Anyone know anything about these? I remember being taught these in a fitness class in middle school and they stuck with me.
Drinking cold water is actually bad for you either because A. It lowers your core body temperature and you waste energy having to heat it back up or B. It just makes you thirsty for more water which could lead to over-hydation.
Drinking soda or other beverages is harmful before exercise because their is sodium in them and the sodium in the soda actually lowers the amount of water you have and doesn’t hydrate you at all.
That “waste [of] energy” is also called “burning calories”. In this fitness obsessed culture, that’s usually promoted as a benefit of drinking cold water.
Sodium is an electrolyte. You want it so you can replace what you lose while sweating. That’s the entire principle behind the existence of stuff like Gatorade or Pedialyte.
I am prone to kidney stones, so my doctors advise me to stay well hydrated. A urologist told me that my urine should be almost colorless. Medium to dark yellow is a sign that I’m not drinking enough. This may not be required for other people, but I highly recommend not getting kidney stones if at all possible.
Most people get enough (or too much) Sodium. The real issues are potassium and Magnesium.
Good advice, but do note that several vitamins will color your urine. So you could be great at hydration, but still have yellow urine.
Two other related myths- Caffeinated beverages do not hydrate you, they dehydrate you. This is false. I mean, I guess that a espresso shot may do that, but ordinary coffee, tea or soda does hydrate- just that not as well as water.
Similar with booze- but here the line is fuzzier. High potency booze does not hydrate, but most beers and many wines do. It depends on the proof.
So if you went on a fishing trip with nothing to drink but coffee and beer- you could be fine- hydration-wise at least.
Erm… Do you bring bottled coffee on fishing trips?
I mean, if you don’t, you’ll need water to make it and brewing coffee seems a bit strange if the purpose is being hydrated.
You can in fact die from drinking too much water. It does not happen very often, but it has happened. If you drink too much water, especially the distilled kind, you can make the large battery that is your body unable to maintain a charge, causing the cpu to fail.
Although compared to the Calories in food or almost any beverage other than water, heating up cold water is completely lost in the noise.
And I’ve heard that the origin of the “8 glasses of water” thing is that that’s the total amount of hydration that the human body needs. But most foods we eat already contain a fair bit of water, enough to cover the majority (though not all) of most folks’ needs even before we touch any beverages.
However, most of those other sources of hydration include other things that tend to accumulate in parts of the body where that accumulation is not desired. Hence, if you want to keep your BMI down, drinking a lot of water may be seen as a way to help with that.
Anecdotally, I can report that if you go boating in salt water, you get thirstier than if you go boating in fresh water.
I’m currently on a streak where I drink a lot of water - it’s part of trying to eat healthier and exercise regularly.
I definitely pee a lot (at least once on the middle of the night), but I can also report that I feel better when I’m well hydrated. It’s like I feel “cleaner” on the inside - lighter on my feet, with improved energy (granted, with the other things, like healthy food and exercise, it’s really a synergistic effect).
Oh, I dunno. Drinking a lot of water MAKES me sluggish - I wake up with a distended bladder in the middle of the night and that’s all she wrote. Sleep is gone, cut short, and I drag my exhausted self around the next day.