Used to be that the water we drank just came from a kitchen tap. Or the hose in the backyard when you were too busy or too lazy to go inside for a drink. Standing in front of the sink, a glass would be filled almost to the brim to be either chugged down right there and then, or taken to the table and consumed in reasonably short order. Schools had banks of bubblers, water bottles were what you took camping and Zaps, Glugs, Razzes and Sunny-boys were available frozen or not from the tuck shop in their (original) tetrahedral tetra-paks.
If you were lucky there was a redeemable yellow “free” printed on the inside of the pack. It got you another one for nix, and star status for a couple of days.
This was part of a kid’s survival kit along with milk, juice, cordial, limited soft drink and loads of second-hand smoke. A ubiquitous jar of ‘Tang’ would be in the cupboard; a flavoured powder that pretended to be orange juice when mixed with water with the claim it contained more vitamin C. Made extraordinarily popular by NASA supplying it to astronauts, it probably did; and it’s sugar content was stratospheric.
It wasn’t something anybody much cared about, being too busy cutting the fat off steak, swapping butter for margarine and sending the kids to get beer from the fridge in the garage.
Electric toothbrushes were yet to be de rigueur so the twice-daily was done manually and without any type of fancy timer or song to let you know when two minutes was up. That was completely subjective, likely more like 30-45 seconds and it yet mostly turned out A.O.K. Fluoridated water, school dental programmes, lack of ultra processed foods, regular quality sleep and six-monthly dental check-ups helped assuage any daily brushing shortfalls.
It was however, a bit of a drill-and-fill culture. Unlike today, dentists weren’t well trained in how to handle fear or phobia. They did what they could and their patients, big or small, dealt with it. At times it was quite brutal; and many a kid walked home dazed, with a mouthful of blood after having been pinned to the chair by the nurse.
No-one except maybe models and hippies subscribed to ‘8 glasses of water a day’ either – you drank when you were thirsty. For adults, coffee, tea and alcohol largely solved that; all readied by a small orange juice at breakfast.
It’d be easy to jeer and sneer at a time that is never to return, but on the whole, people were healthier. Obesity was a rarity, diabetes not so commonplace and fewer kids and adults suffered from excess weight. The perception of food was very different. Evenings were home-cooked meals and conversation around the table rather than takeout in silence or solitude in front of a screen.
In a world that seems to become harsher, less reasonable and more disparate, nostalgia is the deft signature of the already interred; that indelible mark amid the scribble. The smoking, alcohol and sugar consumption of the time are easy targets, but junk food didn’t have a cupboard of its own and a family block of chocolate was shared among five people one night a week. Snacking was either a piece of fruit or met with the universal no-you’ll-spoil-your-dinner.
It wasn’t all beer and skittles (it was mostly beer) but inarguably, everyday life was more active.
Walking wasn’t a separate exercise, it was a huge part of a normal day. Just having to walk to the phone in the kitchen or the hallway to answer it, getting up to change the channel or standing at the sink washing up made it impossible to just sit for hours on end. People were much less sedentary in the office. Documents needed to be physically delivered so you walked over to co-workers you needed to see. Generally you didn’t phone them, and email was some dystopic idea of E.M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’.
Clothes weren’t stretchy, and they weren’t cheap. You’d quickly notice if they were getting a bit tight, and rectify it in a week or two. So called ‘self-care days’ laying about in pyjamas would have been considered plain crazy or plain lazy. You couldn’t do it in bed because there was only one tv. For any of it to have been remotely acceptable would’ve involved hospital admission.
Certainly had you done that, someone would’ve had a few words. Mostly “get the hell dressed and get outside”.
You might have been handed a drink of water first.
As far as hydration is concerned, if you’re a healthy person, odds are you’re getting plenty. Even if no one can say exactly what the right amount is.
The importance of being hydrated is indisputable. It’s important for dental health and saliva production. How much water should you drink every day? Water keeps our organs working, helps the distribution of nutrients, keeps the body thermostat in balance and prevents muscles basically seizing up.
Research tells us that without food, survival is two to three months as long as there’s access to water.
Without it, cells die; and death invariably occurs within a week.
We have this knowledge, yet there are no specifics of what constitutes adequate water intake.
Despite ‘8 glasses a day’ experts and we dentists don’t usually agree on how much water people need. They even differ on how to efficiently measure the level of hydration, and which liquids – or combinations of – are the best replenishers. There’s no definitive scientific threshold to maintain, and there are divisions on whether thirst indicates that the process of dehydration is about to happen, or already has.
Certainly the how-much answer has to begin with “it depends.” On climate, exertion, general health, size, and diet – including salt and sugar consumption.
So although the water consumption rule of thumb to drink ‘8 glasses a day’ sounds like a fact, it isn’t.
Regardless of the absence of any independent scientific or medical evidence verifying this amount, it’s been accepted as true since 1945: the year the US Food and Nutrition Board Report stated that people need about 2.5 litres of water each day.
What was misinterpreted at the time, and has remained so, is the conclusion – “most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods”. Meaning that in a generally balanced diet, everything that’s consumed in a day contains all the water we need.
It’s certainly been a convenient confusion for the $US30 billion global bottled water market. Around the turn of the new millennium, hydration became a fixation. Water’s benefits were splashed across magazines, and costly branded bottles flooded supermarket shelves. Suddenly we were all drinking it in, and drinking, drinking, drinking – as permanently attached to an expensive water bottle as Linus to his blanket.
It didn’t make scientific sense. But nobody cared about that; it was celebrity, influencer and social media endorsed.
If that was fake news, the good news is we can still rely on our body – which we seem to do less and less as each decade passes.
Research revealed in the 1950s that a pea-size structure in the brain’s hypothalamus controls thirst. This natural mechanism is why most of us don’t need to be obsessed about hydration as if it’s a constant spectre of death. The human body is roughly 60% water – and that concentration is carefully controlled by sensory aspects like having a dry throat.
How Much Water Should You Drink Every Day? Your Brain Tells You
Neuroscience has recently gained other remarkable insights into how the brain monitors this.
A region called the subfornical organ (SFO) monitors the concentration of water and salts in blood. It triggers the urge to drink, and we’re satisfied almost instantly when we do. However, it takes 10 to 15 minutes for liquid to travel from our mouth through the digestive tract and into the bloodstream. Something in the brain signals that although the blood may not have changed yet, enough liquid was had to reinstate the balance.
It stops the feeling of being thirsty.
Signals converge on the SFO from the blood telling you the current state of hydration; from the mouth notifying how much fluid you drank; and from the gut identifying whether it was water, or something else that was consumed. SFO neurons add these signals together and transmit the message to either keep drinking, or stop.
There are some exceptions with particular health conditions, and for the older population there’s a decline in the system’s sensitivity. People over 70 should remind themselves to drink water to avoid the common condition of dehydration.
Overall though, you can trust your brain rather than any arbitrary (mis)information when it comes to how much water to drink. On hot days it’s a good idea to not necessarily wait to be thirsty before having a drink; same goes for if you’re about to go on a run for instance.
Or a long walk back to 1969.
