If you are like me, you constantly wonder whether, when literally dying of thirst, it is wise to drink coffee.
Coffee is a diuretic: It contains caffeine, which promotes urination. So, when it comes to re-hydration, coffee is not the best choice. What to do, then, if you are stranded in the desert, without water, and all you have to drink is a cuppa joe? This could happen, for example, if you were a research scientist driving through the desert in your Land Rover, only to discover that your colleagues had prankishly siphoned off half of your gas, and, as a further joke, replaced the water in your Camelbak with coffee (or camel piss, but that's another story).
Would drinking the coffee cause you to dehydrate sooner than you would if you drank nothing at all?
I can now tell you with some confidence that you should indeed drink the coffee. According to a story on NPR this morning:
Researcher Doug Casa of the University of Connecticut has found that caffeinated drinks, long assumed to have a strong diuretic effect, don't actually stand in the way of hydration. "If you drank one liter of water, your body might retain say 800 ml of that water, and you might lose the remaining 200 as urine. When you have something that has caffeine in it, say a liter of something that has caffeine, you might retain say 700 ml of it and maybe lose 300 to your urine." Casa says the net effect is that you're still getting most of the extra fluid you need, even with the caffeine.
I hope this information never comes in handy.
Posted by cradle at July 5, 2007 05:03 PMI've had some conversations with various hydration advocates that had me suspecting as much. I was more or less thinking "wouldn't I be a dessicated corpse by now?"
Posted by: Jack at July 8, 2007 01:20 AM