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In order of sequence, the five things that affect your health more than anything else are:

NUMBER ONE: The thoughts that you think, be they expressed or unexpressed.

NUMBER TWO: The air that you breathe.

NUMBER THREE: The water that you drink.

NUMBER FOUR: The exercise that you get.

NUMBER FIVE: The food that you eat, or whatever you stick into your mouth, whether you call it food or not.

Why are we interested in these five points at all? Why are we interested in physical health at all?

Most of us, I think it’s safe to say, believe in some type of superior intelligence, and that there is some type of life after death, something that survives the body, be it spirit or soul, whatever you call it; that, if this be the case, we as spiritual entities are walking around in this body, for x number of years, and this body serves us as a vehicle, a mode of transportation, here on this plane of existence.

The condition of this vehicle that we use greatly determiners our pleasure or our sorrow while we are using it. In other words, the ideal condition would be to have this body of ours in such condition that we were unaware of its presence. We wouldn’t have to waste any time fixing it, patching it, doctoring it, nursing it, or coaching it along, hoping that it would get up one more morning for us.

Some people will tell you, "Well, I have more important things to do. This material world doesn’t mean anything to me. I’ve got places to go, things to do, and people to see." But they’re going to have to carry this body with them anywhere they go.

Some people say, "I’d rather meditate than mess around the kitchen trying to fix up a protein drink or something." Well, if you’ve ever tried to meditate with your back or your stomach hurting, it’s a little hard to do. Regardless of what you want to do in life, I’ll guarantee you you can do it better if you are using a body that does not bother you, a trouble-free machine.

Through this book we hope to be able to share with you some ideas that will help you to get this machine running in as carefree condition as possible. Since we have to carry this thing around with us, from the cradle to the grave, let’s see what repairs we can do to make it run more efficiently, with fewer repairs.

In fact, let’s go back and look at the body and the condition it’s in when we start out with it. At the same time of conception, two cells joins together and begin a cell division process called mitosis, which develops a zygote, which eventually develops into an embryo. Different people have different opinions as to when you can start calling it life; that doesn’t matter for our purpose here. The point is that it starts out a soft, gelatinous mass, very spongy, very flexible, anything but hardened. Then the ossification process begins-the tissues gradually become more and more hardened. Calcification begins to occur. The first bone to ossify is the collar bone or the clavicle. The bones continue to grow until the age between 21 and 25. The tissues gradually become harder and harder. It would be nice if they would just continue to harden up to a convenient point and then stop, but they don’t: the hardening process continues throughout the years. Pretty soon, the soft, elastic, flexible tissues become hardened and crystallized; they lose their elasticity. Dehydration sets in. The same hardening process that stated way back in the uterus ends up in what we call old age and eventually death.

It just so happens that water happens to be the number one cause of this hardening process! Assuming that it’s to our advantage to retard this hardening process, assuming that it’s advantageous to remain flexible, mobile, soft, and pliable, then this subject is worth pursuing.

I cannot stress too strongly what this hardening process does to us. If it would stop at a certain point, we would probably live forever, but there is a gradual increase in the density and the firmness of the bones, tendons, ligaments, cartilage and even in the very substance of the soft glands such as the stomach, liver, lungs, and kidneys. The joints become rigid and dry. In time, they begin to crack and grate from their movement because the synovial fluid, which once oiled them, is diminishing in quantity. In place of it, there is a thick, gelationous substance that does not serve as well as a lubricant. Even the heart, brain and spinal cord partake if the same consolidating process. The larger blood vessels gradually lose their elasticity. They grow smaller. They become incapable of carrying the required amount of blood. The fluids in the body thicken. The capillary beds begin to clog up. The skin wrinkles. The hair falls out for lack of oil. Motor nerves begin to dry up. All of this is due to the hardening process. The elastic, healthy, alert, pliable, tissues become rigid and slow and insensible, until finally the point of death is reached.

Now, from a purely physical standpoint, chemists are unanimously agreed that what is responsible for this hardening is a total of three items. Our bodies collect an excessive amount of (1) phosphate of lime, which is bone matter; (2) carbonate of lime, which is common chalk that we write on the blackboard with; and (3) sulfate of lime, which is plaster of paris. Those three items collect in our bodies and are responsible for this hardening process. As a matter of fact, the only difference between the body of old age and that of youth is the greater density, toughness, and rigidity caused by the greater proportion of these earthy elements.

To give you an example: the bones of a child are composed of three parts of gelatin to one part of earthy matter; earthy matter is those three limes that I just named. In old age this proportion is exactly reversed. In other words, one part of gelatin to three parts of earthy matter. If we could find the source of this death-dealing accumulation of this earthy matter, we would be on the path to eternal youthfulness, health, and longevity.

Now, the entire body is nourished by the blood stream. Everything that is contained in the body entered by way of the blood stream. It first had to be in the blood before it could be deposited. Now here is pertinent fact. The arterial blood, which is the blood that goes from the lungs out to supply the body, contains a higher percentage of this earthy matter than does the venous blood, which returns form the muscles and blood as being the pure blood containing lots of oxygen, which it does. We think of the venous blood as being the contaminated blood; that is, carrying waste material, carbon dioxide, to the lungs to be eliminated, and that is true. The venous blood has a higher percentage of carbon dioxide that does the arterial blood. Since this is the way we commonly think of it we are a little surprised when we hear that this earthy matter, more commonly referred to as ash, is higher in the arterial blood than it is in the venous blood. What this means is that it was deposited somewhere. The ash content of the arterial blood was deposited in the tissues somewhere and that’s why the ash content’s lower in the venous blood, and this depositing is being made every time the blood makes a complete cycle. Now the supply of earthy matter must be replenished, too, or it could not continually make deposits. So, where does this supply come from? There can be but one answer - from whatever you are sticking in your mouth, the food you eat, the water you drink. There is absolutely no other source.

To sustain physical life, it is necessary that we eat and drink, so we can’t just do away with this source completely. But, as there are many kinds of foods, it behooves us to pick those which have the lowest content of this ash material. If we concentrate on such foods, we can lengthen our lives, we can make our sojourn here much more pleasant, and we won’t have to spend so much time nursing and doctoring, and coaching these bodies along.

Now, someone may object and say, "Well, we have systems to take care of that waste material. This is what skin is for, this is what the kidneys are for." And it’s true that they do remove a large amount of this waste material. As a matter of fact, were it not for the skin and urinary system, we would be dead by the age of ten.

It has been calculated that ordinary spring water contains enough carbonate and lime compounds that the quantity of this spring water used by one person in the form of tea, coffee, soup, drinking water, etc., in forty years would be sufficient to form a block of solid chalk or solid marble the size of a large man. Let me run that by you once more. We’re just talking about the ash content, that substance which does not dissolve, which is responsible for the hardening process of our tissues. There’s enough ash content in ordinary spring water that, from that amount that a man would use in his ordinary beverages for a period of forty years, he could build a statue of himself out of solid marble. That’s how much of it is collected. The reason we are not solid blocks of marble at the age of forty is because the kidneys, lungs, skin and bowels are working to excrete it. So we’re getting rid of most of it, but if we could get rid of more of it, we could lengthen our lives and slow down the hardening process.

Now, as if the ash content of spring water weren’t bad enough, there are certain things that compound the felony, such as the public health service’s adding other elements to the drinking water, which have other side effects. For example, the chloride that is added to the city water supply is added for the purpose of destroying bacteria. It destroys bacteria by destroying the DNA, and there is research going on right now to determine whether or not the chloride in the drinking water affects the DNA in humans.

You can get charts in health food stores listing the ash content of foods. You can tell which foods have the highest ash content, and which foods have the lowest ash content. For example, the food highest in ash is cocoa. If you want to remain soft and pliable, this is the number one food to avoid. And, in spite of all the foods that you can find on the ash list, because our intake of water is so great, water outweighs them all. If you go out of your way to eat ash-free foods, and you’re still drinking tap water, you’re defeating your purpose. You’re going to pick up more ash from tap water than all your foods together, because of the large quantity that you use.

Did you know the average household consumption of water per person if fifty gallons a day, and on a national scale, the average usage a day is one hundred fifty gallons per person? This is because of the large amounts that are used by industry, which means the actual individual isn’t using one hundred fifty gallons. But, the average person uses fifty gallons of water per day. It takes two and a half gallons to flush your toilet. How many times a day do you flush it? That’s two and a half gallons right there. So it’s not too hard to add up to fifty gallons.

Did you know that a man who weighs one hundred fifty pounds, that ninety pounds of his weight is water? Almost two-thirds of body weight is water. Now you can begin to see why water is placed higher than food on the list of important contributors to good physical health.

Some people have the idea that if they boil their water that will make it pure. It just so happens that that increases the ash content. I’ll tell you why. When you boil water, the pure water is escaping as steam. Therefore, you have less water left in the kettle than when you started So the concentration of ash content has become greater. When you boil your water, it’s far worse for you than if you took it straight out of the tap, as far as the ash content is concerned. Those of you who keep a tea kettle on the stove know that over a period of months or years, you get a hard layer of solid chalk white substance in the bottom of your kettle. The fact that it is there, that that hard stuff is in the bottom of your kettle, is tangible evidence that you’ve been increasing the water you’re using. It would be better if we could find a source of water from which the ash had been removed.

In some places like the Southwest, the ash content is particularly high. If you wash your car with the garden hose - have you ever tried to wash off those white spots that appear, later after they’ve dried? It’s next to impossible, because when the water has evaporated, those little white spots are the ash that was in the water. You can imagine how much of that must be accumulating in your bodies, if that much accumulates on the car. On the other hand , that ash content serves as a wonderful cleanser. It actually has an abrasive effect. You can get you skin cleaner using tap water than you could using soft water. If you’ve ever taken a shower with soft water, you know it feels like your hands are slimy, and no matter how much you wash, you can’t get rid of that slick feeling. Now, soft water has its advantages - to wash your clothes, to wash your hair, but not your skin. The hard water, the ash, the alkaline water is a much better cleanser. It’s the best cleanser. Therefore we make a mistake if we have a water softener put in our homes that softens the entire water supply. If you want to use soft water for your washing machine, have it installed so that it softens the water that goes only to that area. Your water softener bill is, I suppose, cut one-tenth, when you soften only the necessary parts of your household.

There are some companies that sell bottled water. I used to live in Los Angeles, where there is a company that advertised water from lake Arrow head, about eighty miles from Los Angeles. What they didn’t tell us was that, to transport it from Lake Arrowhead to Los Angeles, they chlorinated it. Then, when they got it to Los Angeles, they de-chlorinated it by running it through charcoal filters. Charcoal can be a carcinogen, a cancer-producing agent. Charcoal is a wonderful filter for bacteria or dirt; but to put the chlorine in the water and then take it out again and sell it as spring water was unfair to the public. The best water for low ash content is distilled water. If you understand what distilled water means, you’ll see why at once. Distilled does not mean that it has gone through an ion transfer method as has soft water; nor does it mean that it has gone through a series of filters. What it means is the water has been heated, turned to steam just like in your kettle; only, instead of using the portion that’s left in the tea kettle, they collect the condensation of the steam. All the ash content has been left in the bottom of the boiler.

It would not be practical to put a large distiller in your home because it takes up a considerable amount of space. For example, the space scientists had to figure out some method of purifying water because the astronauts obviously couldn’t take enough water with them. So they had to reuse their water. And the purest water would be distilled water, but it wasn’t practical, so they used a series of filters, and they did come up with very pure water as compared to tap water, but the ash content wasn’t nearly so low as that of distilled water.

Let me give you some figures here. This will make more sense to you. Ordinary tap water contains about 114-123 parts per million of sodium. If you run water through filters such as used on the space program, you get that 114 down to about 12 to 14 parts per million of sodium. Tremendous reduction. One hundred percent reduction. And you think that’s pretty good? And it is; it’s fantastic when you compare to tap water. But just compare it to distilled water. What do you think the sodium content is of distilled water? .00006 parts per million. That’s several thousand times less than 14 parts per million. That’s how much purer distilled water is than filtered water; and it’s just ridiculous to compare it to tap water.

If you’re going to get distilled water, you have to read the label. We’ve talked quite a bit about labels in this book, and I’m going to keep talking about them because they’re the secret to getting what you want. You’ll find, in little tiny letter it says, "For all distilled purposes," and in big letters, "Distilled Water." The fine print tells you that it’s not water distilled water, it’s water for distilled purposes, which means it’s water that was filtered, and the filtering process is supposed to be efficient enough for the water to be usable in steam irons because there is not enough ash in it to clog up an iron; and because your steam iron can be replaced, that’s okay. But remember, we’re stuck with this body of ours, and we’re not satisfied to just have just less ash in our water. We want the purest water available, the water that has the absolute least ash content and, for this purpose, we want true, unadultered distilled water.

I cannot over-emphasize the point that distilled water is man’s greatest friend when taken internally and yet it can be his enemy used externally. It’s not good to bathe is distilled water. You won’t get clean. It doesn’t have the abrasive affect your skin needs. I don’t want anybody to get a five-gallon bottle and rig up a shower out of it. It’s not that good.

There’s so much that can be said about our city water supplies. Most of you are familiar with the fluoridation battles going on. It’s been proven that 13-14 parts per million fluoride can produce molting of the teeth, can turn them black; they’re fighting to put three to five parts per million in our drinking water because they figure that it prevents tooth decay. There’s no way to control intake, though, because, one person may drink ten times as much water as another, so it would be very easy then for one person to get too much fluorine and another person get not enough fluorine. If somebody wants to use fluorine, why, that’s his prerogative. He can go to his dentist, and have fluoride treatments an his teeth. It’s true that fluoride is beneficial to your teeth, but not to your stomach. As a matter of fact, fluoride is a rat poison. If you went to the drugstore to buy fluorine, you’d have to sign the poison book. Yet they want you to put it in the drinking water. There are some cities that already have their water supplies fluorinated. There are also many cities that are reclaiming water, meaning they’re taking the water form the sewage treatment plant, filtering it, and putting it back in the city water supply.

The amount of chlorine being used in our city water supplies in increasing, however; over seventy percent of public water supplies in the United States no longer meet the Public Health Department’s standards, the river water is becoming increasingly contaminated, and, to keep it at a safe drinking level, they have to keep increasing the amount of chlorine they put in it.

There are other methods of purifying a city water supply, but it happens that chlorine is the least expensive.

Soft water has gone through an ion exchange to remove the calcium and magnesium ions; this would be best for our clothes or hair. The plain old alkaline water would be best for bathing. And the distilled water is the best for cooking, drinking, even brushing your teeth, and making beverages.

We need six to eight glasses of water a day to maintain optimum health. This does not mean that you have to actually sit down and drink that many glasses of water. It’s safe to say that most of us are getting that much water through other sources - through juice and fruit. When water is absorbed through the root system of a tree or a plant, and goes up into the fruit that you eat, that is just as good as being distilled water. The purest water you can get is the water inside fruit. If your body weight is made up of almost two-thirds water, you know that you have to take in large quantity of water each day to maintain it.

One of the objections to distilled water, you lose all the minerals. You lose the bad minerals with the good minerals. I contend that we should not look to water as our source of minerals. We should look to water as a source of H2O, period. If we’re not going to look to vegetables for all our vitamins, then we’re going to take a vitamin because we know our vegetables do not contain all the vitamins that they should because the topsoil is depleted. It would take that same type of reasoning to decide not to rely on your water supply for minerals. If you’re going to supplement your vitamins, a multiple form, contains your minerals anyhow. You can’t buy a multiple vitamin without buying the minerals along with it, and there are mineral supplements available by themselves. Too, if you drink three cups of mixed herb tea a day, and you make that tea with distilled water, you will get more minerals than somebody who drinks eight glasses a day of tap water. The herbs are that high in minerals.

You’ll hear people say that distilled water will leach the minerals out of the body because it doesn’t contain any. It’s like taking in white sugar, which leaches out vitamins, because it doesn’t contain any. And that would be true of you had no other source of mineral. My point is, do not rely on your water supply as your source of minerals. You should be taking a supplement that has minerals in it, or using herbs or cell salts, such as Schussler’s Cell Salts. These are superior sources of minerals.

Another complaint you’ll have is that distilled water tastes funny. I guarantee you that after you get used to it, chlorinated tap water is the one that tastes funny to you. In fact, if you have distilled water in your home, when you go to someone’s home and drink a glass of water from the tap, it almost turns your stomach. The chlorine in it just reeks. People who drink it every day don’t think anything about it. If you do mind the taste of distilled water, what you’re minding is the taste of H2O because that’s all distilled water is, and that’s what real water tastes like. If you think water should taste differently, then you have not been drinking pure water. You’ve been drinking some water that has some additives in it, and it’s the additives you’ve been tasting.

Recently, a new company has been selling a filter system that fits underneath your sink, and it turns out to be much less expensive than bottled water, after several hundred dollars of installation. It’s a filter system that’s patterned after the type that they sue in the space program, and as I said previously, it does an excellent job of taking down the sodium a hundred percent, for example. It also does an excellent job of removing the bacteria, but it just doesn’t hold a candle to distilled water. It is less expensive, not the installation, but per gallon, than bottled water, but it’s many thousand times higher in ash content than is distilled water.

A lot of things are happening today concerning water. The salmon industry is losing fifty percent f the eggs that are supposed to hatch and the problem has been traced to the DDT found in the water. In the state of Vermont, they ran a survey where they sampled 79 different drinking water sources, and out of 79.76 of them contained pesticide residues. The Federal government has established that the solids in water should not exceed 500 parts per million. It was found that the water systems coming from Colorado River averaged 746 parts per million. The same water is allowed 250 parts per million. The Colorado River water was found to contain 307 parts per million of sulphates. This is before they chlorinate it, but the Chlorination doesn’t change the ash content. Chlorination just kills the bacteria.

Here’s an interesting fact for you. Chlorination kills bacteria, but it does not touch viruses. viruses even pass right through a filter, which means that no matter how well filtered your water is or how well chlorinated your water is, you can still pick up such virus diseases as influenza and polio. The most common diseases carried by water are typhoid fever, paratyphoid, cholera, and both bacteria dysentery and amoebic dysentery. Another common thing found in a city water supply is parasites. People pick up roundworms, hook worms tapeworms, and wonder where they came from. Water is the most common carrier of these problems. So it is obvious that distilled water is worth using.