Posted on 3rd June, 2008 by Heather
One and a half litres of a fairly big-name brand apple juice costs me £1.20 in my local shop. A litre of another big-name brand of orange juice costs 99p.
These juices are made from concentrated fruit juice. Diluted with water.
In the same shops, a litre of water costs 99p.
So water costs more than apple juice. Uh?
To make apple juice, loads of apples need to be grown, harvested, transported, pulped, filtered and dried. Then mixed with water………
In fact, in my gym and my workplace it costs me £1 for a third of a litre of water but this water comes out of machine. Oddly, it costs less to have a minimum-wage human being serve you a product than it costs when the seller is a machine.
No wonder I can’t understand this sub-prime fallout, collapse of building societies and all that. I can’t even understand how things diluted with water are cheaper than the water that dilutes them…..
Popularity: 12% [?]
Popularity: 12% [?]
Posted on 4th April, 2008 by Heather
Make sure to breathe 17,280 times a day. It’s for the good of your health. Don’t forget to take those breaths or your health will suffer.
OK, there’s no guidance yet on how much air you should breathe. Maybe that’s just because nobody has worked out how to sell air yet. Not so for water. How many times have you heard that you should drink x amount of water a day? You might have even heard that tea, coffee, soft drinks, beer and wine somehow don’t count as containing water. It’s not just the Penelope Keiths either. Even the respectable and respected nutrition advisers seem to give out this tosh. The Food Standards Agency, for instance, presents a sanitised version of the “other drinks may not count” argument.
The British Nutrition Foundation cites unspecified authorities to recommend an amount. More crucially, it says thirst doesn’t tell you when you need water.
Health professionals recommend at least 1.5 to 2 litres (6-8 cups) of liquids a day in temperate climates. The sensation of thirst is not triggered until there is already a water deficit, so it is important to drink before you get thirsty.
So, it’s pleasant to see a public debunking of the “drink 2 litres of water a day myth”. A Penn U study showed that there was no health benefit to drinking extra water.
You don’t get much more of an insistent human drive than thirst. So why do we have so many “experts” telling us that thirst isn’t a good guide to needing water? We may be bad at letting our hunger tell us when to eat. But thirst is pretty basic.
There are a very few circumstances (e.g. heat stroke if you’ve suddenly moved from winter Finland to summer Malaysia) in which your own thirst isn’t a good guide to how much you should drink.
(In any case, I wonder how anyone could drink as little as 2 litres of water-based fluid a day. I’ve had that before lunchtime, if coffee counts.)
Popularity: 18% [?]
Popularity: 18% [?]
