What is it about water?
There are lots of recommendations out there that we don’t drink enough water and we ought to drink more. Does it help you lose weight? Are you getting enough? Are American’s dehydrated? Does it make you feel full? Or sleepy?
What we do know is that our kidneys love to make dilute urine. You are getting enough fluids if your urine is clear. Dilute urine looks clear. If it’s yellow, you are getting a little dry and your body is conserving water by concentrating your urine. If your urine starts to have a burning quality and looks darker, you are likely very dehydrated.
The 8 Glasses a Day Theory
It’s interesting to note that this practice came from the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine. The board wrote that a rough rule of thumb would be one milliliter of water per calorie eaten. That makes about 2,000 milliliters, or two liters, of water a day. Two liters equals approximately 2 quarts which then translates into eight, 8-ounce glasses. But more interesting and often left out, is the fact that the report then continues with, “and much of this can be gained from the solid food that we eat”.
It often surprises people to learn, for example, that white bread is more than 30 percent water. People either aren’t aware of that second sentence of just forgot about it, so through the years it became the standard advice to drink those eight glasses of water a day.
Heinz Valtin, a physician and professor emeritus, feels that this emphasis on eight glasses of water per day is encouraged by the bottled water industry. (Nutrition Action Report of June, 2008) He states that the bottled water industry is making billions of dollars on this myth.
It has been known and measured that eating lots of salty foods, or a large meal will make you shift fluids into your gut to process all that stuff. Your body puts into your small bowel the equivalent in fluid volume of about 70 percent of your body weight each day. Then it absorbs it back.
To digest properly, you need lots of water to work with. And if fluids are in your intestine, they aren’t in your blood stream circulating to your brain. A large salty meal will make you feel sleepy. Being a little dehydrated or tired may very well be a sign that you are a little dry. Try it. If you feel fatigued and worn out, a large glass of water will often, by itself, feel like a pick me up.
In hot weather, you can get quite dry just by the sweat you make without your even being aware of it. You can avoid heat stroke completely by drinking ahead of time.
But this is all old news.
Last month in Nutrition Action, there was a wonderful review about the amount of fluids we should or shouldn’t drink, and the consequences of what’s happened to Americans in the last 25 years from the fluids we do drink.
What has happened is that we have had a huge shift to sugared sodas and fruit juices. Fifty years ago, virtually no one drank sugared drinks. Now, we all drink about 400 calories a day in sugared fluids (9 percent of our total calories). If you take that out a year at a time, that many extra calories can add up to a weight gain of as much as 40 pounds a year.
What the nugget for today is that liquid calories do not satisfy or surpress your appetite. What you drink isn’t counted by your brain as calories. It just slips under the radar screen and ends up on your hips and belly. When you drink calories, you don’t feel it is food.
What is also interesting, is that soup doesn’t have that effect. In fact, eating a soup course in a meal will reduce your total calories. Why the boundary between soup and liquid fruit juice, we can’t say. Drinking full sugar soda may give you a caffiene effect. If that’s what you need, drink coffee. It’s a great chemical. No harmful effect and lot’s of research to show it.
What will work for me?
This is simple. Drink water. Or diet soda. Stop the sugared soda if you want to control your weight. And stop the sugared fruit juice. Stop feeding your kids the sugared fruit juice. Eat the whole fruit and get the fiber and the appetite effect. Your weight as a child predicts your weight as adults.
