Ever sat by a crystal stream and had the urge to follow it to its source? It is natural for us to seek the source, to find that secret place where pure water seeps from the rocks and becomes a stream.

But have you ever pondered whether that water seeping from rocks is really pure? And whether pure water is really so good for a body genetically designed to accept anything but pure water? Today many health authorities question to drinking of pure water, because it is not natural, causing leaching of body minerals through osmosis.

Even the fable Hunza water, splashing blue from the base of ancient glaciers, has large amounts of pulverized colloidal minerals in it. Everything that ever fell on a glacier eventually emerges in the glacial melt. Yet the Hunzakuts lived up to 150 years drinking this water. Furthermore, crime was not known in their society.

Many studies have been made of these remarkable people, and every study has pointed to the water. But exactly what was it about the water that gave its life-enhancing ability? Like the healing springs of Lourdes, the Tlacote well of Mexico, the Nordeneau Caves of Germany and the Nadana Spring of India, Hunza water is negatively charged. It has undergone a natural process of ionization in its passage through the earth, and it is a different water at an atomic level. It is nature's greatest antioxidant, laden with negatively charged hydrogen ions. It clusters in smaller molecular groups, which hydrate the body at a far deeper level than our old familiar H2O. It is alkaline, which was our body's state at birth, a state that we once were able to easily sustain with the help of unpolluted natural spring water.

Keeping Germs out: or making them want to leave?

The final words of Dr Louis Pasteur were "The germ is nothing. The inner terrain is everything." So why should we drink this water rather than pure filtered water? Whether we drink pure water or not, we still ingest 8 million germs as we breathe. Dr. Victor Yu, specialist in infectious disease, states the war against newly evolved viruses is clearly being lost. Dr Russell Wolfe, of Quebec's Wolfe Clinic, a specialist in the study of water, goes further. He says that we have now entered a critical mass when it comes to bacterial warfare, and that our greatest weapon against this is an alkaline body. He says that the creation of an alkaline body is the single most important strategy we can pursue.

Changing Our Inner Terrain

Dr Pasteur's Inner Terrain refers to our digestive tract, our lymph system, and our blood and intercellular fluids. All of these systems must be protected at all cost. Dr Wolfe puts it very clearly; "There is only one sickness, one disease, and one cause. It is acidosis, the main cause of all illness When I say this, I mean ALL illness, because your inner terrain holds the secret to whether you are going to lead a healthy vital life or whether you are going to live in sickness and disease."

He likens our inner terrain to the inside of a refrigerator. Go home, turn off the refrigerator, and watch what happens. Your food begins to break down through fermentation and putrefaction. Mold and bacteria start growing. They didn't just sneak in when you turned off the power. They were always there. They just changed through and environmental shift- a change from a low-temperature alkaline environment to a higher temperature acid one. Cold water is more alkaline than hot water. Therefore a cold refrigerator alkalizes and protects foodstuffs.

If your internal terrain is not in proper balance, it will become a perfect breeding ground for bacteria; just like food in a warm refrigerator. The Hunzas who drank their daily alkaline water lived long and peaceful lives partially because their inner terrain was always alkaline.

A Powerful Antioxidant

However there is a further reason for their longevity. The university of Texas conducted their own study of mice, fed identical diets, with one group given tap water and the other given water similar to Hunza water; alkaline, and negatively charged.

Mice drinking the alkaline water lived significantly longer with no side-effects. It also increased their T-cell count and their antioxidant mRNA levels. Not only did the alkalinity protect their inner terrain, but the negative charge of the water acted as a very powerful antioxidant. When compared with Vitamin C, a common antioxidant, negatively charged water is thousands of times more powerful because it acts at an atomic level rather than at a molecular level.

Dieting without a Diet

Of course there are many reasons we do not live long, and perhaps our most common one after acidosis is obesity. Believe it or not, fat saves lives by wrapping acidic waste and packaging it as far away from our vital organs as possible; (buttocks, breasts, legs) The more acidic you become, the more broad you will become, because the acid has to be moved to your toxic waste storage dumps. Dieting your body into health will only cause a return of your acid waste closer to your vital organs. In the New England Journal of Medicine, Drs. Jerome Kasirir and Marcia Angell stated "Until we have better data about the risks of obesity and the risks of weight loss, we should remember that the cure for obesity may be worse than the condition."

However the combination of alkaline water, which neutralizes acid waste, its antioxidant power, which neutralizes free radicals created through hyper acidity, and the special ability of this water to regroup in smaller molecular clusters, means a three-pronged approach that gets to cellular spaces that ordinary H2O cannot. Once there, it fulfills its mission of disarming and flushing away the wastes that were the reason for the fat in the first place. Without acid waste, fat has no raison d'etre. People drinking alkaline water regularly report weight loss without diet change or appetite loss. In fact most report enhanced appetite and zest for food.

Osteoporosis: every woman's nightmare

Many women worry about taking too much calcium supplement, believing that it may lead to calcium deposits. Let us get this straight. All calcium deposits within the body have been found to have been leached from the body and not from nutritional calcium. The true cause of calcium deposits is lack of hydrogen, alkaline minerals and proper cleansing, which precipitates a state of crisis, causing calcium to be commandeered away from body tissue and bones due to acidosis.

When calcium deposits are found in the breast, for instance, this is your first warning sign that your body is crying out for a happier inner terrain where there is no longer any need to adjust acidity to alkalinity through leaching of our bones. Dr Wolfe says that calcium was pulled out of your bones to help put out the acidic fire in your breast. He says that when we are talking about cancer of the breast, of the ovaries, or liver, or cancer anywhere in the body, these are areas already in the grip of severe acidosis.

In America, sales of water ionizers have skyrocketed as the results become more widely known. In Japan, ionized water is accepted at a government level as a cancer curative. Japanese hospitals also regularly use it both internally and externally for a wide range of maladies including ulcers, psoriasis and other skin conditions. 15% of Japanese households have their own domestic water ionizer. The units, made principally in Korea, using Japanese design technology, are a simple electrical device attached to your tap, consisting of a water filter and an Ionization chamber. Sitting by the kitchen sink, they supply alkaline water at the flick of a tap. In the USA, they are being bought faster than they can be supplied by people with a wide variety of ailments including MS, asthma, arthritis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, chronic indigestion and cancer, as well as people who see the advantages of alkaline water as a long term way of health maintenance

As Dr Wolfe says, the acid/alkaline theory is going to be the foundational health decision of people in the next five years. We now have the opportunity to permanently change 75% of our body from an acidic liability and breeding ground for germs, to a natural alkaline state; the state we were designed to live in before we polluted our planet and our bodies.