The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Hartford lab to study link between water and health
Colleen Munoz is a research scientist who has the dubious honor of being given, unprompted, status updates from her colleagues about the color of their urine.
“It's actually a very funny experience,” said Munoz. “People have gotten the message that hydration is really important.”
Munoz is studying how the body absorbs and loses water, which has major implications on the human condition. But while everyone understands that water is essential to life, there's a lot we don't know about water and health.
“People normally assume we all have a good amount of information about this, but I think you would be appalled to find out what we actually know,” or don't, said Munoz. “The majority of things we've heard from our clinicians or professors are actually not well supported.”
In the hopes of answering some of those questions, Munoz has started up a hydration lab at the University of Hartford, where she'll study hydration and health in people who aren't professional athletes. She explained that most of the work in the hydration field had been done on athletes, not people from other walks of life.
She said the link between good hydration and fewer kidney stones was pretty solid, but this wasn't the case with other conditions. The science of hydration and how hydration plays with human health is largely a big question mark.
“There's really only a couple of conditions that we feel confident now that we can say ‘Yes drinking optimal water on a daily basis will prevent or alleviate this condition,'” said Munoz.
That's a big problem in a country obsessed with hydration. TikTok trends sucked a brand of water bottles off the shelves this year as people shared “recipes” for water with various additives. Hydration challenges periodically emerge from social media. Twitch video streamers offer viewers the ability to pay to watch them drink water. Hydration advice drowns us online. Wellness beverages dominate the drink aisle at grocery stores. And through it all, the classic advice about needing to drink eight glasses of water a day persists against repeated debunking and clarification.
“There are a lot of people who make claims that are not scientifically backed,” said Munoz. “In the non-scientific, nonclinical world is making things even more confusing … There's no one-sizefits-all hydration recommendations.”
The science of water, hydration and health also happens to be extremely important in a world beset by rising temperatures and climate change. This summer was the hottest summer on record. A study conducted by the U.S. Committee on Military Nutrition Research found that under hot conditions, physically active humans can shed almost three gallons of water a day.
Extreme heat and dehydration can be deadly. In humid environments, sweating doesn't help much in cooling you down. In extremely dry environments, you can't sweat fast enough. Part of mitigating the risk of extreme heat requires figuring out how the body manages heat, sweat, and water needs.
Munoz intends to dig into this by doing “omics” studies — looking at the genes, proteins and cellular signals that are sent out when the body experiences dehydration. Seeing how those signals change as the body gets more or less hydrated is important for finding links to other areas of human health.
“Our main focus is on physiological outcomes,” said Munoz. “But we aren't going to ignore that those outcomes are in part being driven or are more significant now than decades ago because of climate change.”