How important is it to drink eight glasses of water a day?
That advice dates back to 1945 when the US Food & Nutritional Board published guidelines that recommended consuming 1 millilitre of liquid for every calorie of food consumed.
Tamara Hew-Butler, an exercise scientist at Oakland University, Michigan says the guidelines were misunderstood. ‘That recommendation included all the fluid contained in fruits and beverages. It was not just about drinking water!’ Surveys published in 2016 from France and the UK found that food accounts for around 35 percent of moisture intake.
The answer to how much fluid we actually need to drink is the oft-ignored line in the original 1945 report which states that ‘sensations of thirst usually serve as adequate guides to intake -except for infants and sick persons’.
