In my post “6 ways I feel good about myself“, my 6th point was about drinking lots of water. Well according to this article from The Guardian, drinking “lots of water” for your health and image is not the way to go! There are apparently many myths about water that it unveils:

 

Hosted By: The Guardian

Written By: Emine Saner

Many of us have been led to believe that the more we drink, the healthier we will be. At the weekend, in his column for the Sunday Times, Dominic Lawson outed his sister Nigella as an “aquaholic”, drinking several litres a day. Several newspapers followed this up this week by interviewing women who drank excessive amounts of water thinking they were doing themselves good – one, Joanne Jarvis, interviewed by the Daily Mail, was hospitalised after drinking 11 litres over four hours.

When did we become so fearful of dehydration? Schoolchildren are encouraged to take bottles of water into classrooms and sip them throughout the day. Peer into most meeting rooms in the country and you will see bottles of water planted on the table in front of executives, as if they fear that the slightest dehydration will impair them in some way. At the gym, people replenish water as fast as they sweat it out.

A few years ago, Stanley Goldfarb, professor of medicine and a kidney specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, noticed a strange phenomenon. “People were dragging around big bottles of water with them and drinking all the time and I thought: ‘What are they doing?'”

He says on the phone from his office in Philadelphia: “Since we have a perfectly good system to alert us if we need water, why would you need to subvert that by drinking in a prophylactic way?” He reviewed the scientific literature on the health benefits of drinking a lot of water, identifying the four recurrent themes that were put about by those who advocated it.

Read the rest of this article to get some great information, about consuming water, that we all could use in our everyday lives: Continue

MR