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.
