Drink more water
for Metabolic Health and
Weight Loss
It sounds too simple!..
Water makes up about 60 percent of our bodies, and getting in enough clean water is of profound importance to every aspect of health. Water is the medium of our entire cellular biology, and therefore our lives! But did you know that adequate hydration also may be key to optimizing metabolic health and healthy weight, specifically?
According to Dr. Richard Johnson, professor of medicine at the University of Colorado and author of the incredible book
He also states in his book that “people with obesity are ten times as likely to be dehydrated as their leaner counterparts.” (!!)
Why might this be? Interestingly, making new fat tissue in the body is a way for humans to store more water—called “metabolic water”—which can then be released into the body in times of water scarcity.
Think about camels: they can survive in the desert with low water supply in part because they store water in the fat cells of their fatty humps for times of drought!
How dehydration leads to obesity is one of the most fascinating stories in all of medicine. Dehydration activates a process in the brain called the “polyol pathway,” which stimulates the body to manufacture fructose.
The fructose our bodies produce does two things:
It stimulates a hormone called vasopressin, which tells our kidneys to retain water.
It causes us to “print fat”—literally manufacturing more fat and filling our cells with it—by disrupting mitochondrial function.