Higher Water Intake Tied to Weight Loss

If you still haven’t found a reason to drink more water, a new study reinforces what we already have been told-drinking more water may lead to greater weight loss.

 

A review of 11 previous studies focusing on more than 4,000 subjects found that, overall, those who consumed more water in those studies lost more weight.

While most researchers attributed the weight loss to feelings of fullness brought on by drinking the water, there could be more at play, says Rebecca Muckelbauer, a nutritional researcher at the Berlin School of Public Health in Germany who led the water study review.

She suggested that “water-induced thermogenesis,” which causes the body to expend more energy, could be a possibility.

“Drinking water itself increases energy expenditure of your body. It has an energy consuming effect,” Muckelbauer said in an interview with Reuters Health.

A 2003 study appearing in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that drinking 500 milliliters (about a pint) of water increased metabolic rate by 30 percent, suggesting that drinking water helps give metabolism a significant boost.
A study three years later found that water must be chilled in order to benefit from a metabolic boost, which comes about as the water is warmed to body temperature.

And while other studies included in the review cast similar doubt on the idea of water as a weight-loss tool, water is the most important nutrient for our body nonetheless, so drinking more of it can’t hurt.

It might even lower the risk of developing diabetes, according to a 2011 study.

That study of 3,615 subjects with normal blood sugar levels found that those who drank more water- four glasses or more a day-were less likely to develop hyperglycemia in the years following the study than those who did not take in that much.