THURSDAY, April 3, (News Locale) - Your grandma's advice to drink at least eight glasses of water to improve your skin tone and gain good health may have amounted to nothing, according to University of Pennsylvania researchers. 

Since a long time, drinking extra water has been touted as being the best way to reduce hunger and shed those unwanted pounds. Besides this, our ancestors considered water to be a cleanser to toxins in the body. No more, say Dr. Stanley Goldfarb and Dr. Dan Negoianu of the University of Pennsylvania.

The researchers are both kidney experts and stressed that unless a person is an athlete or resides in an unusually dry climate, there was no meaning in consuming those extra glasses of H2O.

The researchers arrived at this conclusion after reviewing prevailing medical literature on the health benefits of guzzling plenty of water. Published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, their paper says that there is no scientific basis for drinking eight glasses of 8 ounces (225 ml) of water a day.

According to the paper there were some myths associated with drinking extra water including:
* Reducing hunger
* Toxin excretion
* Improving skin tone
* Reducing frequency of headaches
* Improving function of organs

In an interview with Reuters Health Dr. Goldfarb reiterated that it was the kidneys that cleared the toxins from the body and this function was independent of the amount of water consumed. However Goldfarb also said that while there are no outward benefits, there are no adverse effects either to consuming extra water.

However anecdotal evidence does exist to support drinking extra water. A study of 20,000 healthy men and women in the May 1, 2002 American Journal of Epidemiology said that women who consumed more than five glasses of water each day were 41 percent less likely to suffer a fatal heart attack.

It must be emphasized that in certain disease conditions, increased fluid intake is a must and the above study only reviewed the benefits of drinking extra water for healthy people only. Furthermore plenty of fruits and vegetables like oranges, grapefruit, grapes, watermelon, carrots and tomatoes contain plenty of water. As indicated by the above study, these may be better choices from a nutritional point of view.
 

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