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How Much Water Should You Drink Each Day? Experts Weigh In
Drinking water is kind of non-negotiable when it comes to, you know, living. But while we all pretty much know we have to drink water to keep our bodies functioning, we can't seem to agree on just how much water we need.
The truth? Water intake isn't exactly a one-size fits all prescription. Instead, how much water you need to drink each day is dependent on a bunch of different factors: your weight, how your metabolism works, how much food you eat (and what you eat), what your body temperature is, and how active you are, among other things, according to Baruch Fertel, MD, an emergency medicine physician at Cleveland Clinic.
So what's the deal? How much water should you really be drinking each day—and how do you know if you're hydrated enough? Here's what experts have to say about your sipping habits (or lack thereof).
Okay, how much water do you officially need each day?
So, the "8 x 8" rule—drinking eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day—is pretty solid advice as a starting point, says Cynthia Sass, RD, Health contributing editor. But "you need to consume more fluid if you’re losing more, through exercise or from being in hot, humid weather," Sass explains. "You may also need more if you’ve been ill and have a fever, are sweating, or are experiencing vomiting and diarrhea."
The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies takes it a step further and suggests women consume an average of 2.7 liters (about 11 cups) of water each day. Note, however, the institute says "consume"—that's because you can get your water intake from both beverages and food. "We don't offer any rule of thumb based on how many glasses of water people should drink each day because our hydration needs can be met through a variety of sources in addition to drinking water," Lawrence Appel, director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research at Johns Hopkins University, said in a press release for the institute.
As far as those different sources of water go, the institute says "people also get water from juice, milk, coffee, tea, soda, fruits, vegetables, and other foods and beverages as well." Dr. Fertel explains, however, that "not all liquids are created equal." Alcohol, for example, is a diuretic—that means it can have a "paradoxical effect" and cause water loss, says Dr. Fertel. Liquids that contain salts and electrolytes, however (think: sports drinks) can help you retain fluid and hydrate better.
One beverage that doctors and nutritionists are on the fence about, though? Coffee. In the past, your fave cup of Joe was thought to be dehydrating, but Sass says that the caffeinated beverage actually can hydrate you, depending on how you consume it. "Newer research shows that our bodies can adjust to caffeine, which negates its diuretic effect—as long as [intake is] consistent and not excessive. On the other hand, if your caffeine intake is erratic, you may experience a diuretic effect.”
RELATED: What Causes Dehydration? Here’s What You Need to Know
How can you tell if you're drinking enough water?
Take a look in the toilet—no, really. Dr. Fertel says that the color of your pee can tell you a ton about your drinking habits. "Urine should be the color of lemonade: a touch of yellow." If you're peeing infrequently and your urine looks bright or dark yellow, that could be a warning sign that you're not getting enough H2O.
Additionally, confusion, the inability to drink liquids, and severe weakness are signs of dehydration. If you experience any of these, or if you have no urine output, you should seek medical attention, according to Dr. Fertel. And definitely don't let your thirst guide you: "By the time you feel thirsty you're already slightly dehydrated," says Sass. (Though, to be clear: You should always drink when you're thirsty—but the best route is to drink before you feel thirsty.)
Something else to keep in mind: Dehydration isn't something to be taken lightly. One myth about water intake, says Sass, is that dehydration is no big deal, but "just a 2% loss of body fluid can negatively impact physical performance, and a 1-3% loss has been shown to impair mood, reduce concentration, increase headaches, impair working memory, and increase anxiety and fatigue," Sass says.
Basically, staying hydrated is important—but there's no quick answer to exactly how much water your body needs each day. Your best bet? Starting off with the "8 x 8" rule and then paying attention to your body from there and supplementing with a few more glasses when needed.
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Health24.com | Is it just a myth or can can cold weather cause a cough?
Cold air, wind and water have long been believed to lie behind catching a cold.
A previous Health24 article cites a 2017 study arguing that cold weather can actually cause a cold, proving there is some truth to this “old wives tale”. The reason is that viruses replicate faster and more efficiently in colder conditions.
Winter might be coming to a close, but the cold and flu season isn’t over just yet. And with the cold weather often comes a mild, hacking cough that can become more severe. But how can simply being outside in the cold and breathing in the crisp air lead to a cough?
Dr Graeme Thompson told ABC Health & Wellbeing that cold air can exacerbate an existing cough – especially if you have a respiratory infection such as pneumonia or bronchitis. It is, however, unlikely that it can cause it. Chances of this happening are more likely if you live in regions where temperatures drop really low, such as Canada and Siberia.
Coughing at night
If you’re already battling with a cough, it may worsen at night. This is because we normally expel mucus from our airways through coughing, but when we’re asleep, we aren’t coughing, explains this Health24 article. This allows mucus to build up. There are ways to loosen the mucus trapped in your airways though, which includes being physically active and moving around.
Check out our list of the five distinct types of cough that can be either acute or chronic. If your cough persists for more than three weeks, it’s best to see your doctor as it may be a sign of something more serious.
Image: iStock
Health24.com | ‘Fast and feast’ diet works for weight loss
Tired of that spare tyre?
Low-calorie diets work, but can be difficult to follow. A much simpler approach to losing weight might be to just stop eating every other day.
It’s called alternate-day fasting (ADF). As the name implies, you starve yourself by fasting one day and then you feast the next, and then repeat that pattern again and again.
In just the month-long trial of the ADF diet, study volunteers lost more than seven pounds (more than 3kg).
That weight loss occurred even though people on the ADF diet ate about 30% more on the days they were allowed to eat than they normally would. Even with that extra food on feast days, the study volunteers still consumed fewer calories overall because of their fasting days, the researchers explained.
“This is an easy regimen – no calculation of calories – and the compliance was very high,” said the study’s senior author, Frank Madeo, a professor of molecular biology at Karl-Franzens University of Graz, in Austria.
Madeo said the researchers didn’t study how the ADF diet might compare to other types of intermittent-fasting diets or to a more typical lower-calorie diet.
He said that the ADF study didn’t appear to have any impact on the immune system (at least in this short-term study), but that diets that simply rely on lower caloric intake may dampen immune system function.
A number of fasting variations
Why does intermittent fasting work?
“The reason might be due to evolutionary biology,” Madeo suggested. “Our physiology is familiar with periods of starvation followed by food excesses.” It’s only in recent history that humans have had such an abundance of food that they need to restrict calories to maintain weight, he added.
Intermittent-fasting diets have gotten a lot of attention in the past few years. A number of celebrities, like Beyonce and Jimmy Kimmel, are rumoured to use intermittent fasting to lose weight.
There are a number of variations for fasting besides ADF. Some people eat as usual for a set number of days per week, and then may fast or eat very little during the rest of the week. Some people restrict the number of hours they eat in the day, eating only from 07:00 to 19:00, as an example.
That kind of diet worked for Jared Sklar, 27, of Woodland Hills, California. He went from 285 pounds (more than 129kg) before an intermittent-fasting diet to 190 pounds (just more than 86kg) seven months later. Sklar told CNN that he only eats between the hours of 12:00 to 20:00 each day – leaving the next 16 hours as a fast. He also started eating healthier and exercising.
“There’s always something in front of me to keep me motivated, to make sure that I don’t fall back into my old habits,” Sklar said.
Not yet recommending it for everyone
In the new study, Madeo’s team recruited 60 people, all healthy, non-obese adults. On average, they were just slightly overweight at the start of the study.
Half of the study volunteers relied on an every-other-day fasting plan for a month. So, in a 48-hour period, they only ate during a 12-hour period. Eating during this time wasn’t restricted.
The other 30 people ate as they normally did without any restrictions.
Folks in the “fast and feast group” lost an average of 4.5% of their body weight. The group eating normally went up an average of less than a half pound.
In addition to losing weight, the fast and feast group also saw healthy changes in heart disease risk factors, such as lower cholesterol, according to the study authors.
Despite these positive findings, the researchers aren’t yet recommending ADF diets for everyone because the long-term effects of this diet aren’t known.
Difficult to maintain
Registered dietician Samantha Heller from NYU Langone Health in New York City said that although people lost weight, a diet where you fast every other day would be difficult to maintain.
“What if you want to exercise? What if you have a physically active job? Our bodies are OK with not eating for a while, but they’re happier when we have a consistent source of healthy foods to provide nutrients needed to accomplish the tasks we challenge our bodies with every day,” she said.
Plus, Heller added that it’s important to learn how to improve your lifestyle. “Someone who loses weight by fasting every other day won’t learn strategies for living a healthy life. You need to create a healthy eating pattern that you can live with.”
One simple change people can make would be to extend the natural intermittent fast everyone already does while they sleep. “For many people, after dinner is when they sit in front of the computer or TV and snack. So, close the kitchen after dinner,” she suggested.
The study was published online August 27 in Cell Metabolism.
Image credit: iStock
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Busy older stars outpace stellar youngsters
The oldest stars in our Galaxy are also the busiest, moving more rapidly than their younger counterparts in and out of the disk of the Milky Way, according to new analysis carried out at the University of Birmingham.
The findings provide fresh insights into the history of our Galaxy and increase our understanding of how stars form and evolve.
Researchers calculate that the old stars are moving more quickly in and out of the disc — the pancake-shaped mass at the heart of the Galaxy where most stars are located.
A number of theories could explain this movement — it all depends where the star is in the disc. Stars towards the outskirts could be knocked by gravitational interactions with smaller galaxies passing by. Towards the inner parts of the disc, the stars could be disturbed by massive gas clouds which move along with the stars inside the disc. They could also be thrown out of the disc by the movement of its spiral structure.
Dr Ted Mackereth, a galactic archaeologist at the University of Birmingham, is lead author on the paper. He explains: “The specific way that the stars move tells us which of these processes has been dominant in forming the disc we see today. We think older stars are move active because they have been around the longest, and because they were formed during a period when the Galaxy was a bit more violent, with lots of star formation happening and lots of disturbance from gasses and smaller satellite galaxies. There are lots of different processes at work, and untangling all these helps us to build up a picture of the history of our Galaxy.”
The study uses data from the Gaia satellite, currently working to chart the movements of around 1 billion stars in the Milky Way. It also takes information from APOGEE, an experiment run by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that uses spectroscopy to measure the distribution of elements in stars, as well as images from the recently-retired Kepler space telescope.
Measurements provided by Kepler show how the brightness of stars varies over time, which gives insights into how they vibrate. In turn, that yields information about their interior structure, which enables scientists to calculate their age.
The Birmingham team, working with colleagues at the University of Toronto and teams involved with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, were able to take these different data strands and calculate the differences in velocity between different sets of stars grouped by age.
They found that the older stars were moving in many different directions with some moving very quickly out from the galactic disk. Younger stars move closely together at much slower speeds out from the disc, although they are faster than the older stars as they rotate around the Galaxy within the disc.
The eventual goal of the research is to link what is known about the Milky Way with information about how other galaxies in the universe formed, ultimately being able to place our Galaxy within the very earliest signatures of the universe.
The research is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, the Royal Astronomical Society and the European Research Council.
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Ancient die-off greater than the dinosaur extinction
Clues from Canadian rocks formed billions of year ago reveal a previously unknown loss of life even greater than that of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, when Earth lost nearly three-quarters of its plant and animal species.
Rather than prowling animals, this die-off involved miniscule microorganisms that shaped the Earth’s atmosphere and ultimately paved the way for those larger animals to thrive.
“This shows that even when biology on Earth is comprised entirely of microbes, you can still have what could be considered an enormous die-off event that otherwise is not recorded in the fossil record,” said Malcolm Hodgskiss, co-lead author of a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Invisible clues
Because this time period preceded complex life, researchers cannot simply dig up fossils to learn what was living 2 billion years ago. Even clues left behind in mud and rocks can be difficult to uncover and analyze.
Instead, the group turned to barite, a mineral collected from the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay, Canada, that encapsulates a record of oxygen in the atmosphere. Those samples revealed that Earth experienced huge changes to its biosphere — the part of the planet occupied by living organisms — ending with an enormous drop in life approximately 2.05 billion years ago that may also be linked to declining oxygen levels.
“The fact that this geochemical signature was preserved was very surprising,” Hodgskiss said. “What was especially unusual about these barites is that they clearly had a complex history.”
Looking at the Earth’s productivity through ancient history provides a glimpse into how life is likely to behave over its entire existence — in addition to informing observations of atmospheres on planets outside our solar system.
“The size of the biosphere through geologic time has always been one of our biggest questions in studying the history of the Earth,” said Erik Sperling, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford who was not involved with the study. “This new proxy demonstrates how interlinked the biosphere and levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are.”
Biological angle
This relationship between the proliferation of life and atmospheric oxygen has given researchers new evidence of the hypothesized “oxygen overshoot.” According to this theory, photosynthesis from ancient microorganisms and the weathering of rocks created a huge amount of oxygen in the atmosphere that later waned as oxygen-emitting organisms exhausted their nutrient supply in the ocean and became less abundant. This situation is in contrast to the stable atmosphere we know on Earth today, where the oxygen created and consumed balances out. The researchers’ measurements of oxygen, sulfur and barium isotopes in barite support this oxygen overshoot hypothesis.
The research helps scientists hone their estimates of the size of the oxygen overshoot by revealing the significant biological consequences of oxygen levels above or below the capacity of the planet.
“Some of these oxygen estimates likely require too many microorganisms living in the ocean in Earth’s past,” said co-lead author Peter Crockford, a postdoctoral researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science and Princeton University. “So we can now start to narrow in on what the composition of the atmosphere could have been through this biological angle.”
The research was supported by Stanford University McGee and Compton Grants, the Northern Scientific Training Program, NSERC, National Geographic, the American Philosophical Society, Geological Society of America and the Agouron Institute.
