Water: An Overlooked Essential Nutrient
Lunch and Learn
Registered Dietitian
Hello everyone, my name is Jennifer, I am a Registered Dietitian, and here to talk about water: an overlooked essential nutrient. Since 58% of the employees are active at least 5 days a week, I want to advise everyone how important water is to our bodies, providing us with hydration, and giving us nutrients. Our bodies are roughly made up of 60% water, which helps aid in the function our digestion system, body temperature, circulation, and transporting nutrients in the body. Water also helps keep the body hydrated because we need to replace what we lose. When you exercise, your body loses these fluids and they need to be replaced, and drinking water can help you control calorie intake, and energize your muscles (Zelman, 2008). Some may say Gatorade and Powerade offers them more during a workout, so let’s discuss recommendations, nutritional value, advantages, disadvantages, safety concerns, cost, and varieties of these drinks.
Let’s first take a look at what some recommendations of water, Gatorade, and Powerade. While most people have always known that 64oz or 8-8oz cups of water is supposed to be consumed daily, over the years that daily recommendation has changed to 9 cups for women and 11 cups for men. While there is no daily recommendation for sports drinks like Gatorade or Powerade, the American College of Sports Medicine does make the state that no physical activity up to one hour, is not recommended, but exercise lasting over an hour, sports drinks are recommended but only at certain times. Now that we know the basic of what is recommended, when can these be consumed in reference to exercise. To maintain hydration it’s best to drink 16-20 fluid ounces of a sports drink or water four hours before beginning and another 8-12 fluid ounces of water only about 20 prior to the workout. To maintain hydration during a workout, you should...