Water Quality, Structure, and the Biology of Performance

Water quality affects performance, growth, and cognition before overt pathology emerges. Across species, the evidence shows water's mineral balance, structure, and quality impact health outcomes.

Minerals are crucial for hydration, nerve signaling, muscle contraction, acid-base balance, and nutrient transport. Their effectiveness is influenced by composition, concentration, and structure.

Aurmina End-of-Year Sale Ends Tonight

As we close out Aurmina’s first year, really, its first few months, we wanted to mark the moment with something simple: gratitude.

Lisa, Scott, and I built Aurmina because we believed there was a missing piece in modern water treatment, and we’ve been genuinely moved by how many people immediately understood what we were trying to do. Watching this small company help real people has been deeply satisfying, and we wanted to say thank you.

Through midnight, we’re offering 25% off single bottles, with no limit on quantity. For those who already know they’ll be using Aurmina long-term, the 6-pack remains the best value at 34% off, so don’t outsmart yourself by buying six singles.

Discount Code: HOLIDAY

If you’ve been following my water series, you already know why this exists. Aurmina isn’t about stripping water down to nothing. It’s about restoring order, clarity, and purity after modern treatment has tried to do its job.

This is our thank-you.

A Blue Planet, With Less Water Than We Think

From space, Earth appears blue because most of its surface is covered with water. But the reality is that only about 2.5 percent of all that water is fresh, and most of it is frozen in ice caps and Greenland. The remainder, consisting of lakes, rivers, and shallow groundwater, comes out to less than one percent of the planet’s total water, and only a slice of that is even usable. As pollution rises, that slice is becoming smaller and less clear.

Inside the body, the situation is just as unforgiving. And yet the body has no warehouse of water you can draw from later. You stay hydrated only by constant replacement, day after day, against steady losses through urine, sweat, breathing, and stool. Balance is something you earn repeatedly, not something you bank.

Why Animals Show the Truth First

It is difficult to study the effects of water in humans because of the many other changing variables like diet, activity, climate, income, disease, and compliance. In animals, especially livestock, those variables are much easier to control. Feed is controlled and genetics and environmental settings are similar. Outcomes like growth, milk production, fertility, illness, and death are measured directly. That’s why the clearest signal connecting water quality to health shows up first in veterinary and agricultural studies.

The pattern is absolutely striking. First, know that animals can tolerate a contaminated water source that would absolutely crush human physiology, and yet measurable losses in health and performance still appear as water quality drops. When water improves into a cleaner, better mineral balanced, and less osmotically stressful state, those losses reverse.

When Water Looks Fine and Still Hurts

Imagine water with a TDS of around 4,400 mg/L. Your kidneys could not tolerate such water physiologically, so thankfully, your taste buds would protect you from drinking it first. Osmotically, such water drives dehydration rather than correcting it. Yet water in that range shows up routinely in livestock studies.

Those numbers don’t come from exotic toxins. They come from ordinary ions concentrated to brutal levels. Brackish groundwater loaded with sodium and chloride forms the base. Sulfate from gypsum-rich geology piles on. Calcium and magnesium bicarbonate add alkalinity. Stock tanks evaporate, shallow wells concentrate salts, and agricultural runoff adds nitrates. The water can be clear, disinfected, and free of pathogens but still impose constant metabolic stress.

Energy is diverted to electrolyte handling and excretion, so animals drink less, which slows their growth and milk production. Reproductive performance also declines.

The reason is simple physiology. Cattle, sheep, and goats can excrete salt at two to three times the capacity of humans. Their systems evolved for mineral-rich environments; ours never did. And even with that advantage, water quality still shows up in performance metrics again and again.

That’s the key point. If organisms with wider tolerance margins still suffer measurable consequences, this suggests that in the more narrowly tolerable systems of humans, the difference in impacts according to water quality are likely larger.

As water quality degrades, health, growth, and productivity slide. When water improves, those curves bend back the other way. The effects show up early and quietly, not as dramatic poisoning, but as chronic drag.

Much of what follows in this chapter draws from a comprehensive review in 2009 from North Dakota State University, which pulled together field data and controlled studies tracking performance and health under different water conditions. The signals are consistent.

Outcomes Associated With Poor Water Quality

Across species, water quality affects performance before overt disease develops. Subclinical effects dominate and first appear as changes in intake, growth, reproduction, and efficiency.

Multiple studies show that elevated TDS, sulphates, nitrates, iron, or poor palatability reliably reduce voluntary water intake. Because water and feed intake are tightly coupled, this leads to measurable drops in growth rate, feed conversion efficiency, milk production, egg production, eggshell quality, and reproductive success.

For example, cattle consuming high-sulphate or high-TDS water showed reduced water intake, followed by reduced feed intake and impaired performance metrics.

Water low in essential minerals, or water that delivers minerals in excess or distorted ratios, has been repeatedly associated with electrolyte imbalance, increased diuresis, disrupted mineral absorption from feed, and secondary deficiencies (notably magnesium, copper, and calcium interactions). Animals drinking mineral-poor or imbalanced water must compensate metabolically, often at the expense of performance and resilience.

Field data and epidemiologic comparisons also associate low-mineral or poorly buffered water with higher rates of cardiovascular stress and sudden death (especially linked to magnesium deficiency), muscle weakness, tremors, reduced exercise tolerance, slower growth, developmental abnormalities in young animals, and increased morbidity in newborns. Again, these effects were observed without significant toxicity, reinforcing the idea that water quality exerts chronic physiological pressure rather than acute poisoning.

Regions or operations using low-mineral or otherwise marginal water showed increased edema and anemia in pregnant animals, higher morbidity in offspring, and reduced reproductive efficiency. These findings were particularly striking because diet, air quality, and husbandry were otherwise comparable, isolating water quality as the differentiating variable.

Improved Intake and Performance After Water Quality Improvement

Here is where it gets good. Intervention studies and field corrections show that improving water quality, by reducing excessive TDS, sulphates, nitrates, or microbial load, produced rapid, measurable improvements, including increased water intake, increased feed intake, improved growth rate, improved feed conversion, and improved milk yield and egg production. One cited intervention showed that reducing TDS from ~4,400 mg/L to ~440 mg/L led to increased water and feed intake, followed by performance gains.

Mineral-Appropriate Water as a Performance Variable

The review repeatedly emphasized that water containing moderate, balanced mineral content supports better metabolic stability, improved thermoregulation, reduced stress during heat exposure, and greater tolerance to other dietary challenges. Animals consuming water with moderate calcium, magnesium, and bicarbonate levels demonstrated lower morbidity and more stable production outcomes than those consuming low-mineral water, even when all other variables were similar.

Cleaner Water Reduces Disease Pressure

Improved microbiological quality, particularly reduction of bacterial contamination and cyanotoxins, was unsurprisingly associated with lower incidence of acute illness, reduced mortality events, improved overall herd health, and reduced pathogen amplification within operations. Water improvements often reduced disease risk even when pathogens were asymptomatic carriers, highlighting water’s role as a silent multiplier or dampener of biological stress.

Across species and settings, moving water out of the low-mineral, low-buffer range and into a moderate, mineral-coordinated range consistently improves hydration behavior, physiologic stability, growth, and disease outcomes, often rapidly and at population scale.

Humans And Water: An Unrecognized Epidemic Of Chronic Dehydration

Before we look into the compelling, albeit smaller, evidence base supporting the impacts of improved water quality on human health and performance, I first want to explore the issue of “chronic dehydration,” a scourge I was not really aware of until I started to dig deeper into water quality research.

I thought chronic dehydration largely plagued only the elderly or impaired. I was shocked to learn that there is immense amounts of epidemiologic and physiologic data showing that chronic low-grade dehydration is widespread across the general population, seen in office workers, manual laborers, athletes, and sedentary adults alike.

The key point I want to make here is that in these studies, they did not assess for obvious clinical signs and instead looked at physiologic signals that integrate hydration status over time, not just whether someone drank water that day.

For instance, they looked at plasma osmolality (concentration of solutes in the blood). If levels are high - not enough water. Large cohorts showed a surprising proportion living near or above the threshold of 295mOsm/kg. Literally 40-60% of adults fell at or above this threshold on a single measurement, and 20-30% of adults remained there persistently across repeated samples. What?

These are not institutionalized, frail, or heat-stressed populations! They are people with intact thirst mechanisms, normal kidney function, and regular access to fluids, many of whom believe they hydrate adequately. Yet their plasma chemistry shows a chronic bias toward concentration, meaning their bodies are continuously defending water balance rather than operating in a relaxed, well-hydrated state.

It gets worse: controlled trials in healthy adults demonstrated that mild but sustained underhydration, often as little as 1–2% body water deficit maintained over days, led to higher blood viscosity, poorer cerebral perfusion, and reduced glymphatic clearance, the system responsible for removing metabolic waste from the brain during sleep. No wonder I get headaches when I forget to switch from coffee over to water around noon.

Participants were otherwise “healthy,” exercising, and not “clinically” dehydrated, yet in this state, they produced measurable declines in attention, reaction time, endurance, mood stability, and thermoregulation. So is that what’s wrong with everybody lately?

Basically, in younger or healthier adults, chronic dehydration tends to manifest subtly: fatigue, headaches, impaired concentration, reduced exercise tolerance, increased kidney stone risk, higher vasopressin tone, and long-term cardiometabolic signaling changes. Interestingly, such complaints are either normalized, misattributed to stress or aging, or never linked to hydration at all.

Dehydration In the Elderly

Conversely, in older or impaired adults, the same physiology instead tips into overt pathology: delirium, hypotension, acute kidney injury, falls, arrhythmias, constipation, infections, and hospitalization. Their margin for error is simply smaller because their perception of thirst decreases with age, many take diuretics or antihypertensives that increase water loss, and their regulation of blood osmolality weakens.

Worse, studies of elderly patients have identified chronic dehydration as an independent risk factor for hospital length of stay, readmission, intensive care, in-hospital mortality, and poor prognosis. Apparently, it is so common that it has been tied to a substantial economic and social burden.

One study really got my attention; it reported that up to one-third of acute confusion or delirium episodes in the elderly resolve with rehydration.

That last finding genuinely humbled me. I immediately thought back to when one of my core roles as an ICU Director was training teams to respond to medical emergencies in the hospital. I had developed a number of protocolized assessment and response techniques to allow for rapid diagnosis and resuscitation across a myriad of causes and complaints.

“Altered mental status” in an elderly patient was among the most common emergency calls I took, at all hours of the night. Yet, looking back, dehydration was rarely near the top of my differential diagnosis. To think that up to a third of those calls might have been resolved with something as simple as a glass of water? My God.

Why We Are Chronically Dehydrated

Historically, we drank water, not proactively, but rather in response to signals of deficit. Those signals are triggered in two ways, intracellular and extracellular. The first signal occurs when water is lost without accompanying electrolytes, solute concentration rises, which draws water out of cells into the extracellular space. The resulting cellular shrinkage is detected by osmoreceptors in the brain, which initiate hormonal signals that drive drinking. In this way, thirst only appears when a significant internal imbalance occurs.

But, our brains make us stop drinking even before ingested fluid ever reaches the bloodstream. Sensory input from taste receptors in the mouth and gut, particularly signals related to salt content, activates anticipatory reflexes that tell the brain hydration is underway. These reflexes shut down thirst early, often long before intracellular hydration has been fully restored. As a result, people frequently stop drinking while cells remain relatively underhydrated.

This aspect I found fascinating (and that I completely identified with), is that in modern environments, thirst only plays a small role in daily fluid intake. Most fluids are consumed incidentally, through foods, caffeinated beverages, sweetened drinks, alcohol, or for comfort and stimulation rather than physiologic need. While this pattern can prevent severe dehydration, it also disconnects drinking behavior from true cellular hydration status. The outcome is a population that drinks frequently yet insufficiently, resulting in subtle, chronic underhydration at the tissue level, an effect reinforced by intermittent beverages that blunt thirst signals without effectively restoring intracellular water.

I think I just described my average friggin day. Yeesh.

Ultimately, what I found both shocking and unsurprising is that chronic underhydration correlates with increased cardiometabolic risks, chronic diseases, and premature mortality markers. Even modest chronic dehydration is physiologically stressful and associated with measurable health costs beyond athletic performance.

Benefits Of Water Quality In Human Exercise Performance

Although human studies showing physiologic benefits from higher-quality drinking water do exist, they are far fewer and more heterogeneous than those in animals. My argument, grounded in the much larger, better-controlled veterinary literature, particularly structured-water studies demonstrating improved intracellular hydration and mineral handling, is that similar gains in human health and performance are a reasonable expectation as water quality improves, whether through better mineral balance, improved hydration dynamics, or both.

Hydration, Muscle Cramps, and Exercise Recovery

In athletes, water quality shows up in measurable ways. In one study of soccer players, regular consumption of mineralized bottled water was associated with improved hydration status and more efficient lactate handling, reflected in lower urine specific gravity and a rise in urine pH.

Broader reviews of the literature report similar patterns: when fluid intake includes water with appropriate electrolyte content, both physical and cognitive performance improve, dehydration is less likely to develop, and fluid–electrolyte balance is more easily maintained.

This becomes especially apparent during and after heavy exertion, where clinical studies consistently show that electrolyte-containing water better preserves serum sodium, reduces the incidence of muscle cramps, and supports faster recovery compared with plain water.

Benefits of Mineral Water On Human Cardiovascular and General Health

In a previous post, we reviewed the wealth of studies showing the detrimental effects of demineralized and/or low-mineral-content water on a range of health outcomes. Conversely, in terms of the positive benefits of well-mineralized water, this study found that regular consumption of mineral-rich water was linked to improved cardiovascular health, blood pressure regulation, and vascular function.

Across other large human epidemiologic studies and meta-analyses, drinking water that naturally contains calcium and magnesium was consistently associated with materially lower rates of cardiovascular disease, stroke, hypertension, and sudden cardiac death, with relative risk reductions on the order of 15–35% as mineral concentrations rose into ranges commonly found in untreated groundwater.

Magnesium appears to carry the strongest signal, with protective associations emerging at concentrations as low as 8–10 mg/L, while calcium contributes additional benefit at moderate levels.

Impacts of Structured Water on Animal Health

When I discovered that there was a wealth of veterinary literature studying the impacts of “structured” water on health outcomes and performance, I was excited, not only because Aurmina structures water, but because I could not find a single study in humans.

Let’s start with racehorses. In a randomized trial involving thoroughbreds, matched for physiological, training and racing attributes, researchers found that over four weeks, horses provided approximately 10 liters per day (which was only 15% of daily intake!) of structured water exhibited increased hydration (measured by bioelectrical impedance analysis), improved upper airway health post-exercise, and enhanced heart rate variability compared to the control group.

One paper consisted of a narrative review of various studies of livestock and laboratory animals where they drank structured water, also called magnetized or modified water. Across those animal studies, the consistent findings (seen in three or more studies) included a cluster of positive physiological responses when animals consume structured water daily for at least one month, such as:

• Increased growth rates

• Reduced markers of oxidative stress

• Improved glucose and insulin responses in diabetic models

• Improved blood lipid profiles

• Better semen and sperm quality

• Increased tissue conductivity measured by bioelectrical impedance

Among these outcomes, the most striking (and repeatedly observed) effects reported were increases in growth and improvements in metabolic and reproductive markers across multiple species, suggesting physiological changes beyond hydration alone.

Note that some studies measured higher tissue conductivity by bioelectrical impedance.

I want to stop on that last phrase, because it is relevant to a study I will be sponsoring, which assesses whether Aurmina-treated water improves intracellular hydration. So, a quick primer on bioelectrical impedance (BEI) is due;

BEI is a well-validated method that reflects how water and dissolved electrolytes move and distribute through the body by measuring how easily signals pass through tissues. Changes in tissue conductivity reflect shifts in total and intracellular body water and electrolyte content.

Rising tissue conductivity reflects water moving into cells and participating in charge transfer, signaling functional hydration rather than simple fluid accumulation. This indicates more effective electrolyte retention and intracellular water distribution rather than simple plasma dilution.

Used properly, it lets us observe hydration where it actually matters, in tissue and cells, rather than guessing from intake, output, or lab work. As noted in the review above, animals that drank structured water consistently showed improvements in intracellular hydration.

Conclusion: Water as a Quiet Determinant of Health

By the end of this chapter, the pattern should be clear; water quality shows up in the body the same way it shows up in a herd, upstream, quiet, and cumulative. Long before pathology announces itself, water chemistry is already shaping hydration behavior, electrolyte handling, tissue function, and metabolic stability.

The veterinary literature makes this impossible to ignore. When water quality degrades, animals do not immediately collapse; they drink a little less, eat a little less, grow more slowly, reproduce less efficiently, tolerate stress poorly, and fall behind. When water quality improves, those same systems rebound, often rapidly and at scale, even when nothing else changes. That pattern mirrors what we see repeatedly in human health: regulation fails gradually, not catastrophically.

Human data, though thinner and more confounded, point in the same direction.

Chronic underhydration is widespread, even among healthy adults with access to fluids and intact thirst mechanisms. Mild but sustained dehydration alters cognition, exercise tolerance, cardiovascular signaling, renal stress, and brain waste clearance. Mineral-poor water worsens electrolyte loss and increases diuresis. Mineral-appropriate water stabilizes hydration, supports cardiovascular function, and improves resilience, especially under stress.

What makes this uncomfortable is how most water looks fine, tastes acceptable, and meets every regulatory box. And yet, when stripped of buffering capacity, mineral balance, and ionic order, it behaves differently inside the body. Hydration becomes inefficient, cells stay subtly underfilled, hormonal systems remain activated, and performance slips before disease ever appears.

This post is about recognizing water as a biologically active input, not a neutral background variable. Like food quality, sleep, or light exposure, water exerts its influence quietly, every day, whether we pay attention or not. When its chemistry supports physiology, the body works with less friction. When it doesn’t, the cost is paid slowly, diffusely, and often invisibly.

Taken together, the evidence supports a coherent pattern rather than a single isolated mechanism: water that carries geologically derived minerals appears to support cardiovascular and metabolic stability, while water stripped of its geologically derived minerals behaves more like an inert solvent that must be biologically corrected at the body’s expense.

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If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I then write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I try to get out to the public), supporting my work is greatly appreciated.

More Stuff: Aurmina and Book Publications

If you want to learn more about the water purifier we made from Shimanishi’s volcanic-mineral complex, go to Aurmina.com where we are running a 25% off end-of year sale, code: HOLIDAY.

Upcoming Book Publications

Yup — not one, but two books are dropping from yours truly (at the same time? What?)

1. If, instead of (or in addition to) these Substack posted chapters, you prefer the feel of a real book, or the smell of paper, or like to give holiday gifts, pre-order From Volcanoes to Vitality, my grand mineral saga, shipping end of January.

2. And if you want to read (or gift) another chronicle of suppression, science, and survival, grab The War on Chlorine Dioxide—the sequel you didn’t see coming—shipping early to mid-January. On this one, I say: “Buy it before they ban it.” Hah!