The Importance of Water and Why we Should Drink Plenty of It
Without water, life as we know it could not exist. From the smallest cell to the largest animal, every cell depends on water to live and function. Of all the substances in the human body, water is the most plentiful, making up 57 percent of the total adult weight. The water content of a newborn infant is even higher, adding up to seventy-five percent of its total weight. However, the volume of body water gradually decreases from birth to old age, the most rapid decline occurring during the first ten years of life.
Every living cell throughout our bodies must be continually supplemented with life-giving essentials, and this is taken care of with water, because water is the body’s transport system. The arteries are just one of the systems waterways. It carries oxygen and food to nutrients to the cells that need it. Flowing in the opposite way is the veins. The veins carry two kinds of cargo away from the cells, which include:
1. Substances they have manufactured, such as hormones, and 2. Carbon dioxide and other chemical wastes for elimination.
This is well proven by the lungs. As you inhale, oxygen enters the air sacs of your lungs. Moistening the inner surface of each air sac is a film of water. After dissolving in this water, the oxygen passes through the air sac wall into the blood, where it is picked up by hemoglobin and carried to every cell in the body. When a hemoglobin molecule reaches a cell, it releases its oxygen molecule, which must dissolve in the fluids surrounding the cells before entering the cells themselves.
Water carries oxygen and other nutrients to the enzyme factories in each cell. The oxygen helps burn the fuel so the cell has energy to complete its tasks. Carbon dioxide, a waste product of this burnt fuel, now passes into the tissue fluid to be picked up by the hemoglobin in the veins. Taken back to the lungs, the carbon dioxide passes out of the vein into the fluid lining the air sac. From there it is expelled into the air as you exhale.
Thus the water within and around each cell acts as a transport mechanism, carrying oxygen and nutrients into the cell and carbon dioxide and other waste products back out to the body’s great waterways, the blood and lymph.
