eight glasses of bullshit a day

It being a new year and all, I've been trying to clean up my act. For someone who already doesn't drink alcohol or coffee (the latter gives me migraines) and has no interest in anything requiring filling my lungs full of smoke, this has culminated in New Year's Resolutions about exercise and breakfast, and also a vague commitment to drink 8 glasses of water a day.

I read in a book (you know, those things made of paper that exist offline) that a good way to keep track of your eight glasses is to count how many gulps you take when you drink a glass and then try to drink eight times that number of gulps every day. It's quite handy, although I've been converting my gulps into half and quarter glasses cos otherwise I forget where I'm up to. I just thought I'd pass that on, dear readers, because I thought it was a damn fine idea.

But then I actually started drinking all this water. And I discovered that my office is rather a long way from the toilet. Which started me wondering - if so much of this water is, ahem, passing through me, do I really need it all? And how come I got by reasonably well for all this time without drinking all this water?

But then I thought, well how much damage could I really be doing myself by drinking too much water, except perhaps wearing holes in my shoes from all the walks to the conveniences, and decided to persevere for a bit longer.

I mentioned all of this to a friend of mine, who is rather the sceptic (in fact I'm 98% sure he's a signed up member of the NZ Association of Rationalists and Humanists so favoured by Paul and Xavier) and he made a sarky comment that tipped me over the edge from slight cynicism to medium conspiracy theorism.

Here's the International Bottled Water Association's website. You didn't even know there was such a thing as the International Bottled Water Association, did you? Anyway, do the IBWA's hydration calculation for yourself and you'll no doubt discover you in fact "need" considerably more than even 8 glasses a day. (For readers who are more inclined to metrics [like myself] here is a handy metric conversion site.)

There's an interesting article on some big flash report on water intake from Dr Heinz Valtin, who's a professor of physiology at Dartmouth. Here's the money quote:

...he finds it, "difficult to believe that evolution left us with a chronic water deficit that needs to be compensated by forcing a high fluid intake."

Exactly.

Ok I'm convinced - the eight glasses theory is at least a crock and at worst a ploy to get us all to buy bottled water at a time when health conscious consumers are turning away from the other products sold by those who peddle plastic-wrapped H20 - soft drinks.