Is it good or bad to drink… say… a gallon of water per day?
is that, or more, bad for your health? Will it increase your urination so that you’ll urinate essential vitamins/minerals out of your body?
What else will drinking too much water do to your body?
It will stress your bladder and kidneys, and it will screw up your blood chemistry (think sodium and electrolytes).
But if you space a gallon of water out over a day, you should be fine. It’s when you drink too much too quickly.
Or sweat too profusely. When the triathalon comes to our town on a hot weekend, we see life threatening cerebral edema caused by depleted sodium in people drinking too much free water (sports drinks would be better). Also, if you certain heart, lung, or kidney problems then a gallon a day would be way too much,
Larry
Yup, hyponatremia.
But is there an issue with too much water in a normal state of activity? Hyponatremia typically presents in cases of extreme exertion, where the sodium leaves through perspiration.
What if someone drinks 10 gallons per day without any real challenging levels of exertion? Would the increased kidney/excretion cycle force out the sodium and other things? It would certainly stress the kidneys and bladders through additional activity, but is that a clinical condition?
The cases where extreme thirst factors in is both Diabetes Mellitus, where ET is a sentinel symptom, and can indicate renal distress, and in Diabetes Insipidus, where ET is driven by excess urination.
In the case of DI, the excess urination throws off blood chemistry and metabolics. The excessive drinking of water isn’t the issue, the issue is abnormal excretion.
In the case of overt kidney or bladder problems, excessive intake of water may aggravate the problems; but I suspect that excess consumption alone wouldn’t actually cause them…
This Straight Dope column by the Master may be of interest: Can water be too pure? Is too much water bad for you?
Not to be overly pedantic about it, but Hyponatremia isn’t really about taking in too much water. It’s about excreting (and not replacing) the minerals…
Wasn’t excessive water a short lived dieting fad in the 70’s or early 80’s that ended up killing a bunch of people? IIRC it caused major kidney problems.
I do seem to recall Elizabeth Taylor’s name used in conjunction with Lasix, a diuretic drug. I don’t have a cite to confirm it, though, just my own faulty memory.
Too much water will also lead to hyperfiltration, leading to loss of protein in the urine. This is not a good idea. In most people it won’t cause a problem, but in people who have low protein to begin with it could be serious.
Seen it a few times, young women with positive urinary protein, who just drink lots and lots of water.
I did the Stillman water diet in the summer of '72, and spent that September in the hospital with a kidney infection (that they finally diagnosed when I mentioned my gallon+/per day regimen), if you’d like to date the fad more precisely.
I lost a lot of weight, though. Didn’t realize that I almost lost it all.
Without denying the seriousness of hyponatremia, it’s probably helpful to note that dehydration is a far, far more common problem. In the course of an ordinary day, someone is way more likely to suffer from dehydration.
Atkins advocated a half-gallon of water daily, to counteract the constipating tendency of his diet. Apparently that isn’t too insane of an quantity.
What’s the safety limit on this for an adult in normal shape?
Are we talking a ballerina or a defensive lineman?
As usual, ultrafilter brings up a good point. At the gym, I constantly see the big, bulky meatheads walking around with milk jug full of water. Consider that they usually weigh 250 lbs or so, they sweat a lot, and they are most certainly taking vitamin/mineral supplements to help balance out what they’re losing. Your average person working a white collar job and not getting enough exercise would most certainly be destroying their kidneys by drinking that much water.
Let’s say a guy who looks like the Baron Harkonen working a desk job…
You need about 2500mL fluid containing 100mmol sodium and 70mmol potassium per 24hours for maintainence, plus, obviously you need to replace insensible losses (eg diarrhoea, vomiting, sweating). That means that if you were taking absolutely no food, but were otherwise completely healthy and normal I’d put up 2 one litre bags and 1 500ml bag of normal saline (with the potassium added) in a 24hr period.
This is based on the average 70kg man- for fluid per hour some people suggest 4ml for the first 10kg, 2ml for the next 10kg and 1 mL for each Kg after that.
Most people will get a lot of this fluid and all of the sodium and potassium from their food.
Drinking those 8 glasses of water will be absolutely fine for the vast majority of people living in a temperate climate, and certainly it will be more than sufficient for some people. The amount of water you should be drinking would be enough to make your urine pale yellow- not clear and not dark.
There is no benefit in drinking more than 2litres of water a day unless specifically told to do so by your doctor.
Uhoh. How pale is pale? Tiny tint of yellow to it?
I’ve danged near gotten it to clear when I was using water as a sore throat treatment at work – never quite there, though.
Two earlier threads on drinking water:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118397
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=2215076#post2215076
Is thirst a reasonable guide? The hazard is with people who are really pushing the fluids, right? Because I drink probably a gallon or so of water per day, just drinking when I’m thirsty. I’ve been checked for diabetes, and I don’t have it. I doubt there’s any shortage of salt in my diet either. So is there anything unhealthy about that?