Rona, I absolutely agree that some people drink too little water. Particularly if the climate where you live is generally hot, or if you exercise a lot. Clearly some people don't get enough to drink, and like your own experience shows, that can be downright dangerous. If your doctor told you that you weren't getting enough to drink, then you weren't getting enough to drink, and you needed to increase your intake of water.
My point is that there is no general recommendation about how much water each and every one of us needs to drink. Science does
not tell us that we need to drink at least eight glasses of water a day, for example. But so many women seem to be convinced that there is such a recommendation.
I had an aunt who died fifteen years ago. About five years before she died, she started drinking a lot of water. Had she suddenly become very thirsty? Had she got diabetes, for example? Had her doctor told her that she needed to drink more water? Not at all. No, but my aunt was always full of folksy wisdom, and now she had become convinced that drinking lots of water was healthy. When I visited her, she would go out into the kitchen at regular intervals and pour herself a drink of water from the large jug she kept in her fridge. She had to drink up all that water in the jug before she went to bed, you see. She had never done that sort of thing before, but now she just "knew" that it was healthy. All that water-drinking did not improve her health, however, and she died about five years later.
I consider my own daily newspaper to be serious. I have subscribed to it for thirty years. I have never seen it report, even once, that
scientists have issued a general recommendation that people should drink at least eight glasses of water a day. I read some general science magazines too, such as Scientific American, though not on a regular basis, and I have never seen it or any other science magazine report that we need to drink at least eight glasses of water every day. I have never read about a scientific study which shows that those who drink at least eight glasses of water a day are healthier than those who don't.
A week ago my daily newspaper reported that there is
no scientific evidence that drinking water when you are not thirsty generally improves your health. A professor was interviewed in that article, and he said that it is a misconception that everyone needs the same amount of liquids, and it is not true that you generally need more water than your body seems to tell you that you need.
I remember another article, obviously from New York Times.
In that article, a professor said that he himself had never come across a case where a healthy and moderately young person had died of dehydration, but he had indeed come across cases where people had drunk water until they died. He described a case of a female marathon runner, who kept drinking water throughout the race until she collapsed shortly before the finish. She was rushed to the hospital, where it was found that she had imbibed so much water that she had upset the chemical balance of her bodily fluids so severely that water either left of seeped into all her cells at fatal amounts. You know that your body liquids contain a certain amount of salt, don't you? I think our salt levels may be about 8%. This woman had drunk so much salt-free water that her body was unable to keep liquids flowing normally in and out of her cells, and she died. Some years ago I read about another young woman in her twenties, who had taken part in a water-drinking contest. She, too, suffered acute "water-poisoning" and died.
Some people drink too little water, and they need to drink more. But there is no general recommendation that we should all take care to drink at least eight glasses of water per day.
Ann
