How Did Staying Hydrated Become a Thing?  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Sporkful]] - Full Title: How Did Staying Hydrated Become a Thing? - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/52c7d350-6a38-4d3b-901d-5a0d5541e65a ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Personal Water Worrying Story** - Christina Cotarucci recalls a heated car-ride argument about water consumption with her wife Deb. - She grew up hearing the eight-glasses rule and now rarely goes without a glass nearby. Transcript: Speaker 3 I actually remember this very vividly because it actually turned into a fight. One of probably like the top 10 times we were annoyed with each other that year. Dan Pashman This is Christina Cotarucci. She's a senior writer at Slate. Speaker 3 One of us started like needling the other about their water consumption. Dan Pashman Christina and her wife were in the middle of a long car ride somewhere in New Jersey. Speaker 3 I forget whether my wife Deb was making fun of me for being so concerned with whether we would have enough water for the rest of our car ride or whether I was saying to her, like, huh, it's Weird that on this four hour car ride, you haven't drunk any of our water bottle. And I've like drained the whole thing. Dan Pashman Christina is rarely found without a glass of water by her side. As a teenager in the 2000s, she learned about water's importance in health class. She read about it in magazines. She heard the advice to drink eight cups of water a day. Speaker 3 Probably couldn't even count the number of times that I've heard the eight glasses of water a day. You know, it always seemed to me that it was an inarguable fact that, you know, people weren't drinking enough water because otherwise, why would we have to be told to drink more? Dan Pashman This is now received wisdom, right? Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. ([Time 0:01:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/055f24ea-67ea-461c-9f74-958a0c12cbb2)) - **Hydration As A Marketed Problem** - Gatorade reframed thirst as a medicalized problem called dehydration to create demand. - This invents a market by turning a felt experience into a treatable condition. Transcript: Willa Paskin I'm going to start with one of the concepts, the very idea of hydration. So I'm trying to get at this sort of moment. Basically, we like invent hydration. I mean, maybe that's like a dramatic way of putting it, but it sort of seems to me like... Speaker 3 That is only slightly overstating it, I have to say. Christy Ashwinden is the author of Good to Go, What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. In a sense, hydration from a sports perspective really was sort of an invented thing. Willa Paskin So obviously, again, people need to drink water. And if we don't, eventually we get thirsty, we get disoriented, our bodies stop working properly. In this sense, human beings have always been aware of dehydration. We feel it. But intentionally examining how dehydration affects us, that's relatively new. In fact, the general consensus for much of the 20th century was not to drink very much, even if you were running a marathon. ([Time 0:05:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fab6fda4-0234-4bb9-8d8b-77af36b27afe)) - **The Two-Percent Dehydration Claim** - Sports science pushed the idea that 2% dehydration harms performance even when thirst isn't felt. - That implied people must drink before feeling thirsty to avoid unnoticed deficits. Transcript: Willa Paskin And hydration, as opposed to thirst, is drinking to address a condition, dehydration. In 1985, Gatorade founded the Gatorade Sports Science Institute to study athletic performance. Dan Pashman It's called the Gatorade Sports Science Institute. We test dehydration under extreme conditions. Willa Paskin Scientists and researchers funded by the institute and elsewhere came to a consensus that even a little dehydration, like 2%, was bad for performance. The thing about 2% dehydration is you might not feel it, which means you could be a little dehydrated and not even know it. In order to avoid that, you have to drink even when you're not thirsty. ([Time 0:10:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2f8837a1-8bdd-4e4c-a598-965287a571e4)) - **Perrier's Glamorous U.S. Relaunch** - Perrier relaunched in the U.S. with Orson Welles ads to sell water as sophisticated and healthful. - The campaign positioned Perrier as a chic alternative to cocktails and sodas. Transcript: Willa Paskin Naturally sparkling from the center of the earth. Perrier. That's Orson Welles. In 1977, he became the spokesman for Perrier, which comes from a spring in Verges, France. People have been drinking water from it since Roman times, but they started bottling it under the name Perrier in the 19th century. That's how far back bottled water goes in America, too, when it was sold primarily as a medicinal product. The brand Poland Springs, from the town of Poland, Maine, started bottling then. But in the U.S., the bottled water market bottomed out in the early 20th century with the introduction of chlorination. People started drinking tap water, and bottled water became that five-gallon jug on a water cooler. In Europe, though, the market never collapsed. Bottled water remained a luxury, with different tastes and mineral components regularly served with dinner. Perrier was one of these waters, but by the 1970s, its growth in Western Europe was flat, so it decided to try a well-financed relaunch of the brand in the United States. Dan Pashman Deep below the plains of southern France, in a mysterious process begun millions of years ago, nature herself— The Orson Welles ads are the most famous part of that relaunch, and they Willa Paskin Helped Perrier position itself as more than water. Americans, after all, weren't used to buying water in the first place. To overcome their skepticism, Perrier used Wells' purring vocals to present itself as a sophisticated, healthy European substitute for diet sodas and alcohol. Imported, Perrier. Dan Pashman It goes with good food. It's what I drink instead of a cocktail. Refreshing, Perrier. ([Time 0:12:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2e331dc6-45a2-4212-af1f-ae4b50d86a8e)) - **Plastic Bottles Changed Everything** - The PET plastic bottle lowered cost and made bottled water portable and ubiquitous. - That convenience catalyzed bottled water's explosion into a major beverage category. Transcript: Willa Paskin The end of the 1980s, bottled water was a small but growing market segment that still seemed needless to most people. But the pump was primed. Americans were more invested in exercise and health than ever before and looking for alternatives to sugary drinks. Thanks to Gatorade, they increasingly knew and cared about hydration. Thanks to Perrier and Evian, they'd become at least a little accustomed to the once-foreign idea of buying bottles of water, which had been marketed to them as sophisticated objects Of wellness. And then in 1989, a practical innovation came along that took water out of glass containers with French brand names and put it into the fridge at the bodega, a cheap disposable plastic Water bottle made of a material called polyethylene teraphthalate, or PET, the lightweight, clear plastic that bottled water comes in to this day. The PET bottle brought the price of water down, and it made it extremely convenient for consumers. ([Time 0:20:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4c779e07-afca-4304-8195-daea0db44fa9)) - **Big Beverage Joins The Water Market** - Major beverage companies entered bottled water, making purified municipal water a mass product. - Brands like Aquafina and Dasani normalized buying water previously taken from taps. Transcript: Willa Paskin Nestle, which had purchased Perrier and thus Poland Springs in 1992, was first. In 1994, Pepsi started rolling out Aquafina, a purified municipal water, meaning a purified tap water. Finally, in 1999, Coca-Cola, which held out for so long because it was afraid of cannibalizing its own soft drink sales, began selling Dasani, also a purified municipal water. ([Time 0:23:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9135dcf9-a6b0-4e11-882c-b1149838bd58)) - **Wellness Turned Water Into An Industry** - Wellness culture multiplied hydration products: specialty waters, enhancers, and designer bottles. - Hydration became an industry selling status, tools, and the idea of always optimizing health. Transcript: Willa Paskin So has everything else to do with hydration. And to explain that, we have to turn back to the wellness industry. So as I've said, the idea of wellness has been a part of selling water from the start. But since the 1970s, wellness has become an industry in its own right. And though people who are into wellness would probably never consume sports drinks, they have too much sugar, or bottled water, they're bad for the environment and full of BPAs, it's The wellness industry that has fully married these two beverage categories sales pitches, selling water as more than just water, selling it as hydration. Amy LaRocca is a writer who's working on a book about the wellness industry. Speaker 3 Water is, you know, free, except hydration is not necessarily free once you get into wellness. Willa Paskin You can get so many more hydration-related products now than you could in the 1990s, starting with just more kinds of water. You can buy mineral water and artisanal water, spring natural distilled, filtered, but also enhanced probiotic, alkaline, and raw. Then there's all the stuff you can do to your water, filter it, not just with a Brita, or enhance it with packets of vitamins and nutrients. And then there's where you can put it, a wide variety of reusable bottles that have grown into a $239 million market in their own right. ([Time 0:26:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8ce8725f-d3d6-472a-92a9-9c9b558b2db9)) - **Thirst Versus Dehydration Confusion** - Early dehydration studies often conflated thirst with dehydration, skewing conclusions. - Performance drops may reflect denied drinking rather than harmful mild dehydration itself. Transcript: Willa Paskin If through the 1990s, research and consumer habits about water had risen in lockstep, in the early 2000s, they began to diverge. Christy Ashwinden again. Speaker 3 There have been at least five or six documented cases of marathon runners who have died from a condition called hyponatremia, which is basically, it's also called water intoxication, But basically you're diluting your blood so much that nothing works properly. Willa Paskin I'm not trying to scare you about overhydration. You are unlikely to get hyponatremia. But the deaths did spark a re-examination of hydration recommendations in the sports world. And there's a problem in decades of dehydration research, and it's that it didn't distinguish between dehydration and thirst, something that was explained to me by the science writer Alex Hutchinson, who walked me through all of this and whose book I'll tell you about in the credits. Basically, to study dehydration, subjects are denied fluids until they're 2% dehydrated or more, and then their performance is tested. And they tend to do worse than when they weren't dehydrated. But what if the problem wasn't the dehydration? What if it was that they were thirsty and hadn't been allowed to drink? A couple percentage points of dehydration might be just fine, as long as you can drink when you want to. When it comes to athletic performance. ([Time 0:29:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/827b7a47-e78b-460c-b112-feec3774364e)) - **Trust Thirst Over Quotas** - Drink to thirst and eat to hunger rather than chasing arbitrary water quotas. - For most people, thirst reliably signals adequate hydration. Transcript: Willa Paskin Basically, to study dehydration, subjects are denied fluids until they're 2% dehydrated or more, and then their performance is tested. And they tend to do worse than when they weren't dehydrated. But what if the problem wasn't the dehydration? What if it was that they were thirsty and hadn't been allowed to drink? A couple percentage points of dehydration might be just fine, as long as you can drink when you want to. When it comes to athletic performance. But there's a lot indicating that certainly for regular people, you're good if you just drink when you're thirsty. You just need to drink to thirst and eat to hunger. Like, it's really that simple. But that idea hasn't trickled down to us just yet. ([Time 0:30:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3426c2e1-5f0d-4fc4-9abe-830ef96b8f67)) - **Parenting By The Bottle** - Willa Paskin describes becoming anxious about her children's water bottles despite knowing the marketing forces. - She still packs bottles everywhere, showing how ingrained the habit is. Transcript: Willa Paskin I do it on my children. Do you have a lot of water bottles? Dan Pashman We have four water bottles. What do your water bottles look like? Willa Paskin That's my older daughter. She's six. Dan Pashman One of my water bottles has Elsa and Olaf and it also, and they also have a unicorn one. Willa Paskin She has a mermaid one and a dinosaur one. One is metal. Three are plastic. One was a gift. One was a replacement for one we lost, but then we found the one that we thought we lost. They all have masking tape wrapped around them with her name written on them in Sharpie. Where do you take your bottle? Dan Pashman We take them pretty much everywhere we have to go. Willa Paskin Where is that? Like, school, to the parks, to the museum. What happens if you leave the house without one? Nothing. Dan Pashman You just get water from somewhere else. Willa Paskin That part is not true. What happens when you leave the house without your water bottle is that your parents scurry around trying to find your water bottle. Daycare, nursery school, after school, camp, they all ask you to provide your child with a water bottle. And somehow this command bleeds into everything. Everywhere we go, we bring our kids water bottles, even to places where there already is water. ([Time 0:33:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c96b16f0-4aff-4693-8bc0-4d955504ba2a))