If you’ve ever been on a health kick, some wise guy has probably told you that you need to drink eight pints of water a day.
Drinking eight pints of lager is hard enough for some people – so just imagine spending your day sloshing wearily through that amount of water. Grim. Unless you’re a fish.
But if you thought this sounded like bullsh*t, then you’d be absolutely correct.
While staying hydrated is good for your health – giving you better skin, kidney function, calorie control, brain function and concentration – drinking so much of the stuff is a bit daft.
One health researcher had enough of the ‘8 glasses of water myth’ being splashed around – and is now clearing it up for everyone.
“If there is one health myth that will not die, it is this: You should drink eight glasses of water a day,” said Aaron E Carrol, Professor of Pediatrics and Assistant Dean for Research Mentoring at Indiana University School of Medicine, in The New York Times.
“It’s just not true. There is no science behind it.”
The actual advice was that humans needed the equivalent of eight glasses of water a day. But you can get this from many sources – fruit, vegetables and other food and drink.
“Many people believe that the source of this myth was a 1945 Food and Nutrition Board recommendation that said people need about 2.5 litres of water a day.
“But they ignored the sentence closely behind. It read ‘Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.’”
We all feel very silly now.
