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Wikipedia Has Got it All Wrong; Hydration Does Depend on the Type of Water You Drink

We Are Setting the Record Straight

It was shocking to find that some of the internationally recognized, award-winning scientists we present at the Hydration Foundation appear on Quackwatch lists, even with demonstrated experiments supporting their published, peer-reviewed work in referenced and respected journals. Wikipedia also falls down on structured water science. They don’t reference or recognize important scientific work that is changing how we interact with water and how water interacts with us.

If you type “Wikipedia, structured water,” here’s the first sentence you get in reply: “Hexagonal water, also known as structured water, is a term used in a marketing scam  that claims the ability to create a certain configuration of water that is better for the body.”

Wiki’s entry tars us, here at the non-profit Hydration Foundation, with other associations, and more importantly, hurts our ability to share better types of hydration, just as we discover how much we need water’s cleansing action across all living forms in our ever-more polluted environment.

We Need a Big Hydration Rethink

For our kids trapped in dehydrating schools, suffering more anxiety, poor performance and increasing school-sports concussions; for our elders in nursing homes with unmitigated chronic dehydration; for us in our cars and cubicles, attached to cell phones and screens, pills and processed junk, fighting to gulp 8 glasses a day, we need a big rethink around hydration.  

Processed Water

What we drink is as important as what we eat, but most of us aren’t aware that our water is as processed as the processed food we now know to avoid. Most water has minerals and beneficial microbes removed and chemicals added.

Just in time, it is profound to find we can get superior hydration from fresh food, from natural minerals and microbes in water, and from water that has been shaped by movement in nature; not sterilized, and by processing, made inert.

Therefore, with joy, we feature below the major and growing PUBLISHED, PEER-REVIEWED science, the published journal articles, books and sources that address previously inadequate explanations of water dynamism and point to emerging understandings.  We actually believe we will never come to the end of understanding water, but isn’t all of life bigger than our ability to know it? Yet we become bigger ourselves for discovering new things.

Structured Water is a Discovery of Major Proportions

Structured water is not new, it has always been present in nature and in all of us, we just see it now.  The whole picture of water is not only vapor, liquid and ice, but a sliding spectrum of distinct phases that water uses to renew and charge itself.  Structured water is that state. That’s when water releases the spark of life into all living things.

New Frontiers of Water Science

Consistently, new research is coalescing around the previously little recognized action of invisible waves on water activity. The frontiers of water research is quantum and electric.  

Just as we can understand how liquid, vapor and ice would have entirely different impacts on environments, there are impacts inside us based on what type of water is in there.

These findings point to the difference between grounded states of water molecules and excited states of water molecules and how instantaneously water molecules jump between these states.  

Just like rocking a boat, eventually larger waves begin to coalesce and that begins to activate a different impact on other molecules. This is a mechanical result that isn’t so hard to picture, but there is more.  

Hydration Delivers Information

These waves carry information in the form of electrical signals.  In our digital age it is not hard for us to understand that digital signals travel instantaneously.  We understand that a clear and coherent signal is necessary to deliver better and faster information.  Hydration isn’t just wet, it is coherent wave signals that deliver information from cell to living cell.  

Here’s a good place to say that structured water research is still so new that it flies under many names: structured water, fourth phase of water, ordered water, liquid crystalline, exclusion zone or EZ, even H3O2.  We are not done naming all the phases of water, and we got stuck at just three for far too long.

A more sophisticated understanding and appreciation of water is upon us and that will help our health and planet too.

Of course, scientists do not always agree with each other, but the general direction of a new state or phase of water that actually drives biological action is especially consequential.  

2017 was a breakthrough year, as respected universities from FOUR major water research teams, Oxford, University of California at Berkeley, University of Stockholm, and Cornell, published articles on new states of water. Their work is also listed below.  

Of course we don’t need to understand the science to experience better hydration, but this work is so inspiring, just reading it or knowing it exists improves our approaches to hydration. In our modern dehydrating world, with its planes and cars, sequestered indoor living, dried out, processed food and now tipping the balance, the high use of electronic devices, we need new wisdom.  

Structured Water is How Nature Works

Structured water is not a marketing sham to get your money, rather it is a discovery of how nature works.  Crazy sales claims are always crazy, but the work of water, in the state designed by nature to have the most impact, is ever available to us, as long as we don’t interfere.  Come on, it’s common sense that water delivered by constricting pipes run through miles of buildings, after being “washed” by chemicals, isn’t quite normal; nor is water sitting inside a plastic bottle, loaded from the back of a truck, stored how long in a dark warehouse somewhere.  That’s not the same as water rushing out of a spring, or packaged by nature in a juicy apple.

Please, can we just have a reverent moment for water provided from nature’s hand, not ours. It’s not a scam that some types of water will better hydrate, reduce fatigue, improve focus, reduce stiffness, deliver longevity, improve skin, hair, eyesight, mood, in short, get your own juices flowing! That’s nature, supporting you to live through water. None of that is a sham.  

Our Review of Peer Reviewed Articles and Books on The Science of Water

Gerald Pollack and “The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid and Vapor”

This book is the groundbreaking and delightfully accessible text on “What is water?” It is the seminal work in the field of different phases of water.

Many studies not only refer to his work, they replicate his findings, confirm from other disciplinary approaches and are published in peer reviewed articles. For easy access to Pollack’s concepts we recommend his TEDxTalk.

Life Depends Upon Two Kinds of Water, Phillipa Wiggins
This article from a woman scientist in New Zealand was published in the prestigious PloS1 journal in 2008 and virtually disappeared almost without a trace. In this article, she describes the instantaneous switching between states of water. We feature her work here to recover her groundbreaking place and draw attention to this important and fundamental laboratory work. A must read for all working in water science, whether biology, chemistry or physics.

Ho, Mae-Wan, The Living Rainbow and H20
This book is the brilliant Mae Wan Ho’s last book and a profound pointer to a renewing future. A respected geneticist who founded her own Institute, it offers a novel and panoramic perspective of cell biology based on structured water as the “means, medium and message of life.”  

Large Supramolecular Water Clusters Caught on Camera – A Review by Mae-Wan Ho. This article provides a context for studying water molecules in groups rather than only one.

The Widespread Properties of EZ Water

Del Giudice, E., V. Voeikov A., Lomonosov A. Tedeschi, “The widespread properties of EZ water.”  A chapter in the textbook Fields of the Cell: The origin and the special role of coherent water in living systems, Research Signpost 2015

This book chapter adds research to the mounting evidence of structured water’s impact on cell functioning and signaling.

Fields of the Cell: Coherent Water in Living Systems

Annual Conference of the Biology, Chemistry, and Physics of Water

This annual conference convenes many of the world’s top water scientists from all over the world, such as Russia, Korea, Japan, Italy, Finland, Germany, Austria, Canada and France, including Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier. Many fascinating presentations are available here:

Free Video archives

Two of our favorite include one by the world’s most recognized “tree-ologist”  Ernst Zurcher on how trees hydrate using structured water:

 Chronobiology of Trees and the Fourth Phase of Water

And John Stuart Reid’s pioneering work making invisible sound and information wave patterns in water visible. In this article Reid provides images of how sound and wave action affect the water inside our cells:

CymaScope Imaging and Analysis of Cancer Cell and Healthy Cell Sonic Signatures in Water

 

RECENT SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS CONFIRM DR. POLLACK’S GROUNDBREAKING WORK

Below find successful experiments, independent of Dr. Pollack, that show new phases of water are being documented.  They add to the emerging conversation on the importance of hydration in biological health and our new understanding of water:

Dr. Antonella DeNinno independently studied the experiments of Dr. Pollack and agreed with his theories on EZ water for the Italian National Agency for New Technology.

De Ninno, A. et al,  “Dynamics of formation of the Exclusion Zone Near Hydrophilic Surfaces” in Chemical Physics Letters (2017, 667, 322-326)

Dr. Enrico D’Emilia also reviews Dr. Pollack’s experiments in a reasoned way and offers an H-Bond theory, which supports EZ water.  See Dr. D’Emilia’s “Force In Water: Evidence That Hydronium Cyclotron Resonance Enhances Polymorphism” in Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine (2015, vol. 34, 4)

Dr. Del Giudice was a senior quantum physicist with the Italian Nuclear Research Institute who derives his work on water molecules in quantum physics from Pollack’s breakthrough of EZ water. Del Giudice demonstrates that interfacial water adjacent to hydrophilic surfaces is electrically charged. It is known as ” Exclusion Zone water ” (EZ-water) because it excludes solutes, which is consistent with Dr. Pollack’s work.  

Dr. E. Del Giudice’s “The widespread properties of EZ water,” in Fields of the Cell, (Research Signpost 2015).

Fields of the Cell: Coherent Water in Living Systems

In 2017, Katrin Amann-Winkel and her team from University of Stockholm also identified and reported on a different and new phase of water. Amann-Winkel says “water transforms into a viscous liquid which almost immediately transforms to a different, even more viscous, liquid of much lower density than ice.”  

The Sakally Group at UC Berkeley is using ultrafast laser spectroscopy to investigate one single water molecule and their findings also show that water exists in other states besides liquid, gas, and solid. As an important aside Sakally, lead author of the study notes, “Water is the most important substance on the planet. Its unique and versatile hydrogen bond network underlies many of the processes responsible for life as we know it. Yet, and despite centuries of study, vital questions regarding the intrinsic nature of water remain unanswered.”

The Oxford University team led by physicist Laura Maestro also documented a second state of liquid water, as reported in Science Alert. They confirm that water switches between states.

Smithsonian Magazine also featured a story that scientists discovered that water might exist in a whole new state: “In addition, the structural changes in liquid water may be associated with the behavior of biological macro molecules, and in particular with protein denaturation. This is relevant to us because it is known that hydration supports protein functions in the body.  

 

This aligns with recent work published from a science team based at Cornell University.  These scientists recently found that water forms a ‘spine of hydration’ around DNA. This research identifies a previously unknown characteristic of water in the cell. “It’s super-flexible. It dissipates energy and mediates interactions, and that’s becoming more recognized in biological systems,” says Poul Petersen, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell University.  

With all these new studies, we note that there are differing theories of why this phase of water transpires, yet it is shown by demonstrable, transparent experiments to exist.  

We know that basic chemistry is inadequate to examine all the phases of water and we will continue to share the work being done on bioelectrical, nanoparticle, and sub-cellular physics, in addition to the continuing work of  Dr. Pollack.