Drinking too much water is BAD for health

We are always hearing about how drinking water will always help improve your health and I have pretty much been following this forever. The thinking is the more water you drink, the more you detoxify your body, so the more you drink the better. I started thinking about a week ago that I could actually be harming my body by trying to drink more water than I feel that I need. Did some internet searches and tons of results came up that drinking too much water can cause health problems and may possibly damage the kidneys. More important than the internet searches though, I just feel like this is correct. We wouldn't eat more food than we have an appetite for so why would we drink more water than our thirst dictates. I have read in many different places that you should drink enough water so that your urine is always clear, if it is colored at all than you are not drinking enough water. I now feel that the opposite is actually true, if your urine doesn't have any color, than you are not allowing your kidneys to do what they are supposed to do. Colored urine (or at least cloudy) means your kidneys are functioning properly and expelling waste as they should. I am very glad that I finally realized this and decided to follow my own intuition, instead of following bad advice form "health experts" that I have heard time and time again. It seems strange to me that it took me this long to realize this but it is one of those things that I never even really gave serious thought to until recently.

Interesting internet article from 2008:

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=378f85de-27de-4046-8...


Drinking too much water called latest threat to health

Canadian doctors are warning drinking too much water may cause loss of kidney function - something they discovered purely by accident.

BY THE GAZETTE (MONTREAL) JANUARY 18, 2008


Canadian doctors are warning drinking too much water may cause loss of kidney function - something they discovered purely by accident.

Researchers have been studying the health of residents of Walkerton, Ont., since the water supply was contaminated with E. coli in 2000. They identified 100 otherwise healthy adults who had a condition called proteinuria, or abnormal amounts of protein in their urine.

None had any medical conditions or were on medications that would explain why.

Proteinuria can cause kidney failure and is a sign of microvascular disease, where the heart's tiny arteries are damaged, causing cardiac disease and death.

Of the 100 people, 56 agreed to follow-up testing and to reduce their fluid intake to fewer than eight large glasses per day for one week. The result? The cases of proteinuria were "largely reversed."

"When we were in Walkerton we were surprised that almost five per cent of the population were drinking very large volumes of fluid," said Dr. William Clark, a scientist at Lawson Health Research Institute in London, Ont., and professor of medicine at the University of Western Ontario.

"We went on the supposition that this must be because of the water contamination," meaning that when people moved to bottled water, they drank more. But Clark, project leader of the Walkerton Health Study, said most admitted to drinking vast amounts of water even before the contamination crisis, ostensibly for health reasons.

They were drinking, on average, at least four litres per day. "That would be about 18 large glasses of fluid per day," he said.

Some people were drinking six litres. One woman, a health-care worker, was drinking eight.

"They didn't like it when we asked them to reduce their fluid intake, although they did do it," Clark said. "Most corrected their kidney abnormality. Some did not correct completely, meaning they may have a permanent bit of damage."

The study is published in this week's issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

"If you go on the Internet you'll get at least 500 hits on how healthy it is to drink as much water as humanly possible," Clark said. "Some health magazines recommend people drink a minimum of 12 to 15 glasses of fluid per day."

But Clark said flushing the kidneys doesn't help kidney function.

Even doctors believe the medical myth that people should drink at least eight glasses of water a day, according to an article published last month in the British Medical Journal, which traced the notion back to a 1945 recommendation from the U.S. Nutrition Council.

Ignored in the original statement was that most of the fluid people need is found in food, especially fruits and vegetables, the researchers said.

Clark's team has been screening the population of Walkerton to track for health syndromes associated with E. coli damage. The big, silent problem is kidney damage.

The researchers measured urine protein levels from 2,253 adults who later attended a follow-up clinic annually between 2003 and 2005.

Clark noticed many had increased protein excretion in the urine. The condition causes progressive loss of kidney function.

After excluding diabetes or any other explanation for the problem, "we still ended up with 100 people who had no explanation whatsoever," he said. On average, they were excreting almost three times the normal rate.

Treatment was simple, Clark said. "When they drank less water, the problem went away."

"This was something we've never conceived of. It's not reported anywhere," Clark said.

And he doesn't think the data is unique to Walkerton. "We're drinking lots of water, and people think it's healthy."

"We would recommend until we know better that maybe eight glasses of fluid a day is fine but probably less than six is better, unless you're in a very arid climate or carrying out marathon running or massive exertion or have a particular kind of kidney damage and you lose salt."

Fluid means "all fluids," including coffee, tea and juice.

What's not known is "whether the proteinuria associated with excessive fluid intake in these otherwise healthy people will affect their kidney function in the long term," the researchers wrote in this week's journal article.

What do you guys think? This could be a big help for a lot of us because I think most people who believe they are toxic (and thus posting on curezone) are apt to drink more water, thinking it is cleansing the body of more toxins. If we stop doing this and start allowing are kidneys to function as they should and continuing good safe cleansing practices this could be a big help. Tweet