By: Michael Jones and Susana Vuong

There’s a risk in drinking too much water?! IMPOSSIBLE! Water is supposed to be healthy for you no matter what! How can you drink too much of it? GUESS WHAT? Although it is true that it’s really hard to overdose on water, it’s not impossible to be harmed from drinking large amounts of water.

So I’m sure people have heard of the term dehydration right? It’s when the body does not have enough fluids. In simple terms, it literally means your body is being drained of water. That’s when you become thirsty, your body is craving water. Check this out, there is such a thing call hyponatremia. Drinking too much water causes low sodium in the blood. Sodium is important to the body because it helps regulate the amounts of water in the body that flows to the nerves and muscles.

So next time you hear people tell you it’s impossible to drink too much water, you can. It’s also hard to drink 8 glasses of water a day if you don’t exercise which most people don’t tend to do on a daily basis. In order to lead a healthy life, drinking at least 2 to 6 glasses of water is recommended. Dr. Heinz Valtin, who was interviewed in the June 2008 issue of the Nutrition Action Health Letter stated that none of the statements: “drinking eight classes of water a day” or “it’s impossible to drink too much water” have ever been proven.

There are some reasons however, why some people tend to drink more water than others. One reason being, when you exercise you sweat; sweating is losing water so naturally the body would want that liquid back, causing people to drink more water. Another reason being is that larger people need to drink more fluids than smaller people (and here I thought there was something wrong with me). Also, people who eat meat will get less water in their foods. In other words, vegetable lovers will tend to drink less water because they already get some of it from eating their veggies.

People are now drinking more calories rather than getting it from their foods, which makes it hard to lose weight and have a healthy diet. Even juice now isn’t so healthy because of all the excess sugar that has been added. Although juice and soda might give you a boost of energy for a while, you will crash later. The less energy you have, the harder you have to fight. So the best choice to drink is water.
 

Stories like this can be found on Youth Radio Eats

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