Drinking too much water is terrible for you. The study that everyone quotes the water ratio from is misquoted - the equivalent of 8 8-oz glasses of water a day will keep you healthy and everything going good, but there is water in almost everything you eat. You should probably have a little more water on days you drink coffee or alcohol to excess, since both of those take water out of your system to be metabolized properly (and that's why you get hungover, in case someone missed that memo) but drinking too much water can
absolutely kill you.
And yes, it is
exactly because you are diluting essential nutrients in your body. It's a condition called hyponatremia (
easy-to-read-sciencey-linky-link), and what is happening is that your cells are trying to maintain a certain concentration gradient of solutes to solvents (ie. salts to deliiicious H2O) and if you suddenly pump a shitton of water into your body, you're throwing that concentration off to the point where cells will start to chuck
all of their salts
out to re-establish the ideal concentration for that solute. At the same time, your cells start to swell up to pull down the outside concentration gradient so that they can reach happy-happy equilibrium time. Yes, it really only happens to little kids whose parents make them drink tons of water because they don't research the "common wisdom" that they "know", and to athletes as well (which is why, no joke, they have ambulances following runners during marathons - because people up and keel over), but there are still normal everyday people who die because they drank way too much water all at once. If you're guzzling a shitton of water super fast, you'll get sick because your body hates you in that moment - its trying to get you to
stop. If you're drinking a shitton of water over th course of a day...well, you're going to be peeing a whole hell of a lot and your body will still hate you, but less so, because you're still accelerating certain chemical processes in your body. 8-12 eight ounce glasses of water will do
most people just fine, but it varies from person to person, on a lot of different levels - if you eat really healthily, that can take up about 20% of your daily water intake needs, and you should never ever for never drink all your water at once. Also, the 8-12 eight ounce glasses don't have to be water. Any juice, tea, or whatever you drink counts towards that total.
So. 8 glasses of juice will be good for you for the day. You don't need another 8 glasses on top of that. Unless you like running to the bathroom all the time.
Your business though. Oh, and for anyone interested
This is a handy dandy short-shot hydration calculator. For my stuff, I need about 2 liters of water a day. Which is just about 4 pints/half a gallon of water. Since I eat healthilyish, I'll go ahead and take 15% off, which puts me to about a three and a half pints of fluid today. Which is pretty much my morning tea (16 oz = 1 pint), another cup of tea when I get home (1 pint) and my odd trips to the fridge for juice/milk/water (1.5 pints).
/science rant
Chocolate is awesome.
