Being dehydrated makes you stupid. The thoughts come slower and are harder to work through. Maybe I should speak for myself, but if I’m down on go-juice I just can’t access all three things I know about carpentry as quickly as I’d like to.
Which also explains why coffee wakes me up. Even if it’s blazing out, I keep an OxxBoxx coffee maker on my truck.
Time magazine says that to actually remain hydrated you need to take in other nutrients. The study the author cited found that coffee, beer, milk and other drinks kept the test subjects better hydrated than water alone. Check it out. Excerpts below.
Of course, no one’s suggesting that people dump water in favor of milk and OJ. Water is still hydrating. So are sports drinks, beer, and even coffee, to some extent. But the authors of the 2015 study wrote that there are several “elements of a beverage” that affect how much H2O the body retains. These include a drink’s nutrient content, as well as the presence of “diuretic agents,” which increase the amount of urine a person produces. Ingesting water along with amino acids, fats and minerals seems to help the body take up and retain more H2O—and therefore maintain better levels of hydration—which is especially important following exercise and periods of heavy perspiration.
“People who are drinking bottles and bottles of water in between meals and with no food, they’re probably just peeing most of that out,” Nieman says. Also, the popular idea that constant and heavy water consumption “flushes” the body of toxins or unwanted material is a half-truth. While urine does transport chemical byproducts and waste out of the body, drinking lots of water on an empty stomach doesn’t improve this cleansing process, he says.
