Okay, don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to suggest that drinking water is not healthy. Of course it is. But why should we believe that it is so very good for us to drink water when we are not thirsty? Why shouldn't we believe in our bodies' ability to tell us when we need more water?

Yes, I know. Some people do have certain sicknesses and conditions so that they don't notice when they are thirsty. Okay, but most of us don't. And yes, sometimes our bodies try to make us do things that are bad for us, or refrain from doing things that are good for us. Just because Ellen Lane of LnC had a body which told her to keep drinking a lot of alcohol doesn't mean that it was good for her to do so. And just because I'm lazy and have a body that tells me to refrain from doing any exercise doesn't mean it's good for me to take my body's advice on that score.

Okay. But we all know that it is bad to drink a lot of alcohol, and we all know that it is good to exercise.

How do we know this? I'd say we get our information from two sources, and one of these sources is more important to most of us than the other one. The first source is the information and input we get from those people we consider our peers. The second source is the informaiton and input we get from scientists, who conduct rigorous scientific studies to learn about the real world. We are sure to get information and input from our peers. We are much less sure to hear and understand what the scientific community is telling us. When it comes to alcohol and exercise, our peers and the scientists will tell us the same thing. It is bad to drink too much alcohol. It is good to exercise. People will tell us so, and there is a ton of scientific research which can prove it to us, too.

But what happens when our peers keep telling us something and science just doesn't back it up? Like when it comes to drinking more water than your body tells you that you need?

If you are a woman, chances are that at least one of your good female friends will keep swigging water from one of those ubiquitous plastic water bottles. (And if you ask her why she is drinking water all the time, she will look at you as if you were a little stupid and tell you that she does it because it is healthy. Hello? What planet are you from? You didn't know that??? :rolleyes: )

If you don't have a good female friend who keeps swigging from her water bottle, then maybe you have seen several female colleagues at work who do so. Maybe you have seen women at shopping malls carry around water bottles and drink from them. Maybe you have seen women drivers drink water while they drive.

Maybe you have heard a female celebrity being interviewed about how she keeps herself so fit. And maybe you heard her say that she drinks a lot of water every day. And maybe you sometimes read one of those "women's magazines" where you can read about fashion and recipes and diet tips and celebrities. Maybe, probably, you have seen articles in those magazines about how to stay healthy, and probably those magazines suggested to you that it is good for you to drink a lot of water.

So what if the scientific community does not chime in? What if scientists don't tell you that drinking a lot of water is healthy? Are you going to care what they say?

When I was in my early and mid twenties, in the late seventies and very early eighties, it was extremely fashionable among young women to fast. Fasting meant that you spent a few days eating no solid foods at all, but only drinking various fruit juices and vegetable decoctions. I'm not kidding you when I tell you that all my best friends fasted on one occasion or another - all my female friends, that is. It actually started in the last year of high school. You knew that a girl was fasting because she would show up all wan and tired-looking, and then she would inform you that she was so tired because she had just started fasting. And also, when the rest of us ate lunch in the school canteen, the girl who was fasting would just sip the strange vegetable brews that she had brought along in old-fashioned thermos flasks.

No boys I knew fasted, or if they did, they didn't tell anyone about it. But really, I don't think that any of them ever did, because they all had lunch in the school canteen every day.

All the girls I shared classes with fasted at least once while they were in the last year of high school. Everyone did it but me. I didn't want to do it, you see. I didn't want to make myself so tired, and I didn't want to give up the joy of eating real food and replace it with the torment of drinking cabbage and beetroot brews. But the idea that a girl would not fast seemed so strange that I felt a little defensive about it. I promised myself that if I ever read a serious-looking article in a serious newspaper which claimed that fasting had been scientifically proven to be really, really good for one's health, then I would fast too, at least once. Meanwhile, I would be able to tell those who wondered why I never fasted that I was waiting for scientific evidence that it was a splendid idea to do so.

And you know what? That serious article in a serious newspaper which proved the great health benefits of fasting just never appeared. The scientific community never told me that I had better do some fasting. And because I didn't want to do it, and because I would only do it if scientists proved to me that I should, I never did do any fasting.

After a couple of years - it may have been as much as ten years, though - the fasting fad disappeared. The younger generation of girls just didn't do it, and my own generation of females fell slowly out of love with fasting. The whole thing just faded away and disappeared. And nobody seemed to wonder where it had gone. But I was mystified by the whole thing. Why had the fasting mania appeared so suddenly, and why had it just disappeared?

One day I heard a radio program about a medieval religion called Manichaeism, which apparently prescribed almost exactly the same kind of fasting that my friends had practised in the nineteen seventies! The Manichaeists apparently believed that you needed to fast to rid your body of various poisons, and the right way to do that was to give up eating for a couple of days each month. But when you abstained from eating, you needed to drink a lot of liquids like water and vegetable decoctions, because the poisons in your body would be effectively flushed out by those liquids. Do you know that my friends who fasted several hundred years later said exactly the same thing, namely, that fasting and drinking those weird liquids flushed out poisons from your body?

But do you know that science, to my knowledge, has never said or proved that fasting flushes out poisons from your body?

Can you imagine? These ideas from a medieval religon have been sort of floating around on the the edge of consciousness of the European mentality since the Middle Ages. And then, in 1970, those same ideas just exploded in Europe and possibly in the United States - but almost exclusively among females. Isn't it amazing?

Personally, I look at excessive water-drinking as a "lighter" version of fasting. Water-drinking doesn't make you suffer nearly as much as full-fledged fasting does. You don't have to give up or even cut down on eating, and instead of drinking weird vegetable brews you just drink water, but a lot of it. And somehow, I think that there is a vague idea behind it all that you flush out poisons from your body if you fill yourself up with H2O.

Ann