Email to Friend Print Page Bookmark

 

Daniel Reid, Author, "The Tao of Health, Sex and Longevity"

INTERVIEW:

Dan Reid has been living the 'Alkaline Life' for at least seven years and studying longevity health for the last twenty. He is a highly respected author of self-help books that demonstrate techniques for health and longevity and yes, sex. This in an edited version of a larger interview Dan had with Ian Hamilton of IONLIFE.

IL: Dan, I've been reading your book, The Tao of Health, Sex and Longevity. You had a lot to say about Ionization a long time ago.

Actually, I first read about it in a book on Yogic Breathing. The book is called "Pranayama" But it went into it scientifically and explained how Pranayama works. It talked about negative ions as the element in science we use to describe 'Prana' or Chi'.

Chi means energy, but he explains the difference between air and energy. It's not chemical, and it's not oxygen. In Indian Yogic philosophy too, Prana is not air or oxygen. It is a vital energy considered to be carried in the air. So after a lot of research, the conclusion was reached that it was negative ions. I also researched the American Space Program where it was realized that even a mouse couldn't stay in space for more than twenty-four hours without going crazy. They figured out that the air, although the perfect blend of oxygen and nitrogen etc., had to be ionized. The link between traditional Asian breathing exercises - why you need to breathe a certain way, why you need certain kinds of air - and Western research on negative ions was obvious to me.

IL: So we are now capable of intake of negative ions in the form of air and water. Negative ionized air, and negative ion alkaline microclustered water. The Japanese have tried to achieve the same result through diet - what we call macrobiotics, which Herman Aihara, the father of modern macrobiotics says is a dietary method of rendering our inner terrain alkaline.

Dan Reid: He had his diet divided into acid and alkaline. You'd have alkaline yang and alkaline yin, then acid yang and acid yin. Throw the book out!

IL: Really?

Yes! There is something to it, but it's not practicable or applicable. You can't use it. I've never seen anybody successfully follow it. It's a theoretical construct. There are so few foods that can be properly combined if you get that fine about it. The one thing people keep questioning me about in the Tao book is food combining. They take it so seriously, even though I say several times that if you are about 75% you'll be OK. Your body can adjust. You are built to adjust to an imperfect world where imperfect food combinations occur all the time. People take it too too strictly; "I can't eat this with that, or that with this." And in the end they can't eat anything with anything! That's not how it is. Just be sensible. Don't have steak with four potatoes. But it's not going to hurt you to have some chopped meat with your noodles, or one prawn with your salad.

He just went too far with his system.

IL: Have you seen Sapoty Brook's Food Chart system, where he eats only raw food and balances them based on the acid or alkaline residue it leaves in the body?

Dan Reid: Yes, Sapoty gave me his chart, and I'm sure that theoretically it is right and it may be beneficial, but, I don't think it made much difference at that 'finer cut'.

IL: The only problem I have with raw food people is that they don't look healthy, and they seem to do nothing but eat.

Dan Reid: They need negative ions.

IL: What interested me though, was that Sapoty said he doesn't drink water because the fruit he eats offers him all the water he needs and releases it slowly into his system as the cellular walls of the fruit breaks down in digestion.

Dan Reid: I don't think that's true. If that was true why don't you just drink beer.. or water? For hydrating, it has always been accepted that nothing works as well as plain water, with nothing else in it.

IL: Yes, Kinesiologists say this too. They always ensure that the meridian system can 'talk' to them before a treatment by giving the patient water, and only water.

IL:I recently returned from India and what shocked me was the fact that you could see people aging due to pollution.

Dan Reid: Free radical damage. Those obvious symptoms you see - the wrinkling, the hair falling out, the age spots, free radical damage. Lack of negative ions as antioxidants. Apart from the lack of oxygen in the air, you have the excrement, the unshielded EMF, the diesel fumes, the factory output - it's got to rank with the worst air on earth. Their food is terribly poisoned and you can imagine what their water supply is like. They are getting saturated with free radicals.

IL: So they don't even have the ability to ionize within their body the way a healthy human specimen does. But how would you compare them to us? We live in comparative cleanliness, but let's look at an Australian city dweller. You still have your stress your EMF, your environmental pollution, your supermarket diet.

Dan Reid: I'd say it's six of one and half a dozen of the other. If you want a comparison, I'd say your average western stressed out businessman in a big city is actually worse off than an Indian. An Indian's body is certainly experiencing free radical damage, and he is looking a lot older than he is, and he does have problems from that, but overall an Indian has a spiritual life. They know what life is all about, they are grounded, they don't get stressed out like us, so they don't have their own body eating itself up. They don't have the auto-immune response problem that people have here. They don't have the adrenal glands burning out from constant cortisol and adrenaline, and the stress factors. I believe that damage is worse, because it is so toxic. When you don't use those stress hormones to go and club a saber toothed tiger like our forebears would have, they break down into pure poison. How often do you get a stress response? Forty seven times a day? You're a taxi driver and you're frustrated with waiting in line, you're stressed because your boss is angry, and you know how we Westerners are - we're always "Aargh!" We spurt out stress, and it just burns us up, and the side effect of all of those problems is massive acidification. I should add that Westerners with their Coke and Big Mac habits are adding to their acidification, constantly having calcium leached out of their bones and teeth. They aren't re-alkalizing, they aren't using negative ion water or air.

Dan Reid: Let me give you an example - the Osteoporosis problem in the West. There were studies carried out in India and in the West, on typical 50-year-old Indian women and Western women. The Western women had virtually no tensile strength left in their bones. But the Indian 50 year old women are still carrying 20 kg of water on their heads every day. Sure, they have the free radical damage, but they have calcium in their bones, they're not stressed out and their damage is only on that one level. It's having a direct effect on the physical body, but I think that their hormonal, their endocrine, their mental balance would be better than most Westerners.

IL: So the Westerner has the choice of listening to all the ads, and buying all the antioxidant products pushed by the pharmaceutical giants. But I still wonder about these antioxidant supplements, because it seems to me that they are still only capable of working at a molecular level, whereas ionized air and water works at an atomic level. It seems that nobody really tells you what you get when you buy antioxidants. I've had people telling me they spend $75 to $100 a month on antioxidants, and really not knowing the effect.

Dan Reid: The thing about all those supplements is that they have to pass through the digestive system, and most Westerner's digestive system is not very good, so there is that obstacle. If your stomach is hyper acidic or your small intestine is covered with slime and mucus, they are just going to be excreting their $100 worth. So those supplements are fine for people in pretty good condition, but for the people who need them most, I think the absorption and utilization factor is pretty low. Vitamin E for example has all these good antioxidants, but they aren't eaten with all the necessary cofactors, you need a good digestive system, and your liver has to be in good working order in order to break it down and transform it. Compare all that to breathing air, or drinking water, which just goes straight in, so for people who need it the most, the water and air systems are infinitely superior. But people who really have good digestive systems, are able to assimilate food, have balanced internal organs and can therefore use the supplements, don't need them!

IL: So they would be the one in a hundred, or one in five hundred.

Dan Reid: We all have natural free radical damage from metabolism, but we also have natural ability to deal with it, with our super oxide dismutase, our peroxidates, the enzymes produced for that purpose. You don't need any supplements. You really shouldn't even need ionized air or water. The free radical damage that we can't deal with is caused by taking in chemicals, preservatives, pollutants and wrong food combinations causing putrefaction and fermentation in the gut. When you do that, your ability to use digestive supplements or antioxidants becomes very limited.

IL: Some people say that it is wrong to use electricity to create ionized water.

Dan Reid: So what would that mean to the ocean, to the lakes, to the reservoirs? I have heard that argument, but I don't see what they are saying. Are they saying that water shouldn't have electricity in it? Water is the finest conductor in the world. And these Ionizers like mine control it exactly using an onboard computer. I think they are trying on the idea that technology is bad, just to make their point. Hey, I'm a Luddite, but I'm also high on technology, because we have to understand that electricity is one of the most basic parts of our universe!

There is nothing more 'natural' than electricity! You have only a few energies that run this planet; solar, gravity, electricity, so let's extend their argument to all these forms. Take sunlight. Does sunlight damage water? Why should electricity? Water and electricity have been interacting symbiotically for countless millions of years, in fact that's how life began, with a lightning strike into water carrying carbon substances, passing on energy and causing the very first life-sustaining reactions! Without electric input energizing water, water will remain inert. So the whole point of putting electricity into it is to give it life. Electricity is a life force. If you don't believe it, put a voltmeter to your body. It's what makes your nerves work! A chemical reaction creates an electrical impulse. It's totally compatible with blood, body fluids, water. I don't know what they think they are talking about. It isn't adding anything to the water. There is no chemical added. It's about the purest method of water treatment there is.

IL: What about this 'pure water" argument. Some people say electrolysis of water removes certain minerals. The only minerals it removes are the toxic ones, which are released into the byproduct acid water, so I can't see what they are complaining about.

Dan Reid: My ionizer does purify the water. Pure water doesn't have chlorine in it. If you think of pure water as spring water coming out of some high mountain then think again. It's loaded with minerals! It has no acids, no fluoride. It's loaded with all the good things that come out of the earth. By the time we get it, though, it's already been ruined by processing.

IL: So, Dan, how long have you been drinking ionized water?

Let's see. We got our unit in 1996. Six years.

IL: So how has it been for you?

Dan Reid: I can taste the water. I can tell it's ionized because I know what water is supposed to taste like. When we first tasted it we really knew this was the real McCoy. I also never liked drinking water. I would drink tap water and be dehydrated as a result. I decided that's it, I don't like it, it makes me feel bad, but when I found this water, it just went right in. I had another glass, and it tasted good, and it was then I realized I had been drinking the wrong water. I've continued drinking it since then. Of course, it makes good tea, it's good for cooking, food tastes better.. and the micro clustering and all the other reasons to take it are there. I think one of the main reasons is because I am aware, now, having had it for a long time, of the importance of minerals and trace elements, and how difficult it is with ordinary H2O to assimilate them. Most mineral supplements do zilch. They only ones that work really well are colloidal minerals which are super-expensive. I'm using the Marine Minerals from Bionatural, which is very good, and of course the Ionized water.

IL: How old are you now?

I'm 55.

IL: What would you say to our age group? We are all baby boomers and we are all looking down the gun barrel of aging. We are again, and none of us have really looked at it.

Dan: I have. I've been looking right at it for the last 20 years.

IL: But as a class we haven't, have we? I only heard today that kids are not mentally maturing properly because their parents never did - their baby boomer parents.

Dan Reid: It's easy. Get natural! We started off as Hippies saying "Hey, be natural man!" Mister Natural, and in the end we've become the most unnatural of the entire generation groups, far more unnatural than our parents! We've become technophobes, but it's also the kind of stuff we do and take and use, and still we claim we're being 'natural'. Being natural has been reduced to wearing an eagle feather in your hair or something.

So let's get really elementary here. Food, water, air. That's it. We need to eat. We need to drink. We need to breathe. We need to assimilate more oxygen, we need to pump up our circulation, and also for all the energetic reasons, we need to drink ionized water because you can't get any more real water without going to the top of the Himalayas. So you use technology to create something that reproduces the natural order of things.

IL: Many people say they can't afford to eat whole food.

Dan Reid: That's nonsense. They can't afford to eat whole food the way they eat junk food. The reason they eat so much junk food is that there is no nutrition in it. So they keep eating, and eating, and eating, and the body isn't getting anything. They are fat, they are overweight. If you eat whole food, your body will be nutritionally satisfied. When you get a hunger signal, the body will tell you to eat - not based on how much is or isn't in your stomach, but when you have met your nutritional requirements. When they've been met a healthy body will turn off the hunger signal, so if you eat junk food you're just going to keep eating because your body is going to make you keep eating.

So it's not too expensive because you will eat less food, and digest it fully. Junk food digests totally differently. It functions more like a drug, You have to chew wholefood, it's more fibrous, you take longer to break it down, and you feel full, you feel satisfied and the true signal - not the one that disguises a call for more acidic food - but the real hunger signal, switches off. So you are eating about half the quantity. It's not double the expense, is it? I think their real argument is "I can't afford to eat whole food the way I eat junk food." They are just fooling themselves. They just want to keep eating the junk. They've gotten used to doing that, and they are lazy! Whole food has to be cooked! You've got to cook! You can't just go and stick it into the toaster! So many of our city generation don't even know how to turn the stove on anymore. They can push a button to make coffee. That's why they eat fast food on the run and they never get properly nourished. Rather than sitting down and relaxing quietly, getting off the stress cycle and allowing our digestive system to work. They're running down the street stuffing in a burger, your body does not digest, period! It sits there and ferments. My advice to these people is that they cannot afford not to eat whole foods. It's not a matter of money. On a polluted planet they can't afford not to be careful about what they eat.

IL: When I began ionized water my attitude towards food changed. As I became more alkaline I changed. Only when my body changed could my mind see what it really needed.

Dan Reid: It's certainly a state of mind. You are what you eat and you think what you eat. Your body functions on energy derived from whatever it is you put in there to burn. If you burn plastic, imagine what it would smell like compared with burning straw. If you poison your body it poisons the way you think and the way your mind works. I've also discovered that one of the symptoms of advanced toxicity is apathy. Just as constipation is a symptom of being filled up with garbage food, plus toxicity, skin eruptions and body odor, I believe apathy is an integral symptom of advanced toxicity. Somehow you get into this state where you don't care. "Yes, I'm dying. Yes, pass the Cola." And the only time these people care, the only time you can get them to think again, is to get them back into a healthy state. Then they literally wake up and say "Whew! That was a close call!" Otherwise - they just won't do it.

They need to see a good friend dying slowly, or they need to read a book like mine.

The statements enclosed herein have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The products mentioned on this site are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Information and statements made are for education purposes and are not intended to replace the advice of your family doctor.