Evidence wishy-washy for health benefits of water
4:00AM
Thursday April 03, 2008
By Megan Rauscher
There is no clearcut scientific rationale for the average healthy individual to drink a lot of water - and it may be downright harmful - according to two kidney experts.
Drinking a lot of water is claimed to be helpful for everything from clearing toxins and keeping organs in tip-top shape to keeping weight off and improving skin tone. At best, however, the evidence to back up these claims is weak, according to a new scientific review published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
"There is what I call an urban myth that drinking a lot of water is a healthy thing to do and it leads to people toting around plastic water bottles all day drinking water," Dr Stanley Goldfarb, of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, told Reuters Health.
"The source of this is the complementary and alternative medicine worlds. If you go on the internet and look up water-drinking and its health implications, that's what you encounter," Goldfarb said.
As a kidney specialist, Goldfarb is interested in how the kidney handles fluids, which prompted him and colleague Dr Dan Negoianu to review the scientific literature on the benefits of drinking water. In doing so, the researchers debunked four myths.
