Water is necessary to regulate body temperature and to provide the means for nutrients to travel to all your organs.
Water also transports oxygen to your cells, removes waste, and protects your joints and organs.
A good estimate is to take your body weight in pounds and divide that number in half.
That gives you the number of ounces of water per day that you need to drink.
For example, if you weigh 160 pounds, you should drink at least 80 ounces of water per day.
If you exercise, you should drink another eight ounce glass of water for every 20 minutes you are active. I
f you drink alcohol, you should drink at least an equal amount of water.
“Drinking water cooled to 37.4 degrees may lead to a slight increase in calorie expenditure for an hour after you quaff it, a study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism finds. (The cool liquid forces your body to work to maintain its internal temperature.) And a glass before a meal—chilled or not—may curb your appetite slightly, helping cut calories.
And maybe protect your heart. When a National Institutes of Health–funded study tracked 34,000 people for 14 years, it found that men who downed five to six glasses of water a day were nearly 70 percent less likely to die of a heart attack. The correlation wasn’t as strong in women, but “it’s a very intriguing finding.
We are now following 96,000 men and women in another study and will see if the preliminary results hold.”
