With the very hot weather upon us, there’s constant exhortation from the train companies to the self-help gurus to drink lots of fluid and stay well hydrated.
It’s in fact quite difficult to become dehydrated during a normal working day, but lots of people are now trying to drink very large amounts of fluid, and this will cause problems with urinary frequency, although there’s little physical danger unless one drinks truly huge amounts of water.
There are various gurus who will tell people how much they need to drink, but when my patients ask me what’s the benefit of good hydration, I will tell them that they will feel healthy, but also they will have a lower risk of forming kidney stones and probably having urinary tract infections.
So how much should you drink? From my perspective this depends on what you’re planning to do. If you’re about to take a holiday in the Sahara Desert mountain biking in August then you will need huge amounts of fluid to keep healthy and you’ll probably need some electrolyte substitution as well during the course of a day. If, however, your idea of heaven is to go off and do some ice fishing in Greenland, then you probably wouldn’t be expending a huge amount of energy nor losing a great amount of water.
Fortunately, there’s a simple solution here and that just means looking at the colour of your urine. One and a half to two litres a day of urine is a good amount and will be enough to keep the kidneys working nicely and to avoid a high risk of infections.
So rather than working out how much you need to drink, you need to look at the urine and the sensible thing here is after a full bladder of urine passed into a white lavatory pan, the colour of the combined water and urine shouldn’t be darker than a Sauvignon Blanc wine. Therefore get used to what you’re peeing out and if you see it’s darker than this, drink more and if it’s at that level you’re drinking enough. It’s a simple way of making sure you’re well hydrated and doesn’t need complex monitoring.
Attached is a photo of a few glasses of this wine for those teetotalers who may be reading this!