Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/16/stay-hydrated-this-summer-with.html
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Drink all the things!!
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Sure, cool off this way where it’s dry but, in humid climes you just get wet and soggy.
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Do you mean… mоist? I think you mean mоist.
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I mean, if you really want him, here you go:
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It’s probably because I’ve watched too many police violence videos over the last two weeks, but I keep seeing that as her pepper-spraying herself in the face.
And is the second photo suggesting we rehydrate with wine? I mean, cool, but I didn’t think we were supposed to do that.
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I belonged to a glider (sailplane, not hang) club for a while. You get the national magazine as part of dues. One excellent article was on hydration.
Glider pilots can be aloft for hours which can result in needing to pee. There are, um, technical solutions for that, but it’s nice to avoid them. An the other hand, mild dehydration can result in 25% reduction in cognitive ability. That’s before you are even thirsty. Not good while flying.
But what stood out was an interesting tidbit about drinking if you are thirsty. If you start drinking without stopping, you will reach a spot where some instinct says “done.” That’s when we all just stop. Turns out that is pretty close to 2/3 the amount you need to fully hydrate. If you pay attention to how much you drank, you can drink 50% more and be reasonably certain you are good to go. Don’t try to drink more. It will just become pee.
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Or, instead of a 750ml bag of wine, buy a box wine (3l or 5l), take it out of the box for a fraction of the price.
Unless you really want people to see the designer name on your wine bag…
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Sport drink bottles. You can get them for less than a buck. They work fine for carrying water, and are lighter-weight than any of the alternatives listed here. They even throw in a tasty sport drink when you buy them! If you don’t care about that particular lagniappe, dumpster-dive them for free, or better yet, scavenge them when you trash out a trail! Other trail users will thank you for cleaning up.
(I also have a small water bottle, spray-painted red, that carries methanol for my stove. And a wide-mouth one, spray-painted yellow, that I carry only in the winter, which is to avoid having to put my boots on in the middle of the night, if you get my drift.)
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The myth that refuses to die - because so many ‘authoritative’ sources push it.
We have billions of years of evolution that’s finely tuned a system that tells us when we need to drink. The big mistake in dehydration is failing to listen to it. There are two common reasons.
One is that you might be trying to conserve a limited supply of water. If you’re thirsty, the best place to conserve your water is in your body. Most people who succumb to dehydration in deserts are found with unconsumed water on their persons!
Another is that you simply don’t want to stop what you’re doing to take a drink, or don’t want the hassle of carrying the water. Toxic masculinity plays into this - lots of guys want to prove to themselves how long they can keep up doing whatever it is they’re doing. I will admit that I have fallen victim to this, and the solution for me was to adopt a system where it’s easier to pause quickly. On relatively easy trips, I can carry two water bottles slung from the ladder straps of my pack. On more strenuous trips, I might carry a hydration bag in the pack so that I can just sip from the hose without even breaking stride.
I suppose that for a glider pilot, not wanting to resort to the relief tube (or something more primitive) would be a special case of the second reason, and another spurious reason to deny thirst. Also, glider pilots go through some pretty extreme changes in altitude - ones that a climber would consider pretty foolhardy - and that can mess with your homeostatic perceptions, so there may be some suppression of the thirst response there.
Caffeine is another near-myth. For the caffeine-naïve, yes, it can be extremely dehydrating, but the tolerance builds up fast and there’s little evidence to show inveterate coffee drinkers are at greater risk of dehydration than those who never touch the stuff.
I know from my own body that if I drink as much as the pundits say I have to, I feel funny, and hike weakly, until I’ve pissed it out again.
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I’m not sure which myth you are referring to.
Much of the article was about how you need to drink even when you aren’t thirsty. And how to drink the right amount without over hydrating. Normally, being a little cognitively deficient isn’t deadly. But this is one of those cases where it is.
You are partially right about hydration in the desert. You lose water from evaporation (sweat, breathing) and kidneys. The evaporation is less fine tuned and will happen regardless of hydration level. So you should never stop drinking. But the kidneys will adjust depending on hydration. Being slightly dehydrated to decrease urine output without affecting health is a good strategy if water needs to be conserved. Not drinking or drinking too much are bad news.
(Yeah, I used to live and hike in the desert. You end up thinking through this sort of stuff. Like my grandad keeping a 60L milk can in his truck filled with water.)
I’m with you on drinking too much before activity. Makes me queasy. But sitting in an office, I drink lots. Toilet is close by and I need all the cognitive ability I can get! 
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Agree! And they most of them have that nice wide mouth, easier to refill than your average soda bottle. I like to go drawing out and about, a coffee shop the favorite daytime venue, but what with those being under plague interdiction I’ve switched to the great outdoors – parks and plazas and other public spaces. The trees and squirrels and protesters are good subjects, but the lack of coffee and AC is brutal, so I’ve taken to half-filling a bottle with instant-coffee-espresso (four or more tbsps to a cup) and freezing it. Top off with water during the day for convenient caffeination and thermoregulation.
One thing – the stuff that comes in the bottles I use (VitaminWater, with scientifically enhanced electrolytes, available at better Walmart’s worldwide) is not, judging by the taste, meant for internal use. Pretty sure it’s just to make the bottles sit more stable on store shelves. Empty and rinse well before use.
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I’m sure that for our ape ancestors, there were enough confrontations with the dangers of the wild that they needed every scintilla of cogntition that they possessed. So I’m not buying it. If there were a real selective advantage in drinking sooner, evolution would have given us the urge to do so.
This may not apply to going from sea level and normal aspiration to 17500 feet and supplemental oxygen in a sailplane. Our ancestors weren’t subjected to that particular set of stresses.
Interestingly, you are partially right. “Dehydration didn’t hamper performance on all the tests; the women’s reaction time, for example, was not impeded. The decline was seen during the complicated tasks.”
This would align with your ape ancestor theory of surviving danger. Maybe older parts of the brain that kick in during danger are less affected? The more advanced part of our brain seems to have come with the ability to make stupid decisions like wandering around thirsty. There are lots of articles that confirm the relationship between cognition and hydration. Doesn’t mean we turn stupid. Just less than optimum.
Maybe it’s possible our prefrontal cortex was able to improve because it loosened the requirement for optimal performance during dehydration. Sort of how recent CPU’s are able to offer higher performance by throttling back when the get hot rather than always running at the lower speed.
As an aside, most glider flights don’t go from sea level to 17500 feet. Those guys in Reno and Moriarty are the exception. Most flights stay below 1 mile. Only about 10% of pilots who have achieved 1000 m ascents have gone on to achieve 5000m. In my 50ish flights, I only hit 1 mile a couple times.
Yeah, I know. I see a gaggle almost every day, working the rotor over the Helderberg escarpment. They look to be maintaining about 1500 ft above the cliff tops, flying back and forth along the line where the lift is. I was citing the extreme example to point out that I accept that evolution hasn’t optimized us for the human-built environment.
My personal experience is that once I’ve been out 15-20 minutes on a hot day like yesterday, I’m starting to want a drink. Not, “my $DEITY, I need water!” thirsty, but more like, “grab the bottle off my backpack strap and take a gulp or three.” In hot weather I might go through a litre in an hour that way if I’m walking fast and carrying heavy. If I had to take off my pack and go digging in it for the water bottle, it’d seem “not worth the effort” - and I strongly suspect that’s the level of “dehydrated before you’re thirsty” that you’re talking about: “yeah, a drink would be nice if someone handed me one, but I’m not really thirsty.” The solution for me is to carry the water where I can get at it without even breaking stride.
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