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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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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