Mediterranean Wellness blog

As this infographic points out, staying hydrated is so important for so many aspects of your health! From your brain and kidneys to your skin and energy levels, simply keeping hydrated is one of the easiest solutions you can apply for your overall health.

But how much is enough? We have been told that you need AT LEAST 8, 8-ounce glasses of water each day. This coaching was provided to us by our health establishments and official institutions as “evidence based” advice. Turns out, it was not. Please read this solid review by H Valtin: “Drink at least eight glasses of water a day. Really? Is there scientific evidence for 8 x 8“?

That issue speaks to the quantity of fluid. Now let’s talk about the quality of the thing you’re drinking.

Even if you’re not sucking back swimming pools of water each day, you might think that staying hydrated would be a simple matter of including more water in your life. Where it gets confusion is in the plethora of products (and their urgent ad campaigns), from “smart” water to sports drinks, and all of them want to convince you that their product is the one you should buy.

This randomized trial (funded by Coca-Cola, who makes sports drinks) wanted to create a hydration index. This index would show how well drinks can hydrate your body, compared to water.

The data are presented in this graph. Other than the oral rehydration solution (like Pedialyte), the best drink for hydration is actually milk. Yeah, milk. Perhaps because of its associated proteins, the body hydrates better with this than even water itself.

Another interesting point of note here is that the sports drinks (think, Gatorade) that sweaty athletes drink on TV was worse than water for re-hydration!

So the bottom line is that hydration is critically important for your health. You don’t have to drink swimming pools of it every day, and don’t be fooled by the ads about hydration drinks!

When listing healthy drinks, first let’s exclude the liquefied salad slurry, where you toss in peanut butter, berries, whatever’s going bad in the veg drawer, and a sprinkle of flax seeds or whatever. Yes, that sludge is actually healthy for you, but peanut butter, flax, and kale are not drinks, they’re foods.

Now that we’re on firm footing, what are the healthiest drinks available. Water is good for hydration, but doesn’t carry nutrition and isn’t even the most hydrating of drinks!

Basically, the healthiest drinks are the ones that you make a tea out of. For example, to make tea you take specific leaves, pour in hot water, which extracts the healthy aspects of the leaves into the water. Then, you drink that.

In other words, you make a tea of the leaves.

The same thing happens with coffee and cocoa. Pour in hot water, allow it to steep and think about itself for a while,  and the healthy parts of each release into the water, and you drink that on chilly days with fuzzy socks on.

It turns out that cocoa and tea (especially green/black teas) have more antioxidants than any other drink, and are crazy healthy for you for that reason. In fact, short-term intake of cocoa and green tea flavanols … affect selected markers of one or more measures of oxidative stress, inflammation or hemostasis in obese adults at risk for insulin resistance. (reference)

And … in 19 randomized clinical trials comprising 1,131 participants, our study suggests that cocoa flavanol intake has favorable effects on select cardiometabolic biomarkers among adults (reference). 

For Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)

A 2007 review of studies showed a positive effect of coffee consumption on reducing the risk for AD by ~30% compared to non-coffee drinkers [reference].

A 2010 review of epidemiological studies involving middle aged adults, associated a daily intake of 3–5 cups of coffee with a risk reduction of 64% [reference].

Two meta-analyses reported that as coffee consumption increased, disease incidence decreased [reference, reference].

For Parkinson’s Disease (PD)

As reported here, coffee drinkers were at a 30% lower risk of PD as compared to non-drinkers [reference], which is consistent with the latest meta-analysis from 2014 and the conclusion that the strongest positive effect (28% lower risk) was observed for the daily intake of 3 cups of coffee [reference].

Additionally, that analysis demonstrates a linearly dependent correlation between caffeine dose and risk for disease. Daily increase of caffeine consumption by 200 mg resulted in a 17% lower risk for disease.

Just keep in mind that many of these studies are correlational only — meaning that people who drink these drinks also have a reduced risk of getting those diseases. But something else may also be going on, so maybe it’s not the coffee, the tea, or the cocoa?

All that said, even persnickety researchers agree that these drinks are probably great for you, and certainly not harmful. So, while we’re waiting on them to make up their minds, we might as well wrap our hands around a steaming cup of yumminess and enjoy!

Approximately every 3 minutes one person in the United States (US) is diagnosed with a blood cancer (source: https://bit.ly/2dcsntk). In other words, by the time you finish reading this post, another person will be diagnosed. And if it takes you 9 minutes to read through the “Close Look” below, someone else will have died from Leukemia, Lymphoma, or Myeloma.

These kinds of numbers throw the importance of the issue into sharp relief.

You’ve probably heard it said, “If you live long enough, you’ll get prostate cancer.” That’s because its onset is at least partially due to increased age, with the average age of diagnosis at 66 years old! (source: https://bit.ly/2krh8jL).

And now that we have a test for it (the PSA), it is detected far more often — even when it is small and still benign (source: https://bit.ly/2RbjAcm). In fact, most men diagnosed with this disease do not die from it. This doesn’t mean it’s not a serious disease because it is, only that context is needed when talking about this particular cancer.