Water: does it Chemically cleanse the body?

ElPumaMex

The whole water drink (8 glasses) has been talked about a lot here at MFP.
Some pro drinking as much water as possible, some say they don't need to drink water and wll get it from food.

This post is not directly addressing those already covered views on water drinking.

What I would like to discuss here, are any descriptions on how the water is used by the body to "cleanse" (for lack of a better word) the body.

Anybody here with a Biology or similar degree that could explain to us how the water is used to eliminate toxins, etc?

To get the discussion started, here is an example of the type of answers I am looking for:

(as copied from http://askville.amazon.com/Chemically-water-cleanse-body/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=7978645 )

"Assuming that you mean cleanse by drinking (not washing with) the water, then ...
It's a matter of flushing out toxins and waste byproducts.

When your body encounters toxins, waste materials, and so on, it has several mechanisms for getting rid of them. One of the primary ways is to metabolize the toxin to a water-soluble form, after which it is dissolved, moved into the bladder, and eliminated in the urine.

Chemically, this process includes such things as hydroxylation, conjugation (with sugar moieties) and so on. The strategy is to render the molecule water-soluble, if it isn't soluble enough already. This is especially important if the toxin is lipophilic (fat-soluble) to begin with. The more hydrophilic (water-soluble) the molecule is, the more readily it will partition into the water and out of fatty tissues.

Drinking plenty of water ensures that this flushing process is optimized. Since the whole system is in dynamic equilibrium, the more times you flush, and the greater the volume of water, the better the system works, at least up to a point. It *IS* possible to drink too much water, endangering your health; but you REALLY have to swill down a lot of water to reach that point.

It gets a lot more complicated than this, of course, but that's the short answer!"

ElPumaMex

bump

ElPumaMex

.