Most American children and teenagers aren't drinking enough fluids, and that's leaving them mildly dehydrated, according to a new study. In fact, one-quarter of a broad cross-section of children ages 6 to 19 apparently don't drink any water as part of their fluid intake.
The Harvard scientists who turned up the finding were initially looking into the consumption of sugary drinks in schools and looking for ways to steer children toward water instead — a much healthier beverage.
Along the way, they noticed that "kids weren't really drinking that much fluid," says postdoctoral researcher Erica Kenney at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She wondered if that was posing any problems for them.
So she and her colleagues dug into data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which gathers an amazing amount of information from study participants, including chemical tests of their urine. Those urine tests reveal whether people are adequately hydrated — people who don't take in enough water have darker, saltier urine.
The researchers report Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health that more than half of the several thousand students studied between 2009 and 2012 were at least a bit dehydrated.
"This doesn't mean we're saying kids are dropping like flies or that they're very seriously dehydrated and need to go to the hospital or anything like that," Kenney says. But even mild dehydration can affect children's fatigue levels, mood and possibly their ability to learn, she says.
"It was astounding to me," Kenney says, that so many children said they drink no water at all. "And even among the kids who were drinking water — they weren't drinking very much of it." (MORE)
Source: NPR
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