Drinking excessively but driving legally

Hcan a person be drinking excessively but driving legally, you might ask. Well, the liquid being drunk is water; that most wonderful, natural liquid vital to mankind. It is not only valuable for healthy kidneys and for flushing out the toxins in the body to provide us with a healthy and glowing skin.

It also helps us avoid dehydration which, in an extreme case, causes the body to overheat; that can be life-threatening. Did you know that water also helps to lubricate and cushion joints? It is our body’s principal chemical component and makes up about 50 to 70 per cent of body weight. Every cell, tissue and organ in our body needs water to work properly; our survival depends on it.

The reader is perfectly entitled to say – tell me something new. Well, you may not be aware that human consumption of liquids, especially water, has changed hugely over the centuries. Very few of us would have been there (lol) to see this, but 500 years ago kids had wine with meals because water was so unsafe to drink. Thank goodness we now have that the right way round; though our kids might not approve! But although we are much wiser, and today capable of bringing drinking water consumption uninterruptedly into our daily lives, there are two sets of contradictions that have arisen.

Firstly, there have been many attempts, with significant variations, to identify how much water we should consume daily. The basic guide is – in common with hunger, where your body tells you to eat – you listen to your body telling you when you’re thirsty. And if you also ensure your urine remains almost colourless you won’t go far wrong. But there is still a great deal of arguing about what is a fair daily target. Many (including the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine) have argued that just under four litres a day in a temperate climate is a fair target for men, with just under three litres a day for women. That’s about 15 and 11 cups a day respectively. That takes a bit of drinking. On the other hand, you’ll meet around 20 per cent of your water requirements from food. Many fruits and vegetables, such as watermelon and spinach, are almost 100 per cent water by weight.

Water

Elsewhere in the world, for example, the UK National Health Service, and in many cases where clean tap water is freely available, a daily water intake of two litres is considered sufficient. But for those in hot and humid environments, or at high altitude, as well as athletes and pregnant and breastfeeding women, a larger daily quantity is needed. Unfortunately, there were years of unsubstantiated claims that feeling thirsty meant we were already dangerously dehydrated. But experts now largely agree that we don’t need any more fluid than the amount our bodies ask for.

But the quantification issue is still on the table. And, according to the latest research by the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, published in a Science magazine, we should be drinking between 1.5 and 1.8 litres of water a day as a base figure and personalise our water intake to our activity levels and the temperatures around us. The base figure has come down from two litres with more accurate data for food consumption and thus the amount of water obtained from it. That’s less than half the figure recommended on the other side of the Atlantic.

Those who have complied with the four-litre theory have possibly been over-drinking. From a health perspective, drinking too much water is rarely a problem for healthy, well-nourished adults; but best to avoid it. Athletes have been known to over-hydrate, to avoid dehydrating during long or intense exercises. The kidneys simply cannot get rid of the excess water. The sodium content of our blood becomes diluted. This is called hyponatremia, and it’s serious.

Obsessed

The second contradiction lies with the population of the affluent nations of the world having become obsessed with the consumption of drinking water. Everywhere you go you see people walking and catching buses and trains, with water bottles in hand. Every meeting table has full water containers on them. Adhering to the four-litre optimum intake, Americans are perhaps going overboard; and into an excess of water (but fortunately not drowning (lol). And definitely not doing it the right way. The sale of reusable water bottles topped US$ 2 billion in the USA in 2022, up from around US$1.5 billion in 2020, according to CamelBak, maker of reusable bottles. And sales of single-serving water bottles have been rising steadily too, reaching around 50 billion litres in 2022, according to the most recent data from the Beverage Marketing Association, which tracks beverage sales.

In other words, in the USA, which is the very big consumer, people are spending billions of Dollars a year on reusable bottles to stay hydrated with tap water, then buying lots of bottled water anyway. Main water standards are relatively high but still under-utilised. The charity shops are full of donated re-usable water bottles. And bottled water has become so popular that it is often more expensive than soda. Reusable water bottles and bottled water are massively over-purchased as part of the over-consumption phenomenon. That, ironically, uses valuable resources, and is detrimental to the global environment.