Coffee doesn’t dehydrate you after all
Most of us who drink coffee know that while that sweet sweet taste and glorious buzz it provides comes with a pay off. While it’s busy working its magic pepping you up it’s equally working on sucking all the hydration from your body.
But you figure you’ve got to take the good with the bad, right? Wrong!
Turns out the whole caffeine dehydrates you thing is a big fat myth.
Well, sort of.
“Coffee, or, specifically the caffeine in coffee, does have a diuretic effect—meaning it causes your kidneys to flush extra water through urination—but the stimulant is very mild,” Jennifer Haythe, M.D., a cardiologist and internist at Columbia University tells marie Claire US.
So basically, caffeinated drinks do cause you to urinate more often, which is technically losing fluid, but it’s not enough to impact your overall water volume.
“In a healthy body, it’s very unlikely that a few cups of coffee are the cause of your dull skin, or headaches, or overall feeling of dryness—at least, not through the mechanism of dehydration.”
Dr. Haythe does add however that there are people that may have a particular sensitivity to caffeine which can trigger headaches or stomach aches, but that it’s unlikely to be due to hydration.
So now you know you can order your coffee (or second or third) and not stress about it wreaking havoc on your insides.
This article originally appeared on Marie Claire
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