Your body can’t produce enough water through metabolism to meet your daily needs. This means you need to consume water via your diet – including food and, naturally, drinks. Every tissue and organ in your body requires water. This includes (1):
- nutrient transportation
- thermoregulation (regulating your body temperature)
- lubrication of your joints and lubrication fluids in your body (saliva and mucous)
- Shock absorbance
Dehydration is very dangerous. At a minor level, it will leave you feeling lethargic, incapable of concentration, and decrease athletic performance, not to mention the effects it has on your hair and skin. At an extreme level, it causes organ failure and death.
Still, there is much misinformation about water: How much you should drink per day, the temperature of the water, and whether or not drinking water on an empty stomach has specific benefits. Let’s clarify some of these myths and misconceptions so that you can focus on hydrating properly.
Myth 1: Drinking water on an empty stomach first thing in the morning removes toxins from your body
This is a common myth that many people believe, but there’s no evidence to back it up. Drinking water first thing in the morning has no special benefits for your body or its ability to remove toxins from your system; it’s simply part of a healthy hydration routine. Your kidneys are responsible for removing waste and toxins from your body. Do they require water to function? Of course. Does your water drinking schedule have any impact on this? No.
There is also a common misconception that because your urine is darker in color in the morning, this means that you are dehydrated from not having drunk all night. This is not entirely true. Researchers studied urine samples of adults after a night’s sleep without water intake and found that urine color in the morning didn’t actually correlate with dehydration levels. It is simply darker because it is more concentrated because you also didn’t urinate during that time.
Myth 2: Drinking water before breakfast decreases your calorie intake throughout the day and helps you lose weight.
While water can make you feel fuller, this effect does not exclusively apply to drinking water before breakfast — nor the general population. While there are some studies that suggest that drinking water prior to a meal (breakfast, lunch, etc.) can help to reduce calorie intake in said meal, these results only held true for older adults. That is to say that drinking water before meals had no effect on younger adults. None of the studies found specifically that drinking water before breakfast would change appetite levels for the whole day, either.
Furthermore, many so-called ‘health experts‘ claim that a glass of water first thing in the morning promotes weight loss. There is some truth to this, as water does have a thermogenic effect. This means that your body has to work, aka burn calories, to warm up the water when you drink it. Studies show that this thermogenesis has the capacity to increase your metabolic rate by 24-30% in the first 60 minutes after drinking a glass of water. However, there is no evidence to suggest that drinking a glass first thing in the morning has any special effect over any other time of day.
