Just One Thing - Drink Water Facts By Dr Michael Mosley

we would all like some quick and simple ways to improve our health but we're bombarded with often conflicting advice so if you were going to do just one thing to improve your mental and physical well-being what should it be maybe a few minutes of sunshine each day to strengthen your immune system or some dark chocolate to help your heart or even playing video games to boost your brain power I'm Dr Michael Mosley and this is just one thing where each episode we'll explore one thing you can start doing today to improve your health or life in ways you might not expect right it's lunch time and I'm about to do just one thing that can boost my concentration increase my energy levels and keep my skin healthy I'm drinking a glass of water Ah that's good now we all know how important water is but there are many confusing messages about how much you should be drinking some of us are trying to drink liters and liters others just stick to tea coffee and soft drinks we'll learn later why that's not always a great idea so how much should we really be drinking well for most of us all we need to do is have a glass of water with every meal it's that simple keeping hydrated can improve your attention and problem solving it can improve your mood help you keep calm and alert improve your skin and even help you lose weight Ah that's done so is this something you think you'd like to try I'm speaking to Nema a social media manager to see if this is just one thing he might like to try hi liema how much water do you normally drink per day so I'm a drinking habits at the moment usually coffee uh quite a lot of fizzy drinks as well so quite a lot of the time I can go probably a whole day without having any water at all so what's the main thing you think that's stopping you from drinking water I've just got no routine that includes water it's just about building it into my everyday routine really great so how active are you I have just joined a football team to help lose weight so I will be doing that every Friday night then you're going to be sweating without realizing you're doing it so it's also important after you play the football to have a glass or two of water to pep you up afterwards yeah definitely and how often do you reckon you go um for a week per day probably about three or four times so what I'm going to ask you to do is really quite simple and that's to have a glass of water with every meal you eat and um we're going to see whether that improves things like your activity levels your mood um and also I would like to see you having a Wei about six or seven times a day so keep a record good plan that sounds like something I can probably achieve we're asking Nema to drink a glass of water with every meal keeping properly hydrated can make a big difference to our brains physical performance and overall health so I'm going out on a limb and I'm going to predict this simple change will have a big effect on how he feels your body is made up of 60% water but your brain is 90% water we need water to hydrate our skin digest food and to allow our kidneys to flush out waste on top of that it's important to replace the water we lose by breathing out and sweating especially when it's hot or we're doing exercise surprisingly even mild dehydration losing 1 to two% of our body's water can impair cognitive function in fact a number of rehydration Studies have shown that drinking more water led to improvements in short-term memory attention and working memory and drinking more water can also significantly reduce regular headaches so if you're playing football like Nema then drink enough water could reduce your fatigue and help you perform better and last but not least it could also help with weight loss in a recent study two groups were asked to adopt the same weight loss diet but one lot were asked to drink half a liter of water before each meal that group ended up consuming fewer calories and lost the most weight so if one glass of water is good surely two glasses is better probably not the old idea that we should be drinking eight glasses of water a day originated from the US health and nutrition board in 1945 and it wasn't based on any research if you love water feel free but there really is no need to go mad for most of us just adding an extra glass with every meal is probably enough but a lot of us aren't even doing that there are plenty of people who like Nema rely on tea coffee or other caffeinated drinks for their main fluid intake but though the first few cups will help hydrate you research suggest there is a Tipping Point where these drinks start to become a diuretic and you actually lose more water than you gain confusing well I'm going to be asking an expert to give us the load down in a bit but first let's see how Nemo is getting on I am now midweek for my challenge of drinking water with every male really enjoying it I've always got my water bottle with me um I feel a lot more energized by drinking it as well um I also found that when I do a fizzy drinks uh I get full up quite quickly I feel bloated and I couldn't drink at all so I'll let you know how it all [Music] goes we'll check in with Nema again at the end of the week first I want to dig into the science of water how much should we drink how often and why I'm hoping steuart Galloway who is Professor in exercise physiology from the University of Sterling can provide answers hello Stuart we know you have to drink um fluid and otherwise you dehydrate and die uh but what specifically is water doing to your body and brain we we essentially need water to undertake a number of the processes in our body and because we're constantly losing fluid throughout the day through breathing sweating urine losses we need to replace that with um water that we obtain from drinks and from our Foods if we don't replace that then we can end up in a body water deficit and that means that we often have impaired physical performance we can have some impaired mental performance and feelings of fatigue for example there's an interesting study on older adults where mortality was greater if they were admitted to hospital in a dehydrated state so the consequences of having inadequate water intake can be very severe to uh mild or moderate so how much water broadly speaking should you be drinking a day it doesn't necessarily have to be water depends what your overall dietary goals are and your water intake is going to be influenced by the climate uh by how much activity you do the European guideline is for around 2 L per day of fluid intake for a man and around 1.6 L per day for a woman your urine color along with the number of times that you actually go go to urinate per day is also a good guide now we've recommended to our volunteers that they drink a glass of water with every meal in addition to what they are currently doing well yeah because we're typically um drinking a range of beverages over the day and often people are falling a bit short of what the the recommended uh intake would be because they're not ingesting much uh plain water so a glass of water with your meal um is is a good way of uring that you you meet your daily fluid intake targets is there a danger of overdoing it of getting too enthusiastic and glugging too much water yeah certainly you can um and there have been some high-profile studies in in uh marathon races where people have overing ested water and they end up um with a condition called hyponatremia where they've got a low serum sodium concentration and that can lead to uh complications and death in extreme cases we also have quite varied water requirements depending on the temperature of the environment we're in how much physical activity we're doing and sweat losses so I think anywhere between 2 L per day and 16 L per day is is what people might consume but I think it's probably better to gauge whether you're having too much by how many times you need to go for a Wii during the day if you if you're going um five or six times per day or maybe up to seven times per day then you're probably drinking the right amount of fluid if you're only going three or four times per day for a pee then you're probably not drinking enough and if you're going more than seven or eight times per day then you're probably drinking too much now I know you've also done research looking at what are the best forms of rehydrating agents and um you're a fan of milk or at least your research points in that direction is that right one study that we did compared a variety of different drinks that you might ingest during the day anything from water to fizzy juice to um fruit juices and and milk what we found in that study is that if you drink one liter of milk you then hold on to more of that for longer which means it has a more prolonged hydrating effect than uh many of the other drinks that We examined the downside of drinking milk obviously is it contains a significant amount of calories exactly yeah so you don't want to do that if you're trying to lose weight or whatever but um it can be useful strategy post exercise for example where you're getting the added protein you're getting the liquid to replace your your fluid losses and many people aren't necessarily aware there's quite a bit of um salt in milk as well that you're replacing your salt losses what about it's coffee or tea again there's sort of an idea that if you drink coffee you're dehydrating yourself you can have tea and coffee as part of your daily water goal but the evidence as you suggest is a bit sketchy on how much coffee you need to drink to make it have a diuretic effect to make you lose more water than you're than you're ingesting but it seems that it's around somewhere between 400 500 milligram of caffeine which is equivalent to about four or five reasonably strong coffees now the obvious way of measuring how much fluid you're taking is am I feeling thirsty if I'm feeling thirsty then I need to drink something is that actually an adequate way of assessing things in in humans when you get thirsty you're normally already down about uh 1 to 2% % loss of of your total body mass as water and that that's quite important because as little as 1 or 2% loss can affect some of your abilities such as physical abilities if you're doing endurance tasks uh in particular um but it can also affect some of your mental abilities and your mood State whether you feel fatigued for example even when you're just feeling a bit thirsty you ignore it that could actually be affecting your mental state in some way way that's the brilliant thing about it water is it can tast no calories it's free if you get it out the tap um it can be delicious if you mix it in with a bit of lemon juice so um why isn't it being drunk more I think it's partly the the range of all the choices that we have thrown at us every day and water isn't often there at the Forefront of our mind when we're thinking about what to drink so maybe it's about making it part of your daily routine now let's check in one final time with Nema I've just finished my one week of drinking water with every meal and it's gone really really well actually I've made sure I've been drinking with every meal so I have had a weight loss of around 2 kog which I think drinking a lot more water has contributed to that heavily I've got a lot more energy uh I've definitely noticed an increase in the amount of times I go to the L probably about seven or eight times now so I think going forward it will be something that I can easily keep going in the future so feeling really positive about [Music] that it's great to hear Nema has been doing so well and as usual I've been doing it too now I've always tried to drink water during the day but making sure I have a glass with every meal has been different it's topped me up and filled me up and I think I can actually focus a bit better so drinking water with every meal it's just one thing you can do to make sure you're hydrated which could help cut down on headaches boost your sports performance and help you think more clearly cheers that's good so that's it it's just one thing you can incorporate into your daily routine which really could benefit your body and life if you want to hear more of the series then why not subscribe