Why is water, compared to every other liquid, so vital? Exactly how much of us is water, and why is certain water intake vital daily?
In: Biology
The simple answer is to excrete wastes that are dissolved in water. Components of food you don’t need (mostly electrolytes such as salt, potassium), as well as the spent products from your cells (nitrogenous waste, uremic toxins), are removed from your body suspended in water via the urine.
Your body has to get rid of all this stuff every day so you don’t die. The problem is your kidneys can only concentrate so much of that stuff into each drop of water (future pee). It comes out that you have to drink a little less than 1L of water to carry all this stuff out of your body. For the sake of argument, let’s say you need 1L of water to do this.
If one person drinks 1L of water per day, they will be fine. If another one drinks 0.5 L of water, he will slowly die. If another one drinks 1L of water with a bunch of salt/potassium/nitrogenous wastes in it… he’s getting water that already has stuff dissolved in it, and his kidneys can’t really put more in there, and he’ll slowly die.
tl;dr. You don’t need water specifically, you need fluid without electrolytes in it.
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