I mean, caffeine and alcohol are diuretic because they stimulate urination. The myth is that consuming any diuretic will lead to a net loss in fluid. So, yeah, you’d be better hydrated by drinking water than coffee, but you’re better hydrated drinking coffee than nothing, which is contrary to the myth.
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I always wondered about that. When people say you shouldn’t drink coffee to hydrate because it is a diuretic and will worsen your dehydration, they never address how much and how fast. Does a little bit of coffee make you urinate a lot? Does a lot coffee make you urinate a little? What about the concentration; doesn’t that matter, too? What about how long it takes you to drink it? And what about how fast your metabolism is at the moment; does that affect how fast you metabolize the caffeine, and impact how much water is expelled? There are so many variables, I never understood how they could definitively say that.
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… and… roads:
I admit that paving the world with plastics (of all kinds, some of which are endocrine disruptors)
and in case that link gets taken down by the U.S. government, here:
… is not without its drawbacks, but if one could create a matrix in which to quasi-permanently sequester the seemingly infinite stream of used “waste” plastics…
… then yea, recycling, upcycling, downcycling it all is one kinda good way to start. A main problem is…
… regardless of the what successes may be had with the Pacific Garbage Gyre cleanup:
… because the plastics are killing ocean life.
If we are talking about the water cycle, and the potable water cycle, we are also talking about the “plastic cycle” and how we are proliferating it.
For too many people—and not just the people in developing nations—
clean, potable water is not a right but a privilege. Please, if you have that privilege, do use a reusable water bottle and try to use tap water.
And fight for clean water, everywhere, but especially, where you live:
Shout out to people protecting my water:
Thank you to water.
We are water.
Water is life.
ETA: I hit “post comment” button too soon, needed to finish adding links. Also: grammar.
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Right back atcha.
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If only there were a word, maybe something in Greek, for an overwhelming fear of water
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Laughing hysterically at this.
Not to mention the entire new realm of jokes that Watney could have made about “sparkling clean Martian spring water” in The Martian.
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So… Home water distillation set up for you, then?
So many pearls of conciousness
Ever since veterinary school, and being shown an old film of a human hydrophobic (due to rabies) as part of a lecture on the importance of recognizing zoonoses, if you’ve got overwhelming hydrophobia, I’m going to stay far far away from you.
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Plastic recycling is a stop-gap solution at best, though. Everything ends up as lawn furniture or the like, after which you can’t really re-use it anymore. It’s not 100% recyclable like metal and glass.
But I get that you wouldn’t want to drink arsenic. Though arsenic-tolerance would come in handy if you ever decide to become a roman emperor. 
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Water-terror!
But in Greek.
seems like Plan 9 was succesfull after all…
Now it all makes sense.
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On the opposite side of the same spectrum, there are people who have a pathologically level of thirst and would drink well over the limit of hyper hydration.
I’ve heard stories of psychiatric patients who opened the discharge valve of heating radiators to drink the water since nurses were preventing them from drinking (too much) tap water.
Well, that’s fair enough. Refusing to eat sandwiches unless they are brought to you by a servant on a silver platter while you play cards with your chums is perfectly reasonable.
I hated water as a kid, I drank a lot of fruit juice - that’s what I don’t get here. If you’re not going to drink water, wouldn’t you still drink some kind of water-containing liquid? Apparently not, since these people are ending up in the emergency room! I’m sure my sugar consumption was a bit much with the fruit juice but I wasn’t dehydrated.
Now I’m a kidney stone former and also trying to cut down on the sugar, so I’m more serious about drinking more water and keeping other beverages as a treat and not something to quench thirst.
How do you get a kidney stone, which is described as roughly as painful as childbirth, and think “I refuse to do anything to avoid this pain in the future!”
I gave up potatoes to avoid kidney stones. POTATOES. Do you even know how tasty potatoes are.
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No the myth is that caffeine is diuretic at all in the low doses you see in beverages. Drinking a cup of tea is just as likely to make you want to urinate as drinking a cup of water.
A couple weeks ago I posted [in a topic about plastic in salt] a recipe from the Mayo Clinic for making homemade rehydrating solution (like Pedialyte) from salt, baking soda, sugar, and water.
The first time I made it, I expected it to taste awful, and I thought I’d have to choke it down—especially since I was very sick, which was why I made it. To my surprise it tasted delicious, and it was really easy to sip all day. It was so much more drinkable than plain water. I didn’t have to make myself drink it—I wanted to drink it. (For the record, I make it with slightly less sugar than that recipe calls for.)
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I got a similar assist from my ENT at research center I sometimes volunteer at for medical studies as a guinea pig. He gave me a recipe to make my own homemade saline lavage for cleaning the sinuses. I can’t remember where I put it though.
I bet your solution cost much less than store-bought, too.
