Water – Why it is essential

There isn’t a simpler and more efficient natural remedy than water. Water can be easily found everywhere, it flows from the taps at home, it can be bought in bottles but we often don’t give enough importance to it. Water is essential for the health of the body, this so precious liquid plays a role in carrying the nutritive substances to the cells and the toxins and wastes outside the body, water regulates the body temperature through sweating, is a shock absorber for organs such as the eye or the brain. However, we often don’t remember to drink or we drink only when we feel a sense of thirst, but this is late because we are already dehydrated. Very interesting are the studies performed in 2012 by a group of American researchers of the University of Connecticut and published on two scientific journals, The Journal of Nutrition and British Journal of Nutrition. The studies state that when we feel the sense of thirst we have lost 1-2% of the total volume of water in our body. If you think that it is a small quantity you should consider that, according to the same study, the negative effects of dehydration already occur when there is a loss of 1,5% of body water, with headache, tiredness, poor concentration, problems of memory and alertness. But other symptoms related to a poor hydration can be constipation and a sense of excessive hunger, the senses of hunger and thirst indeed are regulated by the same nervous centers and the brain can mistake a sense for the other. In addition to this, the sense of thirst is less clear in elderly that, for this reason, are at greater risk of dehydration. Finally, a research performed by a team of French researchers and published in 2011 on the journal Diabetes care shows that a relation between the intake of water and the risk of suffering from hyperglycemia exists, in particular an increase of the quantity of water introduced in the body may have a protective role for what concerns the increase of the blood sugar level. In this article we have limited ourselves to describe the importance of water for the health of the body, in the article of next week we will see how much water is good to drink and in which form.