We can go way longer without food than water but enjoy eating food much more than drinking water. But if water is so important for our health, why we don’t crave it enough and sometimes even end up dehydrated?

Question

We can go way longer without food than water but enjoy eating food much more than drinking water. But if water is so important for our health, why we don’t crave it enough and sometimes even end up dehydrated?

In: Biology

Answer 1

You do crave it when you need it. You won’t end up getting dehydrated without being crazy thirsty except in the most extreme circumstances (like an endurance race or manual labor under a hot sun for hours and hours on end). Unless something is wrong with your body, you’ll crave water when you need it. Most of the talk about hydration comes from marketing departments at beverage companies (and the “scientific” studies they underwrote). Before water was sold in bottles, no one – and I mean no one – ever said you have to drink XX amount of water a day. No one talked about proper levels of hydration. If you were thirsty, you drank (and often out of a garden hose if you were a kid in the suburbs in summer). If you weren’t thirsty, you didn’t drink, and no one was charting their hydration levels. In all of human history, being thirsty was the signal to drink. That only changed once you could buy water in small bottles, and suddenly it became essential to drink 8 of those bottles a day.

/shakes tiny fist, yells at you to get off my lawn with your damn Nalgeens and Yetis