http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190403-how-much-water-should-you-drink-a-day
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In the early 19th Century, people had to be close to death before deigning to drink water. Only those "reduced to the last stage of poverty satisfy their thirst with water", according to Vincent Priessnitz, the founder of hydropathy, otherwise known as "the water cure".
Many people, he added, had never drunk more than half a pint of plain water in one sitting.
How times have changed. Adults in the UK today are consuming more water now than in recent years, while in the US, sales of bottled water recently surpassed sales of soda.
We've been bombarded with messages telling us that drinking litres of water every day is the secret to good health, more energy and great skin, and that it will make us lose weight and avoid cancer.
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Years of unsubstantiated claims around the 8x8 rule have led us to believe that feeling thirsty means we're already dangerously dehydrated. But experts largely agree that we don't need any more fluid than the amount our bodies signal for, when it signals for it.
"The control of hydration is some of most sophisticated things we've developed in evolution, even since ancestors crawled out of sea onto land. We have a huge number of sophisticated techniques we use to maintain adequate hydration," says Irwin Rosenburg, senior scientist at the Neuroscience and Ageing Laboratory at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
So now we are supposed to drink water when we are thirsty again instead of making sure we never experience thirst? Who woulda thought?Quote:
Too much fluid consumption can become serious when it causes a dilution of sodium in blood. This creates a swelling of the brain and lungs, as fluid shifts to try to balance out blood sodium levels.
Over the last decade or so, Kipps has been aware of at least 15 cases of athletes who've died from over-hydration during sporting events. She suspects these cases are partly because we've become distrustful of our own thirst mechanism and that we think we need to drink more than our bodies are calling for to avoid dehydration.