10 tips: Make better beverage choices.Maintenance and replacement fluid therapy in adults. Pregnant and breastfeeding women: Drinking for two. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. High-altitude travel & altitude illness.Exercise prescription and guidance for adults. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Dietary reference intakes for electrolytes and water.The heat is on! Precautions for people with diabetes during the summer months. As with most things, it's probably best to listen to your body before proceeding accordingly. Clearly, it's all relative, as when you feel thirsty will be different if you're drenching yourself in spin class or spinning in your cushy chair at work. Research suggests that drinking water when you start to feel thirsty is sufficient should you desire to continue existing. A 1995 Australian survey found that the diet of average adults provides more than enough daily fluid: Women take in about 2.8 liters a day, and men consume 3.4 liters a day. (Sorry!) And when you include all the other stuff we munch on or guzzle throughout the day, we actually consume more than the recommended two liters. Recent studies have suggested that adequate hydration may not only give our cognition a boost, but goes a long way toward keeping chronic kidney disease at bay.Īs for how much we should be drinking, there is unfortunately no hard and fast rule. Fereydoon Batmanghelidi, a medical practitioner in Virginia who claims that a lack of water is responsible for many preventable diseases. Since then, researchers have begun to see eight glasses a day as an overestimate (especially considering our diets), but there are still advocates pushing for eight glasses of pure water or more. (He passed away in 2002 at age 91.) Stare was one of the first to recommend that humans consume six or so 12-ounce glasses of water a day. Stare, an influential 21st century nutritionist and founding chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. The idea may have been at least partly put forth by Frederick J. The academy spuriously suggested that "2,500 mL of fluid should be ingested on a daily basis," although a primary clinical study was never actually cited. So where exactly did this eight glasses of water a day voodoo come from? The very idea of a "minimal water requirement" is actually a fairly recent notion that first appeared in dietary guidelines published in 1945 by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences. Even something like, say, a baked potato, is 75 percent water. Even though we're told it's important to drink eight glasses of water a day, "there's no evidence that benefits health in any real way and it really represents an urban myth," says Goldfarb. Stanley Goldfarb, a nephrologist (kidney researcher) at the University of Pennsylvania. Despite the widely held notion that tea and coffee dehydrate us, they actually count toward our overall water intake, says Dr. You and I, on the other hand, may get a bit cranky in our air-conditioned offices if we forget to visit the water cooler for a morning, but it's highly, highly, highly improbable that we'd shrivel and die at the dusty hands of the dehydration monster. Saharan nomads, for example, are capable of subsisting on very little water for days at a time in one of Earth's most hellish climates, as was first noted in 1976 by anthropologist Claude Paque. Set aside the entangled interests of Big Bottled Water, and you'll see that study after study continues to show that the human body is remarkably resilient when it comes to quenching our thirst. Under the company's expansive culinary umbrella? Volvic, Evian, and Badoit bottled waters. In fact, many of the groups behind the public push for over-hydration have been exposed as having - surprise! - monetary interests in the fluid industry.įor example: In a 2011 article published in the British Medical Journal, Margaret McCartney debunked the eight glasses a day myth and noted that one water advocacy group in Europe, Hydration for Health, is not only sponsored by, but was actually created by food giant Danone. But health researchers have refuted the eight-glasses-a-day claim as a silly myth riding a wave of flimsy scientific literature.
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