Have we had our fill of water?

by Emine Saner Guardian 23 July 2011

An article in the Guardian said:

We’ve been told to drink at least eight glasses a day. Celebrities clutch bottles like fashion accessories and children are urged to swig in class. But as Nigella Lawson is outed as an ‘aquaholic’, is the tide finally turning on the health benefits of H20? 

The British Medical Journal’s website had an advert for a new public health initiative, Hydration for Health. It was sponsored by Danone – which owns the Evian, Volvic and Badoit bottled water brands.  It urged healthcare professionals to encourage people to drink more water, claiming that “evidence is increasing that even mild dehydration plays a role in the development of various diseases”.

The BMJ admitted “we hadn’t followed our own guidelines. The advertisement bypassed our editorial checks”

The drive to get people to drink more water is everywhere – the Royal College of Nursing’s “hydration toolkit”  best practice guidance is produced in conjunction with Water UK, which works on behalf of the water industry. This claims that by drinking water you “will also be helping to protect yourself against three of the biggest killer cancers [bowel, breast and prostate]”.

We’re told to drink lots of water all the time. Dominic Lawson outed his sister Nigella as an “aquaholic”, drinking several litres a day. Everyone carries bottles of water – schoolchildren to executives. 

Stanley Goldfarb, professor of medicine and a kidney specialist at the University of Pennsylvania. He said: “When we need water, the brain releases a hormone in response to dehydration that tells the kidney to reduce its excretion of water.  The body has this system for regulating amounts of water. The way you’re told to drink water is you become thirsty, and you become thirsty well before there’s any impairment that dehydration might induce.”

He reviewed the medical evidence for drinking water, and debunked some myths.

“One was that water improves your skin,” he says. “We showed there was no scientific basis for that. The second myth is that drinking water is an aid to diets and would reduce your appetite. That has been carefully studied and it doesn’t. If you flavour the water, that will suppress your calorific intake during the subsequent meal, but nobody has shown that it suppresses it over 24 hours. When you finish the meal and you didn’t eat enough calories, you’re going to be hungry, and you’ll eat later. We said there really is no evidence that going on a water-drinking campaign will lead you to lose weight.”

Many of us have been led to believe that the more we drink, the healthier we will be. At the weekend, in his column for the Sunday Times, Dominic Lawson outed his sister Nigella as an “aquaholic”, drinking several litres a day. Several newspapers followed this up this week by interviewing women who drank excessive amounts of water thinking they were doing themselves good – one, Joanne Jarvis, interviewed by the Daily Mail, was hospitalised after drinking 11 litres over four hours.When did we become so fearful of dehydration? Schoolchildren are encouraged to take bottles of water into classrooms and sip them throughout the day. Peer into most meeting rooms in the country and you will see bottles of water planted on the table in front of executives, as if they fear that the slightest dehydration will impair them in some way. At the gym, people replenish water as fast as they sweat it out.

A few years ago, Stanley Goldfarb, professor of medicine and a kidney specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, noticed a strange phenomenon. “People were dragging around big bottles of water with them and drinking all the time and I thought: ‘What are they doing?'”

He says on the phone from his office in Philadelphia: “Since we have a perfectly good system to alert us if we need water, why would you need to subvert that by drinking in a prophylactic way?” He reviewed the scientific literature on the health benefits of drinking a lot of water, identifying the four recurrent themes that were put about by those who advocated it.

“One was that water improves your skin,” he says. “We showed there was no scientific basis for that. The second myth is that drinking water is an aid to diets and would reduce your appetite. That has been carefully studied and it doesn’t. If you flavour the water, that will suppress your calorific intake during the subsequent meal, but nobody has shown that it suppresses it over 24 hours. When you finish the meal and you didn’t eat enough calories, you’re going to be hungry, and you’ll eat later. We said there really is no evidence that going on a water-drinking campaign will lead you to lose weight.”

The third myth he looked at is that drinking water flushes more toxins out of your body. “All it does is increase the volume of your urine, but it doesn’t change the material in the urine. The last issue that people have advocated is that water can control headaches. It was not substantiated.”

When we need water, he says, the brain releases a hormone “in response to dehydration that tells the kidney to reduce its excretion of water. This hormone is suppressed whenever there is more water than the body needs, and the kidney immediately unleashes its ability to excrete water, which is dramatic. The body has this system for regulating amounts of water. The way you’re told to drink water is you become thirsty, and you become thirsty well before there’s any impairment that dehydration might induce.”

“What people don’t need to do is take in two extra litres a day. You’re going to take in two litres a day based on your diet and thirst sensation. What [bottled water companies] are really asking people to do is take in four or five litres, because they’re already taking in two or three as coffee, tea, soft drinks, fruit, alcoholic beverages – that’s all water. This notion is a marketing ploy.”

He also said: “The National Academy of Sciences in the United States did a very extensive study several years ago assessing water intake. Their executive summary was: drink when you’re thirsty.”

The death of the British teenager Leah Betts in 1995 was caused by the huge amount of water she drank after taking an ecstasy pill.

We cover this in detail in WaterDrive.

YouDrive thinks…

There’s a lot to take in here. It really does show that you can’t believe everything you read!
Many things count as liquids and will prevent dehydration – even those we think of ‘diuretics’ which are supposed to dehydrate you.

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All areas of health are interlinked

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Find your initial focus

You might think that physical, financial and mental health are quite separate, and for some people they are. However, often a problem in one area has a knock-on effect on others. Losing your job can lead to anxiety and depression, which can turn you to drink and impact your health.

You might have a severe issue in one area but that can lead to problems in other areas, and the people treating you for the first problem won’t be equipped to deal with these linked issues.

For example, doctors and nurses can treat you for a physical problem but can’t advise you about your job or finances.  Nor for the anxiety that comes with it, apart from prescribing some drugs, which might or might not be the best solution.

We encourage you to take a holistic view – we look at all areas and offer support across the whole spectrum.

health areas interlinked

Even this view of health is simplistic, as you’ll discover later if you go down that route.  You might want to consider overall health, or wellness or wellbeing, which include additional types of health, such as occupational health (how you are in your job).   Then there’s happiness and quality of life – how do these fit?

If you’re interested in that, click the link here to see more information.

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Health Areas in Domains

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Domains

We break down the overall concept of health or wellness into ‘bite-sized chunks’ that we can actually do something about.  The first level we call health domains. 

We like the Life of Wellness site and we have chosen the following domains.

1. Emotional Wellness: Awareness and acceptance of feelings
2. Spiritual Wellness: A search for meaning and purpose
3. Intellectual Wellness: Recognition of your creativity, knowledge and skills
4. Physical Wellness: Need for physical activity and balanced nutrition
5. Environmental Wellness: Positive awareness and impact on your environment
6. Financial Wellness: Debt reduction, cash flow balance or financial future planning
7. Occupational Wellness: Personal achievement and enrichment from your career
8. Social Wellness: Contribution to your community

Health Areas

Within each domain, we have included a number of health areas. These are specific issues that you can tackle.  Within each health area, e.g. Depression, we have built additional information and exercises which you can do to help in the area. You can create your own Action Plan to address this area, and see

Emotional: Anxiety, Compassion Fatigue, Depression, Gambling, Laughter, Narcissistic, Personality Disorder, Sleep, Stress

Environmental: Environmental Issues, Greenness

Financial: Debt, Family Finance, Financial Planning, Financial Wellness

Intellectual: IQ, Personality, Procrastination

Occupational: Jobs for Different Personality Types, Retirement Income, Work Life Balance

Physical: Alcohol, Disabilities, Dizziness, Drugs, Fitness, Food Preferences, General Health, Healthy Ageing, Illness, Nutrition, Sleep Apnea, Smoking

Social: Communication Skills, Communication Styles, Domestic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Love Partnerships, Mental Abuse, Parenting Styles, Sexual Addiction

Spiritual: Are You Sensitive, Mystical Guidance, Spirituality

Each health area has supporting information and its own questionnaire.

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Understand Health

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Physical, financial and mental health

One definition of health is:

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. 

The NHS define health as: ‘We use a broad definition of health that encompasses both physical and mental health, as well as wellbeing. This means we are not only interested in whether or not people are ill or have a health condition, but also in how healthy and well they are.’

We believe we also have to consider financial health, as this can easily impact physical and mental health. Click the button to see an example of how these are connected.

 It gets more complicated…

What is Health? How about Wellness, Wellbeing or Happiness?

The Active Wellbeing Society (TAWS) define Health as a state of the overall mental and physical state of a person; the absence of disease. They define Wellbeing or wellness as a way of life that aims to enhance well-being and refers to a more holistic whole-of-life experience which also includes emotional and spiritual aspects of life.  We expand on this definition of health to include financial health and mental health, to make it synonymous with wellbeing or wellness.  

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Health domains

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We break down the overall concept of health or wellness into ‘bite-sized chunks’ that we can actually do something about.  The first level we call health domains.

We like the Life of Wellness site and we have chosen the following domains.

1. Emotional Wellness: Awareness and acceptance of feelings
2. Spiritual Wellness: A search for meaning and purpose
3. Intellectual Wellness: Recognition of your creativity, knowledge and skills
4. Physical Wellness: Need for physical activity and balanced nutrition
5. Environmental Wellness: Positive awareness and impact on your environment
6. Financial Wellness: Debt reduction, cash flow balance or financial future planning
7. Occupational Wellness: Personal achievement and enrichment from your career
8. Social Wellness: Contribution to your community

wellness wheel

Health Areas

Within each domain, we have included a number of health areas. These are specific issues that you can tackle.  Within each health area, e.g. Depression, once you have subscribed we have built additional information and exercises which you can do to help in the area.

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See which domains you should address

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Having established that we use 8 domains, you need to understand which you should concentrate on.

The 8 are:

  • Emotional
  • Environmental
  • Financial
  • Intellectual
  • Occupational
  • Physical
  • Social
  • Spiritual

 

You can take a questionnaire, which scores you in each domain.  You can decide which domains you are strong in, and which you need to improve.

Another analysis shows which domains you should look at, but also which domains you want to look at.

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Locus of Control

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  • We want to help people in all aspects of their health  – physical, financial and mental. We also provide detailed explanations of how overall health (or well-being) is measured.
  • We believe these things are often linked, so we try and address health holistically. We are building templates, questionnaires and exercises to help you identify what’s important to you.
  • We think people should try and take responsibility for  of their own health as much as they can.  See below for what that means.

People look at things differently.  Some people believe things happen to them, while others believe they can influence what happens to them. Technically this is called the ‘locus of control’.  People can have an Internal or external Locus of Control

So how do you see things?

Psychology Today have a 15 minute test which gives you a summary of your position you can buy the detailed results if you want to.

My Personality Test have a 10 minute test which gives you a summary.

People tend to take more responsibility (locus gets more internal) as they get older.  However, external isn’t always bad – for example if you are physically unable to do some things you can accept it and focus on the things you can do.  This American video explains the concept and gives examples of how this can affect relationships.

locus of control

Internal

  • More likely to take responsibility for actions
  • Tend to be less influenced by others

External

  • Blame outside forces for what happens
  • Don’t believe they can change their situation themselves

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Add your attitude to change - see how you view changes in your life

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Do you need to change?

No matter how healthy you are at the moment, the chances are that there are some areas you could improve. It may be that you have a real problem in one or more areas, and you would like to make some improvements.

At YouDrive we accept that there are many different degrees of ‘not wellness’ in a large number of different health areas, ranging from physical illness such as covid-19 through mental illness such as anxiety through to financial problems like debt.  We try and help where the problem ranges from ‘slight’ to quite bad’ – after this expert help and intervention may be needed.

However, especially in these times, we have to try and make these changes ourselves, possibly with some help from others, whether remotely or face to face.

The thing is, to make an improvement we have to change some things.

This involves changing our behaviour in some respects, and that’s not always easy.

Henry Ford, the creator of the assembly line, is quoted as saying “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”.  

henry ford

Another way of looking at this: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” – attributed to Albert Einstein.

Consequently we need to make some changes.  The problem is that we have already developed a lot of habits, some of which we need to break and replace by better ones.  Some of our bad habits have become entrenched, and the bad results they create in turn engender further bad habits to develop – in effect the bad habits can feed on themselves.

We need to understand how we can make changes and stick to them, and that’s what this part of your health profile is about.

It will involve some learning, through reading, some videos and some additional information and also seeing how you react to change currently.

It will also ask you to consider whether you feel you are in charge of your future, or whether you feel it’s all fate.

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Assess your overall health using a health questionnaire

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At YouDrive we try and help people improve their health. We use ‘health’ but we understand there are other terms such as wellbeing or even happiness that reflect how we are doing in our lives – if you’re interested in the different definitions and ideas see our page on the subject.

We want to help whether you have a particular problem – physical, financial or mental – or if you just want to improve some specific part of your life or just make some improvements overall.

You’d be surprised, but there has been a serious amount of scientific work done in this area over the last twenty years.

So first we allow you to assess your current health (or wellbeing, or happiness).  We do this by questionnaire.  Which one is determined by the type of person you are:

  1. You understand yourself well and want a quick overview of your health and wellness, and will drill down in any areas needing work
  2. You want to do a more detailed assessment and then focus on areas you’re already aware of
  3. You want to look at the whole situation in more detail across all the health domains.

By the way, we take your privacy seriously – we collect information that you choose to provide but we de-identify it as much as possible and will never share it with anyone without your explicit consent.

You can then drill down into some specific areas and there are more questionnaires to see your situation in these particular areas.  We provide you with specific information and refer you to other potential aspects of help. Our next step is to build a personalised action plan – for now we will make a suggestion for you to develop your own plan and then after a time you can see whether this has had a positive impact by retaking the test.

In future we will be engaging with medical and behavioural specialists to devise action plans for individual people with specific situations.

We have an overall questionnaire which you can complete which will assess your current state.

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Values, Attitudes and Beliefs

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We all have our beliefs, attitudes and values – these have developed throughout our life based on who we are and what we have done. Let’s look at what these are.

The University of Reading explain: “People’s values, beliefs and attitudes are formed and bonded over time through the influences of family, friends, society and life experiences. So, by the time you’re an adult, you can hold very definite views on just about everything with a sense of “no one is going to change my mind”.

The combination of your personal values, beliefs and attitudes are your moral principles that guide you in life and affect your behaviour. However, your views can wildly differ to others and in an institution such as a school, these beliefs may be counter to the values of the school, child development or indeed the law.” 

Let’s look more closely at the differences between beliefs, attitudes and values.

Beliefs

These come from real experiences – we think our beliefs are based on reality, but in fact our beliefs colour our experiences; also, an original experience e.g. when we were a child is not the same as what’s happening now. Beliefs can be moral, religious or cultural and reflect who we are. They can be rational (‘it gets colder in winter’) or irrational (‘I am never going to make something of myself’).

Attitudes

This is an immediate belief or disposition about something specific. It is a recurring group of beliefs and behaviours aimed at specific groups, people, ideas or objects. They will normally be positive or negative and we will always behave that way to the target group. Examples of attitudes include confidence (I can or can’t do something), grateful (I an entitled to / grateful for XXX) and cheerful (I am generally happy / miserable).

Values

These are things (principles or qualities) that we hold in high regard or consider to be worthwhile or right / wrong. They are formed by a belief related to the worth of something – an idea or behaviour. Some values are common (e.g. family comes first, the value of friendship) or cultural (which the whole community have – see video at Study.com here)

The theory

Links to Wikipedia

Expectancy Value Theory suggests you balance your beliefs about something with the value you attach to it. The Theory of Reasoned Action suggests that beliefs and evaluation about behavioural outcomes determine attitudes, and intentions lead directly to behaviour.

Beliefs

Expressions of confidence – can change over time

Attitudes

Learned predispositions to something – are subject to change

Values

Ideals that guide our behaviour – Generally long lasting and often need life changing experience to change

Iceberg demonstrating implicit and explicit bias – from Owlcation

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A Butterfly Life: 4 Keys to More Happiness, Better Health and Letting Your True Self Shine

Times of change can be a challenge, no doubt! Whether it’s a relationship breakup, job loss, or being diagnosed with a serious health issue. Or you may WANT things to be different, but it feels a little scary or overwhelming. The butterfly reminds us change can be beautiful, even necessary, in order to realize our full potential and live our best life.