Nutrition Questions and Dietary Fads

[katyseagull]

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There are health effects to not drinking enough water, so to provide some guidance, we end up with a rule that likely is helpful to the "Average" person.

In general, if you are not drinking enough water, your body will tell you.



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I read the article. I would agree that if you're an active person and involved in any type of sports you would want to make sure you are hydrated. No argument here. But some of us are pretty inactive and sit at computer's all day. I can't really see how we would be in danger of being dehydrated.

On the other hand, preventing kidney stones is a very good reason why one might want to drink a lot of water. Now there's a reason that actually makes sense to me.


Ok check out this article. I skimmed it this morning and found it rather interesting.



Do we need 8 glasses of water a day?


It's debunking the 8 glasses of water a day thing. Not saying that people shouldn't keep doing what makes them feel good, I wouldn't want that (especially for people like Pryor who have found that water helps them prevent headaches.) But this article suggests that the 8 glasses rule was a pretty arbitrary amount with little scientific foundation.

this article needs to exist is to contradict his absurdly pervasive and unjustified idea that “chronic dehydration” is some kind of epidemic. It is probably not. There may be such a thing as “chronic dehydration”, but the weight of expert opinion is clear: if it exists at all, it is not serious, and easily cured in any event.




p.s. I hope someone read the article I linked above on antioxidants. It was pretty fascinating and slightly troubling.

[Sniper]

katy, the article that you link to, debunks the "chonic dehydration" being an epidemic claims, but it does conclude by stating that drinking water does matter and does provide benefit. Just don't worry about it too much.

I also agree with Pryor that drinking lots of water when you are drinking alchohol helps prevent hangovers.

I'll take a look at the antioxidant issue later.

[dcasper70]

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In general, if you are not drinking enough water, your body will tell you.

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Unfortunately, most people don't recognize the signals the body sends, or attribute them to other causes.

I used to be a high caffeine guy. Three big cups of coffee by 10 am, mountain dew & cola's through the afternoon. When I felt worn down & tired, caffeine was my answer.
I switched to water when dieting about 5 years ago, and within a month I felt far more energized than I ever had during the caffeine days. No longer having that post-lunch fatigue wass the most noticable change.

These days when I don't drink enough, I can feel it and I understand what my body is telling me. If I never switched to water, I wouldn't know to attribute those feelings to dehydration.

[Colt McCoy]

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This may be good for a whole thread in its own right, but here goes... What's the silliest diet anyone ever heard of?

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I love all the new global warming diets that are trying to convince people to turn vegetarian because all the cattle farts are contributing to the destruction of the ozone layer.

[MrWookie]

Katy,

DB is right when he's talking about the water soluble vitamins. The flip side of those is that you can't really get too much of them. If you guzzle OJ like a fiend to try and OD on vitamin C or something, your body just passes all the excess out in your urine.

You actually do have to be careful with some of the fat-soluble vitamins, like vitamin A. Since it doesn't dissolve in water, it just hangs out in your body until it's needed. If you eat way, way too much, it can become toxic.

For free radicals and antioxidants, I'm skeptical. Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) produced by your cells' mitochondria as a normal by product of your metabolism are extremely reactive. Some, like hydroxide radical, will react with virtually the first thing it touches. Fortunately, your body has mechanisms to reduce the output of OH radical and instead put out the less harmful nitric oxide. Still, though, it seems like for antioxidants to have any effect, they'd have to be at a comparable concentration to other things in your cells that these free radicals might react with. Your cells are roughly 200 mg/mL protein, but people take these antioxidants at levels where their concentrations will be, oh, 4-5 orders of magnitude below this. Since proponents say that these antioxidants suck up the ROS directly, they have to be around to bump into an ROS molecule before it reacts w/ something else. If people argue that some of these compounds are stimulating your body's natural defenses against ROS, that I could believe, but I'm skeptical about how effective they are at chewing up ROS on their own.

[Ron Burgundy]

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If you're prone to colds and infections, vit C will likewise work wonders.

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I did a longass research paper on vitamin c in like 7th grade. My research concluded that this claim is BS and has been disproven by many different scientists.

[Blarg]

Water intake has been correlated to mood, too. By way of anecdote, I tried myself to see if increasing my water intake seemed to make much difference, and it did. I feel noticeably more energetic when I'm drinking more water than usual. Even when I'm not sprinting to the bathroom.

As to why, I don't know, but water is sometimes called the universal solvent. Your body needs it for most everything it does. It certainly needs it for passing waste out of your body. As well as helping me do all kinds of other things, I'm figuring it helps me get waste out faster when I drink a lot of it. That might have spillover effects into my mood.

[Blarg]

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This may be good for a whole thread in its own right, but here goes... What's the silliest diet anyone ever heard of?

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I love all the new global warming diets that are trying to convince people to turn vegetarian because all the cattle farts are contributing to the destruction of the ozone layer.

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Lots of things about cattle farming are very wasteful for the amount of useable food you get from it. Farts are inherently funny, but it's true that large-scale cattle-raising is very costly environmentally.

[Zameus]

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Water intake has been correlated to mood, too. By way of anecdote, I tried myself to see if increasing my water intake seemed to make much difference, and it did. I feel noticeably more energetic when I'm drinking more water than usual. Even when I'm not sprinting to the bathroom.

As to why, I don't know, but water is sometimes called the universal solvent. Your body needs it for most everything it does. It certainly needs it for passing waste out of your body. As well as helping me do all kinds of other things, I'm figuring it helps me get waste out faster when I drink a lot of it. That might have spillover effects into my mood.

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Blarg, water is useless without a loofah. You should know this by now [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[Blarg]

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Water intake has been correlated to mood, too. By way of anecdote, I tried myself to see if increasing my water intake seemed to make much difference, and it did. I feel noticeably more energetic when I'm drinking more water than usual. Even when I'm not sprinting to the bathroom.

As to why, I don't know, but water is sometimes called the universal solvent. Your body needs it for most everything it does. It certainly needs it for passing waste out of your body. As well as helping me do all kinds of other things, I'm figuring it helps me get waste out faster when I drink a lot of it. That might have spillover effects into my mood.

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Blarg, water is useless without a loofah. You should know this by now [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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Yeah, I'm probably just being poisoned by my own testicles, so it's clouding my thinking.