We often mention how drinking water provides a number of benefits, including weight loss, better skin, improved digestion, and boosting your metabolism. It also will help you to avoid dehydration, a condition in which the body loses more water than it takes in.
What Causes Dehydration?
Dehydration can be triggered by different factors, including:
- Illnesses that cause vomiting, diarrhea or increased sweat production
- Prolonged exposure to hot weather
- Vigorous exercise
- Certain medications
- Lack of water intake on a regular basis
When you’re dehydrated, your body will often react negatively. Indeed, dehydration can be the cause of a number of surprising issues. Here are 5 reasons to avoid the condition if you can:
Reason No. 1 to Avoid Dehydration: Bad Breath
As mentioned above, water keeps your body healthy overall and specifically contributes to oral health. Dehydration, you might be surprised to learn, can be a cause of bad breath in particular. Here’s how:
- Lack of saliva: When you don’t drink enough water, or when you don’t have enough in your body, you’ll fail to produce a healthy amount of saliva, and end up with a dry mouth. This gives bacteria more of a chance to grow, resulting in unpleasant odors on your tongue or from your teeth.
- Lack of rinsing your teeth: When you drink water, you’re essentially rinsing your mouth, washing away bacteria and food particles. If you don’t do that regularly, the bacteria and/or leftover food can cause odors, leading to bad breath.
Reason No. 2 to Avoid Dehydration: Weight Gain
Drinking lots of water can help you lose weight because water helps to make you feel “full” and it boosts your body’s metabolism. The opposite is also true: Dehydration can lead to weight gain, causing your body to hold onto fat. (A dehydrated body can lead to issues burning fat, and the tendency to snack and feel hungry all the time.) That’s why, for many people, just increasing your own water intake will spark weight loss.
Reason No. 3 to Avoid Dehydration: Migraines and Other Headaches
Migraines can be triggered by many things – emotional stress, hormonal changes, flashing lights, and even chemical preservatives in food. And while scientists still haven’t figured out the exact connection, it’s been established that migraines or other headaches have also been linked to dehydration.
One current theory is that, when dehydration occurs, fluid flows out of the brain. Scientists believe this may stimulate the pain receptors in the brain’s lining, called meninges, causing a migraine. Another possibility is that patients may have underlying conditions that depend on proper fluid balance, and dehydration worsens these conditions.
Finally, the connection between migraines and dehydration may also happen in reverse – you might experience a migraine and become dehydrated because nausea leads to decreased fluid intake. Unfortunately, this particular form of dehydration can make you more sensitive to pain, which means existing migraine symptoms can be exacerbated.
Reason No. 4 to Avoid Dehydration: Fatigue
Nearly all of the body’s systems depend on water to function properly. In terms of energy levels, water provides the necessary lubricants for proper digestion (so you can process the energy from food), helps your heart pump blood more effectively, and boosts the transportation of oxygen and other essential nutrients to your cells. Water also affects your brain. In particular, one famous recent study from a decade ago involved researchers who induced mild dehydration in small groups of men and women and then put them through testing. Both groups experienced fatigue as a result of dehydration. Researchers also noted that dehydration affected women more severely, as they experienced “degraded moods” and an inability to concentrate at higher levels than men.
Reason No. 5 to Avoid Dehydration: Frequent Illnesses/Other Physical Issues
Your immune system is no different from any other internal system – if you throw off the balance of something such as water levels, it will likely affect your ability to ward off illnesses, very colds, stomach bugs, or other viruses that get passed around each season. Drinking more water helps to boost your immune system, meaning fewer sick days.
Dehydration also can cause a number of other physical issues: muscle cramps, urinary problems, dizziness, and lot more.
Conclusion
In general, your body doesn’t function well when you don’t drink enough water. One root cause of this might due to the fact that you’re not confident in the water from your tap. Improving your water quality may help you drink more water, allowing you to avoid dehydration and leading to better health overall. Why not get started with a free water quality analysis from us? We’ll send a technician to your home and test your water for contaminants and hard water particles and then get you the results fast. We’ll then recommend the right water quality solution for you. It’s that easy. Contact us today to get started.