An introduction to "Water4More" | World Vision
Monday, April 16, 2018
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
Sports drinks aren’t ‘recharging’ your kids. They’re just pumping them full of sugar.
As temperatures heat up and we sprint to the Olympic Opening Ceremonies, sports-drink marketing is at a fever pitch. Coca-Cola, owner of Powerade and Vitaminwater, is the longest continuous Olympics sponsor, and the company is clearly onto something. Kids across the globe aspire to be as fast, strong and skilled as Olympic athletes, so marketing Powerade as the drink of an Olympic winner is certainly a gold-medal strategy.
Commercial sports drinks were initially designed for athletes who, like the Olympians, train and sweat so vigorously and for such prolonged periods that they sufficiently deplete their bodies to require the rehydration and calorie replenishment these drinks provide. But here’s the thing: The elite athlete market is tiny, and our kids, even the most athletic ones, are not part of it.
Powerade and Gatorade wouldn’t be in big business if the only people who consumed their products were those who actually needed them. When these companies expand their markets to include all children who play sports, parents who believe the hype that their kids need to replace electrolytes and adults who think they are making a healthy choice by skipping the soda in favor of a “recharging” sports drink, the companies are suddenly pole-vaulting into money.
The sports-drink market was recently estimated at a whopping $6.81 billion. Kids and adults want something to drink besides water, and they want it to fulfill the righteous promises of rehydration and replenishment. This is why companies such as Honest Tea and Greater Than have entered the market with healthier sports drinks that are lower in sugar and free of artificial food colorings, and why Dr Pepper recently bought 11.7 percent of BodyArmor for $20 million.
Are these new drinks actually healthy? And will kids drink them? I did a blind tasting of six sports drinks (Honest Sport, Greater Than, Aspire, BodyArmor, Gatorade and Powerade) with my boys and their friends. Then I drilled into the nutrition facts and ingredients list for each product. Here’s what I found:
To my dismay (but not to my surprise), the kids blindly chose Powerade and Gatorade as their favorites. After all, these varieties are the sweetest and the most chemically engineered to cause consumers to come back for more. Next, the kids unanimously voted for all three Honest Sport flavors, followed closely by Aspire. They said they might choose water over the flavor of Greater Than and probably wouldn’t drink BodyArmor.
Just because the big brands want us to drink their products and consumers are buying them, it does not mean the facts have changed:
•The American Academy of Pediatrics concludes that “routine ingestion of carbohydrate-containing sports drinks by children and adolescents should be avoided or restricted … Water, not sports drinks, should be the principal source of hydration for children and adolescents.”
•Kids and teens rarely, if ever, lose enough electrolytes during their athletic endeavors to require extra replenishment. Sodium is the most common electrolyte lost in sweat, yet most Americans get more than enough sodium from their diets.
•Many sports drinks contain as much sugar and as many chemicals as soda.
•Some sports-drink bottles contain 2 or 2½ servings, so the grams of sugar listed on the nutrition facts panel may need to be multiplied.
•Kids do not lose vitamins when they sweat, so Vitaminwater and vitamin-enhanced drinks are unnecessary.
Water paired with a banana, orange or clementine is undeniably a better choice than any sports drink. These fruits are higher in potassium and many other minerals and vitamins than commercial drinks. The natural sugars in these fruits travel into the bloodstream at a steady rate, unlike a manufactured sports drink that causes blood sugar and insulin levels to skyrocket or that delivers a dose of an unhealthy artificial sweetener. No child benefits from 20-plus grams of added sugar and chemical flavorings after a one-hour game.Friday, July 15, 2016
Thirsty? New Study Links Good Hydration To Slimmer Waistlines
A quick consultation with Dr. Google will tell you that drinking lots of water–and staying well-hydrated–can help you lose weight.
But is there any truth to this? A new study published in the Annals of Family Medicine adds to the evidence that hydration may play a role in weight management.
“What we found was that people who were inadequately hydrated had increased odds of being obese,” says study author Tammy Chang of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan.
The study was based on data collected by a federal health survey, in which researchers had documented weight and height of participants. They also conducted urine tests to establish an objective measure of participants’ level of hydration.
Chang and her colleagues found the odds of being obese were 1.59 times higher for people who were not well-hydrated. And overall, they found that a lack of proper hydration was associated with higher body mass index.
“The idea that hydration could have this effect is interesting and important,” says Chang. But there’s still a lot that remains unknown. This study captures one snapshot in time, and it does not prove that staying hydrated helps people manage weight.
It is possible that people who stay well-hydrated also have other habits–say, a healthful diet–that keeps them slimmer.
The new findings do fit with a few, small studies that found dieters who drink water before meals are more successful at weight loss, at least in the short term.
“Over several months, people who are drinking water before their meal lose more weight,” explains Eric Rimm of the Harvard School of Public Health. The idea here is that people feel less hungry after filling up on water. “But is it a lasting effect?” Rimm says it’s not clear.
He says what is clear when it comes to the relationship between weight and what we drink is this: Swapping sugary drinks for water is beneficial.
In long-term studies that tracked people’s habits over several decades, “we found that people who choose water instead of sugar-sweetened beverages gain weight at a much slower rate,” says Rimm. It’s not necessarily pointing to the importance of hydration, “just drinking fewer calories,” he adds.
There’s no hard and fast rule on how much water is ideal to drink. A gardener working outside or an athlete in training needs more than someone sitting in an air-conditioned office.
So, how do you know if you’re well-hydrated? Chang says she tells her patients to notice the color of their urine. If it’s dark, you probably need to drink more.
“If your urine is light–almost like the color of water–then you’re probably well-hydrated,” Chang says.
This may be particularly important for older people. Research suggests people over 65 years old don’t feel as thirsty as younger people, even when they are dehydrated.
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Facts that could change the way you think about water
Dave Mosher, Business Insider, Jun. 1, 2015
Water, water everywhere–but less than half of a percent of Earth’s reserves are drinkable.
That’s just one shocking fact Neil deGrasse Tyson and five experts dropped at this year’s Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History–all about the surprising origins, scarcity, and value of water.
Before the event, we joined a closed-door meeting with Tyson and the five experts.
Below are just a handful of facts they shared that help put water shortages like California’s crippling four-year drought into stark perspective.
$0.002 per gallon is the average cost of US municipal tap water. That’s cheap but not free, as Jay-Z might have you believe. Yet the panel said we pay hundreds or thousands of times more for bottled water–even though there’s no real difference compared to what comes out of a hose. To boot, the panel referenced this classic episode of Penn and Teller filling up bottles with a garden hose and serving the water in a fancy restaurant. (No unsuspecting patron was the wiser.)
A “glacial taste” much better than tap water. What’s more, bottled water requires 5 to 11 times more water to produce than the bottle holds. Panelist Kathryn Sullivan, the administrator of NOAA, the government agency which studies Earth’s water stores from space, says most of that water waste comes from filtering. The process can rack up waste water in shocking amounts–up to 9 times more water is wasted than actually gets bottled.
Then there’s the plastic bottle itself. Making the plastic demands twice as much water as the bottle’s volume. Add in the fuel to make the plastic and truck the filled-up bottles around, and you’re staring at a significant environmental conundrum. “Our world is topsy-turvy,” Sullivan says. “We pay more for bottled water than we pay for oil or gas or Coca-Cola.”
Agriculture uses about 80% of all US freshwater. Despite this, says panelist Tess Russo, a hydrologist who estimates water availability around the globe, only 10% of farmers monitor how much water their soils actually need. And that leads to a lot of waste.
And that’s just the average; during a dry year, farmers in California can use up to 90% of the state’s water. But drought in California isn’t just a “California thing,” says panelist and planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel, who’s scoured the Solar System for water. That’s because the state is a veritable cornucopia–more than half of U.S. vegetables, fruits, and nuts come from the Golden State. In fact, almost all almonds, artichokes, dates, figs, kiwis, olives, pistachios, pomegranates, walnuts, garlic, plums, broccoli, nectarines, canned tomatoes, celery, apricots, wine grapes, strawberries, avocados, lemons, carrots, and other U.S. foods are grown there. (Did we mention California also produces a huge percentage of feed for red meat and dairy?)
You might be drinking aquifer water from the last Ice Age. We’re pumping so much groundwater in some locations, says Russo, that they don’t have time to recharge naturally via rain, melting snow, and other sources. Some aquifers only have left the glacial meltwater deposited there about 10,000 years ago.
Pumping water is causing earthquakes, landslides, sinkholes, and more. Russo noted part of northern California as an example. She says parts of the region are actually rising because the state is pumping out so much water–i.e. it’s making the Earth’s crust there lighter and more buoyant. “That crust material [is] floating … and releasing parts of the pressure on the San Andreas [Fault]” and triggering earthquakes, she says.
The average Las Vegan uses twice as much water as a New Yorker–but it rains 10 times more in the Big Apple.
“Those sorts of asymmetries are just crazy,” says Sullivan. And with climate change mixing up weather patterns we’ve grown accustomed to, Hammel says we can expect more of these disparities.
Nevada agriculture uses 90% of the state’s water but only employs about 6,000 people. “The Mirage Hotel–singular–in [Las] Vegas employs more people than that,” says Ellen Stofran, NASA’s chief scientist and another of Tyson’s panelists. She cited it as just another example of water use not jibing with reality. “We have to start valuing water as a precious, finite commodity,” Sullivan added.
Right now, 35 US states are fighting legal battles over water. Take Des Moines, Iowa’s municipal utility, for example, says Stofran. The city is in the process of suing three upstream counties for dumping too much nitrate into the Raccoon River, which feeds the city freshwater.
In the 1970s, a Saudi Arabian prince started an iceberg-towing company. Icebergs are valuable sources of freshwater. If you can afford to tow them to land.
Mohammed al Faisal once established “Iceberg Transport International” (ITI) to tow Antarctic ‘bergs to Mecca and melt them into freshwater, says panelist and retired U.S. Air Force General Charles Wald, who’s seen water’s importance in armed conflict.
ITI estimated it’d cost $100 million to tow 100 million tons of ice, and that the trip would take eight months, writes The Atlantic. But after debating the scheme in an international conference in Iowa and doing a test in the San Francisco Bay with a giant block of ice, the company determined the plan wouldn’t work. That was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Even today, towing icebergs remains uneconomical.
85% of the water on the International Space Station is recycled. If you’re hip to space operations lingo, using what you’ve got wherever you’re at is called “in situ resource utilization,” or ISRU. Most ISRU water comes from condensed astronaut breath, sweat, and urine. Yes, NASA installed a fancy pee-recycling machine in 2008 to save launching 2,800 liters per year into low-Earth orbit. (And the water tastes great!)
The US will never run out of water. All of the experts agreed on this point, since there are replenishable supplies of freshwater available across the country (unlike some very dry, land-locked nations). But they noted this liquid abundance creates a huge problem: It means people living in the US, one of the wealthiest nations in the world–and perhaps the most capable of solving water crises–rarely feel the strain that others do on their water sources.
General Wald said in Ethiopia, for example, he’s met people who walk 6 hours to fill up water containers and bring them back to their village. And during conflict in the Middle East, he adds, attackers often target armored convoys in part to steal their potable water.
This will likely get worse, since in about 2 years, the Gaza Strip in the Middle East could run dry. That’s because water use there is outstripping the region’s ability to supply freshwater, says General Wald. Gaza is about the size of Washington D.C. and borders the Mediterranean Sea, but it has no desalinization plants that would convert that salty seawater into something drinkable. And not to rag on soft drink manufacturers, but General Wald noted one company is building a plant in Gaza–even though making soft drinks consumes an incredible amount of water.
In fact, it might take between 168-309 liters of water to make a single 0.5 liter bottle of cola. One study from 2010 estimated the “grey water footprint” (i.e. the water dirtied during manufacturing) to be roughly 20 to 40 times as much water as there is in a half-liter bottle–that’s not including the water required to grow the beverage’s source of sugar–usually corn. Add that and other water use during manufacturing and transport, and the water used per bottle skyrockets.
Around 2030, there could be a “very serious” worldwide water crisis. Naturally the military is worried about it, General Wald said. “Water wars are not new,” he said. “If anything they’re being exacerbated [by water].” He cited Egypt’s constant threat of war with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam–a $5 billion hydroelectric plant on the Blue Nile, a major southern tributary of the Nile River (you’ll recall the Nile flows North). Completing that project would mean holding back the tributary’s waters for a year while the dam fills up, threatening Egypt’s water supplies and the capacity of its hydroelectric dam on Lake Nasser.
“We’re going to have to hit bottom,” says Tyson, before we wake up and realize just how bad things are–and a full innovative engine to solve water shortages kicks into gear.
Until then, now is a good time to savor a closing era of cheap, reliable, and free-flowing freshwater.
Water, water everywhere–but less than half of a percent of Earth’s reserves are drinkable.
That’s just one shocking fact Neil deGrasse Tyson and five experts dropped at this year’s Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History–all about the surprising origins, scarcity, and value of water.
Before the event, we joined a closed-door meeting with Tyson and the five experts.
Below are just a handful of facts they shared that help put water shortages like California’s crippling four-year drought into stark perspective.
$0.002 per gallon is the average cost of US municipal tap water. That’s cheap but not free, as Jay-Z might have you believe. Yet the panel said we pay hundreds or thousands of times more for bottled water–even though there’s no real difference compared to what comes out of a hose. To boot, the panel referenced this classic episode of Penn and Teller filling up bottles with a garden hose and serving the water in a fancy restaurant. (No unsuspecting patron was the wiser.)
A “glacial taste” much better than tap water. What’s more, bottled water requires 5 to 11 times more water to produce than the bottle holds. Panelist Kathryn Sullivan, the administrator of NOAA, the government agency which studies Earth’s water stores from space, says most of that water waste comes from filtering. The process can rack up waste water in shocking amounts–up to 9 times more water is wasted than actually gets bottled.
Then there’s the plastic bottle itself. Making the plastic demands twice as much water as the bottle’s volume. Add in the fuel to make the plastic and truck the filled-up bottles around, and you’re staring at a significant environmental conundrum. “Our world is topsy-turvy,” Sullivan says. “We pay more for bottled water than we pay for oil or gas or Coca-Cola.”
Agriculture uses about 80% of all US freshwater. Despite this, says panelist Tess Russo, a hydrologist who estimates water availability around the globe, only 10% of farmers monitor how much water their soils actually need. And that leads to a lot of waste.
And that’s just the average; during a dry year, farmers in California can use up to 90% of the state’s water. But drought in California isn’t just a “California thing,” says panelist and planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel, who’s scoured the Solar System for water. That’s because the state is a veritable cornucopia–more than half of U.S. vegetables, fruits, and nuts come from the Golden State. In fact, almost all almonds, artichokes, dates, figs, kiwis, olives, pistachios, pomegranates, walnuts, garlic, plums, broccoli, nectarines, canned tomatoes, celery, apricots, wine grapes, strawberries, avocados, lemons, carrots, and other U.S. foods are grown there. (Did we mention California also produces a huge percentage of feed for red meat and dairy?)
You might be drinking aquifer water from the last Ice Age. We’re pumping so much groundwater in some locations, says Russo, that they don’t have time to recharge naturally via rain, melting snow, and other sources. Some aquifers only have left the glacial meltwater deposited there about 10,000 years ago.
Pumping water is causing earthquakes, landslides, sinkholes, and more. Russo noted part of northern California as an example. She says parts of the region are actually rising because the state is pumping out so much water–i.e. it’s making the Earth’s crust there lighter and more buoyant. “That crust material [is] floating … and releasing parts of the pressure on the San Andreas [Fault]” and triggering earthquakes, she says.
The average Las Vegan uses twice as much water as a New Yorker–but it rains 10 times more in the Big Apple.
“Those sorts of asymmetries are just crazy,” says Sullivan. And with climate change mixing up weather patterns we’ve grown accustomed to, Hammel says we can expect more of these disparities.
Nevada agriculture uses 90% of the state’s water but only employs about 6,000 people. “The Mirage Hotel–singular–in [Las] Vegas employs more people than that,” says Ellen Stofran, NASA’s chief scientist and another of Tyson’s panelists. She cited it as just another example of water use not jibing with reality. “We have to start valuing water as a precious, finite commodity,” Sullivan added.
Right now, 35 US states are fighting legal battles over water. Take Des Moines, Iowa’s municipal utility, for example, says Stofran. The city is in the process of suing three upstream counties for dumping too much nitrate into the Raccoon River, which feeds the city freshwater.
In the 1970s, a Saudi Arabian prince started an iceberg-towing company. Icebergs are valuable sources of freshwater. If you can afford to tow them to land.
Mohammed al Faisal once established “Iceberg Transport International” (ITI) to tow Antarctic ‘bergs to Mecca and melt them into freshwater, says panelist and retired U.S. Air Force General Charles Wald, who’s seen water’s importance in armed conflict.
ITI estimated it’d cost $100 million to tow 100 million tons of ice, and that the trip would take eight months, writes The Atlantic. But after debating the scheme in an international conference in Iowa and doing a test in the San Francisco Bay with a giant block of ice, the company determined the plan wouldn’t work. That was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Even today, towing icebergs remains uneconomical.
85% of the water on the International Space Station is recycled. If you’re hip to space operations lingo, using what you’ve got wherever you’re at is called “in situ resource utilization,” or ISRU. Most ISRU water comes from condensed astronaut breath, sweat, and urine. Yes, NASA installed a fancy pee-recycling machine in 2008 to save launching 2,800 liters per year into low-Earth orbit. (And the water tastes great!)
The US will never run out of water. All of the experts agreed on this point, since there are replenishable supplies of freshwater available across the country (unlike some very dry, land-locked nations). But they noted this liquid abundance creates a huge problem: It means people living in the US, one of the wealthiest nations in the world–and perhaps the most capable of solving water crises–rarely feel the strain that others do on their water sources.
General Wald said in Ethiopia, for example, he’s met people who walk 6 hours to fill up water containers and bring them back to their village. And during conflict in the Middle East, he adds, attackers often target armored convoys in part to steal their potable water.
This will likely get worse, since in about 2 years, the Gaza Strip in the Middle East could run dry. That’s because water use there is outstripping the region’s ability to supply freshwater, says General Wald. Gaza is about the size of Washington D.C. and borders the Mediterranean Sea, but it has no desalinization plants that would convert that salty seawater into something drinkable. And not to rag on soft drink manufacturers, but General Wald noted one company is building a plant in Gaza–even though making soft drinks consumes an incredible amount of water.
In fact, it might take between 168-309 liters of water to make a single 0.5 liter bottle of cola. One study from 2010 estimated the “grey water footprint” (i.e. the water dirtied during manufacturing) to be roughly 20 to 40 times as much water as there is in a half-liter bottle–that’s not including the water required to grow the beverage’s source of sugar–usually corn. Add that and other water use during manufacturing and transport, and the water used per bottle skyrockets.
Around 2030, there could be a “very serious” worldwide water crisis. Naturally the military is worried about it, General Wald said. “Water wars are not new,” he said. “If anything they’re being exacerbated [by water].” He cited Egypt’s constant threat of war with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam–a $5 billion hydroelectric plant on the Blue Nile, a major southern tributary of the Nile River (you’ll recall the Nile flows North). Completing that project would mean holding back the tributary’s waters for a year while the dam fills up, threatening Egypt’s water supplies and the capacity of its hydroelectric dam on Lake Nasser.
“We’re going to have to hit bottom,” says Tyson, before we wake up and realize just how bad things are–and a full innovative engine to solve water shortages kicks into gear.
Until then, now is a good time to savor a closing era of cheap, reliable, and free-flowing freshwater.
