Give Us This Day Our Daily... Hydration? By Jim Robertson At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Our mothers told us a lot of things that have kept us out of trouble through the years, and a few things we still don’t understand: make our beds every day, be sure to have clean underwear in case we are in an accident, eat your spinach, etc. But chances are we didn’t hear perhaps the most important life-instruction from our mothers at all, more likely it came from our health teacher in grade school: drink water. Lot’s of water. Eight cups per day, at a minimum. And like many things we were told back then, it went in one ear and out the other as through the years the complexities of life descended all around us.

Cut to a couple of decades later, and here we all are, doing pretty well, all things considered, and we probably haven’t given a whole lot of thought to the act of drinking water at all. We do it, we know it’s good for us, but it’s not like taxes or retirement planning, we don’t plan for it, we rarely give it a second thought. But maybe, if we revisited what’s at stake with our very-adult sensibilities and the fear of impending old age at our heels, we might give it the due it deserves. Because water is everything. And in our case, we do mean that literally.

Most of us already know that our bodies are composed largely of water, that our blood is 82 percent water (the rest is the stuff that makes it red), our brains are 95 percent water, and – this one is less widely known – our lungs are 90 percent water. Our joints and muscles require water to move. We know we sweat, and when we do we need to replace that moisture with fresh water, and fairly quickly. In fact, water bottles are everywhere these days, something our mothers probably still can’t understand because it still flows freely from the tap. But here are a few facts to put it all into perspective.

Water is the stuff that keeps our skin supple and younger looking. Aging tends to dry it out, and we can fight back by drinking lots of water along with all those creams and lotions we apply. Body functions depend on water, and not just to ferry wastes out the back door – our essential levels of electrolytes are regulated by water, our kidneys and liver use water as the primary means of filtering out toxins, our immune systems uses water to fight disease, even our heart health is dependent on water.

We all consume more water than we think we do in the form of the beverages we consume and the food we eat. But there’s a catch – coffee, juices, soda, and even milk, as nutritious as it is, don’t count toward our daily water consumption requirement. Why? Because they act as diuretics and have the exact opposite effect to the intended benefit of consuming water – they help us eliminate it from our bodies. So for every cup of coffee you drink, you need to add an extra cup of water to the eight cups you should otherwise consume.

So start planning and start drinking. If the health benefits don’t get your attention, then this just might: water, more than anything else other than lifestyle choices, is what keeps us looking young and energized. And we don’t need our mothers to tell us how important that is.

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