Eight Glasses of Water a Day Not Needed

Do you believe that a person needs to drink eight glasses of water every day? If you do, you will have a lot of extra trips to the bathroom. Why do so many people believe this rule? The number originally came from the National Academy of Sciences of the United States Food and Nutrition Board, which publishes recommended daily allowances of nutrients. The 1945 edition of the Food and Nutrition Board recommended: "A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 liters (about 8 cups) daily in most instances." This amount is based on the calculation of one milliliter of water for each calorie of food. HOWEVER, the Board also noted that most of the water you need is in the food you eat.

All foods contain water. Even the driest nut or seed has a lot of water in it. Furthermore, when food is digested, it is converted to energy, carbon dioxide and WATER. Most people can get the fluid the body needs from food, and they only need to drink enough water to prevent constipation.

When you eat, the pyloric valve at the end of your stomach closes to keep food in the stomach. Then the stomach takes fluid that you drink and food that you eat and turns the solid food into liquid. If you don't drink enough fluid, your stomach takes fluid from your blood and adds it to the food in the stomach to create the soup. The pyloric valve will not let food pass to the intestines until this liquid soup is formed. Then the liquid soup passes to the intestines and remains a soup until it reaches your colon. Only then is the fluid absorbed to turn the soup into solid waste in the colon. If you do not have enough fluid in your body, your body extracts extra fluid from your stool and turns your stool into hard rocks, causing constipation.

A study from the Journal of the American College of Nutrition showed that plain water is not needed as long as enough fluid is obtained from other drinks and food. Twenty-seven healthy men consumed one of two diets for three-day periods and were studied in a lab setting. The first diet included plain water while the second omitted it, relying on only foods, orange juice, diet soda, and coffee for fluid. None of the nine measures of hydration were affected.

A reasonable amount for a healthy human is one cup of water or any other fluid with each meal. If you have a problem with constipation you may not be drinking enough water, but if you are not constipated, you are getting plenty. You'll also want to replace fluids whenever you sweat a lot, particularly when you exercise or in hot weather. Drink water whenever you feel thirsty, but there's no health benefit from forcing yourself to drink eight glasses of water a day.

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Diabetes Risk: Lifestyle More Important Than Genes

You may inherit a susceptibility to Type II diabetes, but you do not inherit the disease. Risk factors for developing diabetes include: a family history of diabetes; storing fat primarily in the belly; high triglycerides; low HDL (good) cholesterol; blood sugar higher than 200 thirty minutes after a meal; fasting blood sugar above 110; excess hair on the face or body (in women); or diabetes during pregnancy. A person with any of these warning signs should immediately make lifestyle changes to prevent diabetes: avoid refined carbohydrates (foods made with flour, white rice, milled corn; all added sugars and drinks that contain sugar), exercise regularly, lose weight if you are overweight, and keep your weight controlled for the rest of your life. If you do this you will be at low risk for developing diabetes, even if you have genes that make you susceptible.

Studies from the Journal of the American Medical Association show that one of three Americans will become diabetic, with women more likely to develop diabetes than men. The average person who is diagnosed with diabetes at age 40 will die 11.6 year earlier than a non-diabetic and he or she will be severely incapacitated with one or more side effects of diabetes 18.6 years before a non-diabetic. Early lifestyle changes can add years to your life.

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Lifting Weights Helps to Prevent Diabetes

One third of Americans will become diabetic because they eat too much and exercise too little. A study in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise (July 2006) shows that lifting weights can help to prevent and to treat diabetes.

Extra fat prevents your body from responding normally to insulin. Before insulin can do its job of driving sugar from the bloodstream into cells, it must first attach to little hooks on cell membranes called insulin receptors. Having extra fat in cells turns these receptors inward, making it far more difficult for insulin to attach to the receptors. This prevents insulin from doing its job of lowering blood sugar levels, even though your body is making plenty of insulin. That’s why anything that makes you fat increases your risk for diabetes. Doctors can measure how cells respond to insulin with a sugar tolerance test.

In this study, adolescent boys were given a program of lifting heavy weights twice a week. After only 16 weeks, their muscles were larger and they lost fat. Sugar tolerance tests showed that the ability of their bodies to clear a load of sugar from their blood streams improved dramatically. This means that a regular weight lifting program decreases insulin resistance and thus reduces risk for becoming diabetic.

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How Much Exercise for Weight Loss?

How much do you need to exercise to lose weight? In one recent study, researchers asked people to walk and count an extra 2000 steps each day (Journal of Human Nutrition & Dietetics, August 2006). This is really a minimal amount of exercise. They also kept complete food diaries. They lost weight and did not increase their food intake. When you start an exercise program, your appetite may increase, but this will not increase your caloric intake to equal the extra calories that you burn. For example, if you burn 600 calories with added exercise, you may take in 200 calories extra and you will lose weight.

Exercise helps you lose weight by raising your metabolism so you burn more calories for several hours after you finish exercising. However, only vigorous exercise that increases body temperature and makes you sweat will increase your metabolism enough to continue burning more calories after you finish. Overweight is a major cause of premature death and increases risk for heart attacks, strokes, cancers and arthritis. If you are out of shape and want to lose weight, get a stress cardiogram and ask your doctor to clear you for an exercise program. Start slowly and then gradually increase the intensity of your exercise over several months.

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Why Blood Pressure Rises with Age

Blood pressure often rises with aging. Contrary to what many doctors think, salt, obesity and alcohol have little to do with this rise.

High blood pressure is associated with heart attacks, strokes, aging and death. Recent research shows that high blood pressure associated with aging is probably caused by damage to the arteries leading to the kidneys. Obesity, excess salt and alcohol cause reversible high blood pressure. Taking a large amount of salt can cause your body to retain fluid, enlarge blood volume and raise blood pressure temporarily, but blood pressure returns to normal soon afterwards. For most people, taking in a lot of salt does not raise blood pressure. Drinking alcohol raises blood pressure only for a short time. Obesity is associated with a sustained high blood pressure at any age, and is usually reversible with weight loss.

Several studies show that damaged kidney arteries, called intimal fibroplasia, are the most likely cause of high blood pressure and that prevention of high blood pressure with aging includes preventing kidney arterial damage by eating plenty of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans and nuts, reducing your intake of processed foods and dairy products, exercising and avoiding overweight. More on the diet that lowers blood pressure

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Detecting Performance-Enhancing Drugs

World records in sports are broken by better athletes, better training methods, better nutrition or new drugs. Drugs appear to be the cause of many recent records in sports requiring strength and speed. Many bicycle racers know that some drugs that make them better riders can’t be detected by testing techniques that are available today. A recent study shows that laboratories have no definitive test to discover athletes who take erythropoietin (EPO), a drug to boost their red blood cell counts (Haematologica, August, 2006). Athletes have found that taking very low doses of EPO daily will raise red blood cell counts, and will not give test results high enough to show that they are taking extra EPO.

The primary limiting factor to how fast a person can ride a bicycle over long distances is the time it takes to move oxygen from the lungs into the muscles. So anything that increases oxygen transport from the lungs into the bloodstream, or carries more oxygen in the bloodstream, or moves oxygen faster from the blood into muscles will make a person a faster bicycle racer. Since more than 95 percent of the oxygen in the bloodstream is carried by hemoglobin in red blood cells, anything that increases the concentration of red blood cells will help a racer ride faster.

When healthy people do not get enough oxygen, their kidneys produce a hormone called EPO that causes the bone marrow to make more red blood cells. When athletes are given additional EPO, their red blood cell counts rise and their performance improves.

Doctors can do blood tests for EPO, but the hormone lasts only a few days in the bloodstream, so athletes who stop taking EPO several days before testing may not be caught. Some athletes tried to foil the test by adding pepsin, a chemical found in spot removers, to their urine samples. However this destroyed all of the EPO including their own natural EPO, so they failed the test because a person is supposed to have some EPO. The new study shows that athletes have now found a way to circumvent the test by taking very low doses of EPO every day.

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Carbohydrates Can Increase Endurance

A study from The University of Bern in Switzerland shows that a high carbohydrate, high-fat diet for three days before competition can help athletes store more fat in their muscles and use much more muscle fat for energy during exercise (European Journal of Applied Physiology, November, 2006). Endurance-trained athletes exercised for three hours to empty sugar and fat reserves from their muscles. Then they ate a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet for 2.5 days or the same diet with lots of added fat for the last 1.5 days. Athletes who ate the high-carbohydrate, high-fat diet stored 55 percent more fat in their muscles and used more than three times as much of that fat during exercise.

The data on fat storage may have no practical value for endurance athletes because the authors were not able to show that the extra fat stored in muscles increased endurance. This is probably because there is almost an unlimited amount of energy available from a person’s own body fat. Changing the percentage of fat use from body fat to muscle fat would not increase energy sources and therefore would not increase endurance.

Carbohydrates are another story. Normally there is only a small amount of carbohydrates stored in the muscles, liver and bloodstream. Storing extra carbohydrates in muscles is beneficial because when a person runs out of stored muscle sugar, his muscles hurt and are more difficult to control. In the 1940s, Per Olaf Ostrand showed that a high carbohydrate diet for several days before athletic competitions helps a person store more sugar in muscles, which does increase endurance. Since then athletes have eaten high-carbohydrate diets before competition and often have pre-race pasta parties. Subsequent studies showed that highly-conditioned endurance-trained athletes can maximally fill their muscles with sugar just by eating their usual meals and cutting back on their heavy workloads for a few days before competition.

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