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Can we benefit from drinking seawater? Water expert Robert Slovak says “Yes!” Robert is a mechanical, aeronautical, and astronautical engineer best known for his decades of research, exploring a variety of waters: hydrogen-rich water, deuterium depleted water (DDW), and seawater.
Today, Robert focuses on seawater, a world-famous medicine, hidden in plain sight. For most of the twentieth century, seawater was considered a medicine. It was even imported and used to treat tuberculosis in children’s hospitals in the USA.
Robert makes a case for including seawater in our diets today, because of its mineral-rich composition, noting that it is the only aqueous solution that contains the entire periodic table! Robert explains how to get the therapeutic benefits: he covers the amount we should drink, and where it should be sourced.
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Listen to the podcast here:
Ancient Healing Seawater
Episode Transcript
Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda
Mostly most of us have heard about the healing benefits of being near the sea, the sunlight, salty sea air, grounding on the sand and the seawater itself. Speaking of which, we swim, surf and boat in it but have we ever explored the benefits of actually drinking the seawater? This is Episode 316. Our guest is Robert Slovak. Robert is a Mechanical, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineer best known for co-founding Water Factory Systems in the early 1970s. Throughout several decades, Robert has become more and more of a water expert. Exploring the benefits of a variety of waters, including hydrogen-rich, deteriorate, depleted water and seawater. We will focus on the latter, water from the sea.
Robert tells the story of what led him to uncover a world–famous medicine that was hidden in plain sight. For most of the twentieth century, seawater was considered a medicine. It was even imported and used to treat tuberculosis in children’s hospitals in the United States. Robert makes a case for including seawater in our diets because of its mineral-rich composition, noting that it is the only acquiesced solution that contains the entire periodic table. Robert explains also how to get the therapeutic benefits. He covers the amount we should drink and where it should be sourced. Robert talks to us about why the use of seawater as a medicine has been so overlooked at this moment. He also talks to us about a radical and successful experiment in which the entire blood of six dogs was replaced with Quinton seawater.
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Welcome to the show, Robert.
Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here at Cuixmala with you. It’s quite a surprise for both of us in a way.
This is a gorgeous environment. I came to hear experts like you. The pressing question on my mind now is, do you drink seawater?
I do.
Are you serious?
I have consumed seawater since 2003.
Why?
It’s better than drinking one’s urine, for instance. It’s an established health practice for decades. I said it as a joke.
Why do you drink seawater in the first place?
I’m a water scientist. That is what you know me most as. There was a time in 1998 that I went off to Brazil by the invitation of some corporations to help revive the water technology of Brazil, which was lagging behind the world standard. Here was a country that had more mineral resources and they needed this water technology. I agreed to go to Brazil to help these people write the manuals and have college courses. At one point several years later, I was in a more remote part of Brazil where there weren’t doctors. I became deathly ill from bacterial gastroenteritis. I knew how serious it was. I knew enough about health science and medicine to know how serious it was. I needed to get out of dodge, this remote area, back to Rio de Janeiro but it wasn’t going to happen.
I have never heard of that condition before. What were the symptoms?
It’s intestinal trauma, diarrhea, the whole thing of the collapse of your body’s gastrointestinal system caused by the infection of the microbes.
What did you do?
There wasn’t a lot to do because I had nothing to work with but before I had acted to even think about doing something. A very simple, basic person who was a carpenter on our project handed me a little tray of six glass ampules and said, “This is our doctor, take this. This will help you.” He didn’t say it would cure me but he said, “It will help you.” I’m going, “What is this?” He said, “I know it’s made from seawater and it’s called Quinton.” It’s spelled like Quintin. It was upsetting in a way because I’m thinking the guy here from Brazil, you don’t know. Out of desperation, I did that. I took 1 per hour, 6 ampules 6 hours and by close to midnight, I was perfectly well.
It makes me think he must have had access to some traditional wisdom in his community that modern people had never had before. His people knew about something that modern scientists didn’t know anything about.
He got this information from a doctor in Rio de Janeiro. It filtered down and he said, “We use this for everything. We don’t have a doctor here. This is our doctor.” That’s what he said. It sounded very silly to me but I took them anyway. I didn’t know at the time that this is a very world–famous medicine.
I think a lot of us don’t know that yet so do tell us more.
The product he was handing me is a product that has been made in the form, which is a double tip glass, ampule of 10 milliliters. This has been made since 1897.
What do you mean this has been made since 1897 because you said it’s from a plankton bloom?
The solution inside is from seawater that is harvested from an area known as a plankton bloom, which is a huge bio-reactor in the ocean that consists of phytoplankton, like plankton on top where the sun is and zooplankton, which is several 100 feet below. They have lived a symbiotic relationship in this bioreactor that produces like 50% or more percent of the oxygen on the planet. It’s a silly part of the story but I ran down in the small village after I showered and cleaned up, etc. I ran down to the only thing that would be open in a small village in the middle of nowhere, the bar. I knew that is where the men are drinking Cervesia. I went to him and I said, “I need more of this and there’s no way I’m going to be without this.” This was my lifeblood at that moment. He said, “I will try to get you something tomorrow but sit down and have a beer,” which I didn’t do and this moment changed my life.
What is it about this Quinton seawater that is such good medicine?
It’s a very complex solution. Let’s start with the fact of what is seawater itself. Almost no one realizes that seawater is the only acquiesced solution of the entire periodic table of the elements in our solar system. Not just on the Earth but in the solar system, there is no other sea in our solar system. Not everybody understands what the periodic table is. I want people to be little mini scientists so they can figure stuff out on their own. The periodic table is a list of 92 things we call elements. These 92 things make up everything in the known universe.
Everything we can touch, taste, smell and see.
Everything you can hit with a space probe. Every star is made out of the periodic table, every planet, whatever there is, all of it including all of us. We are made out of nothing more than the periodic table. It doesn’t include things like photons of light or something. That is not included. Energetic things are not included in the periodic table. This is substance. The substance of the universe are these 92 things.
Does the sea have all these things?
It does. That is the only thing that has all these things.
Our soil has been depleted of these elements. Is that right?
Yes, but more than having them all. It has them all in very specific proportions that we would call or a chemist would say, “These are the solubilities of the elements in the water.” The fact that they are with water and not just a pile of dirt that might have the 92 elements. Eleven of the elements are gases so they are not in everything but they are in the seawater, though.
Sally Fallon Morell also often points to cheese, for example, having vitamins A and D in the right proportion. They work synergistically. What I’m getting from you is the proportion in which these elements are in the water is just right.
Just right but more than you can imagine how right they are. It is through this solution that life as we know it began as a microorganism. No one knows what that microorganism was like. In the beginning, the Earth was a hot, dry, cooling mass of the periodic table but no water. That was about 5 billion years ago, it started about 500 million years after it started, it was bombarded by comets that delivered water to the planet. That was called the Late Heavy Bombardment.
How long did that last?
That lasted for hundreds of millions of years. The Earth ended up 4.5 billion years ago because we are reducing now. By 4.2 billion years, the Earth was pretty much covered by water, no land. Not long after that in the seas that covered the Earth, life began to emerge out of what we now call the primordial ocean.
To people who have a different frame of reference, maybe people of faith or whatever they might see it a little differently.
These are possibilities. The geological record would not be kind to a variation. We see that there are microbes embedded as fossils in the oldest billion years, not soil but rock and so on. I think the biggest contention with evolution might occur much later on when we started to have the formation of animal species and where there might have been interferences. The first 2 billion years of evolution were pretty simple and not very advanced. In 2 billion years, you’ve got some shrimp and some sponges. I’m not sure if divine creation was involved in that, they must have been sleeping most of the time because not a lot of impressive things happen. It was more like life trying things out. I think I will grow a fin. That thing didn’t work and it keeps working itself out.
It was a slow process but why this context for this information on seawater? Do you think why is this important? I like that you are laying it out.
Since evolution for those first 2 billion years strictly occurred in the solution. There was no land. I don’t know if you remember in the chart that I showed you, there was a big blue rectangle. I said, “All life in this rectangle was only in the ocean.”
I know that the Bible says that God’s spirit moved above the waters. That was the first thing like there is water in there.
I’m very open-minded to the influences of God in this. There was definitely something higher in initiating life but I also took the position that, if I were God, what would I do if I was interested in having something completely different called life? I might say, “I’m going to give my magical substance water and I’m going to put in everything else that I created in there. I’m going to make a sandbox of the sandboxes of all time and go for it.” I want to see how my thinking in life how creative it can be. It made all millions of strange things, all the five kingdoms of life. You have bacteria, sponges, shrimp, fish, porpoises. You have whales that weigh 100 tons.
That’s fascinating God who could do that, anything goes but I do know that the geological record does show us that life evolved in the ocean. If 2 billion years is a very long time, imagine the influence of a solution of the periodic table on life for 2 billion years. I asked doctors, “Do you think life got used to needing the periodic table after 2 billion years?” I should say so. The man who put this together, also a student of Darwin and so on, asked himself or he said at some point, “Life left the ocean,” and that was maybe 700 million years ago. He made a statement. “The only way life could leave the ocean, to break that dependence, was to take the ocean with it.” I showed our class that here is a chart showing the ten major electrolytes, to simplify it, of the ocean. Here are the ten major electrolytes of your blood plasma. They are identical. It is a match. We did take the ocean with us.
We didn’t keep up our end of the bargain because once you left the ocean, you left the source. The only source that early animal species have would be the vegetation on what is now the new land. The new terrestrial life would be the vegetation that was able to assimilate the minerals and trace elements from the soil, convert them into a form that we could use. It would be soiled. The early soils contain the entire periodic table of the elements without the gasses. Without the gases, you had the whole periodic table of the elements but there is a point now that it’s not in the food anymore for us. It’s a very serious problem. Those in the know of physiology will say, “This is perhaps one of the great and most serious of all problems of continuing life.”
I understand this because I have interviewed farmers who talk about this Brix method of identifying the quality of the nutrients in the soil. They will say, “This carrot is very different from the carrot twenty years ago.” That is even more different from a carrot from 100 years ago. Without even realizing it, this is affecting our health but I have never heard anyone say what you are saying, that we need to somehow return to getting that sea with us or that ocean with us.
René Quinton said it immensely. Scientists throughout the early twentieth century, when René Quinton was doing his thing with healing people by using seawater, he immediately knew its relevance. In the early 1900s, we were faced with cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid, syphilis, gastroenteritis. All the pandemics were descending upon primarily Europe. He focused on, “I believe this nutritional need supplied by the seawater is essential to deal with these pandemics.” This simple product, that seawater, has become for most of the twentieth century, medicine in the Physician’s Desk Reference of Europe called the Vidal
That’s in Europe but not in the United States?
More for historical reasons because Quinton couldn’t make enough. At that point, it wasn’t a commercial product. It’s only historical limitations. There were no big pharmaceutical products in 1908. Quinton was imported to the United States Children’s Hospitals of New York, Boston and Chicago, to deal with childhood tuberculosis.
Tell us some of the things that either the study showed or René’s writing show about the effectiveness of this treatment.
They use the product in numerous ways, orally, subcutaneously, rectally, topically. For the mucosal tissue, it would be put in the nose for respiratory conditions, etc. IV also was used. One of the reasons that it was used most popularly subcutaneously like by injection, small amounts was when they’ve got incredible effectiveness subcutaneously. They didn’t have to use a lot. You can get the same results orally as it was finally discovered but you have to use more. For instance, you might have to use a whole ampule orally but maybe only 1/3 of an ampule. That helped keep the products available. Imagined back in 1897, this being a sterile injectable product, almost unthinkable. When I first saw it, I said, “No way couldn’t have been done.” I know my science, I know what it takes to make sterile water and I say, “No way,” and he did achieve it.
You keep talking about this product but is it just seawater or no? Is there something else that they do to it?
There are two of these. I don’t have the other one. There are two kinds of Quinton. They are identified by their concentration. This is the concentration called isotonic concentration, which is the concentration of the saline solution and your body fluids. There is the concentration of the sea itself. That is called hypertonic. That contains about three times more concentrated than this. That is used more nutritionally to fortify someone’s physiology that is lacking nutrients. This is used more to achieve homeostasis in doing a medical condition or in preparation for dealing with the medical condition. We often say the isotonic is the medicine and the hypertonic is the nutrient.
Why do you think that this has been so overlooked by modern people trying to improve their health?
There are many reasons. One, this remained a very small company. Remember, up until 1930, this was the medicine of the day. It’s in the Physician’s Desk Reference as a true pharmaceutical before there weren’t real pharmaceuticals. The first challenge for this was penicillin in 1934. It had all those years of dealing with the multiple pandemics in Europe until penicillin came along. This dealt with other conditions. It was used regularly in hospitals. In 1975, the French government with almost 75 years of experience of having this available now, determined with their national health program to make this available free of charge to every French citizen. How many products get that accolade?
It didn’t go over well with the growing pharmaceutical companies. Competition and something that validated it to a crazy level and they didn’t like it. They first got it banned from hospital use as a serious medicine with political influence. That was a blow to Quinton and it somewhat went underground. It was very well known. Quinton was a world hero. Throughout Europe, there are statues to René Quinton because of his contribution. Like 100,000 plus people showed up at his funeral, heads of state. After the ‘80s, the schools of René Quinton, which included whatever Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain, each country had its own like a school of Quinton.
They somewhat went underground because of the force of the pharmaceutical companies. Something that now engaged me ultimately is that in 2004, amazing divine coincidence, the very year that this saved my life, the French Ministry of Science held a 100–year Centennial celebration of the contribution of René Quinton to Science, Health and Humanity. They invited those schools to come back to Paris and put on a week–long celebration or whatever and explaining the technology. What was explained then is, “We don’t have to use this by injection anymore. You can use it orally. Here are the new rules and we can make enough now.”
The whole pushing it aside reminds me of the story of homeopathy. It was understood to be the way to treat people but it got dismissed and demonized as quackery when there was a push to normalize or focus on pharmaceutical drugs that were created in the labs instead.
This came to its own. I had an opportunity that I turned down at first. Like someone said, “Robert, you have been in Brazil with this. It influenced your life. Are you interested in bringing this back to America?” The last time it was in America was 1908. I said, “I would be honored to go show it to people,” and I did. That was my philosophy. I went back and I showed it to the doctors. Some of the people go, “You only get to do this once in your life as something of this significance. You are going to be a foolish man if you don’t take this on. This is yours.” I’m going like, “I’m a retired water scientist but don’t pull that one on me.” I took it seriously. It’s probably one of the best things I have ever done.
I’m going to ask you two questions before we wrap up. The first one is, can you tell us about the story of the dogs, whose blood they replaced with this stuff?
One of the things that René Quinton used because his whole thing was the only way life could leave the sea was to take the sea with it. This became your blood plasma. The statement was great but you had all these brilliant doctors in Europe going, “Where is the clinical proof that it can function like blood plasma?” He said, “Gather around.” There was a week in which by reinfusion, he replaced the whole blood of six dogs with this product. The dogs survived and thrived just operating on this until their bodies caught up and made enough red blood cells to function normally. It wasn’t a cakewalk for them but it is written up in minute-by-minute detail in his treatise called L’Eau de mer, milieu organique, which in French means the water of the sea is the same as the water of your milieu.
Now what I want to do is run out to the ocean and drink some, is that not the same thing?
Frankly, there is nothing wrong with that if I were to be in someplace and I was in a clean ocean area, I would add a sip of this. This is only 10 milliliters. It’s just a sip. I would take advantage of the periodic table that is in every ocean.
I am so thankful that you took some time with us to understand how healing the sea can be in ways we might not have expected before.
This is pretty radical. It has been around 124 years.
I want to ask you if our readers could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend? I know you have mentioned a lot of health hacks, like getting the morning sun and grounding. What would you recommend?
The biggest thing missing and this applies to everybody, your children, fetus, everything is you are from evolution, your body, every animal is expected to supply to its cells, the periodic table of the element. You evolved in it for 2 billion years before you left the ocean. Make sure you have minerals and trace elements that at least get close to what is in the ocean. It’s very easy to do now. Make sure your drinking water has some minerals and trace elements in it. Your food no longer does. It’s one of the reasons the soil no longer does. You and I are visiting a place that not only has a biodynamic garden that does a lot to supply the minerals and trace elements. The botanist here asked me, “We now want to add the minerals of the sea to our compost because now we get it.”
Make sure we get these minerals. That is great advice. I’m going to go take a dip in the ocean and see what I can sip too.
Thank you. It was a great fun interview.
This is a tag to the other show. Robert, I told you I was going to go outside and drink that seawater, but I forgot to ask you, in what proportion should one take that in?
It seems that if I answer this question, I’m going to condone you walking close to shore where there someone else is going to copy you. They are going to be 0.25 of a mile from a sewage outflow that contains about 150 million different viral organisms that cause infection. It’s not something I want to be a party to.
Thank you for that clarification. It matters. In other words, what the quality of the water is.
Make sure your drinking water has some minerals and trace elements in it.
Close to shore is not a very good place. It’s where things are deposited from the ocean. At the shore, the oceans trying to get rid of things. Let’s not convince the people that any old seawater is the way to go. If you live in Fiji and you have a favorite fisherman who can go 20 miles out, when he goes fishing and fill a three-gallon glass bottle of water and you bring it back and you immediately refrigerate it, you could use that for up to one week. Take 10 milliliters per day.
Thanks for that little addendum. I appreciate you. I’m so glad we had this conversation.
Very good.
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Our guest was Robert Slovak. For more resources on seawater, go to WaterAndWellness.com or OceanPlasma.net.
About Robert Slovak
Robert Slovak devoted himself to the science of water after life-altering experiences. He took his astronautical and mechanical engineering degrees and decided to pursue the research of reverse osmosis with his brother Jack. The dynamic duo were considered the early developers of Reverse Osmosis technology.
Robert is best known for co-founding Water Factory Systems in the early 1970’s. He and his brother were among the early developers of Reverse Osmosis (RO) technology and its many applications.
For the past nine years, Robert’s focus has been on bringing a new nutraceutical breakthrough called “Molecular Hydrogen” (H2) to medical professionals and health-minded consumers. This “smallest molecule in the Universe” has been overlooked for its remarkable health benefits until now. With more than 800 worldwide health studies on the subject, physicians, researchers, and clinicians have been proclaiming H2 as the most unique and versatile antioxidant and signaling molecule. In 2010, Robert co-developed a practical way for everyone to benefit from this discovery by creating the first reactive hydrogen tablet that infuses water with a supersaturated concentration of H2 gas. This proven nutraceutical is now in its 9th year of distribution in both professional medical and consumer markets.
In 2011, Robert became a founding investor in the Quicksilver Scientific Corp., which was developing a groundbreaking new technology to deliver nutrients and nutraceuticals to the cells: nano-encapsulated liposomes. In just a few years, Quicksilver Scientific established its scientific dominance in this growing field and is currently expanding its product scope and global distribution.
Transcript edit:
“Almost no one realizes that seawater is the only acquiesced solution of the entire periodic table of the elements in our solar system.”
He says “aqueous”, not “acquiesced” (which has a different meaning).
Amandha aren’t you contradicting yourself when you say viruses don’t exist and then you say a sewage outflow contains about 150 million different viral organisms that cause infection ?