Is water always the best choice on a hot day?

There&#x27;s this cult of drinking water - with people insisting you should drink more and more water - until people are drinking ludicrous quantities trying to get literally clear urine. They also tend to chug it all at once, repeatedly. As the article says it just flows straight through and does nothing useful.<p>On a very hot day after a lot of arduous exercise I&#x27;ve seen someone collapse from hyponatremia from drinking too much water - washed everything out of their system because they thought they had to drink sixteen litres a day or something.<p>Calm down and just drink a reasonable quantity of water slowly over time, and combine that with eating full meals which people tend to put off if it&#x27;s hot, making everything worse.

In Japan (and, for some reason, Australia and Mexico) you can buy a drink called &quot;Pocari Sweat&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pocari_Sweat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pocari_Sweat</a><p>It&#x27;s a soft drink specifically designed to avoid you getting hyponatremia, and was apparently inspired by doctors who would drink the contents of saline IV pouches.<p>Like many asian soft drinks it&#x27;s not very sweet but it&#x27;s not unpleasant. If you live on the US west coast you can find it in most Japanese supermarkets.

It appears that the answer is &quot;yes&quot;, especially if supplemented by a piece of fruit to replace minerals and nutrients. And even tea and coffee are fine provided that your body is relatively used to dealing with caffeine.

Milk really doesn’t sound refreshing on a hot day. If anything, drinking milk would make me wanna drink water straight after to wash it down, even if it fully hydrated me.<p>The truth is, water is just fine on a hot day, and if you really do have a salt imbalance, it’s more likely that is related to hard physical activity combined with a hot day, in which case you’d know that a sports drink or salt tablets with water would be just fine. In most cases, water really is just fine. This article almost reads like it was sponsored by dairy product manufacturers.

Pickle juice!<p>Alternatively, Sekanjibin (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sekanjabin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sekanjabin</a>)<p>And if you add 10:1 dilute gatorade and orange slices, you now have enough information to know where i’ve spent many summer vacations.

I exercise quite a bit in 30-35 degrees C and I sweat a ton (it’s not a bad thing as long as you stay hydrated; a natural liquid cooling!). I use electrolyte tablets [0]. On longer rides I also tried Coke (classic) which was quite good too.<p>I’d bring about 1.5l per hour out, riding mountain bikes or enduro off road motorcycles.<p>I was told you need to sip slowly and that when dehydrated the first thing to go is your concentration.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;highfive.co.uk&#x2F;products&#x2F;zero?variant=39896116756639" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;highfive.co.uk&#x2F;products&#x2F;zero?variant=39896116756639</a>

Shit country army hydration &quot;pack&quot;: half a teaspoon of sugar, half a teaspoon of salt to ~1L of water.<p>Tastes like shit, but damn it cures hangovers. Also, probably hydrates.

Interesting that they did not mention beer.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;How_Beer_Saved_the_World" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;How_Beer_Saved_the_World</a>

A colleague on mine who once ran an ecological survey in the desert mentioned that her fluid of choice for extreme dry heat was V8. Pretty much anything else would cause horrible salt deprivation.

Lots of good information but the writing style is very scattered and wordy

I do NuSalt with lemon Mio right before and after my runs.<p>Sodium &amp; Potassium and tastes kinda like a margarita. Always keeps me well hydrated. Sometimes I&#x27;ll also take a multimineral with it to get calcium and magnesium too.

Any long-distance athlete would be intimately familiar with this trade off. At Ironman races you always see a non-trivial fraction end up with debilitating cramps, confusion, nausea + vomiting, or ultimately in the medical tent from low sodium or low glucose.<p>That said, I think &quot;drink water&quot; is still good blanket advice on average. Most athletes I know still drink far more water than the average person through the day, in addition to all the sport-specific fuelling.

Turks have this traditional salty yogurt drink called &quot;Ayran&quot; for hot weather, which is pretty much like Salty Lassi in southern Asia. Americans usually get disgusted by the idea of having salt in their drink. I hope they&#x27;ll eventually come to terms with it. It&#x27;s hard to find good ayran in the states.

I remember a scene from an Australian TV series in the &#x27;80s called The Flying Doctors where one of the characters was stranded in the outback.<p>At one point he took out a pouch of salt, ate a pinch of it before taking a swig of water.<p>Don&#x27;t know why, but that scene always stuck. Now I know why he did it!

The BBC is a great organisation, but on the topic of milk on a hot day, I’m trusting the Channel 4 News team.