Do you really need to drink eight cups of water a day?


Hyponatremia: sodium imbalance

Drinking more and more water just dilutes sodium and can cause many ill-effects and even death.

It is such a pervasive belief that drink loads of water is lovely... even on a LC diet where you tend to lose a lot of sodium anyway. I always get a bit steamed when people are suffering from low sodium there's always someone telling them to drink more water.

One of your previous posts convinced me.
I cut down my water about a month or two ago.

Good! Did it help with any symptoms?

I must be a very contrary person LOL! I have never been very fond of plain old water, but purchased a Sodastream a few months ago (as I am quite fond of carbonated mineral water, but can't justify the expense), and have upped my daily intake to around 2 liters, on top of the copious amounts of black tea I drink every morning. While on a short trip this last weekend, and away from both my tea and carbonated water I could feel the dehydration - dry mouth, especially in the morning, chapped lips (always a problem, less so with lots of liquid), a general feeling of things being "off". Back home, and back on routine, I feel much better. I have mentioned on other threads that I also seem to have an opposite effect when it comes to sodium; adding it into my diet made me feel awful, and raised my blood pressure to an unacceptable level, and I am doing much better back on my relatively low salt regimen.

Not that I noticed. But I definitely don't feel worse. And it's a huge relief to not have to drink that much water. I swear I'm not as thirsty as I used to be. Which would make sense if I'm not flushing all the sodium out of my body.

I noticed when I drink tea my mouth gets very dry, then I have to either drink more tea or drink a bunch of water. My sister has dry mouth all the time and I bet it is because she literally drinks gallons of the stuff (unsweetened, fortunately).

Before I moved to a dry climate I had headaches almost daily and the only water I drank was with the aspirin. Now I drink ~2L of water (green tea, SodaStream creations & some plain) each day and I never get headaches except for when I'm too busy or involved in something and skimp on water. A glass or two of water (without the aspirin) usually cures the headache in 30-60 minutes.

How much water you should drink is a complicated question. I was getting up 2-3 times a night, so dropped back. Some have said one can go by color of urine. White too much. Yellow OK. Orange Bad. Others have questioned that.

Now I just drink if thirsty. Coffee covers most of my needs.

Comments:

1) It's hard to imagine our ancestors drinking 2 litres a day.

2) When I've been on holiday France & Italy, they appear to drink very little apart from espresso and wine which are both diuretic.

3) Recently read that the body creates 10% of its water from mitochondrial ATP synthesis.

4) A large percentage of most of the foods we eat is water so the requirement for liquid water on its own might not be that high.

5) It's the tannin in tea that gives you a dry mouth - It can be prevented with more milk / cream or by brewing for less time.

#2 isn't really accurate. Coffee will cause you to excrete a slight amount more liquid than water and only the non-habituated. Coffee and wine still count as liquid.

Darker urine just as often means you ate something particularly nutritious, like liver. I've never been able to work up much enthusiasm for micromanaging the colour of my urine.

Yes, I can do all kinds of things to my urine by eating various foods:

Beets, red
Asparagus, bright yellow-green and stinky
Coffee, dark almost brown
Vitamin B supplements, neon yellow

After reading this newspaper article, I see where you got your ideas about not drinking so much water.

The article was based upon one study of extreme athletes. Good study, well designed. Interesting findings. But I don't see how it applies to people on LCHF diets? For one thing, I doubt if the cyclists had much fat on them and they were not cycling for weight loss. So generalizing from one study of a specific population to an entirely different population doesn't seem reasonable to me. Although the newspaper article was interesting, all its conclusions seem to have been derived from this one study. I wonder what Westman, Volek and Phinney would say.

I tried drinking more water besides all the coffee I put away, all it did, was get me up numerous times in the night. Now I drink when I'm thirsty.

I'm almost sure the '72 Atkins book didn't advise drinking copious amounts of water.

Westman says eat when you are hungry; drink when you are thirsty. "It is important to drink an adequate amount of fluid per day" and under Beverages, "Drink as much as you would like of the allowed beverages, but do not force fluids beyond your capacity. The best beverage is water"