Water: eBay Blog Posted Oct. 13th, 2006

I need a Drink

Posted Oct-13-06 09:03:38 PDT Updated Oct-13-06 09:05:03 PDT

Drinking 8 glasses of water a Day will not keep the Doctor away!
Oh wait that was an apple a day story, SORRY ........

Anyhow.........
I have been doing some research here and there, TRYING to get myself prepared to lose weight SO, I read up on different issues now and then.
Everyone keeps telling me I need to drink at least 8 glasses of water a day.
I am a MAJOR coffee drinker ... I have tried to drink water and still want my coffee cup ........

Here are some inserts from a post:

Claim: The average person needs to drink eight glasses of water per day to avoid being "chronically dehydrated."

Status: False.

Origins: "You need to drink eight to ten glasses of water per day to be healthy" is one of our more widely-known basic health tips. But do we really need t daily basis?


In general, to remain healthy we need to take in enough water to replace the amount we lose daily through excretion, perspiration, and other bodily functions, but that amount can vary widely from person to person, based upon a variety of factors such as age, physical condition, activity level, and climate. The "8-10 glasses of water per day" is a rule of thumb, not an absolute minimum, and not of all of our water intake need come in the form of drinking water.

Kidney specialists do agree on one thing, however: that the 8-by-8 rule is a gross overestimate of any required minimum. To replace daily losses of water, an average-sized adult with healthy kidneys sitting in a temperate climate needs no more than one liter of fluid, according to Jurgen Schnermann, a kidney physiologist at the National Institutes of Health.

One liter is the equivalent of about four 8-ounce glasses. According to most estimates, that's roughly the amount of water most Americans get in solid food. In short, though doctors don't recommend it, many of us could cover our bare-minimum daily water needs without drinking anything during the day.

Other doctors certainly take issue with his figures:

[S]ome nutritionists insist that half the country is walking around dehydrated. We drink too much coffee, tea and sodas containing caffeine, which prompts the body to lose water, they say; and when we are dehydrated, we don't know enough to drink.

Can it be so? Should healthy adults really be stalking the water cooler to protect themselves from creeping dehydration?

Not at all, doctors say. "The notion that there is widespread dehydration has no basis in medical fact," says Dr. Robert Alpern, dean of the medical school at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

Doctors from a wide range of specialties agree: By all evidence, we are a well-hydrated nation. Furthermore, they say, the current infatuation with water as an all-purpose health potion — tonic for the skin, key to weight loss — is a blend of fashion and fiction and very little science.

The best general advice (keeping in mind that there are always exceptions) is to rely upon your normal senses. If you feel thirsty, drink; if you don't feel thirsty, don't drink unless you want to. The exhortation that we all need to satisfy an arbitrarily rigid rule about how much water we must drink every day was aptly skewered in a letter by a Los Angeles Times reader:

Although not trained in medicine or nutrition, I intuitively knew that the advice to drink eight glasses of water per day was nonsense. The advice fully meets three important criteria for being an American health urban legend: excess, public virtue, and the search for a cheap "magic bullet."

SOURCE :::: http://www.snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp