Wednesday, February 7, 2001

By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
sallies@juno.com

In a chance meeting with a friend, I discovered that we had both begun drinking more water, and felt better than we had in years.

Our resolve was based on articles we'd read such as one by Jane Brody, a respected food columnist, who advises that a good New Year's resolution would be: "Start drinking eight glasses of water daily. None of your body parts, from your brain to your toes, works well without adequate hydration."

My friend and I became convinced that ordinary drinking water is a virtual miracle drug. After reading how water aids digestion, safeguards the kidneys, cushions creaky joints, helps shed pounds, and promotes wrinkle-free skin, I started a regimen of two glasses at each meal plus two more at other times during the day.

One researcher says that dehydration may often be blamed for poor concentration and memory loss among seniors. (And why would seniors in particular drink too little water? Honey, when you get a certain age, the inability to get to the bathroom in time can result in serious embarrassment. One way to avoid that is to reduce the frequency of nature's call.) It's logical, isn't it?

More than two-thirds of our weight is water. It is essential for controlling body temperature, dissolving chemicals, distributing nutrients and eliminating waste. We can live for weeks on our bodies' food stores, but only a matter of days without water.

We can't store water very long; we excrete it continuously, with every breath, in perspiration, and through the kidneys and intestinal tract.

Our daily water requirement is 2,000 to 3,500 cc per day, and, yes, we do get much of it from fruits and vegetables. That much is fairly incontrovertible, and came from medical texts I used in paramedic training.

What the medical community would call anecdotal evidence is this: My joints were beginning to twinge, sometimes severely, especially my knees, damaged playing basketball so long ago I can't remember much except the pain of twisted cartilage. Since I've been drinking lots of water, they went from hurting every day to hurting not at all. I'm still cautious about how I turn or twist my back, but I can once more get out of a low chair without help.

My winter-dry skin is less so and call me optimistic but I swear the little wrinkles in my face are less noticeable. And two glasses of water before a meal does take up tummy space that I would ordinarily fill with calories.

Water is calorie-free, and that's science, not anecdote. So why is this discussion about to take a detour?

Well, I'm obliged to make a disclaimer to keep your lawyer off my case: Check with your doctor before making drastic changes in your intake of anything, water included. When I told mine I was drinking lots of water, he said he believes it can be harmful. I couldn't believe my ears, or didn't want to.

What he says about drinking gallons at a time is true, of course: Water intoxication can have deadly results. But we're talking about two quarts, half a gallon distributed over a whole day. So I called two other physician friends, expecting them to bolster my argument.

The best I could get out of the dermatologist was, "From a general health standpoint, you should drink all you can, but it won't make much difference with your skin." Dry skin, she adds, is due more to exposure to sunlight than to lack of water, and wrinkles are caused by a weakness of collagen and elastic tissue.

From the internist, "Sometimes we don't give the kidneys credit. At the molecular level it doesn't matter where the liquid comes from."

Meanwhile, the dietitians are saying, "What do doctors know? They get maybe three hours of nutrition training." And the docs are saying, "Where did you get your information, off the Internet? (Well, yeah, part of it.) How much physiology and chemistry have these 'experts' had, and have they published controlled studies of their theories?"

My doctor advises that you should drink water when you're thirsty. Nutritionists say if you're thirsty, you're already dehydrated enough to impair judgment, that a loss of just 2 percent of body weight in water may start weakening brain power and performance levels.

My doctor says drinking too much water will cause electrolyte imbalance. My paramedic manual says electrolyte imbalance is caused only by drinking too little water. My internist friend says: "What an incredible job the kidneys do to balance the electrolytes! Even if one day you have a high consumption of water, the next low, kidneys regulate electrolytes."

But he adds, "Water is so much of what we are and what we need, and it's so available. It has the added benefit of keeping calories out."

The dermatologist notes that in many parts of the world there is no good drinking water. "In many places you can't drink the water, but people seem to survive maybe not as healthy as they could be, but they live on very little water." Yet both she and the internist agree that they drink a lot of water and recommend it to their patients. They believe, however, that the theory is based more on tradition or medical folklore than on good science.

I'm open to comments (SallieS@Juno.com). Meanwhile, I'm drinking six glasses a day, in addition to soup, tea, coffee and juice. And I feel great.

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