In the United States of America, a kidney failure epidemic happening because so many Americans are not drinking enough water, drinking too many caffeinated & ethanol containing or alcoholic beverages. Dehydration one of the main causes of hangovers, as ethanol a diuretic, as is caffeine.
I find physiology & medicine & surgery very interesting aspects of applied science & technology, especially medical imaging, cytology, cell signaling, hormonal axis balances, the effect of different foods & different genetic traits on a persons longevity & response biologically to highly variable food & drink items, especially the polar solvent H20 or water. I find it paradoxical that water, as an effective solvent of so many chemical compounds, so essential to human life.
Recent research on "humans" as a species, shows that a person can survive without food, in a fasted state, for up to several weeks, before starvation's negative effects kick in. Obese people have an advantage in this respect, since their nutritionally dense diet of carbs causes excess storage of body fat, they have lots of extra fuel to survive a long fasting window or supply chain disruption to foods, during a natural disaster of significantly disruptive intensity, like a powerful earthquake in a densely populated urban local. Without water on the other hand, people can die of dehydration in 3 or 4 days easily.
So what does water do in the human body. Water mixes with NaCl or common "salt" to form an isotonic 0.9% vol concentration of human cells, all throughout the human body. We cannot drink sea water because the salt concentration too high & sometimes a persons sodium intake can produce a negative effect in their body if they eat too much salt added to food or large servings or processed foods that contain a lot of salt, usually added to improve taste & shelf life. In antiquity, before refrigeration, salting perishable foods was a preservation method that extended the life of common food ideas from several days to weeks, to several months or even a couple of years. Salt does this by osmotic pressure differential extraction of water from wet foods stuffs like meat. Meat can be up to 90% water, if you have ever eaten beef or turkey jerky, you can see the volumetric reduction in meets size when the water removed by freezdying or hot thermal drying.
Why does salt improve the flavor of so many foods. Well, the human tongue contains a saline detecting cells that can taste the salt, which when combined with other flavors, sends a bigger more intense pleasurable signal to the brain to produce enhance satiety, or a sense of fullness after eating, assisted by the hormonal leptin or stop eating hormone that reduces appetite, where ghrelin the hormone that increases appetite. Dysfunction in the Leptin / Ghrelin hormonal axis strongly affects the serving sizes of foods that people eat, how much they eat before feeling full, this has implications in anorexia & obesity, along with other mental issues associated with past emotional trauma, often from being abused or neglected or harmed or hurt significantly, PTSD like levels of harm, that cause hormonal imbalances to the insulin / glucagon system where insulin takes glucose from eating carbs, out of the blood stream & stores it as body fat & where glucagon causes the muscles to dump glycogen which is further converted to blood glucose, into the blood stream to raise blood sugar levels.
Type II diabetes an example of a dietary excess consumption of sugar & simple carbs & starches & lack of fiber consumption, not enough healthy monounsaturated fats, too many saturated & trans fats & dehydration, where the insulin signaling system tells the body to take extra blood sugars for eating large portions of carbohydrates & store it as body fat. I learned about this from Dr. Robert Lustig & Dr. Jason Fung & Dr. Annette Bosworth on their respective YouTube channels about metabolism, food, nutrition, interval fasting & fasting, ketogenic diets & low carb diets & why type 1 & type 2 diabetic people were prescribed a low carb diet by their doctor before the commercial introduction of transgenic bacteria produce human insulin & semi-synthetic longer lasting analogs became widely available to patients.
During a high blood glucose event, the body uses the kidneys to dump excess blood glucose into the bladder for expulsion in urine. Sugar in the urine can feed bad bacteria that create UTI or painful annoying urinary track infections that suck, I know since I have had a UTI twice. I used extra fluid intake & cranberry juice to fight the infection with good success in both cases. Imagine the feeling of having to pee, but when you try its painful & nothing comes out, but you feel like you have to pee, & this goes on for hours & hours & really unpleasant.
This gets back to another reason why staying well hydrated, where your urine is a light straw color, think pale yellow, or clear off-white amber thats faint in color or with less hue. You can pee into a clean optically clear bottle or container to look at your urine & use an online visual guide about urine colors vs health, google images such, to check. Urinalysis a common analytical tool in diagnostic medicine for example, since whats present in your urine tells a tail about the health of your organs & their function & a more abstract indication of your diet. Some foods produce a profound shift in the color or smell of urine because of the water soluble metabolites the kidneys release after your digestive system has broken those foods into small molecules to diffuse into your wet cell systems.
Brain health depends on proper hydration because the cerebral spinal fluid bathing the brain & spine are filtered & cleaned up by your liver & kidneys. So when your hydrated your CNS gets a better fluid exchange, like cleaner oil in an engine, to protect the cells from semi-toxic metabolites, implicated in demential & Alzheimers. When we sleep, our brain shrinks down like a sponge & sequeezes out cell waste & junk, metabolites, that is why your morning urine usually a darker color, that process was happen all night while you were semi-conscious or unconscious, sleeping.
Kidney health depends on proper hydration or drinking enough water daily to prevent the formation of kidney stones, highly textures with sharp ridges that cut your urethra on the inside surface if you pass one in your urine, in an excruciatingly painful process of passing a kidney stone into pee. Men & women both find passing kidney stones very painful. Thankfully there are fiber optic laser & ultrasound blasting techniques to break up kidneys stones into smaller parts that are less painful to urinate away. These examples of applied technologies, applied optical light of great spectral flux intensity in coherent beams of laser light that travels easily through fiber optics even at moderate power levels, or the applications of vibration or cymatics science to the use of ultrasound techniques for imagine & cell stimulation or ablation or destruction of tumor cells or kidney stones.
Hydration important for your eyes & tear production to keep your sclera supple & soft & flexible & to keep the epithelial cells in your eye lids secrete the correct concentrations of salts, oils & antibiotics into your your eyes to keep them sanitary with a slightly acidic mixture, similar to the way a health vagina keeps the constantly wet inner tissue from forming fungal or bacterial infections, like a yeast infection, which can also happen more likely if the kidneys are dumping sugars into the urine, which can feed back pathogenic yeasts & bacteria that will produce off smells & discomfort, heat or irritation of the nerve rich vulva or outer vagina, the labia minora, clitoris, urethra, labia majora, the sensitive areas * also why having dry underwear so important for girls & women, as keeping the outer vaginal interface dry helps to also prevent unwanted yeast infections or pothogenic bacterial infections, especially given the vaginas proximity to the anus the pathogenic bacteria in poop, which is up to 50% bacteria by mass.
Hydration important to preserve the elasticity, suppleness & flexibility & stretchability of skin, which means that if you stay well hydrated, you will look younger longer, especially if you avoid dangerous UV light in Sun & stay away from tanning beds, since those higher energy UV photons cause mutagenic, carcinogenic effects in skin, photoaging or light induced skin aging accleration effect.
Hydration important for your nerves & cells signaling systems; for arteries & veins & capillaries, for your whole body. Don't go overkill with water consumption, a couple of few liters per day enough. Monitor the color of your urine to keep an eye on your hydration. Look up "Staying properly hydrated on YouTube" - use common sense too. If you are going to have a calm down rest day & not get hot & sweaty, you can drink a little less water. If you going to do intense physical activity & get hot & sweaty, like being a UPS driver delivering hundreds of heavy packages daily, you might need 3-5 or more liters. When I go snowboarding or hiking, I can easily drink 4 or 5 liters, from sweating so much. Long bicycle rides or HIT exercises, if I am breathing hard & sweating all over, I can slightly increase by water intake to keep my electrolytes balanced. This is why many athletes are drinking electrolyte mixtures in water ; if you drink a lot of water to stay cool or hydrated, eventually you can approach an electrolyte depletion state which is rally bad for coordination & brain function, balance, sensory perception, thinking, movement & activity or fitness //
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