Is Your BloodStream A Clean Spring or Grubby Pond?

Somewhere along the journey of your life you will have heard this simple biochemical fact - your body is 65% water.

In my experience, we hear it briefly and then let it go, like taking for granted the sky is blue and grass is green.

I invite you now though, to stop and truly think about this one simple, massively important fact.

You are sitting here reading this, as one giant pool of water with bits floating in it. Its quite miraculous really, how beautifully your body functions, even under the worst care and conditions.

If you've ever owned a fish tank, swimming pool or pond, you'll appreciate how very difficult it can be to keep it clean and functioning. Between the delicate pH levels, rain, algae and other organisms like fish and mosquitoes, managing a pond or pool can be a pleasant hobby or a nightmare (ever tried to fix a pool after a lightening storm?)

Now imagine for one second, your body is that pool. You have a delicate pH level too. You too have organisms swimming about in there, defecating, breathing and breeding - yes, all those tiny organisms breaking down your food, all the billions of bacteria you are home to (roughly 100 trillion of them according to the microbiome project!)

You too have a filtration system in the beautiful lymphatic system and a means of dumping unwanted waste in your ever useful excretory system. Your body runs effectively and autonomously, to the best of its ability, with the tools it is given.

There is however one part of this system that seems to be overlooked, the intake system. Despite hearing it over and over again, we don't really seem to grasp the importance of adding clean water back into our bodies. You would never pour dirty sewerage water into your sparkling blue pool would you? No self respecting trout farmer would pour anything but beautifully clean water in with his darling fishes. Yet, here we are, day after day pouring "dirty water" in the form of drinks full of colourants and preservatives into our pools. Those colourants and preservatives, whilst adding fun and flavour, are like tiny little stones your body cannot use that have to be sent off to be flushed out, or if they cannot be moved, end up sticking to one another to form stones.

When we don't add clean fluids, our pools become stagnant masses of toxic liquid, a breeding ground for harmful bacteria. Our blood cells literally stick together to try and avoid the sludge they are swimming in, and the fragments of that sludge stick to our "pipes", our carefully constructed and beautifully formed arteries and veins, leading to clogging, inflammation and imbalance.

Just as dangerous are the amounts of diuretics we drink without thinking, which are literally wringing all the liquids out of our system and leaving behind a thick, viscous mess that makes transportation of desperately needed nutrients to our brains and vital organs dangerously difficult.

Did you know that you need 3 cups of water to neutralize the effect of 1 cup of coffee?

I encourage you, before you consume that next cocktail / soda / cordial, have a glass of clean water first. Give your body a chance to cleanse itself. Give yourself the option of being a beautiful sparkling spring of wellness rather than a fetid pool of grime.