{"id":33051,"date":"2015-10-06T02:00:19","date_gmt":"2015-10-06T06:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33051"},"modified":"2015-10-04T23:11:31","modified_gmt":"2015-10-05T03:11:31","slug":"your-daily-recommended-minimum-intake-of-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/10\/06\/your-daily-recommended-minimum-intake-of-water\/","title":{"rendered":"Your daily recommended minimum intake of water"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m sure you’ve heard variations on the notion that we’re all effectively dehydrated and should drink more water … where “more” is defined as a minimum of 64 ounces of water. It’s pseudo-scientific bullshit<\/a>, as you may have already decided for yourself:<\/p>\n

If there is one health myth that will not die, it is this: You should drink eight glasses of water a day.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s just not true. There is no science behind it.<\/p>\n

And yet every summer we are inundated with news media reports warning that dehydration is dangerous and also ubiquitous.<\/p>\n

These reports work up a fear that otherwise healthy adults and children are walking around dehydrated, even that dehydration has reached epidemic proportions.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s put these claims under scrutiny.<\/p>\n

I was a co-author of a paper back in 2007 in the BMJ<\/em> on medical myths. The first myth was that people should drink at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day. This paper got more media attention (even in The Times<\/em>) than pretty much any other research I\u2019ve ever done.<\/p>\n

It made no difference. When, two years later, we published a book on medical myths that once again debunked the idea that we need eight glasses of water a day, I thought it would persuade people to stop worrying. I was wrong again.<\/p>\n

Many people believe that the source of this myth was a 1945 Food and Nutrition Board recommendation that said people need about 2.5 liters of water a day. But they ignored the sentence that followed closely behind. It read, \u201cMost of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m sure you’ve heard variations on the notion that we’re all effectively dehydrated and should drink more water … where “more” is defined as a minimum of 64 ounces of water. It’s pseudo-scientific bullshit, as you may have already decided for yourself: If there is one health myth that will not die, it is this: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,66,16],"tags":[347],"class_list":["post-33051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-health-science","category-science","tag-debunking"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8B5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33051"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33052,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33051\/revisions\/33052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}