Dr. Alexis Cowan on Deuterium: How One Simple Water Hack Could Reverse Mitochondrial Damage, Cancer, and Chronic Disease
— Kenny Carmody (@KennyCarmody) April 23, 2026
Sweat is deuterium enriched, so it helps your body to deplete deuterium. So, just briefly, deuterium is a heavy form of hydrogen. The amount of deuterium in… https://t.co/sBkqs1mkaO pic.twitter.com/OZ3fZ9QnMc
Alexis Cowan on Deuterium: How One Simple Water Hack Could Reverse Mitochondrial Damage, Cancer, and Chronic Disease Sweat is deuterium enriched, so it helps your body to deplete deuterium. So, just briefly, deuterium is a heavy form of hydrogen. The amount of deuterium in your drinking water varies depending on what latitude you live at. High latitudes, lower deuterium. Equatorial latitudes, higher deuterium. Deuterium is enriched in plant foods, roots and fruits, starches, and is depleted in animal foods. At more northern latitudes, we’re really only meant to receive deuterium during the part of the year where we can grow and eat plants. Of course, now in the modern environment, we have access to any food at any time of year, and so a lot of people, especially if you’re eating processed foods, are eating deuterium bombs, and then they’re never sweating, they’re never getting out into sunlight to help them remove that deuterium, and deuterium clogs and gums up mitochondria. So, if deuterium levels get too high in the tissue, that creates mitochondrial dysfunction, which then begets more deuterium overload and more inflammation and more disease. So on the converse to that, deuterium depletion is being used in the treatment of cancer and diabetes right now, but there’s a large scope for other diseases as well, to actually reverse some of the root causes of the disease at the mitochondrial level. And so that’s why if people have heard of deuterium-depleted water, it’s something that is leveraged within these clinical trials, for example, to help ameliorate these two disease types. And for people who are interested in that, I’ll just make one brief note that the concentration of deuterium in the water is important. So you don’t want to just drink straight deuterium-depleted water because the deuterium in the bloodstream actually plays an important role. The blood is the most enriched source of deuterium in the body. The tissues have the least. So wherever there’s mitochondria, the deuterium goes away from that ideally. And so it’s concentrated in the blood where red blood cells have no mitochondria, so they don’t have to deal with this issue. But what you’re doing is you’re pulling water out of the blood volume, and because that’s deuterium-rich water, what you’re effectively doing is removing the deuterium-enriched water from the body, and then what you have to do in order to establish equilibrium is to pull deuterium out of the tissues to reestablish the right concentration of deuterium in the blood. So in effect, you’re depleting deuterium from your tissues when you sweat. And similarly with the drinking water, the drinking water is directly in homeostasis with your blood volume, and so if you’re drinking deuterium-depleted water, and the ideal range is between 105 and 120 parts per million, that’s going to very slightly reduce the blood deuterium levels, which then results in the deuterium being pulled out of the tissue to restore the roughly 150 parts per million concentration in the bloodstream. So those are a couple different ways. Obviously, when you’re sweating, you’re releasing deuterium. There’s also some evidence that when you’re getting exposed to full-spectrum sunlight, it also helps to remove deuterium from the water in the body, as well. And so there’s just a couple things. There also makes sense too because when you’re in an environment, like let’s say it’s summertime and there’s more plant foods available, there’s more deuterium in those foods. You’re eating that, but the body has the ability to handle that deuterium load better because the sunlight quality is better. Versus in the wintertime when there’s no plant foods available and you’re meant to be eating animal fats and proteins, which are low deuterium foods, that helps your mitochondria work better in the absence of full spectrum, like UV light and more intense, longer days...
