Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

There's this cult of drinking water - with people insisting you should drink more and more water - until people are drinking ludicrous quantities trying to get literally clear urine. They also tend to chug it all at once, repeatedly. As the article says it just flows straight through and does nothing useful.

On a very hot day after a lot of arduous exercise I've seen someone collapse from hyponatremia from drinking too much water - washed everything out of their system because they thought they had to drink sixteen litres a day or something.

Calm down and just drink a reasonable quantity of water slowly over time, and combine that with eating full meals which people tend to put off if it's hot, making everything worse.

View on HN

You're ignoring extremely hot and dry environments like deserts.

I struggle to drink enough water to urinate at all when working on my desert cabin in the summer months. It's completely redefined my perception of how much water the human body can lose to perspiration alone.

> You're ignoring extremely hot and dry environments like deserts.

I'm not - I've got professional experience managing healthcare in Helmand in the summer. You still don't need as much water as some people think.

I don't know anything about your work or conditions, but my first recommendation would still be to make sure you're eating as much as you need, and then to drink less but more slowly.

I don’t have much experience with living in the desert, but when I hiked down the Grand Canyon I drank 8L and didn’t go to the bathroom. I also ate trail mix and protein bars, had lunch, etc.

I was drinking as much as was comfortable to me, since I was worried about getting dehydrated, and still never needed to use the toilet until after the hike was over.

I don’t think drinking less would have helped the situation.

> I don’t think drinking less would have helped the situation.

It might have if the unexpected happened and you needed the water to survive the next day. Water consumption when hiking/backpacking can be tricky, especially in hot+arid environments lacking known springs or streams.

It was a day hike with plenty of taps to refill your water along the way.

I had no idea they'd put in so much infra at the Grand Canyon, yeah I'd be drinking water like a fish :)

I'd love for you to come build a roof with me in the Mojave in July and demonstrate this drink less water more slowly approach.

> I’d love for you to come build a roof with me in the Mojave in July and demonstrate this drink less water more slowly approach.

I’m not building a roof in any desert during the summer, and am also interested in this drink water more slowly approach.

Make sure you drink a Gatorade or two as well. Pedialyte works as well.

People aren't good at hydration, at least I wasn't, so at the risk of self promotion I have an iphone app called Max Hydrate - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/max-hydrate/id1575744883#?plat... - that calculates how much you should drink to stay hydrated. It's based on research and the most important parts are free.

I had thought about it mostly for working out and athletes, but perhaps in warmer temps it has more general applicability. I've learned older people often suffer from dehydration without realizing it.

It has a WUT test to test for dehydration and uses your sweat profile to suggest hydration products. There are a lot of options these days beyond Gatorade and Pedialyte.

Most people don't get enough salt, so that's something to watch out for, especially if you are a salty sweater.

Snacking on canned sardines in water (and drinking the broth) seems to work well enough, plenty of sodium.

edit: Writing this comment has made me realize mixing powdered dehydrated boullion into the water would probably work quite well too. The ambient temps are so high the water is basically at hot soup temperature as-is.

I've used Pedialyte (and equivalent convenience store alternatives[0]) after cutting weight for grappling, and occasionally also to prevent (or recover from) hangovers. Very useful drink.

0. Make sure they have Zinc!

> does nothing useful

I am pretty sure it contributes in removing salts - which in weather conditions that makes one sweat profusely, worsens the problem.

> sixteen litres a day or something

Best to remind then that drinking 6 liters of water can be sufficient to kill a human.

( https://scienceswitch.com/2014/12/09/takes-6-liters-water-ki... )

> Best to remind then that drinking 6 liters of water can be sufficient to kill a human

How many people does this actually kill? I can't imagine anyone I know doing anything like it.

The point that people do die of it may be less important that the point that people do not know that one can die of it.

I have seen very many people in the running cultures that first, have lost contact with the bodily feedback, and/or second, let pieces of information float and influence without getting vetted and grounded.

One of such dictums warns "to drink at least three litres of water per day!" with many exclamation marks: I have seen people suffer the consequence (and one brought one to the hospital, where she was told "lady, break that habit") because, simply, it was not the adequate amount /for them/.

It is not a difficult error to make if some hydrate and do not eat (intake nutrients), and do not know or feel that, as emerged in these posts, the concentration of salts is key.

Anecdotes about people dying for that 6-litres are around and you can find some in the article I linked.

I haven't seen any data indicating that this is much risk.

Someone got sick drinking 3L water per day? I find that hard to believe.

I don't know Alison, I could put you in contact - I, by chance, brought her to the hospital the day she got sick. Then again, I was not the assessing doctor and there is always a doubt in putting causes together in a correct frame.

This given, have you considered that some people weigh 120, some 80 and some 40? Already because of this, a "3l (or 1, or 9) [for everyone]" should intuitively make little sense.

Another point: if the concentration of salts have a meaning, as a few are indicating around the thread, drinking Xl while eating 2Y and drinking Xl while eating ½Y makes quite a difference.

These two humble points stress what already written: very generic stubs of rules make little sense. Match that with the missed notion that some things are harmful, match it again with the lazy inclination that makes the body a not-listened-to servant (I know people that do not know they should sleep), and one day or the other some get hurt.

(There's something a little creepy about using someone's personal name, unless you know them.)

(There may be, wolverine, but it is also a rhetoric device that makes sense when there are reasons why you may be addressing one person more than a group. Some (sub-/)peoples, on the contrary, find using the name a polite form of addressing. Some (sub-/)cultures have peculiarities you may not guess: call e.g. some (many) Russians by surname and they will start shaking as if insulted. The impact and perception depend. "Wol", "wolverine", or "wolverine876", there is no rule to surely identify how you will react to any of these. When a user inserts what looks like a personal name in the username in a community context, it is as if they introduced themselves - it is the identity hook they are providing.)

If you look around HN, I think you'll see that people refer to each other by username unless they know each other. That's my experience in other forums too.

I saw in the news quite recently a young guy, German I think, died after getting pretty drunk, and his friends, trying to help, gave him too much water or non-alcoholic fluids. Just too much too quickly for kidneys to process iirc; will edit link in if I can find it.

So that's not to say a lot - that's one case and it was newsworthy here in the UK, i.e. international news if I remember correctly that he was German. But does happen.

(Ok I can't find that one specifically, but there are a bunch of other cases just searching 'died too much water' there are a bunch of news article, so, yeah, it happens, but not so much not to make the news.)

the parent comment says hyponatremia in the next sentence, which is removing salts too far, so you're agreeing!

I intended to expand, not to disagree :) (but the texts do not flow properly because I in fact read something different - I must have been very tired, if unedited). Nonetheless, different statements on the same point can be very useful, as different voices have different efficacies in passing similar information (one skips this, misreads that but gets an other).

Yes, hyponatremia is one possible consequence of overdrinking. I understand that the concentration of salts can be more important of their presence, so over-diluting or under-diluting have consequences.

6L in one hour can kill you, not in one day.

Yeah it's a bit sad the BBC article starts with saying you need to drink 6 to 8 glasses of water daily, which is a myth, which the BBC has written about multiple times before e.g.: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190403-how-much-water-s....

Drinking too much is rare, but still it happens and it's rooted in misinformation about minimum drinking requirements that's unfortunately not rare, but rather a very common piece of misinformation.

Surprising to see it on the NHS website too (of course, without any source, but still the claim is made).

> There's this cult of drinking water - with people insisting you should drink more and more water - until people are drinking ludicrous quantities

> I've seen someone collapse from hyponatremia from drinking too much water

I've never heard of this or seen it. Have other people?

> I've never heard of this or seen it.

Hyponatremia? Yeah it's documented https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hyponatremia/.... When you hear about people dying from ecstasy it's usually actually hyponatremia I believe.

I've heard of hyponatremia, but not this cult of drinking so much water.

Hydrohomies, at least.

No. But, I have heard of people acting weird from drinking too much water - after playing game designed to make you drink ridiculous amounts. No collaps tho. Just acting weird (sort of like after alcohol) and discomfort when drinking next cup.

The game was stupid, but no collapse or health issue beyond discomfort after drinking a lot. Which makes me thing it is not easy at all to drink to issue.

Ironically, many people think it is perfectly normal to play the same game with alcohol and collapse.

You can actually cause kidney failure from drinking too much water.

Citation needed.

pretty much every response on this article has talked about the health problems from drinking too much water, but if you don't want to read up on any of that, maybe the Mayo Clinic will help. hopefully that's enough "citation" other than what The whole article and all of the responses are about.

I googled it for you:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...

No Jerry, I was asking for citations about kidney failure caused by excess water consumption. Hyponatremia is not kidney failure.

Frankly, I live under the understanding that it's semi common knowledge / sense. The body is finite. It has limits. Exceeding those limits and undesirable things happen.

https://www.freseniuskidneycare.com/thrive-central/hypervole...

https://www.renalandurologynews.com/home/news/too-much-water...

No mention of kidney failure in the linked articles.

https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/kidney-disease/...

Again, you’ve linked to a page with general information on kidney failure. There’s no mention of drinking too much water causing kidney failure…

Let's start here: "Kidney failure means your kidneys no longer work well enough to do these jobs and, as a result, other health problems develop..."

That is, if you overwhelm your kidneys they will fail. This issue here isn't the links, it's an inability to interpret the clinical facts and apply them to real life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com