The Dehydrated Generation: Do We Really Need To Drink More Water

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

You eat well and play sports, but you think that earning the title of a person leading a healthy lifestyle will only help a huge bottle of water that you drink every day. The benefits of consuming H₂O in large quantities have become overgrown with myths and legends. Let's check them for consistency.

It seems like every week someone comes up with a new app or gadget that will keep track of how much water you drink and encourage you to drink more. Increasing the amount of water you drink is easy, but if you desperately focus on such little things, you distract from the significant improvements that could be in your life.

If tracking the amount of water you drink motivates you to make other changes, and does not take all your will, great, an extra glass of liquid will not hurt. But if every evening you reprimand yourself for not drinking as much as you need today, if you only think about drinking more water all day, you may overestimate the extent of its effect on the body. So, is water really that good.

Why do we need water

The worst argument for drinking plenty of water is that we are 75% water, or maybe 45%, somewhere like that, the exact amount depends on body weight and other factors. Yes, water is needed for blood to run through the veins and arteries, it is needed to lubricate joints and for chemical reactions. At the molecular level, water keeps proteins and cell membranes in shape. We are water beings, no doubt about it.

But bigger doesn't mean better. Gasoline is essential for driving the car. You might think that the more gasoline the better, and we must constantly top up to a full tank. This is not true. However, even without gasoline, the car will not go. The loss of a significant amount of water will lead to serious consequences, ranging from headaches and nausea to kidney failure and death. A slight loss of water will show up as bad breath and dry skin. But are you dehydrated now? Most likely no.

Fortunately, there is no epidemic of dehydration

Many of us drink more than eight glasses of water a day without realizing it. By the way, it is completely incomprehensible what the magic number 8 is, why exactly so many glasses should be drunk. It seems to you that you do not drink much, since you are counting only pure water. But when it comes to hydration, your body doesn't care where it gets its water from.

We get half of the daily amount of water from food: watermelon, for example, is 90% water, about the same contains soup. Even the cheeseburger contains 42% water. Water enters the body when you drink lemonade, coffee (even with caffeine!). Caffeine acts as a diuretic, but our bodies adapt to this effect after a while.

It is normal that you are thirsty. And that doesn't mean dehydration. Thirst appears when the body loses 2% of water. In a medical sense, dehydration occurs when you have lost about 5% of your water. A yellow to dark yellow urine color signals that you need to drink water, but is not a sign of dehydration.

About the benefits and dangers of water

The influence of water on many processes in the body is overestimated. Let's figure out when excess water is beneficial and when not.

Weight loss

There is no evidence that sipping water all day will somehow help you lose weight. Weight loss can only be facilitated by the fact that you replace all high-calorie drinks with water. In a Nutrition Reviews review of the effect of water on weight loss, such a substitution was called promising, but additional research requires the question of whether this technique will work in the long term - whether losing weight will not add calories lost on drinks with another meal.

Does water dull hunger? This issue has been carefully researched. In the latest post on Obesity, the answer was yes. Drinking water before meals helps to lose weight: drinkers of water have lost an average of about two kilograms in two months. However, in some cases, the weight, on the contrary, increased. So this is not a final conclusion.

Skin health

If you pinch the skin on the hand of a dehydrated person with two fingers, it will not return to its previous state for a long time. Does this mean that the more you drink, the younger and healthier your skin will be?

Logic says yes, but a study published in Clinics in Dermatology failed to provide evidence for this hypothesis. Drinking an additional two liters of water a day will change the skin, which will be noticeable in the laboratory, but will not reduce wrinkles or smooth it.

Brain activity

Is the brain working worse due to lack of water? Answer: “Yes, but …” Yes, if a person is dehydrated, he has a bad mood and he thinks worse. But during the study, subjects ran or sweated in the sauna to lose water, so it is unclear whether the reason for the display of impaired mental ability was dehydration or mild heatstroke.

When subjects were given water, some wrote better tests, some, oddly enough, worse than when they were dehydrated. So again, there is no evidence that your brain will perform better if you are at normal hydration levels and drink more water.

Internal organs work

We hear from all sides that drinking water helps to remove toxins from the body. But there are not so many toxins in us to specifically remove them. And with those that are, the internal organs successfully cope if they work normally.

Prolonged dehydration can result in kidney and bladder stones. If you are prone to these diseases, yes, you need to drink more to prevent them.

The effectiveness of sports activities

Here the disagreements are very serious. Drinking or not drinking while playing sports - both options have a lot of pros and cons.

Let's start with the basics: you need more water when you exercise than when you are at rest. You lose water in sweat, and the amount depends on the intensity of the activity and the ambient temperature. Surely you will spend more on a run in hot water than on a walk on a cool day. But exactly how much water do you need?

It is believed that mild dehydration - losing as little as 2% of body weight - is detrimental to performance. You will run slower or feel disgusting during your workout.

At the same time, the publication of the British Journal of Sports Medicine says that in real situations, the effectiveness of athletes does not decrease until dehydration reaches 4%, which is equivalent to a loss of 3 kg with a weight of 75 kg. In some cases, moderate dehydration even increases productivity. And no, it doesn't cause seizures.

Most will prefer to avoid dehydration for safety reasons. Then another question arises: drink as much as possible, before, during and after training, or only when you feel thirsty?

And here, too, there are disagreements. The American College of Sports Medicine has released a guideline that provides a rough estimate of the amount of water you will need and recommends weighing yourself before and after exercise to see if you are drinking enough. The developers of the manual believe that "thirst is not the most correct indicator of the body's need for water."

Previously, the Institute of Medicine (a division of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine) issued guidelines that stated that most healthy people can only be guided by their thirst to fully satisfy their need for water. This science and sports camp is concerned that the fear of dehydration leads people to another problem - excessive water intake, which threatens to deteriorate health, up to and including fatal complications.

The best option is to choose the golden mean: while playing sports, drink when you want. The exception is critical situations like a marathon on a hot day. In such cases, you may not even notice how dehydration will set in, so it is better to prevent it and drink it, even if you do not feel the need to do so.

Water is great, but don't waste your willpower on it

You can only drink water if you drink liter by liter. It is not at all scary if you drink a few extra glasses a day. Or you won't. In general, do not obsessively monitor how much you drink, and do not be afraid that you have dehydration. You would feel.