Drink 8 glasses of water per day. This has become a near mantra when it comes to a heathier lifestyle. Doctors tell you it will help prevent diabetes.
It helps with weight loss (not true). It helps to detoxify (not true). It keeps you from eating as much at a meal (not true). But at least it won’t harm you, right?
Wrong.
I have previously gone over the reasons why drinking water may actually be harmful to your health. The principle reason is that, when many of us choose to drink water, it is bottled in a plastic water bottle containing Bisphenol A (BPA). I would also consider that, with every ounce of water drunk, this is one less ounce of tea that can protect you in a multitude of ways.
You see, tea (unsweetened) has been shown in hundreds and hundreds of studies to protect us from a vast array of chronic diseases. If done right, most people find tea very satisfying. My 6 year old son now orders this on a regular basis when we go out to eat and this is our primary drink around the house.
Contrast this with water, which has no evidence that I have come across that suggests it lowers the risk of chronic disease. Now I’m not saying you should go hiking in AZ at noon in August and not bring some water. But look around you. Odds are that half the people you see are lugging along a 12 oz bottled water that they keep within arm’s reach as if they were going to shrivel up into a prune at any given second.
This particular study delivers some very interesting results. The “standard” recommendations suggest that we should replace sugar sweetened beverages (SSB) and fruit juices with non-caloric drinks such as water (do NOT consider non-caloric drinks containing artificial sweeteners like Splenda and Nutrisweet to do anything but harm our progression to diabetes) to lower our risk of diabetes.
Because of this, researchers looked at what effects drinking water vs SSB would have on diabetes risk. Researchers found that replacement of a serving SSBs and fruit juices per day by a cup of plain water per day with 8% lower risk of diabetes.
Sounds pretty good, right?
Well, at least it does until you find out what the rest of the data demonstrated. Plain-water intake at ≥6 cups/d increased diabetes risk by 6%.
Yes–increased.
What does this mean? It means that SSB and fruit juices are not good for us. We should NEVER drink our calories (which includes milk, by the way) because it will always increase our risk for diabetes.
However, replacing SSB with water may help, but it is not the best option because water itself may actually increase the risk of diabetes, just not as much as SSB. Which of course leaves drinking more tea.
So what is your favorite type of tea?
