Dan Reid has been living the 'Alkaline Life'
for at least seven years and studying longevity and health for
the last twenty. He
is a highly
respected author of self-help books that demonstrate techniques
for health and longevity and yes, sex. This is an edited version
of a
larger interview Dan had with Ian Hamilton of ION LIFE.
Dan appears
in darker text below, the interview
questions are in a lighter shade of grey.
Dan Reid: Actually,
I first read about it in a book on Yogic Breathing.
The book is called "Pranayama" But
it went into it scientifically and explained how
Pranayama works. It talked about negative ions
as the element in science we use to describe 'Prana' or Chi'. It
is a vital energy considered to be carried in the air. So after
a lot of research,
the conclusion was reached that it was negative ions. I also researched
the American Space Program where it was realized that even a mouse
couldn't stay in space for more than twenty-four hours without
going crazy. They figured out that the air, although the perfect
blend of oxygen and nitrogen etc., had to be ionized. The link
between traditional Asian breathing exercises - why you need to
breathe a certain way, why you need certain kinds of air - and
Western research on negative ions was obvious to me.
So we are now capable of intake of negative
ions in the form of air and water. Negative ionized air, and negative
ion alkaline
microclustered water. The Japanese have tried to achieve the same
result through diet - what we call macrobiotics, which Herman Aihara,
the father of modern macrobiotics says is a dietary method of rendering
our inner terrain alkaline.
Dan Reid: He had his diet divided into acid and alkaline. You'd have
alkaline yang and alkaline yin, then acid yang and acid yin. Throw
the book out!
Really?
Dan Reid: Yes!
There is something to it, but it's not practicable or applicable.
You can't use it. I've
never seen
anybody successfully
follow it.
It's a theoretical construct. There are so few foods that can
be properly combined if you get that fine about it. The one
thing
people keep questioning me about in the Tao book is food combining.
They take it so seriously, even though I say several times that
if you are about 75% you'll be OK. Your body can adjust. You
are built to adjust to an imperfect world where imperfect food
combinations
occur all the time. People take it too too strictly; "I can't
eat this with that, or that with this." And in the end they
can't eat anything with anything! That's not how it is. Just
be sensible. Don't have steak with four potatoes. But it's not
going
to hurt you to have some chopped meat with your noodles, or one
prawn with your salad.
He
just went too far with his system.
Have you seen Sapoty Brook's Food Chart system,
where he eats only raw food and balances them based on the acid
or alkaline residue
it leaves in the body?
Dan Reid: Yes, Sapoty gave me his chart,
and I'm sure that theoretically it is right and it may be beneficial,
but, I don't think it made
much difference at that 'finer cut'.
The only problem I have
with raw food people is that they don't look healthy, and they
seem to do nothing but
eat.
Dan Reid: They need negative ions.
What interested me though, was that
Sapoty said he doesn't drink water because the fruit he eats
offers him
all the water he needs
and releases it slowly into his system as the cellular walls
of the fruit breaks down in digestion.
Dan Reid: I don't think that's
true. If that was true why don't you just drink beer.. or water?
For hydrating,
it has always been accepted
that nothing works as well as plain water, with nothing else
in it.
Yes, Kinesiologists say this too. They always
ensure that the meridian system can 'talk' to them before a treatment
by giving
the patient water, and only water.
Dan, you wrote about ionization
years ago so I suppose you would have had plenty of experience
with air ionizers?
Dan
Reid: Sure. When I found
out about it I got myself a negative ion Generator for my house,
and I can't say that I noticed
a difference, although
I did notice the dust it precipitated all over the house!
It precipitated the dust?
Dan Reid: Yes! That's what negative
ion generators were sold as. Air cleaners. The people who made
them didn't even
know what negative
ion generators were for! They purify the air in your room. The
negative ions they generate will latch onto anything; dust, carpet
fibers, smoke - it will drop, so you will always find a film
of dust over everything. You'll dust it away and there will be
another
film there tomorrow, because the negative ions are causing those
dust particles normally floating free to plummet to earth all
over your furniture! So I noticed it cleaned the air but I didn't
notice
anything like the effect I have had with my GEOMED ActivAir energizer.
I just don't think the others puts out a strong enough density
of negative ions to make much difference, but they are useful
for cleaning the air, I suppose.
The actual lifespan of a negative
ion is a couple of minutes, so if you don't ingest them in that
time they
are useless.
Dan Reid: Yes, that's true.
Another thing I like, and still have is a portable negative ion
generator
you wear around, and
I always used it in
air trips and found it very good because it was hanging right
under your nose. But then I met an expert on EMF effect and he
took a
meter to our devices and found they were creating an aberrant
EMF field right over my heart. So now we still carry them but we
sit
them away from our bodies. As long as they are within a meter
from our bodies, they work, and I have found them more useful than
room
generators. They are ionizing my immediate space and I can definitely
tell the difference. It makes a huge difference when I fly. It
eliminates jet lag, it protects you from the stale air, the microbes
from other people's breathing.
I recently returned from India
and what shocked me was the fact that you could see people aging
due to pollution.
Dan Reid: Free radical damage. Those obvious
symptoms you see - the wrinkling, the hair falling out, the age
spots, free radical damage.
Lack of negative ions as antioxidants. Apart from the lack of
oxygen in the air, you have the excrement, the unshielded EMF,
the diesel
fumes, the factory output - it's got to rank with the worst air
on earth. Their food is terribly poisoned and you can imagine
what their water supply is like. They are getting saturated with
free
radicals.
So they don't even have the ability to ionize
within their body the way a healthy human specimen does. But
how would you compare
them to us? We live in comparative cleanliness, but let's look
at an Australian city dweller. You still have your stress your
EMF, your environmental pollution, your supermarket diet.
Dan
Reid: I'd say it's six of one and half a dozen of the other. If
you want a comparison, I'd say your average
western stressed
out businessman in a big city is actually worse off than an Indian.
An Indian's body is certainly experiencing free radical damage,
and he is looking a lot older than he is, and he does have problems
from that, but overall an Indian has a spiritual life. They know
what life is all about, they are grounded, they don't get stressed
out like us, so they don't have their own body eating itself up.
They don't have the auto-immune response problem that people have
here. They don't have the adrenal glands burning out from constant
cortisol and adrenaline, and the stress factors. I believe that
damage is worse, because it is so toxic. When you don't use those
stress hormones to go and club a sabre toothed tiger like our forebears
would have, they break down into pure poison. How often do you
get a stress response? Forty seven times a day? You're a taxi driver
and you're frustrated with waiting in line, you're stressed because
your boss is angry, and you know how we Westerners are - we're
always "Aargh!" We spurt out stress, and it just burns
us up, and the side effect of all of those problems is massive
acidification. I should add that Westerners with their Coke and
Big Mac habits are adding to their acidification, constantly having
calcium leached out of their bones and teeth. They aren't re-alkalizing,
they aren't using negative ion water or air.
Let me give you an
example - the Osteoporosis problem in the West. There were studies
carried out in India and
in the West, on typical
50-year-old Indian women and Western women. The Western women
had virtually no tensile strength left in their bones. But the
Indian
50 year old women are still carrying 20 kg of water on their
heads every day. Sure, they have the free radical damage, but they
have
calcium in their bones, they're not stressed out and their damage
is only on that one level. It's having a direct effect on the
physical body, but I think that their hormonal, their endocrine,
their mental
balance would be better than most Westerners.
So the Westerner
has the choice of listening to all the ads, and buying all the
antioxidant products pushed
by the pharmaceutical
giants. But I still wonder about these antioxidant supplements,
because it seems to me that they are still only capable of working
at a molecular level, whereas ionized air and water works at
an atomic level. It seems that nobody really tells you what you
get
when you buy antioxidants. I've had people telling me they spend
$75 to $100 a month on antioxidants, and really not knowing the
effect.
Dan Reid: The thing about all those supplements
is that they have to pass through the digestive system, and most
Westerner's digestive
system is not very good, so there is that obstacle. If your stomach
is hyper acidic or your small intestine is covered with slime
and mucus, they are just going to be excreting their $100 worth.
So
those supplements are fine for people in pretty good condition,
but for the people who need them most, I think the absorption
and utilization factor is pretty low. Vitamin E for example has
all
these good antioxidants, but they aren't eaten with all the necessary
cofactors, you need a good digestive system, and your liver has
to be in good working order in order to break it down and transform
it. Compare all that to breathing air, or drinking water, which
just goes straight in, so for people who need it the most, the
water and air systems are infinitely superior. But people who
really have good digestive systems, are able to assimilate food,
have
balanced internal organs and can therefore use the supplements,
don't need them!
So they would be the one in a hundred, or
one in five hundred..
Dan Reid: We all have natural free radical damage
from metabolism, but we also have natural ability to deal with
it, with
our super oxide dismutase,
our peroxidates, the enzymes produced for that purpose. You don't
need any supplements. You really shouldn't even need ionized
air or water. The free radical damage that we can't deal with is
caused
by taking in chemicals, preservatives, pollutants and wrong food
combinations causing putrefaction and fermentation in the gut.
When you do that, your ability to use digestive supplements or
antioxidants becomes very limited.
Some people say that it
is wrong to use electricity to create ionized water.
Dan Reid:
So what would that mean to the ocean, to the lakes, to the reservoirs?
I have heard that argument, but
I don't see what
they are saying. Are they saying that water shouldn't have electricity
in it? Water is the finest conductor in the world! And these
Ionizers like mine control it exactly using an onboard computer.
I think
they are trying on the idea that technology is bad, just to make
their point. Hey, I'm a Luddite, but I'm also high on technology,
because we have to understand that electricity is one of the
most basic parts of our universe!
There is nothing more 'natural'
than electricity! You have only a few energies that run this
planet; solar, gravity,
electricity,
so let's extend their argument to all these forms. Take sunlight.
Does sunlight damage water? Why should electricity? Water and
electricity have been interacting symbiotically for countless millions
of years,
in fact that's how life began, with a lightning strike into water
carrying carbon substances, passing on energy and causing the
very first life-sustaining reactions! Without electric input energizing
water, water will remain inert. So the whole point of putting
electricity
into it is to give it life. Electricity is a life force. If you
don't believe it, put a voltmeter to your body. It's what makes
your nerves work! A chemical reaction creates an electrical impulse.
It's totally compatible with blood, body fluids, water. I don't
know what they think they are talking about. It isn't adding
anything to the water. There is no chemical added. It's about the
purest
method of water treatment there is.
What about this 'pure
water" argument.
Some people say electrolysis of water removes certain minerals.
The only minerals it removes are
the toxic ones, which are released into the byproduct acid water,
so I can't see what they are complaining about.
Dan Reid: My ionizer
does purify the water. Pure water doesn't have chlorine in it.
If you think of pure water as
spring water coming
out of some high mountain then think again. It's loaded with
minerals! It has no acids, no fluoride. It's loaded with all the
good things
that come out of the earth. By the time we get it, though, it's
already been ruined by processing.
So, Dan, how long have you
been drinking ionized water?
Dan Reid: Let's see. We
got our unit in 1996. Six years.
So how has it been for you?
Dan Reid: I can taste the water.
I can tell it's ionized because I know what water is supposed
to taste like. When
we first tasted
it we really knew this was the real McCoy. I also never liked
drinking water. I would drink tap water and be dehydrated as a
result. I
decided that's it, I don't like it, it makes me feel bad, but
when I found this water, it just went right in. I had another glass,
and it tasted good, and it was then I realized I had been drinking
the wrong water. I've continued drinking it since then. Of course,
it makes good tea, it's good for cooking, food tastes better..
and the micro clustering and all the other reasons to take it
are
there. I think one of the main reasons is because I am aware,
now, having had it for a long time, of the importance of minerals
and
trace elements, and how difficult it is with ordinary H2O to
assimilate them. Most mineral supplements do zilch. They only ones
that work
really well are colloidal minerals which are super-expensive.
I'm using the Marine Minerals from Bionatural, which is very good,
and of course the Ionized water.
How old are you now?
Dan Reid: I'm 53.
What would you say to our age group? We are
all baby boomers and we are all looking down the gun barrel of
aging. We are again,
and none of us have really looked at it.
Dan Reid: I have! I've been
looking right at it for the last 20 years.
But as a class
we haven't, have we? I only heard today that kids are not mentally
maturing properly because
their parents never
did - their baby boomer parents.
Dan Reid: It's easy. Get
natural! We started off as Hippies saying "Hey,
be natural man!" Mister Natural, and in the end we've become
the most unnatural of the entire generation groups, far more unnatural
than our parents! We've become technophobes, but it's also the kind
of stuff we do and take and use, and still we claim we're being 'natural'.
Being natural has been reduced to wearing an eagle feather in your
hair or something.
So let's get really elementary here. Food, water,
air. That's it. We need to eat. We need to drink. We need to
breathe. We need to
assimilate more oxygen, we need to pump up our circulation, and
also for all the energetic reasons, we need to drink ionized
water because you can't get any more real water without going to
the
top of the Himalayas. So you use technology to create something
that reproduces the natural order of things.
Breathing in a city
is, frankly, suicidal. So get the GEOMED and deliver pure ionized
air right to your lungs;
once again using
technology to reproduce that which we have destroyed. So it is
with whole food. Like any animal, quality and longevity will
depend on the right food, the right water and the right air.
Many people say they can't afford to eat whole
food.
Dan Reid:
That's nonsense. They can't afford to eat whole food the way
they eat junk food. The reason they eat
so much junk food is
that there is no nutrition in it. So they keep eating, and eating,
and eating, and the body isn't getting anything. They are fat,
they are overweight. If you eat whole food, your body will be
nutritionally satisfied. When you get a hunger signal, the body
will tell you
to eat - not based on how much is or isn't in your stomach, but
when you have met your nutritional requirements. When they've
been met a healthy body will turn off the hunger signal, so if
you eat
junk food you're just going to keep eating because your body
is going to make you keep eating.
So it's not too expensive
because you will eat less food, and digest it fully. Junk food
digests
totally differently.
It functions more
like a drug, You have to chew wholefood, it's more fibrous, you
take longer to break it down, and you feel full, you feel satisfied
and the true signal - not the one that disguises a call for more
acidic food - but the real hunger signal, switches off. So you
are eating about half the quantity. It's not double the expense,
is it? I think their real argument is "I can't afford to eat
whole food the way I eat junk food." They are just fooling
themselves. They just want to keep eating the junk. They've gotten
used to doing that, and they are lazy! Whole food has to be cooked!
You've got to cook! You can't just go and stick it into the toaster!
So many of our city generation don't even know how to turn the
stove on anymore. They can push a button to make coffee. That's
why they eat fast food on the run and they never get properly nourished.
Rather than sitting down and relaxing quietly, getting off the
stress cycle and allowing our digestive system to work. They're
running down the street stuffing in a burger, your body does not
digest, period! It sits there and ferments. My advice to these
people is that they cannot afford not to eat whole foods. It's
not a matter of money. On a polluted planet they can't afford not
to be careful about what they eat.
When I began ionized water
my attitude towards food changed. As I became more alkaline I
changed, and so it made
me wonder whether
being acidic is like being on an acid trip. Only when my body
changed could my mind see what it really needed.
Dan Reid: It's
certainly a state of mind. You are what you eat and you think what
you eat. Your body functions
on energy derived from
whatever it is you put in there to burn. If you burn plastic, imagine
what it would smell like compared with burning straw. If you poison
your body it poisons the way you think and the way your mind works.
I've also discovered that one of the symptoms of advanced toxicity
is apathy. Just as constipation is a symptom of being filled up
with garbage food, plus toxicity, skin eruptions and body odor,
I believe apathy is an integral symptom of advanced toxicity. Somehow
you get into this state where you don't care. "Yes, I'm dying.
Yes, pass the Cola." And the only time these people care,
the only time you can get them to think again, is to get them back
into a healthy state. Then they literally wake up and say "Whew!
That was a close call!" Otherwise - they just won't do it.
They
need to see a good friend dying slowly, or they need to read
a book like mine.
Dan Reid: Living the Alkaline Life