Lemon may be an excellent and rich source of vitamin C, but lemon water is not.
Lemons contain pectin fiber, lemon juice does not (unless it's very, very pulpy). Lemon water contains even less. The fruit of a lemon, eaten whole, like with a knife and fork, contains about 1% pectin fiber. Lemon peels contain about 30% pectin fiber. Pectin is a constituent of cell walls, not in the juice. A whole, fresh lemon contains about 2.4 grams of dietary fiber (about 5 grams if you eat the entire peel).
Lemons, nor anything else you can eat, will help maintain or balance your body's pH levels. If you alter your body's pH levels you will die. Our blood’s pH is 7.4 which slightly alkaline. Enzymes that facilitate chemical reactions in the cells work only in a narrow range of pH. Any significant change (below about 7 or over 7.7) means certain death. A series of buffers and compensation mechanisms keep the pH in our blood from moving far from 7.4. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most prevalent acid in our body, and is a product of cellular activity. The blood carries CO2 away and eliminates it in the lungs. Everything we eat is broken down by stomach acid (pH of about 3 – very acidic). Everything that is ejected from our stomach, into our intestines, is then immediately neutralized by digestive liquids and enzymes. Everything we eat and digest will end up at the same pH in our intestines. What this means is the initial pH of any thing we eat is completely irrelevant.
Please do not pee (or spit) on litmus paper and think the result is your body's pH level.
Having warm lemon juice early in the morning helps flush out toxins? Really? Warm lemon juice in the morning will somehow, as if by magic, do something the kidneys and liver fail to do 24 hours a day 7 days a week? No. In the context of medicine and biology, "detoxification" means treatments for dangerous levels of drugs, alcohol, or poisons, like heavy metals. You cannot "detox" your body with anything you find on the pharmacy shelves or in the produce section of the grocery. The "Master Detox Flushing Cleanse Ear Candles, Coffee Enema and Cucumber Slushy" deal is all marketing with no science backing it up. You may feel a little less bloated after a detox diet, but you won't be any more or less detoxified because of it. Exercise will accomplish the same thing, both in terms of kidney and liver function, and bloating.
Lemon water encourages the production of bile? Really? Bile is continually produced by the liver and is stored and concentrated in the gallbladder. Every time you eat or drink anything bile is discharged from the gallbladder into the duodenum. If you want to really and truly jump start the production of bile, eat something fatty, since bile's job is to emulsify lipids in the things you eat. Lemons have almost no lipids.
I could go on, but rest assured everything on that list is either overstated, far-reaching and misleading, or flat out wrong. There's certainly nothing wrong with drinking lemon water, and freshly squeezed lemons in water, tea and other drinks do provide plenty of benefits, but heavily diluted lemon juice will not provide the magical benefits for which it is touted. A whole lemon gives you about half the necessary daily vitamin C you need. When you squeeze a quarter, half or whole lemon, squeeze it good to get as much of the pulp in there as you can, because that's where the fiber is. You want to eat lemons for the fiber, the vitamin C, it's antioxidant properties, and it's lemonoids which help prevent and fight cancer. I squeeze fresh lemons into water, tea, lentil soup and over salads, and will add cubed sections of lemon to a fruit cup.
