August 24, 2012
Audio interview from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2012/08/what-is-structured-water/
Ben: Hey folks, it’s Ben Greenfield here and today we’re going to be talking about water. With me on the call today is someone who has a PHD in bioengineering and who is currently on faculty at theUniversityofWashingtonin the Department of Bioengineering. His name is Dr. Gerald Pollack and his research themes are primarily into the area of systems and quantitative biology and much of the research that he does is on aqueous solutions, on water, on storage potentials of water, on purification systems and all sorts of things related to water and since water is something that we’re drinking everyday and showering in and bathing in and filtering and try to use to enhance our health or enhance our performance, I thought that we should get Dr. Pollack on the call to talk about some of his expertise and to ask him some of the important questions when it comes to water. So Dr. Pollack, thank you for coming in on the call today.
Dr. Pollack: Hi Ben, happy to be with you and happy to answer any questions that you might have.
Ben: Well, let’s start here. In terms of you, your background in the field of water, what brought you into this particular specialty in the first place?
Dr. Pollack: I was studying muscles mainly which I guess is rather than to many of the people who are probably listening and so let me give you a background of the muscle contraction, the ideas about how muscles contract or the ideas that go maybe half a century back and we’re talking about the molecular mechanisms involving proteins active in muscles and such, and it goes with a theory that’s been around and if you like at any book or any textbook, you can see very nice artistic drawings of those proteins mechanistically do certain things and the odd thing about that is that they leave out the water and I must admit that I myself was guilty for many years of thinking about muscles consisting of a few characteristic proteins that then develop a force and create a notion that the water was absent and if you think about how much water there is in muscle well, or in the body as for that matter, we all know it’s roughly two-thirds of volume of our body is water but if you think about what that means in terms of the number of molecules, what are molecules is molecules are really small, they’re tiny molecules and other molecules in their body are pretty large so you need a lot of water to make up that two-thirds volume and it turns out that, in fact, you and I and your listeners where 99% of our molecules are water molecules, I’m not sure if you’re aware of that. So it’s a lot of water muscles and I thought whoa, it’s really interesting because muscle consists of 99% water molecules and yet every textbook eliminates or omits all those water molecules out as possible, that the muscle proteins apparently could act in a vacuum.
Ben: I’ve never even thought about that before. I’ve got textbooks lying in my shelves of muscle function and anatomy and actin and myosin fibers and all these pictures, it didn’t really struck me until you said that that you don’t see water in those diagrams.
Dr. Pollack: Well you don’t see water in those diagrams and I think the reason is that it used to be that when people thought about muscle, they thought about the water. In fact, a guy who was the head of the field by far was a little pioneer, this is 60, 70 years ago, he’s name was Albert Szent-Gyorgyi. It appears Szent-Gyorgyi is a national hero fromHungary. He discovered vitamin C and Szent-Gyorgyi won the Nobel Prize of course and he wasn’t kind of a scientist-scientist and he knew that water was sent through from everything. In fact, he thought that the contraction he wrote is, and I saw it only recently, he said the contraction of muscle is triggered by a destructuring of water, so he had the idea 60 or 70 years ago that the water inside the muscle was not just like water molecules in a glass that you might drink but that water, since most of it sat next to some actin or myosin protein, had a kind of impact with those proteins or it was ordered and he knew that was absolutely central. So then following him, a lot of people followed and during the past 50 or 60 years, a lot of the research in biology has, you might say it’s a reduction approach, it takes apart each component part and tries to boil it down to absolutely minimum components so we’re talking about molecules and sub-molecular parts so what you’re doing is taking apart whole structure and when you take apart a whole structure, a lot of us tend to forget about the water because we’re looking at just at the protein or part of a protein and so people will gradually begin to lose sight of the fact that muscle are at 99% of the molecules, there are water molecules so I think it’s a real mistake because the water molecules are really important. Anyway you asked a question and to answer your question specifically, it was basically the idea that how could you take the water away from a structure and try to understand how the structure operates without considering the possible role of water, so that’s where I got started.
Ben: Right, okay it makes sense and I guess kind of a logical question form there is that when you got into beginning to study water and why water seems to be kind of left out of some of the equations and how water actually does interact, what did you find? I mean, I’ve seen that you’ve written books on water, I know that you have a book coming out soon, you have another book called “Cells, Gels and The Engines of Life” and I know that in those books, you highlight the importance of water and it’s absolute importance to sell biology but what are some of the important things that you found when it comes to water’s function especially when it comes to things like muscle performance or physiology or contraction?
Dr. Pollack: Okay well long question definitely has to be answered bit by bit. First of all, the book that you mentioned, the Cells, Gels and The Engines of Life is now 10 years old and that book, as you mentioned, describes the role of water in biology and cell biology and basically everything that you sell a dozen and the main conclusion that book is at almost every basic function inside your cell and that water plays an active role and another was a chemistry of water and it’s well-integrated into the chemistry of what happens inside every cell in your body, that the hell is a main message. So at the time, we knew that there were a lot of evidence from mainly old evidence that the water inside the cell was organized in some way and think that water molecules is being randomly scattered out about and moving very rapidly and then having some sort of non-predictable random orientation when I said, that’s not true. I can see that the water that’s sitting, if you can imagine that protein surface and water molecules near it so what happens is that it charges those protein surfaces organized the water molecules nearby so they kind of stack up and that stacking can still extend pretty far. Inside the cell, it doesn’t really have to extend very far because proteins are so close to each other that you actually have this space typically between two nearby proteins, the equivalent of about seven water molecules. So all the water, essentially all the water inside your cell, is near some charged protein or nucleic acid surface so almost all the water is lined up so it’s not like water in the glass where the water is bulk water that’s random. So we knew that and the fact that the water molecules were lined up plays a key role in everything that your cells do. Okay so the book was published and a year or two later, we began to look for some new, modern experimental evidence that dares on the nature of that kind of ordered water and we were shocked. We came upon an observation that these water molecules could actually line up not by two or three layers next to a surface but we could find examples of two or three million layers in the right situation. In other words, it’s like a stack of bricks that went up to the size of a mile-high building or something like that and on and on and on. It was just because the experiment was a situation that we had that we could see and of course we became extremely interested and from an experimental point of view, it was a great advantage that we had so many of these molecules lined up because then we could study them easily. If you have only few, it’s hard to study but if you had a lot of them, it’s easy to study so we had a lot of them. At first people thought it’s impossible, it simply can’t be true because there’s a lot of random energy, random motions going on and you could never expect anything to build on high but we studied it for a few years and it became clear that this was real and then we began to look at the properties of this stuff and so we were continually amazed that apparently month by month. The odd thing, it’s not odd but it’s rather interesting, is that this ordered water, we actually caught exclusion zone water or EZ water for short because it excludes almost everything just like ice. In fact, the structure is very similar to ice. Yeah, while the molecules are lining up in some kind of almost crystalline arrangement and nothing shifts in to that lattice, everything is excluded. No matter what you can think of, it’s excluded. So that was the first, this easy water. Second they only found was that it has charge, it’s not neutral. So water molecules, you think of as being neutral but we found that this zone was charged and so it was like the water, to form the zone, the water molecules not only gather together but they divided up into negative charge and positive charge so this region, this exclusion zone where you have the negative charge and all the water that was right beyond that has positive charge, so it’s like a battery, negative-positive.
Ben: Interesting.
Dr. Pollack: Isn’t that? We thought that was really a cool observation because nobody ever thinks about a battery and water.
Ben: Well yeah, it’s different than what most of us learn even in just like high school chemistry, chemistry 101, water is kind of like a neutral H2o molecule and we don’t see that it stacks like that or has these type of charges that you’re describing to me.
Dr. Pollack: Yeah absolutely. What you learned in the textbook and what I learned in the textbook, as little as I learned, is not much so this is really new stuff Ben and it’s stuff that’s just coming out now but if you think about charge separation, if you think about that, you just look up in the sky. In Seattle today, we just got cloudy skies and there’s always rain here so if you think about it and you think about the thunder and lightning, well in order to get lightning, you’re talking about potential differences or volts or hundreds of thousands of volts and those hundreds of thousands of volts, most of these discharges go between clouds and clouds, that’s about 80% of them and so it means that you have one cloud filled with water, basically clouds are water and another drop of water somewhere else and the potential difference between those two bodies of water builds up to hundreds of thousands of volts. So that’s a very substantial battery of water and we see batteries of water which charges separated and we’re talking about not hundreds of thousands of volts but maybe less than one volt or between maybe a few tenths of the volts or something like that so it’s not so unusual to think about a battery with a charged separation in water. Well you’re probably going to ask Ben, where does the energy come from to give you this charge separation or maybe you weren’t going to ask that, were you? Okay, doesn’t matter.
Ben: Yeah. What I’m curious about is yeah, how is water getting discharged and how is it stacking like that I guess?
Dr. Pollack: Okay let me tell you. So the energy, here’s the biggest surprise. The energy comes from light. By light, I mean in the scientific kind of conception of light, it’s not just the visible range of wave lengths of like the ones we see but extending more beyond in the ultraviolet reason and the infrared reason especially so we kind of call light any electromagnetic wave of any wave length but it doesn’t matter because visible light works, it builds this charge separation. Infrared light works even better, it builds this separation.
Ben: Isn’t dark inside our muscles?
Dr. Pollack: It’s dark inside your muscles. However, the infrared energy is always there so example, when this is free energy, it’s free for the taking, and it’s always there. So have you ever seen a picture taken with an infrared camera? I’m not sure you.
Ben: Yeah I think so, I think I have.
Dr. Pollack: So in the dark, this is like, you can use it in sniper scopes if you want to like shoot somebody.
Ben: That’s kind of like the night vision type of light.
Dr. Pollack: Yeah. So if you turn off all the lights in your studio or your really whatever and turn on the infrared camera, you get a beautiful image. Not only it’s you but your equipment and the walls and the chairs and everything is generating infrared. It’s almost impossible to get rid of it, so this is, it’s like a gift of nature, and it’s always there. In order to get rid of it, you have to bring the temperature down to absolute zero minus 273 degrees, see so we’re not there. So scientists talk about “free energy” but this is genuinely free energy, it’s there for the taking.
Ben: Wow!
Dr. Pollack: So with this energy, if you have this energy available and it’s always available, that’s the energy that’s required for building this charged separation and building the ordering of water. So you can’t get, just like your cell phone, you got to plug it in to the wall to get charged, otherwise it runs down. Well it’s the same thing with this you need energy, in order to build charge separation, I build this battery charge separation or build order, you need energy and that’s where the energy comes from. So probably you’re thinking Wow, this is a real surprise and it was for us. However if you just think about it, you probably have a plan sitting right next to you right now and where did the plan get its energy? Well it gets its energy from light, the same way as I’m suggesting to you that water gets its energy from light. So light comes into the plant, it builds chemical energy which actually involves charge separation in water, that’s the first step of photosynthesis. So if you have a charge separation occurring in water, so the light, I would say the word transduces or the light is absorbed and that energy from the absorption of light is transduced into a different kind of energy and that different kind of energy is the battery charge, it’s charging the battery, light is charging it and that energy is free to be used, that’s the key part. Just like the plant, it uses the chemical energy. The water uses the chemical energy too and we can actually demonstrate in a glass of water that you think is just sort of sitting there and not doing anything but actually it does a lot. The molecules inside the water are moving around ferociously and doing all kinds of things and we even found, we could insert a tube, just like a straw made of some polymeric material, you just put it lying in the water and what you find is that the water will flow continuously through it. Unendingly, it just keeps flowing and flowing and flowing. It’s kind of like taking one of your blood vessels and putting it into water and finding that the blood just keeps flowing without a heart. So energy, you got to have energy to do this and just like a heart does it inside your blood vessel and that energy we demonstrated comes from light, so the light is coming in and if you will push in the water to the tube and so this is one example of how the water takes this energy that comes in and transduces it into other kinds of energy. So you can guess we’re excited about this finding.
Ben: Yeah. You’re seeing that actual water inside like human body cells.
Dr. Pollack: Well no. Now what I’m telling you is, well I’ve told you in the past few minutes it involves experiments outside the body but it applies certainly inside the body and really not that much difference but we have a special chamber that we use and we take certain kinds of materials and we find these exclusions grows right next to these materials in the presence of infrared light or any kind of light, infrared is especially good. So that’s why we’ve been able to see and get all the details that we’ve been able to get because we have this preparation but your question is quite appropriate, the question as well. Okay so what, you see this thing in the laboratory, what does that mean for you and for me, that was your question right?
Ben: Exactly. I mean like, how does this manifest itself in terms of like our health or our performance when it comes to what you’re absorbing in laboratory conditions?
Dr. Pollack: Okay so that’s a deep question, it’s not a question that the answer goes in two sentences but let me get a go at it. First thing was that this easy water is kind of structured water, I mean it’s organized, it’s ordered in some way and in the book that we mentioned, the Cells and The Engines of Life, the main message of that book is this kind of ordered water is central to everything you do. So in other words, this what we now call EZ water, the same as ordered or structured water 10 years ago, the water that we know a lot of properties about is in your cells, so everyone of your cells is stilled with this stuff. I’m not saying that a hundred percent of the water in the cell is kind of water but it’s mostly ordered EZ water so it means if you ever want to find out how a muscle really works, you can take those same actin and myosin proteins that we all know about but add the component that’s always been missing and that is the EZ water. So it means you got, your muscle cell is filled with the proteins and this kind of water. So immediately one of the interesting features that come to mind is well okay, what does infrared energy, how does that affect your muscles?
Ben: You do see things like infrared saunas and infrared wraps and things of that nature actually being marketed to triathletes and also in kind of like the healthcare sectors.
Dr. Pollack And what generally is the result of using those?
Ben: Well, they’re designed for enhancing blood flow primarily and in a few situations, at least from a little bit of what I’ve seen a possible increase in growth hormone or speeding up the healing of injuries.
Dr. Pollack: Yeah okay, so just think about what you just said. Certainly speeding up blood flow is certainly a possibility but I would suggest something more fundamental. The same thing that you’d feel in a sauna or you would feel those infrared lights, what I’ve been telling you is that this sort of stuff builds EZ water. So inside your body, your cells are filled with EZ water and I could imagine that in muscles that are fatigued, a muscle that’s injured or muscle that’s overworked, that some of this EZ water has been depleted, that the proteins are not functioning as well as they did earlier and the energy is gone and probably the EZ water is also depleted and diminished. So in order to perform well, this EZ water needs to be raised back to its full complement. You go to a doctor, the doctor always says drink water if you’re sick. Well there’s something to that and it’s the water that is really important for function, so it means if you apply infrared light, what you’re doing is just the same in the laboratory, you’re building back this EZ water. So if you got an injury and the infrared injury, whether it’s from sauna or from an infrared light or whatever, it should be doing the same thing, it should be building up and making you, restoring you back to your original pristine state. So it’s the same with your brain or muscles or whatever, you go into sauna, two hours later or 1 hour later or 15 minutes later you feel great and I think the effect of this is it’s not just psychological, it’s actually physiological that the energy that’s coming, the infrared energy that’s coming from all of this is having a major impact on the water inside your body, it’s restoring that depleted EZ water or structured water back to its original state.
Ben: So it’s almost as though you’re initiating that charge that you’re talking about into the water, almost like restructuring it?
Dr. Pollack: Absolutely, restructuring. You’re building it back up again and when you build it back up again, this charge separation is basically potential energy, batteries have potential energy and you use that potential energy and so it’s the same in the cell. The separation of charge related to this water I’m suggesting to you is really important, it’s electrical energy that your cell uses because all the reactions that go on in your cell involves charge, either negative or positive charge. Some reactions need negative charge for driving, some need positive charge and all that charges right there is a consequence of the charge separation that I’ve been talking about. So, I think that’s what these devices do. I mean we have no direct evidence for that and I can chemise that that’s probably the case but there’s also, just before I leave that point, inside your body all the metabolic reactions are generating heat. Well, heat is similar to infrared energy so it means that the reactions themselves that occur in your body supplies fuel such as heat waves that radiated away. That energy is actually or can be, again this is conjecture, can be fuel that dries the buildup of this kind of structured water. So, it comes all the way around and I think that provides some explanation. So muscles also, I just want to go back because we studies muscles for so many years and one of the things is that nobody really understands what happens when you have a muscle knot, why does it sometimes knot up. Although we were never studying athletes although our focus was at the molecular level, we could see that was knots forming even in isolated strands of muscles that we’re studying and now, I think I’d better understand that the infrared energy, what it can do in possibly removing those or helping to remove those knots is it builds up the water structure and the water structure is needed to bring the muscle back to its ordinary relaxed state, so it can contract again. That knot is sort of fully-contracted and a way to get away from that fully-contracted state, the water inside that know is just ordinary water, it needs to build back up to the structured EZ water and infrared should help that, I should be honest.
Ben: Interesting.
Dr. Pollack: So anyway, it’s a long answer to a short question.
Ben: Well, it seems to me from what you described so far in terms of the ability of water to both carry a charge and to also form like a structure within ourselves, like to me when I’m looking at this from like an athlete’s point of view, would be okay, well there’s two different ways that this might help if I wanted the water within my cells to be as structured or as charged as possible. It sounds like we just talked about how perhaps huge extrapolation but perhaps something like infrared or even something like even exercise might have an effect at charging or structuring water, what about the actual water itself like the water we’re drinking, the water we’re showering in etc., is all water the same or are there things that you can do to water before you consume it or expose your body to it that might make it more likely make it to be charged or structured or whatever the case may be?
Dr. Pollack: Okay so another really good question and the answer to that, lots to say about this. First of all, I’ve been studying water now for quite a few years and water’s different, not the same at all. Anybody who tells you that water is water, it’s just H2o and there’s nothing you could do about it to change it.
Ben: Yeah, I hear that a lot actually.
Dr. Pollack: Yeah well I’m sure you do but the published evidence, evidence all over, well I come back to our own work and the new book that will be coming out in a few months, actually a version is on my homepage, myUniversityofWashingtonhomepage.
Ben: Okay.
Dr. Pollack: And anybody can freely download it if they’re interested. It’s not the final version, it’s a draft.
Ben: You sure it’s your University of Washington page?
Dr. Pollack: Right, yeah. I don’t have the URL often but it’s easy. There’s a button that says New Book and if you click it, you can look at it. The final version should be ready in a few months so there are some changes but it shows a 400-page book full of, my son’s an artist and he is a great artist and beautiful pictures and whatever, and I think it was written, it shows that it is simply, absolutely untrue that water is just H2o and that’s it that so many changes can occur in the water especially in terms of this EZ water because even a glass of water that you have that you drink, a certain fraction of it is almost certainly EZ water. So if the fraction is almost zero, which is probably true in distilled water that comes out of the still and there’s ultra pure, some of which we use in the laboratory, then you don’t have much of it. On the other hand in most waters, are either sitting next to a surface or have molecules of some sort inside of them and any surface of anything that dissolves or are floating in the water creates this EZ structure. So, if you have a clean glass surface for example, it’s going to create this structure. If you have some minerals in the water, you’re going to create this structure and the amount of it is not yet clear because this really needs to be studied in a highly systematic way and it’s not been done. On the other hand, various people have been creating what they call structured water or ordered water or many or energized water, what have you and I guess that some of these…
Ben: Yeah, it seems that it’s a big industry like you see the stuff all over the place.
Dr. Pollack: You do.
Ben: Like especially kind of like the Health and Fitness sector, like any expo I go, there are people trying this song stuffed in bottles. It’s ten times the price of a normal bottle of water but its structured water or something of that nature.
Dr. Pollack: Right. So I can’t do you anything definitive on this, I can only tell you that probably some of the people are shot at this. On the other hand, I know that some other people are not shot that some of these waters have demonstratively altered features so I’ll just give you a number of examples of different kinds of water that show altered properties so one of the water we tested in the laboratories, it’s not available for the public but I think maybe in the future, water that’s treated in a certain well-defined way and I think there’s a patent for it. We got some of that water and then we brought it into the laboratory and it sat around on my desk for about 2 months before I was able to get a student to check it out and it showed that there was some kind of signature indication of this EZ water. Even after sitting around for 2 months, we put it in this spectrometer to test for this water and it absolutely showed it really clearly. I was excited about it really because the fellow who makes this has that his various friends and colleagues have experienced unimaginably good health since drinking it and more interesting than that, certain patients with serious pathologies were actually cured so he was telling me and I actually examined hospital records and the colleague of mine went to interview the patients and the scoop is this, these are patients, there were a handful of them so far. The patients who had irreversible kidney disease and they were about to go on dialysis looking for a replacement kidney. So they knew about this guy and they started drinking the water. So the hospital records confirmed what my friend told me that in 21 days or three weeks after drinking water, they couldn’t find any more pathology, it was reversed. So I’m not sure one would have to do serious objective tests with controls and what have you.
Ben: Yeah.
Dr. Pollack: But it seems to me that there were two things that this water EZ in spade, it was full of EZ water and the hospital records and injury was like somebody confirmed that there really was something going on there. So that’s one example and I’ve heard from various other people about their water and some of them are actually, I know one who’s putting the structured water making gels and these gels have amazing skin healing properties.
Ben: Like a topical gel that you put on your skin?
Dr. Pollack: Topical gel, right. So in and around, I think the studies absolutely need to be done objectively and comparatively, double-lined studies to make sure this is correct but I’ve seen enough of it to suggest that such studies really would be worthwhile because there might be something really good. It could be, possibly a kind of generic healer that could impact virtually almost anything in your body. If it’s really true that function depends on this EZ water then it doesn’t matter what organ, you just want to restore this EZ water to its pristine state and you can do this either by infrared or light if you saw it and another way is to actually drink some of this water. That’s a hypothesis right now and it would be great to test it but I think there might be something there on the future.
Ben: Have you ever in your lab taken, you’ve talked about how you put this stuff that somebody brought you into a spectrometer or you’ve ever taken like Aquafina or some kind of like generic store-bought water and done the same thing and noticed like a difference between the two?
Dr. Pollack: No, we haven’t done that. We have plans to do it. I’m not sure that I would necessarily take the store-bought water but they would certainly be possible as controls but if you’re doing this properly, you really need to do an extensive series of tests to do it right. You won’t really get anywhere if you take water, put it in the spectrometer and wave a flag and say “Hey, this stuff looks pretty good because it has EZ water”. It’s got to be done systematically, it has to be done with multiple waters and in fact, what we planned is, if we can get the funding for it, that’s the big issue to do a proper job, is to look at pathological animal models. For example, some people have claimed that tumors are reversed by this kind of water so what we would like to do is take mice bearing tumors and do control an experimental test, give each group of mice each different kinds of water that they drink over extended periods of time and then examine to see whether there’s a difference in the tumors after a given amount of time. So it sounds simple but it’s actually quite extensive to carry out the studies properly and we do the same with kidney disease and we do the same with diabetes and so on and see if there’s a kind of generic healing effect of certain types of water and then check those waters to see if it really contained EZ water or maybe there’s something else that’s even more important than that, that’d be sure.
Ben: Right. Now for people who want to kind of look into this a little bit more, when you’re saying EZ water, are you like have you written about literature, are you literally E like elephant, Z like zebra water? Is that how you pronouncing it?
Dr. Pollack: Right! EZ, Exclusion Zone, EZ, elephant zebra.
Ben: Exclusion Zone.
Dr. Pollack: It’s so-called EZ to pronounce, EZ right, and so it’s kind of a slow pronunciation, it’s not a good name I’m sorry but someone who’s acted on this about six or seven years ago, we were getting started with it the name stuck because it’s easy to say. So we have many papers that we published in the literature to describe the properties of this kind of water but I think your listeners might not have such easy access or interest in scientific detail.
Ben: Yeah. Well, I’ll certainly link to your website but what you’re suggesting, it sounds to me like is that if water can enhance structure and carry this charge that you’re noting in the exclusion zone water, that it may and all those still needs to be looked at in studies, that it may affect like the health of an organ or the health of a cell or the health of muscle tissue that contains that water.
Dr. Pollack: Absolutely.
Ben: Interesting.
Dr. Pollack: Right on, you got it.
Ben: Yeah.
Dr. Pollack: I think that that’s an absolutely distinct possibility.
Ben: I think it’s one of those things were you can see so many people right now jumping on the bandwagon and trying to market stuff like this but I think that you’re right that I mean, what we really need ate studies that compare one form of water to another form of water and like you say take mice with tumors and see how they respond to water that has a higher amount of this exclusion zone going on and yeah, there’s just so much work that still needs to be done huh?
Dr. Pollack: Yeah absolutely. The problem is that the people who make the water have financial incentives and suggesting that their water’s great, right everybody knows that.
Ben: Yeah.
Dr. Pollack: So the huge skepticism out there, skepticism from that point of view and along with what we learned in the chemistry book that water’s H2o and there’s nothing you can do about that, that’s all period, that’s all there is. So those are the two important factors and that’s why I think it would be really important if some, you might say neutral group or a group that has no financial interests in any of those but has experience dealing with water, it doesn’t have to be us, it could be any group although I think we’ve done a lot of work that sort of puts us at the center of this. Someone needs to do it and we actually applied to the National Institute of Health to get some money in a fairly ambitious proposal but it didn’t get very far. I’m not sure of the reasons but around 90% of grant proposals are rejected or don’t get funded because of the competition and such but I think in part, it needs to have somebody who you might say believes in the possibilities that this might be true and is not convinced that there’s no such thing about H2o, that’s all there is and no matter what how many studies you do, you’ll never find anything different. It needs to be someone or a group of people whose mind is open enough to be interested in carrying out such studies and eventually I think we’ll get our money and go ahead and do this. It just needs substantial funding in order for it to be carried out but I think potentially, depending on how it really all starts out, it could be a real breakthrough.
Ben: Interesting, cool.
Dr. Pollack: Yeah.
Ben: Well, I know we kind of just scratched the surface in terms of geeking out on water but what I’m going to do is I’m going to link for those of you listening in, to Dr. Pollack’s website over at the University of Washington faculty page where you can kind of see some of the stuff that’s going to be, did you say you have a title for your upcoming book?
Dr. Pollack: I didn’t tell you but finally we arrived at the title, it’s called the Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid and Vapor.
Ben: Wow!
Dr. Pollack: Because I think this is a fourth phase of water, it’s in between liquid and solid and someone suggested, a prominent physical chemist, a hundred years ago that there is a fourth phase of water because it was so much evidence at that time, a hundred years ago that the interface when certain solids meet water, actually a hydro helix solid that is water-loving solid which most are, that the water changes and there’s something different about that region, there’s some phase, there’s some area that’s different and there’s enough of it to suggest that it’s a different phase of water, we all learned that water was solid-liquid-vapor.
Ben: Yeah.
Dr. Pollack: It might be equivalent of the fourth phase of water.
Ben: I’m going to have to go back and take chemistry 101.
Dr. Pollack: No, don’t take chemistry because you won’t learn this.
Ben: Well, once this means the extreme. So I’ll link to your websites.
Dr. Pollack: Okay.
Ben: If you click on that, you can read about that a little bit more and I’ll also link to this other book that you wrote on the past although it sounds like your newer book is probably going to be a lot more comprehensive and for those of you listening in who have more questions, feel free to leave them in the show notes for this podcast episode over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com. I know that we always get lots of questions about water and I’ve talked before about water filters and things of that nature and I think this just verifies, what Dr. Pollack just told us today just verifies that not all water is the same and there are some pretty cool things that he is observing in his lab that I think we’re probably just scratching the surface of. So Dr. Pollack, thank you for your time today and for coming on the call.
Dr. Pollack: My pleasure, I really enjoyed it. Take care, okay.
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