The Truth About Hydration | E-Neighborhood Advisor

 Happy Saturday! - Hope you have a great one!

The 8x8 rule has become a health goal for many. But when it comes to healthy skin, eyes and having bags of energy, the research tells another story, as reported in The Guardian by Amy Fleming. Have you drunk enough water today? You might want to refill your bottle because if you wait until you feel thirsty, you may already be dehydrated. No one is sure where this advice came from, but it’s all over the internet. “Nowadays this is not considered sensible,” says Stuart Galloway, an associate professor in physiology, exercise and nutrition at the University of Stirling. “As humans, we have this homeostatic system, so when we need water, we feel thirsty.” Drinking when you are thirsty, he says, maintains your body’s water level within about 1-2 percent of its ideal state. “For most people, this is absolutely fine. Even for athletes, a loss of around 1 percent is considered to have negligible impact upon performance. So, although thirst may not kick in until you have lost some body water, this is not necessarily a bad thing.” As we get older, our sense of thirst can get fuzzier and that is when dehydration can become a threat. It is a similar story for children, too. So perhaps the advice to drink water before you feel thirsty was originally aimed at parents and the elderly, but now healthy adults are putting away gallons of water in a quest to be their best selves. There is a dearth of facts when it comes to hydration. Pharmaceutical companies aren’t interested in researching the benefits of a free resource and dehydration isn’t a pressing public health issue requiring government funding. This leaves a profitable grey area for the drinks industry to exploit. Water is, it would have us believe, a purifying fast-track to glowing skin, bright eyes and bags of energy. Galloway says detoxing with water is “a load of rubbish. Your kidneys do a very good job of sorting out what you need to retain and what you need to get rid of.” Will water make your skin better? While dehydration isn’t good for your skin, says Bav Shergill, a consultant dermatologist and honorary senior lecturer at the University of Manchester, “Once you hit a certain level of fluid intake, providing you are healthy, any excess water will be peed out.” Dehydration is said to be the most common cause of headaches and in 2015, Burls wrote a critical appraisal of the evidence. She concluded: “Chronic mild dehydration may trigger headaches. Increased water intake could help. A small trial shows modest benefit; however, a larger, methodologically sound, randomized controlled trial is needed to confirm efficacy.” There is that grey area again. In the US, popular advice is to drink eight, 8-ounce glasses of water – about 2 litres – a day: the “8x8 rule” that originated from a recommendation by the nutritionist Dr Fredrick J Stare in 1974 (he actually suggested six to eight glasses). How much you need to drink is governed by how active you are, the weather and your physiology. Tellingly, if you seek water-consumption advice from a quietly reputable US source such as Harvard Medical School, instead of the 8x8 rule, you get “four to six cups” a day for healthy adults and all beverages count. Don’t they make us pee more so we end up dehydrated? In 2016, Galloway tested the hydrating potential of a range of drinks and found milk was even more hydrating, and effective as a hydration solution for people with diarrhea. While not a green-light to binge on high-calorie drinks, it’s good to know that other liquids still count as water intake. How many of us are seriously dehydrated? No one knows. If we’re ingesting enough water, he adds, we should probably be going to the loo “somewhere between five and seven times a day.” Your Flooring Consultant, Matt Capell Email: sales@capellinteriors.com Phone (208) 288-0151 P.S. Here's a joke for you! Someone asked me to name two structures that hold water.  I was like, “well,… dam!”