Why Drinking Water Is So Important
This video is sponsored by noom find the link in the description below we all know that we need to be drinking water but why do we need to be drinking water what makes it so important what does the body even do with it and what happens to the body when you don't have enough of it are these simple questions maybe but they're important questions that .
Everyone should have the answers to and in today's video we're going to use the cadavers to take a look at what happens to water once it enters into the body through the digestive system we'll see how the brain even understands that you need more or less water how the kidneys respond to the brain's instructions and we'll even see what happens to cells .
When they have too much too little or just the right amount of water it's gonna be a fun one let's do this thirst occurs when there's a need for an organism such as you to find and consume water as you probably already know without water you die within a few days depending on the exact circumstance i .
Mean if you're in the sahara desert with no protection from the elements you're likely to die a whole lot quicker than you would if you were in other environments but all in all you tend to die within a few days in contrast humans can survive without food for weeks to months at a time again depending on the exact circumstances water is just very .
Very important and you find it in two places in the body you can find it inside of the cells or what we call the intracellular space or you can find it outside of the cells in what we call the extracellular space roughly two-thirds of your total water volume is going to be located in the intracellular space meaning most of your water is going to .
Be in the cells of your brain your heart your lungs your kidneys so on and so forth the remaining one-third will be found outside of your cells so think like your connective tissues now this means depending on the type of dehydration you're experiencing you could actually experience different types of thirst an intracellular thirst .
Or an extracellular thirst let's say that if your cells become dehydrated oftentimes simply drinking water can be enough to replenish them however if you lose blood because blood contains water let's say you get a cut on your arm that could mean that you need water and salt to help regenerate the blood at its .
Correct concentrations this could mean you might need a meal to go with your water to fully quench your thirst although i'm not entirely sure that's the best way to describe it you might be wondering how much water you should be drinking per day that's actually a little more difficult to answer than you may think and that's because it depends .
On a variety of factors what altitude do you live at believe it or not how old are you are you menstruating do you consume alcohol how physically active are you the list goes on and on and while these are all important questions to ask i personally don't find them necessary to ask in the beginning instead you want to focus on building .
The habit of drinking water to start off with and then start to dial in the exact amount you need for you as a person based on your individual circumstances but that's true of health and wellness in general if you want to make an overall improvement in your health well first you need to educate yourself as to why it's actually important and a good .
Idea to make that improvement and then you need to build a healthy habit off of that and then you can even start to expand later on down the road it's to me undeniably the best way to go that's why i love the sponsor of today's video nume i've been using noon for a little over a month now and i am head over heels for it and the reason is super simple it's .
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Better overall health habits now let's go ahead and jump over to a cadaver section of the brain and see just how the body monitors hydration levels you're looking at a mid-sagittal cross-section of the human head meaning we've cut it right down the middle so to quickly orient you so you know what you're looking at this is the anterior .
Direction this is going to be the nose this is that nasal septum and then we're heading in the posterior direction and this really cool looking structure here is called the cerebellum and then right in front of it is the brain stem but our focus today is going to be in this little region right here so specifically what i'm tracing with my .
Probe is a region called the hypothalamus and then just below the hypothalamus is a really fascinating gland called the pituitary gland now both of these structures together form what you can think of as like a bridge between the neurological or nervous system like the brain that i'm touching with the probe .
Here and your glandular hormonal endocrine system like the adrenal glands for instance so these two structures together form a bridge and what's going to happen is the hypothalamus is going to communicate with the pituitary gland and then that pituitary gland will start sending out signals now the messages it's communicating are typically based .
Around something called homeostasis so you can think of homeostasis as your body's natural balance or you know as close to being balanced as possible and the hypothalamus job is to try and bring the body back to homeostasis or at times actually bring it away from homeostasis it really depends on the circumstance but a real .
Easy thing to wrap your mind around would be like body temperature which is about 98.6 degrees fahrenheit or i think it's 36 to 37 degrees celsius i forget which one it is but the body or the hypothalamus will deviate from that based on demand so maybe say if you're hot then it will recognize that as you're going above that temperature and .
It will start to initiate sweating to help bring you to cool down well what goes with that homeostasis is going to be water regulation now the term we're actually going to use here is osmoregulation now to understand what that means we first need to discuss something called osmosis simply put osmosis is the diffusion or movement of .
Water from one area to another based around electrolyte concentration now you've probably heard of electrolytes before it's probably in sports drinks but these are gonna be things like sodium chloride potassium to name a few and they are all over the body they are extremely important for cellular function and just performance and in .
This instance they are essential for monitoring and regulating hydration levels so inside of the hypothalamus which again is going to be this region right here there are going to be cells in there called osmoreceptors which are that's probably going to make a lot of sense to you osmo in this .
Instance is for osmosis now these osmoreceptors are actually stretch sensitive neurons and what happens is they are capable of actually determining how much water and how much electrolytes are overall in the body based around how many how much water and electrolytes are inside of them so think about it like this .
If there is not enough water those osmoreceptors will actually shrink and that will send a signal down to this area right here called the posterior pituitary and tell it to secrete a hormone called antidiuretic hormone you've probably heard of diuretics before a diuretic is something that causes you to urinate so .
An antidiuretic hormone would cause you to not urinate or retain your water so if you don't have enough water it makes sense to not urinate you don't want to lose any more so what will happen is that we'll go down to the kidneys and say hey let's not urinate .
But let's say you have too much water that would then cause those osmoreceptors to start to swell right they start to bloat and that itself would also send a signal down to this posterior pituitary and say hey make less anti-diuretic hormone because if you make less of it then obviously .
You're going to urinate more and you can start to lose water it's all about balance remember it goes back to that term that we just mentioned homeostasis now osmoreceptors aren't the only ones in the body monitoring hydration levels in fact they belong to a larger regulatory pathway called osmoregulation one other example of neurons that are .
Osmoregulatory are what are called baroreceptors these are going to be located inside of blood vessels specifically arteries like the aorta which is going to be coming out from the heart and they are monitoring blood pressure so i mean picture this right there's water in your blood so if you have too much water in the bloodstream .
That's going to elevate blood pressure and these barrel receptors are also stretch sensitive and they are going to detect that and they are then going to initiate a series of events that is going to be osmoregulative at the same time let's say maybe you get cut i don't know maybe like in the knee or something along those lines and .
You're bleeding well you are now losing water and so what's going to happen is you're going to have a slight decrease in blood pressure those barrel receptors are also going to sense that and once again they are going to become osmoregulative you're looking at a kidney that's been cut in the frontal or coronal plane which means .
It's been divided into front and back portions now i'm going to give you a quick tour of the kidney because there's a lot to look at here so this is called the renal artery and what it does is it brings unfiltered blood to the kidney because that's what the kidney does it filters your blood and this renal artery is going to start splitting and it .
Splits many different times until eventually these tiny little blood vessels get to this outer rim which you can see this distance here is called the renal cortex this is where all the really interesting stuff happens inside of the kidney and that's because there are these tiny little filtration units located in here that we can't see .
Which are called nephrons they're going to filter the blood and then that newly filtered blood will basically take the same return return trip except instead of going in the arterial system it's going to go in the venous system which is if i can grab it that's this one behind it right there now .
When it filters uh the waste out it's going to drop it into this darkened inner core of the kidney this region here is called the renal medulla and the renal medulla is made up of these individual renal pyramids that's what all these darkened portions are the renal pyramids are basically just .
Made up of all these little tubes what will happen is the waste product will drop into the collecting tubes and then go down into the urinary tract and that's what you're seeing here which will eventually go down to like the ureter and then down to the bladder now in terms of osmoregulation that is going to occur here in that renal medulla so .
What you have to understand is that the tissue of the kidney itself is going to be naturally salty it's going to have a bunch of sodium and chloride inside of there and that is going to attract water so just think about it like this if you have too much water what will happen is .
The kidney will actually put the salt into the collecting tubes and that will attract water into those renal pyramids and then you will urinate out the excess water now if you are dehydrated what will happen is that salt will move into the more so into the kidney tissue and the water will come with it so the water will go into the .
Tissue of the kidney which will then find other accessory blood vessels and be returned to the body so you can think of all the osmo regulation of the kidney happening here in that renal medulla so what does dehydration do to the body well it depends on again the type of dehydration that's happening to you remember blood loss actually is a form .
Of dehydration and with enough blood loss you have some pretty severe problems on your hand but it also might be important to discuss the different ways you can lose water to begin with because you don't just lose water through urination you lose water through breathing and speaking through crying through sweating and it's not .
Just water you're losing in these instances either you're also going to be losing electrolytes remember those salts are what attract water to it and so in order to get rid of the water you're also going to be getting rid of some of those electrolytes which is going to definitely uh alter and affect your that .
Osmoregulation pathway so it depends on the form of dehydration are you just dehydrated from water are you just dehydrated from electrolytes or is it both and in what amounts but in the end it's going to affect the performance of the cells the individual cells themselves how much is it going to affect their .
Performance again it also depends right i mean just think about the common symptoms you see with dehydration headache dry mouth lips eyes you can get a darker color of urine i'm sure you've all seen that where that's because there's a high there's when there's less water content in the urine and there's a higher .
Density of other things it just tends to look darker but you're also going to get confusion you'll get fatigue and the worse the dehydration gets the worse these symptoms will get to the point where it's not just confusion in the late stages of dehydration it's borderline delirium to the point where you're psychotic so what's happening to .
The body essentially you're just dying and you're dying very slowly in the initial stages and then you're dying very quickly in those later stages thanks again to the sponsor of today's video new be sure to click the link in the description below and take their quick and easy free evaluation and you can start building better health habits .
Today as always be sure to like comment subscribe if you haven't already and just good luck hydrating out there folks be sure to consume electrolytes on top of that water to optimize these hydration levels and i will see you in the next video you .
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Thanks again to Noom for sponsoring this video! Click here https://noom.com/humananatomy to take your free Noom Evaluation. ____ Why Drinking Water Is So Important ____ In this video, Justin from the Institute of Human Anatomy discusses how the body regulates hydration levels, as well as what happens when the body becomes dehydrated. ____ References https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908954/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK541108/ https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-540-29678-2_5688 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5957508/ ____ Cool Stuff Merchandise https://beacons.page/instituteofhumananatomy Support Us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/instituteofhumananatomy Codex Anatomicus https://codexanatomy.com/?ref=IOHA Coupon Code for 20% OFF: IOHA20 mUvmethod https://muvmethod.com/product/all-splits-flexibility-program-public/ref/1/ Coupon Code for 30% OFF: IOHASPLITS30 ____ Video Timeline 00:00 – 00:45 Intro 00:46 – 02:22 What Is Thirst? 02:23 – 05:34 How Much Water Should You Drink Per Day? 05:36 – 06:44 The Neuro-Endocrine Bridge 06:45 – 07:34 Homeostasis and Osmoregulation 07:35 – 09:42 How the Brain Regulates Hydration 09:43 – 10:40 How Blood Vessels Regulate Hydration 10:41 – 12:08 How the Kidney Works 12:09 – 13:04 How the Kidney Regulates Hydration 13:05 – 14:49 What Dehydration Does to the Body 14:50 – 15:33 Build Better Habits ____ Audio Credit: www.bensounds.com ____ #Noom #Noomfluencer
