Your Body's Drought Management System Explained

It's hard to imagine, but simply breathing causes the loss of a significant quantity of water each and every day, depending on the climate in which you live and your level of physical exercise. Without fresh supplies of water to transport nutrients, vitamins and blood plasma throughout your body, you would soon become dehydrated and experience mental and physical fatigue. Your brain, for example, must be kept hydrated at all times.

So the body, when it is lacking water, will do everything possible to keep supplying adequate water to the brain. This involves limiting the loss of water in other areas of the body. To prevent 'drought-like' conditions from occurring, your body has developed a keen system of prevention. When triggered by a deficiency of water, your body tries to prevent respiratory water loss by producing histamines, which close off the capillaries in your lungs. Through the constriction of these capillaries, water loss is reduced, but of course breathing is made far more difficult. It's important to understand that the body is doing this on purpose.

The body is producing histamines as a strategy, not as a disease or something gone awry. The body wants to constrict the capillaries in your lungs because it is trying to save your brain. What is conventional medicine's answer to this production of histamines by the body? Well, of course, it is the prescription of antihistamines, or drugs that are designed to counteract the histamines produced on purpose by the body in order to conserve water.

These antihistamines then open up the capillaries in the lungs, making breathing seem easier. As you can see here, then, the conventional medicine approach treats nothing but the symptoms, and in doing so it counteracts the body's own intentions and strategies in trying to conserve water. It could be said that that patients with asthma really need is lots of water on a regular basis, not histamine prescription drugs.

What's the best way to help your body's drought management system?
A good place to start is to manage your intake of water-depleting drinks such as coffee, beer or beverages containing sugar. What we need to be doing as a population, of course, is simply drinking more water. But there's more to it than just that -- we also need to stop drinking beverages that deplete our water supplies. Believe it or not, most beverages that are consumed by American consumers today actually don't offer hydration; drinking soft drinks results in a loss of water in your body, not a gain in water.

Once you drink one can of a soft drink beverage, you feel like you still need more, and thus the body is trapped in a never-ending cycle of craving for hydration that simply cannot be met by consuming soft drinks. What your body truly craves is water.

Caffeine is also another water-depleting drug. Consuming caffeine in any form, whether soft drinks or coffee or pills, creates a diuretic effect in your body, which means your body begins to eliminate water through urination. Sadly, most Americans continue to drink alarming quantities of soft drinks, coffee and other beverages that actually deplete water from their systems.