If water could kill, I’d chill until
A recent editorial in the Journal of the American Society for Nephrology is getting wide press coverage for debunking the so-called “8×8″ theory—the popularly held belief that drinking eight 8-ounce glasses of water daily helps remove toxins, improve skin tone, and increase satiety, among other health benefits. The authors chalk up the belief to folklore, and newspaper reports claim ignorance as to its provenance. Just how long has this idea been around?
Two-hundred years, at least. The most commonly cited source for the 8×8 myth is the U.S. government-sponsored Food and Nutrition Board. The board’s “Recommended Dietary Allowances” from 1945 include the following advice:
A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 liters daily in most instances. An ordinary standard for diverse persons is 1 milliliter for each calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.
According to this theory, people ignored the last part of the statement, which points out that you can get most of that water just by eating. If you actually had to drink all 2.5 liters, you’d need around 10 8-ounce glasses per day. (…) However, the Explainer has uncovered evidence of the 8×8 myth going all the way back to 1796, in a German text by Dr. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland called Makrobiotik. The book includes an anecdote about the surgeon general to the king of Prussia, a vibrant 80-year-old man who had “contracted the habit of drinking daily from seven to eight glasses” of cold water and thus “enjoyed much better health than in his youth.”
photo { impale }
