There appears to be no definitive answer for how much water you should drink a day in order to be healthy. It could be 1.5 litres or 2.0 litres, it could be 8 glasses or 8 pints or any amount of figures that float around the Internet.What I can work out is that it depends on the individual, the environment you are in etc etc, blah blah. It also depends on what you eat, for example eating loads of apples, grapes, watermelon or whatever and you will need less actual water.
Another 'myth' for want of a better word, is that water intake should only be water as in purely H2O but this is apparently a load of crap.
If you lose 500-700ml every day (minimum) via urine, breathing and sweating you need some liquid spare for the cells in your body to do 'stuff'.
So if someone is drinking around 8 litres a day, it has to be said that there is some sort of problem lurking in the background.
Especially if that happens to be 8 litres of Coca-Cola.........
Sadly, this is what happened to Natasha Marie Harris from Invercargill on New Zealand's south island.
I promise really hard not to make any jokes because at the end of the day, 8 kids have been left motherless and that in itself is very tragic.At the inquest into Natasha's death her partner Christopher Hodgkinson said she would always have a bottle of coke beside her bed, it would be what she drank before going to sleep and what she drank when she woke up.
Without her coke it was said that Natasha would be moody and irritable. In the year before she died, poor Natasha was being sick nearly every day as well as suffering from tiredness and lack of strength. However, it was suspected that this was due being only 30, having 8 kids and gynaecological problems (though I'm not at all sure that we need to know this). However, these symptons can also be seen in people suffering from caffeine toxicity.
During her autopsy it was discovered that she had cardiac arrhythmia and a diseased liver. It was suggested by Dr Dan Mornin that Natasha possibly had a lack of potassium in the blood due to the high consumption of Coca-cola also.
Its as a result of this that Christopher Hodgkinson says that Coca-cola killed his partner, however, George Adams, Coca-Cola's New Zealand MD that his claims are unfounded.
Whether Natasha caused her own death by drinking too much cola or whether it was simply 'one of those things', it doesn't really matter in my opinion. It's not going to bring her back. I can understand wanting to know what happened and perhaps trying to avoid it happening to someone else, but my alarm bells would have been ringing beginning with the sheer amount of juice consumed.
I hope her kids will be well looked after and my thoughts go out to Tara, Aiden, Brodie, Tyler, Rueben, Connor, Forde and Dominic.
