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Comment by nandemo | Hacker News Reader

"drink more water"

This is the most puzzling one for me. How can this even be a goal?

Are all those people chronically dehydrated? Perhaps they drink soft drinks instead of water? Is it a North American thing? Mysteries...

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Americans love their soft drinks. They also feel really guilty about it and resolve to drink more water, which means big money for people who make water filters and bottled water.

Edit: to note this relates to the "Health" category I mentioned in another comment in this thread.

I think drinking 2-3 liters of water per day (~100 ounces?) is seen as beneficial for the health. People usually don't drink that much because they don't feel thirsty, but they would like to.

I don't live in the US so I don't know what I'm talking about.

The widely accepted notion that we should drink 8 glasses of water per day is apparently an urban legent

http://www.snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp

Perhaps some people prefer to excrete more dilute urine?

(As an aside for the curious, your water intake and your sodium excretion are virtually orthogonal - the body is very, very good at retaining sodium while wasting H20 when necessary. Therefore, drinking lots of water will not cure hypertension or reduce your whole-body sodium burden.)

Some say that disease prevention is the best cure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidney_stone#Prevention

Most fitness or nutrition guides tell people that they should be drinking 8 glasses of water a day.

Considering that the #1 goal is to lose weight, it follows that people listing "drink more water" as one of their goals are doing it as a part of wanting to lose weight.

The last time I went to the dentist he pointed out that I was drinking enough soft drinks that it was causing noticeable damage to my enamel. I found it surprisingly hard to stop drinking them. In fact, I haven't stopped, but I have reduced it substantially.

It's hard at first but it's definitely worth the effort of going cold turkey. After a month or so the next time you try a soft drink your stomach will feel all gassy and terrible and the drink itself will taste pretty bad.

Or at least that's what happened to me. I used to drink 3-4 cans of pepsi and maybe 1-2 of mountain dew every day. I went from that to nothing and two months later I had the above experience. I've had soft drinks maybe a half dozen to a dozen times over the past year and it's never a particularly pleasant experience.

I've quit soft drinks cold turkey on a few occasions. I've gone from drinking them almost exclusively to having none for months at a time.

My experience was that they were even better than I remembered them. The only thing that I can relate to you is that if I haven't had a Coke in some months, drinking a large amount does upset my stomach.

me too. What I've found is that carbonated water is the best substitute when trying to get myself to not drink soda. Safeway sells carbonated water in cans, just like soda pop, so it feels quite similar to drinking a soda.

(I don't know if the acid in the carbonated water would hurt your teeth without the added damage from the corn syrup or not.)

Maybe it is an American thing (I'm American). I've had to very consciously switch my drinking habits from diet soda over to water. I used to literally not drink any water at all.

This is probably associated with the 'loose weight' theme. It means: "Drink water instead of coke or some other sugary drink."

I lost a significant amount of weight by doing nothing but transition from drinking Coke and Mountain Dew to water.

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