Bottled Water Again

Salon.com has a review of the book Bottlemania and an interview with the author, Elizabeth Royte.

I’d always taken to heart the X glasses of water a day rule (even if I didn’t follow it) and I suppose it comes as no surprise that, having never investigated the origin of the rule, there’s more to the story than a simple equation.

Why do you think that water in single-serving sizes became so popular?

Marketers hammered home this idea that we need to stay hydrated, and we need to drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day. If it was so important to drink all that, then portability became important.

It turns out there is no scientific basis for that eight by eight rule.

Where did that idea come from?

It got its start when the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council put out a report sometime in the ‘40s that said adults should drink about a milliliter of water for each calorie of food, which meant that we should drink about 64 to 80 ounces a day.

But the next sentence in the report was ignored. It says, “Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.” When you think about pasta or rice, you know that it absorbs an enormous amount of water. And we get water in coffee and in beer and in soda, and all the other things that we drink. But it was easy to ignore that part of it, if you were selling water.