883: Hydration: The Most Important Thing We Can Do to Prevent Chronic Disease With Dana Cohen

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and this episode is all about hydration and how this is the most important thing we can do to prevent chronic disease and early aging. And I’m here with Dana Cohen who literally wrote the book on this in Quench and I’ve talked to her before. I linked to the book in the show notes, but she has worked side-by-side with the late Dr. Atkins and is a true pioneer in the field of integrative medicine. She has specifically gone deep on the topics of hydration and also fueling the body with enough nutrition, which we’re going to talk about in another episode. She served on the board of directors of the American College for the Advancement of Medicine, which is the leading voice in integrative medicine. She’s currently an advisor to their board of directors, and she has served as the program director for their yearly conferences, which train over 1,500 master-level healthcare providers. She has lectured all over the world on many, many topics, and her first book, Quench, was published by Hachette Media and has gotten a cult following of devotees and really tackles the important topic of hydration, which we talk about today. I learned a lot in this episode and got some practical tips that I can implement, even though I felt like I had this already kind of dialed in, I learned a lot. I know you will too. So let’s jump in. Dana, welcome back. Thank you for being here again.

Dana: Thank you so much for having me again.

Katie: I’m very excited to reconnect and especially in this shorter episode format, because this will let us go deep on a couple of topics that I think are really relevant to the audience and to really kind of work into some action steps and key takeaways that can really help the listeners. So we’re going to get to go in a couple of different directions. In this first one, I would love to really delve into the topic of hydration and all that kind of falls under that umbrella. And then for everyone listening, stay tuned because we’re going to record another episode that really goes deep on your new book and the idea of fueling up and how our blenders can help us avoid ultra-processed food and really kind of increase our nutrients and so much else. So for this first episode, I know we covered this in a much older episode, which I will link to in the show notes, but kind of walk us through some high level points of hydration and maybe some things we tend to get wrong in this area.

Dana: Okay. So first of all, hydration is the one thing that I’m a real stickler in my practice for, meaning diet stuff, I’m really all about the 80-20 rule. Hydration, it’s something you need to stay on top of hour by hour, day in, day out. It is the single most important step to take in treating and preventing chronic disease, hands down. We need to learn how to hydrate because it is important in so many functions. Think about things like even detoxification. If we’re not hydrated, we’re not detoxifying. Detoxification, the only way we detoxify is through poop, pee, and sweat, and all of those require hydration.

So chronic disease, since my book was published more than five years ago, some new studies came out a year and a half, two years ago that low-grade dehydration is a causal factor of aging and chronic disease. So those are the big picture things that we need to do.

So I’m going to give you one very important thing that takeaway home thing that we all need to do. The way that you know that you are properly hydrating, and it’s not necessarily drinking more water, it has to do with food as well, what you’re eating, and how you’re moving. But the way that you know that, because we don’t have a simple test, the way that you know that is by looking at your urine output. So we are meant to pee every two or three hours while we’re awake. And my suggestion is do a little hashtag box as you’re sitting around all day and count how many times you’re peeing all day. I know myself, I’ve sat at my desk eight hours, and I’ve not peed all day long, which is my mistake. So if you’re not peeing every two or three hours, you’re not well hydrated.

Katie: I feel like that’s a helpful rule because we seemingly all these things circulate of like, take your body weight and do some sort of calculation. And then it’s based on ounces. And then, but then there’s all these caveats and about what if you drink caffeine and what if you exercise and, or I’ve seen stats, like if you live in a hot climate or use the sauna often or exercise a lot that you can lose more sweat and minerals in a short span of time than a lot of people could if they’re sedentary throughout their whole lifetime. So it seems like there’s a lot of compounding variables that it seems like it can get really complicated if we try to get like mathematical about it. So it seems like that kind of general rule of like, pay attention to your body and adjust as needed.

Dana: Yes. Yes. You know, we’re all cut off from our heads down. So paying attention to your body is also super key. Thirst, by the way, is an overt sign of dehydration. It’s not just a little signal like, oh, I need to drink. You’re overtly dehydrated if you’re thirsty. So it’s not a great signal. And all of those things you mentioned, yes, there are some people who, you know, who can drink one glass of water a day. And there are some people who need eight glasses of water a day. It’s so individualized. So you can’t, all of those things can be, you don’t need to look at as long as you’re looking at your urine output and then you’ll know if you’re dehydrated or not.

Even the color of your urine turns out is not to be a great marker of dehydration. It’s okay. And, you know, drink, if you twisted my arm and you needed a number, like how much do I need to drink? I have to know. Then I guess a better example would be half your weight in ounces of water. That’s okay. But it’s still not great because you can’t take a six-foot two athlete who’s sweating and exercising versus a five foot sedentary person and give them the same thing.

The other thing is, I think about this, if you’re on like a ketogenic diet, even or a very low carb diet, that’s a dehydrating diet. It’s a diuretic. We know that. So I tell people, if you’re doing that, maybe, maybe 75% of your weight in ounce is a better, you know, arm twisting number that I have to give you in order to do that. So different for everybody, many confounding factors. And I think the, the, the easiest and best thing to do is just look at your urine output.

Katie: And I love that you said that there’s no detox without adequate hydration. I feel like that’s really important to focus on because one thing I’ve said in the past is it’s easy to get sucked into these kind of like trendy detox ideas of cleanses and supplements and all these things we can take, but the body is naturally designed to be able to detox itself effectively as long as we give it the proper inputs to do that. And it sounds like hydration is one of those really important ones that’s easy to get off on if we aren’t really like aware of it and paying attention to it.

It also sounds like, but I would love you to confirm or deny this, that there’s potentially more risk of if we’re not drinking enough water than if we’re drinking slightly too much water. So is it better to err on the side of a little bit more if we’re unsure or are there also risk of if we drink too much water? I know there’s an extreme, if we drink extremely too much water, there’s kind of risk, but what about just like slightly more than we need?

Dana: Great question. Yes, definitely. You can err on the side of caution and drink slightly more. But I will tell you, almost every single week, I see people who have low sodium, low chloride, because they’re drinking too much water, so that they’re flushing out their electrolytes. You know, it’s extraordinarily rare that somebody can have seizures, like, for example, from too much water. It happens. It happened to Brooke Shields recently, you can read about it. She was drinking all this water preparing for a Broadway show, and ended up having a seizure, you know, so. So yes, it can happen extraordinarily rare. But with this gallon water challenge that’s going around, that’s scary to me, you know, drinking a gallon of water a day. You know, so, yes, air, but err on the side of caution, a little too much water is probably okay.

I think the other part of that that’s interesting, too, is that people have always been told you want your urine to be crystal clear by the end of the day. I’m not so sure that’s true. You want color in your urine, you want something to come out, you know, so. But once again, the color of your urine is not a great factor to look at.

Katie: I’m so glad you brought up the mineral side because this is, I feel like, another area where there’s a lot of information floating around. And I feel like it’s seemingly very important, but a lot of misinformation abounds. And you specifically mentioned sodium and chloride. I know because I tend to eat a little bit lower carb, spend a lot of time in the sauna, exercise a lot, and spend time in the sun, I’ve learned to be very aware of replenishing minerals consciously because I notice a difference when I don’t get enough, especially sodium and chloride, which is basically salt. I feel like for a long time, we were sort of taught to be afraid of salt.

And I’ve noticed a really big difference in my energy level from sort of trying to optimize my salt, even in strange ways that I didn’t think about before, like that those chloride atoms are used to make stomach acid. And so if we’re not getting enough salt, we actually might not have enough stomach acid to digest our food well. So my digestion seems better.

But I would love your take on the minerals, how to kind of gauge how much we need, where to get them from. I would guess food comes into play here as well. But what do we need to know about minerals?

Dana: Yes. Great question again. So let’s just first of all differentiate between sodium chloride, which is salt, and what I call real salt, which is actually a brand of salt. But real salt is full spectrum mineral salt. So literally the brand real salt is excellent. But there’s pink salt, there’s sea salt. You want salt as it is in nature. So what it does is it has all of those minerals in it. It’s got magnesium and it’s got the full spectrum of minerals. Much better way of getting your electrolytes than just plain table salt and the salt, the sodium that’s so astronomically high in, for example, canned soup and those kinds of things. We don’t want that, right?

So salting your water in the morning is a great habit to get into. A little pinch of real alt, whatever type you choose with water and maybe a little squeeze of lemon for some flavor and extra minerals is a great way to start your day. Big glass of water. We call it front loading the water in our first book, Quench, right?

Other ways, some of those electrolyte mixes are great. Full disclosure, I’m on the board of one called Cure Hydration, really excellent one. They follow the World Health Organization of Mineral Replenishment. And, you know, and I think the key thing is what you said, I can’t tell you how many people say I feel better when I do an electrolyte replenishment, they feel more energy, they feel better, clearer thoughts, you know, so that alone is worth its weight in gold.

And, you know, all of the other stuff, there’s a whole, there’s a whole section about salt in that first book. That whole thing about salt being bad for you because of blood pressure is really being pulled back. Now, if you have high blood pressure, you definitely need to talk to your doctor. Don’t just go eating all this salty food because that could be a difference. But I think a little bit of salt, you know, we’ve pulled back too hard on so many people.

So a lot of the electrolyte mixes are great. You want to just look at look for things like, you know, fake colorings, even, you know, some of the electrolyte drinks, like, I don’t want to mention names, but the, you know, the ones that are that are neon pink and, and have all these added colorings and, and even fake sugars you don’t want in them, you know, especially things like saccharin and that kind of thing. So you want to look for more natural ones. And there’s some great ones on the market.

Katie: It also strikes me, and I know we’re going to talk about ultra-processed food and some dietary switches we need to make in our next episode, but it also strikes me that the typical American diet is likely very dehydrating because those are not foods that actually contain any water or minerals and actually probably pull water from our body. Like if you think of flour or corn, like if it goes in water, it sucks up water and it maybe I’m oversimplifying, but is kind of our typical diet also dehydrating? And if so, if someone’s choosing to eat that way, do they need to sort of compensate with additional hydration?

And or I guess the other end of the spectrum would be, you mentioned like a ketogenic diet can increase your need for hydration and probably minerals as well. So if someone is kind of on either end of that spectrum, what do they need to know about diet and hydration?

Dana: Yes. So yes, I absolutely believe that our diets are one of the major reasons why we’re more dehydrated today than even, you know, 10 years ago, or longer. So diet plays a big role, but also our environments, medications, sedentary lifestyles, there’s many reasons why we’re super dehydrated today, more so than we were not that long ago. Even EMFs, I think, play a role, putting our phones up to our ears, you know, all these reasons, right? But diet is absolutely a reason.

And, you know, I think what you said, one of the main reasons is what it takes to process, what it takes for our bodies to process that ultra-processed foods. It takes hydration, you know, it takes detoxification, it’s a lot. Our bodies have to work really hard at that food that’s not meant to be eaten, you know, the way Mother Nature intended, right?

So what better way to get more hydrated is to eat food the way Mother Nature intended, get more real whole foods into our diets. And this is going to be our next talk, but I wrote a whole book on using a blender as a way to cheat your way to good health. Nobody puts cake and stuff into a blender. You’re only putting real food into a blender. It’s a really fun, easy hack, basically, or cheat, we call it. Did that answer your question?

Katie: It did. And I know we’re going to go deeper on that in our next episode, but I’ve had that theory for a while that our bodies are so innately wise that if we are missing something that’s an absolute key part of our diet, or it sounds like even hydration, that it will try to crave anything related to that, that it can in order to motivate us to get enough of that thing. So if we’re not getting enough, for instance, micronutrients in our diet or enough protein to actually like build our basic building blocks of our body, we’ll keep craving food, but it’s not because we actually need more calories. It’s because we actually need more micronutrients or more protein. And I would guess the same thing kind of comes into play with hydration and like our body’s going to kind of motivate us to search for whatever it is that’s as close as possible to what it needs.

But you said also, I thought this was interesting, that thirst is already an overt sign of sort of minor dehydration. So, because I’ve heard people say before, just rely on your thirst, pay attention to your thirst, but it sounds like that alone might actually not be the best gauge. And that we, like you talked about, need to be more aware of actively hydrating.

Dana: Completely, completely. We want to stave off the thirst. We want to address it before it happens, just to stay on top of that day in, day out, low-grade dehydration that can happen in an hour. You know, that it’s just the one thing we sort of need to stay on.

Now, that doesn’t mean you’re drinking water all day long, but if you’re eating well, if you’re eating lots of fruits and vegetables and fiber and things that hold on to that hydration better, that your body will better be prepared to handle those low-grade, you know, signs throughout the day.

You know, just something you said, our bodies are truly inherently wise. And if we give it what it needs to do its job, it’s an incredible machine. I say this all the time, if you start to look into speaking about detoxification, if you start to look into toxins and toxicology, it’s overwhelming. Like it is doom and gloom and scary. But what I try to tell people is that, yes, it is, but once again, you give your body what it needs to do its job, our body is amazing, amazing at what it does. And it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom.

Katie: Yeah, I’m so glad you said that. I say a version of that also, and I think it bears repeating anytime it can be repeated, which is like the body is innately wired to be as healthy as possible, to heal. It’s incredibly resilient. And so if we’re having something like symptoms, I try to now look at those as messengers. That’s our body actually clearly telling us either I have too much of something I don’t need, or I don’t have enough of something I do need. And it’s an invitation to sort of learn the language of our body, rather than view symptom bad, fix symptom, but not understand what is the body actually saying in that symptom? What message is it trying to convey?

And I also have seen on social media, and I know we talked about this a little bit in our first episode, but the drastic seemingly anti-aging benefits when we really consistently get this hydration piece correct. And even the befores and afters that look like someone had a facelift, when all they did was actually, become very intentional with their hydration, which makes sense if water is so vital and we are so much water. But you also talked about dehydration being essentially causal in early aging. So can you speak more to that? Because it would be amazing if we could all focus on hydration, perhaps in place of botox in today’s world.

Dana: I love that. Yeah. So, the, the key word is perhaps causal, you know, there’s, there’s still no, and I don’t think there could ever be proof to say what I’m going to say because it’s, there, there could never be any kind of study that could, that could actually study that. However, it is my so firm belief that before you start on any nutrition program, any supplement program, any diet, you have to start with, by learning how to hydrate, just period.

It is the foundation of every process in our body, how our cells work, how our cells are plumped up, including our skin cells. And, you know, funny enough with that first book, my biggest sort of cult fan base are estheticians. And they, you know, I have so many people that saying, I give this to every one of my clients before they even start with me, because they know better than anyone that by putting something topically on, it doesn’t work as good as hydrating from within. So yes, the anti-aging.

And then once again, just going back to that most recent study, there was a study even before that, that I believe was in the book about how just feeding mice or mice or rats, I don’t remember which one it was, water, by giving them water, helped treat metabolic syndrome. So water as a treatment for metabolic syndrome. Think about that. Like, that’s a crazy idea. Metabolic syndrome is a triad of high triglycerides, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure, you know, and so a treatment which we know as, you know, using for us, maybe metformin and diet and all these other things and blood pressure medications. So, yeah, I mean, chronic disease, aging, you have to start with hydration first.

Katie: That was such a great explanation. What about timing? Are there any things related to timing? Does the body need more or less or absorb certain times of day better? You talked about the morning hydration. That’s become a habit for me is having a quart-sized mason jar on my nightstand with minerals and sometimes lemon or chlorophyll or all kinds of things in it just so it’s there. Before I go anywhere else I hydrate. But are there any things like that that we can kind of make note of when during the day it’s important to hydrate or around exercise is it more important or anything like that?

Dana: We don’t really know. You know, the thing that comes to mind is you want to hydrate so that it doesn’t disrupt your sleep. You know, you don’t want to be hydrating at nine o’clock at night, so that you’re up in the middle of the night peeing. And, you know, that that’s one thing that comes to mind. I think morning is just easy, because, you know, we liken it my co-author, that first book was an anthropologist. And that’s kind of how desert people hydrate. They don’t walk around with, you know, or even, you know, historical desert people, they don’t walk around with water bottles. So they hydrate first thing in the morning, you know, and eat really well. Think about the Tarahumara tribe of people that that book Born to Run, they fuel themselves on chia seeds, which hold on to that water, their fiber, they plump up there. You know, so there’s ways of doing that.

So timing, I don’t really know. Now with exercise, if you’re exercising, really, you know, endurance athletes, especially that’s a whole, you know, exercise physiology thing in and itself, but you want to replenish and there are there are equations that those people can look at how they should hydrate. And they want to, you know, if you’re sweating a lot, you want to replace those electrolytes after you exercise. So that’s something very different. You don’t want to just drink plain water, because then you know, you you’re really at risk for, for flushing out even more electrolytes after you’ve just sweated a bunch of electrolytes.

The only other thing timing wise that I liked, you know, I like what you said, it’s become a habit, whatever’s going to work for you to become a habit. So that first thing in the morning, laid it your bedside, I do that too. I have a beautiful canister with the glass over the top of it, that first thing in the morning before my feet even hit the ground, it goes down. That’s become a habit. I love that. I also like to drink a glass of water before every meal, just so that I remember to get it in, you know. It’s just whatever it’s going to take to make that easier for you.

But I don’t know of any real sort of research of timing of the day that could be better for you or not. What comes to mind, and maybe is going to be your next question is the temperature of the water make a difference? I don’t know, just to sort of stave off the question. I don’t know, that’s Chinese medicine. And they firmly believe something about the temperature of the water is helpful for you. I say whatever it takes to get it in. You know, if you only like drinking ice cold water, then drink ice cold water.

Katie: That’s a good point. And it seems like from timing, just logically, not probably that there’s any science behind this, but makes more sense to me to front load in the day ahead of time, just because it gives you a lot more energy when you’re hydrated in the morning. But also, rather than getting to like nine o’clock at night and being like, oh, darn, I didn’t drink enough water. And now I’m going to chug half a gallon and try to go to bed. And it’s going to impact your sleep because you’re going to be awake going to the bathroom all night. So perhaps just more logical considerations than that we have data, probably hydration is important, period, overall. But if we can front load in the day, same with like protein and micronutrients, I feel like the body tends to enjoy that.

Dana: Exactly. I agree.

Katie: Perfect. Well, I will make sure I link to our other episode where we kind of provided some foundational info for this episode, as well as to your book and your new book called Fuel Up, which we’re going to really go deep on in our next episode. So for you guys listening, make sure to tune in for that one as well, because that will be some really key takeaways and action steps that I’m excited to learn as well. But Dana, for this episode and for our time today, thank you so much for being here and for all that you’ve shared.

Dana: Thank you.

Katie: And thank you for listening. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama Podcast.

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