https://www.theaustralian.com.au/ne...t/news-story/2213af8a44d698e342c363963fa46066 The thirst amendment Before you next reach for your water bottle and take a swig read this. The jury is out over how much H20 is actually good for you. By HELEN RUMBELOW How much water is too much? How much water is too much? From The TimesAugust 6, 2018 8 MINUTE READ97 My Scottish grandmother lived to her mid-90s without drinking a glass of water. Unless she was sneaking off to chug massive aluminium bottles of it, like the Hollywood stars do, only in secret, behind locked doors. All I saw her sip were a few cups of tea through the day and a rather larger whisky in the evening. On longer journeys she probably got a little thirsty because she certainly did not own a water-carrying receptacle. When I was rooting through my grandmother’s cupboards the nearest thing I could find to a water bottle was her slim tartan coffee flask for the hottest summer picnic. I sometimes wonder what she and her generation would think of the hydro-obsessed way we live now. Her little flask would be laughed off Instagram. The trend is for giant 1.8-litre barrels the size of a petrol canister to be lugged around town. We receive endless commandments on public transport to “carry a bottle of water at all times”; we buy and pack bottled water as if we were in the Foreign Legion. READ NEXT Haddad ex wins estate fight SAM BUCKINGHAM-JONES What has happened to Western humans? Were our grandparents some kind of reptilian race, able to survive by licking condensation from their forelocks? Have we become weirdly amphibious, in mortal danger when separated from a constant water supply, our gullets open like a sluice gate? To answer that question you need to enter the water wars. In one corner you have what may be termed the “modern” view, in the form of the new book Quench, co-authored by medical doctor Dana Cohen, who runs a clinic in New York. She ministers to drying patients. In the other, more “traditional” corner you have Aaron Carroll, a professor of pediatrics in Indiana, but more pertinently a researcher with a nice speciality in debunking claims about hydration. First, I read Quench. Of course Cohen is evangelical about water. Quench has the declamatory air of the book that Arianna Huffington wrote about sleep, in which she seemed to have practically invented the practice. Sleep and water are similar in that way: humans need both to survive, but no one is sure whether we are getting more or less of them than our ancestors. Stranger still, we are not sure about the right amount of water or how to measure it. Cohen admits right off that the best scientists can’t track down the evidence for the popular admonition to drink eight glasses of water a day, which is still echoed by Britain’s NHS. It’s far better, Aaron Carroll says, to take your cues from thirst. It’s far better, Aaron Carroll says, to take your cues from thirst. This is so broadbrush as to be meaningless anyway: a 180cm athlete in a heatwave needs more than a tiny office worker in winter. It may have sprung from a reckoning made in 1945 by the American Food and Nutrition Board that people need 2.5 litres of water a day, although widely ignored was the next sentence: “Most of this quantity is contained in foods.” Cohen is fascinated by that long-forgotten idea. She says juicy foods such as fruit, vegetables and, particularly, soaked chia seeds deliver water more slowly to the body and are closer to the way early humans would have kept steady hydration over long periods. When I began her Quench plan, I was ready to guzzle ballooning quantities of water like a basking shark. I had bought a humungous 1.8-litre water bottle like the celebrity favourite, Hydroflask, and was almost getting the hang of the overbalancing tidal wave of water that would “quench” my cheeks and shirt when I raised it above my face to drink. Yet I found Cohen’s plan quite manageable. A 500ml serving of water first thing is fine if you are used to leaving a pint of water by your bedside as a hangover prep. After that, a glass before every meal and a big homemade smoothie feels fine; a little bloating, but it possibly lessens my irregular headaches. There’s no big downside, if you don’t count my suffering the nocturia of an older gentleman with an irritable prostate. There is a lot in this book to pique the interest. I loved the quote by Isak Dinesen: “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.” But is water the cure for everything? Sometimes the book gets within touching distance of suggesting that, tentatively linking too little water to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and bladder cancer. Cohen is fond of making big claims such as, “shockingly, most of us are dehydrated”, or of citing studies that show that half of American children do not get enough water. She gathers all those familiar pieces of research into how more water can improve concentration, help weight loss, give you softer skin and so on; all ideas that have made us more water-addicted with each passing decade. I get Cohen on the phone and tell her the story of my grandmother. Are we really so dehydrated now? “This low-grade, chronic, subclinical dehydration is epidemic,” Cohen says. “I see it in my patients. It’s the epidemic behind most chronic diseases.” The International Marathon Medical Directors Association now recommends that exercisers drink only when they are thirsty, not to pre-empt dehydration. The International Marathon Medical Directors Association now recommends that exercisers drink only when they are thirsty, not to pre-empt dehydration. That is, of course, an even bolder claim, which we will return to. I put it to her that the evidence in the scientific literature for it is not very robust and there are queues of other doctors ready to debunk her book. “I don’t know about being debunked,” she says. The problem, she says, for the case of mildly lowered hydration (as opposed to clinical dehydration of the kind that lands you in hospital with a drip) is that there is lack of evidence either way. “All I have to go on is what I see clinically. Patients come to see me who have been to so many doctors. This is going to sound so cavalier, but I literally see miracles on a daily basis just by changing someone’s diet. There is pushback from doctors, doctors who are not open-minded to it. “The whole gist of the plan is to find out for yourself what you feel the best on. So you are not getting headaches, fatigue, and your urine is a nice pale yellow, every two to three hours.” The surprising central tenet of her book is that you do not need to carry around so many plastic bottles. “Get your water from good food and vegetables — that is a key idea,” Cohen says. “Eat your water. People who say, ‘I never drink water, I feel great’, that’s because they are eating really well.” I almost hesitate to put some of what Cohen has said to Carroll. When he wrote his book debunking medical myths, the part that drew attention was his demolition of the claims made for increasing water consumption. People could not believe what they were reading: the secular religion of the West unites by taking this daily communion, glugs of much-venerated, near-holy water. Why did my grandmother drink so little? “The cynical part of me would say when your grandmother was younger there was no industry around selling you water; you turned on a faucet and you drank it,” Carroll says. “A surprisingly large number of the studies that prove people are dehydrated are funded by groups that stand to make money off you buying water or beverages.” How much does he drink? “When I’m thirsty, is my answer, so I have no idea. I have a huge cup of coffee in the morning; that’s water. Vegetables for lunch contain water; the body doesn’t distinguish.” Carroll’s case rests on the fact the human body is exquisitely expert at regulating its water levels. In normal modern life it takes a serious illness or extreme event to become dehydrated. However, he says it is easier to override the body’s resistance to too much water: people flooding their bodies with so much fluid that the electrolyte balance is disturbed. “There is more danger of people overhydrating with all this hysteria than they are going to get dehydrated in normal life.” It’s far better, he says, to take your cues from thirst. “If you drink too much water you will just urinate more. The body is incredibly good at judging how much water you have, how much you need, and giving you cues such as thirst long before you potentially become dehydrated. “We don’t have good tests for being ‘perfectly’ hydrated, as the body is very good at compensating for how much you drink, so if you drink more than usual you pee more than usual.” The human body is exquisitely expert at regulating its water levels. The human body is exquisitely expert at regulating its water levels. OK, I say, so what about Cohen’s claim that “most chronic diseases” have a connection with under-hydration? He whistles like an old-fashioned kettle on the boil. “If she is trying to argue that people are sub-clinically dehydrated, and they could just drink a little extra water to avoid cancer and heart disease, there’s a Nobel prize in it for her. We’d be shouting it from the rooftops. Water is cheap. No one is trying to hide this. “But there is no good science proving that is the case.” What about those studies that are frequently cited showing that your cognitive scores drop when you are even mildly parched? “Of course, if someone is thirsty and you don’t let them drink, I’m sure it becomes a distraction — and I’m in no way saying if you’re thirsty you shouldn’t drink — but there is no need to drink ever more to avoid getting thirsty.” He and his fellow apostates cite studies that have countered the findings of previous ones showing that water makes your skin soft, helps you to lose weight and so on. They are muddying the water. After years of advice to the contrary, the International Marathon Medical Directors Association recommends that exercisers drink only when they are thirsty, not to pre-empt dehydration. This has come about because the “keep on drinking” mantra has caused deaths in marathons when runners chug down excessive fluids. The field is far from cut and dried. In sports science, for instance, water intake is studied seriously, and some researchers still think that, in the case of athletes, thirst is not a reliable enough cue. It is still probably unclear to most of us whether we should be drinking a bit more or a bit less. So, I ask Carroll, is there any harm in Cohen suggesting we hydrate a little better? “Probably not. People tell me they try to drink eight glasses a day. I roll my eyes and say, ‘Feel free, but don’t feel like you have to.’ What bothers me is that it confuses proven science.” In some ways our obsession with water has an end-of-empire feel to it. As Carroll says, those of us in the developed world “have never had such easy access to water”. Sea levels are rising. Water, water, is everywhere. The more we have it, the more we fret about it. The Times
Not sure I get the point if the article because without water you die. But if it is focused on whether we need 8 glasses minimum or some other number I agree that everyone is different. In sports or workout days I am sure I drink almost double that while I occasionally have the 2-3 glass days. I do think most people would benefit significantly hitting the 8 glass minimum though. Too many people rely on soft drinks and coffee for "hydration".
I open a 101 ounce bottle of Poland Spring every single day. In the summer I usually finish it before bed, in the winter I usually have about 10-15 ounces left over before going to bed. It may seem like a lot of water everyday, but that’s all I drink (besides beer lol). Never had a cup of coffee in my life. Don’t drink milk, tea, soda, juice, or anything else.