THERE IS ONE DRINK I ENJOY MORE THAN ANY OTHER, AND I NEVER CAN DRINK enough of it, I’m so fond of it.
You should drink more of it, too.
You really should. And I’m going to tell you how to do it.
First, I’ll tell you what it is (though you have probably already guessed).
But wait. Let’s recap a bit.
I’ve told you that I like strong drink and the occasional soft drink. I’ve sung the praises of coffee and tea in moderation. You also know that I love almost any flavor of unsweetened, caffeine-free herbal tea, served piping hot or ice cold. Naturally, I adore all fruit and vegetable juices, because I adore all fruits and vegetables.
Not one of these aforementioned drinks is my favorite, however. No, indeed. If I had to choose but one thing to drink for the rest of my life, it certainly would not be wine or beer or root beer or coffee or tea or juice.
No, it would be water—pure, clean water, the world’s best beverage. That’s my favorite, and I’m not just saying so because water is essential to life—though that is a very good reason.
In fact, anyone foolish enough to pick Coke, or carrot juice, or anything else but water as the sole beverage for the rest of their life would have a very short rest of their life, I’m sorry to say.
I also pick water as my favorite drink because I love the way it refreshes me and makes me feel good all over. I also love the taste of water, as long as it tastes like nothing. That’s the perfect flavor for water. It should be clear and clean and fresh, like the air we want to breathe.
Just as we don’t want a lot of difficult smells in our air, we also don’t want a lot of puzzling flavors in our water.
Unfortunately, the municipal tap water that comes out of the faucets in our homes or the drinking fountains in town is sometimes flavored in ways that disappoint us, to say the least. It is still water, and unless there is something seriously amiss at the water treatment plant, it is avowedly safe and better than nothing.
But, it is not water at its best.
I used to make fun of bottled water when it started becoming so popular a few decades ago. Why were people paying boutique prices for the stuff that covers most of the Earth’s surface free of charge?
But I swear, tap water has started tasting worse and worse as time goes by, at least to me, and now I’m grateful for the fact that there’s a whole aisle at the grocery store that is stocked with bottled water of every shape and size and price.
Well, I’m mostly grateful, I should say.
It’s a bit of a sore point for me personally, considering where I live. I can walk out into my front yard and see the famous arrowhead rock formation carved by nature into the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains in Southern California. “The Arrowhead,” as it is called, is California State Natural Landmark No. 977 and it is the namesake not only for Lake Arrowhead above it, on the mountaintop, but also of Arrowhead Springs below it, an artesian oasis where bottled Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water has been sourced since 1903.
I see the tanker trucks coming and going, filling up with perfect water that is transported all over the Western United States and enjoyed by millions of people.
Since I live downhill in the valley just below the fountainhead of this remarkable water, I figure my tap water should be awesome. Right?
Alas, the tap water is clear and bright only some of the time, while other times it comes out in various shades of gray, or even brown, or even red. And it ranges in taste from OK to terrible with flavor notes that can be described variously as metallic, tanky, rusty, swampy, and soapy.
I sigh, heavily, as I turn the tap on, then off. And later I grumble, a lot, as I pay good money for bottled Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water at the store. I wish I could just trudge up the hill a little ways, with a pail, and get the good stuff that comes out of the magic spigot there, within sight of my house. Unfortunately, it’s a tightly guarded location.
Oh, well.
In spite of my grumbling, I do admit that I am willing to pay whatever it takes to have good water to drink.
It’s vital. It’s the world’s best and most necessary beverage. And it’s my favorite.
You see, I come from a long line of water drinkers.
You won’t be surprised to hear that Seventh-day Adventists in general are big aquaphiles (yes, that’s a word!). It started at the beginning, with Ellen G. White. You’re not surprised to hear that, either, are you?
“Pure water is one of heaven’s choicest blessings,” my great-great-grandmother wrote in The Ministry of Healing (1905). “Its proper use promotes health. It is the beverage which God provides to quench the thirst of animals and man. It helps to supply the necessities of the system, and assists nature to resist disease.”
Now, when I was growing up, the Weeks family refrigerator was stocked with very few things to drink. There was milk, which I always disliked. I would pour it sparingly on cereal, but I didn’t care to drink it by the glass, ever. There often was a quart of buttermilk, too, in the family fridge, because my dad was fond of it. I have forgiven him for this. He was a good man. But honestly, buttermilk is the ghastliest last thing in the world I ever would pour down my own throat. In fact, I loudly hated it so much even in childhood that my parents learned to deploy it as a device of punishment. If I misbehaved in some extreme way, I was forced to drink a tall glass of buttermilk. It was like torture.
I also hated cottage cheese, another nasty lumpy dairy product, so my parents also implemented this as a deterrent weapon. A compulsory serving of cottage cheese was way more effective than a hard whipping in making me repent my sins.
I think we can glean two important truths from this whole business with the buttermilk and the cottage cheese.
First, my parents were sadistic monsters.
Ha! I am just joshing, of course. What I mean to say is that my parents were clever and ingenious tacticians in establishing discipline in their household.
Second, we also can surmise from this business with the buttermilk and the cottage cheese that I was greatly ahead of my time in perceiving the manifest dangers of consuming dairy products. Either that, or I was just lactose intolerant. We never will know, because I have shunned most dairy products by choice for most of my life, so their physical impact on me never has never been fully tested.
Anyway, let’s get back to business here. We were talking about the beverage contents of my family fridge when I was growing up. Usually, in addition to milk and sometimes buttermilk (ick!), there was juice of some kind. Orange or apple or grape.
That’s about it.
There never was soda pop, either the caffeinated kind because of the caffeine, or any other variety because of the sugar. We would have root beer floats as a special treat, now and then, but we would go out for those. There never was root beer in the house.
And, of course, there was no tea or coffee.
Sometimes I would complain, “There’s nothing to drink!” as I opened, then closed the refrigerator door, dejectedly.
“Just drink water,” Mom would say. She said it a million times.
And that’s what I did. I just drank water. A million times.
We didn’t splurge on bottled water in those days. We drank it out of the tap. Straight. We didn’t even put ice in it. Or keep a pitcher of it in the fridge.
I guess Mom believed that good plain water was good enough.
She got it from her dad.
Herbert C. White, my grandfather, wrote more about water even than Ellen G. White, his grandmother, ever did. In his book Nature’s Seven Doctors (1962), co-written with Dr. H. E. Kirschner and published under his own imprint, H. C. White Publications, water gets top billing.
It is one of the seven essential agents of health discussed in the book (along with sunshine, fresh air, good food, exercise, rest, and an active mind), but it gets four chapters of its own, more than any other.
Water has an “almost magic power” to promote health, prevent sickness, and reverse disease, my grandfather wrote. Many examples are offered of how water has been used throughout history to treat the body, both internally and externally.
Dr. Kirschner was personally acquainted with Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who for decades was director of the Adventist-founded Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. Hydrotherapy was high on the list of therapeutic services offered at the institution (not surprising, since Kellogg himself was author of a massive book titled Rational Hydrotherapy, published in 1918). Patients were treated with copious amounts of water both inside and outside their bodies. Cold baths, hot baths, sitz baths, cabinet baths, “fomentations” (hot and cold wet compresses), wet sheet wraps, water massages, and colonic irrigation and cleansing were among the extensive water applications available.
The sanitarium grew from little more than 100 patients during its first year of operation (1866) to more than 7,000 annually during its heyday in the early 1900s.
Indeed, “The San,” as it was called, became famous and attracted a clientele that included such luminaries as President Warren G. Harding, President William Howard Taft, former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, aviator Amelia Earhart, Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford, J. C. Penney founder James Cash Penney, human rights activist Sojourner Truth, playwright George Bernard Shaw, actor and athleteJohnny Weissmuller, and even C. W. Post, founder of Post Cereals, which competed with the cereal company founded by Kellogg and his brother W. K. Kellogg.
In fact, Dr. Kellogg would later accuse Post of stealing the recipe for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes while he was a patient at Battle Creek. Post had crept into Kellogg’s office and burglarized his safe, the good doctor claimed!
OK, that’s enough about corn flakes. Let’s get back to hydrotherapy. And when I say hydrotherapy, I don’t mean sitz baths, though don’t let me stop you if you enjoy those. But, no, I am talking about the health benefits of water taken in its simplest form. In a drinking glass.
Lots of drinking glasses. Every day.
We need it.
You see, humans are just big, complicated bags of water, so yes, water is very, very important. It’s the main ingredient in our bodies and it accounts for about 60 percent of our body weight. It’s what keeps every system in our bodies lubed and lively. It transports nutrients to the cells where they are needed and flushes toxins and wastes away from our vital organs.
And, mind you, we humans are not watertight. Not at all. We are big, leaky bags of water. We lose water when we breathe, when we talk, when we sneeze, when we sweat, and when we relieve our bladders and bowels. We are losing water all the time, so consequently we need to replenish water all the time. It’s what makes us work.
The old adage, “Drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day,” is a useful formula, and easy to remember, but it’s important to remember that circumstances and individual needs do vary. If you are exercising and sweating on a hot or humid day, or if you’re huffing and puffing at high altitude, or if you’re pregnant or breastfeeding, or if you’re sick and feverish and losing fluids due to vomiting or diarrhea, you obviously need extra water.
The “drink when you’re thirsty” rule is a good one, but unfortunately there are millions of people who are so chronically dehydrated that they don’t recognize thirst as soon as they should. Here’s what the Mayo Clinic Health Letter has to say on the subject: “Don’t use thirst alone as a guide for when to drink. By the time you become thirsty, it’s possible you may already be slightly dehydrated.”
Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about becoming parched, because you are going to hydrate properly. I’m going to show you how.
First, if you haven’t started doing so already, consider eating the world’s best diet, which is full of juicy fruits and vegetables like tomatoes and watermelon and grapes and cucumbers and carrots that are as much as 90 percent water. If you’re eating right, you’re getting up to one-quarter of your daily water needs from your food alone.
The rest is easy!
Now, I know, if you were to fill up eight separate tumblers with 8 ounces of water each, and line up those eight tumblers in a row, and look at those 64 ounces of water all at once, it would be a daunting sight.
So, don’t do that.
Take it nice and slow. Drink a glass of water when you wake up each day. You can manage that, can’t you? It’s just one glass of water, and it’s a great way to power up and get started.
It also will help you moderate the temptation to rely too much on coffee or tea in the morning. That’s also a good thing.
If you feel like having an extra glass of water with or after breakfast, great, go ahead. If not, don’t worry about it.
But remember to take a mid-morning break (you’re OK with taking breaks, right?) and enjoy another glass of water while you do.
Later, when lunchtime rolls around, have a glass of water before you eat. It will get your juices going and start the process of filling your tummy even before you start adding calories. Have another glass of water while you eat. More swallows of water can mean fewer swallows of food you will need to satisfy your appetite. That’s good!
And, besides, it’s important to stay hydrated during that long middle of the day.
In fact, during your mid-afternoon break, refresh yourself with another glass of water. Keep those batteries topped up!
Later, when it’s time for dinner, have a glass of water before you eat. It cleanses the palate and takes that first edge off your hunger. Calorie-free!
Feel free to have another glass or two of water during dinner. It’s the world’s best beverage, remember. A twist of fresh lemon or lime adds a nice touch and looks pretty in the glass.
Next, enjoy your evening. If you exercise, or work on projects, or do chores, or do anything that makes you thirsty, you know what to drink, right?
In fact, as part of any good exercise regimen, or any bout of physical labor or exertion, it’s wise to drink water before, during, and after.
OK, finally, it’s time for bed. A glass of water before retiring will help your body’s engine hum while it idles. It will make your tummy feel good and help your muscles relax. You’ll sleep better and dream better.
Before drifting off, think back on your day and tally up the glasses of water you enjoyed. Wow, you drank somewhere between eight and a dozen glasses of water!
That was easy, wasn’t it?
Not only easy, but oh-so-refreshing, too.
Here’s an extra tip I’ve learned as a lifelong connoisseur of the world’s best beverage: Ice water may be a special treat but it’s not the best choice for efficient hydration. If you drink your water cool, not cold, you’ll drink more of it. Guaranteed.
Don’t get me wrong. Ice water is fantastic for sipping. I love it. If I try to glug ice water, though, I get a bad case of brain freeze. I don’t love that so much.