Primal-Libertarian

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….