water: the fantastic stupendous splendiferous magnificent miracle cure!

Yes. She is flawless.
No. It isn't because she drinks 8 eight-ounce glasses of water a day.





















I have continually found Snopes.com to be a trustworthy source of myth-busting. When concerned loved ones emailed pleas to postpone my trip to Thailand, after seeing "unbelievable" photos of the 2004 tsunami hitting the coast, I was able to dispel their worries with Snopes. When fear-mongering email forwards frightened my friends with "inconceivable" stories of car thieves rendering their victims unconscious with ether-filled perfume bottles in grocery store parking lots, it was Snopes that helped me to set their minds at ease. Snopes has continually come through for me as a source for critical analysis of rumors. From them I will even consider an argument I don't necessarily want to hear:

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."

Darn. Not since the Thighmaster; not since the Atkins' Diet; not since Kirstie Alley lost 200 lbs by dancing all day to Sir-Mix-a-Lot had I truly believed in the one-stop beauty shop. My faith had been restored when I jumped on the water bandwagon! Drink 64 ounces of water each day and your skin will glow, your body will tighten and people will like you a whole lot more? "Heck! I can do that", I said. That transparent liquid was flowing through my body like the Fraser River. Now this.

Ah well. Somewhere inside I probably knew it was too good to be true. Though, I'm not going to stop drinking water altogether. I do find that if I'm feeling tired, a glass of water energizes me just as well as a cup of coffee (perhaps even better, because it isn't followed by that agitated twitching thing I get when brimming with caffeine). I suppose I don't have much use for all the extra sugar that I imbibe in the average fruit juice or soft drink. Water costs quite a bit less than most other beverages, and I enjoy saving money. And, when I get a headache, a glass of water generally subdues the pain (particularly when the headache is induced by beverages of the more costly variety). Also, a few glasses of water taste really good after an intensive hike or a hard bicycle ride. I guess from now on, I just won't bother lining up my 64 shot glasses each morning.