If I were drowning I am sure the doctor’s antidote would be “Drink a glass of water and call me in the morning.”
The ancient mariner decried that he had no drink. Water, water everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink (Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner). Most of us have too much to drink. But what is the right amount?
Ever since I can remember, or since I went to school in the 1940s, I have been told to drink lots of water, or the food guides might say drink eight glasses of water a day. Now my doctor has implemented a care nurse to make sure I am well looked after. And to justify her existence, she asks faithfully, “Are you drinking enough water?” Last time she called I had to try to account for how much water I consumed. Of late I have a water bottle with me, which I fill when it runs low. But I don’t keep track of the amount. I am sure she enters in her log book that I am being recalcitrant.
“The very idea of a ‘minimal water requirement’ is actually a fairly recent notion that first appeared in dietary guidelines published in 1945 [About the time I started school] by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences [US].”
“So you’ve probably heard that you’re supposed to drink eight, 8-ounce glasses of water every day, right? Well, turns out, that’s bullshit,” says Rachel Becker and cites the Mayo Clinic.
The latest craze in home remedy is to examine your urine before you flush. If it’s too dark (and they even publish a colour guide, which I neglected to clip), drink more water. Professional athletes and workers in hot weather jobs have long recognized the importance of keeping hydrated. Doctors, dieticians, coaches, travel agents, labour unions – all espouse the theory that we shall drink lots of water. They list eight or ten, up to thirteen, reasons for drinking lots of water: for health or medical reasons, for biological and physiological reasons.
Let’s be sensible: If your body craves more water – Drink. My primary reason to drink water is that I not drink an excess of sugar-enriched juices and pop. A concomitant might be that it aids digestion and means that I have less room for, or less desire for, an excess of food. God was preoccupied with water: He divided a shapeless mass into land and water and made the surface of the earth about 70 percent water; He made the human body 60 or 70 percent water. It took Him the better part of six days to get it all right. So drink lots of water.
