Quench: The Big "8 Glasses Of Day" Water Myth, Why Water Isn't The Best Way To Fully Hydrate & Much More!

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, you know, you have to go see your doctor, get blood tests, and then they prescribe hormones. So I couldn't, I just couldn't figure out what I wanted to do. Anybody who's taken fiber and mixed it with water, you let it sit there for too long. It's undrinkable because it's so thick. There's no research that shows by eating a green smoothie, are you being more hydrated than by just drinking more water.

And I think a lot of people these days are aware of the importance of organic produce. But what about this whole new hell? Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Check, check, mic check, check, mic check. One, two. This probably sounds somewhat different than the way that you're used to hearing me, probably because I'm in California right now. In an Airbnb recording today's podcast introduction for you. I actually had a very interesting talk, very interesting discussion with Dr. Cohen about her new book. And it's all about hydration. But more than what you'd think, we take a deep dive in hydration. And I realized that was a pun probably. I'm very good at that because I've spent the past seven hours at Universal Studios and Harry Potter's Wizarding World with my family, which is why I'm at an Airbnb in California recording this introduction for you. Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And as promised, I wanted to give you an episode on the new science of hydration because I recently read this new book called Quench. And this book debunks a lot of myths about water. Like more than just like the drink, eight glasses of water a day stuff. It gets into stuff like gel water, the type of water that you get from plants. It gets into some of Dr. Gerald Pollock's research from University of Washington, which I've talked about before regarding structured water, regarding how photons of light interact with water. It was just a fascinating read for me. And the author is Dr. Dana Cohen, and she's actually a medical practitioner out of New York City. She's board certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine, and she got her MD from St. George's University School of Medicine, did a three year internal medicine residency at Albany Medical center, and now she's a real voice in integrative medicine for not just MDs, but DOs, ND's all sorts of healthcare providers. And she has a real body of knowledge in this field of hydration and electrolytes and how it interacts not only with your body, but also with fascia, some of the ancestral tactics to be able to hydrate the body a little bit better. So it's a really, really fascinating read. So the book again is called Qu, and I'm going to link to it in the show notes if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com quench that's where you can get the shownotes for everything that Dr. Cohen and I talk about today. So, Dana, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. How exciting.

Yeah, and it's just a fat like the whole premise of the book is very intriguing. Like the idea that just drinking water might not be the ideal way to hydrate. So I would love for you to just get into why you wrote this book in the first place. And we have times you can get into this as deep as you want, but why is it that water might not be the ideal way to hydrate?

So I actually have been practicing integrative medicine for over 20 years. I started Crazy Field working with Dr. Atkins literally 20 years ago, right out of residency. I started to work for him. And the truth is I've always known I have to write a book if you need a platform in this, in this industry. And could never quite figure out what I wanted my book to be on. I didn't want to write another book on hormones or thyroid, which I do a lot of in my practice, meaning, you know, you have to go see your doctor, get blood tests and then they prescribe hormones. So I couldn't, I just couldn't figure out what I wanted to do. And going on now, almost five years ago, my co author, Gina Bria, asked to come talk to me about the work that she's doing with Hydration Foundation. And she sat down, brought me a smoothie, and she sat down and started to talk to me about the work of Dr. Pollack and tells me that he's discovered phase of water. And I looked at her, I'm like, what are you talking about? A new phase of water? H2O. We know that water exists as liquid ice and vapor and now there's this new phase of water. And then she told me that she did her dissertation on how desert plants hydrate and they hydrate via gels. And then she also told me about her mother who was in a nursing home who would be rushed to the hospital because she would be severely dehydrated. And she decided to ask the nurse to put some chia seeds in her morning Orange juice. And never again did she have to be rushed to the hospital. So putting all of those things together, she asked, you know, she talked to me. She's like, do you think that we could hydrate via food? And I just looked at her, and she blew me away. And I said, gina, I have been searching for my book. I've always known that hydration is a huge issue. I ask all of my patients all the time, do you think you drink enough water? And even my healthy yogis are like, no. And I said, do you want to write this book? And so we spent the next couple of years really digging into the research. And I have to tell you, I never realized how complicated it was. And at times I'm like, oh, my God, what did I get myself into? I'm a clinician. I'm not a researcher. But we ended up putting together quench and really pulling from a lot of different modalities. And I'm really proud of it, and I think it really helps. It's going to help a lot of people. And so the idea that drinking. You asked about drinking more water is not the answer, and it's not. So let's start with eight glasses a day. You know this, and everybody knows this. How can you say that eight glasses a day is. Is right for everyone? So, first of all, we're all different shapes, we're all different sizes, we all do different exercise. Some sweat more than others. And it turns out that that comes from nowhere. Much like the food pyramid, it comes from nowhere. It's a bunch of people sitting around saying, oh, eight glasses of water a day is what you need to drink. And in my clinical research, I have found that I have people that come and say, I drink hardly any water yet. I'm really healthy, but I eat a really good smoothie a day, and I do all this stuff. And so that's what we really come to find out. It's more about other things that you do to get best the way that it's incredibly individualized, meaning only you know, what's your optimal set point for hydration.

Okay, so I want to interrupt you real quick because you said. You said gel water. And a lot of people may not understand what gel water is and how that would be different than regular water. So can you explain that?

So we call it gel water. You mentioned structured water. There's easy water, which is what Dr. Pollock calls it. There is another phase of water. So once again, water exists. We know that water exists as liquid ice and vapor. Gel water is another phase It's a little thicker. It probably has a different chemical equation than water. Water is H2O. Dr. Pollock describes it as H3O2. Not everybody agrees on this, but I have to tell you, when you look at his research, it is the one that makes the most sense to me. So think about how desert plants hydrate. You open a cactus or you open aloe, and there's literally gel that flows out of it. That's a really good example. That's gel thickened water. Think about. There's also gel water in waterfalls. So it has to do with the way it's a little bit thicker, it's a little different than regular water. And it turns out that that gel water is what's mostly found in nature. So think things like even lettuce, iceberg lettuce, that there's gel, it's loaded with gel water. And it also happens to be the type of water that's found in our cells. Does that make sense?

It does make sense. And I actually interviewed a couple of months ago, Dr. Thomas Cowan, who talked about the cytosol itself and how the cytosol actually has a large number of H3O2 molecules. So you've basically got an extra hydrogen with the oxygen atom, and that's water not in the liquid phase or in the vapor phase or in the solid phase, but in the gel phase. And, you know, a lot of people who grew up just thinking water is H2O have yet to really wrap their heads around this concept. But it's exactly how water forms an electrical gradient that allows it to move through plant walls, through blood vessels. And it's one of the ways that our cells actually store water as well. And it's also, when you're looking at the cytosol in the cells, the intracellular components of the cell actually are able to maintain a proper electrical charge because of not the sodium potassium pump, but a notion that was basically disproven by Gilbert Ling. You know, the fact that it's not a sodium potassium pump that's responsible for maintaining the normal electrical gradient within the cell. It's the actual cytosol. And that cytosol is composed of gel water. But I think it's one thing to know that the cell has the gel water in it, and another thing to understand how to actually consume that water in its H3O2 format, above and beyond what I think maybe some people might know about, which would be just like, you know, using a structured water generator or drinking structured water, and you get into way more than that. In your book. So let's start with produce. You know, you're a big fan of fruits and vegetables for staying hydrated, and I'm curious why. And if there are certain fruits and vegetables that have a higher amount of this gel water in them. And I'm guessing it goes beyond just eating cactus.

Yes. So think about. Let's just talk about Chia, because Chia is the star of the show in our book, really? And anybody who's made chia pudding or thrown chia in water, you leave it there for a few minutes, you literally see the gel forming. That is just a really great example. Think about cucumber and the seeds on the cucumber, you see the gel. Most of the time, you don't see it. So iceberg lettuce, if you look close and you look in the veins of the iceberg lettuce, that's gel water. But then there's things like cough cauliflower. Who would think that that has a high water content? It actually does. And then fruits. Fruits are really high in gel water. And it's clinically our belief that by blending vegetables. Oh, you know, I have actually another great idea. Think about fiber. Anybody who's taken fiber and mixed it with water, you let it sit there for too long. It's undrinkable because it's so thick with gel water. You know, so the idea of blending vegetables and fruit using that fiber as opposed to juicing it, because you're getting rid of the fiber, which there's a place for juicing, but we're talking about blending vegetables is just a great, incredible way to get gel water into your cells, into your body?

Okay, so it's one thing to say that, and I'm sure many people right now are wondering, okay, so is there actual research that shows that, for example, a fruit or a vegetable packed with gel water or some other form of gel water is actually more hydrating than simple H2O. So, A, is there research? And B, if there is, how is hydration actually measured?

Yeah, so that's a really good question. And, you know, throughout the book, I have to be, as a physician and not a researcher, incredibly careful about what I write. And I was. I was meticulous in my writing. The truth is, there's not even research to tell whether or not you're subclinically dehydrated. You know, there's research. We know when you're overtly dehydrated and your blood pressure fails and you need to be hospitalized, there's a difference. But there's no research that shows how I can measure. Are you day in and day out this what we call subclinical dehydration? And no, there's no research that shows by eating a green smoothie, are you being more hydrated than by just drinking more water. But when I started off this conversation, I said, we are all individuals, and you have to know what it feels like to be properly hydrated. Do you suffer from afternoon fatigue? You know, instead of reaching for sugar, most likely it's start reaching for better. You know, start to become better hydrated. I think you're going to notice a difference between brain fog and energy. And those are some earlier signs. So unfortunately, there's not. And whoever tells you that there is, it's just not right now. The research is not caught up yet.

So you can't. I mean, I know there's a lot of hydration assessment techniques just because, you know, when I was studying exercise physiology, we could measure, you know, isotope dilution with bioelectrical impedance. We could measure, you know, plasma markers in the urine like osmolality and sodium or hematocrit or hemoglobin. We could measure specific gravity of the urine. There's even some variables like salivary flow that were used. So are you saying that none of these have ever been used to assess fruit and vegetable intake versus water intake on hydration status?

Not that I know of. I'm also an exercise physiology. That was my undergrad major and I worked for the U.S. army Research Institute for Environmental Medicine. We used to do the testing on these poor soldiers. But, yeah, no, unfortunately, there's no research to measure that subclinical. I wish there was. It's just not there yet, and I don't know why.

Yeah, somebody should actually analyze that sometime and do a comparison of fruit and vegetable volume intake versus hydration status to see if that's actually the case. I mean, intuitively, I was even telling my children last night about the importance of. Of water. And also when they asked me how much water they should drink per day, I mentioned that you do get water from, you know, everything from lemons and oranges to cucumbers and even, you know, dark leafy greens to a certain extent, as you mentioned, with. With, you know, with lettuce, for example, as a water carrier. And, you know, granted, there are some issues, you know, like, for example, if somebody is just getting lettuce. One of the reasons lettuce carries water so well is a bioremedian. Right. It's actually used as Almost like a filter for the soil. So if you're consuming big salads of lettuce and not getting organic produce grown in proper soil, you could actually be eating a giant salad full of toxins or whatever that lettuce happened to seep up from the water in the soil. And I think a lot of people these days are aware of the importance of organic produce and being careful with pesticides and herbicides and soil quality. But what about this whole, you know, new carnivore idea about the potential for excess fiber to contribute to things like, you know, diverticulosis? Like, like would you be concerned if someone were getting a huge amount of fiber along with all this gel water that they were getting from, from fruits and vegetables?

So, you know, I think the research shows something different. I think fiber prevent, you know, it's. Fiber prevents diverticulosis. I think that's, that's what the research is showing. A lot of fiber really helps prevent diverticulosis. And you know, I don't have a lot of experience with the carnivore diet, so I do have to say though, it does make me a little nervous. The carnivore diet is not a paleo diet. It's not the diet of our ancestors. I don't think. I think when you look at the most anthropologists will agree that the diet of our ancestors ate a ton of fruits and vegetables, you know, and a little bit of meat. Meat. They were not eating meat all day long. And so I honestly, I know one person on a carnivore diet, so I can't speak intelligently about it. And by the way, he did fantastic, but I'm definitely no expert on it.

Okay, gotcha. Well, first of all, I do, just for the record, I do disagree with you. I don't think there's a lot of data that shows that a high fiber diet protects against diverticulosis. But that, and I think a little bit of the research goes back and forth, but I think there's a case to be made that you can get away without a lot of fiber in your diet if your goal for eating that fiber is to prevent diverticulosis. However, that being said, we can also look at anthropological data or even just, you know, the whole what did our ancestors do? Type of perspective, and that's what really fascinating me about your book, is how all these different desert populations, you know, nomadic cowboys and, you know, some, some of our ancestors actually figured out how to hydrate even, even folks who would be considered largely, you know, carnivorous, like you know, or at least are painted that way often, like the Hasda, for example. So I'd love to delve into that a little bit, starting with. With. With people in the desert. You talk about how people in the desert traditionally hydrate. Can you get into that?

Sure, yeah. So interesting. The. The. We'll start with the. The. The Bedouins, which are Arabian desert nomads. And by the way, Gina Brea is an anthropologist. She's my co author. This is a lot of her research based on that. And I think you're going to be talking with her for the Hydration Foundation. I believe that you guys are getting together on that. So she is really the expert in this. So they. First of all, I think one of the things. And we talk about this in our book and in my clinical now in the past three or four years, and I'm really prescribing eating this way, I find that people who front load their water or drink most of their hydration first thing in the morning. So we recommend a big glass of water, throw a little electrolytes in there in the form of sea salt or salt and lemon. And that's what they would do. So they would gulp their water first thing in the morning. They certainly weren't walking around with bottles of water in the desert. The other interesting thing about them that I thought was fascinating is those robes that they would wear, those big heavy black robes, hooded robes. They're literally humidifying tents that they would create. So they're. What's the word? Recycling their own hydration by creating these humidity tents. T E N T S. And then they would drink camel milk and goat's butter slathered on bread, which were loaded with electrolytes. And. And you know, I have a whole chapter on fats.

Well, yeah, I actually, I want to rabbit hole a little bit there because I think it's more than just the salt and the electrolytes and things like butter and ghee. It's my understanding from reading the book that it's more than just about the salt and the electrolytes in the butter and the ghee, that there's a little bit more to it than that.

Yeah. So according to the research of Dr. Pollock, who actually, I think even. And I don't have that information, but I think he recently published something about ghee, that it is actually loaded with gel water. And then there's more to it. So there are. Our cell membranes are made of fat. We all know that phospholipids and the way that water gets into our cells, it's lined these aquaporins or these water channels which are lined with fat. And I think fat plays one of the most important roles at a cellular health standpoint. And if we're, you know, in the past, not so much your group of people, I hope and I know, but in the past we've all subscribed to a low fat diet and it's been the wrong thing to do. And finally, that tide is turning. But yeah, there's more to it. So I think the fat has to do with, yes, the electrolyte, also the cellular health and how that hydration literally gets into the cell.

Yeah. Dr. Gerald Pollack did indeed look at ghee. And I'll try and find that study and put it for folks in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Quench but he did find that ghee is very high in this H3O structured gel, like water. And so when we see people in the desert, like the Bedouin tribe that you were talking about earlier, consuming large amounts of ghee and butter, it does seem reasonable that that's a good hydration strategy. And perhaps they got clues if they were doing autopsies on dead camels or something, because we know that the hump of the camels is a rich source of this gel, like water blended with the same type of fats that you'd find in ghee and in butter. So I thought that was really interesting. And then another, I guess it could be considered, considered a form of fat to a certain extent. But talk to me about chia and maybe this Tarahara Indian tribe. You mentioned chia a little bit earlier about how you mix different fibers with water. You get almost like this really intense gel. And that seems to be another strategy that could work for hydration. So can you unpack chia for me?

Yes. So chia, we also know is an incredibly rich source of omega 3 fatty acids, specifically alcohol or alpha linolenic acid, linoleic acid, which is our parent Omega 3. So not only that, it has the water and the fat mix. It's sort of the perfect superfood. It has your omega 3s along with gel water. We also talk about, what do you call it, grinding your chia seeds. And I think our reasoning behind that is you're getting more surface area, creating more gel water when you, you add water to it. So it's a form of fiber. It has your omega 3s, it has tons of gel water. It's the perfect thing to add to smoothies. I had One pushback, I think it was from Dr. Mercola, actually, about the lectins in chia seeds. And I just want to sort of address that. You know, I think you need to play around with it and see, I do think if you're not soaking it overnight in a pudding, it's possible it could be a problem with you. I have to tell you, though, I have hundreds and hundreds of patients on chia seeds every day, and they do great on it. They do fine on it.

Yeah. I think if you can soak them, and also if you have a fine sieve and can discard the water after a few rinses prior to soaking them, then you give them an overnight soak, which further degrades some of the. Those lectins. I think some of the issues can be overcome. What drives me crazy is when I see people just throwing chia seeds into their smoothie or consuming chia seeds in some kind of like a homemade trail mix or something like that. That is the wrong way. Putting them on a goat cheese beet salad, like anything like that. Chia seeds, just like quinoa or any other similar small, round, hard seed or grain. Those have a pretty intense protective layer on the outside. But you're right. When you soak them, they store all this water and you create this fantastic gel. As a matter of fact, you know, I didn't plan on this being a commercial for one of my products, but we have chia seeds in the. In the kion bar, and I have experimented with just cutting that bar into chunks, putting it into a small, little bit of water overnight, and it makes this wonderful gel liquid that you can then use as a smoothie base. And I haven't talked about that much before in a podcast, but you can actually cut up the bar, soak it in water overnight, and then use that as your smoothie base. And it works really well. And you have. I believe you have a recipe in your book for another chia thing. It's like it's taken from the Tarahumara Indian tribe. Can you remind me what that recipe is?

Yeah. Yeah. So it's called a tariff fix, and it's basically 12 ounces of water, a teaspoon of ground chia seeds. I like the idea of. I never even thought about that. Soaking them the way you would soak beans and then just getting rid of that. I don't know why I didn't think of that, but that's.

You just need a. You need a good sieve to be able to do it like a good.

Filter and then 4 ounces of kombucha, either homemade or your favorite kombucha. The Tarahumara people would mix theirs with like a homemade fermented corn, like a corn beer or a mead, and then a pinch of rock salt. Easy. Really easy. Most of the recipes in the book are super. Try to be super simple. Some are a little esoteric. We tried to get some interesting ingredients in there, things you wouldn't see normally, but most of them are pretty simple. This is really simple, easy. And just to remind people what the Tarahumara tribe were, those are the Mexican desert peace people who would run marathons using chia seeds as their source of hydration. And this kind of chia fresca you could call them, basically, which is like chia.

Yeah. Fantastic book by Chris. I forget his last name, but he wrote also a book called Natural Born Heroes, which is also. It's more of a book about free running and combat and World War II. But both of his books are absolutely fantastic. All hunt those ones down.

Born to Run.

Yeah. Born to Run and Natural Born Heroes are the two books. And, you know, another kind of set of people that you talk about are these nomadic cowboys, the gauchos, I think you call them, on the Uruguayan pampa plains. And some of the things that they would use to actually get this gel water. Can you talk about what the desert cowboys did?

Yes. So they would drink yerba mate, which is becoming very, you know, very hip now. And yerba mate is an herbal drink made from a type of a holly tree. And that they've done studies, I think, from the 1960s, that this yerba mate has practically all of the vitamins necessary to sustain life, and it has the perfect balance of electrolytes. So these, the gauchos, the cowboys of Uruguay would drink a lot of the yerba mate. And it goes. It fits right in line with basically one of the principles in our book, Quench, is that dissolving plants in water, which delivers the best nutrients from the plants and allowing the water to be more hydrating than just water alone. So that's a basic principle.

There are a few other kind of ancient type of populations that you talk about in the book, kind of from an anthropological standpoint, in terms of archaeological analyses, like in the Andes, for example, and also some, I guess, research done on what was done with grains to actually break down the crystalline layers of grains and kind of gelatinize the starches to form water. What has been found in terms of archaeological or forensic analyses, when it to comes comes to the way that folks would hydrate. I believe some of the examples you give in the book are from the Himalayas and the Peruvian highlands.

Yeah. So if I can remember correctly, there was actually. I think it was Gina's. One of Gina's family members, who's also an anthropologist, did research on some of the pottery from these people in high altitudes. And they found that the pottery showed a lot of gelatin from grains. I don't know how they did that, but somehow they did. And so I think what it really relates to is that these people ate a lot of stews, and these stews would cook for hours. And stews made from a lot of grains, some meat, but mostly grains and vegetables. And you think about the grains or even think about bone broth. Right now you're letting bone broth cooked down and it's creating that gelatin. But the same with fiber. Grains create the fiber from grains. Like I said, when you put fiber in a glass of water and let it sit there for a little while, it becomes undrinkable because it gets so thick with gel that it's almost too thick. Even metamucil does that, which I'm not recommending. So, yeah, these people would. Would do a lot of stews that would break down into very gelatinous kind of material. And I can't tell you exactly how they knew that, but they did. There's something in that research from her. And the way that they looked at the pottery, they found that the very high gelatinous materials from grains.

Yeah. Over and over again, it seems that, you know, when you talk about the chia seeds and the Tarahumahara tribe, and then you talk about some of the. Of these stews and grains that were steeped for long periods of time, very similar to bone broth, which we also see as an ancestral staple to gelatinize this water and form what now. Modern researchers like Dr. Pollack are researching and finding to be incredibly hydrating forms of water. It's really fascinating that our ancestors kind of cracked the code on this a long time ago, despite really, I think someone like the Gatorade Sports Scientists Institute or someone needs to do an actual either bioelectrical impedance or other good hydration scientific study on some of these compounds to see how much better they actually could hydrate. Right. Because let's face it, we're kind of sort of hypothesizing right now and just looking at anthropological data. But the interesting thing is also about the Hasda. You talk about the Hasda as well, and and they're often considered to be either carnivorous or kind of like a paleoish type of population. But they actually, if I'm not mistaken, not only do a lot of plants. But you talk about how they, I think they use, what's it called? The baobab fruit.

Yes, if that's how you say it. B A O B A B Fruit. Yeah. Which I've never tried. And there's also a berry that they use, a Congo robi berry. I would love to get my hands on and taste some of these things. But the baobab fruit has this hard outer shell with this chalky flesh inside that surrounds a seed. And what they would do is they would blend this flesh from the baobab fruit with water that was loaded with fiber, fat and vitamins until it formed a thick milky consistency. So they would basically eat that for breakfast. Basically a smoothie, you know, that had all the, all the ingredients that we needed. And then these congurabi berries, which are very high in fiber and polyphenols, is something that they would eat for lunch or snack upon. Really interesting, these hosta people. And those are the people in Northern Africa, Tanzania, I think.

Well, you know, what I'm kind of seeing here over and over again is that whether it's ghee or butter or whether it's chia seed slurries, or whether it's bone broth or whether it's these stews where you're steeping some of these grains and legumes and things that we might consider if you're kind of going with the plant paradox approach, for example, to be things that are big no nos in the diet, but when treated properly, not only do you deactivate a lot of the built in plant defense mechanisms, but they might also be very good hydration strategies. And whether you're a, you're a plant based person or whether you're a carnivore type person, elements of those could fit into both diets. I mean, just about everybody I know who's eating a largely nose to tail meat based diet, they're getting lots of gelatin from really deep nourishing rich bone broths. And then you have a lot of vegans or people who are more of a plant based persuasion doing lots of chia seed slurries and smoothies. And I really do think that people using an approach like this are going to find that they're better hydrated than just drinking water. So it's really interesting and you mentioned earlier, Dana, how you're an exercise physiologist I have a training in exercise physiology. And that's what I appreciate about the book because you also get into fascia and muscle quality. And I would love to hear a little bit more about the link between fascia and hydration and why you think that's so important.

This is one of the really big ideas in the book, and I do think it's really interesting. So fascia is becoming very trendy. People are talking about fashion, and most people know that that is the network of collagen that surrounds every single cell and organ in our body. It basically holds up everything in our body. We liken it to when you open a grapefruit and there's all that, the white pith on the outside of the grapefruit, and then every single grapefruit cell has a little surrounding around it. That's like what fascia is in our body. And a few years back, there was this very brilliant French. I believe he was a plastic surgeon, Guimberto. That's definitely something you should link because if you haven't seen that video, it's incredible. It's incredibly beautiful to look at. But basically, he's the first person whoever decided to look under the skin of somebody living fascia, you know, so it's called. I think it's called something living fascia. I can't remember. Guimberto is his name. And before that, we've only ever studied fascia on dry, desiccated cadavers now, have never seen what fascia looks like or what it does in the body. And when you look at it, you see that, first of all, there's water that moving through it. You see liquid. So it basically acts as a hydraulic pump, which is really interesting because a lot of it is instinctual. We know that you have to move your joints to lubricate them. Now we really understand why, because you're literally squeezing fluid, moving fluid, which is also really interesting because we've only ever really thought that hydration gets moved via blood and lymph only, you know, never really thought about that. So the whole fascia story is. And now we're finding that it not only moves water, it's an electrical system as well.

Yeah, that's really interesting, this idea. And of course, we know that the cell cytosols are, of course, acting in an electrical conductivity sense. But fascia, a lot of people don't think of that as an electric electrical network, but it is. It's a specific form of electricity called. I believe it's piezoelectricity.

Right yeah, piezoelectricity. Piezoelectricity. I usually say it. Piezoelectricity is basically motion that stretches tissue and generates electricity. I think it's. And I'm no expert in this, but I think the way that our touch screens work like that, by touching the screen, you're generating crystal energy. And that's sometimes. That was how I really sort of understood it. When I heard that, I was like, oh, I get it. But piezoelectricity is this motion stretching. So the idea of movement creates motion and it can be very little movement. We've actually laid out a couple of studies. I think one of the more interesting ones was this British study that studied over 12,000 in women who sat for greater than seven hours a day. And it was basically a fidgeting study. Women who did not fidget, who fidgeted less, and sat for more than seven hours a day had a 43% increase in all cause mortality compared to women who fell into the middle or high levels of fidgeting. And even the women who had the high levels of fidgeting who sat for seven hours or more a day, they still had a less risk of dying.

Now it's so interesting, and if I could get up on my soapbox for a second, because when I was in anatomy and physiology classes, as I'm sure you did plenty of Dana and was doing dissections on cadavers, a lot of times fascia just seemed to be like this Saran wrap, right? Like a protective wrapping around the organs and the muscles, and you dissect it and kind of get it and toss it away and get it out of the way. And then it was in the early 2000s that they started to do a lot of research on fascia. And there's fantastic videos and I think that one of the more popular ones that you can find online for fascia. Do you remember the video that's really, really interesting? Like the YouTube video on fascia and hydration.

Something living fascia. It's Gwimberto. G U I M B E R T E A U is the guy who really looked at it under the skin. He took the electron microscope and it's. I mean, it's so beautiful to look at and it's just so interesting. And yeah, I would totally remember, like you couldn't wait to get down to the muscle of the organ. Like you would just open up the cadaver and throw everything aside and get rid of all, you know, whatever came in your way. So, yeah, it was never looked at. And Never really understood. And it's still quite, people are, it's just now becoming interesting to learn about fascia and it is really a big deal.

Yeah. And if you, if you watch the video like the fiber optic camera that they use in that it shows the fascia like pulsing and moving and transporting water droplets, like literally transporting water through the body. You know, like you described it Dana, almost like a hydraulic pump. And so not only is drinking water or eating a lot of those gel like compounds that we talked about earlier, going to assist with the gel, like water necessary for that, but then once you begin moving and dare I say, you know, doing things like deep tissue work, foam rolling, getting massages, things like that, you're actually going to massively improve the ability of your body to not only hydrate, but because water conducts electricity. Fascia is just like a giant electrical network. So we're talking about, about almost very similar to like a paracrine based cell to cell signaling type of effect. When you're looking at fascia, it's actually a communicative network within the body. And so you're sending neurotransmitters, you're sending electrical signals, you're improving proprioception. And as you talked about, there's even the piezoelectric type of component where you are correct, if you were to like squeeze a quartz crystal in your face, fingertips, it's going to create a little bit of electricity and that's the same type of electricity that you get when you for example, pressurize the gel, water or move and specifically move your fascia. So I think, I mean really one of the best things folks can do, especially when they get up in the morning and this has been a practice of mine for years, is a little bit of deep tissue work, right. Just like self inflicted foam roller. I do full body foam roller in the morning and this takes me about 15 minutes. I just roll everything and I intersperse that with swinging some limbs, doing some, you know, almost like some, some Tai chi type side to side twists, slapping the body and it's a night and day difference. I mean my wife, she knows that that's my happy place. And you know, I've told her, babe, I just need that, that little bit of 15 minutes in my routine before I like get with the boys and make coffee, you know, and lead the family in devotions. It's like just give me that chance to wake up the body. And man, it's not just lymph, it's fascia, it's water, it's Electricity, it's hydration. And when I'm combining that with the two to three cups of bone broth I'm drinking per day and getting a lot of this structured water that I drink now, I mean, it's a night and day difference. And I still do start every day with a big old, like 32 ounce glass Mason jar of water with typically salts or electrolytes or minerals added to it. But when I combine it with those strategies, man, oh man. The title of your book is Quench. And I would say I'm definitely not needing to be quenched when I'm doing that type of stuff.

So fantastic. We really wrote the book for the masses and I love what you're doing, but the truth is this is for everybody, like, even, even the really sick people, like, just if you can't get up and slap yourself in foam roll because you, because you're hurting everywhere. You know, I see a lot of really chronically ill patients. So it could be as much as just like, you know, doing touch your chin to your chest, you know, getting, getting movement in any kind of micro movement. We talk like we. The book is real, really basic stuff. And yes, by all means you want to work towards what you're saying, but yeah, we need to move our extremities and even small movements have huge positive consequences.

Oh, yeah. I mean, even like dry skin brushing, for example. I mean, anybody can do that. I keep one in the floor of my sauna. Whenever I'm in there, I'll do a few different moves where I'm just brushing from my feet all the way up to the top of my body, you know, and from, from the arms down towards the heart. And that's fantastic at drawing the fluid towards the, you know, towards the lymph nodes in the, in the groin and the armpits. And, you know, when you brush upwards towards your heart, it helps out even more when you're coming across from, from your lower body and from your torso. And that, that's another fantastic thing that again, you know, anybody can do that.

Yeah. Love it, Love it.

Okay, so you also have a recipe in your book for what you call beauty water. You have a lot of recipes in your book and a lot of little systems for doing these micro movements throughout the day and different diagrams of the stretches that you can do. But one recipe, in addition to the chia seed recipe that you mentioned earlier, the Tara Fix recipe is your beauty water. So get into this beauty water and what it is and how it works.

Okay, so we call it beauty Water, we made that up, basically. Once again, the book is written for the masses. I want people to, to take a step forward and you know, I can't stress enough. There are, you know, I don't know what your listeners, I think your listeners are probably way more advanced than this. But Beauty waters are basically single recipe water mixed with, you know, blueberries or just water and raspberries or pomegranate seeds or even lemon slices. It's just a single recipe, easy thing as opposed to just plain water in your, in your water bottle all day long. I think it adds a little more. Some electrolytes. It adds, it may help in structuring the water. So it's just, that's all it is. It's a very simple idea of just doing something a little bit different. You know, the one thing we didn't talk about is these people walking around with water bottles and drinking so much water that they're actually over hydrating. And honestly, I see at least once a week somebody whose electrolytes are off because they're over hydrating. And it's not as uncommon as you would think. Meaning that you are just drinking way too much water and peeing out all your electrolytes. I see it often by maybe adding a little electrolytes or some fruit to your water can help prevent that.

Yeah, that's, you know, one thing that I think you underplayed there is the idea that anything you're adding, like a pomegranate or a blueberry or you know, perhaps a cucumber, anything that you're infusing into the water, kind of putting into these water bottles that you're carrying with you throughout the day, even if you're concerned about calories, you know, you don't have to eat all the blueberries at the bottom of the bottle or the, or the pomegranates or whatever. Even though it's going to get kind of expensive for your water if you're just throwing all the calories in there, not doing anything with them, maybe save them for later, for a smoothie later on. But you're getting some of the gel water from the vegetables or the fruits that you're putting into the water that's seeping into your water. So essentially it's almost like a natural way to structure your water. And of course, I've talked in the past about how there are other things that can really assist with that structuring even more, like exposure of the water to light photons, whether it be under the sunlight or under an infrared Light, light panel, for example. So that might be an upgrade to your beauty water, Dana, is you make your beauty water, then you put it out in the sunlight for a few minutes and then you drink it. But yeah, it's just so fascinating that a lot of people just drink regular oil. Even if you're past the whole drinking out of plastic bottles and you got a good water filter, you still need to structure your water, preferably with a structured water filter. You need to preferably be consuming these viscous, viscous gel like substances throughout the day. And like I mentioned earlier, even if you're carnivore, you can do this with bone broth. If you're concerned about plant anti nutrients, you don't have to do, you know, blueberries and lettuce and cucumbers if you don't want to. But the idea persists that you need these viscous gel like forms of liquid for your fascia, for your hydration status, for the electrical status of your body, for your skin. It's just, it's so important. And Dana, this book was just a really, really good, practical read on how to do that. So thank you for writing this.

Oh, thank you. It was really, really fun for me and I'm super proud of it. Thank you.

Awesome. Well, folks, like I mentioned, I'll link to the book and also link to the fascia video and Dr. Gerald Pollock's research and you know, some of these books that we talked about all in the show notes. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com quench that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Quench where you can grab the book, try some of the recipes. Well worth a read. Quick, easy read, simple to wrap your head around with a lot of good information in there for staying hydrated. So, Dana, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing all this with us.

Thank you, Ben. Have a great day.

All right, you too. All right, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Dana Cohen signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate, because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.