The water-heat link
I am lucky, that for the last 30 years I am allergic to most fever sinking remedies. So I prefer to lie in my warm bed and allow my body to do the work. This is more expensive than a doctor and his or her medication, for it mostly can take longer and in the meantime I don’t earn anything. Yet I am under the impression that I am lastingly healthier and am subsequently more fit. Maybe for this reason I have survived one of the most menacing illnesses known, cancer. Medication doesn’t help much. My body can help me more if I help it out.
But how?
As a child, my mother would call the doctor when the fever reached 40 degrees and together they would decrease the fever. I had a very strong immune system and after my first protective vaccination against polio I got a 42 degree fever. Today, being over 60, I have difficulties reaching 39 degrees with a bad infection. Yes, reaching!
How this can be achieved with fever, the most natural and easy remedy to beat diseases, I have learnt from my profession as a journalist. I interviewed Europe’s most famous naturopath, Uwe Karstaedt about his views on drinking water, something I have occupied my time with for many years. He introduced his book “98.6° F – Ideal Body Temperature as the Secret to Optimum Health”, in which he describes the damage a low body temperature creates. And the necessity, not only when ill, but also when healthy to protect oneself against cooling. True to the hippocratic sentence: “Give me the strength to cause a fever, and I will heal all diseases.” For death is cold. How to best stay warm you will learn in this chapter.
Humans as hot water bottles
Calories are energy units which we extract from our nourishment. This word comes from the latin word “calor”, which means heat. So we eat and drink to produce heat. Originally, this term was used to calculate the amount of thermal energy which is necessary to heat up 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. A Kilocalorie is the amount of energy needed to warm up 1 kg (Liter) water from 0 to 1 degree.
Lets take Max Mustermann, scientifically known in common standards as – a man: He is 170 cm tall and weighs 70 kg. Of that are 42 kg water (42 Liters). If we were to see Mr Mustermann as a hot water bottle, is his empty weight 28 kg. To heat up his bodily fluids from 0 to 37 degrees Celsius, we need 42 x 37 Kilocalories. That is a total of 1554 kcal. Not so little if you consider the total average of kilocalories a day, between 2000 and 3000. Luckily Max does not have to heat up his body temperature constantly from 0 to 37 degrees. But also the 28 kg hot water bottle material must remain warm.
So it is not surprising, that heating up the hot water bottle always becomes more difficult, when little, sturdy Max throughout his life has turned into old, weak Grandpa Mustermann. And those who cannot rise to the adequate operating temperature, who don’t even have enough strength to have a fever over 39 degrees, will also somehow, somewhere, get ill. Exactly this was Uwe Karstaedt’s experience with his patients. The great majority had, at least a mild “low temperature”. And someone who seeks a naturopath is usually ill and is not only looking for warm words but also therapeutic actions.
Heat distribution with the Richway Amethyst BioMat
How do you push the energy balance, so that the engine of life can once again run in the right temperature range? How do you eliminate this lack of energy which has become part of modern diseases like chronic fatigue syndrome?
It cannot be more calories from more food. Better nourishment resolves other problems than that of a lost fever competence. And our body heat in any case supplies itself from energy from more sources, not only from nourishment.
Also the rays from the sky, the heat of the earth, a hot bath, going to the sauna, even body heat from other people keeps our hot water bottle in its comfort zone.
Yet what happens, if we cannot walk barefoot often enough on La Gomera’s sun drenched beaches, if we cannot jump into the spa frequently and if your cuddle partner fails to appear?
Chilling out thanks to heat?
Don’t even think of missing anything. Just get well as quickly as possible. Days off due to illness kill my career. Get out of that warm bed! How often have untalented educators mistakenly taken illnesses for laziness, people being slackers, feeble and weak. “In bed is where people die”, my grandmother used to taunt when she would head off Sunday morning on a mountain hike at 6 am. The bed is delighted by secret affection from dreams and creativity, relaxation and love’s pleasures. Nevertheless, it is also unavoidable for the career type. It is the repressed gap in the usually chock a block calendar. And therefor the bed is the last chance for natural therapies, which need time and simultaneously a fixed place. Your bed has not made an appointment with you, yet this is a fixed date which is seldom cancelled or postponed.
The infrared mat which is placed permanently on the bed has been chosen as Uwe Karstaedt’s best form of therapy and demonstrates its strategic brilliance.
Infrared sauna cabins are also available for comparable prices which base themselves on a similar work principle. Yet who sits one hour a day in such a cabin? I own one since the last 3 years. Before it used to be in my home office, so that I can use it more quickly. You don’t do this constantly if you have to do it extra!
On the other hand, on the infrared mat for the bed I can sleep on it, dream, read a book, play on my tablet, watch television, make phone calls, have personal conversations, I can even type this text on it. For the infrared mat doesn’t demand any other activity from me after I have switched it on and set it to my programme. Similar to meditation or yoga exercises, it switches me passively into the parasympathetic relaxation state, frees endorphins and if higher levels are set it stimulates the immune system.
All of this with just one demand: lie comfortably on it. The new Biomats, that Karstaedt uses, even have an extra soft layer named the “Quantum Energy Comforter”. Just by lying on it without exerting pressure on your body can stress, which burdens the muscles with tension or the soul with anxiety, be removed by relaxation. You can even “chill out”, although this adolescent expression indicates the opposite with its meaning. Up to 78% fewer stress hormones is quite cool. Sadly, even youths today have a low temperature, especially if poor circulation in fat pads stand in the way of Max Mustermann Jr.’s temperature balance. Traditionally, a bed is linked to the expectation of warmth. Yet all the warmth which is stored in the eiderdown is first of all produced by the body. The mat helps you with this. And your good night’s sleep is deeper.
To drink warm or cold
With so many discussions about heat I can already see myself as the bogeyman at Ayurveda conferences. This medicinal treatment direction which originates from India recommends ill people to drink preferably warm to hot water. This might be sensible against the background of Indian hygiene conditions. With the statements in this book I am all for drinking water which is colder than room temperature because it can be treated better with hydrogen. After all, I recommend with the many reasons I have displayed in various chapters, to drink electrically activated water which is hydrogen rich and slightly alkaline – up to pH 9,5. In warm or hot water the important antioxidant hydrogen escapes up to 100%. The water will just be alkaline. Therefor I dissuade people from doing this. At the same time I plead for infrared mats, which are a supporting pillar of contemporary pharma-free therapies. How does that fit together?
- To Max Mustermann’s 42 kg (Liter) of body water it is quite irrelevant if you drink a glass (0,25 l) of cold tap water at 17 degrees C, or a glass of water at 57 degrees C, so 20 degrees under or over your ideal body temperature.
- Even if you mix pure water in this ratio, this amounts to a temperature change which is less than 1/10 of a degree. These are the ratios when you mix hot and cold directly. Yet these compromise the regulatory mechanisms of our body.
- Measure your (rectal) temperature before drinking and 10 minutes afterwards. You will see for yourself. If, for example, I have cold feet because I sat for a long time at the computer, my body temperature rises by 0,3 degrees 10 minutes after having drunk 1 Liter of cold water from the tap.
- Of course you can also measure this with a smaller amount of water, to test the regulating ability of your body. I grew up next to a Munich Beergarden where water is also served in 1 Liter beer steins, so I am used to these amounts.
- Also hot water – everyone has their maximum “pain threshold”, will you see that it sometimes causes apparent paradoxical temperature effects.
Karl Heinz Asenbaum
The internationally sought after expert on electrically activated water highlights an aspect of marked health significance in his latest book on water: The, until recent times, underestimated content of dissolved hydrogen gas. Hydrogen gas for a long time was considered a physiologically ineffective gas. This dogma was first toppled in 2007 by Shigeo Ohta’s working group. Since then, research on hydrogen as a therapeutic gas has mushroomed.
The book focuses on the absorption of hydrogen rich water from drinking. Quite suddenly an industry has developed which makes devices for the production of such water. Almost weekly the author receives in his mail new devices, which claim to be better than the others.
Karl Heinz Asenbaum clarifies in this book the different technologies and assesses them critically.
In addition he also illustrates his new ideas on the “hydrogen revolution”, that not only will change drinking, but also eating.