'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

We are told that when we drink coffee, tea or alcohol we dehydrate our bodies. My dictionary tells me that ‘to dehydrate’ means, ‘to cause to lose water’.

Now, if you were lost in a desert or adrift on an ocean and had only a flask of filter coffee to drink should you drink it? I suspect that the answer is that you should. I suspect that if you had a can of lager, you would be better off drinking it, and that only spirit alcohol, along perhaps with espresso coffee are not worth drinking in such a situation.

In other words, a mug of coffee or a can of beer actually do not dehydrate you, they simply do not hydrate you as much as water, they have an ingredient which dehydrates but it is mixed with water, so dependant on the proportion of the ingredient to the proportion of water you may well be receiving a limited hydration benefit.

I have not referred to any scientific source to reach this conclusion. It simply follows from the course of action I would take if I were in those circumstances. I would welcome some informed opinion on the subject, but whereas the issue may be more complex than my simplistic assumption, if essentially I am right then we are at best being told a half-truth. More likely we are being fed a well-meaning falsehood, somewhat disingenuously at that, or to put it plainly, told a lie.

Those that use and promote this simple speak would either argue that it is for simple people, or that we know what they mean. Either way, it frees them up to dehydrate our brains if not our bodies.

As more and more information becomes available, there is more and more temptation to wrap things up in simple bite-sized packages. ‘Sound-bites’ are exactly that. I am a great believer in simplicity, but not in simple ness and there’s the rub, my friends, simple ness is what we are getting; gobs and gobs of what is simply good for you, for your friends and for the Planet as a whole.    

Put another way, bicycling can be bloody dangerous, running the marathon can be horribly harmful to you in later years, and most of our sports heroes are permanently injuring themselves by doing what they do. We know this, but it’s not said. We have comfort talk just like we have comfort food. Well, I find it uncomfortable in the extreme. It makes me see red, and yellow at the same time. I am pissed off by all this double talk, but I am also scared of the consequences of living in a foolish world.

Goody Two Shoes can turn you into a prune as surely as The Merciless Ming. Welcome to the Dehydration Nation!

I am truly sorry to be like this. We’ll have a laugh next time.

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