We consume about 2.5 litres of a water a day, though we are not generally aware of it since about half is contained within our foods. The conviction that we should all drink eight glasses of water a day is the most enduring of dietary misunderstandings. The idea has been traced to a 1945 paper from America’s Food and Nutrition Board, which noted that that was the amount that the average person consumed in a day.18 ‘What happened,’ Dr Stanley Goldfarb of the University of Pennsylvania told the BBC Radio 4 programme More or Less in 2017, ‘was that people sort of confused the idea that this was
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