What If You Drink Lemon Water For 30 Days?

Hello Health Champions. Today we're going to  talk about what would happen if you were to drink lemon water every day for 30 days. You may be  surprised by some of the benefits you will learn plus at the end we're going to talk about under  what circumstances you really want to drink lemon water.

Lemon water is supposed to help with  all kinds of things such as kidney stones and cancer and heart disease it's supposed to help you  lose weight and help with anxiety and depression reduce anemia improve your digestion cleanse the  liver and even lower cholesterol and help with cardiovascular disease and stroke so in today's  video I want to help you understand which ones of these claims might actually be valid and  which ones you want to take with a grain of salt what about kidney stones well kidney  stones are primarily made up of calcium and oxalates and lemon contain citric acid or citrate  and this citrate can bind with these oxalate and transport them out of the body without forming  stones so the citrate can actually protect you from kidney stones however keep  in mind that it takes quite a bit so if you have a problem with kidney stones it's  probably a good idea to drink some lemon juice but you would have to have about half a cup of  concentrated lemon juice in order to have enough citric acid to really make a difference but that's  not all that much so you could certainly do that so we put a green check mark on kidney stones  but it's probably gonna take a little more than squeezing a wedge of lime in there how about  reducing cancer can it do that well there's some research that suggests that phytonutrients in  lemons can actually kill certain cancer cells but they did this in a test tube and when they do  it in a test tube you have to ask yourself how does this translate to the human body what  kind of dosage did they use can we replicate that dosage and get any kind of effect in  the human body and you also have to ask are they really going to spend millions of dollars  on research just to make some lemon farmers happy I don't think so I think they're doing it so that  they can extract one molecule and mass produce it and sell it as a medication so chances are that  the concentrations that they use in a test tube would be vastly higher than what you can get from  drinking lemon water so here just my opinion I would give it a question mark but then again lemon  water is not going to hurt you so what's the harm can lemon water protect you from heart disease  well someone claimed that research showed that eating fruits and vegetables high  in vitamin c can protect you from stroke and cardiovascular disease and then they  concluded that lemons are high in vitamin c and then they said therefore lemons protect  you from heart disease so here's the problem the research doesn't say anything about the  vitamin c being the protective thing it just says certain vegetables are good for your heart and  they happen to be high in vitamin c so we don't know if it's that or something else that helps  so we have no idea if it's actually the vitamin c in the lemon that's going to help so they're  just two totally unrelated statements that they put together and draw some conclusions so I'm not  saying that lemons are bad for your heart or that they wouldn't protect it I'm just saying you can't  make this kind of deductive reasoning it's not valid and there's all kinds of claims  out there they find a shred of evidence and they extrapolate on it and then make some  wild claims here's another wonderful piece i found it says it helps losing weight because lemon  juice is high in fiber and that helps suppress feelings of hunger now that's a little surprising  I never thought of lemon juice as a high fiber food so why don't we go check the facts if you  drink raw lemon juice and let's say that you take 2 tablespoons 1 ounce 30 grams of lemon juice then  you're going to get 0. 1 grams of fiber which is 0 of your daily recommendation someone else  claimed that lemon water can help with anxiety and depression and the reasoning for this was that  sodium and potassium are the two mineral ions in the body that are responsible for signaling in  the nervous system and that's absolutely true and you can get neurological symptoms if  your levels of potassium go extremely low so a normal level of potassium is about three  and a half to five point two but you really have to get down to about three or less before you  start seeing symptoms and this is extremely rare personally I don't think I've ever seen a blood  test out of hundreds and hundreds that has been under four so potassium deficiency to that degree  is kind of rare then they said that lemon is rich in potassium and therefore lemon water can help  with anxiety and depression now first of all a potassium deficiency would probably not even make  the top 50 list of things that can cause anxiety and depression but let's just bear with them and  then go check the facts again now let's double the dose of lemon juice we take 60 grams or a quarter  cup of lemon juice and that gives us 62 milligrams of potassium which doesn't seem so bad but that's  only one percent of your recommended daily intake so the claim that lemons are rich in potassium  is incorrect and that it would help with anxiety and depression is just extremely far-fetched in  fact if you want to supplement some potassium then you would have to drink three full cups of  concentrated lemon juice to equal what you get in about one large avocado I think I know which one  I would prefer and if you truly had symptoms like anxiety and depression you were that deficient  in potassium then you would probably want to have a therapeutic dose something like the  full 100 daily allowance of potassium which means that you would need to drink  1. 2 gallons of concentrated lemon juice or 4.

6 liters and if you were to do that of course  you would also get 317 grams of carbohydrate and 116 grams of sugar but bless your heart if you  were to drink over a gallon of lemon juice then you earned yourself a little sugar but seriously  there are actually some potential benefits if we understand the mechanism what some of these  ingredients do then it would actually make sense why it could reduce anemia why it can help  digestion it can even help cleanse the liver it might help lower or improve cholesterol  and you could even make an argument for why it could help you lose weight and help reduce some  cardiovascular disease and stroke let's start with anemia and citric acid just like the name says  is an acid that means it has a very low pH and pH is very important for signaling in the  body so when we have citric acid which is acidic then it's going to signal and increase the  production of hydrochloric acid so that we start making acids we reduce the pH in the stomach  much sooner than we would otherwise and with a lower pH in the stomach we're actually  going to improve the absorption of iron and this is especially important for vegans  because the type of iron in plants is different it's called non-heme iron versus the heme iron  that we have in meat and animal products and it's much easier to absorb the heme iron whereas  it's very difficult to absorb the non-heme iron without the acid so if you're vegetarian  especially then that can absolutely help to increase your acidity a little bit and potentially  reduce your anemia and that increased acidity can already help improve your digestion but  it can do one more thing because this acid further stimulates and signals and it  stimulates something called CCK which stands for cholecystokinin and that's a hormone that is  responsible for kicking the gallbladder into gear it makes the gallbladder contract and release  bile and bile is another component so we need acid to break down proteins to stimulate pepsinogen  to become pepsin which is an enzyme to break down protein but then the cholecystokinin helps  release bile and this bile helps digest fat but interestingly this can also help cleanse the liver  because what the liver does it basically takes fat soluble toxins and renders them harmless by making  them water soluble and then it dumps these water soluble end products into the bile and that's  one way that we get rid of things it's a main method that the liver gets rid of toxins by  dumping them in the bile which are stored in the gallbladder but then the cholecystokinin  comes in and makes the gallbladder squeeze and release some of that toxin so there's  a dual purpose here it helps us get rid of toxins and it helps us digest fats better but  without the acid without the cholecystokinin the gallbladder can become sluggish it  gets backed up and if it gets backed up now the liver doesn't really have a place to dump  its toxins so the outflow of the liver gets slowed down or clogged up so with acid we can keep that  process going and allow the liver more easy exit of the toxins now this same mechanism can even  help your body regulate cholesterol and the reason is that bile is made from cholesterol so when we  have a stagnant gallbladder if we're not flushing out that bile then there is no reason for the  body to make new bile because it's clogged up and then if we release that gallbladder if we  empty that on a regular basis then we need to make more bile we need to make nubile  from cholesterol so that helps us keep that cholesterol in circulation and it helps the  body regulate cholesterol when there's a turnover but now this story gets really interesting  and this has to do with how carbohydrates are digested in the body so in the mouth you  have saliva and there's something called salivary amylase and this is an enzyme that breaks down  carbohydrates we have some in the mouth and then in a pancreas we have pancreatic amylase and  they used to think that the salivary amylase just worked while you were chewing for a few minutes  and then when the salivary amylase got into the stomach it was neutralized by the acid because  that's what happened it's an enzyme and as soon as there's some acid it degrades and degenerates  that that enzyme but what actually happens is that the acid in the stomach could  take 30 minutes 60 minutes or sometimes even more and during all that time the salivary  amylase is digesting carbohydrates in the stomach so if you eat just carbohydrates like bread with  nothing else with it then all of that or most of that carbohydrate is going to be quickly digested  in your stomach and spike your blood sugar and your insulin but if you take something sour like  citric acid with that bread not that I suggest you would eat bread but if you did then that citric  acid would inhibit the salivary amylase because it would stimulate the hydrochloric acid much sooner  and now we don't have that spike of blood sugar and insulin because it doesn't happen so quickly  anymore now this alone would not solve all of your metabolic problems and reverse diabetes  and cardiovascular disease and all that but it would be hugely important in reducing the spikes  of blood sugar and insulin and one of the most important things about blood sugar is to keep it  stable that's stable is even more important than low because the unstable has tremendously harmful  effects on the body and if you can stabilize the blood sugar a little bit then you're probably not  going to get as hungry either so for someone who is relatively carbohydrate tolerant and who  is just maintaining their health this would be a really cool trick because you can just take  some apple cider vinegar or some citric acid from lemon with your food and you would dramatically  reduce the blood sugar spikes however if you are metabolically unhealthy if you have diabetes  if you're trying to reverse a condition if you're carbohydrate intolerant then you need to  realize that you still have the exact same amount of carbohydrate and therefore you don't really  want to rely on this method because you're still going to drive a lot of insulin it's just going  to be spread out over a longer period of time but nonetheless it could certainly have some  benefit for heart disease and stroke because it would stabilize blood sugar it would be a  good step toward metabolic health now what can you expect if you drink lemon water every day for  30 days well one video I found there was a lady talking about how she had a lifelong struggle  with weight and then this cartoon character went on to tell us that she lost 20 pounds in 30  days and now that sounds really really impressive that's kind of hard to believe but I have to  tell you I was totally convinced when they showed visual proof of how this cartoon character lost  all that weight I mean I've never seen anything like that just imagine in 30 days and then this  cartoon character instructed us to immediately go to the kitchen and make a glass of this magical  drink and I'm having a little bit of fun with them but there were actually some testimonials like  this one he says that it does work because he lost 10 kilograms in three months and that's pretty  impressive that is 1. 8 pounds per week or about 0.