To my understanding, water has no nutritional value. It has nothing in it. It’s simply just water.
That said, why is it so crucial to life?
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We’re mostly water. Animal cell membranes are pretty squishy, and being filled with water keeps those cells in the shape they need to function. Water is also critical for controlling the concentration of things like electrolytes in our blood stream, and is part of a lot of different chemical reactions, like processing sugar.
It’s everywhere and it’s easy to use, so life evolved to make use of it.
Because it’s an amazing solvent; a liquid that a HUGE range of stuff can dissolve in. Solids don’t do chemical reactions well, because the molecules are all locked into rigid structures so things can’t get at each other.
“Life” is an absolute shitload of chemical reactions, so it needs to be in the liquid phase to be possible. Solids wouldn’t react easily enough, gases would fly apart. And water is a liquid in the right temp and pressure ranges, and is able to dissolve a giant range of different substances, including all the things that need to react with each other for life to happen. Very very few other liquids can dissolve so many things, and those that can aren’t easily found in large quantities all over the place like water is.
Lots and lots of substances can dissolve in water. We tend not to notice this because we deliberately make most of our stuff out of substances that don’t dissolve in water. But water can bring nutrients and remove waste products inside our bodies, and most of the stuff inside our cells float around in it, so that it can move around and perform cellular processes that are part chemistry, part machinery. The solubility of a substance can also be easily changed by attaching or removing a few atoms. Much of what the liver does is to make stuff that the body needs to get rid of more water soluble, so that the kidneys can put it in the urine. Bones are grown by taking soluble calcium and making it insoluble.
The answer is that the chemistry of life doesn’t function if all the chemicals are smooshed together into a thick sludge. You need water to act as a spacer and a lubricant . In fact that’s what solvents are – chemicals that get in between. Water allows all these thousands of different compounds to move freely .
about 60% of your body is water…
Single celled organisms evolved in water and when we left the ocean, we took the water with us (and salts)
Most chemical processes in our body either needs water or needs to be in water or uses water for dilution.
Water is excellent solvent, lubricant and suspension container.
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It’s like you were asking why are oxygen so special, no nutrinional value… just that we are basically chemical furnaces that uses oxygen for oxidation.
Or salt. almost all cells uses electrolytes.
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There are a lot of things we need to ingest for our bodies to be functional, we evolved this way. There are things that it is easier to eat than to manufacture ourselves. Like long chained aminoacids.
Nutrition and raw chaloric content is just one part of our daily intake… balanced diet is not a hoax and food contains much more things we need, other than energy
Water dissolves things very well, and most chemical reactions work better when all the components are dissolved.
Air has also no nutritional value that doesn’t mean it’s not useful. Water has salts and minerals that help with many functions.
Ok, a lot of people here are giving true answers, but the *real* reason water is so important and can do all these things people are mentioning is because each molecule of water is just slightly polar. The oxygen side is slightly negatively charged and the hydrogen part is slightly positively charged.
This allows water to be attracted to itself (allowing for surface tension), makes things dissolve into it easier, allows it to absorb and release large amounts of energy without changing temperature much, and all sorts of other things!
Answer to title, though not relating to nutrition: Anomalous expansion of water.
Lakes and ponds of other liquids freeze from the bottom, not on the surface.
Water is one of the few, if not the only liquid that solidifies from the top down.
This is important due to the fact that if it solidifies from the bottom up this means that fish, plants and other organisms will have somewhere to survive when it gets cold and be able to grow in size and number
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