🟢What would happen if you didn't drink water?

#Health #Public_Health #Water #TED_Ed #Animation #Biology #Physiology #Human_Body #Science

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🟢What would happen if you didn't drink water?

Water is virtually everywhere, from soil moisture and ice caps, to the cells inside our own bodies. Depending on factors like location, fat index, age, and sex, the average human is between 55-60% water. At birth, human babies are even wetter. Being 75% water, they are swimmingly similar to fish. But their water composition drops to 65% by their first birthday. So what role does water play in our bodies, and how much do we actually need to drink to stay healthy? The H20 in our bodies works to cushion and lubricate joints, regulate temperature, and to nourish the brain and spinal cord. Water isn't only in our blood. An adult's brain and heart are almost three quarters water. That's roughly equivalent to the amount of moisture in a banana. Lungs are more similar to an apple at 83%. And even seemingly dry human bones are 31% water. If we are essentially made of water, and surrounded by water, why do we still need to drink so much? Well, each day we lose two to three liters through our sweat, urine, and bowel movements, and even just from breathing. While these functions are essential to our survival, we need to compensate for the fluid loss. Maintaining a balanced water level is essential to avoid dehydration or over-hydration, both of which can have devastating effects on overall health. At first detection of low water levels, sensory receptors in the brain's hypothalamus signal the release of antidiuretic hormone. When it reached the kidneys, it creates aquaporins, special channels that enable blood to absorb and retain more water, leading to concentrated, dark urine. Increased dehydration can cause notable drops in energy, mood, skin moisture, and blood pressure, as well as signs of cognitive impairment. A dehydrated brain works harder to accomplish the same amount as a normal brain, and it even temporarily shrinks because of its lack of water. Over-hydration, or hyponatremia, is usually caused by overconsumption of water in a short amount of time. Athletes are often the victims of over-hydration because of complications in regulating water levels in extreme physical conditions. Whereas the dehydrated brain amps up the production of antidiuretic hormone, the over-hydrated brain slows, or even stops, releasing it into the blood. Sodium electrolytes in the body become diluted, causing cells to swell. In severe cases, the kidneys can't keep up with the resulting volumes of dilute urine. Water intoxication then occurs, possibly causing headache, vomiting, and, in rare instances, seizures or death. But that's a pretty extreme situation. On a normal, day-to-day basis, maintaining a well-hydrated system is easy to manage for those of us fortunate enough to have access to clean drinking water. For a long time, conventional wisdom said that we should drink eight glasses a day. That estimate has since been fine-tuned. Now, the consensus is that the amount of water we need to imbibe depends largely on our weight and environment. The recommended daily intake varies from between 2.5-3.7 liters of water for men, and about 2-2.7 liters for women, a range that is pushed up or down if we are healthy, active, old, or overheating. While water is the healthiest hydrator, other beverages, even those with caffeine like coffee or tea, replenish fluids as well. And water within food makes up about a fifth of our daily H20 intake. Fruits and vegetables like strawberries, cucumbers, and even broccoli are over 90% water, and can supplement liquid intake while providing valuable nutrients and fiber. Drinking well might also have various long-term benefits. Studies have shown that optimal hydration can lower the chance of stroke, help manage diabetes, and potentially reduce the risk of certain types of cancer. No matter what, getting the right amount of liquid makes a world of difference in how you'll feel, think, and function day to day.

#Health #Public_Health #Water #TED_Ed #Animation #Biology #Physiology #Human_Body #Science

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❄️چه کاپشنی بپوشیم که برای هوای فنلاند مناسب باشه؟
این ویدیو رو حتما ببین
👇👇

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🟢Why should you listen to Vivaldi's Four Seasons?

#TED_Ed #Music #History #Brain #Animation #World_Cultures #Culture

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🟢Why should you listen to Vivaldi's Four Seasons?

Light, bright, and cheerful. It's some of the most familiar of all early 18th century music. It's been featured in uncounted films and television commercials, but what is it and why does it sound that way?
This is the opening of "Spring" from "The Four Seasons," by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi. "The Four Seasons" are famous in part because they are a delight to the ear. However, even more notable is the fact that they have stories to tell. At the time of their publication in Amsterdam in 1725, they were accompanied by poems describing exactly what feature of that season Vivaldi intended to capture in musical terms. In providing specific plot content for instrumental music, Vivaldi was generations ahead of his time.
If one were to read the poems simultaneously to hearing the music, one would find the poetic scenes synchronizing nicely with the musical imagery. We are told that the birds welcome spring with happy song, and here they are doing exactly that. Soon, however, a thunderstorm breaks out. Not only is there musical thunder and lightning, there are also more birds, wet, frightened, and unhappy.
In "Summer," the turtle dove sings her name "tortorella" in Italian, before a hail storm flattens the fields. "Autumn" brings eager hunters dashing out in pursuit of their prey.
The "Winter" concerto begins with teeth chattering in the cold before one takes refuge by a crackling fire. Then it's back out into the storm where there'll be slips and falls on the ice. In these first weeks of winter, the old year is coming to a close, and so does Vivaldi's musical exploration of the seasons.
Not until the early 19th century would such expressive instrumental program music, as it was known, become popular. By then, larger, more varied ensembles were the rule with woodwinds, brass, and percussion to help tell the tale. But Vivaldi pulled it off with just one violin, strings, and a harpsichord. Unlike his contemporary Bach, Vivaldi wasn't much interested in complicated fugues. He preferred to offer readily accessible entertainment to his listeners with melodies that pop back up later in a piece to remind us of where we've been. So the first movement of the "Spring" concerto begins with a theme for spring and ends with it, too, slightly varied from when it was last heard.
It was an inspired way to attract listeners, and Vivaldi, considered one of the most electrifying violinists of the early 18th century, understood the value of attracting audiences. Such concerts might feature himself as the star violinist. Others presented the young musicians of the Pietà, a Venetian girls' school where Vivaldi was Director of Music. Most of the students were orphans. Music training was intended not only as social skills suitable for young ladies but also as potential careers for those who might fail to make good marriages.
Even in the composer's own time, Vivaldi's music served as diversion for all, not just for the wealthy aristocrats. 300 years later, it's an approach that still works, and Vivaldi's music still sounds like trotting horses on the move.

#TED_Ed #Music #History #Brain #Animation #World_Cultures #Culture

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🟢How much land does it take to power?

#TED_Ed #Education #Animation #Electricity #Climate_Change #Sustainability #Energy #Technology #Solar #Solar_Energy #Wind_Energy #Invention #Innovation

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🟢How much land does it take to power?

No matter how we make electricity, it takes up space. Electricity from coal requires mines, and plants to burn it and convert the heat into electricity. Nuclear power takes uranium mines, facilities to refine the uranium, a reactor, and a place to store the spent fuel safely. Renewable energy needs wind turbines or solar panels.
How much space depends on the power source. Say you wanted to power a 10-watt light bulb with fossil fuels like coal. Fossil fuels can produce up to 2,000 watts per square meter, so it would only take a credit card-sized chunk of land to power the light bulb. With nuclear power, you might only need an area about the size of the palms of your hands. With solar power, you’d need at least 0.3 square meters of land— twice the size of a cafeteria tray. Wind power would take roughly 7 square meters— about half the size of a parking space— to power the bulb.
When you consider the space needed to power cities, countries, and the whole world, it adds up fast. Today, the world uses 3 trillion watts of electricity. To power the entire world with only fossil fuels, you’d need at least about 1,200 square kilometers of space— roughly the area of Grand Bahama island. With nuclear energy, you’d need almost four times as much space at a minimum— roughly 4,000 square kilometers, a little less than the area of Delaware. With solar, you’d need at least 95,000 square kilometers, approximately the area of South Korea. With wind power, you’d need two million— about the area of Mexico.
For each power source, there’s variability in how much power it can generate per square meter, but these numbers give us a general sense of the space needed. Of course, building energy infrastructure in a desert, a rainforest, a town, or even in the ocean are completely different prospects. And energy sources monopolize the space they occupy to very different extents. Take wind power. Wind turbines need to be spread out— sometimes half a kilometer apart— so that the turbulence from one turbine doesn’t reduce the efficiency of the others. So, much of the land needed to generate wind power is still available for other uses.
But the baseline amount of space still matters, because cities and other densely populated areas have high electricity demands, and space near them is often limited. Our current power infrastructure works best when electricity is generated where and when it’s needed, rather than being stored or sent across long distances.
Still, space demands are only part of the equation. As of 2020, 2/3 of our electricity comes from fossil fuels. Every year, electricity generation is responsible for about 27% of the more than 50 billion tons of greenhouse gases we add to the atmosphere, accelerating climate change and all its harms. So although fossil fuels require the least space of our existing technologies, we can’t continue to rely on them.
Cost is another consideration. Nuclear plants don’t emit greenhouse gases and don’t require much space, but they’re way more expensive to build than solar panels or wind turbines, and have waste to deal with. Renewables have almost no marginal costs— unlike with plants powered by fossil fuels, you don’t need to keep purchasing fuel to generate electricity. But you do need lots of wind and sunlight, which are more available in some places than others.
No single approach will be the best option to power the entire world while eliminating harmful greenhouse gas emissions. For some places, nuclear power might be the best option for replacing fossil fuels. Others, like the U.S., have the natural resources to get most or all of their electricity from renewables. And across the board, we should be working to make our power sources better: safer in the case of nuclear, and easier to store and transport in the case of renewables.

#TED_Ed #Education #Animation #Electricity #Climate_Change #Sustainability #Energy #Technology #Solar #Solar_Energy #Wind_Energy #Invention #Innovation

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🟢Smart solutions to decarbonize buildings

#Environment #Science #Sustainability #Business #Pollution #Women_In_Business #Countdown

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🟢Smart solutions to decarbonize buildings

We spend something like 90 percent of our whole life indoors. It's everything from your own home to companies and factories. We get married in those places, our children are born, some great scientist invents a cure for disease in those buildings. But buildings are some bad news for the climate.
[In the Green: The Business of Climate Action]
[Presented by TED Countdown and The Climate Pledge]
[Katie McGinty Company: Johnson Controls]
Buildings contribute about 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. They represent the biggest growing piece of electricity consumption and demand in the world. We're not cracking this climate change challenge unless we decarbonize those buildings.
When you look at a building, there are key aspects of it that enable it to run. It’s the heating and cooling; it’s the lighting; it's all of our appliances. All of those things together add up to a very significant energy load and a big cost. That's what we can go after. Replace the old HVAC. Get rid of the old incandescent lights and add the new LEDs. Put in those windows that have high efficiency. That's where digital smarts come in, where you can add sensors in a building that say, “Hey, nobody’s in this part of the building, so let's ratchet back that air conditioning that’s otherwise blasting.” And don't worry about the upfront cost. Why? Because upgrading will generate savings that now can be used to finance the project in the first place. You're cutting 20, 40, 80 percent of that energy bill.
When organizations begin to look at this journey toward sustainability and net-zero, a whole lot of unexpected promise comes to the fore. The head of a public housing authority, for example, just wanted to cut some costs, but get into the effort. And here's what came to life. That the new community solar garden became green energy efficiency tech jobs for the local community. And that translated into something else: a sense of empowerment, ownership, engagement by that community, and effort to bring cost down lifted the entire community up.
We're at a turning point where piecemeal action is catalyzing whole communities to take action like never before, and they can do it on the basis of the tangible examples that prove the point that climate action is actually not only good for the environment, but it cuts costs and it creates jobs at the same time.
You know, buildings are pretty important in our lives. Buildings aren't just bricks and mortar. With technology and partnership, we can change those buildings into flexible, agile assets, and it is bringing us the opportunity to tackle big issues like climate change.

#Environment #Science #Sustainability #Business #Pollution #Women_In_Business #Countdown

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🟢The Surprising Effects Of Pregnancy

#TED_Ed #Animation #Pregnancy #Education #Women #Science #Human_Body #Medical_Research #Biology #Brain

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🟢The Surprising Effects Of Pregnancy

Muscles and joints shift and jostle. The heart’s pounding rhythm speeds up. Blood roars through arteries and veins. Over the course of a pregnancy, every organ in the body changes. Ignited by a range of hormones, these changes begin as soon as pregnancy begins.
Just days after fertilization, the embryo implants in the lining of the uterus. Because its DNA doesn’t exactly match the mother’s, the immune system should theoretically recognize it as an invader, attack, and destroy it, like it would bacteria or other harmful microbes. That’s the challenge: the mother’s immune system needs to protect both her and the fetus, but can’t act as it usually does. What happens is not as simple as decreasing the immune response. Instead, it’s a complex interaction we’re just beginning to understand, involving many different types of immune cells— some of which seem to protect the fetus from attack by other immune cells. The body also creates an antibacterial plug made of mucus on the cervix, which keeps germs away and stays sealed until labor.
As a pregnancy progresses, the uterus expands upward and outward with the growing fetus. To make room, hormones called progesterone and relaxin signal muscles to loosen. The muscles that propel food and waste through the digestive tract also loosen, which makes them sluggish, causing constipation as passage through the tract slows down. Loosened muscles at the top of the stomach might allow acid to escape into the esophagus and throat, causing heartburn and reflux. These changes can worsen morning sickness, which is caused in part by hormone HCG— and can also happen at other times of day.
As the uterus grows, it pushes on the diaphragm, the muscle that expands and contracts the chest with each breath. This limits the diaphragm’s range. To compensate, the hormone progesterone acts as a respiratory stimulant, making the pregnant woman breathe faster so both she and the baby can both get enough oxygen with less lung capacity. This all may leave the pregnant woman feeling short of breath.
Meanwhile, the kidneys make more erythropoietin, a hormone that increases red blood cell production. The kidneys also keep extra water and salt rather than filtering it out into urine to build up the volume of the blood. A pregnant woman’s blood volume increases by 50% or more. But it’s also a bit diluted, because it only has 25% more red blood cells. Usually, the body makes blood cells using iron from our food. But during pregnancy, the fetus is also building its own blood supply from nutrients in the mother’s food— leaving less iron and other nutrients for the mother.
The heart has to work extra hard to pump all this blood through the body and placenta. A pregnant woman’s heart rate increases, but we don’t fully understand how blood pressure changes in a healthy pregnancy— an important area of research, because some of the most serious complications are related to the heart and blood pressure. The expanding uterus may press on veins— causing fluid buildup in the legs and feet. If it presses on a large vein called the inferior vena cava, it might interfere with blood returning to the heart, causing a dizzying drop in blood pressure after standing for too long.
Some of these changes start to reverse even before birth. Shortly before delivery, the fetus drops down, decreasing the pressure on the diaphragm and allowing the pregnant woman to take deeper breaths. During labor and birth, much of the extra fluid in the body is lost when the water breaks. The uterus shrinks back down in the weeks after birth.
Like the rest of the body, pregnancy affects the brain— but its effects here are some of the least understood. Recent studies show differences in brain scans after pregnancy and early parenting, and suggest that these changes are adaptive.

#TED_Ed #Animation #Pregnancy #Education #Women #Science #Human_Body #Medical_Research #Biology #Brain

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🇫🇮اگه دوست داری بدونی تحصیل دکترا در فنلاند چطوریه این ویدیو رو حتما ببین👇👇

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❄️میخوای بدونی در هوای منفی ۱۰ درجه در فنلاند چطوری رو یخ و برف راه میرن این ویدیو رو حتما ببین👇👇

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🟢Success, failure and the drive to keep creating

#Creativity #Success #Writing #Personal_Growth

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🟢Success, failure and the drive to keep creating

So, a few years ago I was at JFK Airport about to get on a flight, when I was approached by two women who I do not think would be insulted to hear themselves described as tiny old tough-talking Italian-American broads.
The taller one, who is like up here, she comes marching up to me, and she goes, "Honey, I gotta ask you something. You got something to do with that whole 'Eat, Pray, Love' thing that's been going on lately?"
And I said, "Yes, I did."
And she smacks her friend and she goes, "See, I told you, I said, that's that girl. That's that girl who wrote that book based on that movie." (Laughter)
So that's who I am. And believe me, I'm extremely grateful to be that person, because that whole "Eat, Pray, Love" thing was a huge break for me. But it also left me in a really tricky position moving forward as an author trying to figure out how in the world I was ever going to write a book again that would ever please anybody, because I knew well in advance that all of those people who had adored "Eat, Pray, Love" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it wasn't going to be "Eat, Pray, Love," and all of those people who had hated "Eat, Pray, Love" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it would provide evidence that I still lived. So I knew that I had no way to win, and knowing that I had no way to win made me seriously consider for a while just quitting the game and moving to the country to raise corgis. But if I had done that, if I had given up writing, I would have lost my beloved vocation, so I knew that the task was that I had to find some way to gin up the inspiration to write the next book regardless of its inevitable negative outcome. In other words, I had to find a way to make sure that my creativity survived its own success. And I did, in the end, find that inspiration, but I found it in the most unlikely and unexpected place. I found it in lessons that I had learned earlier in life about how creativity can survive its own failure.
So just to back up and explain, the only thing I have ever wanted to be for my whole life was a writer. I wrote all through childhood, all through adolescence, by the time I was a teenager I was sending my very bad stories to The New Yorker, hoping to be discovered. After college, I got a job as a diner waitress, kept working, kept writing, kept trying really hard to get published, and failing at it. I failed at getting published for almost six years. So for almost six years, every single day, I had nothing but rejection letters waiting for me in my mailbox. And it was devastating every single time, and every single time, I had to ask myself if I should just quit while I was behind and give up and spare myself this pain. But then I would find my resolve, and always in the same way, by saying, "I'm not going to quit, I'm going home."
And you have to understand that for me, going home did not mean returning to my family's farm. For me, going home meant returning to the work of writing because writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself. And that's how I pushed through it.
But the weird thing is that 20 years later, during the crazy ride of "Eat, Pray, Love," I found myself identifying all over again with that unpublished young diner waitress who I used to be, thinking about her constantly, and feeling like I was her again, which made no rational sense whatsoever because our lives could not have been more different. She had failed constantly. I had succeeded beyond my wildest expectation. We had nothing in common. Why did I suddenly feel like I was her all over again?

And it was only when I was trying to unthread that that I finally began to comprehend the strange and unlikely psychological connection in our lives between the way we experience great failure and the way we experience great success. So think of it like this: For most of your life, you live out your existence here in the middle of the chain of human experience where everything is normal and reassuring and regular, but failure catapults you abruptly way out over here into the blinding darkness of disappointment. Success catapults you just as abruptly but just as far way out over here into the equally blinding glare of fame and recognition and praise. And one of these fates is objectively seen by the world as bad, and the other one is objectively seen by the world as good, but your subconscious is completely incapable of discerning the difference between bad and good. The only thing that it is capable of feeling is the absolute value of this emotional equation, the exact distance that you have been flung from yourself. And there's a real equal danger in both cases of getting lost out there in the hinterlands of the psyche.
But in both cases, it turns out that there is also the same remedy for self-restoration, and that is that you have got to find your way back home again as swiftly and smoothly as you can, and if you're wondering what your home is, here's a hint: Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself. So that might be creativity, it might be family, it might be invention, adventure, faith, service, it might be raising corgis, I don't know, your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential.
For me, that home has always been writing. So after the weird, disorienting success that I went through with "Eat, Pray, Love," I realized that all I had to do was exactly the same thing that I used to have to do all the time when I was an equally disoriented failure. I had to get my ass back to work, and that's what I did, and that's how, in 2010, I was able to publish the dreaded follow-up to "Eat, Pray, Love." And you know what happened with that book? It bombed, and I was fine. Actually, I kind of felt bulletproof, because I knew that I had broken the spell and I had found my way back home to writing for the sheer devotion of it. And I stayed in my home of writing after that, and I wrote another book that just came out last year and that one was really beautifully received, which is very nice, but not my point. My point is that I'm writing another one now, and I'll write another book after that and another and another and another and many of them will fail, and some of them might succeed, but I will always be safe from the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live.
Look, I don't know where you rightfully live, but I know that there's something in this world that you love more than you love yourself. Something worthy, by the way, so addiction and infatuation don't count, because we all know that those are not safe places to live. Right? The only trick is that you've got to identify the best, worthiest thing that you love most, and then build your house right on top of it and don't budge from it. And if you should someday, somehow get vaulted out of your home by either great failure or great success, then your job is to fight your way back to that home the only way that it has ever been done, by putting your head down and performing with diligence and devotion and respect and reverence whatever the task is that love is calling forth from you next. You just do that, and keep doing that again and again and again, and I can absolutely promise you, from long personal experience in every direction, I can assure you that it's all going to be okay. Thank you.

#Creativity #Success #Writing #Personal_Growth

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🟢The woman who stared at the sun

#Women #Science #Education #History #Astronomy #TED_Ed #Animation #Sun

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🟢The woman who stared at the sun

In the spring of 1944, Tokyo residents experienced numerous aerial attacks from Allied bombers. Air raid sirens warned citizens to get indoors and preceded strategic blackouts across the city. But 28-year old Hisako Koyama saw these blackouts as opportunities. Dragging a futon over her head for protection, Koyama would gaze at the night sky, tracking all sorts of astronomical phenomena. However, her latest endeavor required the light of day. By angling her telescope towards the sun, Koyama could project the star's light onto a sheet of paper, allowing her to sketch the sun’s shifting surface. She spent weeks recreating this set up, tracking every change she saw. But while Koyama didn't know it, these drawings were the start of one of the most important records of solar activity in human history.
To understand exactly what Koyama saw on the sun’s surface, we first need to understand what’s happening inside the star. Every second, trillions of hydrogen atoms fuse into helium atoms in a process called nuclear fusion. This ongoing explosion maintains the sun’s internal temperature of roughly 15 million degrees Celsius, which is more than enough energy to transform gas into churning pools of plasma. Plasma consists of charged particles that produce powerful magnetic fields. But unlike the stable charged particles that maintain magnetic activity on Earth, this plasma is constantly in flux, alternately disrupting and amplifying the sun's magnetic field.
This ongoing movement can produce temporary concentrations of magnetic activity which inhibit the movement of molecules and in turn reduce heat in that area. And since regions with less heat generate less light, places with the strongest magnetic fields appear as dark spots scattered across the sun’s surface. These so-called sunspots are always moving, both as a result of plasma swirling within the sphere, and the sun’s rotation. And because they’re often clustered together, accurately counting sunspots and tracking their movement can be a challenge, depending greatly on the perception and judgment of the viewer.
This is precisely where Koyama’s contributions would be so valuable. Despite having no formal training in astronomy, her observations and sketches were remarkably accurate. After sending her work to the Oriental Astronomical Association, she received a letter of commendation for her dedicated and detailed observations. With their support, she began to visit the Tokyo Museum of Science, where she could use a far superior telescope to continue her work. Koyama soon joined the museum's staff as a professional observer, and over the next 40 years, she worked on a daily basis, producing over 10,000 drawings of the sun’s surface.
Researchers already knew magnetic currents in the sun followed an 11 year cycle that moved sunspots in a butterfly shaped path over the star’s surface. But using Koyama’s record, they could precisely follow specific sunspots and clusters through that journey. This kind of detail offered a real-time indication of the sun’s magnetic activity, allowing scientists to track all kinds of solar phenomena, including volatile solar flares. These flares typically emanate from the vicinity of sunspots, and can travel all the way to Earth’s atmosphere. Here, they can create geomagnetic storms capable of disrupting long range communication and causing blackouts. Solar flares also pose a major risk to satellites and manned space stations, making them essential to predict and plan for.

During an interview in 1964, Koyama lamented that her 17 years of observation had barely been enough to produce a single butterfly record of the solar cycle. But by the end of her career, she’d drawn three and a half cycles— one of the longest records ever made. Better still, the quality of her drawings was so consistent, researchers used them as a baseline to reconstruct the past 400 years of sunspot activity from various historical sources. This project extends Koyama’s legacy far beyond her own lifetime, and proves that science is not built solely on astounding discoveries, but also on careful observation of the world around us.

#Women #Science #Education #History #Astronomy #TED_Ed #Animation #Sun

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🟢A cleanse won't detox your body but here's what will

#Health #Human_Body #Biology #Food #Health_Care

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🟢A cleanse won't detox your body but here's what will

"Should I do a cleanse?" I hear people asking this question a lot. If you're hoping it will remove toxins from your body, that's just not going to happen.
Detoxes and cleanses are very popular. They come in many forms, from charcoal-infused lemonades to detox teas, and they often have a hefty price tag.
The idea of cleansing isn't anything new -- it's been around for thousands of years. For centuries, medicine and religion were deeply intertwined, and there was a lot of focus on ridding the body of impurities and sickness related to bad or imbalanced humors. Bloodletting, purging, fasting -- they were all well-regarded treatments. Today, the wellness industry has picked up on our desire to rid ourselves of things. They've taken the word "detox," the medical treatment for people with drug and alcohol addictions, and used it to apply to market cleanses. They make it sound like pouring liquid cleaner down plumbing, getting rid of all the dirty stuff. But the reason that sounds right to us is it's a rooted in a lack of understanding of how our liver works.
The liver is located in our upper right abdomen. It's somewhere around half the size of a football -- an American football -- and weighs three pounds. It does many, many jobs that keep our bodies running, from assisting the immune system, to creating proteins for blood clotting, to sending out the cholesterol we need to produce hormones. The liver is also a key organ for dealing with harmful substances. You can think of it almost like a factory. It takes nutrients from substances that we consume, food, drinks, medicines, breaks them down so they can either be packaged in a way that's usable -- like cholesterol and protein, for instance -- or removed as waste in the bile or via the kidneys, usually in the form of urine.
Let's look at what happens when the liver encounters some specific substances. What about alcohol? That’s a substance that’s fine in smaller, moderate amounts but becomes poisonous in excess. When we drink, alcohol passes through our liver, and the liver breaks it down in three steps. First, enzymes convert the alcohol to acetaldehyde, a substance that can damage cells over time. But acetaldehyde is quickly converted into acetate, a much more stable intermediate, before it breaks down into carbon dioxide and water. These are components our body can handle.
Now let's look at a popular cleanse -- cayenne, pepper, lemon juice drink, to help your liver flush toxins. You drink it, it gets digested, nutrients get absorbed in the blood and arrive at the liver. The liver processes these nutrients the same way it processes everything else. It packages whatever's useful that came from the lemon and the pepper and disseminates it throughout the body. Whatever it can't use becomes waste. There's nothing particularly magical about mixing cayenne and lemon. Doing a cleanse doesn't "clean the pipes," and it doesn't make your liver work any better or faster. At best, you might lose a few pounds on a cleanse, because you aren't eating much. At worst, you could go into starvation mode. You could throw off your electrolyte balance, not to mention disrupt your intestinal flora and bowel function.