Scientists are still studying why humans need water. Despite there being a huge amount of information available online there is still a question mark over the benefits of water on the human body. This blog covers the basics of the relationship between water and humans and a more in-depth blog will be on its way shortly.
We are told from as early as we can understand that water needs to be an essential part of our diet. How though do our bodies use the water and what really happens when we don’t drink enough?
Let’s first look out how our bodies lose water.
It’s quite incredible that we can lose so much water from our bodies on a daily basis. Some of the water we will visibly see but there are several ways of losing water without us really noticing!
Sweat
We all sweat every day of our lives, some more than others. The average person actually loses between 0.8 and 1.4 litres every day. To think that you lose approximately the same as this 1 litre bottle of water is quite staggering!
Breathing
In a 24 hour period, the average human being loses approximately 400ml of water through breathing- almost half a litre!!
Visits to the toilet!
The most visible way we see water being disposed from our body is when we urinate. When you eat or drink, the body takes as much of all the good nutrients it can to keep your body healthy. Any waste taken from our food and drink is stored in our bowel and blood system. Once the body has taken all of the nutrients from our food and drink, the ‘Urinary System’ gets to work. The Urinary System works with the lungs, intestines and skin to eliminate as much waste as it can. By doing this it helps the body regain a specific balance of chemicals and water in the body. It is the kidneys that produce the urine after all of the waste from our food and drink has been filtered out by the Urinary System. The urine travels into the bladder and once full is ready to be ’emptied’!
If you would like further information about the Urinary System we highly recommend having a look at the Live Science website.
We can see now that the body loses a fair amount of water on a daily basis. Hopefully this gives an insight into why we now need to drink! If we didn’t the body would continue to sweat, breath and urinate and that’s when we end up dehydrated.
How much water should we be drinking?
In looking to find an accurate and reliable opinion on how much water we should be drinking, we found that there is a lot of research on this. However, opinions vary across the internet. Overall, the majority of information recommends that humans should be drinking approximately 2 litres of water everyday.
Having an understanding of how the body loses water has given us a better insight into why we need to keep hydrated. It all makes so much more sense! It has even made us more conscious of how much water we are drinking everyday.
We are also very curious as to what really are the health benefits to drinking water. This is a whole other blog though and this can be viewed shortly once we have done our research.
