KissTheSky
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2005
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16 May 2005
Daily Mail
Daily Mail
To Sarah Schapira's colleagues it's become a running joke. Every half hour or so the pretty 22-year-old PR gets up from her desk and makes a dash for the ladies.
But she isn't suffering from an embarrassing medical condition, the reason for her regular absences is hardly a mystery - every day she downs seven litres of water.
"My argument has always been that water is good for you and helps you to detox," she explains.
"We've all been told about the benefits of water, so I drink lots and lots of it, from the minute I wake up to the minute I go to bed."
In modern Britain "aquaholics" such as Sarah are no longer a rarity. Of course, they claim, there are rewards for such dedication.
The truth, however, is that this new generation of women who seek health and happiness in the bottom of an expensive bottle of water might as well flush their money straight down the pan (£1.2billion was spent on 2.08 billion litres of bottled water last year in Britain) and settle for a nice cup of tea instead.
Not only that, but the message about the benefits of drinking lots of water have become so confused that there's growing concern that increasing numbers are actually overdosing on it.
Take Sarah, for instance, whose health is now beginning to suffer as a result of the amount of water she consumes.
"If I don't have my bottle of water I feel paranoid,' she says. "And if I try not to drink for an hour, I start to feel dehydrated and I get throbbing headaches.
"But it has got to the stage where I don't know how to give it up. It used to make me feel really good and healthy but not any more. I know I ought to cut down but I'm not sure how I can."
Hyponatraemia
Excessive consumption of water can lead to a condition known as hyponatraemia (water intoxication), in which levels of sodium in the blood become dangerously diluted leading to complications such as convulsions, coma and even death.
Catherine Collins, chief dietician at St George's Hospital, London, recently saw a 23-year-old man who had been rushed in after slipping into a coma.
Doctors discovered that his sodium levels had fallen to a dangerous level, causing his brain to swell. Constricted by the skull, the brain has little room for expansion and once it has enlarged by six per cent it hits bone and starts to compress against the hard surface.
The cause of the coma, it would subsequently emerge, was not drugs or alcohol but a detox diet. For three weeks he had cut out junk food and ate nothing but fruit, vegetables, fruit juice and water.
Ironically most detoxers are wasting their money by swigging litre after litre of expensive mineral water in the belief that it will flush out the poisons.
"The idea that you need to drink five or six litres of water a day to detox is an urban myth," says Collins.
Colour of urine
The colour of urine is a good indicator of how much fluid we need. Too little and it will be very dark, about right and it will be a pale straw colour.
Ironically, another problem for those who swig large quantities of mineral water is that they might be drinking water of an inferior quality to ordinary tap water, according to celebrity detox guru Dr Nish Joshi.
"Bottling the water, particularly in plastic containers, provides these bacteria with a fantastic breeding ground and when you think that this water can then sit on a supermarket shelf for anything up to two years, there's really no way of knowing just what kind of pollutants you are taking into your body," he warns. "On the whole the standard of water cleanliness in the UK is very good and I truly believe the mineral water industry needs to be exposed as an expensive, unnecessary and unhealthy alternative to tap water."
As well as detoxers, water is often consumed in excessive amounts by dieters or people with eating disorders.
Take, for example, the advice recently posted on an internet dieting chat site: "What works for me is that I make sure I drink three litres by 2.30pm.
"It gives me enough time to go to the loo before I leave work at about 5pm, as I have a 90-minute journey home and don't want to get stuck with no toilet.
"As soon as I get in the house I tank another litre because I have been without any water during the time I am driving home. I become dehydrated so need to drink. That is my four litres finished.
"I then drink more water during the rest of the evening in addition to what I am expected to drink. The water is really important for you to really clean out the toxins in your body and help towards your fast weight loss."
Clean out toxins
It's a scenario that rings an all too familiar bell with 26-year-old Rachel Bennett, a marketing agent from North London, who even as a child filled herself up with water and juice.
"My friends used to tease me about the amount I drank, but I dismissed their fears because I always thought it was so good for me," she explains.
"It got to the stage where I felt I couldn't function without it. If I woke without a bottle of water by my bed, I would feel really paranoid. I couldn't drink tap water - that tasted awful - instead I drank Evian by the gallon. It's expensive, too - I could spend over £30 a week on water - but I had got to the stage where I got a huge buzz from drinking so much."
At the same time as drinking up to seven litres of water a day she ate very little, mainly salads or fruit. Over time, she found herself plagued by headaches and dizziness and one morning blacked out at home. She was rushed to hospital and diagnosed with mild hyponatraemia
So, then, how much water do we really need to drink? According to the Natural Mineral Water Information Service, the answer is between one-and-a-half and two litres of fluid a day.
And how should we consume that amount? From drinking eight glasses of 'Natural Mineral Water', of course.
Experts such as Professor David Oliveira, a kidney specialist also based at St George's Hospital, argue that the eight-glass rule is probably excessive wherever the water comes from.
"There is a certain amount of water you need to drink a day and, everything being equal, the absolute minimum is about one litre," he says.
That figure is calculated on the basis that we lose about 100ml of water breathing out, 500ml sweating and about 500ml through urine.
Calculate water in food
"If it's hot, or you have a fever or a urinary tract infection it will be more, but that is a minimum," explains Prof Oliveira.
Of course, he's not suggesting that we purposefully reduce our intake to that bare minimum, just that people should beware some of the oft-repeated myths.
For instance, few people ever calculate how much water they take in through their food, and until recently have also discounted tea and coffee from the equation in the belief that because caffeine is a diuretic it will flush fluid from the body leading to dehydration.
But a recent study in the Journal Of The American College Of Nutrition revealed coffee drinkers had the same levels of hydration as those who stuck to water.
Meanwhile, foods, especially fresh fruit and veg, contain high levels of water that count towards the body's daily needs. With a healthy diet, it's estimated that food can provide up to one litre of water a day.
Still, the aquaholics say, drinking a couple of litres of water a day on top of everything must do some good, even if only to your hair and skin.
Unfortunately not, according to a recent television investigation that studied identical twins for a month.
Lesley Peal and Denise Braxton, 38, from Kent, underwent hair and skin analysis before one began drinking an extra two litres a day, while the other stuck to her normal half pint of water plus her usual tea and coffee.
After a month, doctors repeated the tests and found no significant difference in the moisture content of their hair or skin, or their weight.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
