You often hear that drinking 2 liters of water a day is healthy. But can you drink too much? And how do you notice that? NU.nl asks the experts. “You can die from water intoxication by drinking too much water.”
Water bottles, doppers, bidons and thermos flasks fly around you in an average office. The more often the bottles are filled and drunk by the end of the day, the better. Right? Ewout Hoorn, internist-nephrologist at Erasmus MC, does not entirely agree with that.
“If you are otherwise healthy, it is sufficient to drink only when you are thirsty.” He thinks that the idea that you should get at least 2 liters of water a day comes from a trend. “There is no scientific evidence that shows that it is better to drink more.”
When someone is thirsty and feels the need to drink differs per person. If you are healthy, your body usually regulates this itself. If you are thirsty, that is a signal from your body that indicates that you need to drink.
“It also depends on how warm it is and whether you do a lot of sports, for example,” Hoorn knows. In general, you will quickly reach those 2 liters. In the elderly, it is often the case that their sense of thirst decreases. That is something to pay attention to, he says.
If you drink a lot, you have to go to the toilet a lot
If you refill your bottle several times a day and make a large pot of tea in the evening, that is not immediately bad. “If you drink a lot, you have to go to the toilet a lot. It’s that simple,” says Maria Hopman, professor of integrative physiology at Radboudumc. “And there is no evidence that shows that you can put your kidneys to work too much.”
Yet there are exceptions, Hoorn knows. “But those are extreme cases. For example, if you drink liters of water in an hour, you can develop water intoxication.” Even in less extreme cases, it may be that you are drinking more than is good for you, but then there is usually something else going on. “For example, due to a condition or medication use.”
You can fall into a coma, but that doesn’t just happen
Drinking too much in too short a time is so serious that you can die from it, says Hopman. “It dilutes your blood, causing fluid to enter your bloodstream. That process is called osmosis. The same thing happens in your brain. But because the fluid in your skull has nowhere to go, the pressure increases, the functions of your brain fail and you fall into a coma.”
It is not that you can suddenly end up in a coma from feeling great, she says. “Symptoms can be: nausea, headache, blurred vision and feeling unwell. The problem is that you can also suffer from these symptoms with dehydration symptoms if you drink too little.”
But if you are healthy, and you don’t drink extremely much, then both experts think that things are unlikely to go wrong. It is important to listen to your sense of thirst and body. “It is not that you can say that people who do not drink 2 liters of water every day are less healthy,” says Hopman.
And if you were wondering; sparkling water, tea and your flavored water are also counted as water.