Latest / Common Sense Health / Hydrogen Water vs DDW: What You Need To Know
Transcript
- Stephen Thomas BSc. Hons: Hello! Today I want to talk about water. Yes, water, you know the stuff that falls out of the sky for free, because apparently we've all decided it's not good enough anymore. If you've walked down a wellness aisle lately or scrolled some health content online, you'll know what I mean. Plain old water simply isn't trendy. What you'll find instead are premium water with very lofty promises and even loftier price tags. And the two biggest players in this game right now are are deuterium depleted water, DDW, and hydrogen water. Now they both have hydrogen in them, but from an atomic standpoint they're complete opposites. One of them is water with something taken out, and the other is water with something added. So let's have a proper look at the chemistry and work out what you're actually paying for. Now before we can talk about atoms in water, I want to take you back about two and a half thousand years. Because the story of how we even got the word atom is is quite a lovely one. So picture an ancient Greek philosopher, his name was Democritus, and he was kicking around about four hundred BC, so long before microscopes, before proper science, before well pretty much everything. And he asked a beautifully simple thought experiment question. Take a piece of paper, cut it in half, now cut that half in half, keep going. Cut it again and again and again, and in theory, can you keep cutting forever? But Democritus reasoned that at some point, eventually, you'd reach a piece so small you simply could not cut any further. A final indivisible speck of matter, and he gave that speck a name, Atomus, which is Greek for quite literally uncuttable. Uncuttable. That's where our modern word atom comes from. by the way, they're The the tearing paper in half bit is almost certainly a modern teaching analogy retrofitted onto him, not something he wrote, by the way. Democritus didn't have paper, he'd have been working with parchment or papyrus or clay, but the concept is genuinely his. Now, Democritus was partly right and partly wrong in the most delicious way. He was right that matter does come in fundamental building blocks, but he was wrong that the atom is uncuttable. As we'll see in a moment, the atom has quite a lot going on inside and the name stuck even though the description turned out not to be so. So for a bloke with no equipment whatsoever, working it out purely by sitting around thinking, I'd have to say that's not a bad effort. Much better than I could ever do. Now, before we go anywhere near the different waters, we need to get the basics straight because everything else flows from this. What is hydrogen? Now hydrogen is the simplest atom in the universe. In its most basic description, it's one proton in the middle with one electron buzzing around the outside and no neutrons at all. It's the most abundant element in the universe, and it makes up about three quarters of normal matter, and it's the reasons why stars burn. But every water molecule you've ever drunk is two of these little chaps bonded to one oxygen. H2O. Now I promise to be honest with you always. So here's the confession. That tidy little picture of the atom I just gave you, the proton with a tiny electron whizzing around it in a neat orbit, like a sort of miniature solar system, is strictly speaking a polite fiction. It's the picture we're all taught at school because it's useful. But the quantum reality is a little bit stranger. Now down at that scale, electrons don't really travel in neat little orbits at all. Instead they exist as what physicists call a probability cloud. A fuzzy region of space where the electron might be found if you looked, with some spots more likely than others. And it goes deeper still. That proton in the centre isn't a single solid ball either. It's actually made of three smaller particles called quarks held together by the strong nuclear force. And the quarks themselves well that basically that's a rabbit hole for another day. The point is the deeper you dig, the weirder it gets. But for our purposes today, one proton is One electron is all we need, and I don't want to get thrown off the scent by specialized water as the theme and into particle physics. So one proton, one electron, no neutrons, that's hydrogen. So just hold on to that. Now because hydrogen also comes in slightly heavier versions of itself, these are called isotopes. An isotope is the same element with the same chemistry but a different weight because there are extra neutrons packed into that center. Hydrogen has two of these isotopes, and one is called deuterium and the other is called tritium. Tritium is radioactive and rare, so we'll park that one. Deuterium is the star of today's show. So what is deuterium? It's hydrogen with a neutron, just one neutron sitting alongside the proton in the nucleus. Now that might sound trivia, but because a neutron weighs roughly the same as a proton, that single neutron does not. doubles the weight of the atom. The lightest element in the universe just become twice as heavy. So that's an enormous change proportionately. No other element has an isotope that doubles its mass like this. And chemically deuterium behaves almost identically to ordinary hydrogen, but that extra weight slows everything down. When deuterium bonds with oxygen you get D2O. And D2O is what we call heavy water. Now heavy water isn't some industrial invention, it's completely natural. It's stable, it's non-radioactive, and it's been cycling through the earths, oceans, rivers, and clouds for billions of years. Right now, in an ordinary glass of water, roughly one in every three thousand two hundred molecules is a form of heavy water. Your body has been dealing with it for your entire life and it's never actually made a complaint. Because heavy water actually creates a lovely little quirk in the natural water cycle. So when the sun heats the ocean, ordinary lightweight water evaporates more easily than heavy water because heavy water needs more energy to turn to vapor. So clouds are actually slightly depleted in heavy water compared to the sea beneath them. And then when a cloud cools and condenses into rain, the heavy water molecules that are there. are among the first to fall back, being heavier and slightly less volatile. So the planet does its own gentle version of deuterium depletion, free of charge, every single day. Right, so with that foundation said, let's look at deuterium depleted water. Now the pitch goes something like this Deuterium is heavy. Heavy things gum up the works and your mitochondria, those microscopic energy cells in your body are being thrown off by all this heavy hydrogen, by our water, which has been industrially stripped of deuterium and you'll get better metabolism, reversed aging, and endless energy. And the price for this miracle it's anywhere from around a hundred and hundred and twenty, hundred and fifty pounds upwards for a case. now that's a serious amount of money for water that has been naturally occurring as an isotope Is there anything to deuterium depleted water? Well, here's where we need to be fair and joined up about this. It's true that a high concentration of heavy water is genuinely harmful. Not because it's a chemical toxin, but because it's heavy. As simple as that really. One glass of heavy water won't hurt you at all. it actually tastes slight sort of slightly sweet, really, funny enough. But anyway, if enough of your body fluid were replaced with D two O, the stronger bonds it forms would slow down. The speed of life itself. Biological reactions depend on exquisite timing and heavier atoms will throw that timing off. Now, in animal studies, things get dangerous when heavy water replaces more than about 20% of your body fluids. Cell division starts to stall because the machinery that pulls DNA apart can't work properly in that thicker, heavier medium. At around 25% replacement, animals become irreversibly sterile and And at 50% you get multi-organ collapse because the body can no longer repair tissues or make new blood cells. But I want to be absolutely clear about the scale here. You would have to drink nothing but heavy water for weeks to get anywhere near that. The deuterium in a normal diet is essentially equal to a rounding error, to be honest. And this brings me to the part that I think under undoes the entire DDW marketing pitch. And it's my favorite bit of this whole topic, actually. your body doesn't need to buy deuterium depleted water because your body already makes it. And we call it metabolic water. When your mitochondria burn fat for fuel, fat oxidation, proper beta oxidation in the mitochondria, the enzymes involved actually discriminate between hydrogen atoms. They preferentially select the right hydrogen and largely leave the heavy deuterium behind. Your cells then weave those light hydrogens together with oxygen and the product. is literally deuterium depleted water manufactured inside your own tissues. Humans produce somewhere in the region 300 to 400 milliliters of this ultra pure metabolic water every single day just from metabolizing food. Yeah, like a a camel crossing the desert or a whale diving deep or both living substantially off metabolic water. You are, and I mean this in the nice nicest possible way, a walk-in self-cleaning water filter. Anyway, anyone following a low carb or carnivore way of eating who is burning fat as their primary fuel is producing even more deuterium depleted metabolic water. So you are running the exact machinery the marketing is pretending to support, but you're doing it for free. And when we look at the actual clinical evidence for healthy people buying light water, the broad medical consensus is that there simply isn't the large scale human data to justify it. There are some genuinely interesting small studies, mostly in specific contexts in Eastern Europe, and some working in college as well, that are far under promising. But nothing that supports a healthy person spending case prices on water for everyday energy and anti-aging. Your cells already have that job covered. Right. Next is hydrogen water, completely different animal. Nothing about the water molecule itself has changed here. It's still perfectly ordinary H2O. What manufacturers have done is dissolve extra molecular hydrogen gas H2 into the liquid under pressure. So think of it as like the sort of athletic cousin of sparkling water, except instead of carbon dioxide making it lively, it's hydrogen gas. Now the cost of this is around three to five pounds a can or hundreds of pounds for a countertop machine that does the same trick at home. Now, unlike DDW, I have to be honest and say that hydrogen water science actually does have a leg to stand on. Not a huge one currently, but it's a real one. Here's the mechanism. When your body is under stress, intense exercise, illness, or just general modern life, it produces free radicals. These are unstable molecules missing electrons, and they'll steal them from wherever they can, damaging your cells in the process. That's basically oxidative stress. Now Molecular hydrogen is the smallest molecule in existence, so it diffuses through cell walls and even into the mitochondria with ridiculous ease. And when it meets that most damaging free radical, the hydroxyl radical, it can neutralize it. And the end product of this reaction is beautifully just water. You literally detoxify a radical and produce ordinary water as the exhaust. Now, some of you with the sharper chemistry brains might be pulling a face right now because You remember your oil rig from school. Oxidation is loss, reduction is gain. Losing an electron is the literal definition of oxidation. So how can hydrogen be an antioxidant? Good instinct. And here's the answer. The acidic hydrogen we talked about in another video, the one involved with i in acids, i is a naked proton. It's already lost its electron. It's positively charged and it's not neutralizing anything. The hydrogen in hydrogen water is entirely different. Two neutral atoms sharing two electrons peacefully, and when a violent electron steelene radical turns up, that neutral H2 steps in like a bodyguard, splits apart and willingly hands over its own electrons, letting itself be oxidized so the radical doesn't strip electrons out of your tissue instead. That's the chemistry and it's pretty sound. So what do these tr what do the studies and the trials say? Well the honest answer is it it's it is promising, but again, it's small. There there are small clinical trials, mostly in high performance athletes, showing directional evidence for reduced inflammation markers and and faster recovery from hard training. But the benefits are always modest. The studies are small and the marketing has run miles ahead of that data, as marketing does. For the average person, The claimed benefits are exaggerated. And there's one very practical catch that might matter more than any of this science. Hydrogen gas escapes from water remarkably fast. It's the lightest molecule in the universe. It doesn't hang about. So if you crack open a can leave it fr on the counter for an hour or so, well, most of that hydrogen will have floated off into the atmosphere. You're holding a very expensive glass of ordinary water. So if you're gonna try it, Drink it immediately after it's made or opened, ideally from a freshly sealed container, and treat it as a minor post workout experiment rather than a whole health strategy. And for everyday antioxidants Well many people will say eat lots of veg and it costs less, but we're carnivores, so we don't do that. So I'm I'm I'm big on the antioxidants in the animal products and astraxanthin from some from salmon maybe, but I don't think I would push vegetables over hydrogen water, but that's what I tend to see some of these influences doing. They talk about the hydrogen water and they also promote veg. there's not many carnivores talking about hydrogen water. Anyway, so let's let's pull it all together with a a quick hype versus reality scoreboard. So deuterium depleted water, real physics, natural isotope, your body already handles it. And it already manufactures its own version by burning fat. So very low plausibility for the claims, but a very high price. I personally would take my money, but I'm happy for people to put in the comments if they've got great benefits from DDW. Anyway, hydrogen water, real chemistry, plausible mechanism, some small trials supporting a niche recovery benefit in athletes. But modest effects, it's a fast escaping gas and marketing that's vastly oversold it. In both cases, the marketing rests on taking one true fact about chemistry and inflating it into a lifestyle. I am way more persuaded by the hydrogen water, and a small amount of people I've consults with absolutely swear by it. And here's the takeaway I'd love to leave with you. The next time a fitness influencer holds up a sleek bottle and tells you it's engineered at the atomic level, remember your body, you are as well. Every day your mitochondria selector. Light hydrogen, burn your fat and brew your own private supply of deuterium depleted water completely free of charge. You've got a state of the art water treatment facility running inside you and it's never once asked for a subscription. And spare a thought for old Democritus. Two and a half thousand years ago he cut a piece of paper in half in his head and gave the atom its name, meaning uncuttable, and it turned out the atom was anything but. Which just goes to show the first person to name a thing really gets to decide what's really inside it. Now the most expensive thing in the wellness aisle is usually the cheapest science wearing that very expensive coat. So stay sensible, stay hydrated, which is the appropriate amount of water, not eight glasses or two and a half litres, the amount of water that you need. Try and make sure that it's got some electrolytes or simply some salt in there more often than not, and you should be fine. Anyway. Hope that was helpful. Please drop a comment or a like. If you really enjoyed it, don't forget to share this video and subscribe. Hit the notification bell. And the next time I do one of these, you'll be notified. Anyway, I'll see you on the next one. I'll be back.