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If you have no water, but have some other fluid, like coffee or beer, is it better to drink those or nothing?
— Wifiler (@WiFiler) January 16, 2018
Q: If you have no water, but have some other fluid, like coffee or beer, is it better to drink those or nothing?
I once helped rescue a couple in Death Valley whose car broke down several days’ walk from pavement. Their only source of hydration? Half a case of warm PBR.
Conventional wisdom has it that drinks containing alcohol and caffeine are diuretics: by making you have to pee, you lose more water than you’re consuming. If that’s true, then drinking beer or coffee in a survival scenario would be a bad idea, as it would only lead to worse dehydration.
A 2013 study in the United Kingdom set out to discover if this was true. 72 test subjects in a state of normal hydration were asked to consume one liter of either water, milk, coffee, 4-percent beer, tea, orange juice, Coca-Cola, Powerade, or an oral hydration solution over the span of 30 minutes. The researches then measured their…
