After air, water is the most important substance needed by the body.  Increasing your child’s filtered water consumption might be the first step you take in improving your child’s health, particularly your child’s digestion.  In this blog post, we’ll discuss the importance of water and 19 signs that your child needs to be drinking more of it.

The Tao of Detox by Daniel Reid explains the importance of water in this way, “Water is the element that extracts nutrients from food, transports them into the bloodstream and delivers them in solution into the cells for metabolism.  90 percent of the blood and 85 percent of the brain are water; even the bones contain 30 percent water.  Water is thus required for nourishment and the replenishment of vital fluids, as well as for detoxifying the blood and tissues and eliminating wastes (including candida!). “

Winning the Food Fight by Dr. Joey Shulman explains that water helps the body maintain a normal temperature and an acid/alkaline environment.  It also discusses water’s ability to relieve fatigue, asthma, allergies, crohn’s, colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, skin conditions and help with weight loss.  Water also provides necessary minerals.

Water helps children exercise longer and more efficiently.  It reduces stress on the cardiovascular system and improves athletic performance.  Your child will also need to drink more after exercising to avoid dehydration. If your child is experiencing any of these symptoms, he or she may need more water:

• poor concentration
• constipation
• diarrhea
• food sensitivities
• urinary tract infections
• fever
• chills
• headaches
• dry mouth
• dry skin or
• poor skin elasticity (returns to normal slowly if pinched)
• rashes
• muscle aches
• nausea
• crankiness
• lack of tears when crying
• sunken eyes
• lethargy or apathy
• urine darker than a very pale straw yellow or is strong smelling

Children are more prone to dehydration than adults because of their size and higher activity levels.  By the time a child is thirsty, he or she is already dehydrated.  Children sometimes go through stages where they lose the urge to drink or say they are not thirsty; this causes the body to eventually stop signaling that it needs water.  It is important to stay on top of this.

A formula for calculating how much filtered water your child should consume in a day is:

Why do I stress the need for filtered water?  Because tap water contains bad bacteria from chlorine, fluoride, up to 100 other chemicals and heavy metals i.e. aluminum, cadmium, lead, copper.  But the quality of bottled water can be difficult to determine.  You’ll need to do some research to obtain a pure, clean source of filtered water for your family.

And then, children need to develop a taste for water; that is difficult to do if the only drinks your child consumes are juice, milk or pop.  Ensure that your child is given water in a container from which they enjoy drinking.  If your kitchen has a water dispenser that the children can access easily, there will be far more water consumption.  Sipping water throughout the day rather than gulping down a cup at a time is preferable.

One last point that needs to be made is that drinking water helps fill the stomach and decrease hunger.  Why would you want that, you might ask?  There needs to be a balance between water and food consumption.  When I see one of my daughters making a beeline for snacks over and over, within a short time frame, I know she is dehydrated.  For more information on amounts of foods that children need to stay healthy, please refer to my book The Resourceful Mother’s Secrets to Healthy Kids.

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Until next time,

Meredith