It's enough to make you wonder...

It's enough to make you wonder ... if the nutritionists have any idea at all what they're talking about! 

When I was a kid, my dad taught us to suck on a smooth, round pebble to satisfy the thirst we worked up when hiking.  That was the best advice he could find in his reading.  We carried a couple of small canteens on our hikes. 

Then when I was just 9 or 10, he read some new advice: people who were working hard should drink a couple of quarts of water every day.  He bought bigger canteens and we started carrying much more water on our hikes, and we stopped sucking on pebbles.

Much later – in the '90s? – I started seeing advice about the minimum amounts of water we should be drinking daily.  These were always vastly larger than the amount of water I actually drank, amounts so large that I had trouble imagining choking that much down.  I once asked my doctor whether I should drink more water, and he told me not to worry about it – I showed no signs of dehydration :)

Now I read the latest advice, which is basically this: drink when you're thirsty.  So we've gone from drink as little as possible, to drink moderately, to drink a whole lot, and now to drink whatever you feel like drinking – all within my lifetime.  One could imagine being quite confused :)  But I'm not – I decided quite a few years ago that the nutritionists were far more confused than I was, so I just ignore them...