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
It’s not. Think about it – different drinks, i.e. coffee, soda, juice, tea – contain mostly water. It wouldn’t be healthy but you would certainly survive.
Water is like…. the common denominator of your whole body. Think of it like your hands.
You may not notice what you can accomplish in a day with digits, palms, wrists, knuckles and finger nails but in the course of your day your hands are like this super cool tool you can damn near apply to anything from wiping your ass to performing complicated brain surgery. The list in between those two things is probably close to infinite. Your hands just have this cool ability to interact with anything for better or worse. If you lost your hands you’d quickly realize how much time and effort and loss of ability you now have because they’re gone.
Water is like that and your body uses it in pretty much every biological function you have because of the unique properties of water. Without water you would not exist.
Back in the day, people didn’t have access to pure water. This is why medieval people are shown drinking a lot of beer or ale; the process of making the beer would “purify” the water.
No, unless there’s a hospital see when you’re so dumb you ldont drink water you get sick. You may survive a while but not without a hospital.
Now if you are smart enough to distill the soda or coffee you may live.
Ps. I hope you are not truly as stupid as your question
Drink water, just do it.
To add to the discussion: dilute coffee is mostly water so you’d be ok, but on a hot desert island you’d be sweating out mineral salts and the loss of those would be a problem too. If you were able to make a water distiller with a pot, lid and copper tube, say, or collect evaporated water from a pit and plastic sheet, you’d make pure water but you’d need to add a little bit of sea water to it to keep up your intake of vital mineral salts.
Biochemist here, I’ll try to explain as simple as possible:
Water (H2O) makes up 70% of the cell’s mass. But why?
1) water is able to do a form of weak interactions called hydrogen bonding. They are a much weaker than covalent bonds (the ones that connect H to O in water) but they allow for integrity of the cell because the water molecules are vital for cell membrane formation and other infrastructure processes.
2) inside the cell are macromolecules (proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleus acids). These molecules make up the DNA (nuclei acid) protein (enzymes for example), energy source (carbohydrate molecule glucose). A common thing about these macromolecules is that they can be broken down into their monomers through a process called hydrolysis. Hydrolysis requires an H2O to interact with the bonds between monomers to break them down. Likewise water is produced when the cells synthesize macromolecules from their monomers through dehydration/condensation reactions.
Coffee, juices and soda are just mixtures where a solute ( beans for coffee) is mixed with water. Now can be drink these all the time? Yes but it’s not very healthy:
Caffeine in coffee/soda is a diarethic meaning it makes you urinate a lot. Thus you would take in some water, but excrete a lot of it out.
Juice might not have caffeine, but it has a lot nutrients! However the juice tends to be so saturated and sugar filled that there is not much water intake when consuming.
Hope this helps!
I realize I’m a bit late to the party, but I think some stuff hasn’t been mentioned that might help/be interesting.
First off, it’s important to clarify “alternative liquids” in this situation. All the examples you mentioned, soda, juice, and coffee are all just water with extra bits in it: just like all drinking water has minerals/fluoride in it, those liquids just have a bit more, so would technically fil you water needs. Liquids that are not made up of water, such as oil or mercury (as an extreme example) would not work because our body needs the molecule H2O to function and cannot recreate that molecule from other things.
In terms of your question about surviving on just coffee or soda, yes, you could absolutely survive (there might be some complications though, I’ll mention them in the next paragraph). There are stories of [monks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_of_Soissons) drinking almost exclusively beer because they made so much and it was healthier in those times, and sailors at sea drinking alcoholic drinks because water would get bad stuff growing in it during long voyages. Most of this alcohol was about 0.5% however, so not nearly like drinking exclusively beer nowadays.
There are some drawbacks, however. The main one that others have mentioned is that some are diuretics, so while not all will actively dehydrate you, you won’t get as much hydration from the same amount of water. There are also plenty of other small issues, such as coca cola supposedly strips phosphorus/magnesium from your body, weakening your bones, or the reduced hydration can increase your odds of kidney stones, etc.
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