"Alkaline Water" or "Reduced Water"? Let's Set The Record Staright

Everyone nowadays is on the "alkaline water" band-wagon. The net is full of vendors of commercial and household water ionizers that call the water from the reducing, or negative pole, side of their machines "alkaline water" or "alkaline ionized water". Yet, this name is not complete, since it could suggest that the positive bio-effects of the water that is produced by a water ionizer are due to its alkalinity.

Some also claim that it somehow alkalizes the body, or improves its mineral balance toward the alkaline region. Others even make a comfortable living offering bottles of "alkalizing" tablets or drops, which they claim that when added to water, turn it into something with the health benefit of "alkaline ionized water" from the water ionizers.

Incidentally, these drops and tablets usually contain nothing more than a bit of sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide, which do indeed make water more alkaline, but has never been proven to have any health benefit. Sodium hydroxide is also known as "lye", and is used as a drain cleaner. Incidentally, while there is indeed some calcium and magnesium present in most alkaline ionized water, the amount present is very small.

Whenever articles have appeared in the peer-reviewed scientific literature about so-called alkaline ionized water, the water has, more appropriately, usually been talked about as "reduced water". The word "reduced" comes from the fact that the water has been chemically "reduced" by electrolysis. Reduction is a chemical process which is the opposite of oxidation. The research in the scientific literature and in dozens of labs around the world has shown that reduced water often does show markedly strong health-enhancing benefits, among which perhaps the most primary effect is an antioxidant effect.

The health-enhancing benefits of reduced water to human beings and animals when consumed internally does not seem to be due at all to is alkalinity, which is a pretty much an accidental corollary, but due to the presence in the reduced water of a powerful and primitive antioxidant known as the negative hydrogen ion. This ion, which usually is short-lived in nature due to its powerful properties, is present in the reduced water in a protected or clustered form, in which each negative hydrogen ion is protected by a cage (or cluster) of water molecules.

The scientific research shows that it is the presence of this H-minus ion which gives reduced water its powerful antioxidant effects. Due to the presence of the H-minus ion, the water also shows a clustering effect different from normal water or tap water, and usually shows a reduced cluster size and reduced surface tension. These two latter properties (reduced cluster size and reduced surface tension), which are also created by the presence of the H-minus ion, are also believed to have some helpful effect upon the health of human beings and animals.This is because these smaller molecules get absorbed easier and faster through our various cell membranes.

Let us recap: It seems that any helpful health effects of the water produced by a water ionizer are due not to its alkalinity or alkaline mineral (calcium, magnesium) content, but due primarily to the presence of a simple, primal, primitive and primeval antioxidant called the negative hydrogen ion, which has been called the original primordial antioxidant which was present for use by life on earth when it first developed. There may be some secondary helpful bio-effects due to the reduced cluster size of the water and its reduced surface tension. It is important to understand that the alkalinity of reduced water, even when in the pH 11 to pH 12 range, is what is known as "weakly buffered", and therefore will usually not damage tissue, as it is almost at once neutralized by other substances. But, for this same reason, this alkalinity is not strong enough or well-buffered enough to significantly shift the acid-alkaline balance of the body

To learn more about alkaline or reduced water and its effect on our health, please follow this link.