Did you know drinking too much water can be fatal and can lead you to suffer from severe conditions? Learn more about it here.
Overdoing anything is not good and the same rule applies for drinking too much of water as well. While doctors often advice to drink water adequately for being healthy, excessive drinking of water may lead to severe health conditions which we tend to overlook most of the time. In case you are not aware of water intoxication and you always have a water bottle as your daily companion and you drink water even when you are not thirsty, you should learn about the harmful impacts of drinking extra water.
Drinking too much of water brings down sodium level: Hyponatremia indicates a decrease in sodium levels below 136 mmol/litre blood serum which is a result of quick overhydration. Maintaining a healthy balance of sodium in your body is important for efficient functioning of several organs. With a sharp fall of serum sodium levels in your body due to over drinking of water, you may feel nauseous, disoriented, fatigued and get a headache. Worse, it might be fatal in severe cases.
It swells up your cells: With a drop-in sodium level, water enters your body cells by the natural process of osmosis, thereby swelling them up including those in the brain. This can be threatening as it can cause severe damage to muscle tissues, organs and even your brain.
Over-drinking can bring down your potassium ions: Over-hydration due to excessive drinking of water can bring down the potassium ions in your body and lead to a condition called hypokalemia. It hits the balance between intracellular and extracellular potassium ions. Studies show that even 1% change in potassium ion distribution can lead to 50% alteration in plasma potassium ion distribution. This striking change can cause severe diarrhea and continuous sweating.
Excessive water strikes your brain hard: Hyponatremia or low sodium content in blood bloats up your brain cells which can result in speech impairment, disorientation, walking instability, psychosis and even death.
It puts excessive burden on your heart and kidneys: Too much of water intake increases the volume of blood in your body, thereby putting a lot of pressure on your heart and blood vessels that might hamper blood circulation and at severe cases, heart might just cease to function. It can even drain your kidneys out. While your kidneys can filter around one litre of water per hour from your body, to filter out water beyond this level, your kidneys must work overtime to maintain homeostasis.
How much water should you drink in a day?
There are several factors that determine your intake of body fluid like age, sex, medical conditions and daily activity, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. Women should take in 2.7 litres of total water from all food and beverages (including the drinking water they consume) and for men the daily intake of drinking water along with water from food and other beverages should be 3.7 litres, says the National Academies of Sciences Engineering Medicine. Your daily water intake should be restricted to maximum 3 litres.
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