We’ve all heard the age-old advice to drink eight glasses of water a day to stay hydrated. While the advice of drinking water is indeed valuable, there’s actually more to hydration than just guzzling plenty of H2O. The key to effective hydration lies in understanding the role of electrolytes in ensuring the water you are drinking actually gets into your cells.
Before we dive into the world of electrolytes, let’s first understand why hydration is so essential. Our bodies are composed of about 60% water, and every cell, tissue, and organ relies on proper hydration to function optimally. Here are a few reasons why staying hydrated is crucial:
- Regulating Body Temperature: Sweating is the body’s natural cooling mechanism. Adequate hydration helps maintain our core temperature, preventing overheating.
- Transporting Nutrients: Water serves as a transport medium for essential nutrients, delivering them to cells and aiding in digestion.
- Eliminating Waste: Hydration helps remove waste and toxins from the body through urine and sweat.
- Joint Lubrication: Proper hydration keeps joints well-lubricated, reducing the risk of injury.
- Cognitive Function: Dehydration can impair cognitive function, leading to reduced concentration and alertness.
- Headache Prevention/Resolution: Dehydration can lead to headaches or worsen existing ones due to reduced blood volume, electrolyte imbalances, and inflammation.
However, water isn’t enough. While drinking water is indeed vital for hydration, it’s not the whole story. Water must enter our cells to have a meaningful impact on our health. This is where electrolytes come into play.
Electrolytes are electrically charged minerals found in our body fluids, including sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, chloride, and bicarbonate. These ions play a critical role in maintaining fluid balance both inside and outside our cells. Together, Potassium (the electrolyte within the cell, its main role is to help maintain normal levels of fluid inside our cells) and sodium (electrolyte outside of the cell) regulate the balance of fluid in the body. Magnesium is required for optimal cellular uptake of potassium, and therefore also plays a critical role in maintaining hydration at the cellular level.
So with all that in mind, how much water do you really need? How much water intake you need often depends on many factors (e.g. caffeine intake in the diet, medications, physical activity, temperature, humidity, metabolic rate, and body weight, etc), and dehydration may be caused by a variety of things beyond simply not drinking enough water. We lose water and electrolytes in bodily fluids (loose stool/diarrhea, vomit, sweat, and urine), and medications and illness that increase fluid and electrolyte loss may naturally lead to dehydration. Diuretics, for example, increase urination, as does high blood sugar by increasing the demand on kidney filtration. Stress may all, in and by itself, impair water retention as suboptimally high or low cortisol can skew the balance of sodium, chloride and potassium, and dehydration itself in turn also further increases stress so we can get caught in a vicious cycle of depletion.
Dehydration begins to affect bodily functions even before thirst mechanisms are triggered. Here are some signs and symptoms that can begin to show up from dehydration:
- Brain fog and headaches
- Joint pain and arthritis
- Kidney dysfunction
- Gout
- UTI’s
- Bad breath
- Nausea, dizziness, blurred vision
- Hypertension
- Muscle cramps/spasms, fatigue
- Dry skin and wrinkles
- Snoring
- Decreased metabolism
- Allergies and asthma
- Inflammation
- Constipation
- Toxicity
- Mood disorders
As you can see proper hydration is critical for your overall health and wellbeing, however hydration is not a one-size-fits-all concept. It’s more than just drinking water; it’s about ensuring that water reaches our cells and supports essential bodily functions. Electrolytes play a pivotal role in this process, helping transport water into cells and maintaining overall fluid balance. So, remember to not only drink water but also consume electrolyte-rich foods and beverages to keep your body performing at its best. There are many good quality electrolytes on the market. I’ve been experimenting with some lately so if you would like some recommendations let me know! One of the simplest ways to get more electrolytes into your water is to simply add a pinch of a good quality sea salt to each of your water glasses or bottles each time you refill. Stay hydrated, to support your body’s critical functions and help your body to stay healthy!
Written by Sue Rapley
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