Water you on about?

Our man takes an investigation to the bottom of the glass

February 2008

I have a colleague who always drinks eight glasses of water a day. Goodness knows what happens if she strays to nine or gets slack and only puts away six or seven. We all receive precious pieces of medical wisdom. Sometimes even from medical people. Otherwise, particularly in the Gulf, such suggestions tend to come from those working in the hospitality area of civil aviation.

Here are few of the common ones:

• Drink eight glasses of water a day.

• Don’t read in dim light – it ruins your eyesight.

• We use no more than 10 per cent of our brains.

Well Virginia, there may be a Santa Claus (and as a recipient of a Shane Warne book and a Russell Crowe’s rugby league DVD on Dec 25, I know there is) but those myths just won’t fly. And that’s official, as we tabloid people like to say.

There is sod-all scientific evidence to back them up, according to the British Medical Journal. The year-end edition of the normally staid journal is devoted to light-hearted health issues. In fact, this gives me the opportunity to insert LOL which I am informed indicates this response.

But the myth-busting report has a serious message for quacks: Be careful about the advice you dish out. “We can be wrong and need to question what other falsehoods we unwittingly propagate as we practise medicine,” they caution.

Well, yeah. I’d have thought so. I’d have also thought they’d know that by now.

For their debunking exercise, Rachel Vreeman of the Indiana University School of Medicine and Aaron Carroll at the Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis looked at seven commonly held beliefs. They used Medline, a medical database, and Google to search for evidence to support or refute the myths. All the selected beliefs were either “unproved or untrue.”

Drink eight glasses of water a day: There’s a lack of evidence showing you need to down so much water. This common prescription can be traced to a 1945 medical recommendation: “A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 litres daily in most instances. An ordinary standard for diverse persons is one ml for each calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.”

Thus evidence suggests you can meet all your fluid needs through food and other beverages including juices, milk and even caffeinated drinks.

We use only 10 per cent of our brains: This belief, which dates back at least 100 years, doesn’t stand up to studies of patients with brain injuries, which suggest that damage to almost any area of the vital organ has specific and potentially lasting effects.
Imaging studies also reveal that no region of the brain is completely silent or inactive. I still feel further inquiries need to be made. They should start with patrons of several well-known nightspots in Dubai and Bahrain. A number of radio announcers should also be investigated.

Hair and nails grow after death: As former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson joked, “For three days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off.” This belief may come from an optical illusion caused by a retraction of skin around the nails and scalp after death. Hair and nail growth needs “a complex hormonal interplay” only possible in a living person.

Again, the sight of a few people around town after these clubs close belies this morbid myth.

Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight: Dim lights may contribute to difficulty focusing, leading to dry eyes and eye strain. But once the light improve, these side effects don’t last long.

Shaving causes hair to grow back faster or coarser: No. Shaving removes the dead part of hair, not the living section below the skin, so it can’t affect the rate or type of growth. The stubble grows out without the finer taper seen at the ends of unshaven hair, giving the impression of coarseness. Your mates who grow beards faster than a 1970s East German swimmer, are not shaving five times a day to unleash the macho look.

Eating turkey makes people drowsy: This ill-founded folk wisdom stems from reports that turkey is a rich source of tryptophan, an amino acid that affects sleep and mood control. In reality, turkey has the same amount or less tryptophan than other sources of protein.

Possibly the gobbling fowl is said to make us sleepy as it is usually served in large, festive quantities. Any large meal can induce sleepiness because blood flow to the brain temporarily decreases while food is digested.

Mobile phones are dangerous in hospitals: I visited someone I didn’t like and turned the phone on hoping something nasty might happen, but no luck. This myth has been fuelled by reports that cell phones disrupt medical equipment. Many hospitals have banned the devices.

But testing in Europe found minimal interference and only at distances of less than a metre. In fact, a study found that cell phones actually improve hospital safety because doctors can be easily contacted in an emergency.

In the Gulf we already knew cell phones are safe in hospitals as people use mobile phones in hospitals second only to when they’re driving. The patients seem to get through it.

If they keep their hands off the mobiles on Gulf roads there’d be a lot less people in hospitals. That’s no myth.