Not Just for Your Garden: The 9 Health Benefits of Drinking Water

In fact, your body is mainly made up of water. Water forms the largest part of your brain and blood and is essential for the proper functioning of these tissues. Water also offers many other benefits in our bodies such as maintaining blood pressure, controlling temperature, helping in digestion and many more. In this article, we have rounded up nine benefits of taking water to help you understand how important this colorless liquid is to your body.

1. Drinking water replaces the water you lose daily

It’s said that water makes up about 60 percent of your body. Almost all of this water is utilized to keep you functioning well on a daily basis. Therefore, it’s critical to maintain the 60% balance for your health, which isn’t easy for some people. Your body has plenty of ways of losing water, such as urination, sweating, and even breathing. Drinking enough water daily allows you to replace your body water stores.

2. Water helps in digestion

One of the most common consequences of taking insufficient water is constipation. When your body loses a lot of water and is dehydrated, your gastrointestinal system is one of the systems that sacrifices their fluid levels to try to maintain normal fluid levels.
Your gut usually absorbs water from your stool in the large intestine, causing it to harden. This leads to constipation. Water also plays a key role in dissolving food substances in the gut to increase the surface area for digestion. If your daily intake isn’t enough, then digestion is slowed causing constipation. This will can only be corrected by re-hydrating as soon as possible to return bowel movements to normal.

3. Water helps in blood circulation

The largest part of your blood is a substance known as plasma. Plasma is the liquid part of your blood that’s responsible for carrying blood cells and other substances to where they are needed in your body. Plasma also helps maintain normal blood pressure as well as maintaining your body temperature at normal levels.

In short, plasma is pretty vital to your body. Normally, 90% of Plasma is mainly water, so it can’t perform its functions properly if you are dehydrated. With insufficient water consumption, your blood tends to become more concentrated and viscous. This implies that your heart has to pump blood a little bit harder to transport it around your body which can cause a lot of issues like shock if fluid levels aren’t corrected.

4. Water helps to in normal movement of your joints

Whenever you feel your joints becoming a bit achy or stiff, one of the first things you need to ask yourself is if you’re taking enough water.

Joints are made of cartilage which allows your bones to move freely. Water helps in creating the a smooth texture that your joint needs to avoid rubbing together.

When your body is dehydrated, your body compensates by drawing as much water as it can to the vital organs. Sadly, your joint cartilage isn’t one of these organs, so it has to surrender its moisture. This leads to creation of friction between your bones until you top up your fluids.

5. Water increases athletic performance

Believe it or not, dehydration has a major impact on your body musculature. Without enough water, your muscles can’t contract well the consequence is your body won’t be able to perform properly, as they will have difficulties in repairing themselves after working out. Also, you need to bear in mind that during exercise, your body loses a lot of water through sweating. This means you will need to replace it by re-hydrating regularly to keep your muscles working properly and your blood circulating well.  If you’re looking for a kitchen appliance that treats your water, read about water filtration using reverse osmosis here.

6. Affects your concentration and focus

Your brain is one of the vital organs that need water to function properly. Studies show that hypo-tension and dehydration can make your brain cells to shrink causing your brain to be less effective than it should normally be.

When this happens, the consequence is difficulty concentrating, and losing focus. You take a little longer to think or solve simple problems. The extra brain strain due to dehydration can also make you irritable, so taking that glass of water can improve your mood!

7. Beats fatigue and feeling tired all the time

Do you usually feel tired during the day even without working? This could necessarily not be a lack of sleep to blame. Many people go to the hospital due to fatigue, and one of the reasons is failing to take enough water during the day.

While plain water is just okay, some people choose to take sugary drinks instead that can cause an energy crash later in the day.

8. Water protects us against diseases

Studies have found out that dehydration could be one of the contributing factors in causing life-threatening health issues with your lung, kidneys, heart, and bladder. As we mentioned earlier, dehydration can lead to shock that can cause organ damage and failure and even death if not promptly corrected.

Then there is heat stroke and heat exhaustion, which can happen if you don’t take enough fluids while exercising or on a hot day.

Water is also known to flush out toxins through the kidneys. In fact, failure to take enough water means that your kidneys won’t have enough fluid to work correctly. This can lead to infections such as urinary tract infections and others.

9. Prevents helps to moisten skin

We have already mentioned how dehydration can make your blood a little concentrated and thicker than it should be. One of the ways your blood regains some of the fluid it requires is by drawing water from your skin. This will leave your skin dry which tends to speed up wrinkle appearance.

It’s imperative to note that you would have to be very ignorant for this process to start. However, take more water than normal will not make your skin softer or firmer either. So if you have dry skin and you don’t think low water consumption is to blame, then you should see your doctor to check for other possible causes.