The Practical Aspects

Diabetes and the availability of drinking water

Water is essential for health, for healing and for life. Some even say that one is not just sick, but is thirsty.

However, new findings suggest that water crisis contributes in large to the increasing incidence of diabetes among those who do not get sufficient water supply. The lack of water in the body (dehydration) is the cause of many conditions including asthma, allergies, arthritis, angina, migraine headaches, hypertension, raised cholesterol, chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple sclerosis, depression, and diabetes, which is considered to have reached epidemic stage in places where there are high levels of water crisis.

Water has both life-sustaining properties and life-giving functions. Modern medicine only recently recognized the life-sustaining properties of water. That is why chronic unintentional dehydration is ultimately an unrecognized life-threatening process.

The persistent drought in the body brings about a continuously changing new chemical state in the body. When a new dehydration-produced chemical state becomes fully established, it causes many structural changes, even in the genetic blueprints of the body. Diabetes, however seems to be the end result of water deficiency in the brain.

By design, the brain pegs up the glucose threshold so that it can maintain its own volume and energy requirements when there is water shortage in the body. If there is a chronic dehydration in the body, the brain has to depend more on glucose as a source of energy. Under urgent circumstances produced by stress, up to 85 percent of the supplemental energy requirement by the brain is provided by sugar alone. This explains why stressed people resort to eating sweet food.

But while all the other cells are influenced by insulin to take up glucose through their cell walls, the brain does not depend on insulin to carry sugar across its cell membranes. It seems to be in the natural design of the brain to steer the physiological mechanisms in the direction of higher glucose level in the body when there is persistent dehydration that would damage the brain more than it could recover from.

Further, an experiment on amino acid balance for trytophan with diabetics showed that there seems to be a much lower level of amino acid in the brain when the disease exists. Trytophan regulates salt intake. Salt is responsible for regulating water-volume content outside the cells of the body.

With lower salt retention as a result of trytophan deficiency, the responsibility for holding water in the body and outside the cells falls onto the sugar content in the blood. To do its new job, and compensate for the lower salt, the sugar content rises.

When insulin is not adequately secreted, the main body cells do not receive sufficient sugar and some amino acids. This condition deprives the cells from getting needed water and amino acids, leading to their damage. This is how diabetes becomes the cause of many associated diseases.

Hence, patients and people in general need to increase water intake aside from diet manipulation to provide the necessary minerals and amino acid balance for tissue repair, including brain tissue requirements.

The human body transforms nitrate to nitrite. Nitrite may also react with amines in the digestive juices to form N-nitroso compounds. N-nitroso compounds have been shown to attack pancreatic cells in animals, causing diabetes.

Acidic (Low pH) drinking water in individual households is strongly associated with the risk of type 1 diabetes. The pH scale is used to measure the acidity or alkalinity of a solution. A pH of 7, which is normal for water, is considered neutral. Values below 7 denote acidity. The lower the number, the stronger the acid.

Researchers found a significant association between diabetes and the use of well water, as opposed to water from waterworks.

Studies have also correlated nitrate in drinking water with the incidence of type 1 diabetes mellitus and have linked long-term exposure to arsenic in drinking water to cancer of the bladder, lungs, skin, kidney, nasal passages, liver, and prostate. Non-cancer effects of ingesting arsenic include cardiovascular, pulmonary, immunological, neurological, and endocrine effects such as diabetes.

Arsenic contamination of drinking water is a global problem, but the places worst hit by this are Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, where over 112 million reside in areas where groundwater concentrations exceed the World Health Organization's (WHO) maximum permissible level of 50 micrograms per liter (µg/L) and its lower recommended concentration of 10 µg/L. Arsenic exposure is associated with health effects such as skin lesions and lung, liver, and bladder cancers.

Naturally occurring in rocks and soil, water, air, and plants and animals, arsenic can be further released into the environment through natural activities such as volcanic action, erosion of rocks, and forest fires, or through human actions. Agricultural applications, mining, and smelting also contribute to arsenic releases in the environment. Higher levels of arsenic tend to be found more in ground water sources than in surface water sources (i.e., lakes and rivers) of drinking water.

Higher concentrations of zinc were associated with a decreased risk of diabetes after adjusting for pH and the other confounders. The mechanisms which water may involve acidity or mineral content in etiology of type 1 diabetes remain unknown, but the mechanisms are most likely indirect and may involve an influence on survival of microorganisms in the water.

Children who consumed water with a pH between 6.2 and 6.9 were 3.7 times more likely to be diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, compared to children drinking less acidic water.

However, acid water in itself is unlikely to be causally related to type 1 diabetes, but may be a marker of some other factor. Perhaps, they speculate, the association could have something to do with minerals in the water that are leached out of soil or plumbing fixtures due to the water's acidity. On the other hand, more acidic water may provide an environment for bacteria or viruses to grow, which could in turn trigger diabetes.

But not just supplying water would help these subjects. They should get water with good quality. This should be actually done as soon as possible because once people are affected with diabetes then its hard to treat or control the disorder.