Drinking Water Is NOT the Best Way to Stay Hydrated

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you know some years ago i did a video on this whole water myth that everyone needed to drink a certain amount of water or else they’re going to be dehydrated and it kind of shook up quite a few people because everyone knows that eight glasses of water is like the law you have to drink at least eight glasses of water because your body is mostly water and so that video created a confusion because when you tell a person the opposite theory of what they’re basing this concept of water on it can really put someone into a kind of a confusion so i wanted to do this video to give you some interesting new points on water in general in its ability to hydrate your cells first thing you need to know is what is hydration is hydration just water in your cells actually no it’s not how does that water get into the cell and out of the cell the water gets in and out of the cell through little channels that get help with electrolytes and electrolytes are like these um electrically charged minerals that in different concentrations inside and outside the cell you’ll get a flow a certain flow either going outside the cell or going inside the cell and so a truly hydrated cell has the right amount of electrolytes inside and outside with the right amount of fluid and a dehydrated cell is basically an imbalance of electrolytes and fluid it’s not just a lack of water in fact if you drink too much water you’re going to dilute certain electrolytes and create dehydration in certain parts of your body there’s a condition called hyponatremia that means low sodium in the blood one cause would be you just drink a lot of pure water without any salt and now you diluted this sodium throughout the cells it’s very very dangerous you can have inflammation of your brain you can actually go into a coma so we don’t get hydrated just from water now on the flip side i’m not against water i drink water and i think you should too but this concept of you know carrying your gallon jug of water and just forcing yourself to drink all day long might not be the wisest thing you can do especially if you start bypassing the normal thirst mechanism that our body was designed to tell you if you’re thirsty or not when you’re not thirsty and you force your body to drink a lot of water you can end up in trouble especially if you exercise there’s an incredible book by this written by an exercise physiologist with a lot of research in long distance runners and even ultra marathon runners in relationship to hydration and if they should be drinking just a ton of water when they’re not thirsty they can end up with low sodium and actually create a big problem with their health and then you have a lot of other fluids that you drink through the day that can create a diuretic effect you can actually lose more water and become dehydrated when you drink things with caffeine like coffee tea sodas anything you drink with caffeine is very dehydrating and of course alcohol right if you reflect back on the last time you drank a lot of alcohol the next morning you’re going to be completely dehydrated that’s why you have a headache that’s why your lips are dry and so alcohol is a diuretic and it tends to dehydrate you as well and then what about fruit juice okay would that be hydrating well here’s the data with glucose let’s just take a diabetic for example what happens with someone with high sugar they’re peeing a lot they have urinary frequency and they’re thirsty a lot too so the more sugar in your blood the more your body is going to get rid of water and the more dehydrated you’re going to be and so fruit juices sodas things with sugar will greatly dehydrate you now what’s fascinating is that you have all these electrolyte sport drinks with added sugar and apparently the idea is that if you’re exercising you need some sugar to replace the loss of glucose right when you exercise and they call this hydration but is it really hydrating you does consuming glucose hydrates you i’m going to tell you it dehydrates you it pulls water from the cell there is an interesting study which i’ll put down below it’s called the nurses health study 2 which they did on a certain age group from 9 to 15. now this study wasn’t about hydration but it was interesting because it revealed an unknown consequence of drinking these healthy sports drinks now the study found that if a teenager or young adult was consuming at least one soda a day they would have an extra pound of weight and this is what they found and i’m going to just generalize here teenagers that consumed one soda a day on a regular basis gained an additional two pounds of weight whereas those who consumed at least one sports drink a day okay these so-called healthy sports drinks with electrolytes but with added sugar gain three and a half pounds of fat extra on their bodies so the sports drink produced more fat than the sodas now this is probably because the sports drinks usually come in like 32 ounces and sodas come in a 12 ouncer so when you look at the label you have to look at the serving size and rarely does anyone just drink one serving size they drink the whole thing and there’s more serving size in sports drinks now even when people are consuming electrolyte powders many times these electrolyte powders and electrolyte drinks and i won’t mention any names contain added sugar and some per serving size contain like 11 grams of sugar per serving size now there’s four grams of sugar per teaspoon so that’s just under three teaspoons of sugar for one serving size okay and we’re not talking about like a whole bottle we’re just talking about one serving size or one of those little stick packs of electrolytes not to mention the source of the sugar was it beet sugar probably it was and most of the beet sugar in the u. s is total of gmo with traces of glyphosate which is an herbicide and even if they’re doing sugarcane unless it’s organic is going to have also traces of glyphosate so that’s on top of the sugar effect so we have this effect of drinking more water if you’re going to add electrolytes to it and then you have the electrolytes with glucose which basically is going to stop any ability to burn fat and the only thing it probably would do for hydration is if someone had diarrhea for example there are types of oral rehydration therapies where they’re adding glucose to minerals because in the intestine the glucose will help retain sodium so that’s a different situation than if you’re exercising and trying to be hydrated or if you’re not exercising and trying to be hydrated to truly hydrate the cell you need all the electrolytes you need sodium potassium chlorides calcium and magnesium now the professor who wrote the book waterlogged which i’m going to put a link down below had some fascinating information in relationship to drinking more than what you’re thirsty for you have a thirst mechanism and some people will say well you know we don’t really know when we’re thirsty we just have to force our body to drink so much water and that’s just the way it is but he evaluated tremendous amounts of data and he looked at studies that weren’t funded by companies like gatorade for example and he found that even runners long distance runners when they drink too much water when they’re not thirsty they get into trouble i think a really good principle would be to drink when you’re thirsty and don’t ever force yourself to drink too much okay because you can start to dilute these electrolytes now on the flip side if you’re prone to a kidney stone you need to be drinking at least two and a half liters of fluid every single day but i would also add electrolytes to that now are there any tests that you can do to see if you’re drinking too much water sometimes people say well check your color of your urine and it should be clear but i think there’s a better test in fact it’s pretty inexp