Why is that water is needed to live as opposed to alternative liquids? If coffee is just bean-flavoured water, why couldn’t you survive by only drinking coffee? If you were lost on a desert island and had only coffee, juice or soda to drink, could you survive?
In: Biology
According to recent research you probably could get away with drinking beer instead of water as long as it doesn’t exceed 2% ABV, as the alcohols diuretic effect is negligible at that concentration. But good luck finding any beer like that as basically all commercially available beer starts around 4% ABV.
Yes.
Most foods contain some water. Most drinks are mostly water. So while you need… 5 glasses or whatever a day, drinking a coffee counts as one, eating some carrots will have half a glass of water, a sandwich will be have a glass of water, etc etc. You can survive without drinking any actual pure water if you get enough water through other stuff.
BUT. Caffine specifically is a sort of useful poison that your liver, I think, takes extra water to process. So coffee, while being mostly water, also has anti-water. A cup of water would do more to hydrate you than a cup of coffee.
Salt specifically takes a lot of water for your metabolism to process. Which is why drinking ocean salt-water will in fact make you thirstier.
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You don’t necessarily need plain water, and plenty of people go long periods without ever drinking it. It may not be as healthy, due to the sugar content of soda and juice, or caffeine in coffee, but they will satisfy the body’s water needs, in addition to the water taken in from foods. And while caffeine is a diuretic, drinking coffee still provides a net increase in hydration.
Water is needed by the body because your body is made of mostly water. Every cell has water in it, and that needs to be replenished as you do things like spit, sweat, urinate, or masturbate.
So, why is coffee a bad idea for your only source of replenishment? Because coffee is a diuretic. It makes you pee more, which causes you to lose more water, counteracting the positive benefits of drinking the coffee.
Juice and sodas are a little better, but not by much. Pure clean water, especially in an environment where you will be doing a lot of physical work and sweating, is going to be vital.
In the real world, you can get by drinking only soda, if you don’t do a lot to lose water, like if you work in an air conditioned office. On a desert island? You’d be dead.
Yes, you could, because those things all contain water.
Water is needed because, primarily, it’s a polar substance, meaning it has a net partial electrical charge: the hydrogen ends are positive, and the central oxygen is negative. This makes water really good at dissolving materials and carrying minerals in it. There are also [these benefits](https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/why-is-water-important) to staying hydrated.
Biological life itself is dependent on water due in part to its chemical properties. It is a polar solvent that plays a vital role in practically every metabolic process we know of, whether its as a solvent, a reactant, or something else altogether. There isn’t some grand reason for that- life evolved on a planet rich in water, and so water is of critical importance to earth life.
The issue with drinks like coffee and soda is the effect of the non-water ingredients they contain. Caffeine, for example, is a diuretic (it makes you pee) so you’re going to lose a lot of water that way. Could you survive? Maybe. But you’d need to drink massive amounts to keep up with the water loss.
Coffee, juice, and soda are not “other liquids” in the way that, say, cooking oil is. Those are all just water with stuff in it. However, in some cases, like coffee, the other stuff in the water causes your body to produce more urine, which can make it so, on net, you lose water. Whether or not the diuretic effects of coffee are enough to completely cancel out the water you gain I can’t say (though I doubt it). You probably could survive (i.e. not die of dehydration) by just drinking coffee. The same definitely goes for juice (which is mostly just water + sugar) or soda (same thing with CO2 mixed in).
I’ve never seen my father drink pure water and he’s still alive so you can definitely survive at least 30 years with Pepsi Cola as your only source of hydration
You could just eat fruit most, like us, are containers of mostly water
Stuck on a life raft, drink seagull blood or fish juice which isn’t salty
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