Dorothy Brush "Random Thoughts" Published Aug. 28, 2002

Would you like some water?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink." Today, wherever we go, we are surrounded by folks holding a cell phone in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. Although sealed in a bottle, there is water, water everywhere with lots of drops to drink, as the owner sips and sucks from the bottle, working hard to imbibe his eight glasses of water for the day. Eight glasses equals 64 ounces, which is a lot of water.

The just-released research of a distinguished scientist may pull the plug on some of those water bottles. Dr. Heinz Valtin, professor emeritus at Dartmouth Medical School, has been studying for 40 years how the body maintains a healthy fluid balance. He believes the pronouncement that we need eight glasses of water a day was the result of dropping an important phrase from a 1945 report issued by the Food and Nutrition Board.

That report said the body needs about 1 millimeter of water for each calorie consumed. They gave the example of a typical 2,000-calorie diet, which would need eight glasses of water, and then came the all-important word "but," and the words "most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods." That basic information was dropped, and eight glasses of water a day became the message.

Dr. Valtin's research appeared in the August issue of American Journal of Physiology and has the group that sets our nutrition standards taking another look at the issue.

The same week the Valtin research was summed up in newspapers across the country, and USA Today featured a cover story on bottled water. Not just plain bottled water but enhanced bottled water. It seems the thrill of drinking just plain water from a bottle was beginning to wane, so 34 new brands of water enriched with vitamins, minerals, green tea, ginseng and the list goes on and on, have been introduced to the market place.

There is a problem, though, because some of these additives don't taste good. So a little sweetener is added, and the benefit of no-calorie plain water is lost. The cost of these new enhanced waters is up to 40 percent higher than the plain bottled water.

For the first 18 years of my life, I drank water pumped from the well in our backyard, little knowing what a shock awaited when I left home. It was then I learned not all water tastes the same, and each time I returned home the first place I headed was the faucet to fill a glass with water unlike any I found in other places.

The only other water that compared with that at our house was from the flowing well behind the football field at our school. Every week a doctor from the city passed our house in his late model car heading for the flowing well to fill many jugs with the delicious water. It was sad to learn the flowing well no longer flows.

This year's PGA Championship winner Larry Beem doesn't carry a water bottle but instead, a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. To calm his nerves, he swallows the pretty pink drink before every round and goes through a bottle a week. My mother would have approved, because she was devoted to Pepto-Bismol for most of her 98 years. Since Olympic champions are honored by having their pictures appear on cereal boxes I would not be surprised if Pepto-Bismol bottles appear with Beem's face on their labels.

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Dorothy Copus Brush is a Fairfield Glade resident and Crossville Chronicle staffwriter whose column is published each Wednesday.