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Hydration station

Hydration station

Drinking the right amount of water is essential to health. It takes water to create energy. We lose approximately two litres of water daily through the skin, urine, lungs and faeces. Two thirds of our body’s weight is water. Water is absolutely essential for the life in our cells.  Almost everything we require our body to do needs water. It takes water to chew and digest food, to create blood, to move muscles, to breathe, to think. We would consider these as fairly essential functions!

A scientific method we can use to calculate precisely how much water we require, is 35 ml of water per kilogram of body weight. Therefore someone who weighs 50 kg needs to drink approximately 1.75 litres of water per day. A little more than is commonly considered adequate! Obviously, the amount of water we require is also influenced by our activity level, the climate and our diet.

Our brains are made up of 80% water, so it is no surprise that water is important for several functions of the brain. Ensuring you drink enough water every day can improve concentration, cognition and memory function, as well as helping balance mood and emotions. Drinking enough water also hydrates your skin, flushing out impurities, moisturising and increases elasticity.

Digestion also depends on adequate water. Saliva is a water-based substance which is responsible for the first stage of digestion.

The salivary enzyme amylase (ptyalin) begins the very important process of breaking down starches as they begin their journey to the small intestine for absorption. It can be quite astonishing to discover that the three pairs of salivary glands found in our mouths, together secrete about one litre of water per day. Let’s not waste this water! After all, using water wisely should be entrenched into our psyche by now!

Saliva not only contains the digestive enzyme amylase, the water in saliva provides a medium for dissolving foods so they can be tasted and therefore initiate other digestive reactions. The salivary amylase in the swallowed food continues to act on starches for another 15–30 minutes in the stomach.

Another enzyme, lingual lipase secreted by the glands beneath the tongue is also found in saliva.
This enzyme, which is active in the stomach, digests as much as 30% of dietary triglycerides into fatty acids. Chewing well not only physically breaks up our food into small easy-to-handle particles, it also ensures that saliva and enzymes are mixed well with the food and protects the mucosa of the pharynx and oesophagus as it makes its way down to the stomach.

How to help hydration
Set yourself a goal to drink two litres of water a day. For example, make sure you have had one litre by lunchtime. Set reminders…

Invest in a good water bottle that is not only easy to carry around, but a pleasure to do so. There are many insulated stainless-steel bottles on the market that look great, and keep your water at the desired temperature all day.

If plain water doesn’t exactly appeal, infuse! Try adding fresh herbs lemon, lime or cucumber to your water to give it a bit of flavour and to look lovely! (I can recommend, lemon, lime and mint as a delicious and visually pleasing.)

So as you can see, a two litre daily water goal is rather essential to everyday life and not so hard to achieve.

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