Caffeine and Dehydration
We’re pretty nerdy here at Hydrant, electrolytes and hydration science get us fired up!
Part of our commitment to you is to clearly explain the science behind our products in terms that are easy to understand. Academia hasn’t always been great at communicating their research to the rest of the population, so we’d like to be your guides in hydration science.
Nutrition science is hard for a number of reasons, and this article does a good job of breaking down why. The main problem is that scientific studies are each designed differently, so comparing them 1:1 is difficult.
You need to take a bird’s eye view of ALL the research on a topic to really tease out the conclusions. There’s a word for this: “systematic review and meta-analysis”.
Does caffeine cause dehydration?
Check out this timeline of research on whether caffeine is dehydrating:
Does caffeine dehydrate you?
Conclusion: For now, it appears that caffeine is not dehydrating in moderate amounts. Large amounts of caffeine consumed by people who don’t have a tolerance may produce some diuretic effect.
This is a simplistic look at a few papers over the years on caffeine and dehydration. Each study had it’s strengths and weaknesses, and by looking at the whole picture we can make up our minds on the issue.
So what’s our point here?
Nutrition science is confusing and evolving. It would be impossible for you to be well-informed about everything you consume. We only do hydration, so we make it our duty to be up to date on the science. We do all the analysis, so that you don’t have to.
Our team won’t put their names on any claims that aren’t backed up with good science and we’ll only ever recommend Hydrant if it really will benefit you. For some people, our product simply won’t be very beneficial, and we’re up front about that.
Ongoing activities
One way that we hold our commitment to you is by having a team of researchers studying at Oxford University combing through the scientific literature on hydration, and building our own database of research.
We borrow techniques from the Cochrane Review to look for bias, method errors, statistical errors etc. in each paper that we analyze to make sure that our decision making on our product is at the cutting edge of the science.
Have hydration & science questions? Email us at science@drinkhydrant.com, and we’ll point you to the evidence!
