Drinking too much water?
WARNING: Drinking too much water is bad for your health
Water is the body’s most vital nutrient - and most people don’t drink enough. However, you can drink too much, as the recent case of a woman who claims to have been advised to drink 5 litres of water on a dodgy ‘detox’ diet, and suffered brain damage for overhydration as a result, illustrates.Drinking 10 litres in an hour can even kill you.Some ecstasy-related deaths have occurred due to people, paranoid about dehydrating, actually overhydrating. This dilutes the blood and causes water to flood cells and organs.Cells in the brain can then swell up, increasing pressure inside the skull. If vital regions of the brain are compressed this can cause symptoms ranging from headaches to problems with breathing or seizures.
But equally dangerous is drinking too little.
Drinking eight glasses of water - the equivalent of about 1.5 litres (2.75 pints) - makes an enormous difference to how you feel, especially your energy and mental clarity. Water does help to dilute toxic by-products of food metabolism in the blood, for elimination via the kidneys, so drinking water helps support kidney function. It’s also important to keep your body hydrated so that toxins are not reabsorbed into your body from the bowel.
In this hot weather 1.5 litres (2.75 pints) of water a day is really a minimum, especially if you exercise, you will need this much water to replace the liquid you are losing as sweat. The maximum amount of liquids drunk should be equal to the amount the kidneys can reasonably excrete in 24 hours, and in adults this is about 2 litres (3.5 pints) per day.
So, be aware that drinking more than you need, which is about 1.5-2 litres (2.75-3.5 pints) a day under normal circumstances, isn’t better for you and may actually be worse.
Source: Patrick Holford.com
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