Editor's Weekly Ramblings 19

Friday 25th July 2003

Note - If in any doubt Consult your Doctor! This information is NOT a replacement for his/her advice. The Power of Drinking Water

Water is potent stuff. Over 70% of your body is composed of the stuff. Boil you down to your basic constituents and you will be left with a pile of chemicals and a large body of water. When we get 'thirsty' this is our bodies telling us that we have lost a mere 1% of the water that is sloshing around in our cells as blood and other lubricants. If we ignore this bio-feedback then we will inevitably suffer from headaches, tiredness and poor concentration and will then reach for a cup of tea or coffee, which ironically contain caffeine which is a diuretic and will help us to lose even more. Of course it is also a stimulant, so you might feel better for a time, but the root cause of your problems will often come down to the same thing. You aren't drinking enough water.

This particularly comes to the fore when you have been consuming alcohol, and is probably the most common reason (alongside mixing your drinks which is always fatal from a hangover point of view!) that makes people suffer from hangovers the day after a big drinking binge. Now of course we know that alcohol in large doses is toxic, and that by the time you have consumed enough of it to be getting sufficiently merry to enjoy the rest of the evening, you will have killed off a considerable amount of brain cells AND be putting your whole body under stress. Knowledge of that fact doesn't generally stop us drinking though. We do things largely because we associate sufficient pleasure with them to make them worth doing, irrespective of the 'consequences'. And lets face it, most of us have got merry every once in a while. What you don't want however is to feel awful the next day.

Mostly this is easily cured. Simply drink water when you get home after your 'Big Night Out'. This is easily the second best hangover cure (just behind 'sleep it off') known to man. I personally try to drink at least a pint, and aim for two, whenever I decide to have a self-inflicted poisoning session. Most of the time I wake up feeling fine whenever I did down two pints of water in quick succession the night before, and fairly grotty when I crawled into bed without. Another pint of water in the morning then sets you up for a goooood day ahead. (Mix your drinks though and only sleeping for about a week will save you!)

One of the ironies of drinking an adequate amount of water (`'adequate' from your bodies perspective at least) is that your body learns to become efficient at disposing of it. Many people suffer from water-retention (otherwise known as 'edema'), and are under the illusion that if they drink less water they are somehow helping their cause. The logic goes: