How to Grow Water — It’s Not Only Blue, It’s Green | Gina Bria | TEDxNewYorkSalon

the job of anthropology is to collect how other people do things the result is a vast archive of evolved and adaptable solutions somebody somewhere some culture has had your problem my problem that I was trying to seek to solve is one many of us have my sweet 92 year old mother was in a nursing home 700 miles away from me and she was suffering from chronic dehydration I couldn't even get her a cup of water now the remarkable thing the interesting thing is I was studying at this very same time hydration strategies among desert dwellers in drought conditions imma let that sink in for a minute a daughter of a dehydrated woman in a modern desert like home nursing home subject to hot lighting heating vents air conditioning synthetic clothing sitting in a wheelchair next to a thermal cup of ice water with a straw in it that she couldn't even reach come to think of it though her conditions are not that different from ours our offices our schools our cars our planes our daily pathways maybe we are a little dried out too and is this where I tell you that even 2% of reduction in hydration leads to measurable cognitive loss that is most of us somewhere in our day so here I am 700 miles away in New York City pawing through pattered ethnographies in the basement of Columbia University's library looking at drought conditions and how people survived in real droughts what did they do they certainly didn't have eight glasses of water a day how are they doing it while I was knocked over when I found out they were not looking for water they went looking for plants they collected water from plants I want you to think cactus so I looked at desert regions all over the globe the Kalahari Bushmen they dig up specific routes along their trails in the Peruvian desert they use yoga which have roots that we know from long records that store water they actually look like thermos bottles in the Sierra Madres the Tarahumara they use seeds from a plant named Chia it's a desert sage so wherever I looked even though each strategy used a different local plant all these plants had one thing in common they were high gel releasing plants desert plants you see evolve and adapt and we benefit from their capacities from their evolutionary intelligence they often especially protect their roots and their seeds their most vital structures with this gel medium they are so smart they convert and I wish every one of you could do this low rainfall into high gel now how do we know these desert plants do this well it actually got tested just look at this slide from the pollak water lab at the University of Washington this is a tiny seed look at the volume of water that surrounds it more than twice here you're looking at not h2o this is actually h3o - so I want you to keep in mind that this is a desert plant salvia his band with water hidden in it we get the same benefit when we eat these plants when we ingest this denser form of water we to absorb this form of water this means that we can hydrate more fully with less liquid because the water locked in these plants is distinctly different it's been transformed from liquid into gel and that gel retains moisture longer and it absorbs into the tissues nice and slow so it has time to enter fully and efficiently into ourselves it's really slow water I want you to imagine with me solving our water scarcity problems our water scarcity issues with desert plants imagine getting our water out of the desert imagine growing water how cool is that how ironic how unexpected so what other surprises are waiting for us in the ethnographic record while I was further excited to discover something I already instinctually knew but hadn't paid attention to something in our own lives that we are already practicing you see it isn't just desert plants that turn water into gel water inside every plant cell is this gel form all the typical plants we eat all the fruits and vegetables that we eat they come in at 80% water and for leafy greens it's up in the 90s that water locked in there is gel so this is green water not blue but it's there and how do we know this polic water lab tested water squeezed from green leaves from green juices same high range as the chia seed so it looks like drinking green juices or smoothies or even chewing through a salad is more hydrating than drinking from a bottle of water why because the structure of that water transformed by the plants is a different water and because thinner liquid h2o can flash flood your system in as little as 10 minutes pulling out nutrients and electrolytes it's not that we don't need liquid it's just that we need a partnership with both types of water hydrating with plants means we are getting water perfectly packaged and with nutrition - plus a matrix of the fibers which help it actually absorb so back to my mom I want to share a recipe in anthropology everything comes down to getting food and water it's basically a vast recipe swap so I'm going to share my recipe I bought some chia seeds because they're so felt full of gel water i ground them up in my coffee grinder in my kitchen I mailed that package to my mom and I instructed the staff in her nursing home to throw a little bit in her morning orange juice and give it a stir did the trick I knew it would up her hydration and it prolonged her hydration long enough that she never had even though she made it to 98 another dehydration incident this is really important information so what do I want you to know look plants equal water I want you to think of plants not just as nutrition but as water hydration that is perfectly matched to enter our system right down to the cellular level so eat fresh juicy foods to up your hydration with less drinking and maybe our water bottles should look like this perfect biological packaging I just love that we have some new but old ways to think about water it's not only blue it's great yeah good okay all right

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 33,436

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Global Issues, Science, Sustainability, Water

Id: kAiCeRZLCoE

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2016