship of women’s health and women’s unique lifecycle. So, probably women’s health about 50% of the people on the planet, 50% women.

Christiane: Yes.

Gina:          A very important segment. And then of course all the boys that are born of women who have babies, that’s the other 50%. So, 100% [inaudible][14:09].

Christiane: That’s right. That’s right.

Gina:          And that’s come through many subjects, many books you’ve written, including the groundbreaking book Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. Amazing book. And it’s accompanied us as women all the way through and you’ve actually been modeling this all along. So, we are so pleased to have you speak on your expertise about women’s health but especially we’re going to get into the conversation around fascia because that’s something we share and we love. But before we do that, I would wonder if you give us a kind of an overview of women’s bodies in their lifecycle, which of course you documented how it changes and how you think hydration is primary to each of those cycles.

Christiane: We are born. We are gestated in fluid, in the amniotic fluid, which is very similar to sea water and very similar to the plasma in our veins. And since we are 70% water, at least, we don’t function optimally unless we are hydrated properly. And, this is very interesting, the lungs of a newborn baby are erectile tissue just as the lungs of an adult. And when a premature baby is born, one of the ways that you help it along is you have it breathing nitric oxide, which is produced by the endothelial lining of every blood vessel in the body and it increases circulation. But it can’t do it if you don’t have enough fluid around. So, I think lot about the hydraulics of the body. I learned about nitric oxide since it is the pathway through which Cialis and Viagra work and that’s interesting to me. It’s a pathway that increases the blood flow to the penis. But lungs are also erectile tissue. And the female erotic anatomy, which is all internal, is also erectile tissue. And it’s interesting to me that the spark of life, the place from which we all came, actually requires optimal hydration. And so, what you find, it’s interesting, as women begin to go through menopause, the change of life, they speak of becoming dryer like “I’m getting dry. My skin’s dry. My vagina is dry. Everything is dry.” And it may be that what you must do, you’re given as it were a quota of easy hydration, and then at midlife just when your physical fertility for having a baby decreases, your wisdom fertility, your spiritual fertility increases and you have to pay attention to the physical world so that you stay in the body longer when you are a wisdom container, not just a baby machine or someone who makes the meals for the family or any of that. So, you must consciously do hydration from midlife on to keep everything working. And we’re never taught that, ever. What we’re taught instead is … Here’s what the culture does. “Oh, yeah. Well, that’s just because of your age.” That’s what doctors are taught. “That’s happening because of your age” and that is not true. It’s happening because of a number of factors like your vitamin D isn’t optimal and your blood sugar is higher than it should be, and all the rest of it. And salt has been vilified. You’re probably low in minerals. And that catches up with you by about midlife. It’s like the women who diet, that was me, to get into the little black dress. And you can do it in a week when you’re in your 20s and in your 30s. In your 40s the body goes “Really? Because that’s not going to happen. You’ve been doing that to me too often.” The body says “No, we’re done.”,

Gina:          Well, I’m laughing with you. I love the title of your book Goddesses Never Age. So, you’re speaking and will you speak a little bit more broadly about what hydration has to do with aging? This is a really broad question but it’s an extremely important question. And one form of asking it is, of course, does dehydration accelerate aging? But another way to ask and perhaps much more interesting and important way to ask about this is how can hydration change aging?

Christiane: Well, my feeling is that anything that keeps a cell vibrantly hydrated and gives you trigger in your collagen and your skin, all of that is going to delay and postpone what we call aging or as Dr. Mario Martinez says “Getting older is inevitable. Aging is optional.” So, there’s all these things that you can do. Now, this is funny because I have a friend named Sandra Chiu who’s an acupuncturist in Brooklyn and I gave her a copy of Quench. It has transformed her entire practice. Now what she does, everyone who comes in, she makes them take a screenshot of the book and then buy the book and then do your hydration program because she said “Here’s what she’s finding.” And her practice is upscale 30, 40, 50-something men and women in New York City in Brooklyn, which is the cool place to be. And she said “All they have to do, if they follow the hydration rules in your book,” she said “it changes everything. It changes headaches. It changes weight control. It changes, sleep, appetite, relaxation, everything.” And then she took it one step further, which I am loving. So she said “Get a hydrometer,” which I did on Amazon, “and skin functions optimally, the whole body functions optimally between 30% and 60% humidity.” So, it’s winter in Maine where I am right now. So, I’m got one of these things. And then I put it in my bedroom. Now, I always had a wonderful humidifier system going in the music room for the piano and the harps that I have because that they need it at 40%. Good. Well, then, after talking with Sandra, I realized “Wait a minute, I’m treating my harps better than my own body.” My bedroom was 21%. So, I began to put a humidifier in there and began to notice when it’s between 40% and 60%, again, sleep is better, you don’t wake up with a dry throat, any of that thing.

The other thing that that you find when you’re optimally hydrated, so people, for instance, when they travel, they’ll often talk about being constipated, the stress. Think about what a stress do. It causes vasoconstriction. Whether it’s your bowel going “This doesn’t feel safe” or your blood vessels “This doesn’t feel safe” or the cervix of the uterus is also a sphincter. The reason women get into trouble in labor is it doesn’t feel safe but when you’re optimally hydrated, it’s much harder for the sphincters and for the blood vessels to do this stricture thing. One of the things you taught me that has been life changing is the tablespoon of chia seeds and a pinch of Himalayan sea salt. So, what I’ve been doing with that, and I just got back from a trip to Thailand, Mexico, and Laos, and took the chia seeds every step of the way and it makes an enormous difference. And when I didn’t do it, things were much more difficult. And that little pinch of Himalayan sea salt in water, right now I have a little tiny bit of green ice tea but it’s a pinch of Himalayan sea salt in there, I already did my chia seeds earlier, but it’s made me begin to look at how nature hydrates. And when you put the chia seeds in water and you let them expand, they look like frog’s eggs. Well, of course, all of nature repeats the same pattern over and over and over like ways to conserve fluid. Life begins in water. It requires water to continue and to flourish. I’ve noticed the plants in my bedroom now with the humidity higher are blossoming and they weren’t before.

So, hydration is absolutely fundamental. And I don’t believe that we have understood it at all until very recently and especially with the work of the Hydration Foundation because everyone has just told us “Drink more water.” And I always wondered “Why don’t I do this? I know I should do this. Why don’t I do this?” And what I tell people now is drinking eight glasses of water, it’s just like peeing on a rock, it doesn’t really absorb. It doesn’t do anything except make you go to the bathroom more and more. You need to get that water into the intercellular space, into the interstitial space where it’s going to help your secondary nervous system which is the fascia. Also, Hope Matthews, my Pilates teacher, has a saying – “It’s not your age. It’s your fascia” because if the fascia is hydrated, then you just don’t have the aches and pains and the dryness. And a lot of what we call aging is accumulated dense fascia, essentially scar tissue. And there are ways to work with it but you have to work with it. First, optimally hydrate yourself. Second, you have to break up the accumulated dense fascia and you can do it through Yoga and you can do it through massage and acupuncture. See, the acupuncture meridians run through the facial sheath. So, they are secondary nervous system. And, as you know, an electrical impulse at the bottom of your feet reaches your entire facial sheath instantaneously because it’s an electrical system. And it’s been ignored by the medical profession. It’s interesting, when I did surgery I wouldn’t notice. Now I would know what to call it but in the past, let’s say you’re doing a C-section and we would call it taco tissue, meaning that someone’s diet was just such junky food that the collagen in the fascia was just very poor quality, almost could dissect, you could make the opening incision. And then you could dissect right down to the fascial sheath with your fingers because there was no fascia running through the subcutaneous fat that had any quality at all. But we notice when the diet changes and when you’re optimally hydrated, then everything changes and the tissue becomes not edematous, not crappy tissue. It just becomes moist, hydrated, healthy.

Gina:          I think if we could just explain to people look at your skin, that’s your most outer fascial tissue. Same on the inside. If it’s starting to get dried and wrinkled and abused, that’s an indication. Use your own self as your diagnostic capacity. Are you fluid and movement? Do you find to get out of bed without your joints hurting? Do you have joy in your life?

Christiane: Yeah, that is really, really true. And it’s interesting that … So, there’s several ways to hydrate. Obviously, everyone should be hydrating internally. And then you hydrate externally. One of the things Sandra has people do is just spray some kind of hydrating fluid on their skin and press it and press it. And in the morning or as you go through your day, you don’t have to do that if you’re in a tropical climate but you certainly do if you’re in the northern latitudes in the winter in particular.

Gina:          We try to offer as many tricks as we can at the Hydration Foundation. So, I’m going to take that trick from …

Christiane: From Sandra, yeah. Definitely, it’s a wonderful trick. Sandra Chiu. And her business is called Treatment by Lin Shin. Lin Shin is her Chinese name. She’s fluid in Chinese and an acupuncturist in Brooklyn and just a wonderful person who specializes in the traditional Chinese medicine approach to skincare and skin health. And what she said is “If you just do the hydration,” as you have put it forth in Quench, “and then you do the extra stuff with the humidity and then putting the fluid on your face, it makes …” She said many times that’s all someone has to do to get rid of adult acne or rosacea or eczema.

Gina:          We would love to put that trick on our website and make sure she gets credit for it.

Christiane: Wonderful

Gina:          It’s so much fun to collect people and their tips and their ideas. Everybody does it a little differently. It’s just a joy to bring together a community around hydration and help us exchange how important it is.

I would love to hear how you got so interested in fascia, what’s your story there?

Christiane: My story there was that I went to visit Bob Cooley in Boston because I got an email from one of his trainers who had just graduated from Dartmouth and he said “We are doing interesting things with fascia.” And I knew that fascia was important. I knew from the work of Helen … She was at the University of Vermont and I can’t remember …

Gina:          She did the original testing of the …

Christiane: Yeah, that’s it. And I knew about her work. And I knew that she showed how acupuncture changed the cells and change the fascia and worked in these meridians. So, I always had been interested in that. So, when I heard about this iteration, I thought “I am fascinated by that.” So, I went down and I did many sessions of assisted stretching where you would … And what Bob points out is to change the dense fascia requires an enormous amount of force which you cannot do with external pressure. It would hurt too much with Rolfing. And I’ve had many, many Rolfing treatments and many other things but to really get at the dense fascia, you need to use your own muscles or have people assist you with the muscles. And what he points out is that the dense fascia within a muscle will prevent it from shortening all the way. And once you rip out the dense fascia or however you’re going to do it …

Who’s the guy who’s done the myofascial release? A wonderful guy. He teaches at …

Gina:          Tom Myers?

Christiane: No, it’s not Tom. Tom does great work. I think he’s here in Maine.

Myofascial … whatever … I’ll think of his name. But, anyway, he says fascia is a semi-solid tissue. However, when it gets really dense and dry, it’s not and you got to get it hydrated to work it. And so, Bob did all kinds of work on my pectoral muscles. He said, when I went there … Let’s see if I can demonstrate this. He said to me “Your shoulders …” The pecs were shortened here. So, we had to expand the pecs but he said “This is because you feel unlovable. So, it’s been protecting the heart.” And there was truth in that. And then my back was like a turtle shell, again, because the heart goes into the back. And I’ve been kind of a medical outlier because of what I know to be true but I’m also a very sensitive soul and it’s been a little difficult to be a pioneer that’s kind of so far ahead of where the culture has been. It’s kind of coming around now but not as fast as I’d like to see it. So, I have like dense fascia in my whole back like the carapace of the turtle. And then Bob told me that the thymus meridian which is the sort of the back of the neck, and it’s why women get this dowager hump thing … He said “That is all from …” He said “You’re a healer but you’ve taken on other people’s stuff.” So, he taught me a type of thymus roll-down where you literally iron out that dowager something. And so, I’ve always known about emotional anatomy, always. And how does the emotional anatomy manifest in an individual? How do those held emotions manifest? They manifest through soft tissue structures. They manifest through the fascia. And any massage therapist or Yoga teacher will tell you that when people get to a certain stage, they’ll often have big emotional releases like start to cry or get really angry or whatever it is because the truth of our lives, whereas Alice Miller said “The truth of our childhood is stored in our bodies and it’s stored in the fascia.” Anyway. So, I met Bob at worked with Bob and I worked with his trainers. And since I’ve been working with other people who do the old patterns, there’s ways … What Bob found, which is wonderful, all the Yoga asanas are designed to stimulate a particular acupuncture meridian. So, the small intestine stretch, small intestines are located just between the shoulder blades on the back. That’s the TCM thing. So, to treat your small intestine, you press your arms together this way till you feel it in the back. So, you press to feel that in your back and then you resist as you open and then you press down again and resist as you open and you press down again, getting those together. And I couldn’t even put my elbows together when I started, couldn’t even get them together. It hurt that much. So, I basically began to rehabilitate my body and my organs through knowing which places to stretch in the fascia. And there’s a stretch for every organ system. There’s large intestine, there’s pancreas and spleen, there’s stomach meridian, sexual meridian which is the central channel, all kinds of things. And I have been incorporating that into my life regularly. You can do it in a hotel room. You can do those stretches anywhere. You can do it … I will often just get down on the floor in an airport waiting area lounge, who cares, and move.

Gina:          I do the same thing. I do in airports.

Christiane: We don’t care. Here’s what I’ve noticed. When you do it, they’ll start to copy you. It’s just like … because they definitely want to also move as well. So that. And then the other person whose work I began to follow is Esther Gokhale and Esther’s at Stanford, in that area. Her husband’s a math professor at Stanford. And Esther had back pain so badly that she required surgery, as a young woman. She had some discs in L4-L5  and she had back surgery and they told her she should never have another baby, da, da, da, da, da. Then the back pain came back after the surgery, which is so common. So, Esther went around and studied primal cultures, primal movement, how they sit, how they stand, the people who have to move their bodies to make a living. And there are certain ways that all primal cultures move that every little kid starts out moving that way. Ramrod straight back. They can squat beautifully. We’re born that way. And then our built environment changes how we move but that’s also changing the fascia and it’s changing the hydraulic structures of the body. So, I studied with Esther, did her foundation course. So, it’s the Gokhale method and works beautifully for back pain and sleeping and stretching your spine out and that kind of thing. So, she’s done wonderful work. Her book is Eight Weeks To A Pain Free Back.

Gina:          We put it in the resource section of Quench and the most dramatic thing I felt she pictured for us is that you start out with a range of over 300 movements. She actually did the tally with early societies that were still [inaudible][37:35] use their body. We end up in our culture with less than 30 different body movements.

Christiane: Wow!

Gina:          That’s extraordinary picture, extraordinary information. So, we’re linking your hydraulic capacity as a physical being. We’re limiting it by the way we move. And what we want to do in this interview in part is to really help doctors understand hydration is deeply distributed and connected to the fascial system.

Christiane: That’s right. That’s right. In fact, it’s sort of is the fascial system. In a way you can’t really separate what we call the interstitial from the fascia. They’re all of a piece. It’s this incredible web work. And one of the questions that I asked you, I think, or somebody, why have we not seen this? Because you see it in the operating room. And we also know, by the way, that an enormous amount of the immune system is distributed throughout the omentum and all of the fascia between the loops of bowel. That’s all rife with immune cells. So, why haven’t we known about it? And it’s because a lot of the early anatomy, the classical anatomy, was done on cadavers where everything was dried out and any interstitial that you might find is saturated with formaldehyde. And it’s not a very fun way to learn about the body, let me tell you.

Gina:          They couldn’t think of any other way but cutting it open.

Christiane: Yeah, that’s the other thing. Yeah, yeah.

Gina:          We stand on that knowledge and it’s been given to us at great cost. It’s our responsibility to continuing to add as healers and physicians to go and find out the next thing, to go and find out what we’ve newly discovered. And I think it’s why the conversation on fascia is not a trend conversation.

Christiane: No, no, no, it’s not. Remember the woman who came out with the melt technique?

Gina:          Yes.

Christiane: So, that’s all fascia.

Gina:          Right.

Christiane: And my feeling on this is “I don’t care where you start because wherever you start on your fascia, it’s going to affect every other area of your body.” I mean, let’s just talk about … I mean, everyone knows foot reflexology, right? Or you can even buy those socks that have all the organs listed on the soul of the feet. Well, on the foot every organ is identified. On the hand, it’s the same. On the ear, it’s the same. So, when you understand this, you understand this holistic system, then you have almost the key to health in your hands. I’m currently working with a man who had a football injury years ago and then a wrestling injury and then ran the usual 30 marathons and hundreds of road races. And after you abuse your joints in that way, it catches up with you. So, I looked at his feet and I said “This foot on the right here, this is like a cast. This is a cast. Your toes don’t move. This doesn’t move.” I wish I had the ability to show you how his feet rehabbed in about eight months of regular work on the fascia. So, one of the things Hope taught me was how to work on the fascia of my feet because I was learning Tango and those Tango shoes, those Tango stilettos … I mean, the entire fascia of my feet needed to change if I were going to learn to dance that way. Now, I would not, I would never recommend high heels for any woman but if you consider an athletic event, you ought to be able to dance a couple hours in high heels and then take them off. It looks good and it’s fun. So, I had to learn how to manipulate each toe and Hope has on her website, which is the Center for Intuitive Movement Healing or her Facebook page Hope Matthews, she’s got a whole series of videos that she did, just to rehabilitate feet because she broke both her feet snowboarding and then had to teach people how to rehab their feet. So, she taught me and then I taught my friend Ron and his feet are entirely different in eight months. The toes are mobile. He can spread the toes. People don’t ever think about their feet. What women are taught, it’s kind of like the latest iteration of Chinese foot binding. You should get in these Louboutin shoes … And, again, that’s fine, that’s fine. Limo shoes, you get out of the limo and you look good but that’s it. So, then you need to re-learn how to do your feet. So, when would come back from Tango practice, I’d get in the tub with Epsom salt and do these foot exercises, manipulate each toe, pull it out, pull it out and then inter-digitate my fingers through my toes like Yoga toes and then just rotate the forefoot and then massage the entire inner arch which is the spine, you’re literally treating your entire spine. And it is the fascial system that makes that a reality. It’s funny, in Chinese medicine you see the acupuncture dolls, you see the meridians, but the anatomical pathways are all in the fascia.

Gina:          I think what’s so interesting about that is the recognition … If we have the capacity now with our computers to understand what how one button can reach many, many places.

Christiane: That’s true, yeah.

Gina:          We have the conception now that when people say “Oh, your whole body’s in your hand” or “Your whole body is in your ear” or “It’s in the bottom of your foot,” you can just see certain generations sort of raising their eye but if you even go to the map and you look at fractal map like Mandelbrot set, this is the Mandelbrot set of the rest of your body. It’s a reproduction on a smaller scale of the bigger picture and it happens all over in nature

Christiane: Yes, yes.

Gina:          So, we’re going to see those qualities happening in the human body. And the part about the fascia, also, I think that that whether you self manipulate or whether you have someone help you manipulate, there’s a really big difference in getting a massage and having somebody rub you while you’re relaxed, while you’re not engaged, which doesn’t activate the fascia. You’re getting a massage, things are being moved, but that’s all temporary. It is not until you become the generator from the inside of those facial movements that the real shaping begins to happen.

Christiane: That’s correct. You have to engage the muscles. So, let’s say that you want to change the fascia in your bicep, okay? So what you have to do is you have to pull in against resistance. So, like that, yes. And then push out. That gets the triceps. Now, women always get these bat wings down here, right? Nobody wants that. It is from accumulated dense fascia but if you do the triceps this way, you’re pushing, pushing this way and then pulling, you literally change the fascia and you’ll change the underlying structure of the skin. The other thing that’s fascinating is the entire vaginal canal is also a lot of fascia. And when you do one of those ancient jade egg practices, you are literally treating your entire body because the kidney is the opening and then we get to the liver and then the lungs and the heart is the cervix, which is, by the way, why you do not want to have sex with someone who you might get addicted to because when the penis touches the cervix, it goes right to a woman’s heart. And so, you want to be very selective about who you let in.

Gina:          Which is ancient wisdom for women.

Christiane: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. It’s not about morality. It’s practical. That addiction is worse than crack cocaine when you’re addicted to somebody. So, let’s not do that.

Gina:          Well, how would a physician address … Say you’re in the cubicle and you have a patient in front of you, you’re a physician. What do you say after a conversation like this, what do you take out of this conversation into a physician’s conversations or practice with their … ?

Christiane: Oh, that’s easy. You just say “Have you discussed optimal hydration with your patients when they’re coming for a well visit or when they come in for headaches or when they come in for arthritis or when they come in for blood pressure? Anything because hydration addresses all of it. And so, here’s what you do like doctor’s orders on a prescription – “Do the following for hydration. Come back in a month. Let’s talk about it. Let’s see what changed. I want you to start out and you have to do this because things tend to get better in the human body.” So, you need to write down everything that’s not working so well and then see what has changed. It’s that simple. And I think a physician, like my friend Sandra, you have to experience this in your patients to begin to believe it because it’s so simple. In our culture, the average 65-year-old is on six prescription drugs. So, what are doctors trained to do? Give another drug. Can you imagine if you just gave the hydration formula to people? And, like you said, it’s not different for everybody. So, it’s not eight glasses of water for everybody.

Gina:          It’s so thrilling to hear this because we’re actually developing a eight-minute curriculum. So, any physician can sent … they can literally write HydrationFoundation.org on the prescription pad, send them to us, we know you’re busy, we will give them in eight minutes an education around hydration, how to do it more holistically, more fun, more fully involving your foods, involving little movements to really get them to [inaudible][49:36] so that the physician can have that resource. Literally, just go there. We’re going to share as much. And it’s all free. There should never be a price tag on hydration.

Christiane: That’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

Gina:          I know you’ve also written a book called The Power of Joy and this is kind of a sneaky question here but I want to know if you think hydration is an activation in joy in some way.

Christiane: Of course it is. Frankly, if you’re dehydrated, you can’t really engage the molecules of joy. It’s just not going to work. So, joy comes from serotonin, beta endorphin, and nitric oxide. And it is our natural state because if you watch 2-year-olds … Okay, so they’re hurt, they’re angry, whatever. They get over that in about a minute, maybe 30 seconds, and then they’re back to bouncing around. It’s our natural state until … So, I think, what is the data, a kid laughs like 300 times a day, right? An adult, which the late Ashley Montague described as nothing but disintegrated children, an adult laughs maybe 10-15 times a day, max. So, joy is our natural state. So think about it. What do we say about people? “Oh, god, she’s a dried up old,” whatever, right? We know that. It’s like the fluids … She’s not juicy. There’s no fluidity. There’s no joy. She’s dried up. So, why don’t we start with what happens if you get re-moisturized, if you get juicy again, right? Yeah.

Gina:          Yeah, I love that, Dr. Northrup.

Can you share three ways you hydrate. You already have talked about adding chia seed and salt to your water using the [inaudible][51:38] system. Is there anything we missed?

Christiane: The humidifier in my bedroom and applying some kind mist

Gina:          Hydrosols are the most fun.

Christiane: That’s right. That’s right.

Gina:          [Inaudible][51:55] got plant agent in them. And of course roses are the most hydrating of all the flowers and many … maybe they’re raising medicinally for the purposes of hydration and ingested internally as an original part of the Arab culture. So, the widespread roses and rose use there [inaudible][52:14] from medicine.

Christiane: That’s wonderful.

Gina:          So, rose hydrosols are great.

Christiane: Yes. Yes, wonderful.

Gina:          Is there something you’d like to see addressed in this interview that we might have missed?

Christiane: I think we’ve covered it. The main thing I want people to know is that what they experience as joint limitation … Let me give you an example. So, I was learning Tango and there’s a lot of counterclockwise, your hips are going that way and your chest is going that way. I mean, it’s like … So, you have to learn how to turn this way. And if I were a normal person, I would have said “Oh, I can’t do this because this hurts my back.” What I knew is the only reason that this hurts in any way is that I have not done it. The fascia will follow the patterns of your thoughts, your emotions, and your movement. It’s constantly changing, which means I don’t care what age you are, you can improve your structure, you can improve your fascia. It’s never too late. I have just rehabbed the feet of a man who’s in his 70s and they are beautiful. And if you went … Here’s what we do in medicine. We think that this is all mechanical. So, he was given a bunch of orthotics. That doesn’t really address the problem. What it does is it makes it easier to maintain an abnormal pattern. So, you must address the fascia and then everything else follows suit.

Gina:          Wow! I’m so impressed with how you hold this and think about it. I really love the idea that we’re never to disintegrate. There’s opportunity to be becoming more of who we are, becoming more fluid becoming and don’t buy the myth that it’s just because of your age, because of your circumstances. And it’s so exciting to think … One part of this conversation I’d like to just bring to the fore is that the fascia along with all the other ways we’ve talked about it is also an information system.

Christiane: Yes.

Gina:          So, when you sit down and collapse and kind of die inside, that’s information going to your body. We all have seasons of giving up. That’s fine. It’s just the struggles will have but the information system in our body called the fascia, if we can give it a little direction and say “Well, I’ll just move a little. I’ll just move my neck a little. I’ll just …,” whatever that little moment is, is an information to shout out to the rest of you “Come on, come on.”

Christiane: That’s right. That’s right. That’s exactly right. And we all know this. When you put on your running shoes or your walking shoes and you say “I don’t really want to do this,” so what you say to your head is “I’ll just give it five minutes and then I’m going to come home.” And what happens is you never come home because the minute you start, there you go. And the fascia is like that. And then over time what happens is as you learn to stretch it and to change and remodel it, you love the way it feels. At first it can be a little gnarly. I will be the first to tell you. I mean, I could not get my elbows together. It literally hurt because I had so much dense accumulated fascia in the small intestine meridian. Now it feels wonderful. Same with the lungs stretch and the large intestine stretch and all of it. It feels really good. And when it doesn’t feel really good, I do it anyway. And then the next time I do it, it’s remarkably better because the fascia responds so instantaneously to your movement patterns

Gina:          Yes, if you feel it as a digital system, it’s got the [inaudible][56:41] and it’s like “I’ll have a little more, please.”

Christiane: That’s right. That’s right. Exactly right. Yeah, yeah.

Gina:          Well, I loved this conversation. I’m loving your place in the world, the way you made a map and drawn a wake behind you, people who understand things more differently and more joyfully about why we’re not just disintegrating, we’re actually keeping ourselves alive and how we choose to do that is through the power of joy, how important that is.

We thank you. The Hydration Foundation thanks you for your love and support for your lifelong work to heal those in your sphere. You’ve had an impact for us, the way that you recommended Quench, you made people read it, you’ve got a conversation about hydration on your radio program and we’re really are very committed to helping people understand that water is life, it is juiciness, it is fluidity, it’s an information system and we really want to be plugged in there. So, helping other physicians find a way to hydrate their patients and colleagues is a great task.

Christiane: Right, okay.

Gina:          And helping us spread our mission.

Christiane: You’re so much welcome. Thank you so much.

Gina:          Bye.

Christiane: Good. Bye, bye.

Gina Bria:       Hi, Chris!

Chris James:   Hi! How are you doing?

Gina Bria:       A pleasure to meet you, really.

Chris James:   Likewise.

Gina Bria:       Well, we’re just going to dive right into this and bringing the Hydration Foundation community together with yours and the opportunity for us to link up and begin to share knowledge about water and that is really, really beautiful. For us at the Hydration Foundation, our very job is to spread the news about hydration strategies that are better than guzzling a lot of water and also looking at the water contamination issues that we have to deal with today. So, we’re very excited to welcome Chris James from A Healthy Alternative. And we were looking for someone who could speak reliably on water fasting. This is an issue that is a bit of a delicate one because there are right ways and wrong ways to do it. And everybody is a unique individual. We come as our own continent, our own self-contained water being. So, fasting can be a difficult topic because really people are going to have to find their own way into it if they want to practice it even. So, our interest in bringing Chris to our audience through the Hydration Solution Summit and giving him a voice into an audience that will be new and bringing his expertise.

What I love about Chris is that he’s coming at it from personal experience and then how he shares that experience out so that anyone can pick up the reins where they need to from Chris’s story. This is what I really love about finding you and finding the way into this. I looked at other experts on water fasting. I wasn’t even sure we should try to address this topic on the Hydration Solution Summit but I just knew we couldn’t give it a miss but I found a lot of people, Chris, who advocate fasting either in a monetary context where there’s a pressure involved, there’s just a kind of pressure around other people that I looked at that concern me because, again, it’s such a personal choice to pick up water fasting but I come It from an Anthropology point of view being an anthropologist and looking at indigenous traditions and there is no mistaking the use of fasting in every culture. So, we can’t just ignore that because it’s a bit of a topic that requires handling delicately. So, I found you and I saw I could really trust you with this topic.

So, Chris, welcome you. We’re so grateful to find you.

Chris James:   Thank you

Gina Bria:       We want you to unfurl your story for us in the most trustworthy way and in a way that genuinely allows people to decide for themselves “How would I step into this if I wanted to? What are the experiences that other people have had?” So, there you are. Tell us how you came to your experience of fasting, how you want to pass it on to others, and what that has been like for you.

Chris James:   Absolutely. Well, thank you. I appreciate you having me. I’m very honored to have this opportunity to share with your community and be a part of everything that you’re doing with teaching people about hydration. It’s so important. And when I very first came into this journey of wanting to heal myself and just live healthier, live longer, I had no idea how important water was. So, I love what you’re doing. So, I just want to get that out of the way.

My journey started about four years ago now. And, at the time, I was dealing with the mainstream medicine, traditional medicine and I was looking for a way to heal an infection that I had been dealing with for almost 10 years at the time. And the doctors just had no idea what it was. Even to this day I don’t know what it was. They ran every test. No one could ever tell me to the point where they were like “Oh, you know, it’s probably just in your head.” And I just thought that was so crazy that they would tell me that something that I was feeling that had been irking me for years was in my head. So, upon my last visit at the doctor, he was actually a specialist, he said “You know what, maybe what you’re dealing with is dietary.” And at the time, I had already started the process of learning about eating better and cutting out certain beverages and things like that. So, I was already thinking in that vein and when he said it, it was just clarity for me. So, that was the last time I went to the doctor and I started learning about eating fresh vegetables, whole vegetables. I started learning about the way the food is processed and all of these things. And during part of my research, one of the people that I was learning from mentioned fasting. And at the time, that was the first time I heard about fasting in the context of being able to use it for healing because prior to that, I only heard it for spiritual purposes and really just re-centering yourself and building a relationship with God or creator, whatever you want to kind of refer to, to that entity as. And so, I was shocked that you could use fasting for any sort of healing. And I dove in. I’m the type of person that I like researching not just specifically what I’m looking for but I like looking at other documents and other texts that don’t necessarily correlate so that I could see a big picture. So, for example, this this particular guy was talking about fasting for health. I did look at ancient cultures and their traditions and some of the things they did. That’s why what you said resonates with me as far as looking at indigenous people and all of these different cultures that use fasting. And there’s always some philosophy around it about just living longer, vitality and healing and mental clarity and wellness. There was always some philosophy attached. It wasn’t just “Hey, fast just because …” There were always very specific reasons.

Gina Bria:       Right. In fact, those reasons, because if I can just kind of package that, they’re so often associated with a particular spiritual pathway that if you’re not on that pathway, it wouldn’t occur to you that healing is universal, that water has a universal healing impact and we don’t even know how to explore that because we’re locked out of those traditions. We’re not practicing those, we haven’t heard of those and, of course, really spirituality and healing are so interlinked in all cultures except ours. We’re the outliers here.

Chris James:   Right.

Gina Bria:       And that’s why looking for the topic of fasting, when you’re in science community … Why I want you to speak is you’re going to just … not to close the spiritual conversation in any way but the idea that water is a healing element with profound implications and we’re not talking about that in the science world. You are now more and more with intermittent fasting and understanding how cyclical rhythms works and so forth but I really like that we are going to just address that water, fasting, combination with, to help people step into it from whatever tradition they may be practicing and that is really powerful because we’re not used to that. We’re used to locking it into certain practice. When we find out we can unlock it for ourselves, that’s really big news.

Chris James:   Yeah, it’s a natural way of life. Every time you go to sleep at night, your body, it goes into a fast. That’s why we call breakfast, breaking your fast. So, I started the process of fasting. And the way that I started, the first thing I did was I changed my dietary habits and I really kind of stumbled into this because I didn’t know what I was doing, there wasn’t a ton of information out there at the time but I just was like “You know what, I want to try this vegetarian diet.” So, I was eating more fruits and vegetables. And the person that I was learning from was teaching eating more raw. Those plants have a lot of water in them. And so, I was prepping for fasting without really realizing that just by changing my diet. And I did that for about a month. And then the fasting just kind of came naturally. Now, I started with a 13-day fast which is challenging for a lot of people. It was really challenging for me. And it’s not something that I necessarily suggest that people do because fasting is like a muscle. It’s something that if you’ve never done it before, you’ve never utilized that, you kind of got to practice and build up the stamina. And the beautiful thing about fasting is you can actually get benefits from it from just doing 24 hours or even 16 hours. It’s really just about being comfortable prepping yourself mentally, understanding what it is and then just being consistent with it. And so, after about three days of fasting, maybe it was two, it’s been a few years now since I did this but it was just a couple of days, the infection would give me an irritation in my urethra. That was where it was or at least that’s where it affected me. And after about two days of fasting, it went away. And at that point in time, I knew that I had figured something out that was special, that was different because I never got that type of result from anything. I could take like a medication or a supplement or something like that and it would ease it but it was never like “Okay, it’s gone.” So, after two days it was just gone. And that was huge for me because I thought I was going to have to live with that irritation for the rest of my life and it was starting to feel unbearable.

The other thing that was really, really cool about learning about fasting and going through this process was I was able to then share that information with my brother who, at the time, was … well, he’s currently disabled, he’s a veteran and, at the time, he was 100 pounds overweight. So, he was morbidly obese and he was dealing with impotency, sleep apnea, and just a plethora of other issues. So, I started sharing this information with him and he started fasting. Now, this part is pretty amazing. He had just got finished going to the doctor and they told him “In the next three months, we’re going to start you on diabetes medication” because he was pre diabetic. So, the doctor had just told him “Hey, in about three months come on back and we’re going to start your treatment plan.” And I was like “John, based on what I’m learning, you don’t have to worry about that at all. The body can heal itself.” So, he started fasting and within six weeks, all of the conditions that we could see were gone. All of the things that we noticed, without actually going and getting him tested, we could tell it was gone. He was getting better. He had lost like 30 or 40 pounds. And then within eight months we actually went and got him tested and everything and we were able to verify that his diabetic condition was completely gone, at the time he had lost 70 pounds, and the doctors and the nurses were like “Wow! How did you do this?” And we just put a regimen of fasting together for him. And it was super simple. It wasn’t super long fast or anything like that. It was just maybe three to four or five days every week or every so often.

Gina Bria:       I want to hear the route regime exactly but I just want to note for our listeners that if this isn’t like one long extended technique we’re talking about, we’re talking about ways to park, let’s call them, mini-fasting – just stay healthy [inaudible] to park it here, to park it there – that that interruption begins, it ignites a healing process. And that’s why I couldn’t not have a conversation around water fasting. What we’re trying to do is help people understand they can step into it in remarkably easy ways and that we’re here to just speak some information that can be useful. So, starting with the smallest possible fast into these larger extended fast. Give us a lead on that and tell us how your brother did it. We need healing desperately. We need to spread healing, right?

Chris James:   Right, absolutely. Well, we started with like a three-day fast for him and he had a lot of information going into it. So, it was a little bit different from when I did it. And we actually had started prepping his body a little bit. So, the first thing you want to do is take about five to seven days. And I just call it a prep week where you hydrate more, right? And then you really got to learn about proper hydration to hydrate more. You want to hydrate more. We gave him more high-water content fruits and vegetables, things like that. We reduced the fast foods, the processed foods, cheese, and animal products and things like that. So, you want to do that for the first week to kind of prep. And then after that he rolled into a three-day fast and it really was just like “Okay, you’re going to do three days and then you’re going to check in and see how you feel. And if you feel good, you feel like you can keep going, you keep going. If you don’t feel like you can keep going or you feel like it’s getting too strenuous, then you stop,” it’s not a big deal because, like I mentioned, even one day of fasting or even 16 hours of fasting is beneficial. As soon as you stop putting food in the body, the body starts the process of healing because the body wants to move towards that homeostasis. It wants to be balanced and well. So, we started off slow. Then he moved from the three days to five days and we started a regimen of five-day fast every week. And so, he would eat on weekends and on the weekends, he was allowed to pretty much eat whatever he wanted in a small quantity. So, he would do like a one-meal-a-day strategy where he would eat kind of whatever he felt like eating. And this is like beginning stages. This isn’t optimal. If you want to do it optimally, you would eat like a high-water-content diet but he ate whatever he wanted but it still worked. It just shows how powerful the process is. So, you don’t have to do hundred-day fast and eat perfect when you eat. You have a lot of wiggle room. It’s really just about choosing the strategy that works for you.

The beautiful thing is that I’ve been able to work with hundreds or thousands of people at this point and everybody has a unique situation. So, some people work very strenuous jobs. One of the things that I suggest with fasting is to rest. Rest is super important. People think they need to exercise and do all this craziness. You really need to rest and you need to hydrate, right? It’s a water fast. So, if you have a strenuous job, I actually highly suggest adopting either an intermittent fasting schedule where literally all you’re doing is pushing breakfast out. So, if you normally eat breakfast in the morning at 7 when you wake up, push it out to lunch time. So, you’re skipping breakfast and you eat at lunchtime. And then you can have a small meal at night or you could also do a one-meal-a-day strategy where you’re extending your fasting window almost to 22 or 23 hours. You’re just eating one meal a day. And throughout the rest of the day you’re hydrating. Each one of these strategies are super, super effective for losing weight. Like I mentioned, my brother lost 70 pounds at where we were in the story but today, he’s lost 100 and he’s kept it off because as we went through this process, we also adopted better eating strategies.

Gina Bria:       Chris, one of the most interesting things that happens under these conditions is you change your mental focus. You become more than you think you are right now. And I have fasted myself and fasted both in the spiritual context and in the health context and I know that just that first day I became a new person because I crossed over a lot of old stuff about myself to discover that there was a whole part of me that I hadn’t ever even known existed. And this is, I think, why water has a place in the conversations of changing our mental focus, changing our capacities because when you fast with water, and water can actually get to all of your tissues including your brain tissue, your cognitive capacity starts to change very quickly. And we have studies now that show that even a 2% increase in hydration will increase your cognitive capacity. And that doesn’t just mean becoming smarter. Chris, it means becoming wiser. We are becoming more compassionate towards ourselves and how we look out at the world. Getting the wisdom of water inside of us, letting it saturate us, literally, we’re like a wilted plant that suddenly finds itself as whole and complete. So, we have to talk about this. And I’m glad you’re here to do that.                        I keep interrupting you. Maybe give me a day in the life of how someone could actually start a process like this and also how they can come to you for help as well.

Chris James:   Well, let’s pretend like you really want to start with baby steps, make it as easy as possible. So, I mentioned the prepping. So, that’s important. That’s really easy to do. Even if you’re having trouble eating the healthier foods, maybe you don’t have access to them or you don’t have the money to afford the healthier stuff because healthier stuff somehow cost more, you can even just practice the process of skipping meals, so skipping breakfast, and you continue eating what you’ve been eating or you can practice an intermittent schedule where you just choose a block of time, maybe it’s an eight-hour window of time, let’s say, from noon to 8 p.m. where you eat. That’s the only time. That’s a good strategy to get started. And then if you want to move into fasting, what you could actually do is utilize juice fasting because Juice fasting basically allows you to get a little sustenance but it still gives you these immense benefits similar to what you would get with water fasting. We find on average, people who juice fast are looking at one pound a day of weight loss. And then, of course, you’re also getting the benefits of the mental clarity, like you mentioned earlier, which are amazing, being able to go through your daily life and do your daily activities at a higher level. And then from juice fasting, let’s say that you did juice fasting for three days and you felt good, because this is such a personal journey, you want to be ready, you want to be fully prepared, you want to feel physically prepared. You don’t want to force yourself into doing something. You just want to like let it feel natural. So, you do a couple of days of juice fasting, three days you feel good, you want to try a 24 hour fast. Well, you’ve done a five or seven-day prep time, you’ve done the three days of juice, you’re ready, you’re hydrated, you’re ready to go. And so, you try your first day. And it goes well. And now you know you can do it. If you could do 24 hours, you could do 48 hours. And then from that point forward, you increase incrementally. You just allow it to feel natural.

What I actually like to teach is practice fasting like a lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle. This isn’t a diet. This isn’t a fad. This isn’t something you’re doing to quickly lose weight or even heal. It’s something that needs to be incorporated slowly into your lifestyle because, honestly, it’s just a healthy way of living. So, if you guys want to learn more, I have several resources available. One of my most popular resources is my YouTube channel called A Healthy Alternative. And I put out videos every Sunday at 10:30 a.m. Central Time.

Gina Bria:       That’s how I found you, yeah.

Chris James:   You can watch those. I’ve got over 200 videos, I think, at this point in time talking about fasting. We go in depth about it. I also have guests come on and we talk about their personal experience so that you can see those unique interactions. People love those. I have a website AHealthyAlternative.org. And then I also have an academy available where I teach you A to Z how to start this process of learning about fasting and do it safely and that’s AHAFastingAcademy.com.

Gina Bria:       right. And these are all resources we’re trying to spread because there’s a really simple biological principle at work that we’re missing in our medical community here and that is the body is either eating and digesting or when it’s at rest from that process, it starts to heal. It needs time. It’s not doing any other thing to heal. And we keep interrupting that process constantly. So, no wonder we’re chronically ill. And that specific piece of biological information is really missing from our health conversations. We talk about good diet. We talk about exercise. We talk about the importance of sleep. We talk about the microbiome. All of these new conversations have come in but one of the basic principles haven’t come in with it, which is your body needs to be doing nothing else to do the healing process. It’s got to either be on the track of digesting and focus and work or it’s got to be at rest and have nothing to digest so that it can now turn all its attention to creating those new cells and that new health. And it’s quite amazing for people. What I love is surreptitiously the conversation on intermittent fasting has brought back the idea that you’re either digesting or you’re healing. You cannot be doing both at the same time. So, when you bring down the digesting, the opportunity for your body to heal just accelerates completely but all that healing, and this is the part where the hydration comes in, that healing is run by water. It needs some fuel of water. So, water fasting accelerates this process and we have story after story after story, not to mention the longevity history that counts as a clinical study, if you look at it that way. As an anthropologist, I’m used to looking at “Wow, these traditions practiced them for thousands of years. They must work.” It can’t be that far off.” So, that bit of information is really, really central to this conversation, which is if you’re eating, even if you’re just eating three meals a day, you’ve already interrupted the runup and the need for healing has got interrupted at every point. So, you’re just kind of really very creeping along on the healing part. And because we are in such extreme situations as moderns, so divorced from our biological ecology, so living indoors, artificial lighting, prescription medications, processed foods, high-stress work … Do you know that one of my first classes as an anthropologist, my professor taught us that the typically indigenous style of survival and working, they hunted and gathered four hours a day and the rest of the day they were free to party? Wait, that’s the plan. What are we doing? So, the wisdom of biology and water is literally missing from our life. And what we’re trying to do, Chris, you and I together, is reintroduce these patterns, these possibilities, specifically through the channel of water which accelerates everything.

So, just a tiny bit of information. I was just recently at a huge international conference of water scientists and they were all huddled in the corners talking about how water is actually a biological and extremely sophisticated computer. Water molecules function as storing information, delivering information, signaling information. And they were like “Why are we using all this machinery when we could actually do calculations using water molecules?” So, they were all in the corner like “Well, how far are you along on your water computer?” And I was listening to these conversations going “You mean I’m a walking computer?” I’m a water computer and that information is really powerful because when you drink, and I’m going to say this kind of in an unusual way but it helps it land, when you drink, you’re bringing in vast amounts of information. It isn’t just our fuel.

Chris James:   Right.

Gina Bria:       Actually, an exchange of information with all biology that can then reignite ourselves and our healing and our wisdom and our ability to be ecologically balanced inside ourselves and match with the world, the planet that we’re trying to balance as well and water really is the solution to that. This is very exciting.

Chris James:   I love learning about water. Water memory blew my mind. I love the water computer, all of that stuff.

Gina Bria:       So much of the conversation is around “We’re sinking as a planet. We’ve trashed our earth. There’s no way out. It’s downhill from here” to discover that actually water is here to rescue us and that can happen inside of our bodies and outside as well. And the opportunity to use fasting with water to ignite a way of being and becoming a bigger person. We’re so depleted. We think it’s our personal discipline, our personal problem, and our personal fault that we’re so depleted. And, actually, it’s not a me problem. It’s an us problem. The way we set up our lifestyles creates these conditions.

Chris James:   Keep in mind too that when you’re eating foods that are dehydrating that you are sapping water like when you have a bowel movement, your bowel movement doesn’t come out dry like dirt. It’s saturated with moisture. So, imagine if you’re eating a Dorito chip or a cracker or whatever, that has no water but your bowels are coming out with moisture, you’re stealing, you’re sapping water from your body. That’s one of the reasons why we’re so dehydrated. We’re eating dry food. We need to eat water, we need to drink water, we need to drink the right type of water so that we hydrate and we’ll start healing. It’s so simple.

Gina Bria:       One of the tricks that we teach at the Hydration Foundation and, of course, you can come to our website and get, I don’t know how many recipes we put up there now, I’m sure there are over 50, they’re recipes that help people step into “Well, I’ll have the Dorito but I’ll also have the salsa,” right? “I’ll have the Dorito but I’m going to have [inaudible]” “I’ll have a chicken sandwich because I just need that right now.” We know why those cravings are the way they are. We’re directed towards that. We don’t know any other way out but if you’re going to have the pizza, please have an apple or have a salad. Just start to think in terms of compensating for the drying out. Know it’s drying you and then think of how to compensate for that. And then what’s so great about that strategy is the wisdom of water inside that salad. A leaf is 98% Water, by the way, a leaf of salad. That means it’s huge, packaged by nature. When you have that apple, when you have that salad, you’re getting a kind of water biologically activated intelligent water that’s now leading your intelligence. So, even just the apple starts to move you towards your higher self. And that’s a crazy way to say it but it’s actually science, right? We know that those waters from food coming with electrolytes, minerals, nutrients, and they have energetic charge that tap water and bottled water has lost. Really valuable. Wow! And I’ll just say from my experience with fasting, and I’d love to hear your comments on this, I’m careful about the kind of water I drink when I do a water fast. And what I kind of do to just get myself in the framework that helps me is I’ll go to the store and I’ll buy three to five bottles of mineral water in glass, beautiful mineral water in glass, I don’t buy plastic bottles, and I set that up. So, if I know I’m going to do a three-day fast, I’m buying like 15 bottles and then I know my plan and when I hit those points where I’m like “Oh, no, I can’t do it,” I’m like “No, you’re on the plan. You’ve got another bottle. Finish it. You’re fine. You’re just going to walk through this.” And those minerals, that water actually leads me to a higher wisdom, a higher self.

I don’t know, I’d love to hear how specialized kinds of waters that you use or you guide people towards.

Chris James:   Yeah. So, I like to look at nature. I like to look at what happens to water in nature and replicate that as best as I can. If you could get your water from a spring, like, “Oh my god!” like “That’s amazing!” because that’s what we should be doing. We should be drinking from a natural body of water. Getting it in glass is always important because you’re not going to have all those extra chemicals leaching into your water from the plastic. Even if it’s BPA free, you don’t want those extra chemicals leaching into your water. So, when you taste the water, you could tell that it tastes different when it’s been in plastic. We can all kind of taste the plastic. That’s chemicals in the water that you don’t want. You want it to be, like I said, as natural as possible. So, what I’ve done is I just distill my water at home because I went through the process of learning about different waters and, in my mind, it’s really complicated to find good water because you don’t know what these companies are doing to the water before you get it. I know that there are some companies that get sued sometimes for lying about what they did to the water. So, I distill my water home and then I take it and I put it in a clear glass jar and I set it out in the sun and I let the sun charge it because the sun gives the water information and the water has the ability to retain that information and then that information is then transferred to you when you drink it. It’s like a fuel source. So, one of the amazing experiences I had with what I call sun water, I was fasting, it was one of the first times I ever did it, so it was probably within the first two months of me practicing fasting, and I had started to do this process of sun charging my water. And me and my brother, we were doing at the same time, and we both had some. He went to his room, because we stay together, he went to his room and I drank mine. And later that night he came back in my room and he’s like “Chris, did that water taste sweet to you?” And I freaked out like I lost it because I was like “This water tastes sweet.” And I was thinking that sometimes you have residue in your bottle, maybe you had some juice or something. I was like “I don’t know if I’m tripping.” He came back in and he said that, and I freaked out, I couldn’t believe it, the sun had actually altered the water to a place where it actually tastes different. I could taste the sun energy in the water. So, that was amazing. And I’ve had some really amazing results using energized water which is why I drink these. The gemstones have a similar process. They charge and energize and restructure the water. I mean, I’ve got a story for this. I don’t know if you want to hear it.

Gina Bria:       Well, I would like to say, Chris, that using the sun and using other materials like gemstones, plant materials, sand, clays, these traditions exist all over the world and they have been used. In fact, the Iceman, they found it up in the Dolomites, this is the most studied body on the planet. I think they’ve had over 36 doctors’ teams look at this frozen body they found in the Alps. They brought it to a medical facility and they’ve been studying this body. Not only did this body have acupressure points identified on their body but they had a pouch with clay pellets in it. And, I think, those were traveling water decontamination [inaudible]. Everybody has to deal with contaminated water at some point or another, either an animal falls in your local pond or there’s issues that have always existed. We’re just trying to call in these ancient wisdoms now in our super industrialized environments that keep us so under a level of health and beauty and glory that we have available to us as being humans that’s just sunk below because we’re just so detached from how we were designed to live.

So, I just want to say before you tell us your story, yes, these traditions have existed for a long time all over and, as speaking now from a science point of view, we do know that sun changes the angle of the hydrogen bond of the water molecule so that it actually becomes a different entity, a different kind of water than the water you put in there. It changes because we can now watch that happen and we have Dr. Gerald Pollack to thank for, actually, doing the laboratory experiment and see his work, it’s in his books and it’s online, where he actually was able to identify that change of angle on the bond and that when sunlight touches water, it changes the angle of the bond in such a way, actually they’re coming closer together, the angles of the hydrogen, that they can now exchange electricity and become charged and that’s what we’re drinking. When we eat an apple and we get apple juice, we get charged water. And when you put it in the sun, you’re getting charged or when you throw in some something as simple as a pinch of sea salt, when you put that in the water, it starts the electrical charge happening. And it’s that charge, the water becoming the battery, that starts the healing process in us. And, of course, with a water fast lots of charge water coming in, it’s your cells getting that extra energy to really begin to ignite a whole healing process within you.

Chris James:   And that’s why we see such … It almost seems unrealistic how quickly we can see the body start this process of healing. Like I tell people all the time, when you know how the body works, it does work very efficiently and very quickly. It’s just that in our traditional way of thinking we feel like healing and these things have to take a long time but that’s one of the things that I do want to point out is not only do you not have to do these long extended fasts and things like that but it doesn’t take long either. I mean, like I mentioned in my story, my brother was pre-diabetic and then six weeks later all of his conditions were gone. So, it doesn’t take a long time. We can start seeing the healing. I actually just got this bottle, at the time of the story, I just got this bottle and one of the things that I noticed, this is a little personal and I don’t know if I can …

Gina Bria:       Yes, please, we care about this. We love each other’s stories.

Chris James:   Okay. Well, one of the things, as a man, that I noticed is I wasn’t getting good blood flow in my nether regions. It was one of the issues my brother had as well.

Gina Bria:       Yes. Well, those are some of the smallest capillaries in the body, in your eyes and in your genitals. They’re just so tiny.

Chris James:   Right. So, as I got older, I noticed that in the morning time I wasn’t getting those erections and things like they’re very natural for even infants get them, right? And I noticed that after drinking this water for maybe about a week or so that I was getting stronger erections and for a man, that’s very important. It’s those little things that might not be real for some people but it’s those types of things that shows you, it’s a very gentle way of showing you, that you’re on the right path like you’re doing the right thing. And I also noticed that my dreams became more vivid, right? There’s like all of these little things that maybe people won’t pay attention towards. It’s not like the big flashy stuff that everybody talks about but you get to see healing on so many different levels – mentally, spiritually, physically. And it’s really fun. I love it. And so, documenting this process has been fun for me. And that’s kind of how I was able to start teaching others and showing others what I was doing because I documented it.

Gina Bria:       Yeah, that’s great. And we can find that documentation on your YouTube, right?

Chris James:   It’s all over. That’s all I do. I love sharing these experiences.

Gina Bria:       I know. And we’re very lucky to have someone speak up and we are very lucky to be able to just listen to stories and assess for ourselves and now put some more power behind it with information coming out of the science world that there are different kinds of water. We got liquid, vapor, ice. We thought those were all taught, those were only the three stages, but there’s actually waters on the spectrum and there’s multiple stages going on and water when you do expose it to the sun or you put salts in it or you get it from a cucumber, that those states of water drive different kinds of healing in the body. And when you’re missing the capacity of your body, your body makes that kind of water inside of you but it has to do so much more work together. So, when you bring it in, it’s like for free and your body’s like “Yay!”

And you mentioned healing quickly. How quickly do our phones charge when we plug them in? We’re really talking about getting electrical water. You get electricity in your body and, yup, it works again, it works again. So, it’s not such a stretch. And we brought you on because we really wanted to discuss water fasting. Although ‘fasting’ is the word that we have from history but it’s almost like the opposite of fasting. It’s not the loss of something. It’s the actual addition of something.

Chris James:   Absolutely.

Gina Bria:       That is really exciting one, just finding out “Okay, I’m starting from zero. I could just start adding some places where I let the body heal and not put anything in there for an extra hour, extra two hours, extra three hours and then I start bringing in fresh fruits and vegetables that actually have this charge in it and I have more of that in my diet or if I have some drying food or, by the way, take prescription medications,” this is something that came from some of our other physicians on summit that they have a charge in them that drains the electricity in the body. So, all the medication needs additional hydration to compensate. It’s not even on the table. Now we’re talking about when we give 9 or 10 different kinds of prescriptions to the elder. That’s got to stop right now on our watch. Somebody’s got to get in there and say “Look, they at least need to be hydrated. You can’t just make them guzzle ever more water. You help them. You cut up a watermelon. You bring over a salad of nicely chopped little cucumbers with cilantro in it, dress it with lime. I mean, make a make a honey dressing.” There’s a hundred ways to do this. And if you can’t do that, you go buy some great pomegranate juice or a pot of … We now live in communities where food can be hard to get to. Doing something like getting vegetable powders and just bringing your own water to them and making like a smoothie, a juice yourself when you can’t go get all that material and press it and make that happen, there are ways to get to it. it’s really different.

I can’t let you go, Chris, without asking about the spiritual aspect.

Chris James:   The spiritual aspect, it’s funny because it was actually a main focus for me. And I got something different from what I expected. I have such a connection with nature now that I didn’t have before. When we talk about spirituality, I think oftentimes we’re talking about like a higher being and kind of like that God figure but I also have learned that it’s connecting with insects and animals and plant life, trees, the ground, right? It’s like those things that the indigenous people would speak about that we … I don’t know, I felt like we were kind of taught that it was all woo-woo but it’s not. And it’s like we just didn’t understand those concepts because we were so far removed from it but there’s an enlightenment that happens. The water has the ability to fill your body, your cells with light so you become enlightened and I’m aware of things. I look at the world, my perspective on the world has changed. It’s funny because one of my best friends, he doesn’t do this, he’s tried it a couple of times but he’s not consistent with it. He’s like a vegan, I think, now is what he does. And when he sees things happening in the world, he has this negative outlook. It’s like “Man, the world’s so dark. There’s so much destruction and death and da, da, da, da, da.” And I’m like “What are you talking about? The world is beautiful.” You know what I mean? “The earth is amazing. People are amazing.” We see the exact same thing but our perspectives are different. And I think that has a lot to do with the enlightenment that comes from water and my spiritual growth because I used to feel the way he felt and it’s just suddenly changed. And I jokingly say that when I think about water, as it relates to spirituality and God, I think about how the comparisons between God and water is like God is omnipresent, he’s omnipotent, all powerful and I think about water and I’m like water has been here, all the water that’s here today has always been here. It just cycles itself. It has water memory. So, it’s all knowing because it’s experienced everything. It’s everywhere all the time. It’s one of the most powerful elements in the world. I mean, it could destroy a mountain but yet it’s gentle enough to allow fish and butterfly and other creatures to play and whatever. And it gives life. So, I think water is amazing and that’s kind of been my revelation, drinking it, and really focusing on hydration.

Gina Bria:       Yeah, water is holy. It is holy, it really is. And our reverence for it can be … We need to help each other get touch with it. So, I’m very grateful that you’ve opened up a topic for us, given us a place to go to explore it more deeply, found out that fasting can be as little as making it from when you wake up to lunchtime, and that the healing happens when we stop putting food in and get ourselves just some hydration there. So, I’m very grateful to open this conversation with you. I’m very excited to be new allies, bringing healing in in powerful ways.

Chris James, A Healthy Alternative, we really thank you for this interview and for your information and for your love for others. And you’re loving your brother just touches me so deeply because when we come into healing, it resonates all of us to those we love. So, thank you, Chris James. Appreciate it very much.

Gina:          I am calling Dr. Dana Cohen into this interview for the Hydration Foundation. We are doing a series of Doctors Talk Hydration and we’re interviewing the top doctors who use hydration in their practices and in their fields. So, I want to introduce Dr. Dana Cohen. It’s a super pleasure to do that. She’s an integrative physician with a practice in New York City. I bet you see a lot of dehydration.

Can you introduce yourself to us so we get a sense of your expertise and your field?

Dr. Dana:   Yes. Hi Gina. Thank you.

So I am an integrative physician. I’m an internist by training. However, I’ve been practicing solely Integrative Medicine for the past 21 years in New York City. And so, my philosophy is to keep people off of medication using lifestyle and nutrition and acupuncture and Yoga and whatever it takes to do that and it’s good medicine. I’m also on the board of the Organic and Natural Health Association and I help prepare yearly symposiums for an organization called ACAM – the American College for the Advancement in Medicine – and we educate integrative doctors all over the world. And I’ve co-written a book with you.

Gina:          Yeah, this is a special moment, very satisfying and it’s a privilege to interview you because, of course, you’re my co-author on our book Quench which we wrote to get into the hand of as many people as possible, the idea that hydration is not eight glasses of water a day, that there’s other approaches and we wanted to share that with as many people in the medical community as we possibly can along with creating a protocol for doctors to share with their patients and to make it very easy to help people hydrate.

So, can I ask you to speak about how writing Quench has changed you as a physician?

Dr. Dana:   Yeah. So I want to tell the story too, if it’s okay. I think we’ve told it a few times but I’m going to tell it now on your interview of how this all came to be.

So, it’s going on almost four years ago that you called me and said “I want to talk to you about the work that we’re doing in the Hydration Foundation.” And I said “Sure, come on in.” And we sat down and I’ll never forget that day you brought me this beautiful smoothie to drink and you told me about the work of Dr. Pollack and the work that you have done as an anthropologist and using desert communities to hydrate. And I never before thought about … Although I always ask patients about hydration, you really opened up my mind to hydration. And I remember sitting across from you saying “Gina, do you want to write this book?” like “This needs to be written.” And so, in these net last four years we have delved into the research, in my wildest dreams never really thinking how complicated hydration was or even water was, thinking about that simple little H₂O molecule, how hard can that be, but realizing it’s actually quite complicated but from a clinical standpoint how much it’s changed my patients to really talk about becoming optimally hydrated and using food as hydration. So, yeah, it’s made a huge difference. I think it’s really made an impact on my patients. I mean, I know you know this but the feedback that we’re getting from people reading the book even is quite phenomenal on how much even the healthy patients, so called really healthy patients, are saying “Wow! I never knew how much even better I could feel.” So, yeah, it is a big deal. It’s a really big deal.

Gina:          Yeah, I think this one of the interviews for the work we’re doing with this Doctor Talk series is Zach Bush. And he has said, and I think he backs it up clinically, I know you’re going to agree that 100% of us are dehydrated. [Inaudible] one and that’s why it’s so urgent for doctors to share with other doctors how they’re using hydration in their protocol, how they’re including it, what the practicality of it is.

So, I’ll just ask give us some case studies. Give us two case studies from the book. What are your favorites?

Dr. Dana:   So, the case studies in the books are handpicked and they’re all pretty dramatic. I think there’s one that’s not too dramatic but really makes a good point. So, let’s see. I really liked the case study of the woman with fibromyalgia, who came in, who was completely miserable, not feeling good. She’d come in actually from another state to see me and walking in like an old lady and couldn’t … just pain, not working because she was in so much pain and she was drinking a lot of alcohol to mask the pain too. So, on that first visit, which I typically don’t make recommendations, my first visit is for me to gather information and do labs and that kind of thing but for her I said “You know what, let’s start just by …” I gave her the Five-Day Quench Plan and that was all I did with her and I said “I’m going to see you in two or three weeks. we’ll go over all the blood work and figure out a way to where we’re going to go with this.” She comes back two weeks later and literally like jumping up and down at the front desk saying “Oh my god, I feel so much better” and she did was hydrate a little bit better. That was just the start of it. Now, a year later she’s not drinking. Now it’s almost two years later. She’s not drinking. She is functional completely. She’s turned her life around but it was that small impetus that she needed to make those changes that she had really done the work over the next year or so but she was dramatic. And I see dramatic all the time and really sick people that people are not feeling good.

The other case study I love in the book is the … There’s quite a few. I love the one with the airline stewardess, my patient who’s a stewardess, which is the most dehydrating environment, as we know. So, I told her to start making some chia seed drinks and hydrating better and just really turning her on to how she can hydrate with food and hold on to that hydration better. And she came back and told me that she has all the stewardesses drinking chia seeds, bringing them on the plane. I love that story too. Yeah, they’re all dramatic. So, yeah, there’s …

And I’ll give you one more too because this one incorporates two things that I think are really important for me as an integrative doctor. The kid with asthma and really obese person who couldn’t lose weight and we put him on an elimination diet, meaning we got rid of gluten and soy and dairy and corn and a few other things and we hydrated him better, he started doing some green smoothies and his life turned around within a few months, completely turned around and he’s doing phenomenal.

Gina:          I think one really curious thing that happens when physicians recommend hydration as their first intervention is that it then energizes many other changes. In other words, people literally have enough cellular feel better that they can go on to practice a better diet, they can go on to moving a little bit. In other words, the lockdown that they’re stuck in, the malleability of hydration in their system allows them to actually cognitively be able to have the cognitive energy or the emotional energy to move into new practices in small incremental ways but that first intervention of hydration is what we’re really trying to get people to get to.

Dr. Dana:   Absolutely. We talked a lot about that too when we were writing the book. You remember like we really talked about wanting this to … these small changes can have huge effects and then become a rolling stone into a better direction. It’s funny, I …

Gina:          Yeah, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Go ahead with what you were going to say.

Dr. Dana:   I was going to say I gave a lecture just this past week to 60 women in Finance and these are heavy hitter women. Afterwards one of the woman came up to me and she looked at me and she’s like “You know, this I can do. This I can do.” And she was so relieved that it wasn’t a huge lifestyle change, a huge plan, but you know what, the truth is, the secret in my mind is, yeah, she’s going to start here but she’s going to go on and then make some bigger changes and really get that ball rolling but, yes, this is … we set into, this is the first step in any … Before you take on any nutrition plan, any diet, you need to start here. It sets the stage then for whatever you’re going to do that’s going to really help you improve your health. And I want to just say it out loud because I don’t think we’ve said it. This chronic low-grade dehydration, treating that is the best thing you could do to treat and prevent chronic illness. And I think it’s that important for people to hear. So, the first step in treating and preventing chronic illness is proper hydration.

Gina:          So, take us into your office. I want to be closer with you when a patient comes in. How do you start the conversation on hydration? I want to hear what you’re saying in that room? Help us develop that language, that script for what we’re saying.

Dr. Dana:   And before I even met you, I always ask about their diet – “What did you have for dinner last night? What did you have for breakfast this morning?” And I always very specifically asked “What did you have for dinner last night?” And patients will often say “Oh, well, I usually have this.” And I’m like “No, no, no, what did you have last night?” – “Well, that’s not typical.” – “That’s okay. I want to hear what you had last night.” So, I really want to hear what they had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in that day. And I always ask “What did you drink? Did you drink anything else during the day? Were there any snacks?” I really try to get a day’s worth of how they’re eating and how they’re hydrating. And then I’ll always ask “Do you think you hydrate enough?” And 95% of my patients say no, and I’m talking even my athletes, those kind of patients, almost all of them inherently say “No, I really don’t think I drink enough.” And then we start there. And depending on what’s going on with them, I will start to open the conversation or even give them … I’ll give them my book or I’ll give them hints on how to get that start, how to get that ball rolling. And I use my favorite thing that I’ve learned from you and your anthropological evidence is that frontloading your water. So, I say “Start here.” And I’ll tell them “I have a big glass bottle that I bought from Amazon with one of the glass cups that covers it. I fill it with water the night before. I’ll put a little pinch of sea salt. I’ll squeeze a little lemon in there. I’ll leave it on my counter so that when I wake in the morning, I turn over and I drink first thing in the morning.” So, I frontload my water as desert people do because, as you know, you told me, desert people certainly don’t drink eight glasses of water a day.

Gina:          They’re using those plant materials like cactus and aloe, even camel’s milk.

Dr. Dana:   Camel’s back, which I’ve yet to try.

Gina:          Who knew but I think this is why it’s so important to recommend eating as an important part of hydrating. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Dana:   Sure. So, this is the gist of Quench. So, we have learned that a new phase of water has been discovered and we talk a lot in the book about the work of John Pollock who’s the water researcher based in Seattle and he described this fourth phase of water as a gel phase. People know it as structured water. We call it sort of both in the book. And it is in that form of water that’s within ourselves and it’s also that form of water that’s in plants. And think about things like cucumbers, iceberg lettuce. It’s within that form that’s going to be better assimilated in our body and more hydrating in our body. And I think the fiber has a lot to do with it as well. And getting that fibers that were absorbing more water and holding on to it better than by drinking ever more water and peeing out our electrolytes and those kind of things. So, getting water from plants is the best thing that we can do to become optimally hydrated. So, we recommend a lot of green smoothies in the book. As we know, smoothies are not yogurt based or ice cream based drinks. We described them as blended vegetables, blended greens with water, with other things that you maybe want to add to it like salt and lemon and chia seeds and ginger and berries and green apple, whatever it is. We have, I think, over 50 recipes in the book that you can do, an incredible way to hydrate by using some green smoothies. So, that’s what I mean when we talk about eating your water.

Gina:          I heard something I wanted to emphasize that you were saying was such a surprise to people that inside the cells the water is not H₂O. This is a surprised that it is in this gel form.

Talk a little bit more about Dr. Pollack’s work and its impact on you and you as a practicing integrative physician. [Inaudible] science world coming and actually having a practical application.

Dr. Dana:   Yeah. So, this is what we dove into. We dove into this research and there’s quite a few scientists that are saying “Yes, there is this other phase of water.” And when you look at Dr. Pollack’s research, it makes complete sense from a physiological standpoint. And basically he talks about how these H₂O molecules layer upon each other, how they structure. And that’s basically what it means. And it’s in this layering that they share electrons and from that sharing of electrons you’re getting energy from water. These cells are holding on to those electrons. He describes it like a battery. And it’s fascinating and it makes so much sense. The research is still pretty new and this is what many of the water researchers are looking towards that water has electrical energy. And it makes so much sense to me now from a clinical standpoint on how it works when we are able to eat our water and hold on to that hydration better. Patients notice it. I see a difference in their energy, in their symptoms, in their fatigue and brain fog, in their headaches, in their constipation. So, yeah, we see a difference clinically. And I think, as a clinician, I have to listen to the research and look at the research and then I apply it to my practice. And it is, I think, once again, the single most important thing in patients that we can do to prevent this chronic illness. And very specifically some of the research that it’s going towards, I think, some of the things that this low-grade dehydration is putting us at risk for, things like … we know about fibromyalgia and aches and pains and brain fog and cognitive defects but things like certain cancers that puts us at risk for, specifically bladder and colon cancer, and then even bigger things. It puts us at risk for type 2 diabetes, which is fascinating because that is at an all time high right now. We’re seeing children being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. And, I think this is a missing link in that reason why. Yes, sugar absolutely plays a role, but it’s not the only thing that plays a role and I think our environments are just awful as far as dehydrating us. Between being inside and having heat and air conditioning to the chemicals that are in our products that we’re taking, the medicines that we’re taking, the lights that we’re using, all the EMF exposure that we’re being exposed to with our cell phones and our computers, it’s a problem. So, we have to compensate for our environments by becoming better hydrated.

By the way, if I didn’t say it, hydration is the baseline of all homeostasis in ourselves. So, when our cells are being bombarded, we need to create that homeostasis. And the way to do it is to hydrate better.

Gina:          You make excellent points, Dana. I think that the idea that hydration for most people is that it’s a functional moistening effect. You’ve made reference to its electrical or energizing affect. And when we are understanding hydration as the fuel which then drives cell function, it launches to the top of lifestyle interventions. And now you’ve made this beautiful case for the effect of our abnormal biological lifestyles. The modern lifestyle doesn’t match our biology anymore. So, what do we feel? Fatigue. So, if water is our fuel and we don’t have enough water, of course, we’re going to feel fatigued. We’ve run out of gas. We’ve run out of our fuel for cell function. And that inability of the cell to function, well, then is just the cascade for the level of chronic illness we’re seeing. We’re not risking it anymore. We’re not at risk anymore. We are in it.

Dr. Dana:   Yes.

Gina:          Everybody’s in it

Dr. Dana:   Yeah. And we talked about this too, a long time ago. I think that that afternoon fatigue for so many years and so many people are like “Oh, my blood sugar is dropping and I’m going to reach for sugar to get my energy up,” or caffeine when more than likely it’s probably dehydration and not necessarily hypoglycemia or low blood sugar. So, yeah, I think it’s important for people to really test that out. If you’re falling asleep after lunch, it could be blood sugar but I think try hydrating better like some of the ways we’ll give you and we give you in Quench first before you reach for that quick fix of sugar or coffee with sugar in it.

Gina:          Yeah, great point. At the Hydration Foundation we generated an Instagram campaign to go out at 3 o’clock every day, just putting in people’s hands that little nudge “Uh oh, time to get your fuel refueled. Go get that hydration.” And then we give recipes and tips and so forth on the little Instagram but it’s amazing how potent spreading this message is, how valuable it is. I mean now we have our hands on a real intervention that’s easily affordably potently available and it’s actually the simplest health act we do each day. So, it’s remarkable.

Dr. Dana:   So, let’s be clear. I don’t think we said it. I want to just say it out loud that the answer is not drinking more and more water and especially not drinking more and more bottled water because that is a whole issue in and of itself, the plastic bottles. You know what I’m saying but the answer is to hydrate in a way that makes sense for each and every person and every person is different. Some people sweat more. Some people are bigger. There’s many different reasons why people would be with different hydration and it’s important for you to find out what your optimal hydration is for yourself and to do it with more food-based substances rather than drinking ever more water. Now, we’re not saying not to drink zero water. We still need water but ideally also I think I just want to make the point because I think one of the things that … We’ve set out to really make this point in the book and I don’t think we went down that road but the idea of getting the bottled waters out of people’s hands and go buy glass bottles and filling it and filtering it yourself at home or finding better ways of doing that rather than drinking more bottled water. I think it’s an important thing. Just put a little reminder in everybody’s head.

Gina:          I love this notion that it’s actually our personal hydration, how we personally choose to hydrate, which is biologically different for everybody and eight glasses a day prescription for all people isn’t going to work. And not only that, it doesn’t include those fibers and those materials in the foods that are bringing that beautiful structured water right to you with their nutrients and their absorbability but the fact that our personal hydration, the choices we make, how we find our body health and balance around it for ourselves is the first step to worldwide water solutions because you’re getting out of the loop of guzzling all that water, using up water resources, very water challenge world we’re living in, getting the plastics out of the oceans, not participating in that project and plan, [inaudible] level of cognitive power through hydration to then make better contributions to your day, to your family. It’s a beautiful linkage of just starting with, well, the wisdom of water in our body [inaudible] up to cellular function and that is its own kind of biological wisdom. That’s great. I’m so glad you put that together.

Dr. Dana:   Thank you.

Okay, we have to stop for a second. So, we have to cut this. somebody’s just knocking at the door. Hold on one sec. I’m just going to leave it on hold on.

Gina:          So, Dana, I know we’re thinking about how doctors can talk to their patients about hydration and I know movement is a very important part of the protocol that you put together in Quench, we put together on fascia and the importance of it. Tell me a little bit about how you recommend that to your patients, how you talk about movement? We’re in the doctor’s office with you, right? Do you even show them micro movements right in your office?

Dr. Dana:   I do. So, what you just did, this little thing is a micro movement. So, I do. I talk about movement. I want to just talk about how we came to that idea that movement is a hydrating act. So, you turned me on to the work of Dr. Guemberto and he is the French, I think, plastic surgeon or surgeon who decided to put a camera under the skin of a living person and look at fascia, which has never been done before. I found it mind blowing that fascia … I was actually an anatomy undergrad major. I majored in anatomy and physiology. And so, we would do dissections and you dissect a cadaver and the fascia gets thrown away. You don’t even look at it until you get right down to the organs. So, it’s never been looked at in real time in a real living person. And it is fascinating. We’re really starting to … Fascia’s coming into fashion, let’s say, between scientists because it’s a huge organ. And when we look at it under that microscope, we’re seeing that it’s a delivery system for fluid and hydration, which to me is mind blowing because I’ve only ever thought that fluid and hydration gets moved via blood and lymph. And this is a whole new paradigm. It’s a whole new idea to think about. So, yet another reason why sitting is not good for us. We’re squelching delivery of that water to our periphery by sitting all day. We’re meant to move and we’re meant to move fluidly. And so, I always say this. The idea of, oh, you have to move your joints to lubricate them, we really understand why now because fascia is literally a hydraulic pump. It moves fluid in and out of ourselves and it really squeezes it in there. So, we lay out in the book some very simple micro movements, one being this up and down movement with our head, this kind of thing. Somebody said to me recently that I didn’t even think about, in our cars, I think we mentioned in the book something about when you’re turning to pull out your driveway in your car, we want to be fluid in doing that. However, the cars today don’t have … we no longer … they have the cameras in the back. We don’t even have to turn to look in the back. So, it’s even more important now we’re doing less and less. And so, twisting and stretching and you name it, that can be a micro movement. And so, we give you very simple ideas of micro movements to do throughout your day. And it’s important to say that this is not exercise. This has to be done in addition to exercise but it’s super important that we get that fluid going all day long and make it a part of our life and really, really move and bend and twist as much as possible and dance.

Gina:          We’re so trained as kids in school to sit still. I mean, I went through the Catholic system. So, the goal was to sit as still as pots.

Dr. Dana:   I know. It’s funny because the other fidgeting studies that we bring up in the book I think are really interesting too, that people who fidget actually live longer than people who don’t. It’s very interesting.

Gina:          You did an interview with Dr. Christiane Northrup and that point came up that fidgeting reduces mortality in a large segment or cross section, I think, of women in England.

Dr. Dana:   Also, I love … that’s funny because the movement part of hydration is the thing that Dr. Christiane Northrup had really hung on to and was really fascinated by and how we put that together and it makes complete sense.

Gina:          I think she’s famous for her Ageless Goddess book and Women’s Bodies Women’s Self. I think that what’s really fun is that when you think of goddesses, they’re throwing lightning bolts or something. [Inaudible] that’s part of the story. Well, you have also been recognized as an expert on the role of fats in hydration. Even Dr. Stephen Sinatra who is a cardiologist and has had to deal with a lot of questions around fats recognized how important the link you were making. People do not associate fats with hydration. So, can you unpack that for us and help us get to that understanding of why fats and hydration actually go together?

Dr. Dana:   So, there are some really big mind blowing ideas in this book and this is one of them too. So, we know that we need fats for our cell membranes. Our cell membranes are made of fat and water has to get through that fat in order to get into the cell. And there’s literally these pores called aquaporins, the pores through that fatty acid layer that water goes through. And if our cells are not healthy because our fat content is not healthy, it’s going to be cell death. It’s not good nor healthy for us but, yeah, the fats in our diets, every single day there’s something new coming out that we were wrong about fats in so many ways from so many years ago. Even, take for example, eggs. Eggs were thought to be unhealthy, I don’t know, 15 years ago and patients still think that by eating eggs your cholesterol is going to go up. It doesn’t work that way. And that whole thing has been really reneged. So, it’s important that we eat good healthy fat in our diets not only for so many other things, for inflammation, but, yes, for cellular hydration fats are imperative.

Gina:          So, imagine how new this idea is that in your conversation in your office, in your cubicle with your patient you’re talking hydration and what you’re going to bring up is not liquid consumption alone but food, fascial movement, micro movements through the day, and fats. That’s quite an unusual set of combinations to talk about when you’re trying to help your client and your patient get to that first intervention which is hydration. These are some new thoughts and we’re so committed to spreading them and helping hydration take on a new level of urgency and importance, especially in our modern world today where I’m speaking now as an anthropologist and an ethnography and going “Wow! Why aren’t we having a very, very big conversation about how abnormal our environments have become for our biological function. We’re mismatched by the life we’re living, our houses, the indoor, the lack of light, the electronic use device, now that whole G5 phones?” All of these things are really, really … They have taken us down in a way that we understand and because we’re seeing the rise of chronic illness everywhere whether you’re elderly or middle or child, it’s in each segment of the population but what’s so interesting and what I’d like to ask you about is well is hydration protective, can it protect us enough in these new environments?

Dr. Dana:   Absolutely. I think it’s our first line of defense, for sure. It is something though that has to be done on a daily basis and regularly. It’s not a one-time one shot kind of thing. These are lifestyle interventions that we need to take on and keep on and start there. And it’s not hard. It’s so easy. I want to go back to one thing, you as the anthropologist, just going back to the fats because I think one of the ways that the idea of fats and hydration and before we started to do the research into the fats came into play was with chia seeds. And you had just given me all that interesting information about … You are the chia seed champion, really.

Gina:          There’s such a simple solution for today and I’m trying to get so many farmers to grow them because they are of incredible benefit for the particular biology we’re living in today.

Dr. Dana:   They are truly a super food. So, not only do people who have played around with chia seeds know that the create a gel around them so that there’s that gel structured water kind of thing but the Omega 3 fatty acids that are in them are incredibly high and important for us as well. So, that was the first idea of fats when we started to talk about chia seeds and you had told me about your stories and how desert people, the Tarahumara tribe who use chia seeds to run marathons. So, yeah, that was because of you.

Gina:          Yeah, awesome work. As we link up our resources, that information came out of Chris McDonald’s book about Born to Run and as an apologist my head went … So, I was like “All right, I’m going to go find this out.” And, again, I know you know the story but we’ll share it for our listeners that I was able to use those chia seeds to help rehydrate my mother in the nursing home. And , o starting to link up our resources so that information from one strange book about how to run a marathon well and who does it in this world already super cool to bringing now these kinds of concepts about hydration into physicians’ offices so that they can really spread … They want patient transformation. We all do. There’s nothing more discouraging in being a doctor that somebody can’t get out of their pain or their struggle. What’s interesting is we rarely talk about what it’s like for a physician to see one of your patients really flourish. And I’d love to hear you talk not only … There’s a subtle difference I’m trying to get to which is to see your good patients, the ones that aren’t that difficult, they’re already there. What happens when they actually hit above the typical line and they get into this range of what is it that when you’re really finally hydrated, what is that [inaudible]like?

Dr. Dana:   I mean, it’s what I live for. I mean, if I have to be truthful, that’s what I live for. There is no greater gift to me than having a patient flourish and I mean that with every ounce of my being. It’s my gift. It is a gift to me when I have a patient write to me or tell me that they’re even reading this book, somebody I’ve never met reading this book. And you have to feel this way know that when somebody writes to us saying “I started on your Quench program and I feel so much better and I can’t believe it” or the Yoga teacher who is already super healthy saying “I can’t believe how my practice has evolved in doing this.” It’s incredible. I’m so lucky and gifted and that is a gift to me.

Gina:          What else? Is there any, Dana, on your journey with all of this and your becoming more hydrated yourself as a physician? I mean, put the mask on the airplane right, getting a physician. I mean, come on. How difficult an environment is it in our offices and cubicles and hospitals? They are such dehydrating environments and conditions that we’re offering from [inaudible]. Tell us what hydration is meant, just deep [inaudible], for you.

Dr. Dana:   I think it opens up for me personally, it just opens up a whole new idea for my own personal journey. I know when I am not hydrated enough or I don’t have my smoothie that day, I don’t feel well. And there are still days that it still happens and we’re all human beings where I can’t get to my smoothie or I can’t get to drink and it’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon, I’ve been working all day, I haven’t peed all day and I’m like “What am I doing? Why am I doing this to myself?” It is that insult day in and day out of doing that that I think takes a toll on our bodies. And so, when I do better, I feel better and I can relay that to my patients but I know it quicker now. And so, it is an absolute tool that I think anyone can and should benefit from. It’s so important for everybody to take this on. And I just know from my personal experience you will feel so much better and personally me and my 3000 patients that I’ve had over the past many years. So, it’s definitely something that needs to be discussed with patients, asked about. And I want to just talk about one thing that we didn’t mention and that’s the idea of over hydration with drinking too much water because I think this is something really important and I’m seeing it more and more from a clinical … I see it on labs. So, I’ll have patients come in, I’ll do some lab work on them and their sodium is low. And I used to not see that so much. And I see it at least once or twice a week a patient that has a low sodium and maybe a low chloride. And it’s telling me they’re drinking too much water and they’re flushing out their electrolytes. People think like that’s really uncommon because that could actually be very dangerous but it’s, once again, sort of subclinical but their labs are showing it. And when I ask them how much water they drink, they say “I drink a ton of water. I’m drinking water all day.” I’m like “Huh, you’re not doing it right. We need to change that.” And that’s when I really start to talk to them about electrolyte replacement and maybe switching out some of those glasses of water for a green smoothie and putting a little pinch of sea salt or some other kind of electrolyte, even maybe a supplement to do that. I think it’s really important. So, I want to just make sure we mention that because I think it’s more of a thing than we thought as doctors. I’m seeing it more and more that patients are drinking … And it’s not just elderly patients who are forgetting or there is a syndrome where patients do that. I’m talking about regular patients who are drinking way too much water and flushing out the electrolytes. And when you ask them are they getting leg cramps, “Yes, I get them all the time.” It’s because you’re flushing out your electrolytes. So, a really important piece of the puzzle there that I think we’re forgetting to ask as clinicians.

Gina:          It is important and especially in the cultural context of always urging people to drink eight glasses of water a day, everybody go out and get those eight glasses a day, and then you’ll see on health sites the recommendation that people get a gallon into them or it’s the amount that’s the ounces of what they weigh. And we are just trying to bring a real cautionary message into this. And we know that we get such help and aid from getting our water from our foods. And that’s why we brought the recipes into the book as a “Look, this is a great way to hydrate.” I think we should end on a recipe for doctors. I think that’s a great idea. I know we’ve done this recipe ourselves. So, we get to share it. And I think sharing your recipe is such a beautiful way to bring community together but for really busy doctors who don’t have even time to make a smoothie, they don’t have a blender, just go buy some ground chia seeds, keep them in your office, buy a little pack of powdered berries, raspberries or some green powders and just have it around and throw it all in a glass. There’s your smoothie.

Dr. Dana:   With water.

Gina:          With water, exactly.

Dr. Dana:   Yeah. So, like the powdered reds, the greens.

Gina:          Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Dana:   Chia seeds and water.

Gina:          Right. Go get a simple … just have that stuff around you as you’re traveling through your rounds and your thing and we’ll ask you what are you drinking.

Dr. Dana:   I love it. In a glass bottle, please.

Gina:          Glass bottle.

Thank you, Dana. I think you’re an extraordinary healer. I’ve been so grateful to get to work with you and to put the Quench plan into the world but even too now we have this opportunity through the Hydration Foundation to share these extraordinary interviews with top doctors who are using hydration in their protocols with their patients. I think we’re going to make a big difference that way. So, thank you very much and bless you.

Dr. Dana:   Gina, thank you. I love working with you too. Thank you.

Gina:          Bye, bye.

Dr. Dana:   Bye.