Something In The Water

It’s not how much we drink, it’s how we optimise our fluid intake, say experts who are tipping contemporary thinking about rehydration on its head.

- Nicky Pellegrino

Celebrities were the early adopters. Elle Macpherson drinks three litres of it a day, so does Beyoncé. Everyone from Victoria Beckham to Julianne Moore believes it vital to swig lots of the stuff. Cindy Crawford even says drinking it makes her body happy.

We’re not talking about some elixir here, just water, plain old Hâ‚‚O that gushes from the tap. Consuming it is meant to be the key to everything from smoothing wrinkles to purifying the body. These days, you can’t move for people toting water bottles and sipping from them constantly: in the gym, on the street, in offices, parks and shops. It is a trend that has fuelled a bottled-water industry worth billions.

So, it seems pretty hard to swallow (pun intended) the claims made by Gina Bria and Dana Cohen in a new book, Quench. They say many of us are suffering from low-grade dehydration and that this is contributing to a host of modern ills including headaches, brain fog, fatigue, lack of energy, possibly even type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Bria is an anthropologist whose work has included looking at indigenous tribes from the world’s desert regions and how they survive drought conditions. Cohen is a doctor who takes an integrative, or holistic, approach with her patients. Both are evangelical about tackling what they see as an epidemic of dehydration.

Our grandparents weren’t clutching water bottles at all times and it didn’t seem to do them any harm. So what is going wrong? Bria says modern life is to blame.

“We live in a completely new environment, mostly indoors, in cars, offices and sealed homes, all very dehydrating,” she points out. “We eat less fresh food and substitute foods that dehydrate us, we take medications that dehydrate us further and we are subject to hot lighting and ever-more-present electronic devices.”