Why does common advice stipulate that you must consume pure water for hydration? Won’t things with any amount of water in them hydrate you, proportional to the water content?
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Fluids are important overall. Soups, teas, fruits and vegetables are amazing ways to supplement water intake if they are not prepared with high amounts of sugar and sodium.
Pure water is usually stated because a lot of people tend to hydrate with soft drinks and juices which shouldn’t be consumed frequently especially to stay hydrated.
Imagine you have two taco trucks in your neighborhood. One is one mile away and the other is across the street. Lets say the first one takes 500 calories to walk to and from, while the other takes 10. Both trucks serve 200 calorie tacos. While both trucks offer the same amount of food, you have to burn more calories to eat at the first truck. Likewise, when you drink salt water, for every gallon of water you consume your body might need to use one and a half gallons to process that water. However, when you drink a gallon of pure water your body might only need to burn a cup of water to process it (which is why you also can’t hydrate by eating snow, your body needs more water to melt the snow than it actually gets from the snow itself).
Straight water is the quickest and healthiest way to get enough water but it’s not the only way. The idea of “8 cups a day” originally included the water you’d get from your food but has been morphed into 2L of just water per day.
It has more to do with anticipating that people will look at a bottle of soda and think, mostly water this’ll do. Which isn’t wrong but you’re taking in a lot of bad stuff to get water. In reality pure water isn’t a very good hydration source. With a little electrolyte to help you body hold on to it you just piss a lot of it way meaning you need to drink awkward amounts to get hydrated.
I mean, yeah. Provided the water doesn’t contain something like salt, which physically dehydrated you. Drinking water is good because it’s the best possible thing for hydration, and there’s not an absurd amount of sugar in it.
You ever actually drink the recommended dosage of water? Probably not. Why don’t you dehydrate to death.
Because every food you eat has some water in it. And this counts towards your daily water intake
Ever had ocean water? Just because it has water doesn’t mean common sense will prevail. Physics and chemistry love breaking common sense (for example, that stuff that moves continues to magically move in space/vacuums).
The advice is targeted to people who exclusively consume tanker sized sugar solutions they call “soft drinks”.
Most common medical advice ignores that bodies are complex machines able to do things with less than pure inputs just fine. Moderation is key, but so is understanding which direction you are going.
For example, you WILL get an amount of protein from cake. (A small amount, but if you used eggs, then there are eggs in the cake). This is countered by the sugar and refined carbs in the cake.
This creates a balancing act… Which is far more complex than advertisements that want to sell you diet products are interested in trying to process.
Not exactly, but yes, a lot of things will hydrate you enough to live. Juice, coffee, tea, milk, soda, high water content foods, even beer with a sufficiently low alcohol content will keep you hydrated enough for survival. They are not as effective, though. Sports drinks do so even more effectively *if* you are, well, doing sports.
*However,* water doesn’t contain any of the other junk in other beverages. Slurping down the equivalent 8 glasses of soda or juice or Gatorade puts an absolutely disgusting amount of sugar in your body, which isn’t good for you or your teeth. Unsweetened coffee and tea avoid the sugar, but 8+ cups of that much caffeine every day, while not fatal or anything, is a bit too much. There are ways around drinking plain water that would also avoid sugar, caffeine, and excess calories, like only drinking decaffeinated coffee or tea, or eating a massive amount of cucumbers, but they would take a lot more effort than just drinking water. Plain water is the cheapest, healthiest, most efficient way to hydrate if you aren’t doing strenuous exercise (energy drinks or milk are better for intense exercise). It’s a pain to explain that if people do XYZ, they can technically avoid drinking plain water, especially since a not insignificant number of people will think “finding a decaffeinated, sugar free tea is probably just as good” means “it’s healthy to drink 8 diet Cokes a day.” So the advice is just “drink water.”
And yes, sparkling or mineral water is just as good as still water. Some people say otherwise and idk why.
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