Facing the Scientific Facts on Hydration
Are you drinking enough water?
You probably ask yourself this question at least once a day–more if you are an active person. You may even have a target amount of water you try to reach each day in order to achieve your weight loss, hydration, or general wellness goals. Is it 8 cups? A gallon? Even more?
We want to ask you a question that might sound surprising, or even counter-intuitive. Could you be drinking too much water? Due to a lot of misconceptions around hydration, and some meddling with common hydration wisdom by some of the largest sports drinks and beverage corporations, most people think they are in a constant state of dehydration. Since drinking too much water can harm you, especially if you are a hard-sweating highly active person, we wanted to help set the record straight about proper hydration.
Drinking Too Much Water Can Hurt You
Did you know that consuming too much water can make you sick, tired, and, in very excessive amounts, even kill you? The West Chester University HEAT Institute organized a recent conference with CrossFit® to expose some common myths about dehydration, and replace them with trusted, cutting edge scientific research on the risks of over-hydration. For instance, HEAT Director and renowned hydration science expert Dr. Sandra Fowkes Godek (a respected debunker of hydration myths) researches and exposes the risks of drinking too much water while exercising, a condition known as exercise-associated hyponatremia, or EAH. EAH risks include everything from irritability, fatigue, and nausea to seizures, coma, and death. Fowkes’ research on football players and hydration gained national attention when two young high school football players died in late 2014 after drinking too much water and Gatorade before, during, and after practice. Other researchers at the conference exposed the myth that dehydration leads to muscle cramps, discussed “salty sweaters” (athletes whose sweat is extra salty and who therefore need to pay extra attention to replacing sodium during physical exertion), and discussed different preventative measures and treatments for EAH.
Stop Looking at Your Pee and Start Paying Attention to Your Thirst
Does this sound familiar? Look at your pee–if it is dark you are either dehydrated, or you just took a multi-vitamin. Many of us think that the color of our pee provides us a clear, simple message about our hydration level–darker urine is more concentrated, hence less watered down, hence you are dehydrated. The studies on urine color that popularized this notion that you can look at your pee to determine your hydration level have since been challenged for their basis in hard evidence. Newer research shows that using your pee as a cypher for how hydrated you are is misleading at best, and wildly varies from person to person.
Instead of looking at your pee to determine your hydration level and need to drink fluids, in his book Waterlogged: The Serious Problem of Over-hydration in Endurance Sports, Dr. Tim Noakes mobilizes decades of research to offer a much more simple hydration measure: drink when you’re thirsty. Because the research shows that the human body has evolved to become a well-tuned water regulation machine, the thirsty rule applies to the masses and the endurance athletes alike. Although many of us are constantly worried about being or becoming dehydrated (and spending too much time looking at our pee), few are aware of the risks of over-hydration, especially for athletic performance.
How to Stay Perfectly Hydrated–No More and No Less
Unfortunately, the key to proper hydration, especially during exercise, is not quite as simple as drinking when you’re thirsty. What you drink matters. Water lacks electrolytes or other beneficial nutrients that are depleted when you exercise and sweat. And, although electrolyte sodium is an important ingredient for fluid-replacement (which is why saline solution is injected intravenously by medical professionals to hydrate patients), most of us already consume too much of it through salty foods, according to the FDA.
Sports drinks aren’t always properly formulated to suit exercise or daily hydration either. A sports drink with too much salt could overload you with sodium, potentially causing you to dehydrate (since water molecules will leave the cell to follow the flood of sodium in the bloodstream, causing it to shrink), or to take in more fluids than necessary because you’ll feel even thirstier after you drink (in which case the water molecules flood the cell due to a depletion of sodium in the bloodstream and cause the cell to swell, potentially to a dangerous degree). Drinking too many fluids before physical activity can be downright uncomfortable as well because of the sloshing feeling in your stomach. To make matters worse, some high-sodium drinks also contain a lot of glucose, or sugar, which can trick you into consuming a lot more calories than necessary to fuel your workout.
An ideal sports drink should act like a proper hydration fluid, delivering a balanced amount of sodium and other beneficial electrolytes that won’t over-hydrate you (like water without electrolytes can do), or catapult you into an unintentional high-calorie fluid binge (which many popular sports drinks can do).
So, according to cutting edge science, if you want to stay properly hydrated you should probably put down that gallon jug of water that social media insisted you drink every day. Instead, seek out low-calorie balanced sports drinks and natural drinks (like coconut water) that replenish you and keep you balanced, without waterlogging or depriving you.