Drinking Water After Waking: The “Japanese Water Therapy” Claims Checked

Exact instructions are not evidence of a cure

A routine can look scientific when every step has a number: a quantity of water, a waiting period before breakfast and an exact count of days. The missing part here is evidence that the routine produces its promised medical results. The day counts attached to diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer are not supported by identified trials in the account.

Hydration is an ordinary need; treatment for a serious illness is a different question. A fixed amount and schedule cannot automatically serve everyone, particularly when fluid needs or restrictions differ. The precision of a timetable tells us how to repeat the instructions, but not whether those instructions work. To answer that, we would need the diagnoses, comparison groups and outcomes behind the promised improvements.

The explanation about cold water turning food oils into an intestinal coating that causes cancer is unsupported here too. There is no need to attach that fear to drinking water with a meal. The historical routine is preserved so its claims can be examined, with the cure timetables clearly identified as unverified rather than offered as a plan to follow.

Sources for this clarification: NCI: Complementary and alternative medicine

A cure timetable also needs to explain what counts as a cure. Feeling different for a few days is not the same outcome as a confirmed change in a diagnosed disease. If someone follows a water routine while also receiving treatment, changes in their health cannot automatically be assigned to the water. Without a clear outcome and a comparison, the day counts remain assertions, however confidently they are presented.

Drinking Water After Waking: The “Japanese Water Therapy” Claims Checked

The current health trend is drinking water immediately after getting out of bed. The sources behind this 2014 post went further: “Scientist have confirmed the medical value of this to be completely beneficial to our health.” No such trials were identified, and none has appeared since: a dietitian-written review of this “Japanese water therapy” found no evidence that it treats or cures type 2 diabetes or cancer, although drinking more water can help with constipation and, in some people, blood pressure.

Drinking water when waking has been linked to curing and prevention of certain disease and ailments such as headaches, body aches, arthritis, heart problems, epilepsy, obesity, tuberculosis, meningitis, kidney disease, vomiting, gastritis, diabetes, constipation, uterine disease, ear and throat disease.

The historical routine described in the source — not a treatment recommendation:

Upon waking, before doing anything else, drink four 6 ounce glasses or water. Remember if there is some reason you cannot hold this much water at one time, start with as much as you can and increase the amount.
Brush your teeth and perform your morning oral hygiene routine, and then wait 45 minutes before eating or drinking anything.
After the 45 minutes is up, eat breakfast as usual, and then do not eat or drink anything for 2 hours.

Specific diseases

The source said that “if using the above method, the research shows that the number of days the regimen must be followed to cure each disease” is as follows. No such research was cited, and these timetables should not guide treatment or delay medical care:

High blood Pressure- 30 days

Gastric Problems- 10 days

Diabetes- 30 days

Constipation- 10 days

Cancer-180 days

The source also claimed that “using this treatment method has no side effects other than increased urination at the beginning of the program.” That is not true for everyone: drinking a large volume quickly can dilute blood sodium (hyponatraemia, or water intoxication), which is rare in healthy people with working kidneys but can be dangerous, and people with kidney problems are at higher risk; a common rule of thumb is not to drink more than about a litre an hour. The four 6-ounce glasses in the routine add up to about 700 ml, so anyone told to limit fluids, for example because of heart or kidney disease, should follow their doctor’s limit instead. (The Mayo Clinic likewise explains that drinking excessive amounts of water can cause low sodium by overwhelming the kidneys’ ability to excrete water, that kidney disease and heart disease raise the risk, and that acute hyponatraemia can cause rapid brain swelling.) Drinking water and staying healthy and active are the ways that will better our lives.

Both the Chinese and Japanese drink hot tea with their meals instead of cold water. Cold water slows down the digestive process and solidifies the oily foods you have just eaten. Once these solidified oils react with the stomach acid, it is absorbed more quickly by the intestine and lines the intestinal wall. The long-term accumulation of these digested oils, the source said, can lead to cancer. That mechanism does not hold up: the body’s internal heat quickly evens out the temperature of whatever is swallowed, stomach acid breaks food down before it reaches the intestine, and there is no medical evidence that cold drinks cause fats to line the gut or cause cancer (the claim has circulated online since 2006). Perhaps Western cultures should adopt this practice as there is everything to gain and nothing to lose.