Water or Coke?

[Nini]

This is in today's CHI newsletter. I'm so glad I enjoy water!

Water or Coke?

WATER

1. 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated.
2. In 37% of Americans, the thirst mechanism is so weak that it is often mistaken for hunger.
3. Even MILD dehydration will slow down one's metabolism as much as 3%.
4. One glass of water will shut down midnight hunger pangs for almost 100% of the dieters studied in a University of Washington study.
5. Lack of water, the #1 trigger of daytime fatigue.
6. Preliminary research indicates that 8-10 glasses of water a day could significantly ease back joint pain for up to 80% of sufferers.
7. A mere 2% drop in body water can trigger fuzzy short-term memory, trouble with basic math, and difficulty focusing on the computer screen or on a printed page.
8. Drinking 5 glasses of water daily decreases the risk of colon cancer by 45%, plus it can slash the risk of breast cancer by 79%, and one is 50% less likely to develop bladder cancer.

And now for the properties of COKE

1. In many states (in the USA) the highway patrol carries two gallons of coke in the truck to remove blood from the highway after a car accident.
2. You can put a T-bone steak in a bowl of coke and it will be gone in two days
3. To clean a toilet: Pour a can of Coca-Cola into the toilet bowl and let the "real thing" sit for one hour, then flush clean. The citric acid in Coke removes stains from vitreous China.
4. To remove rust spots from chrome car bumpers: Rub the bumper with a rumpled-up piece of Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil dipped in Coca-Cola.
5. To clean corrosion from car battery terminals: Pour a can of Coca-Cola over the terminals to bubble away the corrosion.
6. To loosen a rusted bolt: Applying a cloth soaked in Coca-Cola to the rusted bolt for several minutes.
7. To bake a moist ham: Empty a can of Coca-Cola into the baking pan, wrap the ham in aluminum foil, and bake. Thirty minutes before the ham is finished, remove the foil, allowing the drippings to mix with the Coke for a sumptuous brown gravy.
8. To remove grease from clothes: Empty a can of coke into a load of greasy clothes, add detergent, and run through a regular cycle. The Coca-Cola will help loosen grease stains.
9. It will also clean road haze from your windshield.

For Your Information

1. The active ingredient in Coke is phosphoric acid. Its pH is 2.8. It will dissolve a nail in about 4 days. Phosphoric acid also leaches calcium from bones and is a major contributor to the rising increase in osteoporosis.
2. To carry Coca-Cola syrup (the concentrate) the commercial truck must use the Hazardous material place cards reserved for Highly corrosive materials.
3. The distributors of coke have been using it to clean the engines of their trucks for about 20 years!

Now the question is, would you like a coke or a glass of water?

[Revvell]

Excellent info. Thanks for posting.

Revvell

[honeybee joy]

LOL I need to send this to all of my pop drinking friends and family!

[gavinart]

Coke is evil.

[Cinnamon]

I'll be sending this off to soda drinking friends too, great info and thanks for posting it!

[Spectatrix]

Oh, how cute. They took two urban legend emails and shoved them together. While water is undoubtedly better for you than soda, many of these "facts" are either exaggerations or outright false.

http://www.snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/acid.asp

[rawpriestess]

this is the information from the snopes link just posted, I've heard these before, and thought they were pretty bogus, as I've tried disolving things in coke before.

NO, I don't drink Coke, I was always a Pepsi person, now I am a water person, but I do think checking things out at snopes is an excellent idea befrore we go believing everything we hear or read.




Eight Glasses

Claim: The average person needs to drink eight glasses of water per day to avoid being "chronically dehydrated."

Status: False.

Example: [Collected via e-mail, 2001]

75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated.

In 37% of Americans, the thirst mechanism is so weak that it is often mistaken for hunger.

Even mild dehydration will slow down one's metabolism as much as 3%.

One glass of water shut down midnight hunger pangs for almost 100% of the dieters studied in a U-Washington study.

Lack of water is the number one trigger of daytime fatigue.

Preliminary research indicates that 8-10 glasses of water a day could significantly ease back and joint pain for up to 80% of sufferers.

A mere 2% drop in body water can trigger fuzzy short-term memory, trouble with basic math, and difficulty focusing on the computer screen or on a printed page.

Drinking 5 glasses of water daily decreases the risk of colon cancer by 45%, plus it can slash the risk of breast cancer by 79%, and one is 50% less likely to develop bladder cancer.

Are you drinking a healthy amount of water each day?

Origins: "You need to drink 8 glasses of water per day to be healthy" is one of our more widely-known basic health tips. But do we really need to drink that much water on a daily basis?

In general, to remain healthy we need to take in enough water to replace the amount we lose daily through excretion, perspiration, and other bodily functions, but that amount can vary widely from person to person, based upon a variety of factors such as age, physical condition, activity level, and climate. The "8-10 glasses of water per day" is a rule of thumb, not an absolute minimum, and not of all of our water intake need come in the form of drinking water.

The origins of the 8-10 glasses per day figure remain elusive. As a Los Angeles Times article on the subject reported: Consider that first commandment of good health: Drink at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day. This unquestioned rule is itself a question mark. Most nutritionists have no idea where it comes from. "I can't even tell you that," says Barbara Rolls, a nutrition researcher at Pennsylvania State University, "and I've written a book on water."

Some say the number was derived from fluid intake measurements taken decades ago among hospital patients on IVs; others say it's less a measure of what people need than a convenient reference point, especially for those who are prone to dehydration, such as many elderly people.
The consensus seems to be that the average person loses ten cups (where one cup = eight ounces) of fluid per day but also takes in four cups of water from food, leaving a need to drink only six glasses to make up the difference, a bit short of the recommended eight to ten glasses per day. But according to the above-cited article, medical experts don't agree that even that much water is necessary: Kidney specialists do agree on one thing, however: that the 8-by-8 rule is a gross overestimate of any required minimum. To replace daily losses of water, an average-sized adult with healthy kidneys sitting in a temperate climate needs no more than one liter of fluid, according to Jurgen Schnermann, a kidney physiologist at the National Institutes of Health.

One liter is the equivalent of about four 8-ounce glasses. According to most estimates, that's roughly the amount of water most Americans get in solid food. In short, though doctors don't recommend it, many of us could cover our bare-minimum daily water needs without drinking anything during the day.
Certainly there are beneficial health effects attendant with being adequately hydrated, and some studies have seemingly demonstrated correlations between such variables as increased water intake and a decreased risk of colon cancer. But are 75% of Americans really "chronically dehydrated," as claimed in the anonymous e-mail quoted in our example? Many of the notions (and dubious "facts") presented in that e-mail seem to have been taken from the book Your Body's Many Cries for Water (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0962994235/ref=urbanlegendsrefeA/103-9938937-0087863), by Fereydoon Batmanghelidj. Dr. Batmanghelidj, an Iranian-born physician who now lives in the U.S., maintains that people "need to learn they're not sick, only thirsty,'' and that simply drinking more water "cures many diseases like arthritis, angina, migraines, hypertension and asthma." However, he arrived at his conclusions through reading, not research, and he claims that his ideas represent a "paradigm shift" that required him to self-publish his book lest his findings "be suppressed.''

Other doctors certainly take issue with his figures: [S]ome nutritionists insist that half the country is walking around dehydrated. We drink too much coffee, tea and sodas containing caffeine, which prompts the body to lose water, they say; and when we are dehydrated, we don't know enough to drink.

Can it be so? Should healthy adults really be stalking the water cooler to protect themselves from creeping dehydration?

Not at all, doctors say. "The notion that there is widespread dehydration has no basis in medical fact," says Dr. Robert Alpern, dean of the medical school at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

Doctors from a wide range of specialties agree: By all evidence, we are a well-hydrated nation. Furthermore, they say, the current infatuation with water as an all-purpose health potion — tonic for the skin, key to weight loss — is a blend of fashion and fiction and very little science.
Additionally, the idea that one must specifically drink water because the diuretic effects of caffeinated drinks such as coffee, tea, and soda actually produce a net loss of fluid appears to be erroneous. The average person retains about half to two-thirds the amount of fluid taken in by consuming these types of beverages, and those who regularly consume caffeinated drinks retain even more: Regular coffee and tea drinkers become accustomed to caffeine and lose little, if any, fluid. In a study published in the October issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, researchers at the Center for Human Nutrition in Omaha measured how different combinations of water, coffee and caffeinated sodas affected the hydration status of 18 healthy adults who drink caffeinated beverages routinely.

"We found no significant differences at all," says nutritionist Ann Grandjean, the study's lead author. "The purpose of the study was to find out if caffeine is dehydrating in healthy people who are drinking normal amounts of it. It is not."

The same goes for tea, juice, milk and caffeinated sodas: One glass provides about the same amount of hydrating fluid as a glass of water. The only common drinks that produce a net loss of fluids are those containing alcohol — and usually it takes more than one of those to cause noticeable dehydration, doctors say.
The best general advice (keeping in mind that there are always exceptions) is to rely upon your normal senses. If you feel thirsty, drink; if you don't feel thirsty, don't drink unless you want to. The exhortation that we all need to satisfy an arbitrarily rigid rule about how much water we must drink every day was aptly skewered in a letter by a Los Angeles Times reader: Although not trained in medicine or nutrition, I intuitively knew that the advice to drink eight glasses of water per day was nonsense. The advice fully meets three important criteria for being an American health urban legend: excess, public virtue, and the search for a cheap "magic bullet."


Claim: The acids in Coca-Cola make it harmful to drink.

Status: False.

Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2001]









1. In many states the highway patrol carries two gallons of Coke in the truck to remove blood from the highway after a car accident.

2. You can put a T-bone steak in a bowl of coke and it will be gone in two days.

3. To clean a toilet: Pour a can of Coca-Cola into the toilet bowl . . . Let the "real thing" sit for one hour, then flush clean.

4. The citric acid in Coke removes stains from vitreous china.

5. To remove rust spots from chrome car bumpers: Rub the bumper with a crumpled-up piece of Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil dipped in Coca-Cola.

6. To clean corrosion from car battery terminals: Pour a can of Coca-Cola over the terminals to bubble away the corrosion.

7. To loosen a rusted bolt: Applying a cloth soaked in Coca-Cola to the rusted bolt for several minutes.

8. To bake a moist ham: Empty a can of Coca-Cola into the baking pan;rap the ham in aluminum foil, and bake. Thirty minutes before the ham is finished, remove the foil, allowing the drippings to mix with the Coke for a sumptuous brown gravy.

9. To remove grease from clothes: Empty a can of coke into a load of greasy clothes, add detergent, And run through a regular cycle. The Coca-Cola will help loosen grease stains. It will also clean road haze from your windshield.

FYI:

1. The active ingredient in Coke is phosphoric acid. It's pH is 2.8. It will dissolve a nail in about 4 days.

2. To carry Coca Cola syrup (the concentrate) the commercial truck must use the Hazardous material place cards reserved for Highly Corrosive materials.

3. The distributors of coke have been using it to clean the engines of their trucks for about 20 years! Drink up! No joke. Think what coke and other soft drinks do to your teeth on a daily basis. A tooth will dissolve in a cup of coke in 24-48 hours.






many of the entries above are just simple household tips involving Coca-Cola, as provided by Joey Green in his 1995 book Polish Your Furniture with Panty Hose and on his web site (http:///). That you can cook and clean with Coke is relatively meaningless from a safety standpoint — you can use a wide array of common household substances (including water) for the same purposes; that fact alone doesn't necessarily make them dangerous to ingest. Nearly all carbonated soft drinks contain carbonic (http:///) acid, which is moderately useful for tasks such as removing stains and dissolving rust deposits (although plain soda water is much better for some of these purposes than Coca-Cola or other soft drinks, as it doesn't leave a sticky sugar residue behind). Carbonic acid is relatively weak, however, and people have been drinking carbonated water for many years with no detrimental effects.

The rest of the claims offered here are specious. Coca-Cola does contain small amounts of citric acid and phosphoric acid; however, all the insinuations about the dangers these acids might pose to people who drink Coca-Cola ignore a simple concept familiar to any first-year chemistry student: concentration. Coca-Cola contains less citric acid than orange juice does, and the concentration of phosphoric acid in Coke is far too small (a mere 11 to 13 grams per gallon of syrup, or about 0.20 to 0.30 per cent of the total formula) to dissolve a steak, a tooth (http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tooth.asp), or a nail overnight. (Much of the item will dissolve eventually, but after a day or two you'll still have most of the tooth, a whole nail, and one very soggy t-bone.)

Besides, the gastric acid in your stomach is much stronger than any of the acids in Coca-Cola, so the Coca-Cola is harmless.

The next time you're stopped by a highway patrolman, try asking him if he's ever scrubbed blood stains off a highway with Coca-Cola (or anything else). If you're lucky, by the time he stops laughing he'll have forgotten about the citation he was going to give you.

[rawpriestess]

thanks for posting the snopes links to these statements.

[Janet]

I was just "snoping" it too.

While I would never suggest Coke or soda is good in any way, I'll agree with my esteemed collegue :D that one should take a minute to click on snopes.com to verify things. An incredibly helpful source of information.

Its amazing, the emails and things that make the rounds on the internet. I can have a bigger penis, mortgage my house, help a nigerian prince and get a degree all in the same day from the comfort of my own home. ;)


Water water water water water....three cheers for water!

[Spectatrix]

Its amazing, the emails and things that make the rounds on the internet. I can have a bigger penis, mortgage my house, help a nigerian prince and get a degree all in the same day from the comfort of my own home. ;)
lol! :D

I used to fall for some hoax emails (mainly the "email tracker" ones), but I've since wisened up. Whenever I receive an email that seems iffy or cliche, I mosey on over to snopes.com. If I don't find it there, usually googling a phrase from the email reveals a page or two debunking it.

[rawpriestess]

I do drink water, and I don't drink Coke or any thing in a bottle anymore.

Alas all those years of coffee and Pepsi, but I am a wiser human now, so water is my choice,and well, okay, almond milkshakes too. LOL

But I think probably the energy behind this original post was good, water YES, coke NO, basically, that is the jist of this,and I agree.

[Spectatrix]

I do drink water, and I don't drink Coke or any thing in a bottle anymore.

Alas all those years of coffee and Pepsi, but I am a wiser human now, so water is my choice,and well, okay, almond milkshakes too. LOL

But I think probably the energy behind this original post was good, water YES, coke NO, basically, that is the jist of this,and I agree.
Oh yes, I totally agree! It's just that urban legend things are a bit of a pet peeve of mine, so I wanted to point out that the *specifics* of those list weren't necessarily accurate.

I used to be a Coca-Cola JUNKIE! I'd literally carry around 2-liter bottles of it and drink straight from those. Shortly after I stopped drinking soda, essentially cold-turkey (I was 17 at the time), I moved to a different town and was bicycling about 3-5 miles a day going to and from campus. With that and losing the junk calories from soda, I lost about 30 pounds that summer.

And now... well, I've recently realized that I probably drink too MUCH water. I have a 32-oz. bottle that I carry around and I realized that I drink 3-4 bottles of water (so 12-16 cups) every day. So I'm trying to cut back, realizing that the excess water is probably putting unnecessary stress on my kidneys.

[Janet]

Kidney specialists do agree on one thing, however: that the 8-by-8 rule is a gross overestimate of any required minimum. To replace daily losses of water, an average-sized adult with healthy kidneys sitting in a temperate climate needs no more than one liter of fluid, according to Jurgen Schnermann, a kidney physiologist at the National Institutes of Health.

http://www.snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp


;)