Dehydration and Metabolic Health — Ultrahuman
Written by Abhay Puri
Summary
Water makes up over half of your body weight- percent in women and 60 to 65 percent in men. Since water is involved in almost every biological function in the body, it is no surprise that consuming sufficient amounts of water is the first step in ensuring that your metabolism works at an optimal level. Let’s understand the role of cellular hydration in our metabolic health.
What is dehydration?
We commonly understand dehydration as a lack of enough water. But medically, dehydration is the condition caused by the loss of too much fluid from the body. Hydration is one of the most important processes in your body, simply because it is essential for survival. Every single part of our body, specifically the tissues, cells, and organs, need water to function properly. Water delivers nutrients to cells and helps remove toxins and metabolic waste from the cells.
When you lose more fluids than you take in, and the body does not have enough fluids to perform its normal processes, dehydration occurs. Fluids are released from our body through sweating, urine, defecation and breathing, making it important to replace those fluids. Apart from drinking water, one of the ways to improve hydration would be to eat foods with a high water content, such as cucumber, celery or watermelon. (an electrolyte) helps cells retain water, and foods like lentils, kidney beans, apricots, banana, spinach, salmon, broccoli, cantaloupe, which are high in potassium, are ideal to include in your diet.
What is metabolism?
Metabolism is a series of chemical processes in each cell transforming the calories we eat into fuel to keep us alive. These processes sustain life, everyday functioning, and include breaking down food and drink to energy and building or repairing our bodies.
These chemical processes comprise anabolism and catabolism. Anabolism is a series of chemical reactions that produce complex molecules from smaller units and allow the body to produce new cells and maintain all its tissues. Catabolism is the breaking down of molecules, usually from food, and releasing energy. These reactions break down substances such as starches and turn them into glucose. This energy is used for physical activity and anabolic functions.
Although water occurs naturally in every cell, organ and tissue in your body, the magnitude of its role varies considerably from system to system . Water makes up close to 90 percent of lung tissue and more than 80 percent of the blood that carries nutrients throughout your body. Lean muscle tissue consists of approximately 75 percent water, while brain tissue has only slightly less water at about 70 percent. At the low end of the scale in terms of water content are body fat, which has about 10 percent water, and bone, in which water accounts for roughly 22 percent of total weight. Given this, it should hardly come as a surprise to learn that dehydration can compromise the efficiency of most body functions, including metabolism.
To continue reading, click this link for the full version: https://blog.ultrahuman.com/blog/dehydration-and-metabolic-health
References:
10)http://www.sci-news.com/medicine/water-metabolic-syndrome-09160.html
Originally published at https://blog.ultrahuman.com on November 2, 2021.
