In hot weather, should we drink copious amounts of water even if we're not thirsty?

Even without considering the scientific evidence related to this essential question, one would have to believe it remarkable that the human species would exist if thirst were inadequate to guide drinking during exercise. Martin D. Hoffman M.D., et al.

It may seem like a small matter: who cares if one drinks too much water to avoid dehydration? No one ever died from too much water, right? Wrong. But there's more going on here: if drinking a lot of water during hot weather is not a good idea, if it can, in some cases be dangerous, why are so many reporters getting the story wrong?

I read newspapers and watch television news to learn. And I expect the stuff that I learn to be right, to be checked for accuracy by professional reporters, professional fact-gatherer. When I discover a reporter did little more than unquestioningly repeat what he or she had been told, possibly because it was a good story, I feel cheated. Information in newspapers should be vetted; it should be accurate; it should be right.

There are lots of myths out there. There's even a successful television program based on questioning these stories. It's amazing how many stories are revealed by MythBusters to be just that: stories.

Which bring us to the question of how much and of what should we be drinking during hot spells. Do you believe the news stories? Do you drink a lot of water without waiting until you feel thirsty. Do you try to belt back eight glasses of water a day?

If you question the accepted story, a reporter might respond by sending you a link to Oregon Occupational Safety and Health. The OOSH claims in a hot environment one should drink water frequently, even when not thirsty.

It may seem straight forward but wait. In response, you can site the Loyola Stritch School of Medicine:

In recent years, at least 14 deaths of marathon runners, football players and other athletes have been attributed to exercise-associated hyponatremia, a condition that results from drinking too much water or sports drinks.

But there’s an easy way to prevent hyponatremia, according to Loyola University Medical Center sports medicine physician James Winger, MD. Drink only when you’re thirsty.

Whom do you believe? And why should you even have to ask? Some years ago, I got very ill during a trip to the Sahara desert in southern Tunisia. I followed all the hydration advice. I made sure I drank even when not thirsty. And I got damn sick. When I got home my doctors told me I may well have had hyponatremia or water intoxication.

Since then, the doctors I have talked to have told me much of the advice surrounding the drinking of fluids during heatwaves is wrong. The media reports are often urban myths, I'm told. My doctors have warned me, excessive water intake can be dangerous for folk like, folk with a heart condition.

They remind me that I get water from many sources. Vegetables are often mostly water. For instance, cauliflower is about 92% water. If you drink coffee, I like a brew made from a mix of caffeinated and
decaffeinated, then each cup of coffee is equal to a eight ounces of water. And yes, the warning about not drinking coffee during hot weather is another myth but I'll leave that for another post.

Drinking to quell thirst is the correct way to go in almost all situations. A conference in California found there was an overemphasis on high fluid consumption. Athletes should be advised of the risks associated with over drinking. Decreasing the number of fluid stations at long distance running events might be counter intuitive but it might be necessary to reduce the number of incidences of exercise associated hyponatremia (EAH).

And here is where it gets interesting: dissemination of appropriate drinking advice alone has been shown to reduce the incidence of EAH. It's time journalists spent some time getting this story right. It should not be that hard for a professional fact-gatherer, professional story detective, a finder, a discerner and teller of truths.

And then these journalists can employ these investigative methods, honed tracking down the truth when it comes to water consumption during heatwaves, to uncovering the truths going unrevealed in other, more important, stories. Look out Donald Trump question-asking journalists could soon be on your trail.
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Would you like to read more? Try this article:  Is Drinking to Thirst Adequate to Appropriately Maintain Hydration Status During Prolonged Endurance Exercise? Yes.

Do you need to drink 8 glasses of water a day?

Journalists should not be storytellers

Recently, I read a tweet from a former newspaper editor who now expounds on journalism to students taking his class at a nearby college. He tweeted that he was training young people to be storytellers. I replied: Journalists are not storytellers but reporters.

He disagreed. A story lies at the heart of what a reporter tries to convey, he tweeted. Who's right?

According to Lee Wilkins, professor and communications department chair at Wayne State University in Detroit, faculty emeritus and curator’s teaching professor at the University of Missouri:

Journalists are not storytellers but reporters.

According to Wilkins, a local government reporter before she began teaching: "When we started thinking of ourselves as storytellers was when we ran into a problem." The problem? Journalism changed from an "objective process" to one focused on "storytelling." Wilkins believes this emphasis on story over reporting entered American newsrooms in the 1980s. And I concur.

Sadly, when a journalist puts the story first, all too often it means facts become subservient to the story. I can give a solid example of this but, if I do, I risk losing you. You will immediately know I am wrong because you have seen and heard the story on television, maybe on 60 Minutes, or CBC Marketplace. You have read it in your local paper and in magazines. You know the truth. You know the story. And I will have a damn near impossible time changing your mind.

The story? The threat posed by the urea formaldehyde foam insulation or UFFI was created by the media. Before you quit reading, think about this:

Source: The London Free Press, Saturday Homes Section

When homes with UFFI were tested, the tested homes were found, on average, to have formaldehyde levels only slightly less than that of homes of similar age without UFFI. Also, there was no UFFI caused damage to house framing nor were other UFFI-caused defects found.

Why was the true story not told until years after the damage had been done? Because stories, good stories have legs and when told by good storytellers, by journalists, such stories are hard to resist. I believe it was 60 Minutes in the States that originally broke the erroneous scare story. Then CBC's Marketplace, not to be outdone, did their take on the same story. And the UFFI wildfire was lit and fanned. Newspapers across North American felt forced to run UFFI stories as well.

I covered a lot of UFFI stories and I am ashamed of the part I played in promoting that story. I met a lot of people, many seniors, who had massive amounts of their life savings tied up in their homes and the media-spread myth destroyed much of the equity that had accumulated in the family home. All too sad. Now, there is a story. Will it displace the mythical stories? I doubt it. Marketplace is still bragging about their major contribution to the original UFFI coverage.

Marketplace is proud of the part it played in the banning of urea formaldehyde foam insulation.

As I edited this, I wondered if scare stories involving UFFI were still being printed. It took but a moment to turn up this story from the Cornwall-Standard Freeholder on "toxic spray foam insulation."

I shake my head and a feeling of shame washes over me. I had a hand in pushing this story and the story is still influencing decision making. This is despite the fact that, and this is from the Freeholder story, "Canada is one of the only countries in the world that bans the use of UFFI . . . it (is) being used widely in many other countries including the United States."

If the reporter every decides to focus on that last sentence and explain why a "toxic" foam is only toxic in Canada, the reporter might have an award winning story and an easy one to tell.

According to CMHC, "UFFI is not a source of over-exposure to formaldehyde . . . Houses with UFFI show no higher formaldehyde levels than those without it."

So, are high levels of formaldehyde ever found in homes in Canada today? Not often but, again according to CMHC, "in new or other well-sealed houses, significant indoor formaldehyde levels may still occur (thanks to) new carpets." If the folk in the justice building are worried, maybe they should concentrate on new carpeting and not decades-old insulation.

How not to report a story: The Current goes for false balance with negative overtones

Weight Watchers promotes healthy eating. The accent is not on weight loss.

The Current on CBC radio, featuring host Anna Maria Tremonti, recently claimed to be examining the offer of six weeks of free Weight Watchers memberships to teens between the ages of 13 and 17 this summer..

It was not much of an examination. To learn more, I googled the offer, but I failed to find the original announcement. It would have been nice if CBC had thought to post a link.

Weight Watchers apparently stated right up front that this offer was not about dieting and not about weight loss. No, Weight Watchers was offering to help teens develop the healthy eating habits so necessary at there time of life. And let's make one thing clear: today, this is very important. There is a serious problem with how our kids are learning to eat.

For the most part, the CBC and Anna Maria Tremonti ignored this very important and very believable claim by WW. I can understand why; there was a time that I, too, believed Weight Watchers was just a dieting program, a weight loss program.

Then, in 2010 I had a heart event that changed my life forever. I suffered a V-tach event, my heart went into overdrive hitting 300 beats per minute and I was rushed to the hospital. There, doctors placed defibrillator paddles on my chest and jolted my heart back into sinus rhythm. I now have an ICD/pacemaker in my chest. ICD stands for implantable cardioverter defibrillator. If my heart rate heads for the stratosphere again, and it has, my ICD shocks it back into its proper rhythm.

Roasted Madras Curry Cauliflower with Raita

I take oodles of meds and watch my diet carefully. At one point, I weighed almost 220 pounds. Not good. My doctors told me to get my weight down. Something under 170 pounds would be a fine goal.

My stroke doctor gave me a package of recipes and told me not to think of this not as a diet but as a whole new way of eating and quite possibly a better, more enjoyable, way of eating.

Coincidentally my wife was starting Weight Watchers at the same time. It was immediately clear that her diet and mine were quite similar. We embarked on the Weight Watchers approach to dining well together.

We counted points, don't ask, and slowly we lost weight. It took a lot of months, more than a year, but I got down to 165 pounds and I've stayed close to this weight ever since. And this success is, in no small measure, thanks to the Weight Watchers program. We didn't feel we had to cutback on our food but instead we expanded our food choices. We learned to eat wisely and well.

Following my doctors' and Weight Watchers instructions, we have discovered  a whole new way of eating, just as promised. I wish I'd been offered this program when I was a teen. I've always loved food and I find our new approach to dining is for food lovers.

So, how did CBC handle this story. Well, the broadcaster almost immediately cut to an interview with a holistic health coach, trained at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. And what exactly is the IIN? I googled it and learned many call the online school a diploma mill.

The accusations must be awfully common as the IIN defends itself by stating clearly online that they are not a scam. They point out that much of the criticism of the school is of the strawman variety. Their health coach graduates are not registered dietitians and do not claim to be. A search of the U.S. Dep't of Education database confirms the IIN is telling the truth: its graduates are not registered dietitians.

There is a story here. The Weight Watchers offer deserves examination. That said, I don't find the debate, if not manufactured by the CBC, certainly promoted by it, to be the correct angle. Journalists can do better. I know. I worked for almost four decades in the media.

This is an important matter and our public broadcaster let us down. Just today I saw an article in The Harvard Gazette: a "comprehensive national strategy (is needed) across all relevant segments of society to prevent a looming public health disaster." This was written for Americans but the problem is also prevalent in Canada. In my lifetime, obesity among the young has increased two, possibly even three fold in Canada.

The CBC should have sent reporters to numerous Weight Watcher centres across the country. They could have learned whether or not a consistent approach is going to be taken by all WW leaders. As the Harvard article points out:

We have deep knowledge of the biological drivers of obesity, which include:

• poor diet quality
• excessive sedentary time
• inadequate physical activity
• stress
• leep deprivation
• perinatal factors
• and probably environmental endocrine-disrupting chemicals

What is lacking is an effective strategy to address these drivers with sufficient intensity, consistency, and persistence, according to David Ludwig, professor in Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and founding director of the Optimal Weight for Life program at Boston Children’s Hospital.

CBC had a chance to be part of the solution; they chose to be part of the problem.

Fake News (Tweets) and CBC Ontario Morning

Donald Trump likes to call the mainstream media "fake news." He's wrong but that doesn't mean the MSM can ignore his charge. Those in the media must take those words to heart and attempt to never lend any credence to Trump's accusation.

Sadly, almost all of us have had a contact with the media that went poorly. I have often met folk who have told me that a story with which they were closely associated was reported incorrectly. They may have even talked directly to the reporter behind the story. By the time the reporter condensed the story to a sound bite for television or radio, or boiled the information down to an eight-inch story in the daily paper, the story was corrupted, changed, shaded with error.

Check out this tweet from CBC Ontario Morning:

It makes the claim that giving a child "a taste" or "even a sip" of alcohol is "not a good idea." It is important to note the shortness of this tweet. No attempt has been made to convey the complexities of the story.

This is a story that has been reported in the past and sometimes it has been reported very poorly. That said, let's cut right to the chase.

New Orleans magazine reported on this story. Allow me to quote a paragraph from that article.

“First sipping isn’t an early indicator of issues that would be of concern to parents,” wrote one of the psychologists in an August 2014 press release about an updated look at the same group of children. They showed that taking the first sip before age 12 correlated with a family’s permissiveness towards alcohol rather than predicting that a child was slated for abuse problems in young adulthood. There is no evidence that earlier sippers have more alcohol dependence, delinquent behavior, marijuana smoking, misuse of other illicit drugs, risky sexual behavior, car crashes or interruption of planned schooling than the late sippers."

If you want to stop reading now, you can. But, for those who want to read more, please, read on as I take a look at what some of the studies actually say:

For instance: adolescents who have consumed at least a full glass of alcohol or more are significantly different from adolescents who have simply had a sip of alcohol. And one might ask what the researchers define as a sip. But the important point is that adolescents benefiting from greater parental discipline, living with better rule enforcement and more comprehensive monitoring and enjoying positive family relations are less likely to have consumed a full glass of alcohol. 

And just how extensive is the problem of children consuming full glasses of wine, similar what is shown in the picture accompanying the tweet? According to the studies I found, it is not as extensive as we might expect. Many children consume no alcohol at all: almost 40% at 11 years of age have never tried alcohol and almost 60% have had only a sip or less. The little girl shown represents a little more than 2% of 11 year olds. If she is less than 11, she represents an even smaller proportion of children from her age group. Perhaps we should pity the little girl pictured. She appears to need improved parental monitoring. Going by the studies that I have found, there is a good chance her parents are not even aware she is engaging in a toast.

Screen grab: story discusses taking an early sip of alcohol.

So, if sipping, and only sipping, has not been implicated in future dangerous behaviour, why are we even discussing sipping. The answer is simple: the children who have had only a sip of alcohol and those who have had a full glass or more, have been combined in some reports into a single category. The whole issue has been muddied.

It appears there may be only one study explicitly investigating sipping of wine and beer in early adolesecence and that is Children’s Introduction to Alcohol Use: Sips and Tastes. And what was the conclusion of this study?

A young child’s sipping/tasting of alcohol . . . appears NOT to be an early indicator of the likelihood of future problem behavior.

It actually appears that parents are doing a fine job of keep alcohol away from their kids. There may well be no problem here. Most children only get to sip alcohol but once or twice, implying that this was opportunistic behavior rather than an attempt by parents to introduce their children’s to alcohol use. It may not be the sip that is the problem but the parental attitude.

Bolstering this interpretation is this fact: fully a third of the mothers and over half of the fathers did not even know that their child had ever had a sip or a taste of alcohol. Most sippers either sneaked their solitary sip when their parents were not watching or were given the single sip on the sly by someone such as an older brother or sister.

The public deserves better than this tweet. Our media must take advantage of every one of the 280 characters Twitter tweets offer. Teenage abuse of alcohol is a problem. The link between a young child having had a taste or a sip and having problems as a teen with alcohol is a link that researchers are still disputing.

Lastly, here is a link to the Lancet article that has been causing the recent stir. Association of parental supply of alcohol with adolescent drinking, alcohol-related harms, and alcohol use disorder symptoms: a prospective cohort study.

The Lancet article has a lot of negative things to say about parents supplying drinks to their children and this should come as no surprise. What is interesting is that the article reports under "Findings":

"Parental supply of alcohol was not significantly associated with the odds of reporting symptoms of either alcohol abuse or dependence, compared with no supply from any source."

I have to admit, I found the above statement out of place in the context of the Lancet article considered in its entirety. Putting all the info together is the job of the media, the job of the journalist. Sadly, all too often, the media handles complexity very poorly. (I would guess that Ontario Morning did not spend a number of days, possibly weeks, putting together their take on the research into underage drinking. It's an interesting story and I bet that it was sent to air as quickly as possible.)

Maybe in a future broadcast, Ontario Morning can investigate the role of the media in underage drinking. Yes, in researching this post I came across research claiming the depiction of alcohol in movies, on television and in social media can be linked to early alcohol abuse. This sounds like a great scare story. 

I can see the tweet now: "Let your child watch CBC dramas? We reveal why this is not a good idea, not even a glimpse. Research shows it could lead to alcohol abuse."

The above is a screen grab from the Huffington Post, Australian Edition.