Water, Water, Everywhere!
What’s the origin of the eight to ten glasses of water a day rule?
Who says you need to drink this much water a day to stay hydrated?
The average human body evaporates water through breathing and from sweat on the skin and the total amount expulsed in this way is a little less than 30 fluid ounces of water per day. If you are a particularly huge lard ball you might sweat off a bit more than that from under your pits or your overhanging and pendulous man boobs but not much more.
Having read a lot of medical and scientific literature on this subject[1] and having talked to several notable nutritionists there appears to be no medical reason for consuming this much pure water on a daily basis.
A “glass” of water at the office is about 18 fluid ounces if I use one of the regular glasses and it is about 10 fluid ounces if I use my special water drinking glass.[2] The fiction of drinking 8 to 10 glasses which isn’t even an officially accurate measurement of anything appears to have sprung up (no pun intended) out of nowhere and continues to be perpetuated by various news reporters, certain health “experts” and various websites across the world.
Drinking this much water a day isn’t a lifestyle choice, it’s a homework assignment given by a sadistic teacher with an exceptionally wide mean streak.
You do not need 8 to 10 “glasses” of water per day.
Professional nutritionists worth their salt (no pun intended) who actually know what they are talking about won’t go on record to back up the “minimum of 8 to 10 glasses of water a day” claim. Nutritionists do recommend that you stay well hydrated, and drinking that much water per day, assuming you are a reasonably healthy adult without medical problems, won’t cause you any problems except make you visit the restroom a few extra times.
There is no scientific basis for this myth, there is no medical basis for this myth and there’s not even an original attributable source for this myth. I have never in my life – even when I was doing extreme outward bound adventure sports – consumed anywhere near 8 to 10 glasses of water in a day.
Much of our daily hydration needs come indirectly through the foods we eat. Fruits, vegetables, meat, even something as dry as bread will provide a part of our daily water requirement. How much water you need to consume on a daily basis will depend on your activity level, the climate where you live, your overall health and what foods you regularly consume.
You do not need a 64oz container of water with you before leaving the house to run a few errands. You are not crossing the Kalahari Desert here![3]
Many foods contain high amounts of water so the extra water you add to your daily diet does not need to be a great amount. The overall amount of water that you actually need to consume depends on your lifestyle, your diet, your health and the climate to name just a few factors that influence fluid intake. A reasonably healthy person that isn’t particularly overweight with a regular and not particularly strenuous office or retail job requires around 12 fluid ounces of additional liquid on top of their daily food intake. Twelve fluid ounces! That’s only a single can of soda. That’s just two small semi-dry lattes from Starbucks. That’s a reasonably sized glass of water.
If you go to the gym and work out like a mad man for three hours straight all that happens is you get thirsty. You don’t get dehydrated and you don’t get a chemical imbalance (unless you have a really unhealthy lifestyle).
You get hot, you get sweaty and you get a mild thirst.
The mild thirst occurs because of two things: you’re breathing hard through your mouth and nose drying out those mucus membranes and your skin is sweating and evaporating moisture to cool you down. You lose a little salt which can marginally alter your body temperature enough to signal your body and brain that it might need a drink in the near future.
Working up a sweat for a few hours won’t make you dehydrated. You would need to sweat about ten times more than you can in a few hours of intense exercise to need to drink even one 8oz glass of water.
Here’s what’s really happening: The body is losing a few salts and minerals. This is where cleverly marketed sports drinks will help you. The drink gives your body a few ingredients it needs to stop feeling thirsty and put back some of the salts and minerals you’ve lost in your sweat and breath.
A bottle of Smart Water does this in addition to brands like Gatorade. But the Smart Water is designed to be sipped over time by dainty girls in tight lycra whereas the Gatorade is meant to be gulped all at once by manly men dripping in sweat after a hard set on the basketball court with their bros. Gulping down an entire 20oz sports drink in one go because you think you have a raging thirst is pretty much pointless because you didn’t lose that much fluid through your exertion.
Two employees of mine swear by Smart Water and the benefits it conveys when they are working on rebuilding one of the project Mustangs parked in the driveway on a hot day in the middle of Los Angeles. I agree with the assessment too, Smart Water stops me feeling so darn thirsty all the time when moving boxes around in the storage locker unlike regular “not smart” bottled water.
I was pretty sceptical about Smart Water at the start but it really does help quench the thirst more than water when you are exerting yourself. Sitting around and you just feel like a drink? Total waste of money.
If you only go to the gym for 45 minutes and do the usual aerobic and anaerobic exercises of a moderately fit human being you can easily get by with one of those tiny little bottles of water they often give away at conferences that contain around 250ml of water.
Seek out a way to replenish what your body needs not what you think it needs. Listen to what your body is telling you. A raging thirst is an incorrect signal. Wait a few minutes before guzzling water and see what the body really wants. Sip your water at the gym. Don’t guzzle it. Guzzling huge amounts of water from the bottle or water fountain will just make it sit in your stomach and make you feel like puking when you get back to working out for your next set.
This desire to throw up is your body’s way of telling you “you screwed up, get this crap out of me now!” Too much regular water when you have been working up a sweat can, though rarely, leads to hyponatremia, and is the most common – though still fairly rare except in long distance runners – imbalance that most people experience.
Hyponatremia – you lost some bodily salts and they need replenishing.
When you visit the gym you do not need to lug around a 20oz or 50oz bottle of liquid. Small bottles of Gatorade or Smart Water or any of the other “sport drinks” out there that promise to restore your electrolytes to their proper balance are more than sufficient when working out. Drink a third of the bottle around 20 minutes prior to working out – just make sure you pee before you drink. When you’re working out drink a third more by sipping and then consuming the remainder of the sport drink after your exercises are complete can prevent that post workout crash a lot of people feel that starts with the headaches, mild heat cramps and a few other other ailments.
Toxins are flushed out of the kidneys by consuming large quantities of water, say, 8 to 10 glasses water per day.
Right?
Well, actually, no.
The kidneys don’t store up any significant amount of toxins on a day to day basis and any fluids passing through the kidneys, even that unhealthy soda you’re consuming whilst reading this, will flush the kidneys out of whatever fluidic contents are currently in them. The kidneys act as a filter, not a store house. We’re currently not sure of all of the toxins the kidneys currently filter from your body so we can’t be sure what’s flushed anyway. Any imbibed fluids such as water, soda or coffee flush toxins from various organs in the human body but according to current medical research what toxins are actually flushed, and in what amounts, is completely open to debate and is heavily influenced by a person’s current dietary habits.
Drinking a glass of water with a meal fills you up faster and makes you eat less. Not quite. According to current studies the only thing that drinking a glass of water with your meal will do is aid, very slightly, the lubrication of the passage of food in your large intestine, that’s why cookies (dry) and milk (wet) or cake (dry) and milk (wet) are so good together.
Drinking sparkling water with your meal may make you feel bloated and gassy but again it won’t cut back on the quantity of food you eat.
Don’t even get me started on soda with meals. Drinking a soda that contains artificial sweeteners may actually be detrimental to your health and weight as a number of studies have shown that there is a causal link between those same sweeteners and hormone production that informs your brain that you need to stop eating now.
There is not a single study or scientific paper in any of the medical literature that prove drinking water with your meal will reduce the amount of food you eat at one meal. The only conclusion to date is that consuming water 30 minutes before your meal may reduce food intake by less than 9% if you are fit, healthy and over the age of 60, the study was unable to conclude if this would contribute to any significant weight loss over a period of time other than just the two meals that the study examined.
No studies to date have concluded that drinking a large volume of water over the course of the day inhibits the number of calories ingested. The liquid content of the stomach, which is never very high for very long appears to have little bearing on an individual’s food intake.
For the majority of us in the Western world, and especially America, all of our hunger pangs are answered almost immediately. We consume processed foods ready from the microwave in minutes. We purchase fast food from factory kitchens. We pick up pre-packaged snack foods laden with salts and sugars from local convenience stores.
Many of us have lost the ability to read our bodies subtle signals that indicate hunger and thirst. When we do eat we ignore the signal that states we’re full. This missed message is often the case when eating food combined with certain artificial sweeteners or other appetite suppressing additives. If you’ve just eaten or ate within a few hours and thinking you might be hungry again, try a non-caffeinated, non-sweetened drink instead. It may just be a mild thirst masquerading as a desire to eat.
Often we know we want something to eat, we just don’t know what it is we want. We crave a particular type of food or ingredient, for example salt or potassium, but we’ve suppressed our body’s signals so much with the noise that junk food creates in our hormones and the chemical imbalances in our body that all we know is that we’re really hungry right now. Moving your diet away from junk food to healthier food choices can let you get back in tune with those messages. When there is very little junk food noise being propagated the body’s signals come in loud and clear.
If you suffer from dry skin regularly this has nothing to do with your hydration level and everything to do with how the cells in your epidermis develop and shed. Skins cell development is affected by a number of factors such as hormone production, chemical ingestion due to drugs or particular types of food, and also by illness. Skin cell production is rarely if ever affected by external factors in the environment.
And when I say “rarely” I mean rarely.
Periodic dry skin as that experienced by people visiting a mountainous region or a dry climate such as a desert is caused by atmospheric changes not how much water you drink. The human body has plenty of water in reserve to ensure your newly produced skin cells aren’t drying out and the skin cells you can observe right now are weeks old. The dry skin you might observe within a few hour of arriving somewhere new is mostly being caused by the evaporation of water and essential oils from the skin’s pores.
Severe dehydration, such as greater than 3% water loss, which is bordering on the critical levels will affect the condition of your skin but you’ll have a lot more to worry about besides some wrinkles at this point. Over hydration of the human body, i.e. consuming a large amount of water has no visible or physiological effect on the visible epidermis.
So go drink water, it’s good for you in so many ways, just not the ways you may have been lead to believe.
[1] The scientific and medical literature research covered how much to drink and had nothing to do with huge lard balls.
[2] Everybody needs a special glass they can use to drink out of it. Whatever is put in the glass just tastes better. It does, it does and I don’t care what you say.
[3] If you really are crossing the Kalahari or Mojave deserts you can politely ignore the information in this article and do the correct thing.