By: Andreas Moritz
Posted: September 5, 2012 — updated 2016
The human body is composed of 75 percent water and 25 percent solid matter. To provide nourishment, eliminate waste and conduct all the trillions of activities in the body, we need water. Most modern societies, however, no longer stress the importance of drinking water as the most important ‘nutrient’ among nutrients. Entire population groups are substituting water with tea, coffee, alcohol and other manufactured beverages.
Many people don’t realize that the natural thirst signal of the body is a sign that it requires pure, plain drinking water. Instead, they opt for other beverages in the belief that this will satisfy the body’s water requirements. This is a false belief.
It is true that beverages such as tea, coffee, wine, beer, soft drinks, sports drinks and juices contain water, but they also contain caffeine, alcohol, sugar, artificial sweeteners or other chemicals that act as strong dehydrators. The more of these beverages you consume, the more dehydrated your body becomes because the effects they create in the body are exactly opposite to the ones that are produced by water.
Beverages containing caffeine, for example, trigger stress responses that at first have strong diuretic effects, leading to increased urination. Beverages with added sugar drastically raise blood sugar levels. Any beverage that provokes such a response coerces the body to give up large quantities of water. Regular consumption of such beverages results in chronic dehydration, which plays a part in every toxicity crisis.
Today’s younger generation is sicker than any generation has ever been before. Schools and colleges feed our children cheap, low-nutrition foods, and the situation at home is not much better. Many diseases that used to strike only the adult population are now commonly found among young people. Would you have believed even 25 years ago that hardening of the arteries, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes and obesity would one day be as common among children as they are today? Childhood obesity increased from 5 percent in 1964 to about 20 percent today – and it is rising. Children spend an average of 5 to 6 hours a day on sedentary activities, including watching television, using the computer and playing video games.
Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta have found that more kids than ever in the United States are downing diet drinks – approximately double the number that were drinking them a decade ago. The study looked at data from a federal health survey, which ended with the year 2008 and showed that 12.5 percent of children were drinking artificially sweetened beverages.3
On the surface this may appear to be a positive switch if it means kids are consuming less sugar as a result, but diet sodas are actually worse for your health than regular soda, due to the artificial sweeteners they contain.
From Dr. Mercola