Milk, orange juice, pedialyte more hydrating than water
mobile.nytimes.com
mobile.nytimes.com
Are you more "hydrated" if your stomach is carrying around fluid for longer?
They test how much healthy young men pee out 2 hours after consuming something. The problem is, it's a dumb test. That 2 hours is pretty short when it comes to how long it takes things to empty from your stomach. With a full meal, your stomach would be a little more than half full at that two hour mark.
Just water gets dumped from your stomach really quickly, 50% in 10 minutes. Here's the rub... while it might not be sure based on the study design, it seems there's a real good chance that the only thing going on here is people carry milk and pedialyte around in their stomachs longer. That's it. No extra "hydration" no health benefits.
It would be akin to saying drinking 1L of water right away is more hydrating than drinking it in small increments over 2 hours. Is it more hydrating? Or did your body just have less time to turn it into urine?
The big assumption being made is equating "hydration" with how much fluid you didn't pee out after two hours. If it's not tied to some set of health metrics (and really if it isn't tied to a long term health study) it should say absolutely nothing about conclusions an average person should take.
Your body is very good at leveraging osmosis to move water around. It's main goal is to maintain adequate volume in your circulatory system (low volume means low pressure, just like any pumping system, low pressure means not enough blood gets to your brain). It will shift fluid around from various places to keep enough in the blood. This effect is actually leveraged in traumatic injuries with significant blood loss. "Extra" salty water will be given via IV, and that will 'pull' water into the circulatory system, via osmotic pressure.
If you're peeing out the water you drank within an hour or two, it's because your body didn't need it (or it needed to use it to carrying some stuff out with it). Urinating is a _good_ thing.
What suprises me is that anyone with knowledge in physiology would call this study "brilliant". I would expect better of someone leading a laboratory and an education in biology. (http://kins.uconn.edu/lawrence-e-armstrong-ph-d/)
That is... as _long_ as you constrain yourself to only concluding the facts that are there. How fast your stomach empties and urination schedules ... these aren't facts the average person can draw any conclusions from.
Good for science, bad for stupid news articles.
Seems like pretty flawed reasoning to me. The aim isn't to keep the liquid inside of you as "water supply".
Unless you're dehydrated in the serious sense (survival situation, diarrhea etc) there isn't really any need to drink something special. The body does an entire satisfactory job of balance electrolytes and getting rid of waste via urine if you just drink enough water.
Is that all there is to it? Could it not happen that some drink caused the water supply in the body to decay as normal, but then continuing to even lower levels than before, for example?
> Lawrence Armstrong, a hydration expert
One wonders how there can be such a thing as a hydration expert if not even these basic things have been known until now.
> But don’t forget that milk has many more calories than water, so don’t overdo it, either.
A bit beside the point, perhaps: What caloric content is there in water? Can it be said to have any at all? It makes you think about how to define it, really. On the one hand, we don't typically think of the energy as coming from the water, but in the other hand, water must be present for us to extract the energy from other molecules. In a situation where energetic molecules (but not water) are already present, then, it is the consumption of water that causes an increased amount of energy to be made available to our bodies. Similarly, a battery contains energy, but not until we add cables to connect it do we get access to it. In a sense, it is the addition of the cable that contributes the energy.
"Why is milk so efficient at rehydration? “Normally when you drink, it signals the kidneys to get rid of the extra water by producing more urine,” Dr. Maughan said. “However, when beverages contain nutrients and electrolytes like sodium and potassium, as milk does, the stomach empties more slowly with a less dramatic effect on the kidneys.”"
Is it? I like the stuff sure, but clever marketing and dubious blogs aside I've not seen anything supporting this.
The extra fat and sugar in the latte will stick around much longer...
PDF: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/103/3/717.full.pdf+html
> Total urine masses over 4 h were smaller than the still-water control after an oral rehydration solution (ORS), full-fat milk, and skimmed milk.
> Cumulative urine output at 4 h after ingestion of cola, diet cola, hot tea, iced tea, coffee, lager, orange juice, sparkling water, and a sports drink were not different from the response to water ingestion.
I don't know where the Hacker News submission got "orange juice is more hydrating than water" from.
They didn't just read the abstract like you did. There is a link on the page you hyperlinked to for the full text
Then solid foods that need to be digested to get out the water would score even higher on this index. Condoms full of water would have an infinite score as the water would never show up in the urine. What I am saying here is that this is a stupid way to measure "hydration".
Speaking of stupid, why does HN have so many of these pointless diet things on the front page?
People are really interested in their health. Lots of "hackers" would be super-interested in information that gave them conscious and definite ways to improve themselves.
The problem is that there's very little real information out there.
This study, if were framed properly, would have been at least mildly interesting.
Stomach emptying of fluids depends on the type of fluid... urination frequency too. Thirsty but don't want to pee all the time on a road trip or hacking marathon? Drink milk! Hack your body!
But instead they had to link it with "hydration" which is bollocks. It's not clear that anyone should care at all about hydration unless vigorous exercise or extreme heat is involved because your kidneys do a pretty good job, period.
The problems are that -) human physiology is incredibly complex, and while we are making a lot of progress in understanding all the biological systems, we are far from a point where we can properly model all that goes on.
-) Most people with an actual idea are far too busy doing proper research. They don't care about educating the public that much. And those who do usually want to sell something, in one way or another.
Definitely sarcasm.
He advocates drinking one liter of each every day (to which salt and sugar is added).
He says that polyunsaturated fatty acids are the cause of most diseases.