Is That Really Water, Truman Capote?
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The much-quoted line from water marketers is that we should drink eight glasses of water per day, but where did this come from? Elizabeth Royte, author of "Bottlemania" tells Salon:
It got its start when the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council put out a report sometime in the '40s that said adults should drink about a milliliter of water for each calorie of food, which meant that we should drink about 64 to 80 ounces a day.
But the next sentence in the report was ignored. It says, "Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods." When you think about pasta or rice, you know that it absorbs an enormous amount of water. And we get water in coffee and in beer and in soda, and all the other things that we drink. But it was easy to ignore that part of it, if you were selling water.
So if eight helpings a day is marketing hype to sell bottled water, how much do you really need? According to the Los Angeles Times,
Kidney specialists do agree on one thing, however; that the 8 by 8 rule is a gross overestimate of any required minimum. To replace daily losses of water, an average sized adult with healthy kidneys needs no more than one liter of fluid, according to Jurgen Schnerman, a kidney physiologist at the National Institute of Health.
One liter is the equivalent of four 8- ounce glasses. According to most estimates, thats roughly the amount of water most Americans get in solid food. In short, though doctors don't recommend it, most of us could cover our bare-minimum daily water needs without drinking any of it during the day.
It also doesn't matter what you drink; tea or coffee, juice, milk; any liquid counts as water in your daily intake. Only alchol causes a net loss of fluids. The ultimate answer is- if you feel thirsty, take a drink, but there is no hard and fast rule on how much water you should have, no matter what the bottled water people would tell you.
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