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| Understanding Our Bodies |
| Living in the Ocean |
| Life as we know it evolved from single-celled organisms living within the sea and maintaining a dynamic balance between externally high levels of sodium and internally high levels of potassium. These life forms, then as now, pulled potassium into themselves while excreting excess sodium back out into the Mother Ocean . . . against the grain, as it were. |
| This artifact of holding high levels of internal potassium and low levels of internal sodium, while living in a milieu of high sodium and low potassium, creates immense stress on both sides of the cell's envelope, the membrane. The cell must expend energy (calories) to maintain this intentional imbalance between the internal media and the external media. Someone once said that life exists in response to irritation and stress. This electrolyte imbalance is, in fact, the very stress that enables living cells to absorb nutrients. They excrete waste products by using this membrane imbalance to transport in both directions across the cellular membranean energy fulcrum. |
| As long as a cell is alive, it maintains this imbalance. When it dies, sodium comes rushing in, and potassium is lost. The health of a cell can be partially defined by its efficiency in hoarding potassium while resisting and manipulating the greater sodium found in its external environment, the primordial and mythic Mother Ocean. |
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