In this podcast, I am speaking with Dr. Gerald Pollack – who is professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, and he is also founding editor-in-chief of the journal Water, convener of the Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry, and Biology of Water. He’s the executive director of the Institute for Venture Science. His interests have ranged broadly from biological motion and cell biology to the interaction of biological surfaces with aqueous solutions like water,. We will talk about his research into his theory of structured water and its implications for our health.
Make a donation to Dr. Pollack to fund his further research on EZ water.
Table of Contents
In this episode, Dr. Pollack and I discuss:
- Why might water be perhaps the most overlooked aspect of physiology, even though we are mostly made up of water?
- How can the “structure” of the water in your body affect your health and energy levels?
- How can we take advantage of structured water (or “EZ water”) to improve our performance at a cellular level and therefore how our bodies perform?
- How does infrared light react with the water in our body to create a different kind of gel on which our bodies depend on for proper functioning?
- What kinds of evidence is there for its existence? Which simple experiments prove its validity as a concept?
- Why walking barefoot under the sun may be doing you more good than you might ever have known
- Is it possible to get the benefits of EZ water by drinking it? Or taking a sauna? Or juicing? Or eating fresh leaves from the garden!? Or from an ice bath?
- What are the possible future applications of EZ water? What further research is needed at this point?
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Transcript
Ari: Hey, this is Ari. Welcome back to the Energy Blueprint podcast. I am very excited to share today’s guest with you. He’s somebody who I have an enormous amount of respect for, and somebody I’ve been meaning to interview for a very long time, so I’m glad that it finally happened.
His name is Dr. Gerald Pollack, and he has a PhD in biomedical engineering. He’s a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, and he is also founding editor-in-chief of the journal Water, convener of the Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry, and Biology of Water. He’s the executive director of the Institute for Venture Science. His interests have ranged broadly from biological motion and cell biology to the interaction of biological surfaces with aqueous solutions like water, for example.
His 1990 book, Muscles and Molecules: Uncovering the Principles of Biological Motion won an excellence award from the Society for Technical Communication. His 2001 book, Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life, and his newest book, The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid and Vapor won that society’s distinguished award, their highest distinction. The latter book went on to receive the World Summit Excellence Award. He’s also included in the 2019 listing OOOM Magazine as one of the world’s 100 most inspiring people.
An all-around brilliant guy and I am very excited to share this conversation with you, all around the importance of water in our physiology, the very much neglected importance of water in our physiology, and a discussion around a lot of both known aspects of water in our physiology, and the potentials of how water may play a role in many aspects of our physiology and our health and our risk of various diseases and our energy levels that has largely been neglected in conventional discussions of physiology.
I hope you enjoy this very informative and very cutting-edge talk with Dr. Gerald Pollack.
Welcome to the show, Jerry. Such a pleasure to have you.
Dr. Pollack: Thank you for having me. I’m delighted and thrilled actually.
The interest of researching water
Ari: Wonderful. Tell me– tell our listeners, I should say, since I’m very familiar with your work, I followed you for many years, how you first started getting into this field of researching water.
Dr. Pollack: Well, we had been researching muscles looking for the molecular mechanism of contraction. There were some theories out there and a prevailing theory by the distinguished and famous Nobel laureate, Sir Andrew Huxley especially, but all the theories made up an implicit presumption that the muscle proteins were acting in a vacuum. They never took account of water.
After some time, this seemed weird to me because muscle like other tissues typically is two-thirds water by volume. If you translate that into the fraction of molecules that are water molecules, it’s impressive because water molecules are small. To make up that two-thirds volume, we need a lot of them. The calculation shows that it’s more than 99%. In other words, if you line up all the molecules in the muscle, more than 99 out of 100 are water molecules.
To make the presumption that water was irrelevant and 99% of the molecules don’t do anything, eventually, it seemed to me to be beyond reason. How could it be that 99 out of 100 molecules don’t do anything? It’s like sitting in the bathtub in the water. That’s the presumption that’s made in all the textbooks. I had the occasion to go to a conference at which I met a scientist, Gilbert Ling, who had been studying biological water for many years.
By that time, he’d written, I think, five books. By the time he passed a couple of years ago, it was up to seven. Most of them dealing with water in biology. At that conference, I heard him present. I heard a dozen other people who were invited, who had evidence to support his point of view that, in biology, the water was actually different from liquid water. By the way, you can or anybody can tell by themselves. All they need to do is cut themselves. If it were liquid water, you cut yourself.
The water would come pouring out in the same way that water comes pouring out from a broken pipe. Of course, it doesn’t happen. The water is gel-like. It sticks inside the cell. This is a sign that the water is different and that’s where we got our start. I don’t want to go on and on because I know you have a lot of other questions, but it was a transition from muscle contraction. The water seemed irrelevant to thinking that water is central. That’s how we got started.
How water behaves in the body
Ari: I think, historically, the way that it’s been conceptualized in physiology, and I can think back to many physiology courses I’ve taken over the years, there is no discussion of water other than this implied paradigm of understanding the cells as a bag of water. The water is really only there to dilute the concentration of things like potassium and calcium and sodium and so on to the appropriate concentration.
You need to have the appropriate balance of water to these various ions that are present, but it’s never really discussed in physiology that the water molecules themselves might be doing something important beyond that. Can you talk about what exactly is the significance of this gel-like property of water at the physiological level?
Dr. Pollack: Yes, I can. This is best illustrated in a book that I wrote 20 years ago. It’s called Cell, Gels and the Engines of Life. The book was primarily designed to translate Gilbert Ling’s ideas into a language that is moderately understandable to ordinary people like myself. Gilbert Ling is difficult to penetrate. He’d sit down at the word processor. Before that, the typewriter. He’d bat something out, send it to the publisher, and that’s it.
To produce something intelligible, you need to edit, re-edit, edit again, get some feedback, et cetera, et cetera. I tried to do that. The first half of the book is explaining Gilbert Ling and his ideas, which, by the way in later experiments, we found is not quite the way Gilbert presented it, but I’ll get to that later. The second half of the book provides evidence to answer the question that you asked, what exactly does the water do?
The evidence suggests the following. When the cell, it doesn’t matter what kind of cell, whatever, if it’s in the quiescent state and not doing anything, for example, like a muscle cell that’s not contracting or a secretory cell that’s not secreting, all the water is in this special state, which I’ll talk about in a few minutes, an ordered state. Something like what Gilbert Ling was talking about, the ordered state.
Then when it transitions into action, by “action,” I mean the muscle cell contracts, the secretory cell secretes, the neural cell conducts, it doesn’t matter what, it involves a transition, not only of the proteins but also of the water inside the cell. It’s the proteins in the water together undergo a change. It’s called a “phase change.” The water undergoes a change from the ordered state to ordinary liquid water and then back again after the activity is finished.
The water undergoes a cyclic change from one state, the ordered state that we call the fourth phase of water or EZ water, into ordinary water and then back again. If we’re right and a lot of evidence was induced to support this point of view, then water plays a central role. Absolutely, a central role in everything that the cell does. It doesn’t just sit there to fill space.
Ari: It’s been many years since I’ve looked at Gilbert Ling’s work, but what I recall was that he did some mathematical calculations around the amount of energy that would be required to maintain ion gradients. For listeners who may not have a background in physiology, there are certain ions that are present inside of the cell and outside of the cells in certain concentrations. Certain ions may be high inside the cell and low outside or vice versa. We have certain pumps at the cell membranes that are designed to maintain those ion gradients. The most famous one is the sodium-potassium ATPase pump. The ATPase part is that it requires ATP, which is cellular energy produced by mitochondria.
It turns out, I think Gilbert Ling said something to the effect, that when you analyze all of these different ions, sodium and potassium and calcium, and all the others that are needed that our cells have to maintain these appropriate ion gradients’ differences between inside and outside the cell, it would cost some ungodly amount of cellular energy, ATP, to maintain those gradients all the time. This would be consuming such a huge portion of our total energy if it was such an ATP-intensive process. He said something to the effect of, basically, it can’t all be ATP-dependent. It has to be largely dependent on the properties of the water itself. Is that accurate or maybe you can–
Dr. Pollack: That calculation as I recall for the sodium-potassium pump, I think it was 30 times or something like that, what the cell could possibly muster just to run that pump. Now, there are hundreds of punitive pumps in the membrane, if not thousands. A student of mine went into that field and I asked a question. I think it was a couple of thousands that now are said to exist.
The amount of energy that’s required is astronomical compared to what the cell could possibly produce, which means it’s got to be wrong. Something is fundamentally wrong. I can add to that discussion because I agree with that. There’s some absurdity to it even though it’s widely accepted and appears in so many textbooks. We did a lot of experiments sticking electrodes into cells. If you stick an electrode into a typical cell, you’ll record a potential difference between the inside and the outside of -60, -70, -80 millivolts.
That seems to be the case in healthy cells. The surprise, this is said to be due to the membrane pumps largely and also channels in the membrane, ion-specific channels. The funny thing is that if you stick the same electrode instead of sticking it into the cell, if you stick it into a gel, no membrane, and obviously no pumps or channels or anything in the membrane because there’s no membrane, you get the same result.
Ari: Interesting.
Dr. Pollack: Same result. If you wish to attribute that electrical potential to some membrane features, then you need to explain why you get the same result if you have no membrane. It’s possible that there are two mechanisms that give rise to the same result, but most unlikely. We have a different explanation, a very simple explanation. Maybe I’m just getting ahead of myself. The kind of water that Gilbert Ling was talking about, he’s called it “structured water.” His idea was that the molecules are like dipoles, plus at one end and minus at the other end, and they can stack.
They can line up with certain order. We found that that’s not exactly true. There is order just exactly as Gilbert Ling said, but the order is different. I can talk about it if you ask me. Just one feature is that that water has a negative charge. It’s not neutral anymore. There’s a change that occurs when the water meets certain surfaces. The water transforms into what we call “fourth phase” or EZ and Gilbert would say “structured.” It has negative charge.
Because this water fills your cells and has negative charge, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you’ve got a bag of some sort filled with stuff that’s negatively charged, you stick the electrode in. You’re going to get a negative electrical potential. I think the negative electrical potential in the cell which started all of this arises not from pumps or channels or anything like that, but from the fact that the water that’s inside itself has negative charge. Simple explanation. The gel too, same thing with gel.
How EZ water works at the cellular level
Ari: Okay. Now, connecting everything that you’ve talked about so far, let’s connect it to health. What are these properties of water in this negatively-charged water, fourth phase, EZ water? What do they have to do with allowing the cell to function properly and how does that translate into health?
Dr. Pollack: Great question. I think that’s straightforward. As I said before, because the activity of the cell involves the transition from structured, EZ, fourth phase water to ordinary water and back again, if the cell doesn’t have enough of this special, organized, ordered water, then it’s not going to function properly because it’s a central requirement of what the cell needs.
What that translates into is that you look awfully healthy. [chuckles] To maintain the health, you need to make sure that the cell is filled with this kind of water. Otherwise, one cell or another cell or another tissue or whatever is not going to be functioning properly. The central– How should I say? Central dogma if you want. I hate to use the word “dogma” because it sounds awfully dogmatic.
Ari: [laughs]
Dr. Pollack: The central principle is you must make sure that your body is filled with this kind of water. That translates into a few simple expedience that I can tell you about if you ask me that you can do to make sure that you’re maintaining a proper quantity of EZ water throughout your body.
Ari: Okay, I want to get there in a second. It’s funny. Since your work came out many years ago in your book, The Fourth Phase of Water, I was immediately very impressed and enamored with it. I saw. It was very clear to me, the relevance of this to physiology. I have a couple of, I would say, more conventional, medicine-minded friends who are not really proponents with natural health and not part of that movement. Some are quite smart, quite scientifically literate, and well-versed in physiology. A couple of them were very skeptical of your work and said things like, “Well, okay, so you can take these plastic tubes.” I forget the material.
Dr. Pollack: Nafion.
Ari: Nafion, that’s right. “Nafion tubes and you put them in water and it’s these hydrophilic surface. It generates this EZ water and this flow of water and all these things and, yes, you can do those experiments, but this doesn’t have any relevance to physiology.” I’m curious what you would say to those kinds of skeptics of your work.
Dr. Pollack: I guess I’d need to ask, what’s their rationale for suggesting that it has nothing to do with physiology? If that’s their point, I would request more specifics on why they think that’s the case.
Ari: That’s basically like, “Well, this Nafion material is not what our cells are made of,” so what’s the relevance?
Dr. Pollack: Well, the relevance is that besides Nafion, which we like to use because it’s simple and really easy to use, I’d say we’ve looked at in excess of 50 different substances that do the same thing. Some of them are biological substances like ghee, for example, clarified butter. It produces EZ or fourth-phase water extents that are larger than anything that we’ve seen. Almost 1 millimeter. You take some ghee. Put it in the refrigerator to make sure it’s fairly solid. Put it in water.
Then the way we look at exclusion zones is they exclude particles or microspheres that we use. It’s easy to look at the extent of that zone of exclusion. We were shocked. Just shy of a millimeter, which means roughly a million molecular layers that we see on a regular basis. That’s one argument. Sure, Nafion has nothing to do with biology, but ghee certainly does. We’ve used, as I said, some 50 substances. That argument, I think, is specious.
Ari: How do cell membranes and mitochondrial membranes, organelle membranes fit into this picture-
Dr. Pollack: Well, they fit in–
Ari: -or other substances inside of the cell?
Dr. Pollack: Well, other substances, particularly inside the cell, is what I’d focus on. What’s inside the cell? Well, 60% to 70% are proteins and another, I think, 20%, 25% nucleic acids, plus other solids. The surfaces of these components are mostly hydrophilic surfaces that are water-loving. Those are precisely the kinds of surfaces that build EZ water. It means that inside the cell, these surfaces ordinarily nucleate the growth of EZ water.
In other words, converting ordinary water to liquid water to EZ water. The cell is so densely packed. If you look at electron micrographs of the cell, the cell is virtually so crowded with solids, really packed. In fact, the average distance between solid surfaces where there’s water in between, the average distance is equal to roughly the diameter of seven water molecules stacked together.
That’s how close these surfaces are, which means there’s not a whole lot of water to structure. In order to get all water inside the cell structured, the surfaces need to nucleate the growth of a few layers of water molecules. That’s all. Then the cell is filled with this stuff. I might say another point that’s more general about objections, there have been a half-dozen or so papers published over the past decade that suggest that there’s something wrong.
I responded and published to the first one, which is very extensive and many of the others follow from that. There’s a tendency in science to want to stick to the status quo. Most of us, we’re human beings. We grow up with a series of facts, a kind of knowledge, and we feel comfortable in that. Somebody comes along and says, “Well, wait a second. I’m not sure you’re right because there are a few issues with that.” This is typical.
I remember the story about Lord Kelvin, for example, who was a famous physical chemist. A couple of hundred years ago, 150 years ago, I forget the exact dates, he famously declared. There were some rumblings about the possibility of airplanes. He said, “Nothing heavier than air will ever fly.” Then a couple of years later came the Wright brothers. It feels comfortable even for well-known scientists to profess that the status quo is okay.
We like it. We feel comfortable. Somebody coming along to challenge that is a problem. There’s another famous quote by Max Planck. Because of this sort of resistance, he said, “Science advances one funeral at a time.” [chuckles] The best one, I think, of all is Albert Szent-Györgyi, who was the father of modern biochemistry. What a creative mind this guy had. Of course, he won a Nobel Prize for discovering vitamin C.
He had so many ideas. When he presented his ideas, he said, “The only time I knew I was on to something really significant was when the response was polarized. Some loved it and others hated it.” I take the issue of controversy as something that’s expected. Of course, it happens virtually, every finding that challenges the status quo, but we’ve responded, at least early on. Specifically, I think the arguments are specious. Long answer to your short question.
Ari: Yes, great answer. Let’s quickly summarize what EZ water is actually doing in the cell to create benefit to cellular function. I know you’ve touched on that already. Let’s summarize it. Then from there, I want to ask you about methods to enhance EZ water in the cells.
Dr. Pollack: Okay, so I’ve argued that you need a full complement of EZ water because cellular processes depend on that water. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out if that’s true. What you need to do is to make sure to enhance the amount of EZ water. What can you do? I’ve got a half-dozen different expedience. The first one, and I need to add a little backup of filling material if this is to make sense. Let me provide that first and then refresh me if I go astray because I have a tendency to do that.
Ari: You got it.
Dr. Pollack: This kind of water that we’re talking about in order to go from liquid water, which has no particular order to it, the molecules are randomly disposed and bouncing around, the fierce number of times per second or even per femtosecond doing all that. In order to convert that into something ordered, which characterizes fourth phase water, as I said, not the way Gilbert Ling thought but a different way, which I could amplify if you ask me, but I can skip it for the moment. To go from chaos to order, you need energy. It’s a general principle as illustrated by your office. Yours looks pretty neat, but in order to–
Ari: I can’t take credit for it. I’m in an Airbnb right now. I would like to say that my space is disorganized, but it’s somebody else. [chuckles]
How red-light therapy boosts EZ water
Dr. Pollack: In your space, if you want to organize it, it takes energy, right? You got to put your mind to it. Spend 30 minutes piling the papers correctly. It’s a general principle. To go from chaos to order, you need energy. Where does this energy come from? We found experiments that it comes from light in the way plants use light in photosynthesis. In this case, the light we found in experiments is infrared light.
That means wavelengths, they’re not visible to the naked eye. Just the wavelengths, just longer, a little bit longer than the red light, which is the longest wavelength that we can see just beyond that infrared. It builds it. It builds it like gangbusters. We used in our experiments, an LED, light-emitting diode, with very weak infrared light. We could build the EZ. We could increase the size by a factor of 10 times how powerful it is. Just a little bit of infrared light is enough to do it.
To build water in your body, infrared light is useful. Where does infrared light come from? Well, in your Airbnb if we turn off all the lights and I came with my infrared camera, which is just like any other camera, except the sensor is sensor to infrared rather than visible light. I get a perfect image of you, your beard, the little gray spots on the sides, your microphone, and the picture on the wall, et cetera, et cetera, so no problem.
It’s all around us. Also, since infrared is roughly equivalent, not exactly the same as heat, the metabolism that you’re generating inside your body is also giving rise to that. There’s plenty of infrared both outside and inside in terms of you. This is necessary, this kind of energy. One way, long introduction, is walk out in the sun. Where I live in Seattle in the winter time, ain’t much sun.
Lots of clouds in the winter. It’s gray and some people get depressed. However, you walk out in the sun and feel good. The sun will just peep through a hole in the clouds and, suddenly, you feel better and this is pretty universal. Of course, the explanation is it must be some psychological of that. That’s reasonable and probable, but there’s another. That is the infrared from the sun.
Roughly half of the radiation from the sun is in the infrared wavelength. That’s why it feels warm. That penetrates your skull, for example, into your brain and it should. If theory is right, it should build EZ water in the neurons in your brain. You return to your default situation, which is feeling good instead of depressed. We don’t get born feeling depressed. That’s the first thing you can do, is go out in the sun. Another thing–
Ari: Actually, before we go on, just maybe a quick digression into that first one. I don’t know if you know. I’ve authored the most prominent book on the subject of near-infrared and red light therapy,
Dr. Pollack: I was not aware, sorry.
Ari: No worries. It’s called The Ultimate Guide to Red and Near-Infrared Light Therapy. I have quite a bit of expertise in this topic. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it and also thinking about it in conjunction with your work. Given what you said about objects in our house emitting some degree of infrared, I think it’s interesting to think about modern lifestyles and exposure to infrared compared to ancestral lifestyles. Ancestral lifestyles to your point, we would’ve spent a lot more time being exposed to sunlight. Also, for example, if I go outside and I walk on a trail and I walk barefoot, or if I go to the beach and I walk barefoot, there’s a huge amount of infrared that I’m soaking up through my feet.
Not only from the sun but also, I think, the outdoor environment of walking on that sand or that dirt and on being exposed to even not necessarily barefoot, but you’re being exposed with probably, I would imagine, many orders of magnitude, greater levels of infrared than you get in typical indoor environments. I wonder if you have any thoughts on the modern lifestyle, people living mostly indoors versus outdoor with regards to daily exposure to infrared.
Dr. Pollack: Well, I would just second what you’ve been talking about, sure. Any source, [coughs] particularly persistent source of infrared, should be good for you. Perhaps in that book, you also were dealing with some clinical effects of infrared. I’ve heard from various– For example, I met a guy in Germany who is a practitioner and he was dealing with women who have cancer somehow in some region of their face. They don’t want to have surgery for obvious reasons. I go to him and he said he treated it with infrared energy and the impact was amazing. The cancer just basically disappeared as a consequence of that infrared energy.
Ari: Interesting.
Dr. Pollack: Again, my take on that, this is just my opinion, is that these cancer cells that are dividing in ways that they shouldn’t be dividing, they go back to normal. The proteins and the water, especially inside the cell, returns. EZ water gets built. The cell is then back to its normal state. There were some studies to support this point of view. There were some studies of cancer cells years and years ago. The experimenters stuck microelectrodes into the cancer cells.
Instead of having an electrical potential on the order of 60, 70, 80 millivolts that had -10 or -15 millivolts translation if the electrical potential arises from the EZ water, fourth phase water, there’s not enough of it. That, to me, makes total sense because the cell is in the on-position or activated position and it keeps dividing. All of this is sensible, but let me return to walking on the beach barefoot. What you say makes total sense. Over and above that, there’s another issue that I think might be equally fundamental and that is you’re connecting yourself electrically to the earth.
Why is that significant? You’re walking barefoot on the sand near the water or there’s some moisture. Conductivity is high. What I learned only maybe a dozen years ago is that the earth is not neutral. It’s negatively charged. Of course, you know that, but I didn’t know that. I was actually shocked, so to speak, because I started my career studying electrical engineering. No professor ever told me that when you stick the plug into the receptacle, that third prong, the round one, is connecting to anything other than zero electrical potential.
My Russian friend, who was working in my laboratory, started talking to me about the earth’s electric field. I said, “Andrei, you’re talking about magnetic field. I never heard of electric field of the earth.” He said “Well, of course. Don’t you know that? The earth is negatively charged and the ionosphere is positively charged.” It’s like a capacitor. We have plus here and minus. You get an electric field between the two and the earth is negatively charged.
Ari: Sometimes you get lightning strikes.
Dr. Pollack: Sometimes you get lightning strikes. Absolutely. That has to do with the clouds. Maybe a slightly different issue. I can talk about that also, but let me not deeply-
Ari: Don’t digress.
Dr. Pollack: -digress. I have a tendency to digress too much. Okay, so he said, “In Russia, there must be something really weird about your educational system here. Because in Russia, every middle-school student knows that the earth is negatively charged.” I had to admit that maybe our educational system was not the best, but I went home scratching my head. Then next morning, one of my students comes with the famous series of lectures, a three-volume set by the great physicist, Richard Feynman, which is consumed by probably almost every graduate student in physics because it’s got humor, it’s clear, et cetera, et cetera.
You opened it to Volume 2, Chapter 9. There in Volume 2, Chapter 9 was evidence that the earth is negatively charged. The evidence is clear. It’s just that we don’t learn about it. What am I getting to? When you connect yourself electrically to the earth, the earth is negatively charged. If you are missing some of this, shall we say, negatively-charged, EZ, fourth phase water, the electrons are able to flow from the earth, then into your body, into specifically those regions of the body, which are not as negatively charged as they should be.
The electrons come pouring in. In the lab, we found that electrons build EZ water. You have a container of water and you had to stick two electrodes in. If you look, what happens next to the negative electrodes, you can see EZ water building next when you pass electrons in. Negative charge builds EZ water, which has negative charge. It doesn’t make sense. I would argue that.
Another possibility, your walking-on-the-beach scenario. If you’re connecting electrically to the earth, which you can do by walking barefoot on the sand, especially near the water, or you could stick yourself in a mud bath or even jump into the ocean, you feel good afterward. I think one candidate to explain why you feel good is what I suggested that the electrons from the earth go into your body and build EZ water.
Ari: There’s these two mechanisms then of how being outdoors can potentially build EZ water, both the infrared energy and picking up electrons from the earth, if you’re walking barefoot in the appropriate environment or swimming in the ocean.
Dr. Pollack: Yes, absolutely.
Ari: Okay, so as far as other strategies to increase EZ water in our cells, I have to ask you this. I know you have a list. I’m sorry to interrupt, but I want to insert this because I want to make sure we cover it. One very controversial area is the drinking of water that is supposed to be structured water or is water of this special property or is EZ water or something like that. I know that there are many people that I know that are familiar with this topic who have poo-pooed that idea who have said, no, there’s no possible way this could be relevant. This is not the way to build EZ water in our cells because once that water hits our stomach acid, it’s going to go through some chemical breakdown where the structuredness or the EZ water aspect will be destroyed anyway. The way to build that EZ water is through the methods we just described. Through exposing your body to infrared or picking up electrons from the earth and such, but not necessarily drinking external EZ water. What are your thoughts on that area?
Dr. Pollack: This idea has been brought up in the past that the stomach acid will neutralize and the EZ water is negative charge and the stomach acid is low pH, excuse me, [sneezes] sorry.
Ari: Bless you.
Dr. Pollack: Thank you. It’s going to neutralize it, but what sometimes they fail to take into account is the volume of each one, just a little bit of stomach acid generally in our stomach. If you drink, let’s say a glass of water. Then not just a sip that I took, but a glass of water, then the volume of that water overwhelms completely overwhelms the small amount of stomach acid. Obviously when the two combine there will be some neutralization of the negative charge that water has the EZ water, but it is not much.
We did experiments to check on pH to see what effect it has, and we found that we measure the amount of easy as a function of pH and you start with a neutral pH, and we found that going from neutral pH of seven to all the way up to nine or down to five, essentially no impact at all on the amount of easy. If you go to lower pH than that or higher then the amount begins to diminish. Moderate changes or modest changes of pH because of stomach acid should have only a minor effect. If you drink a sip of water, the argument may be correct, but if you drink glass of water, at least in theory, it should not be correct.
Ari: Oh, that’s very interesting. I hadn’t heard that counterargument. Given that, it sounds like you do think that there is relevance to providing external, EZ water as potentially a method to help build up internal EZ water.
Dr. Pollack: I would stress the word potential because it needs to be checked. It wouldn’t be so difficult to check. I think the way to check is to do clinical experiments in terms of efficacy, take a bunch of patients with some particular issue let’s say stomach cancer or something, and offer a fraction of them, one type of water and another fraction of them with a different type and so on. Half a dozen or more different waters. With enough statistics, you can actually judge the impact of the different kinds of water on the outcome. That would be the way to do it. Unfortunately getting the NIH, National Institute of Health to fund would theoretically fund these studies. They practically never heard the word water.
Ari: I think they’re too busy funding gain-of-function research.
Dr. Pollack: We can discuss the areas that they do fund, but they’re not– Should we say particularly flexible actually some years ago, I proposed that you need the NIH, and is a lead balloon that didn’t go anywhere. What are you talking about water? It didn’t even make the review desk because it seems so uninteresting. For me, the NIH is doing so many clinical studies together with the pharmaceutical companies to look at the latest drug. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars doing this. I think for $5 million or $10 million, a decent study can be done to answer the question that you raised, whether if you drink water that contains easy, is it really better for your health?
I would speculate the answer is yes, but it’s just a speculation until it’s tested. It’s really important to test that. I get asked by so many people, which water should I drink and I tell them, I don’t know.
Ari: Got it. Maybe what you need to do is have some pharmaceutical companies patent the EZ water, so they can make money off of it. Then you can attract some funding to that question.
Dr. Pollack: [laughs] Actually, funding is an issue. You didn’t ask me, but we’ve been in the past funded both by NIH and more recently by a man of some means who loves our work and has wanted to fund it indefinitely and very generously, but he suddenly ran into some financial difficulties and he’s had to stop. We’re desperate actually looking for money because unless we can replace the soon, the money that he had been supplying, we out to business.
Ari: Where can people go to donate money to your work?
Dr. Pollack: If it’s a modest amount our website, pollacklab.org. It’s easy and there’s a donate button. If it’s something more substantial, which is, what we’re looking for because it takes a lot to run a laboratory, just email me, and I’d be delighted to discuss with anybody who would be interested. It’s a simple email address G-H-P and my initials G-H-P@U-W that’s for University of Washington, U-W.E-D-U, ghpuw.edu, and if you can’t– It’s all over the internet, I’m not invisible.
Ari: Perfect. I hope that many listeners will donate to you after listening to this podcast. I certainly think your work is a profound contribution to the field of understanding human health.
Dr. Pollack: Thank you so much. I appreciate anybody who has the means and is interested. It would mean a lot to us.
Ari: I’m going to be making a donation to you personally as well. I hope listeners will do the same.
Dr. Pollack: Wow. Many thanks.
The most practical strategies for making EZ water in your cells
Ari: Thank you for your work. I want to get back to other strategies. If the drinking of external water is not necessarily a good approach, I know people, friends of mine who are in the biohacking space, I’ve seen them making these concoctions and shining red light on the water before they drink it and infrared light and things like that. It sounds like that’s possible but very speculative. We know that infrared and probably grounding or earthing is playing a role, but are there other strategies that relate to building up EZ water in our cells?
Dr. Pollack: There are. One of them is the sauna, or there’s the fin say the sauna. Whether it’s dry or moist, it’s hot. The heat is essentially the same as not exactly the same, but the distinction is subtle is infrared energy. You’re exposing yourself to huge amounts of infrared energy. For most of us, you go in and you come out when you come out, you feel better than before you enter. I think the explanation is, again, straightforward. It’s just exposing yourself to that massive amount of infrared energy will build EZ water and EZ water will bring or restore function back from dysfunction to function. If you go along with a muscle ache, you may come out without the muscle ache.
If you go in feeling depressed, you may come out feeling happier et cetera, et cetera. This is I think a third means or fourth, I don’t know where we are. Another one is that there’s certain substances that have been known for many years to be conducive to good health, starting from way back from Ayurvedic times, 5,000 years ago, or even even older. We wondered about these substances like turmeric, for example. A lot of people take turmeric if they’ve got one problem or another problem. Let’s take turmeric and see if it gets better and seem to be two hypotheses. One hypothesis is that we have turmeric receptors all over our body. If you eat turmeric, the receptors are turned on and somehow that improves a function.
Another one is it has one target and that target somehow distributes itself throughout the body. That would be water or particularly, EZ water because you need EZ water for proper function. We’re wondering to test whether some of these substances build EZ water, simple and direct. We published a couple of papers on that and that indeed is exactly the case. It’s not just turmeric, but I mentioned ghee and basil– Holy basil, so to speak, and various other substances that have been known for millennia to be good for health.
They all build EZ water over a fairly wide concentration range that would be relevant to what we might experience inside our bodies.
Simple expedient for good health is to take some of these substances. It basically confirms what people from ancient cultures have known for so long, and it provides a possible simple mechanism to do that. Another one is to do juicing and you know about juicing, but I don’t know if all of your listeners know, so you go to your backyard, you take some fresh plants or the leaves of fresh plants and you squeeze them to death and squeeze the liquid out and drink it. What is that liquid? Well, the liquid is basically intracellular water that exists inside the plant cells and that water is just filled with EZ water. It’s a huge amount. What you drink has a huge concentration of EZ water to it.
By drinking that you’re basically bypassing the requirement of your own body to convert the water that you drink into EZ water. You just drink it. I’ve heard from various health practitioners that they give this advice to their patients, no matter what, almost no matter what they come in with and the patient will go home and come back few months later and report that whatever the issue was, they’ve improved markedly. They’ve also lost weight in the process. I don’t know the reason for that, but that makes sense to me. That would be another expedient. Maybe little more complicated than some because you have to go to your backyard, but you get some exercise in so doing.
Ari: That relates to the previous question of drinking the external EZ water you think so that the most plausible way that could be a reality is in the context of vegetable juice primarily, or maybe also fruit juice. I would imagine though may be the sugar content could counterbalance that.
Dr. Pollack: No, I’m not sure, but maybe I haven’t thought about that issue about the sugar content, but basically, you can actually eat the whole plant and get the same result, but you get filled up so quickly from all the solids that there’s no need for that. The idea is just squeezing out all the juice and just drink the juice and get an equal benefit from that is simple.
Those are, I think I’ve, or there, well, I guess I should mention this one is not so simple, but hyperbaric oxygen therapy. It was originally used for wounds that wouldn’t heal for example wounds in battle soldiers. It came to pass that if the soldier enters into one of these chambers in which high oxygen, and high pressure, the wounds get healed.
Since then, it has turned out to be clear that there are many syndromes that improve from hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Again we’re thinking what could be the reason why so many different pathologies can be reversed from hyperbaric oxygen therapy. We wondered, is it possible that the high oxygen and, or the high pressure builds EZ water? We tested it, we confirmed it. Both of them build EZ water. I think, again this is a simple, well, it’s not so simple because you need to go to a clinic that has one of these hyperbaric oxygen chambers or have one of your own. It wouldn’t surprise me if increasing number of people decide to purchase one and keep it at home.
Because it’s apparently good for so many different issues. We think we understand why it’s just a build-up of EZ water.
Ari: Very interesting. The science on hyperbaric is quite rich. I’ve done a previous podcast on it with a friend of mine who runs a clinic for hyperbaric named, Dr. Scott Scherr. I know that also even high-level athletes– It’s used in the context of traumatic brain injuries frequently, it’s used also by high-level athletes to enhance recovery. There was one documentary I saw in World’s Strongest Man competitors, where Eddie Hall, who is a former World’s Strongest Man champion was saying that it speeds his recovery time. It cuts his recovery time in half. If it normally takes them two days to recover from a training session, now it only takes one.
Something to that effect, or it even allows him to train two times in the same day. It seems hyperbaric is quite profound. I’m curious if there’s anything about cold, like ice baths and cold water baths have become popular these days. I believe I remember reading in your book or somewhere hearing you talk about ice and EZ water. Is there some relationship with cold as well?
Dr. Pollack: Yes. If you accept the principle that infrared energy is critical for the buildup of EZ water, and also that the buildup of EZ water is critical for health then see if you bathe yourself in ice as demonstrated, the infrared energy that is the core of your body will get transmitted through your tissues out to the ice in the same way that the earth in the evening radiates infrared energy to the cosmos and thereby cools. The same principle I think would apply. You generate the infrared energy from the core, it passes through all the relevant tissues and then out to the core.
Ari: Would that reduce EZ water in the cells?
Dr. Pollack: No, that actually increases EZ water because in theory– Because the infrared energy is passing through the tissues on its way out. Some of that infrared energy is absorbed by the tissue before it comes out.
Ari: Oh, interesting. In that way of thinking, what’s the origin, the source of that infrared energy?
Dr. Pollack: The heat that’s generated because of metabolism. Inside your body. Now, if you keep yourself immersed for a very long time, I suppose there could be negative consequences, but for moderate amount of time, I think that’s a possible explanation of what’s going on. Your tissues don’t care which direction the energy is coming from, whether it comes from outside or whether it’s coming from inside, in this case, is certainly not coming from outside because the ice is not generating a whole lot of infrared energy is very low, but your metabolism is still generating it. It passes from your core, out through all your tissues out to the ice bath and in so doing builds EZ water in the tissues.
Ari: Very, very interesting. This also makes me think of the practice in some Scandinavian countries of alternating between cold water baths and saunas, and perhaps you’re amplifying the fact by doing two methods of building the EZ water.
Dr. Pollack: They know what they’re doing in Scandinavia.
[laughter]
Ari: The literature is obviously robust around sauna use and disease prevention, cardiovascular risk, neurological disease risk, and all cause mortality risk reduction. Those end points are there. It’s just a question of– There’s various other mechanisms at play surely, but it’s interesting to consider whether this may be a key mechanism for mediating that effect.
Dr. Pollack: Yes, absolutely. Yes.
Ari: Are there any other points in this discussion that you feel we may have missed before we wrap up
Dr. Pollack: Numerous.
[laughter]
Ari: Is there anything critically important that you would feel remiss about if you didn’t mention?
Dr. Pollack: Yes, I think EZ water is all over. It’s not just inside our bodies. I wanted to mention that because wherever you have water sitting next to hydrophilic surface, not every hydrophilic surface, but most of them and you have infrared energy, which is all over, you going to have some amount of EZ water. What I’d like to do is to mention my forthcoming book which deals with– It deals basically with EZ water, and particularly the electrical charge of EZ water, and in this forthcoming book, I’m waiting for my son, who’s the artist of the fourth Facebook. He’s fantastic.
To finish remodeling his house so we can devote some time to finishing the cover and the illustrations, but it deals with EZ water and particularly the effects of electrical charge involved with EZ water and explaining so many phenomena in nature that we attribute to other explanations, but we don’t really understand them very well. When we scratch beneath the surface answers become difficult and the subjects range from what creates wind, what turns the earth every 24 hours, what’s the true nature of gravitation? Weather– Easy and electrical charge are absolutely critical for weather.
I could find no fundamental theory of whether that starts from first principles and builds up, nothing like that. We really don’t understand clouds, evaporation, and all of the common features, to how birds fly, and how sailboats– Some kinds of sailboats, iceboats can sail almost directly into the wind. Shouldn’t do that because according to Newton’s Laws, if the wind is coming at you you’re going to go backwards, not forward. I just wanted to mention that book is on its way and hopefully published in the next six months or so.
Ari: What’s the name of that book?
Dr. Pollack: The main name is Charged. There’s a sub name, and I can’t remember exactly what the words are, but something like, unexpected features or the role of electrical charge in our environment or something to that tune. The words are nice words are put together, but I can’t remember them exactly.
[laughter]
Dr. Pollack: We did a poll, a Google poll, offering 10 different names, and the one that we chose is the one that was the most popular.
Ari: Great.
Dr. Pollack: I think that’s about it. There are many things to talk about, but you said is there anything really critical that I haven’t talked about, oh yes. Maybe just one more easy is negatively charged. The region beyond is positively charged because all of this starts from water, which is neutral. If you have a region that’s negative, you have to have a region that’s equally positive. You got those two regions and if you stick electrodes in– Two electrodes, one in a negative, one in the positive, you get electrical energy out of that.
This is actually sun-driven or infrared energy-driven, electrical energy that can be tapped. It’s just a matter of building up because the amount of electrical energy that we’re able to obtain now in the laboratory is small, very small, but the principle is proven and so it’s just a matter of building up. I wanted to mention that.
Ari: Yes. It’s wonderful. Jerry, can I ask you how old you are?
Dr. Pollack: 82.
Ari: 82. Wonderful. I hope you live a lot longer and you can continue to do such amazing work in this field.
Dr. Pollack: Thank you. My natural path promise is 120.
Ari: Beautiful. Wonderful.
Dr. Pollack: Energetic is when I was 30
Ari: Yes, I hope to have as highly functional a brain when I’m 82 years old, as you do. My final question to you is given that you’ve had a lot of experience and you’ve done a lot of research and thought a lot about health-related topics. What would you say are your top two or three recommendations that you want to leave people with? As far as staying or becoming healthy?
Dr. Pollack: We need to keep hydrated. This is a problem for me and my dear physician Dietrich Klinghardt tells me drink more water.
Ari: It’s funny you of all people needs to be told that.
Dr. Pollack: Well, yes.
Ari: Even you need to be told that there’s no hope for the rest of us.
[laughter]
Dr. Pollack: I also think there’s a future in so-called subtle information that’s coming into the water. This is a frontier that I think will or a topic that will be a frontier topic in the very near future because the evidence for this is overwhelming from many different people. It’s just that it’s rejected resoundingly by people who are more conventional in their thinking but it’s the job of scientists not to reject something because it’s not traditional, but if there’s enough evidence for it to search for the mechanism to try to understand, and there’s no understanding yet, no real understanding of how this works, but it’s going to be a subject in the future.
Ari: Sorry to ask you to go on a digression, but this is actually a topic t to ask you about and forgot, but maybe you can touch on briefly. I don’t know if you have to go, sorry if I’m keeping–
Dr. Pollack: I can go on.
How water carries information
Ari: Okay. What is some of that evidence and what is this word information, water carrying information, what do these terms mean, and what is the evidence to support it?
Dr. Pollack: What does it mean? What it means is that– How do I put it in different words is that water has a capability of– I don’t know how to put it in any way that’s different. It’s storing information.
Ari: What kind of information?
Dr. Pollack: Subtle information that the nature of which nobody understands. Let me tell you the evidence for it because without going on too long. It ranges from the spiritual to the highly scientific, and the spiritual starts. It actually starts before this, but the famous person is Masaru Emoto who passed some years ago. The work is being carried on by his son Hero Emoto and I’m well connected with their group, and what Emoto demonstrated to a broad broad audience is he had a container of water and he put his intention toward the water. If he thought I’d love you or positive thoughts to the water. They froze the water and he looked at the ice crystals that formed, and they were beautiful.
On the other hand, if he said to the water, I hate you, or had negative thoughts that he imparted to the water, then the crystals were ugly. He wrote a book on the subject messages from water, and it captured huge audience and sold so many. By the way another version 20 years later just came out a year ago. I actually wrote a forward to the book and so with this evidence, it looked like information coming from Emoto himself and some subtle information that nobody could really understand. He was able to create an impact.
Apparently, the information that came from his mind, from his thinking, or in some cases, playing music– Playing Mozart symphony gave lovely ice crystals, but other kinds of modern music, kinds of rock music did not. The problem with him and why he’s roundly criticized justifiably by scientists is he didn’t do it exactly the way I described. He had 50 petri dishes you fill in with water and he put his attention to all 50 Petri dishes, he’d freeze them and then look, and he’d pick out the one of the 50 that demonstrated what he wanted to demonstrate clearly. It’s not the way a scientist would do it. Scientists would choose randomly.
For that reason, most scientists will just dismiss out of hand anything that comes from that laboratory but there are other people now who are doing experiments where they test repeatability and they’re coming out with positive results and people will hear about that. This is from the spiritual end, and there are many scientists, many of whom come to our conference I organize each year, the annual conference on Physics, Chemistry, and Biology of water. At their other end, at the scientific end, many scientists who come and report at our conference usually two or three each year. I don’t want to go into every experiment because that will take too long.
The culmination of all this is a series of experiments by a person who I guess many would consider distinguished, well recognized. He won a Nobel Prize and that’s the late Luc Montagnier. What Montagnier demonstrated scientifically and now confirmed by a few groups is, let me just tell you his experiment briefly. He puts DNA in a buffer of some sort in a container and the container is sealed. Nothing can get out, it’s factory sealed container containing some short strand of DNA, and next to it, he puts another container that contains only pure water, again, factory sealed so that there’s no way that any of the contents of any of these can get out to cause contamination.
He imparts some generic energy like 50 Hertz or 60 Hertz. The two of them basically are sitting next to each other for a day. He hypothesizes that the information from this sequence of the DNA is somehow being transmitted to the water through some subtle energies that he doesn’t understand and nobody understands. He throws this away, takes the water, and combines the water with the chemicals that are part of the now famous PCR reaction to create new DNA and create lots of the new DNA. He compares the DNA that had sat next to it with the new DNA and they match, which means–
Ari: Wow.
Dr. Pollack: Yes, wow, he’s right, which means that his hypothesis is supported that somehow through some subtle energy between the original DNA or the water that surrounds the DNA, he actually thought that that was more likely because he could dilute the DNA hugely leaving essentially only the water that had been in contact with it. That gave the same result. The water that had been in contact with the DNA could now impart energy to the water. There’s been a long line of experimentation. You might say, starting, but actually, there’s earlier stuff, starting with the spiritualists and now coming to the scientists, all of which are suggesting that there’s some information that’s imparted.
I’ve given you a couple of examples of the information, it’s all vague. Nobody even can hypothesize the nature of this subtle information and nobody understands exactly how it’s imparted to the water. I’ll just say one more thing. I think it’s not liquid water. I think it’s EZ water because liquid water molecules are randomly oriented and they’re bouncing around a fierce number of times per second. It’s hard to imagine that information could be stored in that liquid of that nature, but EZ water is different because it’s like liquid crystal and crystals are water used in today’s computer memories.
You have an array of transistors and they are Silicon crystals basically, so the possibility is that those array of transistors might one day be replaced by EZ water. The theoretical information density is nine orders of magnitude higher because we’re now dealing at the atomic level instead of the supermolecular level. The hydrogens and oxygens are, as I said, at the atomic level. In years from now, it could be that EZ water, which by the way can now be produced in solid form at room temperature, as discovered by an Italian group and we’ve recently confirmed it.
Ari: Wow.
Dr. Pollack: Yes. I hope that answers that question for you.
Ari: Yes.
Dr. Pollack: I’m happy to go further with you, but I think we have limited time.
Ari: Yes. Maybe one more tip regarding health and we’ll finish there.
Dr. Pollack: Pay attention to all of the potentially destructive impacts of what people have been talking about. I think they’re real. Just one example is that glyphosate which is in Roundup, a weed killer and the presumption is, well, it kills the weeds, but it has no impact on us. Many works as compiled by Stephanie Seneff from MIT suggest the opposite. We actually did experiments with glyphosate and we found, unlike the ayurvedic type agents which built EZ water, glyphosate diminished EZ water at every concentration. It basically dehydrates and it might kill by dehydration. The evidence that has been produced by so many groups and compiled by Stephanie Seneff suggests that this could be a problem.
I guess you’re asking for advice and I would stay away from anything as much as you can that contains glyphosate. It’s not good for your health.
Ari: This is a very fascinating note to end on because it paints a paradigm of one potentially key mechanism of human health is this battleground to maintain the appropriate state phase of water and charge of water in our cells. We can conceptualize the degree to which we are engaging in practices that are building that EZ water in ourselves or the degree to which we are engaging in things which are diminishing it.
Dr. Pollack: Absolutely.
Ari: To what extent are you getting outdoors and getting sunlight and walking on the earth and doing saunas and cold exposure and perhaps consuming lots of vegetables or drinking vegetable juice versus taking in pest– I should also mention sources of ayurvedic herbs, turmeric, and holy basil, and some of these other compounds that are EZ water building versus to what extent you’re in indoor environments, you’re in an infrared deficient environment. You are not getting adequate sunlight. You’re taking in or you’re consuming or otherwise being exposed to chemical substances, which are diminishing this EZ water.
It creates this interesting battleground in which side of the scale is being tipped more, therefore what’s the state of the EZ water in your cells?
Dr. Pollack: Oh, so, well put. I couldn’t add another word to that.
Ari: Beautiful. We’ll end there. Thank you so much, Jerry. It was really a pleasure and an honor to connect with you. It’s just something I’ve wanted to do for many years now. Tell us again where people can donate to your lab to help fund your further research.
Dr. Pollack: The lab website, which is fun to look at anyway, it’s pollacklab.org or my email address [email protected]. If you lose that, it’s all over the internet. I’m not invisible.
Ari: Thank you so much.
Dr. Pollack: Oh, thank you. All right.
Ari: Thank you so much, Jerry. It was really an honor.
Dr. Pollack: Yes. Great pleasure. Thank you so much.
Ari: I look forward to next time.
Dr. Pollack: Okay. Take care.
Show Notes
00:00 – Intro
02:35 – The interest of researching water
16:13 – How EZ water works at the cellular level
28:28 – How EZ Water is created
47:50 – The most practical strategies for making EZ water in your cells
1:09:00 – How water carries information
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