Silica Water and the Removal of Aluminum

An Essay on the Chemistry That Clears Aluminum, the Water That Carries It, and How to Make Your Own

This essay is practical. Aluminum has been introduced into human food, drinking water, cosmetics, medications, and vaccines on an industrial scale since the 1890s, and the body carries no built-in route for clearing it from brain tissue. One documented route exists. The chemistry has been confirmed in radioactive-tracer studies and in peer-reviewed clinical trials. The protocol is simple, the materials are either on the supermarket shelf or on the kitchen counter, and the cost is roughly ten dollars a gallon for imported mineral water or forty-three cents a gallon for the homemade equivalent. Most readers will not have heard of either of the two researchers whose work this essay draws on. That absence is itself part of the story.

The essay operates in two registers. The author’s analytical voice sits within a terrain framework in which disease arises from toxic exposure, nutritional depletion, electromagnetic burden, and psychological strain, and the body’s processes work to restore equilibrium once the insult is removed. Terms carried over from establishment medicine, including “autoimmune,” “immune system,” and “antibodies,” appear in quotation, attribution, or published study titles. Multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s are referred to by their names, which is how the conditions are known, without accepting the establishment’s causal explanations for them. The case against aluminum as a toxin, built independently by Christopher Exley and Dennis Crouse over four decades of combined work, sits comfortably within the terrain frame.

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In 2006, fifteen patients with Alzheimer’s disease drank up to 1.5 liters a day of a silicon-rich mineral water for twelve weeks. Three of them, twenty percent, showed clinically significant improvements in cognitive function by the end of the trial. The result was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.¹ Christopher Exley, who ran the trial at Keele University in the United Kingdom, has issued a standing challenge for anyone to identify a pharmaceutical trial for Alzheimer’s that has produced an equivalent result. Twenty years later the challenge is still open. No pharmaceutical intervention for Alzheimer’s has matched it.

Interview with Dr Christopher Exley

Dennis Crouse’s mother was eighty-five when she was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment and sundowners syndrome. She could not balance her checkbook. She could not thread her sewing machine. By mid-afternoon she could not hold a conversation. Her son, a Harvard-trained chemist who had retired a year earlier, started her on one liter per day of Fiji water, which carries 146 parts per million of orthosilicic acid, and systematically eliminated her aluminum exposures. Within twelve months her MMSE scores had improved. Her sundowners stopped. Her short-term memory returned to the point that she was once again talking about things that had happened in the last few days rather than only the distant past.² She lived to ninety-seven. She did not reach end-stage Alzheimer’s.

Interview with Dennis N. Crouse, PhD

Interview with Dennis N. Crouse, PhD (No. 2)

William Miller followed the same approach and reported his results in a separate interview published in April 2025. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. One liter of Fiji per day. Aluminum sources eliminated. After a year on the protocol his MMSE score was 29 out of 30, which his physician described as high normal. He has stayed in that range since.¹⁷

Defying Alzheimer’s: One Man’s Triumph Over a Trillion-Dollar Lie

These three accounts rest on the same chemistry. A specific form of silicon dissolved in water, orthosilicic acid or OSA, binds aluminum in the body and facilitates its excretion in urine and sweat. OSA is the only non-invasive method of removing aluminum from humans with confirming evidence that spans isotope tracer studies, peer-reviewed clinical trials, and more than a decade of self-tracked biomarker data in individual cases. The protocol is one liter a day, continued for years. The materials are either imported mineral water or a homemade equivalent at forty-three cents a US gallon. Which route to take is the only question that remains.

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The problem

Aluminum is the third most abundant element in the earth’s crust. No known organism uses it for anything. Living systems sustain themselves in the presence of enormous quantities of aluminum in rocks and soil and keep it out of their own chemistry entirely. Industrial production of aluminum metal began in the 1890s, and in the century and a quarter since, aluminum has been placed in municipal drinking water as a coagulant, in cookware, in food additives, in antiperspirants, in antacids, in vaccines as an adjuvant, in cosmetics, in medications, and in food packaging.³ The body carries no built-in route for clearing aluminum from brain tissue. Nothing in the human body is set up to remove something that was never meant to be inside it.

The exposures are chronic and additive. Approximately sixty percent of the body’s aluminum ends up stored in bone, which turns over slowly. The remainder distributes through soft tissue, with brain accumulation rising with age. Exley’s measurements show elevated aluminum in one hundred percent of brain tissue from Alzheimer’s donors, and the brain regions carrying the most aluminum show the most severe degeneration.⁴ Donors with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis carry pathologically significant brain aluminum in at least one brain region each.⁵ Crouse’s analysis using Sir Austin Bradford Hill’s criteria for causality concludes that aluminum satisfies every criterion for being a cause of Alzheimer’s.⁶ Exley’s work, built from an entirely different starting point in fish gill toxicity and aquatic chemistry, reached the same conclusion.⁷

Reducing new exposure stops the accumulation from growing. It does nothing about what has already arrived. For that, an elimination route is required.

How the chemistry works

When rainwater percolates through rock, silicon dissolves out of the mineral matrix as orthosilicic acid, a central silicon atom bonded to four hydroxyl groups.⁸ OSA is soluble in water up to about 200 parts per million; above that, it polymerizes into solid silica. In regions where volcanic activity or recent glaciation has exposed fresh rock to weathering, surface and spring waters carry OSA at concentrations between 50 and 150 ppm. Volvic from the Auvergne volcanic region of France, Spritzer from the Malaysian highlands, Fiji from the Pacific island of Viti Levu, and Gerolsteiner from Germany all fall in this range. In heavily eroded regions, including most of the United Kingdom, most of Australia, and the eastern United States, surface and tap waters carry almost no OSA. People drinking from streams in volcanic or recently glaciated country drank OSA-rich water as a matter of daily habit. In the industrialized world, most tap water carries almost none.

OSA that reaches the gut follows water into the bloodstream. Blood plasma OSA is tightly regulated by the kidneys between 5 and 10 micromoles per liter, well below the concentration required for OSA to react with aluminum. The regulation exists for good reason. If plasma OSA rose above approximately 40 micromoles per liter throughout the body, OSA would react with aluminum hydroxide in general circulation and form solid hydroxyaluminosilicate particles in blood vessels. The homeostatic set point prevents that.⁹

In the proximal convoluted tubules of the kidney, local OSA concentration is driven higher than the systemic level by specialized membrane transporters. Local phosphate and citrate concentrations drop. Three conditions are then met simultaneously: OSA concentration above 40 micromoles per liter, pH above 4.5, and aluminum hydroxide available. Under those conditions, OSA undergoes an irreversible condensation reaction with aluminum hydroxide, forming Al-O-Si bonds and producing stable, non-toxic hydroxyaluminosilicates.¹⁰ These particles are small enough to be filtered into the pre-urine and excreted. The same process occurs in the eccrine sweat glands, which is why sweating also enhances aluminum elimination.¹¹

The arrangement is unusual. Most body regulatory systems distribute their signals widely at useful concentrations. The OSA system works the other way: it keeps OSA well below its reactive threshold everywhere in the body, and concentrates it above that threshold only at the two sites where aluminum removal happens. The reaction that would be dangerous in a blood vessel is the same reaction that is useful in a renal tubule or a sweat gland. The body solves the compartmentalization problem by preventing the reaction from occurring anywhere else.

The reaction is specific to aluminum. OSA does not bind iron, calcium, or magnesium at physiological pH, which distinguishes it sharply from classical chelators such as deferoxamine, which pulls iron out of the body alongside aluminum and requires close monitoring to prevent anemia. OSA has no such liability.

The mechanism was demonstrated in 1996 by Bellia, Birchall, and Roberts. They dosed a healthy volunteer with radioactive ²⁶Al, waited forty-eight hours for the aluminum to equilibrate with short-term tissue reservoirs, then gave the volunteer OSA in beer at 51 ppm. Plasma aluminum dropped more than fivefold within hours, with concomitant increases in urinary silicon and aluminum excretion.¹² King and colleagues confirmed the dose-response in 1997 with a more detailed protocol.¹³ Exley’s group then documented the effect in Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis patients in two separate clinical trials.

The question of whether OSA also acts on aluminum already deposited in brain tissue is less fully resolved. Rat studies show that oral OSA facilitates aluminum elimination from the cortex, hippocampus, striatum, cerebellum, thalamus, and olfactory bulb.¹⁴ The cognitive improvements observed in Exley’s twelve-week Alzheimer’s trial, the sustained MMSE improvements in Crouse’s mother, and the many anecdotal reports of cognitive recovery in people drinking OSA-rich water all point in the same direction. The precise transit mechanism across the blood-brain barrier has not been fully worked out, which both Crouse and Exley acknowledge. The effect is reproducible.

The evidence

Exley’s 2006 clinical trial, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, recruited fifteen individuals with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s together with their caregivers. All participants drank up to 1.5 liters per day of Spritzer mineral water, approximately 119 ppm OSA, for twelve weeks. At the end of the trial, three of the fifteen patients, twenty percent, showed clinically significant improvements in cognitive function as measured by standardized instruments.¹ The other twelve were cognitively stable. The challenge Exley has repeatedly issued since publication, that anyone identify a pharmaceutical Alzheimer’s trial producing an equivalent twenty percent clinically significant cognitive improvement, has not been met.

A follow-up multiple sclerosis trial recruited fifteen individuals with progressive MS. For the first twelve weeks, baseline urinary aluminum excretion was measured. The result confirmed what Exley’s group had already seen: MS patients, particularly women, excrete abnormally high amounts of aluminum, consistent with an abnormally high body burden. For the second twelve weeks, participants drank 1.5 liters per day of Spritzer. Urinary aluminum excretion rose significantly for every participant. By the final week, roughly half were beginning to show falling excretion, interpreted as the body burden beginning to decline.¹⁵ A year after the trial ended, Exley was contacted by a consultant neurologist whose patient had continued drinking silicon-rich mineral water on her own initiative. The neurologist reported that her MS was no longer progressing. The neurologist did not contact Exley again.

Crouse’s mother is the longest-running single case. Diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment and sundowners at eighty-five, started on one liter per day of Fiji water combined with systematic aluminum source elimination. Over the following year her MMSE scores improved; her sundowners resolved; her memory consolidation returned.² She continued the protocol for the remaining twelve years of her life. She died at ninety-seven without reaching end-stage Alzheimer’s.

Crouse himself, with his wife Laurie Adamson, has been drinking three to four cups per day of homemade silica water for ten years. The biomarkers are documented in his 2026 book, Discovering Magic in Water that Makes Life Possible on Earth. In their mid-seventies, their 24-hour urinary aluminum levels sit below the Mayo Clinic healthy maximum reference for adults, 0.48 micromoles per 24 hours. Their blood pressure is normal. Their high-sensitivity CRP is below 1 mg/L. Their pTau217, a blood biomarker associated with Alzheimer’s pathology, is very low.¹⁶ A reader whose case Crouse records in the book shows what happens when the protocol stops. After four years of drinking Silicade, his 24-hour urinary aluminum had come down to 0.33 μmol/24hr at age sixty-seven, in the healthy young-adult range. He stopped drinking the water for a year, and the level doubled to 0.67. He restarted.

Beyond the trials and the named cases in the opening, Crouse has collected a substantial body of reader-reported outcomes. An eighty-nine-year-old man with Alzheimer’s goes from MMSE 19 to MMSE 25 after two months on 32 ounces per day of Fiji water. A woman diagnosed in 2020 describes six weeks on Fiji water producing a sense that her brain was starting to work more smoothly. A European reader on Volvic for six months reports the sensation that a fog had lifted. A seventy-year-old father whose memory had deteriorated to the point of not knowing where he was while driving returns to normal within a week on silica water combined with aluminum source elimination.¹⁸ These are not controlled trials. What they report matches the published trial results, lines up with the chemistry, and lines up with the pattern across other cases.

A twelve-week trial in which twenty percent of Alzheimer’s patients drinking silicon-rich mineral water showed cognitive improvement is the single most striking published result in the entire Alzheimer’s clinical literature. It has never been scaled up because funding for scaling it up has never been granted. Exley attempted to secure such funding and was blocked at every turn, including by Danone, Volvic’s parent company, which signed a research contract with Keele University and then pulled out six months later with no stated reason beyond a reference to Danone’s “other research on Alzheimer’s disease.”¹⁹ The gap between what has been demonstrated and what has been pursued is itself one of the clearest pieces of evidence in this field.

Three of fifteen patients in Exley’s twelve-week Alzheimer’s trial showed cognitive improvement. Twelve did not. Crouse’s mother did not recover her prior cognition; she stopped deteriorating and preserved what she had. William Miller did recover to high normal, on a protocol he has sustained for years. The pattern across the trials, the long cases, and the reader reports is consistent: OSA intake reliably reduces body aluminum burden in those who stay on the protocol, and cognitive outcomes depend on how much damage has already accumulated and how long the protocol runs. The intervention is a sustained aluminum-management strategy. It is not a short-course cure. The narrower claim is the one the evidence supports, and it is enough to act on.

What does not work

OSA is specific. Not all forms of silicon in water, food, or supplements convert to OSA at concentrations sufficient to react with aluminum. Exley is explicit on this point. Silica supplements that claim to remove aluminum are, in his view, selling a story that peer-reviewed evidence does not support, and the fact that several such supplements cite his research in their marketing material is one of the standing irritations of his working life.²⁰

Crouse has tested fourteen silica supplements in his own laboratory using the Coradin blue silicomolybdic spectrophotometric assay to measure OSA release under simulated gastric conditions. Most released too little OSA to be useful. Choline-stabilized OSA, which is the most commonly marketed OSA supplement, has approximately 17 percent bioavailability compared with 43 percent for OSA in mineral water, and the dosing recommendation of ten drops a day delivers only a small fraction of the OSA in a single liter of Fiji. Crouse’s mother took choline-stabilized OSA for a year with no observable improvement before being switched to Fiji water.²¹

Sodium meta-silicate, sold as Metso Pentabead 10 by the PQ Corporation, polymerizes in water at pH 6.5 and will not form OSA at the concentration required.²² Colloidal silica, diatomaceous earth, and silica supplements based on insoluble silicon dioxide do not release OSA at useful concentrations. Horsetail and bamboo-extract silicon products have not been shown to deliver measurable OSA to the bloodstream.

Three sources have been demonstrated to work: natural mineral waters with OSA above approximately 30 ppm, Crouse’s homemade silica water, and beer, which is where the Bellia-Birchall-Roberts study first demonstrated the effect in 1996 and which is not recommended as the primary vehicle for obvious reasons.

Exposure reduction, the other pillar

Both Exley and Crouse treat exposure reduction and OSA intake as co-equal. Drinking a liter a day of Fiji water while continuing to cook in aluminum pans, apply aluminum antiperspirant daily, eat baked goods raised with aluminum phosphate, and drink from aluminum cans is pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it. The hole has to be closed first, or at least substantially narrowed, for OSA intake to do its real work.

The sources, roughly ranked by typical daily exposure load:

Municipal drinking water. Most urban water supplies add aluminum salts (alum, sodium aluminate, or polyaluminum chloride) as coagulants to settle out organic matter. The US EPA’s secondary standard caps aluminum in drinking water at 200 ppb, though 180 ppb has been shown to roughly double Alzheimer’s risk.²³ Residual aluminum sits in the water that comes out of the kitchen faucet. Filtering through a Brita pitcher removes a portion of this; filtering at pH 4 to 5, as in the Silicade preparation below, removes substantially more. A bone char filter downstream of a Brita removes fluoride and arsenic without removing OSA. Fluoride in drinking water is itself a problem because fluoride increases the absorption of aluminum across the gut, which is Exley’s explanation for most of fluoride’s documented cognitive toxicity.²⁴

Aluminum cookware. Aluminum pots, pans, baking trays, and foil leach aluminum into food, particularly when the food is acidic (tomato sauce, lemon-based marinades, vinegar-based dressings) or salted. Cast iron, stainless steel, ceramic, and glass alternatives are available. Discard aluminum foil for cooking and food storage; parchment paper and glass containers do the same jobs. Non-stick cookware with intact coatings is safer than bare aluminum, but any scratch exposes the metal beneath.²⁵

Antiperspirants. Antiperspirants (as distinct from deodorants) are aluminum chlorohydrate, aluminum zirconium tetrachlorohydrex glycine, or similar aluminum salts, formulated specifically to be absorbed through skin and plug sweat ducts. Exley’s measurements show accumulated aluminum in the upper outer quadrant of breast tissue from mastectomies, the region closest to the axilla where antiperspirant is applied. His published work on young regular users of antiperspirants shows an elevated risk of breast cancer.²⁶ Aluminum-free deodorants are widely available. The daily use of an aluminum antiperspirant is one of the heaviest sustained exposures most adults experience.

Baking powder and commercially baked goods. Sodium aluminum phosphate is the leavening agent in most commercial baking powder and in the great majority of commercially baked goods. Rumford, Bob’s Red Mill, Clabber Girl’s aluminum-free line, and Hain Pure Foods make aluminum-free baking powder. Many store-bought cakes, muffins, and breads list only “leavening” on the label without specifying; the safer assumption is that any such product contains it.

Antacids. Aluminum hydroxide is a common active ingredient in over-the-counter antacids (Maalox, Mylanta, some Gaviscon formulations) and in prescription drugs for peptic ulcers. In gastric acid, aluminum hydroxide releases aluminum ions, which absorb across the gut. Exley’s unpublished analysis of UK General Practitioners Research Database data found that children prescribed an antacid before age six were 69 percent more likely to be diagnosed with an allergy; Exley describes this as a “look-and-see exercise” rather than a formal study.²⁷ Aluminum-free alternatives (calcium carbonate, magnesium hydroxide) are widely available.

Food coloring and processed foods. Aluminum lakes (chemical variants of aluminum hydroxide bonded to a dye) are the colorants in blue and purple sweets, in cake decorations, in processed cheese slices, and in some pharmaceutical coatings. Aluminum salts are added to milk powders to prevent clumping. Modified food starch in processed foods often contains aluminum starch octenylsuccinate. Reading labels catches most of these; eating fewer processed foods catches more.

Aluminum cans and foil-lined packaging. Soft drinks, beer, and juice sold in aluminum cans leach aluminum into the liquid, more so if the can is dented or has been stored for a long period. Foil-lined cardboard cartons present a similar issue over the shelf life. Glass bottles are the clean choice.

Vaccines. Aluminum adjuvants (aluminum hydroxide, aluminum phosphate, aluminum potassium sulfate) are present in a wide range of childhood and adult vaccines. Injected intramuscularly, this aluminum bypasses the gut and bypasses first-pass metabolism by the liver. Exley’s published work on vaccine aluminum, and the body of research from Angrand and colleagues published in Toxics and other journals in 2022 and 2025, documents the toxicological consequences in detail.²⁸,²⁹ Reducing exposure from this source is harder than from the others and requires a conversation with a provider that goes well beyond label-reading.

Smaller sources. Aluminum salts appear in sunscreens, lipsticks, and a range of cosmetics as processing aids or active ingredients. Lipsticks in particular reach a surface that is routinely licked, swallowed, or kissed; aluminum-free alternatives exist. Some dental cements, implant surfaces, and craniofacial prostheses contain or leach aluminum, and titanium alloys, zirconia, or aluminum-free cements are the better options where they are available.

Laurie Adamson has compiled a working list of aluminum sources and recommended alternatives on the Crouse website at prevent-alzheimers-autism-stroke.com. Exley’s substack covers much of the same material from a UK and European starting point. The practical sequence is to identify the sources used daily first and replace them, then work through the sources used weekly or occasionally. The order matters because daily exposures do most of the damage. The water does the rest once the exposures have been reduced.

Where to buy, and what to look for

Exley’s practical recommendation for everyday use is a mineral water with silicon content above 30 mg/L when expressed as silica, or above 14 mg/L when expressed as silicon or silicic acid, drunk at approximately one liter per day.³⁰

Fiji water. 146 ppm OSA, labeled as 93 mg/L silica on the bottle. Sourced from an artesian aquifer in Viti Levu that filters through volcanic rock. Widely available in US and Canadian grocery stores and online. Current retail runs roughly two to three dollars per liter, which makes daily use expensive over a multi-year protocol.

Volvic. 51 ppm OSA. Sourced from the Auvergne volcanic region of France. This is the water Exley used in his first proof-of-concept trial.⁷ Widely available in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, selectively available in the United States. A liter of Volvic delivers roughly a third of the OSA of a liter of Fiji, so a larger daily volume is required for equivalent effect.

Spritzer and Acilis. Approximately 119 ppm OSA. Spritzer is the Malaysian mineral water Exley used in both his Alzheimer’s and MS clinical trials.¹,¹⁵ In the United Kingdom, Europe, and South Africa it is imported and sold under the name Acilis by SilicaWaters Ltd, a social enterprise run by Rex Garratt. Acilis is explicitly marketed with Exley’s clinical trial evidence behind it.³¹

Gerolsteiner. Approximately 64 ppm OSA. German, widely available across Europe, selectively available in North America. The high overall mineral content also makes it a useful calcium and magnesium source.

Various smaller spring waters in Iceland, Norway, Poland, and parts of central Europe carry high OSA concentrations and are regionally available. Appendix I of Crouse’s 2026 book has a complete international table of OSA content across commercially available mineral waters.¹⁶

For Australian readers specifically, the commercial options are limited. Most Australian spring waters are drawn from aged geology and carry low OSA. Fiji is the main commercially available option carrying clinically relevant OSA, and even that comes at a substantial price per liter sustained over years. The accessibility question is one of the reasons Crouse developed a homemade route.

Exley says you cannot make it. Crouse has been making it for ten years.

Exley and Crouse agree on the mechanism, on the evidence from the clinical trials, on the futility of silica supplements, on the preventative value of daily silicon-rich water, and on the primary indications where OSA intake is useful. Crouse’s first book, Preventing Alzheimer’s, Autism, and Stroke, was peer-reviewed by Exley prior to publication. The alignment on the science is substantial.

The disagreement is on whether a person can safely make silicon-rich water at home.

Exley’s position is categorical. From the final chapter of Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom: “Specifically relating to safety, I want to take this opportunity to warn you against suggestions on the Internet that you can make your own silicon-rich mineral water. You cannot. Preparation of something equivalent to a silicon-rich mineral water requires sophisticated laboratory equipment. In my laboratory we prepare water that is high in dissolved silicon, silicic acid, for research purposes. However, under no circumstances would I advocate drinking this water. Unless water is made or bottled under conditions that have been proven to be biologically safe, you cannot produce a drinking water that is safe for human consumption. Even in a sophisticated laboratory such as my own. Do not believe what you read and watch on the Internet: you cannot make a silicon-rich mineral water. Only Nature can do this.”³²

Crouse’s position is that Exley is wrong on this point, and that he has demonstrated it is wrong over a decade of self-tracked biomarker data. In 2012 he built a laboratory to measure aluminum down to parts per billion and OSA down to parts per million. He tested a range of sodium silicate preparations and identified one specific formulation, low-alkalinity hydrous sodium silicate powder manufactured by the PQ Corporation under the name Product G, which is used worldwide to add silicate to drinking water under American Water Works Association Standard B104-98.¹⁶ The powder is 99.5 percent pure, is sold through chemical supply houses, and is safe to measure and handle with standard kitchen tools. Crouse’s recipe uses this powder together with sodium bisulfate, a swimming-pool pH adjuster also sold on Amazon by LoudWolf. The result is one US gallon of water containing 127 ppm OSA at output, rising to a stable 146 ppm after 72 hours. The cost per gallon is approximately forty-three cents and the active work time is about five minutes. He and his wife Laurie have been drinking it, three to four cups per day, for ten years.

Exley is correct that liquid water glass (concentrated sodium silicate solution) is dangerous to handle, difficult to measure accurately, and difficult to clean up after a spill. Crouse acknowledges this and does not use water glass. Exley is correct that silicate preparations vary enormously in purity and in what they release in solution, and that most of what is sold through hardware stores and general chemical suppliers will not produce useful OSA. Crouse worked through this problem experimentally and documents which specific product does.

Exley’s warning assumes that the person reading it will attempt to use water glass or an uncharacterized silicate from an undocumented source. If that were the only route, the warning would be justified. Crouse’s recipe uses a specific drinking-water-grade product at specific pH steps with specific filtration to remove the small amount of residual aluminum introduced by the ingredients and the tap water base. His biomarker data, including 24-hour urinary aluminum below the Mayo Clinic healthy reference after ten years of use, is the strongest available answer to the question of whether the resulting water is safe to drink long-term.

A reader weighing this disagreement has three options: buy a documented silicon-rich mineral water and accept the cost; make silica water at home using Crouse’s recipe, published free on his website and demonstrated step by step in his YouTube video; or do nothing. The third option is a decision to leave the aluminum already in the body where it is. For readers in markets where imported mineral waters are expensive or scarce, which includes most of Australia, the home-preparation route is the only practical answer to a protocol that has to continue for years.

Crouse’s 2026 book, Discovering Magic in Water that Makes Life Possible on Earth, is the authoritative source for the full chemistry, the biomarker data, and the recipe with all its options and troubleshooting notes. Buying the book supports his continued work: [BOOK LINK].

How to make silica water at home: Crouse’s recipe

What follows is Crouse’s own recipe, published free on his website at prevent-alzheimers-autism-stroke.com and demonstrated step by step in his YouTube video. It is reproduced here so readers have the procedure in one place with the essay. Readers planning to make Silicade should treat Crouse’s 2026 book, Discovering Magic in Water that Makes Life Possible on Earth, as the authoritative source: it contains the complete chemistry, the impurity tables, the troubleshooting notes, the testing protocols, and detail that cannot be fitted into an essay-length summary. Buying the book supports his continued work:

Ingredients

Low-alkalinity hydrous sodium silicate powder, 99.5 percent pure, with an SiO₂ to Na₂O ratio of 3.22. This is PQ Corporation’s Product G, sold through ChemicalStore.com or Zchemicals.com in 2-, 10-, or 50-pound containers. Order “sodium silicate, low alkalinity.” Do not order “sodium silicate, alkaline” and do not use sodium meta-silicate (sold as Metso Pentabead 10).

Sodium bisulfate (also called sodium hydrogen sulfate), 99.5 percent pure, as microprills (small round beads). The recommended source is Professor Fullwood’s product sold by LoudWolf Ltd on Amazon.

Baking soda, standard grocery-store sodium bicarbonate.

Tools

A set of mini measuring spoons including a dash (1/8 teaspoon) and a smidgen (1/32 teaspoon). Crouse recommends Beryler, Yellrin, or Dostien sets because other brands and antique spoons are not reliably calibrated.

A 1-cup Pyrex measuring cup.

A 1-gallon container with a 1-gallon mark.

A pitcher-style Brita filter with a standard filter, a refillable Brita filter, or a Brita Maxtra+ filter. These three remove aluminum at low pH without removing OSA.

A spatula for leveling the spoons, and a stirring utensil.

The steps

1. Place one level dash and two level smidgens of sodium silicate powder (3/16 teaspoon total, approximately 600 mg) into the Pyrex cup.

2. Add 1/8 cup of tap water. Do not add more water at this stage; higher volume lowers the pH and reduces the silicate’s solubility.

3. Heat to boiling in the microwave or on the stovetop and boil for 30 seconds. Small insoluble residue is normal; the powder is 99.5 percent soluble sodium silicate and 0.5 percent insoluble impurity.

4. Dilute immediately with a small amount of cool tap water.

5. Pour the full contents of the Pyrex cup into the 1-gallon container.

6. Fill the gallon container to the mark with unheated tap water. The resulting solution is OSA at approximately pH 9.8.

7. Add one level dash (approximately 830 mg) of sodium bisulfate microprills. This acidifies the solution to pH 4 to 5. If the tap water is unusually alkaline (above pH 8.5), use a pH meter to add a little more sodium bisulfate until the pH reaches 4.0 to 5.0.

8. Stir thoroughly, then pour the acidified solution through the Brita pitcher filter. At pH 4 to 5, aluminum from the tap water and the ingredients is in a form the Brita filter removes. Above pH 5 it is not. This step is critical. Skipping it leaves residual aluminum in the finished product.

9. Add two level smidgens of baking soda to the filtered gallon. This brings the pH back up to approximately 6.5, which is comfortable to drink and stable in storage.

10. Stir to dissolve.

11. Store in the dark at room temperature or in the refrigerator. Freshly made Silicade contains approximately 127 ppm OSA. The concentration rises and stabilizes at 146 ppm after 72 hours at room temperature, and remains at that level for years.

Why each step matters

The boiling step in step 3 gets sodium silicate into solution; sodium silicate does not dissolve in cold tap water. The 1/8 cup limit in step 2 is because higher water volumes drop the pH during boiling and prevent the silicate from dissolving.

The acidification in step 7 serves two purposes. It brings the solution into a stable OSA concentration well below OSA’s saturation level, which prevents polymerization into solid silica. More importantly for the finished product’s safety, it converts any aluminum present (from the ingredients, from the tap water) into a labile form that the Brita filter removes in step 8.

The filtration step brings the aluminum level down to a safe range. Starting from tap water containing up to 42 micrograms per liter of aluminum, the Brita filter operating at pH 4 to 5 reduces aluminum in the finished Silicade to less than 10 micrograms per liter. The US EPA’s secondary standard for aluminum in drinking water, by comparison, is 200 micrograms per liter.¹⁶

The baking soda addition in step 9 neutralizes the acidity back to drinking pH without reversing any of the previous steps.

What not to do

Do not use distilled, deionized, or reverse osmosis water as the base. The trace minerals in tap water matter for the finished product’s electrolyte profile.

Do not use liquid water glass. Do not use sodium meta-silicate. Do not skip the Brita filtration step.

Do not heat the finished water above approximately 94°C / 202°F. Above that temperature, OSA concentrates at nucleate boiling sites and crystallizes on surfaces, which depletes the solution. For coffee or tea, keep the brewing temperature at or below this limit. And do not brew in an aluminum coffee maker, which will add aluminum back to the water you just took the trouble to filter out of.

Optional additions

If local tap water is low in calcium, two level dashes of calcium chloride (99 percent pure, from LoudWolf on Amazon) raise calcium by 80 ppm. Calcium above 75 ppm has a documented protective effect on cognition.¹⁶

If local tap water is low in magnesium, a dash of magnesium chloride hexahydrate (also from LoudWolf) raises magnesium by 20 ppm.

For a sparkling version, carbonate the finished water. The result is a pH 4.5 sparkling beverage.

Sourcing outside the United States

The suppliers Crouse names are based in the United States. ChemicalStore.com and ZChemicals.com ship PQ Product G sodium silicate internationally. LoudWolf’s sodium bisulfate, calcium chloride, and magnesium chloride are sold through Amazon in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and most European markets. Brita pitcher filters are widely available locally in Australia, the UK, and continental Europe. Local chemical supply houses sometimes carry drinking-water-grade sodium silicate, but the specific low-alkalinity PQ Product G that Crouse validated and tested is worth sourcing from the named US suppliers rather than substituting an uncharacterized local product. The main variable is shipping cost on the chemicals; a 2-pound container of sodium silicate is enough for several hundred gallons of Silicade and lasts a household years, so the per-gallon cost including international shipping remains well below the price of a liter of Fiji.

How much, how often, for how long

Exley and Crouse agree that approximately one liter per day is the target intake. They differ slightly on timing.

Exley recommends one liter of silicon-rich mineral water per day, taken either in several small volumes throughout the day or in two or three larger volumes. He drinks one bottle of Acilis per day himself. His framing is explicit: “I consider silicon-rich mineral waters as a philosophy for living in the Aluminum Age as opposed to a classical ‘detox’ therapy for aluminum.”³³

Crouse recommends three to four cups per day of OSA-rich water, taken around mealtimes, based on measured OSA kinetics. The functional half-life of OSA’s aluminum-removing activity is approximately two hours. Spreading the dose maintains elevated OSA at the renal tubules for a longer fraction of the day than a single large volume does. Three to four cups of silica water per day delivers roughly seven to ten times the OSA intake that was shown in Rondeau’s French epidemiological study to reduce Alzheimer’s risk by a factor of 0.69.³⁴

Both schedules work. The Crouse schedule is slightly more efficient on paper and matters more for someone with a known heavy body burden.

The time course is years, not weeks or months. Approximately sixty percent of the body’s aluminum is stored in bone, which turns over slowly. In an elderly person who has accumulated aluminum over seventy or eighty years, bringing 24-hour urinary aluminum below the Mayo Clinic healthy reference of 0.48 micromoles per 24 hours is a six-to-ten-year project. Crouse and his wife reached that reference level after approximately that interval of consistent daily use.¹⁶

The relevant biomarker for tracking progress is 24-hour urinary aluminum. In the United States, Quest Diagnostics offers the test with a doctor’s prescription; one reader of Crouse’s used Quest for exactly this purpose and documented a measurable drop in aluminum after four months on three to four cups of Fiji per day. In other markets, functional medicine practitioners can order the test through specialty laboratories. Hair aluminum is not a reliable biomarker; Exley’s position is that aluminum in hair reflects external contamination from shampoos, dyes, and conditioners more than it reflects body burden.³⁵

In the first few weeks of starting silicon-rich water, urinary aluminum excretion will rise as OSA begins pulling aluminum out of the blood and short-term tissue reservoirs. This has been documented in healthy volunteers, in Alzheimer’s patients, and in MS patients. Cognitive improvement, where it occurs, has shown up at twelve weeks in roughly one in five Alzheimer’s patients in Exley’s trial. In Crouse’s documented cases, improvements in sundowners, in driving ability, in short-term memory, and in daily function often appear in the first one to three months, with more substantial change over six to twelve months. The protocol has to continue after the first visible improvement; stopping drops OSA levels back to baseline within hours, and bone-stored aluminum gradually redistributes into soft tissue if the elimination pressure is removed.

The whole protocol sits on top of exposure reduction, not in place of it. Water removing aluminum while the sources keep delivering more cancels out. Reduce the exposure, then drink the water, every day, for years.

Closing

One liter a day, for years, tracked by 24-hour urinary aluminum. The chemistry was established in isotope studies in 1996 and reproduced in a peer-reviewed Alzheimer’s clinical trial in 2006 in which twenty percent of participants recorded clinically significant cognitive improvement. Twenty years later, no funded replication has been attempted. The silence from the funding bodies is itself a form of evidence about which research questions are permitted and which are not.

Crouse’s mother was eighty-five when she was told she would die of Alzheimer’s. She lived to ninety-seven. She was still herself.

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How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old

A bad metal called aluminum gets into people a little at a time, from food and water and from the stuff grown-ups put under their arms. It is too small to see, but it builds up. When too much of it builds up in your head, it makes it harder for grown-ups to remember things.

A special kind of water comes out of some rocks. It has tiny invisible pieces in it that fit onto aluminum like a key fits into a lock. The pieces do not fit onto anything else in your body, only aluminum. When you drink the water, the pieces travel through you, find the aluminum, and lock onto it. Once they are locked together, they make a new tiny thing that goes down the pipes when you go to the bathroom.

If you drink this water every day for a long time, more and more of the bad metal leaves. That is why some grandmas and grandpas who were starting to forget things started to remember them again.

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In Print

The Unbekoming library is available in paperback, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The shelf begins with the paradigm question underneath everything else — No Virus, the isolation problem, the collapse of virology’s foundational claims, and a disease-by-disease reappraisal — and moves through the suppressed compounds mainstream medicine set aside: The DMSO Book, Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy, The Iodine Book, and The Hydrogen Peroxide Book. Two more recover what’s still on the kitchen shelf: Baking Soda and The Castor Oil Book. Two more recover the minerals modern soil, water, and processing quietly stripped from the diet: The Magnesium Handbook and The Boron Book. Sitting alongside these is No Contagion, co-authored with Jamie Andrews — the case against germ theory itself, catalogued through 258 failed contagion experiments.

The critique books cover what medicine, dentistry, psychiatry, and veterinary practice have become. The Unvaccinated treats the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit treats cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth as the dietary problem they are. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM and the specific damage of every major psychiatric drug class. The Vitamin K Injection covers what happens in the first hours of a newborn’s life.

The full shelf is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming. A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the skeptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.

References

1. Exley C, Korchazhkina O, Job D, Strekopytov S, Polwart A, Crome P. “Non-invasive therapy to reduce the body burden of aluminium in Alzheimer’s disease.” Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease 10, no. 1 (2006): 17–24.

2. Interview with Dennis N. Crouse, PhD. Unbekoming, September 4, 2024. https://www.unbekoming.com

3. Exley, Christopher. Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom: Discussions with Mr. Aluminum. Chapter 8, “Live Safely and Effectively in the Aluminum Age.”

4. Mold M, Umar D, King A, Exley C. “Aluminium in brain tissue in familial Alzheimer’s disease.” Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology 40 (March 2017): 30–36.

5. Exley C. Quantitative and qualitative measurements of aluminum in brain tissue from donors with multiple sclerosis, as reported in Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom, chapter on multiple sclerosis.

6. Crouse, Dennis N. Preventing Alzheimer’s, Autism, and Stroke (2016). Application of Bradford Hill’s criteria to aluminum and Alzheimer’s.

7. Birchall JD, Exley C, Chappell JS, Phillips MJ. “Acute toxicity of aluminium to fish eliminated in silicon-rich acid waters.” Nature 338 (March 9, 1989): 146–148.

8. Exley C, Guerriero G, Lopez X. “Silicic acid: The omniscient molecule.” Science of The Total Environment 665 (May 15, 2019): 432–437.

9. Crouse, Dennis N. Discovering Magic in Water that Makes Life Possible on Earth (2026). Chapter 2, on OSA homeostasis and plasma regulation.

10. Beardmore J, Lopez X, Mujika JI, Exley C. “What is the mechanism of formation of hydroxyaluminosilicates?” Scientific Reports 6 (August 1, 2016): 30913.

11. Crouse, Dennis N. Discovering Magic in Water that Makes Life Possible on Earth (2026). Chapter 3, on sweat gland OSA transport.

12. Bellia JP, Birchall JD, Roberts NB. “Beer: a dietary source of silicon and its effect on aluminium absorption and excretion in man.” Study with radioactive ²⁶Al tracer, 1996.

13. King SJ, et al. Confirmation of OSA dose-response for aluminum excretion, 1997.

14. Rat brain OSA studies showing aluminum elimination from six brain regions, as reviewed in Crouse 2026, chapter 6.

15. Exley C, Mamutse G, Korchazhkina O, Pye E, Strekopytov S, Polwart A, Hawkins C. “Elevated urinary excretion of aluminium and iron in multiple sclerosis.” Multiple Sclerosis Journal 12 (2006): 533–540. Follow-up MS trial reported in EBioMedicine.

16. Crouse, Dennis N. Discovering Magic in Water that Makes Life Possible on Earth (2026). Chapter 7 (recipe and biomarker data) and Chapter 10 (ADOR calculation and Mayo Clinic reference).

17. Interview with William Miller: Defying Alzheimer’s: One Man’s Triumph Over a Trillion-Dollar Lie. Unbekoming, April 25, 2025.

18. Reader-reported cases collected in Crouse, Discovering Magic in Water (2026), chapter on anecdotal cognitive improvements.

19. Exley, Christopher. Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom. Account of the Danone/Volvic research contract and its termination.

20. Exley, Christopher. Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom. Warning on silica supplements and groundless citations of his research.

21. Interview with Dennis N. Crouse, PhD (No. 2). Unbekoming, March 24, 2026. On supplement testing and choline-stabilized OSA bioavailability.

22. Crouse, Discovering Magic in Water (2026). Chapter 7, warning on sodium meta-silicate.

23. Crouse, Discovering Magic in Water (2026). Chapter 10, aluminum dose-response for Alzheimer’s risk at 180 ppb in drinking water.

24. Interview with Dr. Christopher Exley. Unbekoming, April 6, 2024. On fluoride-aluminum interaction.

25. Exley, Christopher. Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom. Chapter 8, on cookware.

26. Linhart C, Talasz H, Morandi EM, Exley C, Lindner HH, Taucher S, Egle D, Brunner C, Concin N. “Use of underarm cosmetic products in relation to risk of breast cancer: a case-control study.” EBioMedicine 21 (July 2017): 79–85.

27. Exley, Christopher. UK General Practitioners Research Database analysis of antacid prescriptions and childhood allergy diagnoses, reported in Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom.

28. Angrand L, et al. 2022 paper on aluminum adjuvants published in Toxics.

29. Angrand L, et al. 2025 paper on aluminum adjuvants and neurological outcomes.

30. Exley, Christopher. Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom. Silicon Fact Sheet, dosing recommendations.

31. SilicaWaters Ltd (UK). Acilis mineral water product information. https://www.silicawaters.com

32. Exley, Christopher. Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom. Warning against homemade silicon-rich water, final chapter.

33. Exley, Christopher. Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom. Framing of silicon-rich mineral water as a daily practice.

34. Rondeau V, Jacqmin-Gadda H, Commenges D, Helmer C, Dartigues JF. “Aluminum and silica in drinking water and the risk of Alzheimer’s disease or cognitive decline: findings from 15-year follow-up of the PAQUID cohort.” American Journal of Epidemiology 169, no. 4 (February 2009): 489–496.

35. Exley, Christopher. Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom. Chapter on aluminum testing in hair, blood, and urine.