How Did Staying Hydrated Become A Thing? (Reheat)

To say that hydration is an invention is only a slight exaggeration. Water bottles have become a crucial accessory — a status symbol. How did that happen?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

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• 0:45Dan Pashman?

  Napa Valley was excellent. I mean, there's no bad glass of wine and no bad meal. Choose between hundreds of wineries, tasting rooms and chef-led restaurants from a low key lunch on a vineyard terrace to a full tasting menu paired by the wine maker. Plan your trip at visitnapavalley.com.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Sirius XM Podcasts.

• 1:13Dan Pashman?

  Hey everyone, Dan here with another Sporkful reheat for you. And hang on, before I start recording this, let me just, let me just have a quick drink of water. Wait a second, do I even need water? Why am I drinking so much water? Why do my kids have 400 water bottles? Why can't they go 15 minutes without water? Well, it turns out that hydration, this whole obsession with hydration, it's kind of a new thing. And that's what we're talking about in this week's reheat from our friends at the Slate Podcast Decoder Ring. They look into how bottled water went from a small European luxury item to the single largest beverage category in America. Turns out, spoiler alert, hydration may not be the wellness cure-all we've been told it is. Of course, if there's an episode of the Sporkful you want us to reheat, drop me a line. I want to hear from you. We take requests.

• 1:57Dan Pashman?

  You can find me at [email protected]. So don't bother filling up any more water. You don't need any more water to listen to this episode. Just keep listening. Thanks and enjoy.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:22Dan Pashman?

  This is Christina Cotterucci. She's a senior writer at Slate.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  One of us started like needling the other about their water consumption.

• 2:29Dan Pashman?

  Christina and her wife were in the middle of a long car ride, somewhere in New Jersey.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:53Dan 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.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  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?

• 3:22Dan Pashman?

  This is now received wisdom, right? Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Today, being properly hydrated is touted by experts and celebrities as one of the best things you can do for your health, your mood, focus, body, beauty, and overall wellness. But Christina's wife, Deb, wasn't so sure. She had recently read an article about how we're over-hydrating.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  And we actually had a fight about it. I'm sorry, this feels like a fundamental truth that everyone has agreed on in the world.

• 3:49Dan Pashman?

  Except not that long ago, it wasn't a fundamental truth. When I was growing up in the 80s and early 90s, not that long before Christina, we just didn't worry this much about hydration. Today, my kids bring water to school every day and have water by their beds every night. I didn't do that when I was their age. If you got thirsty in school, you went to the water fountain. And guess what? We turned out fine. Still, Christina insists that today, we've got the better approach.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  It's conventional wisdom for a reason.

• 4:17Dan Pashman?

  But that reason only has a little bit to do with water.

• 4:26Dan Pashman?

  This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. This week, we have a special episode for you from our friends over at the podcast Decoder Ring. It's a show from Slate about cracking cultural mysteries. I'll let host Willa Paskin take it from here.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  As human beings, we need water, but the amount of water that we think we need and the urgency with which we think we need it has changed dramatically over the last 50 years. Hydration, being hydrated, staying hydrated, it's a buzzword, a command, a concern, a business, a meme. But not that long ago, it wasn't any of these things. In this episode, I'm going to look at how we came to embrace hydration so fully and so passionately so recently. It's a change that has to do with money, lots of money, and the beverages and industries that have figured out how to make it by altering the way we think about something freely, widely available. And they've done this using a sales pitch so successful, it has become indistinguishable from common sense. Why

• 5:31Speaker 03

  are we so damn hydrated?

• 5:51Speaker 03

  There were three things that had to happen to make people like Christina worry about getting their eight glasses a day. Three things that helped turn bottled water into the most popular beverage in America. Two of those things are conceptual, and one is practical. I'm going to start with one of the concepts, the very idea of hydration.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  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 be like...

• 6:18Speaker 05

  That is only slightly overstating it, I have to say.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  Kristi Oshwendin is the author of Good to Go: What the Athlete and All of Us Can Learn From the Strange Science of Recovery.

• 6:28Speaker 05

  In a sense, hydration from a sports perspective really was sort of an invented thing.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 7:06Speaker 05

  It used to be that people were encouraged not to drink anything during exercise. And in fact, yes, my friend, Amby Burfa, he won the Boston Marathon back in the 1960s. And, you know, back then, he said they were explicitly told not to drink.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  The idea was that the water just sloshed around in your stomach, sitting there, slowing you down, making you uncomfortable, and all without helping you. This thinking didn't just apply to marathoners.

• 7:32Dan Pashman?

  Well, did you ever hear of giving a hot, sweaty football player all the cold drink he wants? Never.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  This is a commercial from the early 1970s. It's for Gatorade.

• 7:42Dan Pashman?

  Never that is until Gatorade, because Gatorade gets into your system approximately 12 times faster than water.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  This is the moment Christie was talking about earlier, the moment when the concept of hydration was invented. Or it might be more accurate to say that what Gatorade invented was the problem of dehydration. After all, you can't sell people a solution to a problem they don't know that they have. Gatorade was created in 1965.

• 8:09Speaker 05

  I just want to preface this by saying that this is sort of like urban legend and like, there's this story that's told about Gatorade. Basically, you had the University of Florida football team, the coach was concerned because his players were quote unquote "wilted" during practice.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  This concern was brought to the attention of one of the university's physicians, a kidney specialist named Dr. Robert Cade. Cade and some colleagues concluded the players were sweating out too much water and salt and burning through too many calories without replenishing any of it. So they mixed up water, sugar, and some salt, which they would canonically refer to by the scientific term electrolytes, added some lemon juice to mask the funky taste, and made Gatorade, named after the University of Florida's mascot, the Gator.

• 8:54Dan Pashman?

  This is a laboratory.

• 8:58Dan Pashman?

  That's right, a laboratory where scientists working with the Florida Gators developed the greatest thirst invention since water, Gatorade.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  That's from the same 1970s Gatorade commercial, one of dozens mythologizing the company's origin story. As the rest of the legend goes, the doctors first gave Gatorade to the all-freshman team, who beat the older, bigger B-team. Then the varsity squad started drinking it and had a winning season. In 1967, the Gators won the Orange Bowl for the first time, and the opposing coach supposedly chalked the victory up to Gatorade, saying, "We didn't have Gatorade. That made the difference." Gatorade was on its way. In the late 1960s, the university and Dr. Cade signed a deal with a food company to bring Gatorade to market. Around this same time, the company was also starting to develop the two big planks of its future marketing.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  First, it was licensed by the NFL, which would soon be joined by other sports leagues and later players. They helped Gatorade present itself as "good enough for professional athletes and so good enough for you." But the second thing was just as important. Gatorade sponsored its first scientific study into the effects of dehydration.

• 10:08Speaker 05

  What ends up happening in the sports science space in particular is that science is used as marketing. And so you have this product or you have this thing and you're looking for sort of bona fide scientific evidence for how great it is.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  This early study, done by a respected sports scientist on marathon runners, found that drinking something, Gatorade or water, was better than drinking nothing at all, which remains pretty sound advice.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  As you can hear in that ad, initially, Gatorade got this message across by focusing on the idea of thirst. Thirst is an experience. It's something that you feel. The message was, "When you feel thirsty, you should drink Gatorade." But in the years to come, Gatorade would turn to the idea of hydration. 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.

• 11:14Speaker 06

  Gatorade Sports Science Institute. We test dehydration under extreme conditions.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  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. This research was being done on elite athletes, but Gatorade's market is bigger than just elite athletes. And this idea that dehydration, even in small amounts and for short periods, is bad and thirst is an unreliable guide, would spread far beyond the world of sports.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  The 1970s was a great time to launch a sports drink. It was the decade of the jogging boom and the fitness craze. Americans were exercising more than ever and Gatorade would not be the only beverage to capitalize on this moment. Rather than focus on hydration, though, this next drink sold itself on ideas about health, purity, self-betterment, and virtuous consumption. In other words, it introduced the second big concept on the road to peak water: the idea of wellness. Wellness and water are tightly intertwined now, but this entanglement began with a sparkling European water sold in a voluptuous green glass bottle.

• 12:47Speaker 07

  Naturally sparkling from the center of the earth. Perrier.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  That's Orson Welles. In 1977, he became the spokesman for Perrier, which comes from a spring in Vervez, 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 US, 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.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 13:48Speaker 07

  Deep below the plains of southern France, in a mysterious process begun millions of years ago, nature herself...

• 13:55Speaker 03

  The Orson Welles ads are the most famous part of that relaunch, and they 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 Welles' purring vocals to present itself as a sophisticated, healthy, European substitute for diet sodas and alcohol.

• 14:16Speaker 07

  Imported Perrier. It goes with good food. It's what I drink instead of a cocktail. Refreshing Perrier.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  Perrier also brought the price down, but without making itself too cheap. It was able to become much more widely available, in six-packs at supermarkets, while retaining what Time Magazine called its "snob appeal." There was another thing going on at this time that also had snob appeal: the aforementioned exercise craze.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Thanks to a number of focus groups, Perrier realized very quickly that there was a lot of overlap between the people who were newly into aerobics and fitness and Perrier's aspirational customer base. Within months of launching in 1977, Perrier started sponsoring road races and built 100 Perrier exercise courses in cities across the country. A Washington Post story about the company positioning itself as "the healthful alternative beverage for the healthful alternative sport, jogging," describes how in the very first race Perrier sponsored, runners at the finish line spat the Perrier out because they weren't expecting the bubbles. The brand kept at it, though, sponsoring the 1979 New York City Marathon. This all worked incredibly well.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  In 1975, Perrier had been selling about 2.5 million bottles a year, only in restaurants, which means that, on average, in 1975, a little more than 1% of Americans were having one bottle of Perrier a year. By 1979, though, it was selling 200 million bottles yearly, 100 times more, and that number would only go up throughout the 1980s. And Perrier wasn't alone. There was another European import that followed the Perrier playbook almost exactly, down to the gravelly-voiced male pitchman.

• 16:06Speaker 07

  ...to start drinking Evian Natural Spring Water from the French Alps. Like a new morning, it's always there for you to do something healthy.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Evian, a non-sparkling flatwater launched in 1978. It also became a status object, favored by celebrities like Madonna and Jack Nicholson, and affluent customers who were interested in health and exercise.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  Keep your body at its peak. Drink Evian.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  In this ad from 1986, against the soundtrack of all this moaning, are a fit man and woman, seen in a series of quick-cutting close-ups of their clenched faces and sweaty muscle groups. They're pumping iron and doing crunches, him in a tank top, her in leg warmers and a very high-cut leotard bottom. It's like the sexy version of a Gatorade commercial. And Evian wasn't the only company trying to sell water by selling sex.

• 17:04Speaker 04

  What's all the noise I've been hearing about Poland Spring?

• 17:08Speaker 03

  In 1979, Poland Springs, which was financially struggling, hired Mae West, then in her mid-80s, for a series of radio spots.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  I used to have it delivered to my boudoir by a very handsome young fella. Now he delivers Poland Spring all over the place. Well, I got rid of the fellow, but I still keep plenty of Poland Spring around. After all, it comes naturally.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  The wild double entourage here is a little too in your face to be sophisticated, and it didn't help Poland Springs much. Perrier bought the company in 1980 and would go on to buy a number of others before the decade was out. By 1989, it controlled a sizable percentage of the $1.7 billion water market. If that market was much bigger than it had been in the mid-1970s, it was still just a small slice of the beverage market as a whole. The soft drink category was worth $43 billion. And the whole idea of paying for water still seemed ridiculous to a lot of people. In the 1987 movie Spaceballs, a Mel Brooks spoof of Star Wars, there's a gag about Perrier, a can filled with breathable air.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Part of the joke being, what are they gonna try and sell us next? The answer: so much more water.

• 18:29Dan Pashman?

  Coming up, the plastic bottle changes everything for the water industry. And we know that hydration may not have any real benefit, but can it actually be bad for you? Stick around.

• 18:47Dan Pashman?

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• 18:53Dan Pashman?

  When you're cooking, ingredients matter, right? You use higher-quality ingredients, you usually get better results. And if you're listening to this show, you're probably the kind of person who puts some thought and effort into your ingredients. But ingredients don't just matter with food, they also matter with laundry detergent. Of course, the cleaning job needs to get done, the odors and stains have to be tackled, and I want to feel good about the detergent and the ingredients in it. Because remember, whatever's in your laundry detergent is essentially in your clothes, and then you're putting those clothes on, you want good stuff in there. And All Free Clear uses only essential ingredients. It's 100% free from dyes, perfumes, parabens, and irritating residues. Check out the label and see for yourself, it lists all the ingredients and what they do. We've been using it in my House. We're very happy with it. And let me tell you, family of four, two teenagers.

• 19:36Dan Pashman?

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• 20:20Dan Pashman?

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• 20:57Speaker 03

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• 21:28Speaker 01

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• 22:36Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to another Sporkful Reheat. I'm Dan Pashman, and I have a very big, exciting announcement for you. This past November, I took a group of Sporkful fans and some others on a special trip across Italy to eat pasta, to retrace many of the steps I took on my own research trip from my cookbook, and we had so much fun and ate so, so well. We ate spaghetti alla sasina in Bari. We took a cooking class with Silvestro Silvestri in Leche. We ate with Katy Parla in Rome. And the folks at Culinary Backstreets who organized the tour, they added some stops that I didn't even know about, that were new to me, that were incredibly delicious and also fascinating. Point is, it was so great, we're doing it again. This November, we just opened up spots. It's a small group, so space is limited. Bottom line, come eat pasta with me in Italy.

• 23:20Dan Pashman?

  For all the details, go to culinarybackstreets.com/sporkful.

• 23:27Dan Pashman?

  Okay, back to the show. Here again is Decoder Ring host, Willa Paskin.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  At 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.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  A cheap disposable plastic water bottle made of a material called polyethylene terapthalate, or PET, the lightweight, clear plastic that bottled water comes into this day. The PET bottle brought the price of water down, and it made it extremely convenient for consumers. And that changed everything. I mean, it really changed the way the US beverage consumer consumed beverages. You never in the 80s or 70s ever saw anybody walk down the street with a 12-ounce can of a soft drinks. They just didn't do it. Nobody drank on the street. Michael Ballas is the founder and chairman of The Beverage Marketing Corporation, a beverage industry consulting and research firm.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  He's a beverage industry guy, and he wasn't going to say anything critical about bottled water to me. But I found him and his colleague, Gary Hempel, clarifying about water's incredible sales pitch. Water was dietetic, all-natural, didn't have to be carbonated, didn't have to be chilled, and more usage occasions than any other beverage. And plus, it had a healthy, good-for-you halo. You go into a store and you see something new and you think, well, what the heck is this? You got to figure it out. You got to read the label, look at the ingredients. Really had to do that with water. There's not a comparable beverage that could possibly emerge, probably ever, that will equate with the success story of water. This made me laugh.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  You don't say, "Nothing will ever be comparable to water, literally the substance necessary to sustain life on this planet." But that's the thing. Nothing is comparable to water. On the one hand, selling it to us is such a cynical marketing feat. On the other, it almost sells itself. Water is or should be free, but it's also priceless. So you know, definitely worth 99 cents. And at that price point, the bottled water boom was on. Dozens of new companies popped up of different types and status levels, most with names and labels that connoted purity and nature, like Fiji Water from a tropical island.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  One by one, all the major beverage corporations, what I've taken to calling "big water," got into the business, too. 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. They used ads like this, in which a man dressed as a bear just out of hibernation chugs a Dasani.

• 26:57Speaker 06

  Oh, natural mountain stream thing? It's fine. But this tastes crisp, fresh.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  With hindsight, we know there are serious problems with the rise of bottled water. Environmental problems and social problems, the waste they create and the resources they use, the way these bottled waters, often sourced from municipal systems by private companies, stoke distrust in tap water, further undermining the public infrastructure necessary to keep that free water safe and drinkable. But in getting into the well-documented sins of bottled disposable water, I'm getting ahead of the story. Because in the 1990s, the bottled water honeymoon was on. Celebrities are drinking it and selling it. Cher Horowitz, the protagonist of Clueless, has a bedazzled, over-the-shoulder bag just for her It PET bottle.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  In Robert Altman's Hollywood satire, The Player, the movie executive main character orders a different bottled water everywhere he goes as a status play. It was a cool, new-fangled, zero-calorie, all-natural product with tons of marketing muscle behind it that you could just toss in your bag. And as all of this is happening, something else changes, too. A shift in official hydration policy. In 1996, the American College of Sports Medicine, building on research done at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute, among other places, recommended that athletes should attempt to replace all the water lost through sweating, or consume the maximal amount that can be tolerated. They were recommending a one-in, one-out policy for fluids.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Again, this was not for regular people, but it still seemed like an indication that we ought to down as much fluids as we could, which is basically what we went ahead and did. Michael Ballas again.

• 28:44Speaker 07

  From 1995 to 2005, bottled water grew over, in those 40 quarters, each quarter over 20%.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  This is why the 1990s are the demarcation decade for water, the before and after. If, like me, you became sentient in the 80s and early 90s, you probably didn't grow up carrying around bottles of water, conscientiously drinking more. But if you became sentient towards the end of that decade and into the aughts, you might have. Since the late 1990s, water sales have only increased. In 2016, bottled water became the most popular beverage in America, and it's still growing. But it's not just bottled water that has gotten more popular. So has everything else to do with hydration. And to explain that, we have to turn back to the wellness industry.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  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.

• 30:13Speaker 03

  Amy LaRaca is a writer who's working on a book about the wellness industry.

• 30:17Speaker 05

  Water is free, except hydration is not necessarily free once you get into wellness.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  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. The reusable bottled water craze kicked off with Nalgene's, but now there are scores of options in plastic, metal, and glass, and one that has a large

• 31:08Speaker 03

  amethyst crystal inside of it, from Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop store. And there's also reusable bottles that selling point aren't that they're personalized, always handy, and good for the environment. It's that they make you drink more. They're huge. They have lights and music to keep your water cold.

• 31:25Speaker 05

  Once there's money to be made off of hydrating people, you're gonna have this, "Oh, my God, we're all dehydrated."

• 31:30Speaker 03

  And being dehydrated, it's no longer just about being physically off your game. Hydration is supposed to help with cognition, mood, focus, digestion, skin, and beauty. I saw one article titled, "16 celebrities who swear their biggest beauty tip is water." And I know whenever I worry, "I'm not drinking enough water," I'm mostly fretting about the skin on my neck.

• 31:52Speaker 05

  The question in wellness is always like, is there an extra? If being chronically severely dehydrated is bad for your skin, which sure, it is, most people are not chronically severely dehydrated, is being overhydrated extra for your skin. And a lot of the wellness exists in that, like, is there is extra possible?

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Water, unlike so many things, really is necessary and good for you. So why not have more of it? As Amy put it, "Why just be okay when you could be well? Why just be hydrated when you could be more hydrated?" Good plus good is more good, right?

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Except now the science says something a little different. If through the 1990s, research and consumer habits about water had risen in lockstep, in the early 2000s, they began to diverge. Kristi Oshwindan again.

• 32:48Speaker 05

  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 it's basically you're diluting your blood so much that nothing works properly.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  I'm not trying to scare you about overhydration. You are unlikely to get hyponatremia. But the deaths did spark a reexamination 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?

• 33:48Speaker 03

  A couple percentage points of dehydration might be just fine, as long as you can drink when you want to. I want to say that hydration remains a very contentious and controversial issue 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.

• 34:10Speaker 05

  You just need to drink to thirst and eat to hunger. Like, it's really that simple.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  But that idea hasn't trickled down to us just yet. Instead, we're awash in hyperhydration recommendations, not based in anything concrete, like the advice to drink eight cups of water a day. In 2002, a neurologist, a kidney doctor at Dartmouth, published an academic paper trying to find the source of the 8x8 factoid, and he couldn't find anything conclusive. Eight cups a day is actually kind of on the low end of things now. Many influencers and celebrities recommend drinking far more. You can also buy things like a gallon drinking jug. One has cheery exhortations on it to keep you sipping all day. Exhortations you need, because it's hard to drink that much water in one day. To me, the issue with all of this isn't so much the water.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Water is water. It's basically good for you, even if the only extra you get from it is more trips to the bathroom. But I don't like how, in elevating the importance of this genuinely miraculous fluid, we found another thing we have to do exactly right.

• 35:14Speaker 05

  There's this, this concept underlying it that is so pervasive in our society right now. And it's this idea that, you know, you always have to be doing something and that there's sort of this ideal version of yourself that's out there waiting. It's really up to you to like, get everything right and that it's possible to just absolutely optimize everything to be your best self.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Water has become a solution to the problem of better living, of wellness. But in this case, it's a solution to a problem we don't really have. When it comes to water, our bodies are good at telling us what we need. We could not sweat this one. Instead, marketing has turned us into a nation of non-intuitive drinkers, assiduously chugging and chalking the effort up to progress. Or better skin, anyway. If I'm making it sound like I think this is simple, "Come on, just drink when you're thirsty," I know that it's not. Before going into this episode, I had the hubris to imagine that I was not a water person, just because I didn't carry a water bottle around.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  But I have since realized that I am just as incepted with these ideas as anyone. I just don't express them on myself. I do it on my children. Do you have a lot of water bottles?

• 36:29Speaker 07

  We have four.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  What do your water bottles look like? That's my older daughter. She's six.

• 36:33Speaker 07

  One of my water bottles has Elsa and Olaf and it also, and I also have a unicorn one.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  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?

• 36:58Speaker 07

  We take them pretty much Everywhere we have to go.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  Where is that?

• 37:03Speaker 07

  Like to school, to the parks, to the museums.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  What happens if you leave the house without one?

• 37:11Speaker 07

  Nothing, you just get water from somewhere.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  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. That's why I got interested in this topic. Why were we doing this? Even though bottled water is actually responsible for there being less water fountains in general, there is a water fountain at the playground. There's a water fountain at school. Why are we lugging water everywhere?

• 37:56Speaker 03

  And the answer isn't just convenience or habit or peer pressure. It's because I want them to be hydrated and I am genuinely concerned about what will happen if they're not, like even for a few minutes. I would make them wait for food, but I would never make them wait for water. And that feels like common sense, but it's also marketing. Decades of companies selling us something that we really need so as to make us think we need it even more than we really do. And even though I see that now, I haven't sent them anywhere without a water bottle just yet. Hydration, do you know what hydration is?

• 38:36Speaker 07

  Hmm, something about water.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. You can find me on Twitter at WillaPaskin. And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at [email protected]. If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends. This podcast was written by Willa Paskin. It was edited by Benjamin Frisch. Decoder Ring is produced by Willa Paskin and Benjamin Frisch. Cleo Levin is our research assistant. I want to give it a special thanks to Alex Hutchinson, who helped so much in my understanding of the science of hydration and whose book Endure Mind Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance was indispensable. I also want to thank James Saltzman and Elizabeth Royte

• 39:27Speaker 03

  and recommend their books Drinking Water: A History and Bottle Mania. Thanks also to Gabriel Roth, June Thomas, Shannon Paulus, Eric Hansen, Fernando Galliana, Bruce Nevins, Tanner Watt, Laura Bennett, Savita Jones, and all the people who gave us help and feedback on the way.

• 39:45Dan Pashman?

  That's Willa Paskin of the Slate Podcast Decoder Ring. Check out their other episodes by searching Decoder Ring in your podcast app. They got an episode about soap operas and one I really loved about blue foods. Why aren't there more blue foods? Listen to find out those episodes and more up now from Decoder Ring. This show is produced by me along with senior producer

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Emma Morgenstern.

• 40:06Dan Pashman?

  and producer Andres O'Hara. The show is mixed by Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher. Our executive producers are Peter Clowney and Daisy Rosario. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman. And I'm Barb Harris in Tempe, Arizona, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.

• 40:43Dan Pashman?

  This reheat was produced by

• 40:44Speaker 03

  Gianna Palmer.

• 40:46Dan Pashman?

  The team that produces The Sporkful today includes me along with managing producer

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Emma Morgenstern.

• 40:50Dan Pashman?

  and senior producer Andres O'Hara. Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 41:31Dan Pashman?

  What kind of day is it? It's a White Claw day. Grab a pack, grab your friends. Everything else in life can wait.

• 41:37Speaker 07

  Your friends shouldn't. Let's go. White Claw. Grab life by the claw. Please drink responsibly. Heart's also with flavors. White Claw's also works Chicago, Illinois.

• 41:46Dan Pashman?

  Mr. Monopoly here. Miss me? Monopoly is back at McDonald's with millions of prizes. A 2027 Jeep Cherokee, a Carnival Cruise Vacation, gift cards from DoorDash, and Best Buy. Feel the play in the McDonald's app. Get your bag.

• 42:03Speaker 07

  No purchase necessary. 50 U.S. and D.C. Age 18 plus. See play at MCD.com for rules and play at MCD.com/AMOE for info on playing without purchase by mail by November 2nd. Chance card game ends November 8th. Game ends November 22nd, 2026. See rules for prize details. Monopoly is a registered trademark of Hasbro.