I keep having this same discussion/argument with Family, friends, and clients. No one wants to believe me, since I don’t have a medical degree, and internists and GP doctors are actually quite terrible (in general, not all of them) at dissemination of actual nutritional information. Doctors spend less than 3 hours of study on nutrition in medical school, on average, and they are no different from the general population when it comes to media manipulation and marketing. But some doctors and researchers actually specialize in this aspect of health. Here it is. Keep in mind as you read this piece from 2015 that two issues later a staff writer probably wrote a piece about how dehydrated most Americans are, using studies put out by Nestle (the largest bottler and distributed of bottles water in the world). So I don’t really blame you for getting confused. Just try to spend 10 minutes thinking about the topic critically and you’ll realize the truth. Ask yourself what did humans do before the invention of modern plumbing? Before faucets? Do you think they were running to the nearest stream every hour or that their wells were bottomless supplies of clean water? Was every Native American in the year 1710 dehydrated? Use your critical thinking caps and stop being so easily manipulated.
There is no science behind a formal, one-size-fits-all requirement of daily water consumption.
“Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.” Jacob Bronowski, 1908-1974