Sure sounds like the "8x8" recommendation (why not just say "half a gallon" or "2 liters"?) is actually a reasonable lower bound for what people should be drinking then.
What people often take away from that is that they should drink eight glasses of water _in addition to_ everything else they might consume--soda, juice, coffee, and anything else that has water in it. And they think there's a rule they need to adhere to, and not trust the fact that our bodies are actually pretty good at letting us know when we need water.
I was always told that when growing up but I never understood how drinking soda would actually cause a net loss of fluids. A quick search shows that my suspicions were correct. Even though drinking soda doesn't hydrate you as much as drinking water, it does not dehydrate you.
If you truly believe that these will net-dehydrate you, it should be pretty easy to prove - just survive for 1 week drinking only soda/juice/coffee. If you die of dehydration, we'll admit you were right :)
I've survived for years drinking mostly iced tea, with a soda in the morning instead of coffee. I can count the number of times I drink plain water in a week on one hand (after exercise, basically)
I can confidently admit that when I was a stupid teenager, I had consisted on Soda & Coffee and potentially only getting raw water content absorbed from foods for multiple weeks on end.
You would need to drink a massive amount for it to be lethal.
Instead what you see are obese individuals because drinking soda has the net effect of making you more thirsty, causing people to drink more soda. Which is exactly what the soda makers want you to do, and will fund studies to make you believe otherwise.
I had to look up what 8 fl oz is in a sane unit(236ml), and that seems perfectly normal to me - pretty much all glasses that you can buy here are 250ml. If you buy a 330ml can of coke you can usually pour most of it in with some left for a top-up.
I wouldn't call anyone a 'psycho' for not adhering, but personally I'd typically pour a pint (568ml) of water, at home.
Of course, at any restaurant glasses given with water for the table are going to be somewhere much nearer your 236ml, so there's really nothing psychotic about it.
> Of course, at any restaurant glasses given with water for the table are going to be somewhere much nearer your 236ml, so there's really nothing psychotic about it.
Bingo. It's not hard to sip on a average sized glass of water during a meal. I routinely kill a 750ml water bottle at the gym or when hiking.
Except it's well known that that is way too much water unless you are sweating a lot. If you drink that much, you'll just pee a lot, it won't actually do anything useful.
Since the article got something so basic wrong (and if it was intentional you would think they would mention that the numbers were similar), I decided to stop reading the article at that point, I don't need incorrect information.
Maybe it's an editing mistake?
The actual amount of water you need varies by exertion, and diet and all sorts of things, it's not a fixed amount.
I don't understand why you're downvoted. At the very least, the article is inconsistent on this point:
8 cups / day is widely reported - and suggested in the article itself - to be too high as a minimum, and yet the article actually ends up concluding that you need to be drinking more than that.
>The actual amount of water you need varies by exertion, and diet and all sorts of things, it's not a fixed amount.
I completely agree with this statement.
>If you drink that much, you'll just pee a lot, it won't actually do anything useful.
I drink on average 6L of water a day. When I first started water-only fasting I was urinating constantly. I discovered that this was because I would drink a lot in one sitting, (as a 'meal' replica) and then interspersed throughout the day.
Once I changed my consumption style to ~150mL frequently I found that my body used the water better. Once it realized that a "constant supply" was readily available (and didn't need to worry about feast/famine cycles) I retained what I needed and more casually urinated the processed water.
My body can better manage itself when I drink 150ml 40x a day then it can manage 1L 6x a day.
So you stop what you're doing every half an hour and drink get a glass of water and drink it? Or do you have constant supply at your desk or how are the logistics?
The body doesn't really have any way to retain [liquid] water without causing medical issues. There's no storage compartment except for fat that could be metabolized into water.
You can also store water, for a short time, mixed into fiber in food that was recently eaten.
I'm not implying I have 'water pouches' or anything as silly.
1.5L of water in my stomach gets processed as quickly as my kidneys can manage. Thus I urinate out a large % of that liquid intake before use can be made of it.
Continually drinking small amounts doesn't overwhelm my stomach and therefore it feels like I urinate less, and 'retain' that water.
Yes agreed, it's not helpful to search for a constant consumption requirement. A healthy and sedentary person, with a reasonable diet, on a cold, gray, damp day, does not need to consume much water.