Water, water, everywhere, (but which one should I drink?)

An informative look at recent Holistic Fitness News

DR KAPLAN'S WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

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Every now and then water is back in the news. It's usually the same old story of whether we are being ripped off when we buy water in bottles. I'm tempted to call this issue the story of old water in a new bottle - and with good reason. The defenders of tap water are saying that some of the trendy, bottled water can be up to two years old! Tap water, they claim, is fresh every day.

So once again the men in white coats put water under the microscope and into the machines for vigorous testing. The results were interesting. Here are some of the findings as published.

1. Bottled 'mineral water' may contain less minerals than tap water. Minerals typically mean sodium, calcium and magnesium.
2. London tap water compares well with mineral water but don't drink from bathroom taps if they are supplied from a tank in the loft or on the roof.
3. If you use a chlorine filter for your tap water, make sure you replace it regularly. Otherwise it could actually put bacteria back into the water.
4. My view: Chemically, bottled water cannot be shown to be superior in any way to tap water. However the chemist's viewpoint is not the only way of looking at things. Mineral water usually comes from an underground spring where it has filtered through rocks for many thousands of years, which means that 'freshness' isn't exactly the issue. From an holistic point of view, this makes it preferable to tap water which is recycled and purified by mechanical equipment. We don't know everything about water so we can't measure everything. A gut instinct tends to favour pure water from an underground spring over water that has been chemically 'treated'. There is also the taste to consider. Now here is a test to think about. Give a 100 volunteers 10 glasses of cold water. Will they be able to distinguish the 5 glasses of tap water from the five glasses of still mineral water?

Homeopathic Tip

Let's stay with the issue of water because it plays a huge role in homeopathic medicine. As everyone knows, homeopathic medicines go through a number of serial dilutions in water. For example, lets look at a medicine that I've recommended in this column, Arnica 6.

Arnica 6 started off as one drop of plant extract from the Alpine Arnica Montana. This was then diluted and shaken in a 100 drops of water (with a little ethanol) thus making a one in a hundred dilution or 10-2 . This is done 6 times (hence the Arnica 6) The mathematical among you will have calculated that the final dilution will then be 10-12 or one in a million million dilution. This is clearly far too tiny a dose to have a physiological effect so how does homeopathy work? Homeopaths believe that water has a 'memory'. They feel that water goes through changes in the serial dilutions because at each stage of dilution, the test tube containing the water and the medicine is vigorously shaken and hit against a firm surface, in a process known as succussion. Nobody knows what these changes are; they have yet to be calibrated. However just as every snowflake is a unique constellation of water, so every homeopathic remedy may also have it's own unique 'personality'.

Homeopaths and other scientists will continue to try to identify the many mysterious qualities of water, that magical combination of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen, into the most familiar of compounds, H20.

One thing that everyone agrees on is that most of us need to drink more water.

Dr Kaplan's personal website is: www.drkaplan.co.uk and his practice website is www.140harleystreet.co.uk and he can be contacted on (020) 7487 3416