Hydration - it's not just for when you exercise!
Do you have heartburn? How about fatigue or dizziness? Do you have anxiety, irritability, or depression? Have you ever noticed foggy thinking or poor concentration? Do you have joint or back pain? Migraines or constipation?
These are all symptoms of dehydration. Water is the most common nutrient deficiency in the American population!
Let’s start with some basic facts. Water is the primary component of all bodily fluids – blood, lymph, digestive juices, urine, mucus, tears, and sweat.
The muscles that move your body are 75% water. The blood that transports nutrients is 82% water. The lungs that provide your oxygen are 90% water. The brain, the control center of your body, is 76% water. Even your bones are 25% water.
Our bodies produce about 8% of the water we need daily from metabolic processes. The other 92% comes from food and drink. We lose water through breathing, sweating, digesting, and urinating. Since we can’t store our supply of water, it needs to be replenished every day.
Most of us picture dehydration as the dude crawling through the desert in search of an oasis, or the marathon runner collapsing in the middle of a race. Those are the extremes, of course, but let me paint a different picture.
If your body’s water content drops by as little as 2%, you begin to suffer from fatigue. A drop of 10% causes significant health problems in the digestive, respiratory, immune, cardiovascular, and musculoskeletal systems. Losses greater than 10% can cause death.
Chronic cellular dehydration is the primary cause of painful degenerative disease.
Have you ever wondered why one of the first things they do when you go to the hospital is start an intravenous saline drip (water with electrolytes)? Water depends on electrolytes for absorption. Electrolytes are minerals that become capable of conducting electricity when dissolved in water.
SIGNS OF DEHYDRATION
EARLY SIGNS:
Fatigue or dizziness
Anxiety, irritability, or depression
Cravings, especially sugar cravings
Cramps
Foggy thinking or poor concentration
Dull, dry skin or pronounced wrinkles
Headaches
Pounding heart
MATURE SIGNS:
Heartburn
Joint or back pain
Asthma
Migraine headaches
Fibromyalgia
Constipation
Colitis
How much water do we need?
The amount depends on a number of factors. For example, someone who exercises continuously is losing more water than your average couch potato…and, no, that’s not an endorsement of couch potato-ness! Someone who works outside in the sun every day needs more than an office worker.
A good starting point to determining your best level of water intake is to begin with ½ your body weight in ounces. So, a 200 lb man should be drinking at least 100 ounces of pure water every day. It may sound like a lot, but when you spread it throughout the day, it’s very manageable. Does it make you hit the restroom more often? Yes. That’s a good thing, too, because it keeps you moving more regularly.
What about coffee and soda? They’re primarily water, right? Can’t I just drink those?
Yes and no. Yes, water is their base, but the other ingredients actually pull more water from your body to metabolize them than they provide. They’re called diuretics and also include caffeinated teas, some herbal teas like peppermint, alcoholic beverages, and packaged fruit juices.
The rule of thumb is to add 1.5 ounces of water for each 1 ounce of diuretics, so let’s go back to our math calculation.
Our 200 lb man drinks 2 cups of coffee per day. That’s 16 ounces, so he needs to add 24 more ounces to his water goal, bringing it up to 124 ounces. If instead, he counts that 16 ounces as ‘water’, he begins a slow but steady decline into dehydration.
What happens as we dehydrate?
Before we get into that, you have to understand two core truths about the human body. It knows what it needs and it will do everything in its power to protect the most vital systems. We often force our body to make sacrifices by withholding vital nutrients, especially water. One of the major ways we unintentionally cause this is by not recognizing the body’s many cries for water.
When we have sufficient water, we can support all chemical reactions needed to maintain our bodily functions. Once the water supply dwindles, we enter a ‘drought management’ state. The water we take in gets allocated to the priority areas first, and if it’s not enough, we start redistributing water from other areas to those higher-priority areas. We also shut down functions that cause water loss.
These drought management techniques are necessary, but they also result in symptoms we need to begin recognizing as a cry for water. One of the first ones is pain that has no obvious cause. If you stub your baby toe, that excruciating pain is obviously not a cry for water. On the other hand, if you start having unexplained chronic lower back pain, that might be.
Dehydration pain is a sensation that denotes local chemical changes in the area around the nerves that monitor acid/alkali balance. It comes into play when the area becomes too acidic (it can’t wash away metabolic toxins) and sends a warning signal to the brain. At first, the brain monitors the pain level subconsciously but, if it continues, it begins to warn the conscious mind. If we ignore the warning, pain intensity increases until movement and mobility of the area is affected. This is the body trying to prevent usage and further metabolic waste buildup.
The pain signals related to dehydration are:
Dyspeptic pain (stomach and duodenum)
Arthritis pain
Heart pain on walking, or even at rest
Low back pain
Intermittent leg pain on walking
Migraine and hangover headaches
Colitis pain and associated constipation
False appendicitis pain
Seems like a surprisingly simple thing, doesn’t it? How can you tell if this is a cry for water? Drink 2-3 glasses of water within 15-30 minutes and see if the pain diminishes or goes away completely. Keep in mind that chronic cartilage damage takes longer (multiple weeks) to resolve.
Who is the most vulnerable?
We are all vulnerable to dehydration. Don’t think that being a ‘healthy’ adult means you’re all good.
That being said, infants and the elderly are most vulnerable to dehydration. Be on the lookout for signs of dehydration in infants, like sunken soft spot, few or no tears when they cry, dry mouth, few wet diapers, drowsiness, or fast breathing.
As we age, we lose the ‘thirst signal’ and chronic dehydration can take an even more pronounced toll. One of the reasons elderly people shrink is because the discs in the spine are primarily composed of water. As the water content diminishes, disc volume is reduced, causing pain and height loss.
Other people more prone to dehydration are mountain climbers due to pressure at high altitude, athletes due to excessive sweating and respiration, sick people, and alcoholics.
What other ‘fun’ can come from dehydration?
Other than pain signals, there are other downstream effects. Stress is a big one. Being in drought management state is inherently stressful on your body. Another is high blood pressure. When you’re dehydrated, your body retains more sodium and constricts blood vessels, subsequently increasing your blood pressure.
Earlier, I mentioned water conservation techniques. One of those is histamine production that regulates bronchial muscle contraction. It’s an excellent defense mechanism, because bronchial constriction means less water evaporation while breathing. Unfortunately, it also means respiratory difficulty for those with asthma and allergies.
What can I do about this?
There are quite a few things to help you with hydration. Some are obvious, like drink more water, silly! Others are not so obvious, but you’re in luck. You can reach out to your friendly, neighborhood nutritional therapist to learn all about them.