What’s Up With That?

There was a time when most people mostly drank water. Oh, such things as sodas, milkshakes, coffee, and tea were consumed; but they were special treats. This has changed.

All around me I see fat people. Obese kids. Obese adults. It is disgusting. It is so bad, Mayor Boomerang in New York City tried to regulate soft drinks. I don’t agree that the government should regulate our purchase decisions. People have quit drinking water and replaced it with soft drinks and the ilk. It is time to take care of ourselves and not rely on the Government to do it. It all starts with water!

I mostly drink water. Not the expensive designer stuff sold in stores, but the cheap stuff that comes out of my kitchen faucet. Water is refreshing. It quenches thirst like no other beverage. I don’t know if water has a taste, but if it does, it tastes good to me.

And now we need to talk about water and backpacking – this is a website about backpacking sometimes, you know.

I find that most backpackers I talk to (this is usually online, because I don’t like to hike with others most of the time) don’t like the taste of water. How can this be? I read our bodies are over 50% water. And for hundreds of thousands of years our species has relied on plain water to survive. You can live quite a while without food, but not very long without water. Our bodies will crave the kinds of food that will replenish whatever is missing.

Too many backpackers, as usual, over analyze the sport. They are worried about the right balance of minerals, supplements, blah, blah, blah. Our bodies need some of these things, and it is best to get them from food, not chemicals added to water. It is pretty simple to accomplish this even when backpacking.

WE HAVE BECOME BRAINWASHED

Oh yeah, it has happened. It started with Tang and got progressively worse when Gatorade and the copycats hit the market. There is a lot of junk in those sports drinks, sucrose is the worse ingredient. And some do enhance performance… only because people are not eating right. It is a band aid. It doesn’t address the root problem of nutrition.

CONFESSION TIME

I have sinned. I used to add Kool Aid with cyclamates to my water in the 1970’s. This was because I needed to purify water I found in the wilderness so I wouldn’t get sick from the cooties floating around in them. Then our Government banned cyclamates, and I learned to deal with the iodine taste. But I found out a few years ago that iodine doesn’t kill all the bad stuff that can make us sick. So now I use Chlorine Dioxide, which does kill everything. I don’t really notice any difference in the taste of this treatment versus plain water. I am a happy hiker.

Two years ago I did a long hike with some sort of sports drink to test it out. I didn’t like the taste, it didn’t quench my thirst, and it didn’t improve my performance. And along the trail I needed to take a crap and discovered I didn’t have any water to wash my hands, just some orange stuff in my water bottles 🙂

So get rid of all that junk the marketers are convincing you to purchase and start enjoying that wonderful thing called water.