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H2... oh...
Oct. 27th, 2025 09:56 amFairly recently I attended a webinar given by a dietitian. She was specifically talking about nutrition for older vegans (that's me, folks); but I was absolutely astonished that she had to tell her audience something that was just common sense when I was growing up, and that is the fact that nobody (in this country, at any rate) needs to drink plain water. Anything you drink, provided it doesn't have more than a certain percentage of alcohol, will hydrate you. So, for that matter, will soup. Or fruit. Which is obvious, except that these days apparently it isn't, because she had to say it.
Fun fact: when I was growing up, plain water was drunk in only very limited circumstances. You might have to drink it as a punishment if you were a child (especially if your crime was asking for a drink when it "wasn't time" for one, which meant any time your parents couldn't be bothered to get you one, because you weren't allowed to get one yourself because you would obviously spill it everywhere because all children were deemed to be hopelessly careless and clumsy until they turned 18, more or less). That didn't happen very often, as I soon learnt that children couldn't just have a drink whenever they were thirsty, and that in particular mid-morning drinks were very much an adult privilege. You also had to drink it, boiled thoroughly and then cooled, if you had a stomach upset or were recovering from one; even adults had to do that. I suspect, looking back, that that was a hangover from the times when the purity of tap water was a good deal less consistent; as soon as I grew up and was therefore allowed to choose, I stopped doing that on the grounds that a cup of decaff coffee was not going to upset my stomach further. Also, very mysteriously, when you went to restaurants (which we only ever did when on holiday), there was usually a jug of water on the table. It seemed odd that they'd do their best to put on a really nice meal and then just serve water with it, but that was what they did. I don't remember seeing anyone actually drink it, though. It was just a sort of restaurant ritual.
It's also important to recall that, in those days, you rarely ever heard of anyone getting dehydrated unless they were doing intensive sports... and if that happened, they wouldn't drink water. They'd drink Lucozade or some similar isotonic energy drink, because that kind of drink is actually better at hydrating you than water is. Similarly, while I had Squirty Sidney the Ill-Tempered Ileostomy, I had to drink this awful stuff called St Mark's Solution by the litre, which worked on the same principle. You made it up using glucose, salt, and bicarb, and because of the bicarb it tasted absolutely disgusting; the only thing I found that disguised it enough to make it drinkable was ginger syrup. Had I not had that, I'd have dehydrated very fast no matter how much water I'd tried to drink.
I'm not sure exactly when the modern superstition that only plain water is capable of hydrating people began, but I think it may have started with water coolers in offices, because I can recall seeing those from about the mid-80s. I don't know, but I wonder if there were people getting dehydrated in offices because the only drinks available were either poor quality, too expensive, or both; and nobody wants their employees getting dehydrated, but not many employers are enlightened enough to offer decent drinks free of charge... and nobody was going to go and drink water straight from the tap. So if you have a machine that cools it down to make it a bit more palatable, then you can still offer it free but more people will be prepared to drink it. At about the same time, there was some research done on how much water the average human needs per day; note that this is an average, and people's needs vary enormously according to age, gender, diet, activity level, and ambient temperature. Like most scientific research, this was then misunderstood, and in two ways. The first was "everyone needs the same amount which is the same as the average", and the second was "oh, people need this amount of water, so it has to be taken in as plain water and nothing else will work". Which, I expect, was very convenient for the people who were already selling water coolers.
So now you get the ridiculous situation where people genuinely believe that regular drinks don't work for hydration, so they carry a water bottle around and try to glug through two litres of it (or whatever the popular amount is at the moment) on top of all the stuff they're already drinking. Consequently, these days people need treatment for over-hydration (yes, that is very much a thing) far more often than they do for dehydration. Yesterday I saw someone online say "oh, my headache must be caused by dehydration, all I drank yesterday was tea". Nope. You're hydrated just fine, assuming you drank enough tea, which you probably did. You just have a headache. Indeed, I even have someone in my family who briefly fell for this one; she drinks a vast amount of milky coffee, but she decided she needed to drink two litres of water a day as well. I said, "Where are you going to put it? You already drink more coffee than you need for hydration!" Within just over a week she'd given up on the water bottle, because she found she just couldn't drink it. Of course she couldn't. Her body didn't need it.
I'm not saying you should stop drinking water if you like water. Each to their own and all that. I'm just saying that if you drink regular drinks because you like them and then water on top of that because you don't like it but you think you need it, then ditch the water. You're already getting plenty. (And a lot of people don't like it, which is why you can buy massively watered-down fruit juice these days, which nobody would have touched when I was growing up. Of course, it's not sold as "massively watered-down fruit juice"; it's sold as "juicy water", which is basically saying "here's a cheat for people who feel they must drink water but don't like it". I tried it once because I couldn't find a better alternative. It was, obviously, far too watery.)
I'll be taking my pills in a couple of hours. With chocolate oat milk.
Fun fact: when I was growing up, plain water was drunk in only very limited circumstances. You might have to drink it as a punishment if you were a child (especially if your crime was asking for a drink when it "wasn't time" for one, which meant any time your parents couldn't be bothered to get you one, because you weren't allowed to get one yourself because you would obviously spill it everywhere because all children were deemed to be hopelessly careless and clumsy until they turned 18, more or less). That didn't happen very often, as I soon learnt that children couldn't just have a drink whenever they were thirsty, and that in particular mid-morning drinks were very much an adult privilege. You also had to drink it, boiled thoroughly and then cooled, if you had a stomach upset or were recovering from one; even adults had to do that. I suspect, looking back, that that was a hangover from the times when the purity of tap water was a good deal less consistent; as soon as I grew up and was therefore allowed to choose, I stopped doing that on the grounds that a cup of decaff coffee was not going to upset my stomach further. Also, very mysteriously, when you went to restaurants (which we only ever did when on holiday), there was usually a jug of water on the table. It seemed odd that they'd do their best to put on a really nice meal and then just serve water with it, but that was what they did. I don't remember seeing anyone actually drink it, though. It was just a sort of restaurant ritual.
It's also important to recall that, in those days, you rarely ever heard of anyone getting dehydrated unless they were doing intensive sports... and if that happened, they wouldn't drink water. They'd drink Lucozade or some similar isotonic energy drink, because that kind of drink is actually better at hydrating you than water is. Similarly, while I had Squirty Sidney the Ill-Tempered Ileostomy, I had to drink this awful stuff called St Mark's Solution by the litre, which worked on the same principle. You made it up using glucose, salt, and bicarb, and because of the bicarb it tasted absolutely disgusting; the only thing I found that disguised it enough to make it drinkable was ginger syrup. Had I not had that, I'd have dehydrated very fast no matter how much water I'd tried to drink.
I'm not sure exactly when the modern superstition that only plain water is capable of hydrating people began, but I think it may have started with water coolers in offices, because I can recall seeing those from about the mid-80s. I don't know, but I wonder if there were people getting dehydrated in offices because the only drinks available were either poor quality, too expensive, or both; and nobody wants their employees getting dehydrated, but not many employers are enlightened enough to offer decent drinks free of charge... and nobody was going to go and drink water straight from the tap. So if you have a machine that cools it down to make it a bit more palatable, then you can still offer it free but more people will be prepared to drink it. At about the same time, there was some research done on how much water the average human needs per day; note that this is an average, and people's needs vary enormously according to age, gender, diet, activity level, and ambient temperature. Like most scientific research, this was then misunderstood, and in two ways. The first was "everyone needs the same amount which is the same as the average", and the second was "oh, people need this amount of water, so it has to be taken in as plain water and nothing else will work". Which, I expect, was very convenient for the people who were already selling water coolers.
So now you get the ridiculous situation where people genuinely believe that regular drinks don't work for hydration, so they carry a water bottle around and try to glug through two litres of it (or whatever the popular amount is at the moment) on top of all the stuff they're already drinking. Consequently, these days people need treatment for over-hydration (yes, that is very much a thing) far more often than they do for dehydration. Yesterday I saw someone online say "oh, my headache must be caused by dehydration, all I drank yesterday was tea". Nope. You're hydrated just fine, assuming you drank enough tea, which you probably did. You just have a headache. Indeed, I even have someone in my family who briefly fell for this one; she drinks a vast amount of milky coffee, but she decided she needed to drink two litres of water a day as well. I said, "Where are you going to put it? You already drink more coffee than you need for hydration!" Within just over a week she'd given up on the water bottle, because she found she just couldn't drink it. Of course she couldn't. Her body didn't need it.
I'm not saying you should stop drinking water if you like water. Each to their own and all that. I'm just saying that if you drink regular drinks because you like them and then water on top of that because you don't like it but you think you need it, then ditch the water. You're already getting plenty. (And a lot of people don't like it, which is why you can buy massively watered-down fruit juice these days, which nobody would have touched when I was growing up. Of course, it's not sold as "massively watered-down fruit juice"; it's sold as "juicy water", which is basically saying "here's a cheat for people who feel they must drink water but don't like it". I tried it once because I couldn't find a better alternative. It was, obviously, far too watery.)
I'll be taking my pills in a couple of hours. With chocolate oat milk.
