How to Optimize Your Water Quality & Intake for Health

In this episode, I discuss our body’s most vital and essential nutrient—water. I explain the structure of water and how it is used by the cells and tissues of our body, how much water we each need to drink and when in order to optimize our mental focus and physical performance; and I include how exe

Andrew Huberman: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. [MUSIC PLAYING] I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we’re discussing water. Now, to some of you, water might seem like a boring topic, but I assure you that water is anything but a boring topic. In fact, water as a substance is incredibly interesting for a variety of reasons that I’ll explain today. [00:00:00 → 00:00:29]

In fact, we are going to discuss the physics and chemistry of water, and I promise to make it accessible to anyone and everyone regardless of whether or not you have a physics or chemistry background, and I will discuss how your body needs and utilizes water depending on what type of water you drink, the temperature of that water, when you drink the water, and indeed how you drink that water. Now, water is actually a pretty controversial topic. In fact, in preparing for this episode, which took me several months, in fact, I ran into highly contradictory information and had to go on some real deep dives in order to ferret out the best and most accurate knowledge for you. I also found that there are generally two camps of people out there in terms of how they think about water and the consumption of water. One camp generally speaking, is of the mind that tap water is completely safe. [00:00:29 → 00:01:19]

Perhaps it needs a little bit of filtering, but that in most areas of the world, if it runs out of the tap, and unless there’s a warning sign directly above the faucet, that you can drink the tap water. The other camp seems to be the camp that does not trust anything that comes out of the tap and is excited by and in fact, relies on things like reverse osmosis, deuterium depleted, hydrogen rich, or other forms of water that sometimes can be very expensive or at least involve some substantial steps in order to clean, filter, alter the chemistry of, or in some other way, adjust before they are willing to consume it. So today what we’re going to try and do is to address all the stances around water. For instance, we will discuss whether or not tap water is indeed safe, and I will give you some tools that will allow you to address whether or not the water coming out of your tap is safe, as well as some tools that will allow you to address how to clean that water if indeed it does need filtering and cleaning. In particular for things like fluorides and endocrine disruptors, which it turns out, are quite prominent in a lot, not all, but a lot of tap water sources. [00:01:19 → 00:02:26]

I will also talk about the more “esoteric forms of water” that I mentioned a few minutes ago. So I will go systematically through the list of distilled reverse osmosis, spring water, deuterium depleted water, high pH water, and for those of you that are already screaming out as you hear this, oh no, he’s going to tell us that pH water can alter the pH of our body in helpful ways. I’m not going to tell you that, but I will tell you that the alkalinity or acidity of the water that is the pH of the water that you drink has a profound impact on your ability to absorb and utilize that water and the impact that those water molecules have on specific biological systems. So it turns out pH is very important, but not for the reasons that you’ve probably heard about previously. I’ll talk about how the temperature of water that you drink does indeed turn out to be important for the rate of absorption of that water and its impact on the cells, tissues, and organs of your body, and thereby your health. [00:02:27 → 00:03:20]

And I will talk about various zero cost and low cost tools that you can use in order to get the most out of the water that you drink. And finally, I will talk about when and how to hydrate your body best. Before we dive into today’s topic, I wanna share with you some very interesting results that were just published on the use of deliberate cold exposure to benefit fat loss. Now, deliberate cold exposure is a topic I’ve covered before on this podcast. We have an entire episode about that, that I’ve linked in the show note captions. [00:03:20 → 00:03:48]

Deliberate cold exposure can be done by way of cold showers or immersion in cold or ice water up to the neck. That’s typically the ways that it’s done. It has been shown to reduce inflammation, to increase metabolism, and I think some of the most exciting results that have been published are the results certainly in humans showing that deliberate cold exposure can increase the release of so-called catecholamines, which are dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. And those increases in those three molecules are quite long lasting and lead to substantial increases in mood and focus throughout the day. Now, many people out there hear about deliberate cold exposure and cringe. [00:03:48 → 00:04:27]

Other people hear about it and cringe because they’ve heard that deliberate cold exposure, especially by way of immersion in water, can block the adaptation to strength or hypertrophy training. What I mean by that is yes, indeed there are data showing that if one gets into very cold water up to the neck in the six hours, anytime that is in the six hours after strength or hypertrophy training, that some of the strength and hypertrophy increases that one would observe, are blocked by that deliberate cold exposure. However, after six hours does not seem to be a problem. So it can be done on other days besides the strength and hypertrophy training. It can be done before strength and hypertrophy training. [00:04:27 → 00:05:04]

It can be done after endurance work. And I should mention that it does not appear that cold showers disrupt the adaptations to strength and hypertrophy training, even if they’re done immediately after strength or hypertrophy training. Okay, with that said, many people do enjoy the effects of deliberate cold exposure, in particular for those increases in mood and alertness that are the consequence of those increases in the catecholamine, dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. And again, those increases are very long lasting. So it’s not just during the exposure to cold. [00:05:04 → 00:05:34]

It is for several hours up to four, maybe even five or six hours, depending on how cold and how long the deliberate cold exposure happens to be. Again, there’s a lot to say and explore about deliberate cold exposure. So again, I’ll just refer you to the episode on deliberate cold exposure. If you want to explore the mechanisms and the positive health outcomes, some of the controversies within the data, etc. , within that episode. [00:05:34 → 00:05:56]

Meanwhile, I definitely want to share with you the results of this recent study that just came out. The title of this study is “Impact of Cold Exposure on Life Satisfaction and Physical Composition of Soldiers”. The reason this study is very interesting is that it’s one of the few studies that used, or I should say, explored both deliberate cold exposure by immersion in cold water, as well as deliberate cold exposure by way of cold showers as it relates to weight loss. Now, there’s already data out there on the effects of deliberate cold exposure and metabolism, and here I’m mainly referring to the beautiful work of Dr. Susanna Søberg and colleagues in Scandinavia that showed that people that do 11 minutes total of deliberate cold exposure by immersion and cold water up to the neck per week, so 11 minutes per week total, spread out across some different sessions by way of getting into water that’