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WATER FACTS
Dehydration is one of the most frequent causes of
hospitalization among people over 65. In fact about one half of those
hospitalized for dehydration die within one year. So getting
enough water, six to 8, eight ounce glasses per day is especially important for
senior citizens. A D id You Know? The average person consumes about 16,000 gallons (60,600 liters) of water during his or her lifetime. The US Environmental Agency has detected trichloroethylene in 25 states during the last 10 years. About 100,000 pounds of the chemical has been released into water and land from steel pipe and tube manufacturing industries in Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia between 1987 and 1993. The result: Possible leaching into groundwater. This past summer, upstate New York experienced the state's worst ever E. Coli outbreak which claimed the lives of at lease two people and sickened more than one thousand. On September 23rd the NYS Health commissioner banned the use of untreated drinking water and ordered daily water testing at the states fairgrounds during public events. December 1999 To Top of PageWaterlogged Your body is one-half to four-fifths water, depending on how much body fat you have. Water makes up nearly 85 percent of your brain, about 80 percent of your blood and about 70 percent of your lean muscle. (Because there are a lot of tissues that have less water, the average is about 50 percent.) Every system in your body depends on water. Its roles are impressive. Water: regulates your body temperature, removes wastes, carries nutrients and oxygen to your cells, cushions your joints, helps prevent constipation, lessens the burden on your kidneys and liver by removing some of the toxins, helps dissolve vitamins, minerals and other nutrients to make them accessible to your body Lack of water can lead to dehydration. Even slight dehydration can sap your energy and make you feel lethargic. Dehydration poses a particular health risk for the very young and very old. Besides helping your body run smoothly, there's some evidence that water helps prevent certain diseases. People who have had kidney stones can prevent further stones from forming by drinking lots of fluid. And in one study, women who drank more than five glasses of water a day had a risk of colon cancer that was 45 percent less than others in the study who drank two or fewer glasses a day. November 1999 To Top of Page
Why Water?You lose about 10 cups of fluid a day through sweating, exhaling, urinating and bowel movements. Drinking water isn't the only way to replace those fluids. You also get water from other beverages and even from foods. In an average diet, it's estimated that solid foods provide between three and four cups of water a day. But because it's difficult to estimate the amount of water solid foods contribute, it's recommended that you only count fluids toward meeting your goal of eight glasses a day. But that's only a ballpark estimate. To better determine how much water you specifically need each day, divide your weight in half. Your answer is the approximate number of fluid ounces you should drink daily. Eight glasses is the average. Some people need more, while others can get by on less. Exercising or engaging in any activity that causes you to perspire and dehydrate increases your water requirement, as do hot humid or cold weather and high altitudes. Some beverages, such as those with caffeine and alcohol, are dehydrating, so if you drink them, you need even more water to compensate. October, 1999 To Top of Page
All is Born of Water, All is Sustained by Water - Goethe More than perhaps any other element of life on earth, water makes possible the existence of all living organisms. When two hydrogen atoms fasten to one oxygen atom, they create an asymmetrically shaped molecule. The hydrogen atoms are drawn together slightly on one side of the oxygen atom, creating a positive charge on one side of the water molecule and a negative charge on the other. The opposite charges create an effect similar to a magnet—an attraction that bonds water molecules to neighboring water molecules and to other substances. This remarkable chemical circumstance knits together the fabric of life. The aggregate accumulation of water molecules is a substance that flows at normal temperatures. Most other fluids—sap, milk, blood—are water-based. They are made of nonliquids suspended in water. Without the motion and the distribution system that moving water provides, the elements of life would never connect, their commingling under sunlight would not produce the complicated carbon compounds that lead eventually to cells, cells would not be able to gather as the moist organized and specialized cell colonies we call tissue, their aggregation would have no exchanging processes, no supply systems of food and breath, the eye would not see, the brain would not compute, the muscle would not move. By and large, the characteristics of the water molecule that make it life-giving are freakish properties. They are, more often than not, exceptions to basic chemical rules. · Almost every other substance becomes heavier, smaller, and more dense as it changes from a liquid to a solid. But water expands and grows lighter, so that ice floats. If that does not seem remarkable, it should. If water acted like other substances, its solid form, ice, would sink. The floor of the sea and the bottoms of lakes would accumulate ice. Gradually, winter after winter, the ice would lock up more and more water until there would be none running free on the planet. There would be no life on earth. · More substances can be dissolved by water than by any other material. The water molecule, with its magnet like opposite charges, is able to carry other substances suspended within itself, making it a nearly universal solvent. · Water is able to climb of its own accord, a feat that results in capillary action in soils and in plants. Without this characteristic, water would not travel from the deepest root tip to the highest leaf. There would be no internal flow of nutrients in complicated organisms, and thus no complicated organisms. The trick occurs because the attraction of water molecules to themselves and to other molecules is so strong that they are drawn upward from one foreign molecule to another, always pulling along the adjacent water molecules. The climb is halted only by gravity. = Great amounts of heat can be absorbed by water, making seas, rivers, lakes, and clouds vast energy storage banks. The release of stored heat from the ocean, for example, moderates climates, making coastal winters milder than those only a few miles inland. · Human blood, excluding the cells and proteins, has the same general composition as seawater. Through a fortunate accident, Planet Earth is the right distance from the sun to make the existence of life-giving water possible. Closer to the sun the heat is so intense that water would be vaporized; farther away, water would be permanently frozen. Only Mars, of the other planets in the solar system, is in the narrow temperature band in which water can exist in all three states. But only Earth is blanketed by a living, water-built biosphere, in which the lifesource itself seems to issue from water's evaporation, precipitation, runoff, seepage, transpiration from plants, respiration from animals, melting, freezing, and flowing. Earth, as far as we know, is the only water planet. September, 1999 To Top of Page
Every living creature is made of a tight network of cells bathed in a sea of salty water, what the scientist calls "the internal environment". Seventy percent of the human body is made of water. In addition to the water that carries red and white blood cells in our blood vessels, there is the extracellular water in which the 100 million trillion cells in our body exist. Two remarkable features of body water are it's purity and the consistency of it's composition and temperature: it contains no microbes or viruses, it's chemical composition and temperature do not vary. Our body has millions of filters, a waste disposal system and thermostats. It also has a unique sterilization plant, the immune system. The immunity system tracks down and destroys all substances, bacteria, and chemicals that are foreign to the body and that would otherwise pollute the salty waters of our internal environment. Throughout the millions of years required for the emergence of modern humans, the body had to struggle to preserve itself against the onslaught of bacteria, viruses and parasites. However, this evolution of human beings took place in an unpolluted environment. The pure waters circulating throughout the body were not exposed to industrial wastes or pesticides. By contrast, through the past few decades people have been exposed to an inordinate amount of chemical pollutants, drugs of all sorts (legal and illegal, heavy metals, and ionizing radiations. These chemicals and radiations readily bypass the protective filters of our body. Prolonged exposure to them results in the weakening of our body defenses and a damaging of our cells. Some cancer specialists believe that 80 percent of cancers are caused by environmental factors that could be controlled. Claude Bernard, the founder of modern medicine and the first scientist to study the internal environment of our body a hundred years ago, concluded his studies by saying: " It is only because all of our cells are bathing in water of constant composition and purity that man may enjoy a free life." The effort to preserve our water resources has a profound biological basis; it is the prerequisite for the preservation of the purity of our internal environment, which is bound to reflect the composition of the watershed. Our own preservation is closely linked with the preservation of the water from which life evolved three billion years ago. August, 1999 To Top of Page
How Water Is Carbon DatedCarbon Dating is determined by analysis of a radioactive isotope
of carbon called carbon-14. Most carbon exists as carbon-12 which is a
non-radioactive, stable isotope. Carbon-14 is formed in the upper atmosphere by
the action of cosmic ray neutrons on nitrogen. After formation the carbon-14
will react with oxygen in the atmosphere to form carbon-14 dioxide. Over time
carbon-14 will July, 1999 WATER FACTS ARCHIVES 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 |
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