What would happen if you drank lemon water every day for 30 days? You
might be surprised by some of the benefits you'll learn about, and at the end,
we'll talk about the circumstances in which you should actually drink lemon
water.
Lemon water is supposedly good for various things, such as kidney
stones, cancer, heart disease, helping with weight loss, relieving anxiety and
depression, reducing anemia, improving digestion, cleansing the liver, lowering
cholesterol, and even helping with cardiovascular diseases and stroke.
Water with Lemon: An Ally in Preventing Kidney Stones
Well, kidney stones are primarily formed from calcium and oxalate, and
lemon contains citric acid or citrate, which can bind to oxalate and transport
it out of the body without forming stones. Therefore, citrate can actually
protect you against kidney stones. However, remember that a significant amount
of citrate is necessary.
If you have problems with kidney stones, it’s a good idea to drink some
lemon juice, but you would need about half a cup of concentrated lemon juice to
have enough citric acid to make a difference.
It’s not a lot, so you can certainly do it. Therefore, we can check off
kidney stones, but it would probably take a bit more than just squeezing a
piece of lemon.
There is some research suggesting that phytonutrients in lemon can
actually kill certain cancer cells, but this was done in a test tube.
When they do this in a test tube, you have to ask how this translates to
the human body, what dosage was used, can we replicate this dosage and get any
effect in the human body?
And you also have to wonder if they would really spend millions of
dollars on research just to make some lemon farmers happy. I think they do it
to extract a molecule, produce it in mass, and sell it as a drug.
So, the chances are that the concentrations used in a test tube would be
much higher than what you can get by drinking lemon water.
SO HERE IS MY OPINION: Lemon Water: Real Benefits and Realistic Expectations
They concluded that lemons are rich in vitamin C and therefore said that
lemons protect against heart disease.
So here’s the problem: the research doesn’t say anything about vitamin C
being the protective factor, it just says that certain vegetables are good for
the heart and they are rich in vitamin C.
We don’t know if it’s that or something else that helps. Therefore, we
have no idea if it’s really the vitamin C in lemons that will help. These are
just two completely unrelated statements that they’ve put together and drawn
conclusions from.
I’m not saying lemons are bad for the heart or that they wouldn’t
protect you, I’m just saying you can’t make this kind of deductive reasoning;
it’s not valid.
There are all kinds of claims out there: they find a fragment of
evidence, extrapolate it, and then make some absurd claims.
Exploring the Myths and Truths about the Benefits of
Lemon Water:
They say it helps with weight loss because lemon juice is rich in fiber, and this helps suppress hunger. This is a bit surprising; I never thought of lemon juice as a high-fiber food.
So why not fact-check? If you drink pure lemon juice and, let's say,
take 2 tablespoons (30 grams) of lemon juice, you will get 0.1 grams of fiber,
which is 0% of your daily recommendation.
Another scientist claimed that lemon water can help with anxiety and
depression, and the reasoning was that sodium and potassium are the two mineral
ions in the body responsible for signaling in the nervous system, and this is
absolutely true.
You can have neurological symptoms if your potassium levels get
extremely low. A normal potassium level is about 3.5 to 5.2, but you really
need to drop to around 3 or less before you start seeing symptoms, and this is
extremely rare.
Personally, I think I've never seen a blood test, among hundreds, that
was below 4. So, potassium deficiency to that degree is rare.
Water with Lemon as an Ally in Combating Anxiety and
Depression
Lemon is rich in potassium, and therefore lemon water can help with
anxiety and depression. First of all, potassium deficiency probably wouldn't
even be among the top 50 causes of anxiety and depression, but let's go along
with it and fact-check again.
Now, let's double the dose of lemon juice: we take 60 grams or a quarter
cup of lemon juice, and this gives us 62 milligrams of potassium, which doesn't
seem too bad, but this is only 1% of your recommended daily intake.
Therefore, the claim that lemons are rich in potassium is incorrect, and
the idea that it would help with anxiety and depression is extremely far-fetched.
In fact, if you wanted to supplement with potassium, you would need to drink
three full cups of concentrated lemon juice to match what you get in a large
avocado.
And if you really had symptoms like anxiety and depression and were so
deficient in potassium, you would probably want to have a therapeutic dose,
something like the full recommended daily dose of potassium, which means you
would need to drink 1.2 gallons of concentrated lemon juice or 4.6 liters.
And if you did that, of course, you would also ingest 317 grams of
carbohydrates and 116 grams of sugar, but if you drank more than a gallon oflemon juice, you would deserve a bit of sugar.
But seriously, there are some potential benefits if we understand the
mechanism of some of these ingredients, so it would make sense why it could
reduce anemia, help with digestion, cleanse the liver, maybe help improve
cholesterol, and you could even argue that it could help with weight loss and
reduce some cardiovascular diseases and stroke.
Lemon Water and Anemia: How
It Can Affect Your Health
Citric acid, as the name implies, is an acid, which 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, it will signal and increase the production of
hydrochloric acid, so we start producing acids and lowering the pH in the
stomach much earlier than usual, and with a lower pH in the stomach, we will
actually improve iron absorption.
This is especially important for vegans because the type of iron in
plants is different; it’s called non-heme iron, compared to the heme iron we
have in meat and animal products.
It's much easier to absorb heme iron, whereas it's very difficult to
absorb non-heme iron without acid. So, if you’re a vegetarian, especially, this
can absolutely help to increase your acidity a bit and potentially reduce your
anemia.
This increase in acidity can already help improve your digestion, but it
can do one more thing because this acid stimulates and signals something called
CCK, which stands for cholecystokinin, a hormone responsible for making the
gallbladder contract and release bile.
Bile is another component; we need acid to break down proteins and
stimulate pepsinogen to become pepsin, which is an enzyme that breaks down
proteins. But then cholecystokinin helps release bile, and this bile helps
digest fats.
Interestingly, this can also help cleanse the liver because the liver
basically takes fat-soluble toxins and makes them harmless by making them
water-soluble and then dumping these water-soluble end products into the bile.
This is one of the main ways the liver gets rid of toxins, dumping them
into the bile, which is stored in the gallbladder. But then cholecystokinin
comes into action, makes the gallbladder squeeze and release some of these
toxins.
There’s a dual purpose here: it helps us get rid of toxins and digest
fats better. But without acid, without cholecystokinin, the gallbladder can
become sluggish, clogged, and if that happens, the liver doesn’t have a place
to dump its toxins.
So, the liver’s outflow slows down or becomes obstructed. With acid, we can
keep this process going and allow the liver to get rid of toxins more easily.
This same mechanism can even help your body regulate cholesterol. The
reason is that bile is made from cholesterol, so when we have a stagnant
gallbladder, if we’re not eliminating this bile, there’s no reason for the body
to produce more bile because it’s clogged.
So, if we regularly release the gallbladder, we need to make more bile
from cholesterol, which helps keep that cholesterol circulating and the body
regulating it with the renewal of bile.
Lemon Water and the Carbohydrate Digestion Process: How It Affects Your Health
They used to think that salivary amylase only works while you're chewing
for a few minutes and that when it reaches the stomach, it's neutralized by
acid, because that's what happens. It's an enzyme, and as soon as there's acid,it degrades.
But what actually happens is that the acid in the stomach can take 30
minutes, 60 minutes, or even longer, and during all that time, salivary amylase
is digesting carbohydrates in the stomach.
So, if you eat just carbohydrates like bread, without anything else, all
those carbohydrates or most of them will be rapidly digested in the stomach,
raising your blood sugar and insulin.
But if you take something acidic, like citric acid with that bread — I'm
not suggesting you eat bread, but if you did — that citric acid would inhibit
salivary amylase because it would stimulate hydrochloric acid much earlier.
Thus, we wouldn't have that blood sugar and insulin spike because it wouldn't
happen as quickly.
Now, this alone wouldn't solve all your metabolic problems and wouldn't
reverse diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, but it would be extremely
important in reducing blood sugar and insulin spikes.
Balancing Blood Sugar with Lemon Water: How It Can
Contribute to Your Health.
This stability is even more important than low levels, because
instability has tremendously harmful effects on the body. If you can stabilize
blood sugar a bit, you probably won't feel as hungry. True.
So, for someone who is relatively tolerant to carbohydrates and is just
maintaining their health, this would be a very useful trick because you can
take a bit of apple cider vinegar or a bit of citric acid from lemon with your
food and dramatically reduce blood sugar spikes.
However, if you're metabolically unhealthy, if you have diabetes, if
you're trying to reverse a condition, if you're carbohydrate intolerant, you
need to realize that you still have the same amount of carbohydrates, and
therefore you shouldn't really rely on this method because you're still
consuming them.
It will stimulate insulin production quite a bit; it will just be spread
over a longer period of time, but it could certainly still bring some benefits
for heart disease and strokes because it would stabilize blood sugar, which
would be a good step toward metabolic health.
30 Days
of Water with Lemon: What to Expect from this Daily Routine?
Recently, I heard the story of a woman who faced a constant struggle
with overweight throughout her life. She managed to lose 9 kilograms in just 30
days. This impressive result left me skeptical at first, but the testimonials
and evidence presented convinced me of its truth.
I had never seen anything like it. In just one month, she shared
detailed instructions on how anyone could replicate her success.
Although I joke a bit about the situation, the testimonials accompanying
the story are truly inspiring. She says it works because she lost 10 kilograms
in three months.
That's quite impressive, about 0.8 kilograms per week, which would be
quite impressive if it were just due to lemon juice, but she continues to say
that she also cut out all junk food.
That's a huge step when you switch from processed junk food with no
nutrition to real food. That's one of the most important steps you can take.
And then she went on to say that she stopped eating after five in the
evening. That's called intermittent fasting, it's a time-restricted fasting,
and that's huge, maybe even a bigger step than just learning to eat real food.
So, if you combine the two, it's fantastic. But it doesn't stop there,
because she even goes on to say that she added some exercise, did daily aerobic
exercises, and then she says that if you do all this with lemon water, you'll
see results, and I don't doubt it, because she's doing the things that are
documented here.
Transforming Your Health: How Lemon Water Powers a Healthy Life
I think so, it could be that last 1%, but we need to put that into
perspective and understand the bigger picture. In 30 days, you can likely see
some definite benefits, as we discussed, the mechanism is valid.
CAUTION: I just wouldn't bet my entire health on drinking lemon water. However, here's the main reason for drinking lemon water: if you like the taste.
- I add it to sparkling
water,
- I add lemon to practically every meal,
But if you're looking for major health benefits, I would ask what else
you would do during those 30 days? And maybe for some, it's just that you used
to drink soda and now you drink lemon water, and if you used to have a pack of
soda and now you drink lemon water, that alone could be transformative; you
just have a new quality of life from that part alone.
Water with Lemon: Nourishing Body and Mind
When you set out to do something for 30 days, it has tremendous power because suddenly you feel better about yourself. Just like the person who shared their testimonial.
She talked about drinking lemon water, but in reality, she changed her entire life at the same time, and people tend to do that when you make a decision and say "I'm going to try this, I'm going to do this," so very often you start doing other things too because you feel better about yourself.
So maybe you end up joining a gym and doing more exercise, maybe you start walking more, getting more regular exercise, or taking the dog for a longer walk.
Maybe you skip that cookie and eat a lot less sugar, maybe you stop drinking as much, and maybe you start sleeping better now that you have balanced blood sugar and are tired from all that exercise.
That's how you really get some truly amazing benefits from drinking lemon water, and then of course you tell all your friends how it changed your life with lemon water.
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